Marie Connor Leighton

“ And among those upturned faces was the face of Little Yeogh Wough—very white, very set, very calm. And over in the east, where the sun would rise, there was a radiance that was not yet of the sun and yet was warmer than the chill grim greyness of the dawn. It was a light shed by the presence of a great Archangel, whose arms, outspread, as it were, upon the clouds, enfolded and blessed the dead as they lay beneath, while his face, uplifted to a higher heaven, besought the pity of the great God of the Universe for the agonies of the nations passing through the awful purgative ordeal of War. ”

“ Another blinding mist of tears blotted out the last line, even as just now in the drawing-room tears had blotted out the figure of Little Yeogh Wough's friend sitting at the piano.
That night, after midnight, as I sat on the big sofa with the Boy and his friend, I said suddenly:
"I didn't know you wrote poems, Roland. Why don't you let me see some of them?"
"They're not good enough to show you. I suppose Edward has been telling you I've written them. He oughtn't to have told you." ”

“ My racking fits of coughing would not let me go to the station to meet my treasure; but I dressed myself with as much care to be beheld by him as if he had been a grown man. I wonder how many mothers put themselves out to cultivate beauty for the satisfaction of sons of not yet eight years old?
But the beauty cultivation was all on my side this time. For when he appeared, marshalled by his father and by the friend who had brought him over, he wore his little bowler and a badly cut, dark overcoat that he disliked, and his face was so sullen that the sight of him gave me a shock. ”

“ It is astonishing how lovable women who make up badly usually are.
It was astonishing, too, how much Little Yeogh Wough loved women. He loved everybody and everything, for that matter, with a great and deep love and sympathy; such a love and sympathy as led him, for instance, to get out of his warm little bed one gloomy and bone-chilling morning of a London winter and labour for hours in the sodden garden to get into shelter some newly born puppies who were exposed to the icy rain. But most of all he loved women. ”

“ Just as dance music is sadder than any Dead March ever composed, so youth and gaiety make one think of death more than ever old age does.
Really, most of the old people that one knows, and particularly the old men, make one think of anything rather than the grave. They are skittish, frivolous, doing their best to dance upon their crutches and holding on to the good things of this world with a desperate grip which youth never has. ”

“ Dear Big Yeogh Wough!" he murmured caressingly.
"How is it, Roland, that you never say 'darling'? I don't think I've ever heard you say it in your life, any more than I've ever heard you talk slang."
"I don't know. I don't want to say it, somehow. You know, you yourself say it's cheap."
"It's cheap when a woman says it, because women generally say it too easily; but it can be a grand word when a man speaks it—or a boy. Still, I am quite satisfied that you should call me just Big Yeogh Wough. ”

“ And people as a rule are so disappointing! One's friends fall short, one's lover says the wrong thing at the wrong time, or forgets to say the right thing—which is even worse—and one's dearest clergymen and favourite actors and heroes generally make unspeakable fools of themselves just as one is getting ready to fall on one's knees and worship them.
All my life I have asked too much of people and then been left gaping at their unsatisfyingness. So it was no wonder that I was always frankly amazed whenever I stopped to realise that Little Yeogh Wough had always come up to my expectations. ”

“ But the next day was a different kind of day for Little Yeogh Wough. For he spent it in London—that London which he always loved, as I love it, with a deep and undying devotion; and he found himself in the company of men whose strength was in their brains, rather than in their bodies.
He began, directly I left him, by mischievously telegraphing to an eminent novelist, who was fond of him, to meet him at a given spot in town. ”

“ For he is vain, my Little Yeogh Wough. There is nothing effeminate about him, though he knows a great deal of womanly lore and could, for instance, choose the right lace for a particular gown as well as I could do it myself. There is nothing of the tailor's or hairdresser's dummy about him, with clothes looking like those pictured in an illustrated booklet and hair plastered with the meticulous exactitude required of men going into a Thames racing craft, where one hair more on one side or the other might sink the cranky shell and plunge them into the river. ”

“ Dearest, your Big Yeogh Wough, who has always been so proud of you ever since you have been born, is prouder of you than ever now. She is glad you are where your duty of honour and manhood demand that you should be. You are fighting, not only for us and all that we glory in, but for those who have died—and who are all your brothers, whether they were peers or privates. ”

