Presently they both came in, in dressing-gowns and bedroom slippers, and I learned that they had been guiding down to the sea some coast patrols, new-comers to the locality, who had lost their way.
"What? Do you mean that you have been all the way down to the sea on this bitterly cold and stormy night with nothing on but dressing-gowns over your pyjamas and bedroom slippers on your bare feet?"
They laughed, and then I knew that nothing would hold either of them back from the Front five minutes longer than was absolutely inevitable.
But the next day was a different kind of day for Little Yeogh Wough. For he spent it in London—that London which he always loved, as I love it, with a deep and undying devotion; and he found himself in the company of men whose strength was in their brains, rather than in their bodies.
He began, directly I left him, by mischievously telegraphing to an eminent novelist, who was fond of him, to meet him at a given spot in town. It was the eminent novelist's busiest day of the week, on which he never left home, but he obeyed the summons of the telegram, which bore the sender's surname only, imagining, perhaps, that something had gone very wrong. Anyhow, he was irate when he discovered that nothing more important had required him than Little Yeogh Wough, desirous of showing off his uniform.
He gave his admiration, none the less. Another and another, whom the boy of my heart went to see, charmed him by their brilliance in return for the quicker life which the mere sight and voice of him put into their veins. He passed the afternoon at the Stores, doing as much in helping the sale of military outfits for other people as in buying what he himself needed. And he passed the evening with me at my hotel, with friends of whom one, Mr. Clement Shorter, had known him by daily sight and greeting since the bright years of his earliest boyhood.
He sat and drank in the eager talk of books. And at twelve o'clock, when the never to be forgotten little party had broken up and he was due at his uncle's flat, he came and planted himself in front of me and said:
"Big Yeogh Wough, when this war is over, I'm not going in for the Indian Civil Service. I'm not going in for anything that will take me away from London and you and the life that you live. London and the brain force of London have got into my blood to-day. When I come back I'm going to stop here and use here in this city all the powers that I've got. You will see."
When he was leaving me he turned back and said with sudden wistfulness: