TOMMY WIDEAWAKE

TOMMY

WIDEAWAKE

BY

H. H. BASHFORD

Published by JOHN LANE

The Bodley Head

NEW YORK AND LONDON

MCMIII

Copyright, 1903

By John Lane

CONTENTS

I

IN WHICH FOUR MEN MAKE A PROMISE

We were sitting round the fire, in the study—five men, all of us middle-aged and sober-minded, four of us bachelors, one a widower.

And it was he who spoke, with an anxious light in his grey eyes, and two thoughtful wrinkles at the bridge of his military nose.

"Tommy," he observed, "Tommy is not an ordinary boy."

We were silent, and I could see the doctor's lips twitching beneath his moustache, as he gazed hard into the fire, and sucked at his cigar. The colonel knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and resumed:

"I suppose," he said, "that it is a comparatively unusual circumstance to find five men, unrelated by birth or marriage, who, having been friends at school and college and having reached years of maturity, find themselves resident in the same village, with that early friendship not merely still existent, but, if I may say so, stronger than ever."

We nodded.

"It is unusual," observed the vicar.

"As you know," proceeded the colonel, a little laboriously, for he was a poor conversationalist, "the calls of my profession have forbidden me, of late years, to enjoy as much of your company as I could have wished—and now, after a very pleasant winter together, I must once again take the Eastern trail for an indefinite period."

We were regretfully silent—perhaps also a little curious, for our friend was not wont to discourse thus fully to us.

The poet appeared even a little dismayed, owing, doubtless, to that intuition which has made him so justly renowned in his circle of admirers, for the colonel's next remarks filled us all with a similar emotion.

"Dear friends," he said, leaning forward in his chair, and placing his pipe upon the whist table, "may I—would you allow me so to trespass on this friendship of ours, as to ask for your interest in my only son, Thomas?"

For a minute all of us, I fancy, trod the fields of memory.

The poet's thoughts hovered round a small grave in his garden, wherein lay an erstwhile feline comrade of his solitude, whose soul had leaped into space at the assault of an unerring pebble.

The vicar and the doctor would seem to have had similar reminiscences—and had I not seen a youthful figure wading complacently through my cucumber frames? We all were interested in Tommy.

Another chord was touched.

"He is motherless, you see, and very alone," the colonel pleaded, as though our thoughts had been audible.

We remembered the brief bright years, and the long grey ones, and steeled our hearts for service.

"I have seen so little of him, myself," continued the colonel. "He is at school and he will go to college, but a boy needs more than school and college can give him—he needs a