Boy of My Heart. Marie Connor Leighton

in this war. I was afraid at first—I buried my face in my pillow and sobbed when at eight o'clock one morning the telegram came from Folkestone announcing that he was just going to cross the Channel—but now I have got confidence in fate. He was once taken by one of our friends to an astrologer who told him that he would probably become a soldier, and that if he did he would die a violent death by bullet or bomb, but not before he was fifty-eight. So he cannot die now, at only just twenty. He will get wounded; it is certainly time he got wounded, for he has been in the trenches nine months now and people are beginning to look surprised when I tell them he has not got a scratch yet. They will soon begin to think he hides all day in his dugout. Yes, he is certain to get wounded soon. But he will not get killed.

      Besides—how could there be any idea of death in connection with a creature of such vitality?

      I feel my pulses quickening as I look at the photograph. He has not got perfectly regular features—that is to say, he does not look at all like a hairdresser's dummy—but, oh! how handsome he is and how full of charm!

      One can see even in this half-length portrait that he is not vastly tall. But the fascination that I have called the "dignity of the watch chain" is there. It is such a rare thing for a mere boy to have this fascination! But he has it. It is a perfect sorcery in him. Curiously, it is hardly ever found either with extreme shortness or extreme tallness, but mostly in people on the tall side of middle height.

      What beautiful furry lashes he has! And his hair flung back in the Magdalen sweep! Perhaps furriness is the one characteristic that strikes one most as one looks at him.

      I had a long roll of skunk once with a gilt tassel at the end of it, and his small brother, playing with it, said:

      "This is Yeogh Wough's tail. This is just the sort of tail he'd have if he had one at all."

      "But what about the gilt tassel?" I had asked.

      "Oh, he'd have that, too! If Yeogh Wough had a tail he'd be sure to get a gilt tassel for the end of it."

      That was just like him. He always loves everything that is the best of its kind and the most effective. This is one of his weaknesses. But with what an air he wears his simple everyday khaki! I can quite see why they called him "Monseigneur" at his public school. His photograph draws me. I stoop my face and kiss it.

      My Yeogh Wough! But is he wholly mine? Is there not somebody else who wants him even though he is still hardly more than a boy?

      And now there floats before my eyes the vision of a girl; a small, delicate-faced creature with amethystine eyes, who is dreaming dreams that have got him for their centre.

      What a forcing power for sex this war has been, and is!

      And now suddenly, as I think of the girl, the cinematograph of the mind flashes a crowd of vivid pictures across the screen of my memory.

CHAPTER II THE EXTRAVAGANT BABY

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      These pictures rush back across my mind with intense vividness as I sit waiting.

      It is between a fortnight and three weeks since I first had the hope that he might come home on this second leave.

      The way the sudden hope affected me showed me how little I had expected that he would ever come home again. I had lived through the fearfulness and anguish of his death so many times in the early days when he had just gone out to the Front. One day in particular I remember when, in the quiet of the big house by the sea, with the drip, drip of the rain telling us that it was useless to hope to go out, we had gone to lie down for half an hour after lunch and to read an article in a newspaper on the hospital at Bailleul.

      We were three of us resting on the wide bed—I and the boy's father and his sixteen-year-old sister, whom he always called The Bystander, who was lying across the foot of the bed. The newspaper article was by an American journalist, describing with mingled power and tenderness some dreadful cases that had been taken to the hospital. Then there was mention made of a boy soldier who did not seem very badly hurt and whom the doctor ordered to be placed on one side for conveyance to England. The American journalist looked at the boy a few moments later and then touched the medical officer's sleeve.

      "Doctor," he said in a low voice, "that boy will never go to England. He's going to sleep in France."

      Going to sleep in France!

      The awful, unspeakable piteousness of the simple little sentence cut through me like a knife. It seemed to me that all my heart and all my soul melted away in tears as I lay there and sobbed and sobbed.

      The boy's father and sister were crying, too.

      And then I prayed.

      I had always been a self-centred, worldly woman, not much inclined to prayer; but in that hour I prayed with the humble passionateness of dread and desperation.

      How I loved the boy—I, who had never believed that I could really unselfishly love anybody!

      It had always been a wonderful thing that I should love him as I did—I who had never felt my heart yearn towards children. But he had been to me in a sense a child of atonement. When he was born I had said to myself that I would atone by devotion for many sins of selfishness which I need not particularise here.

      But, then, it was easy enough to worship him in any case. For even in his earliest babyhood he had the peculiar gift of Style. He helped one to live, just as a beautiful flower does, or a great poem or picture.

      There are so many people in this world who are Impoverishers! They don't know it. Most of them wouldn't even know what you meant if you told them they belonged to the great all-round cheapening class. Yet there they are, always making everything about them look worse than it is. Some of them are so far gone in want of style that if they went to Buckingham Palace they would immediately make it look like a shoddy place in Acton or Wandsworth. On the other hand, there are a few rare and blessed souls who would make a pigsty look a proper abode for royalty.

      It has nothing to do with money. It has nothing to do with clothes. It has only to do with Self.

      My Little Yeogh Wough is one of these.

      From the first week of his life he made everybody about him live up to their income. He mutely demanded the best of everything, even while his mere presence lent a charm and glory to the worst of things. I had had ideas of a four-and-sixpenny woollen hat and a ten-and-sixpenny pelisse as quite good enough for any baby; but when I looked at him I saw that it had to be a thirty-five shilling hat and a four-guinea cloak. Somehow or other, he made his nurse quite a distinguished person to look at, while he himself soon became a delight to the eye, with his big, brown velvety eyes, his exquisite skin, his mass of shining curls and his portly little body—so portly that it looked as if it were artificially inflated and a puncture by a pin might cause a collapse.

      "I can't understand how it is," a friend said to me once. "As a rule, babies, like cats, make a place look common, but he never does. He's got a sort of kinghood about him."

      This was true of him then as it is true of him to-day. And I was reverent. But there were times when I was afraid. For I am a believer in Compensation, and I know that where your special pride and joy are, there shall you only too surely be stricken.

      If you are proud of your bodily beauty, then in that beauty shall you be degraded. Not for you then shall be the disease that comes in the leg or the toe or in some wholly unobtrusive place where no one need know of it. To you it will come either in the eye, so that you have to wear an eyeshade, or in the form of a skin disorder, so that the fairness and perfectness of your complexion may be lost to you. I have read of one of our most successful business men that his great passion in life being the taking of country rambles with a botanical interest, he had told himself that when he had made enough money to be fairly comfortable in life he would give up working and devote himself to walking as a hobby; but just as his business