“ The scent of the American currant will always bring my childhood back to me when even music could not do it. The hardest-hearted criminal can be softened sometimes to yielding and to tears by some smell that brings back an old home life long since forgotten. In the same way the sight of clothes worn in other days sends the memory darting back across the years. So it was with me when I was rummaging among my Little Yeogh Wough's things and found a pink linen coat and knee breeches and a little white-frilled shirt that had been worn with them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I wonder if a mother's love is really all gold, as people say it is, Little Yeogh Wough, or whether there isn't a good deal of the dross of pride in it! Now, I would take off my skin and sit in my bones to keep you from feeling cold, but, after all, that's because you are mine, and I suppose I am selfish enough to think, though it's wrong to do so, that what is mine is more precious than what is anybody else's. ”

“ Old Nurse, devoted though she was, was of no use whatever for a child with a temperament, and had not perceived the psychic moment when it was necessary to send him out of the nursery. I should have felt it in my blood if I had been there, and the whole ugly affair would not have happened.
"You see the justness of your punishment, don't you, Roland?"
"You're always just, Big Yeogh Wough. I've never known you unjust yet." ”

“ For, just as a man has to be better turned out in personal appearance than a woman in order to look all right, so he has to be better dressed and finished off inside in order not to do things in a shoddy way. For the bounderishness of a bounder betrays itself in every little thing he does—in the way he smiles, the way he comes into a room, the way he takes his overcoat off and puts it on, the way he touches a piano, the very way he breathes and speaks. ”

“ One feels that the fitness of things is not outraged. But when one sees a young widow—oh, then, one [Pg 186] knows that there is a story of romance and horror and anguish lurking behind the black, and first a pang of pity goes through one's heart, and then a flood of tenderness rises in one's soul for the girl who could only just have gained her womanhood's best joys when she lost them.
Little Yeogh Wough, who had been shopping for himself, was by this time crossing the floor towards me, his face aglow, his step strong, his whole air vital and electric. ”

“ It's no more good to resist flying bullets or shell splinters than an old tottering man's body. That's where I should feel bitter. These times are women's times and this war of machinery might as well be carried on by women, for all the good that male muscle can do in it. And yet they go and take the pick of the boys and let a stray bit of shell finish off in a second a splendid human creature whose mind might have been the driving force of the nation in a few years to come! ”

“ I had very strong doubts as to the discipline that was being kept up at the London house by the old Nurse, under the supervision of my sweet-natured, but too gentle and yielding, aunt.
"I don't suppose we shall know him for the same boy when he gets out here," I said to Miss Torry, who was with us. "My aunt, you know, is one of those dear women who always let in thin ends of wedges all round them, and she will have had time in a fortnight to let in a good many in his daily life." ”

“ It is strange how the stalking shape of Death seemed to be clanking his dry bones everywhere for me that day! It seemed to grin at me when I smiled in pride at seeing Little Yeogh Wough in the khaki of the Officers' Training Corps. It grinned, too, at the other women, who were there in [Pg 138] hundreds—mothers, sisters, aunts, or cousins of the boys—all looking like butterflies in frocks of the "confection" kind and hats from Paris or from the Maison Lewis.
What a mockery clothes are when the great things of life come along! ”

“ Whenever he came back from school it was with honours. He was learning, growing, developing in every way. He was learning to govern himself and through this to govern others. And to this end, and this end only, he had become a good cricketer and footballer.
"You see, Big Yeogh Wough, I had to do it," he explained. "Boys at a public school don't respect brains unless the boy that's got the brains is good at games. That's why a letter was written to you asking you to encourage me to put my heart in cricket and football." ”

“ Just fancy, Big Yeogh Wough, we're going to be in Kiel to-morrow! I shall see father in a tobacconist's shop again."
"Is there anything so very wonderful in that?"
"Of course there is. He's a different man directly he gets into a tobacconist's. You really wouldn't know he was father. It's so funny to watch him."
"Oh! Men are always like that, dear. You'll be like it yourself when you're a grown man. No matter how much a man loves a woman he gets free from her somehow inside a tobacco shop. But I hope you want to see Kiel for better reasons than that." ”

