The Boy with Wings Page 18

  CHAPTER XVII

  LESLIE ON "MARRIAGE"

  She'd said, "Supposing the moon _did_ fall into your lap, Taffy? Supposethat young Cloud-Dweller of yours did (a) take you flying, and (b)propose to you?" and she'd recited solemnly:

  "_Somewhere I've read that the gods, waxing wroth at our mad importunity, Hurl us our boon and it falls with the weight of a curse at our feet; Perilous thing to intrude on their lofty Olympian immunity! 'Take it and die,' say the gods, and we die of our fondest conceit._"

  "Yes; 'of' it! After _having_ it. Who'd mind dying _then_?"

  "But if it hadn't been worth it, Taffy? Suppose you were air-sick?"Leslie had suggested. "Worse, suppose you were Paul-sick?"

  "_What?_"

  "Yes, supposing that Super-Boy of yours himself was the disappointment?Suppose none of his 'little ways' happened to please you? Men don'trealise it, but, in love, a man is much easier to please than a woman!"

  "No, Leslie. No," had come from the girl who knew nothing oflove-making--less than nothing, since she _thought_ she knew.

  Leslie had persisted. "The first pet-name a man calls you--awfullyimportant, that!--may hash up Love's young dream for ever. Some men, Ibelieve, begin with 'Dear old--something or other.' That's the _end_. Orsomething that you know you're obviously _not_. Such as 'Little Woman,'to _me_. Or they don't notice something that's specially there for themto notice. That's unforgivable. Or they do notice something that's quitebeside the mark. Or they repeat themselves. Not good enough, a man whocan't think of _one_ new way of saying he cares, each day. (Even acalendar can do that.) Saying the wrong thing, though, isn't as bad asbeing _silent_. That's fatal. Gives a girl _such_ a lot of time toimagine all the things that another man might have been saying at thetime. That's why men with no vocabularies ought never to get engaged ormarried. '_I'm a man of few words_,' they say. They ought to be told,'_Very well. Outside! It simply means you won't trouble to amuse me._'Exit the Illusion.

  '_Alas, how easily things go wrong! A look too short, or a kiss too long----_'

  (Especially with a look too short.) Yes," Leslie had concludedimpressively, "suppose the worst tragedy happened? _Suppose_ the Dampierboy did get engaged to you, and then you found out that he didn't in theleast know how to make love? To make love to _you_, I mean."

  "There wouldn't have to be any love '_made_,'" little Gwenna hadmurmured, flushing. "Where he was, the love would _be_."

  "My dear, you _are_ what Hugo Swayne calls '_a Passe-iste_' in love.Why, why wasn't _I_ brought up in the heart of the mountains (and faraway from any other kind of heart) until I was twenty-two, and thenhurled into a love-affair with the first decent-looking young man?"Leslie had cried, with exaggerated envy. "The happier you! But, Taff, doremember that 'Love is a Lad with Wings'--like yours. Even if theengagement were all your fancy painted, that Grand Firework Display sortof feeling couldn't _last_. Don't shoot! It's true. People couldn't goon living their lives and earning their livings and making their careersand having their babies if it _did_ last. It _must_ alter. It _must_ diedown into the usual dear old sun rising every morning. So, when your'_Oiseau de feu_' married you, and you found he was just--a husband,like everybody else's----"

  "Not 'like' anybody!"--indignantly.

  "How d'you know _what_ he's like?" Leslie had demanded. "What d'you knowof his temper? Men with that heather-honey kind of smile and those deepdimples very often have a beastly temper. Probably jealous----"

  "I would _love_ him to be that."

  "You wouldn't love to be poor, though," Leslie had gone off on anothertack. "Poor, and uncomfortable."

  "I shall never be comfortable again without him," Gwenna had saidobstinately. "Might as well be uncomfortable _with_ him!"

  "In a nasty little brick villa near Hendon, so as to be close to theflying, perhaps? With a horrid dark bathroom? And the smell of cookinghaddocks and of Lux all over it!" Leslie had enlarged. "And you havingto use up all your own little tiny income to help pay the butcher, andthe Gas Light and Coke Company, and the rates, and loathsome details ofthat sort that a woman never feels a ha'porth the better for! Instead ofbeing able to get yourself fresh gloves and silk stockings and a fewtrifles of that sort that make absolutely _all_ the difference to awoman's life!"

