Читать книгу Boy of My Heart - Marie Connor Leighton - Страница 6

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It is half-past nine o'clock at night and I, an eager-hearted woman, sit waiting still for dinner, with a letter open before me from my son in the fighting line. It is addressed to me in his pet name for me:—

France, 10.12.15.

Dearest Big Yeogh Wough—

I feel very distressed about a sentence in a letter of Vera's that arrived a few minutes ago. I have been away from my battalion for nearly ten days now, and in consequence all my correspondence is waiting for me there and cannot be sent on because they don't know where I am precisely, and couldn't very well send over here if they did. The letter that came this evening was addressed: "Attached 1st—— Light Infantry," and must have been sent on the chance of reaching me. In it Vera says that you seem changed since she saw you last—rather anxious, and worn, and very tired. I am quite at sea as to when and how she saw you, but gather from the context that she must have been down to Sunny Cliff. Is this so? But I do hope that you are not "rather anxious and worn and very tired." It troubles me muchly. Qu'est ce qu'il y a? Is it finances and family navigation; or working too hard; or myself; or what? Please do tell me. Is there anything I can do?

I seem to be very much cut off from everything and everybody just lately. Sometimes I rather exult in it; sometimes I wonder how much of the old Roland is left. I have learnt much; I have gained much; I have grown up suddenly; I have got to know the ways of the world. But there is a poem of Verlaine's that I remember sometimes:

"O, qu'as tu fait, toi que voilà,

Pleurant sans cesse?

Dis, qu'as tu fait, toi que voilà,

De ta jeunesse?"

As I told you last week, I hope to be coming over again to see you soon—quite soon, in fact. Those words of Vera's, though, have troubled me much.

Meanwhile,

Very much love to Father and The Bystander,

Always your devoted,

L. Y. W.

P.S. (a day later).—Have got leave from the 24th to the 31st. Shall land on the 25th.

Such a very wistful letter! It is the saddest, I think, that I have ever had from him. But, oh! what the postscript means to me!

Land on the 25th!

Our home—this house in which I am waiting—is very near the coast. It is not exactly at the spot where he must land, but it ought not to take him more than an hour or an hour and a half to get here. And yet it is half-past nine at night on the 25th, and I and the dinner are still waiting!

There are others waiting, too. They sat in this room with me at first, but they got restless and now they are in different parts of the house, trying to do other things while they wait.

It is so useless trying to do other things when one waits for a really important thing to happen!

I am restless, too, but somehow my spirit's restlessness takes the form of a deadly bodily stillness. All of me is waiting under a spell of suspense, and I feel that if I make the slightest movement I may break the spell.

It is my darling boy that I am waiting for.

There are girls who may think that it is not romantic waiting for a son; not so romantic, anyhow, as waiting for a lover. But I know they are wrong. They have ideas, no doubt, of a grey-haired woman with a mob cap on and a figure stout to shapelessness, so that she has to sit in an attitude of extremest inelegance, with skirts of appalling ampleness and shapeless feet on a hassock; but all mothers are not like this, though a great many very good, dear ones are. This is the sort that knows best how the boy's flannels are wearing and what state his socks are in. But there is another sort that knows a little less about his flannels, perhaps, and a little less about his socks, but a good deal more about his mind and soul; and of these latter are the mothers to whom the grown-up boys whom once they knew as little babies are not sons only, but friends, comrades, and, in a certain sense, adoring lovers.

Twenty years old! How amazing to think that the boy I am waiting for is twenty! Of course, every woman with a twenty-year-old son says it doesn't seem more than a year or two since he was born. But it really is true, and is not said from any affectation. It only seems a very little while since my Little Yeogh Wough—as he calls himself—came into the world. I remember, soon after he was born, going to see a woman friend with a seven-year-old boy, and actually letting her see in my silly pride of juvenility that I thought her so old because her boy was seven; and now my boy, that I am waiting for here to-night, is twenty—and yet I do not feel myself old.

How the years glide by!

But, after all, though twenty years seems such a very long time, yet it is not much if you divide it into four spaces of five years. Five years are nothing. They go in a flash. Well, one only has to have four of those flashes and there are twenty years gone—and a baby has grown up to be a man.

And such a man, too—in the case of this boy that I and a spoiling meal are waiting for!

I don't suppose any two women in the world would agree exactly as to what good points of body and mind go to make up the ideal man; and then, too, there are thousands of sensible people who believe that a mother can never see her children in a true light and with a clear eye. But where I am concerned their belief is wrong. I am not a born worshipper of my own kin, and if one of my children had a hare-lip, I think it would seem to me rather a worse hare-lip than anybody else's. So, when I say that the boy I am expecting is handsome and attractive, I am telling the truth. He has that best of all gifts—personality.

