Boy of My Heart

by Marie Connor Leighton

It would certainly be improved by new wallpaper, but I dare not have this improvement made. Superstition reminds me that I have often noticed how unlucky people have been who have had their bedrooms done up. They are always either ill in the rooms or else never occupy them any more. I decided at once that I would not have it done. The room was attractive enough, as it is, with its high, narrow, mirror-hung door leading into the bathroom, and its vast wardrobe packed full now with his ordinary clothes, his military great-coat—too long and cumbersome for the trenches, even in winter—and piles of small books which in the past two years he has bought out of his own pocket-money; and his sword.

The bed had an air as if it were waiting for him. The darling boy! How thankfully he nestled down between the sheets when he came home the first time! His big brown eyes were almost wild, that night. He had the look of a man who has been back for a time into savage life and wonders at the most everyday things of civilisation.

"I haven't slept in a proper bed since I first went out," he said.

"Why, what about that French château where you said everything was so luxurious?" I asked him.

"Oh, everything is comparative!" He laughed. "I had a feather bed on the floor there and it seemed to be almost a wicked luxury even though there were no sheets or pillows and I had only my brown blanket over me."

Yes, even then, a fortnight ago, his bed had an air of expectancy about it, as if it knew that he had written to say he was coming again. Above the head of it the wall was bare, because I had left it to him to decide what should be put there, and he never cared two straws what his room looked like as long as it had all the little things he wanted in it and was within a dozen yards of a bathroom.

That unlucky bathroom! Why is it that bathrooms and staircases cause more angry passions in a household than anything else?

I, for example, am not a bad-tempered woman. I am positive that even my worst enemy—my worst feminine enemy—would think twice before laying ill-temper to my charge; yet when anybody meets me on the stairs, or comes upstairs close behind me, I feel inhuman. I quite understand the mood of the late editor of one of the great daily newspapers, who drove from his house without notice any servant unlucky enough to meet him on the stairs. So, too, when a new London club was started a few years ago in a very tall and narrow house, I said it could never succeed, because all the people—members and servants alike—were always mounting and descending the staircases, like Burne Jones's figures on the Golden Stairs. And it did not succeed.

In the same way, most men cannot bear that the door of any room, even the most private, in their own home should be locked against them. And this brings me back to the bathroom and Little Yeogh Wough.

When a bathroom is of the ordinary kind, the only cause of trouble, as a rule, is whether the hot water is hot enough. But this particular bathroom has three doors, and the occupants of the three contiguous rooms from which those doors give access occasionally emerged at the same time and fiercely disputed possession of the means of cleanliness.