“ My first ideas of Edward were that he did not greatly care for womankind and that, considering that he was so young, he had an astonishing worship of the music of Beethoven.
"I can't understand it," I had said to him once. "Oh, of course I recognise that Beethoven is very great, and all that, and I like his music about twice a year when I feel ecclesiastical; but on the whole he always strikes me as a composer who was born an old man and who made music for old men."
"Why, mother always worships old men!" put in Little Yeogh Wough mischievously. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a thing very holy and very terrible, like life itself. It is a burden to be borne; a thing to labour for and to suffer for and to die for; a thing which gives no happiness and no pleasantness ... but a hard life, an unknown grave, and the respect and bared heads of those who follow."—John Masefield.
(Quotation found written in a notebook in the pocket of "Little Yeogh Wough" when he received his death wound, Dec. 23rd, 1915.) ”

“ Well, even if he doesn't happen to win it himself, he's pretty sure to be the cause of some other fellow's winning it. I tell you, he's the best soldier in the whole battalion, and if he were to be killed to-morrow without having had the chance to show all the grit that's in him—the chance to hold his trench single-handed against a horde of Germans—he'd still have done so much by his wonderful influence to stiffen up his men that they'd stand like lions, months after he was in his grave, just because of the memory of him. ”

“ I have no doubt that the Hohenzollern was a miracle of luxury inside, with her silver bath for the Kaiser's daughter and other sybaritic appointments; but outside she was not a dream of loveliness. Neither were the two warships that we saw anything like as handsome to behold as our own battleships.
"What funny tin-pot things they look!" said Little Yeogh Wough. "Now I know why all the toy ships we have that are made in Germany [Pg 115] never look a bit like ours. They don't look so professional, somehow. Perhaps it's because we're not used to them. ”

“ He patted my face and neck with the hand that I had left free, as I knelt by the bedside.
"You funny Big Yeogh Wough! Nobody would expect anyone who looks like you to talk like that," he said mischievously.
"You wise little boy!" I laughed. "No, I suppose they wouldn't. People always make mistakes like that, you know. One day the world will come to see that preachers may look very bright and easy-going—just as motherly women with mob caps and three chins are not necessarily the best persons to trust to for seeing that sheets are properly aired. Now, good night. You must go to sleep." ”

“ You can see what I feel, Big Yeogh Wough. I don't want you to see work that I think is bad. And you know that home and you are something quite apart from everything else with me. My best self is always here, but I've had to bring out another self in my school life, or I couldn't have got on in that life at all. ”

“ For, though I can't endure the man who's a cricketer or football player and nothing more, yet, on the other hand, I don't like the man who can't play games at all. There's always something wrong about him, as there is about a man who never smokes. Cricket and football are manure for the character just as Greek and Latin are manure for the mind. Only one doesn't want all manure and nothing else. ”

“ After all, if I'm a good soldier and strong and healthy, what on earth does it matter that I can't see the enemy coming behind bushes five miles off? When it comes to that, one uses field glasses."
"That's the right way to look at it," I told him. "The bright side of everything is really the truest side. That's why I'm sorry Miss Torry isn't here now. She'd only have to cry out: 'Lor'! You've only got to try twenty-three and three-quarter times more and you're sure to get what you want.' That irrepressible sort of person is so helpful in life—so different from Old Nurse's sort. ”

“ You must avoid prinkers, just as a woman looking for a husband ought to avoid a doxer."
"Whatever is a doxer?"
"A doxer's generally a man—a man who smiles too agreeably and moves his head and body about in a funny way directly he gets among strangers. But never mind the doxers or the prinkers, either. I want to listen to this piece by Sibelius."
The strange fear of the future clutched at my throat more and more. It got to be almost more than I could bear when a little later the most spirited of the school songs swelled into the air, sung by scores of voices:
"Jolly, oh, jolly at eve...." ”

“ And I wondered again, as I have wondered all my life, why these so-called bright scenes are sadder far than any funeral, and why black does succeed in looking pathetic on the young, whereas it only looks dismal on the old.
It is only a mild sympathy that stirs in one when one sees a very old woman in widow's crape. ”