World War, 1914-1918 -- Gift books; World War, 1914-1918 -- Miscellanea
When a bathroom is of the ordinary kind, the only cause of trouble, as a
rule, is whether the hot water is hot enough. But this particular
bathroom has three doors, and the occupants of the three contiguous
rooms from which those doors give access occasionally emerged at the
same time and fiercely disputed possession of the means of cleanliness.
When Little Yeogh Wough was at home he usually slipped in at a
well-chosen moment by his particular door and, locking the two other
doors on the inside, remained master of the situation, while various
other members of the family, and notably his father, stormed outside.
The boy had always been a fanatical devotee of the Bath, and since he
has been in the trenches and personal cleanliness has been difficult, he
has become more so than ever. He loves his room because of this door
leading into the bathroom, and more so still because of the long mirror
set in the door on his own side.
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. He
is smart and polished and speckless as any prince with a valet at five
hundred a year, and he brilliantined his rather fair and very rebellious
locks until in the process of subduing they became many shades darker
than their natural hue; yet he always saw clearly and maintained firmly
that clothes should set off the man or woman and not be allowed to make
use of the glorious human figure as a mere peg on which to display
themselves, while hair should never advertise the coiffeur. So, though
he has always examined himself before looking-glasses and had pots of
all sorts of toilet things on his dressing-table, yet he has always
been the manliest of the manly.
"Why shouldn't a boy look in the glass as well as a girl?" he said to me
one day. "I don't see why it should only be the females that are allowed
to take pleasure in whatever good things in the way of looks may happen
to have been given them."
All his little personal ways came back to me as I moved about his room,
making sure that nothing should be missing when he came. The back brush
he had bought for the bath looked a little dusty, so I washed it. Even
as I did this, snatches of poems which I would rather not have
remembered just then kept on coming to my mind and my lips. There was a
poem called "Aftermath" in _The Times_, which I shall never be able to
forget. It begins:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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