The anæsthetist who came from one of the London hospitals to administer the chloroform was a man with one of the gentlest and kindest of faces, and yet somehow Little Yeogh Wough, though he had been told nothing, knew from the first that this man's coming boded him no good. He ran to me to protect him, showing an infinite trust in me that in a way was heart-breaking. And then I realised that for the first time a situation had come about in which I could not help him, but in which he had to face whatever there might be of pain and risk quite alone and unhelped, like a grown man.
I told him this, and for a moment his brown wistful eyes met mine with a look in them which I shall never forget. Then he turned and went over to the table that had been made ready for the operation, and lay down upon it, saying quietly:
"I'm quite ready."
That is the way in which he will meet torture and death if they come to him before his part in this war is over. He will steady the shrinking of his sensitive nerves and will look at the danger and measure it and then say bravely: "Now let come what has to come. I am quite ready."
Oh, if I could have foreseen in those days how much of pain and terror would face him in the years to come that I could not save him from!
It happened often just then that the children made railway journeys on which I did not accompany them. I ought to have felt a sense of domestic freedom at their going—for I am a person who hates a home to be an establishment, full of children and servants and expenses—but instead of this, tremors used to seize upon me as to what might happen. For Little Yeogh Wough in particular I was afraid, as he was the sensitive one. The idea of his being at the mercy of horses or motor-cars or the mechanism of a train was horrible to me.
His sister, aged five, always gave people the impression that she could look after herself in any circumstances. His younger brother, aged two, was a baby still. But Little Yeogh Wough himself, all wistfulness and appealing grace, with the haunting sadness always in his brown eyes—what would his sufferings be if any accident brought harm to him and I was not there?
I used at these times to go to the piano and play to myself in order to drive away my fears. I played dance music and coon songs, though I ought to have known that these are the saddest things in the world—far sadder than any Dead Marches in Saul. I can hear myself now singing: "The Lonesome Coon":
"Dancing, I'll pass de time away,