Personality is a wonderful thing. It is worth so much more than mere beauty. Every woman that lives knows how, once or twice in her life, at least—perhaps quite casually in the street—she has seen a man of whom she has instantly felt that the woman who belongs to him is very lucky. The man may not have been very handsome, and he may have been impecunious looking and badly dressed, but there was something about him which marked him out as a Man, with a capital M, as distinct from the mere empty shells of masculinity that walk about among us and have no power to thrill. I have always called this peculiar and rare quality in a man the "dignity of the watch chain."

People have laughed at me and have not understood; and so perhaps I had better try to explain.

It has nothing to do with watch chains. In fact, a man with anything much in the way of a watch chain cannot very easily have it. Of course, it never goes with vulgarity. I only mention watch chain at all in connection with it because there is always a certain dignity about the chest of the man who has got it. Athletics will not give it, and yet there is something about the set of the shoulders and the build of the breast of a man with personality that makes a woman feel that his arms would shelter her better than any other arms in the world, and that to be the chosen love of such a Man would be the greatest honour and delight that life could give.

My Yeogh Wough has got this charm. I can't describe it exactly, but I know at half a mile's distance when a man has got it. I know directly I go into a church if any man of the congregation has it. And he, my boy, had it from the time when he was a few months old—as was testified to by the fact that a millionaire's wife who hated children asked that he might be allowed to be downstairs when she was calling on me, because, she said:

"He's beautiful. He's not like an ordinary child. There's something about him that draws me."

That seems only to have happened about a year ago, too. And now that millionaire's wife is a peeress and my Yeogh Wough is just twenty, is a lieutenant and an adjutant, and is coming home to-day on six days' leave!

To-day? The day is already gone. It must be a quarter to ten by now and I dare not think of what the dinner must be like, or the cook's temper. If she hadn't known him and worshipped him ever since he was little, she would be in an unmanageable rage. I am beginning almost to be a little anxious, because this is his second leave and I am a believer in Compensation. In this world one never gets a good thing twice and the bolts of fate always fall from the bluest skies.

But I will shut these gleams of fear away from me. The room door will be pushed open presently and he will come in with his gay, firm step and his charming smile.

His smile has always had something surprising about it, because his eyes are so sad.

My Yeogh Wough!

It suddenly occurs to me that Yeogh Wough is a very odd name and must strike outsiders as very ugly. It has even something Chinese about it. His real name is Roland, and when he was very little and the pronouncing of an "r" was beyond him, he called himself Yoland and then Yo-Yo, and so it came to Yeogh Wough.

It certainly does look very ugly and Chinese. I am sorry for that, because he not only made it my name for him, but his name for me, too. I am Big Yeogh Wough, and he is Little Yeogh Wough. It is laughable that he should be the little one, because he is much bigger than I am now, having grown to close upon six feet in height; but he still signs his letters "Little Yeogh Wough," and he says he always will, as long as we are both alive.

The initials L.Y.W. are at the foot of this message that I am looking at now, saying that he is coming home.

I am getting very hungry, but I will not begin dinner without him. He is bound to come within the next half-hour. I have worked out the trains with the utmost completeness dozens of times to-day. So has his father. So has his sister.

I will get his photograph down from the top of the cabinet and look at it. It will help me to get through the last few minutes—or perhaps half an hour—of waiting.

As I take down the photograph I knock off accidentally from the cabinet top a tiny newspaper cutting which I had put there in order that I might not forget it. It is only a cutting from a review of a book, which I have saved because of two lines quoted in it:—

"He needs not any hearse to bear him hence

Who goes to join the men of Agincourt."

I believe the lines are by a nephew of Mr. Asquith's. Anyhow, whoever wrote them, they have haunted me ever since I saw them two days ago.

To join the men of Agincourt! What a glorious thing! When I was a little girl and learned first about Agincourt I used to thrill. Now it is the same. I felt suddenly an intense longing to go out myself and do something hard and fierce and dangerous. Oh, yes, I know so well that the man who dies in a trench or in a charge and who lies unburied or gets hurriedly laid away under two feet of casual earth, is grander and more princely than the king who dies in a stately bed in his palace and is carried to his tomb between packed throngs, standing with bared heads! In very deed he needs no hearse who goes to join the men of Agincourt. But let it not be my Yeogh Wough! Not yet! Not yet!

But what am I thinking of? I am not afraid for him. He will be coming into this room in a moment, looking into my eyes with his wonderful brown velvet eyes that have always been so amazingly sad, considering the gaiety of his laugh, and of all his ways.

No, death will not come to him—not 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.