Boy of My Heart

by Marie Connor Leighton

Hurriedly trying the thing in a gay mood many months ago, I had thought it commonplace and dull. I had never taken the trouble even to hear it a second time. The name of the singer had meant nothing to me, because I am too deeply a lover of music ever willingly to go to a concert. I had heard him once or twice in love songs on the gramophone and had been struck in some odd way by the fact that in those love songs it was a gentleman who was pleading and adoring. There is such a difference between a bounder's love song and a gentleman's, even though the bounder may have the best voice that ever came from a masculine throat.

For, just as a man has to be better turned out in personal appearance than a woman in order to look all right, so he has to be better dressed and finished off inside in order not to do things in a shoddy way. For the bounderishness of a bounder betrays itself in every little thing he does—in the way he smiles, the way he comes into a room, the way he takes his overcoat off and puts it on, the way he touches a piano, the very way he breathes and speaks.

So, now, remembering that I had heard Gervase Elwes sing a love song as if the man really cared and not as if he were a florid windbag who would throw the woman off at the first convenient opportunity, I sat down patiently to listen to the "Morning Hymn."

But after the first few moments I started up, amazed and thrilled.

It was not the singer that mattered. It was the music.

I did not know what the words were. I do not know now what they are. But the music was the music of this war.

The room in which I stood faded from before my eyes and in its place I saw a battlefield in the grey dawn light, with the dead lying in hundreds upon it, most of them with their clear-featured, boyish faces upturned to that pitiless daybreak. And among those upturned faces was the face of Little Yeogh Wough—very white, very set, very calm. And over in the east, where the sun would rise, there was a radiance that was not yet of the sun and yet was warmer than the chill grim greyness of the dawn. It was a light shed by the presence of a great Archangel, whose arms, outspread, as it were, upon the clouds, enfolded and blessed the dead as they lay beneath, while his face, uplifted to a higher heaven, besought the pity of the great God of the Universe for the agonies of the nations passing through the awful purgative ordeal of War.

And over all there brooded such an adoration as forced one to one's knees with one's forehead bowed to the ground. And I knew as I looked—I knew even in my own agony—that the things which those boys had suffered and the other things which they had given up had not been suffered and given up in vain.

Oh, what is the use of trying to put the thought of him out of my mind?