  "Not _all_ the difference, indeed," Gwenna had said softly. But Lesliehad continued to draw these fancy pictures of married life as lived withMr. Paul Dampier.

  "Taffy, for one thing, you've never seen him anything but nicely-groomedand attractive to look at. You try to imagine him in what Kipling calls'_the ungirt hour_.' They talk of a woman's slatternliness killing love.Have they seen a _man_ when he '_hasn't bothered_' to groom himself?That sight----"

  She had shaken her black head ineffably over the mental image of it, andhad averred, "That sight ought to be added to the Valid and LegitimateCauses for Divorce! A wife ought to be able to consider herself as freeas air after the first time that she sees her husband going about thehouse without a collar. Sordid, unbecoming grey flannel about his neck.Three half buttons, smashed in the wringer, hanging by their lastthreads to his shirt. And his old slippers bursting out at the side ofthe toe. And his 'comfortable' jacket on, with matches and fur in allthe pockets and a dab of marmalade--also furred--on the front. Andhimself unshaved, with a zig-zag parting to his hair. I believe some mendo go about like this before their wives, and then write wistful lettersto the _Daily Mirror_ about, 'Why is Marriage the Tomb of Romance?'"

  Gwenna had sniffed. "Oh! _Some_ men! _Those!_"

  "Valid cause for Divorce Number Ninety-three: The state of the bedroomfloor," Leslie had pursued. "I, slut as I am, do pick things upsometimes. Men, never. Ask any married woman you know. Maudie told _me_.Everything is hurled down, or stepped out of, or merely dropped. Andleft. Left, my child, for _you_ to gather up. Everything out of thechest-of-drawers tossed upon the carpet. Handkerchiefs, dirty old pipes,shirts, ties, '_in one red burial blent_.' That means he's been 'lookingfor' something. Mind, _you've_ got to find it. Men are born'find-silly.' Men never yet have found anything (except the North Poleand a few things like that, that are no earthly good in a villa), butthey are for ever _losing_ things!"

  Gwenna had given a smile to the memory of a certain missing collar-studthat she had heard much of.

  "Yes, I suppose to be allowed to find his collar-studs is what he'dconsider '_Paradise enow_' for any girl!" Leslie had mocked. "I misdoubtme that the Dampier boy would settle down after a year of marriage intoa regular Sultan of the Hearthrug. Looking upon his wife as somethingthat belongs to him, and goes about with him; like a portmanteau.Putting you in your place as '_less than the dust beneath hischariot_,' that is, '_beneath his biplane wheels_.'"

  "Leslie! I shouldn't mind! I'd _like_ to be! I believe it _is_ myplace," Gwenna had interrupted, lifting towards her friend a small facequivering with conviction. "He could make anything he liked or chose ofme. What do I care----"

  "Not for clothes flung down in rings all over the floor like when atrout's been rising? Nor for trousers left standing there like a pair ofopera-glasses--or concertinas? Braces all tangled up on the gas-bracket?Overcoat and boots crushing your new hat on the bed? Seventeen holeysocks for you to mend? _All_ odd ones--for _you_ to sort----"

  Little Gwenna had cried out: "I'd _want_ to!"

  "I'm not afraid you won't get what you want," Leslie had said finally."All I hope is that your wish won't fail when you get it!"

  And of that Gwenna was never afraid.

  "I should not care for him so much if he were not the only one who couldmake me so happy," she told herself; "and _unless_ the woman's veryhappy, surely the man can't be. It must mean, then, that he'll feel,some day, that this would be the way to happiness. I'm sure there are_some_ marriages that are different from what Leslie says. Some whereyou go on being sweethearts even after you're quite old friends, like.I--I could make it like that for him. I _feel_ I could!"

  Yes; she felt that some day (perhaps not soon) she must
win him.

  Sometimes she thought that this might be when her rival, the perfectedmachine, had made his name and absorbed him no longer. Sometimes, again,she told herself that he might have no success at all.

  "Then, _then_ he'd see there was _something_ else in the world. Then hewould turn to me," said the girl to herself. She added, as every girl inlove must add, "No one _could_ care as I do."

  And one day she found on the leaf of the tear-off calendar in hercottage bedroom a line of verse that seemed to have been written forher. It remained the whole of Browning as far as Gwenna Williams wasconcerned. And it said:

  "_What's Death? You'll love me yet!_"