The boy used to say that the only hard thing for him in his life at the big Public School was the doing without my half-hours by his bedside at night.
We were never quite so completely in touch with each other when we did not get these talks.
This may seem a strange thing to say, but it is the truth.
It is astonishing how much sympathy the right of entrance into another's sleeping-room means. It is all very well for people like George Bernard Shaw to declare that the custom of married persons sleeping together is an outrageous one and interferes with the liberty of the individual, but if in days to come people of his sort get their way there will be far fewer happy marriages. In the sitting-rooms of the home, as well as in the outside world, there are always things happening and influences at work that interfere with the smooth flowing of the magical current of love and sweetness between husband and wife; and if there is no privacy of the same bedroom to put this disturbance right every evening, what is to become of their happiness?
Some people seem to think that between a husband and a wife, or a mother and son, tenderness and devotion are a matter of course. But this is not so.
Nothing is got in this world without trouble. You cannot get a plant to thrive in your window unless you give it attention and show it plainly that you want it to thrive. Then do you suppose people are going to love you tenderly unless you cultivate that love as if it were a tomato in a greenhouse?
Not a bit of it; not even if you are the most perfect man or woman in the world.
I have an aunt who is devoted to me when we occupy the same bedroom, as we did nearly all through my childhood, but thinks me a hateful person when we only see each other casually. And I used to think of her when, owing to Little Yeogh Wough's absence at school, my nightly visits to his room to see him in bed, as he called it, were interrupted for long weeks at a time.
I knew that these breaks in our sacred and sweet night talks would have been dangerous if our love had been less strong. For in both of us, just as the electric current is tremendously strong when it flows, so it is entirely cut off and dead if anything interferes with it at all. When I am not burning hot with people that I love I am usually icily cold, even to the point of wondering whether I really love them at all. I have no dribblings of mild affection. So, knowing that Little Yeogh Wough had this same peculiarity, I used to be afraid when he had been away from me for a whole term.
But I need not have been afraid.