The Boy with Wings Page 30

  CHAPTER X

  LESLIE, ON "THE MOTLEY OF MARS"

  Now, as it happened, Miss Leslie Long did not choose to wait for herinvitation to the Aircraft Works. Unasked and unexpected, she turned upthere the very next Saturday afternoon.

  She was given a chair in that spacious, white,characteristically-scented room where Mrs. Crewe and Gwenna were againbusy with the wings. She was told not to expect either of them to stopwork to look at her, but to go on talking and to tell them if there wereanything new going on in London.

  "Anything? Why, everything's new," Leslie told them gaily.

  She wore the mauve linen frock and the shady hat that had been herbridesmaid's attire for Gwenna's wedding. And she was looking well,Gwenna noticed, as she stole a glance at her chum; well, and happierthan she had seen Leslie look since the beginning of this eventfulsummer.

  Leslie then gossiped to them of the many changes in London. These arenow very ancient history to a whole nation. But at that time (inSeptember, Nineteen-fourteen) they sounded still strange enough to thosewho lived out of town.

  She spoke of the darkened streets. The bright, purposely-misleadinglights in the Park. Of the recruiting posters; the recruiting results.Of the first of the refugees. Leslie's old lady had given hospitality totwo ladies, a mother and a daughter from Brussels, and it was Leslie'snew duty to translate English to them. Also of the departure ofregiments she talked....

  "Of course there are only two classes into which you _can_ divide theyoung men who aren't getting ready to go out," decreed Leslie, thewhole-hearted. "Either they're Objects of Pity, or else they're Objectsof Contempt."

  "Come, come!" put in the Aeroplane Lady, laughing a little, but withoutraising her eyes from the stretched canvas on the trestles before her."What about my men outside there?"

  "I bet they envy the rawest recruit in K.'s Army!" declared Leslie. "Themost anaemic little plucky shop-assistant who's only just scraped throughon his chest-measurement and who's never spent so many consecutive hoursin the open air in his whole life before!" She patted the stately headof the Great Dane as he stepped up to her from his big wooden kennel inthe corner, and went on to say how she loved the New Armies.

  "We see plenty of their doings up at Hampstead now, Taffy," she said."'_The Heath has Armies plenty, and semi-warlike bands!_' Queen'sWestminsters coming up in sweaters and shorts to do Physical Ekkers onthe cricket-pitch. Swagger young men, some of them, too. Driving up incars. Wearing their Jermyn Street winter-sports kit of last year undercommon privates' overcoats."

  "Mars in motley!" said the Aeroplane Lady.

  Leslie said, "It is a _mixture_! New Army Type Number One, Section A:the boy who was born to be a soldier and bred to be a clerk. The fighterwho wouldn't have got a chance to _live_ if it hadn't been for this war.The Dear Duck who's being taken to the water for the first time aftertwenty years!... Then, of course, there's the New Army Type NumberForty-three: the Honest Striver in Khaki, putting his back into learninga job that wasn't ever meant to be his. Not one bit thrilled by the ideaof a scrap. No fun to him. Civilian down to his bones. But--'_It is hisduty, and he does_.'"

  "All the more credit," the Aeroplane Lady reminded her quietly, "to theborn civilian."

  "Yes, I know, Mrs. Crewe. One thoroughly respects him for it," agreedthe soldier's daughter warmly.

  Adding meditatively, "But it's rather an effort to _like_ him as much asthe other kind!"

  "Talking of duty, Mr. Grant has gone," said Gwenna as she worked. "Youknow, Leslie: the engineer at our Westminster place who was alwaystalking to Mabel Butcher and then saying, 'Well! Duty calls. I mustaway.' I'm _sure_ he said that before he went off to enlist. He's in theR.E. And the office-boy that had such an _awful_ accent went with him._He's_ in the Halberdiers now; billeted in the country in some garagewith six other men."

  "How funny! D'you know who one of the men is? My friend, Monty Scott,the Dean's son," said Leslie, laughing again. "You remember him, Taffy,at that dance? He wore that Black Panther get-up.... He came up to seeme, in uniform, last Sunday. I told him he'd only joined the Halberdiersbecause he thought the touch of black suited him. Then he told me of hisweird billet in the country with these five other men. Two of them hadlately come out of prison, he said; and they were really awfullyinteresting, comparing the grub they'd had there with what was servedout to them here. I asked him (Monty) how he was getting on. He summedup the lot of the New Ranker rather well, I thought. He said, 'I've_never_ been so uncomfortable or laughed so much in my life'!"

  The Aeroplane Lady, working, said she thought he must be a dear.

  "He is, rather," agreed the girl who had thrice refused to marry thisyoung man.

  "Why d'you sigh?" asked Gwenna quickly. A sigh meant, to her, only onething. Impatience over the absence of the Beloved!

  "I--perhaps I was thinking of Monty Scott's eyes," said Leslie lightly,bending over to smooth the dog's neck. "They _are_ so absurdly handsome._Such_ a pity one can't have them to wear as brooches!" Then, quickly,she turned from the subject of Monty Scott. She drew something out ofher black silk bag. A picture postcard.

  "From one of our Allies," said Leslie, showing it.

  It gave a view of a French Regiment, still wearing the picturesqueuniform of Eighteen-seventy, marching down a sunny, chestnut-borderedboulevard. The soldier in the immediate foreground showed under thejaunty _kepi_ a dark, intelligent, mobile face that Gwenna recognised.

  She sighed and smiled over the card. It brought back to her that tea atHugo Swayne's rooms with Leslie, and the tall, blonde Englishman who wasto be her husband, and that dark young French engineer who had said,"But the Machine is also of the sex of Mademoiselle!" He had written onthis card in sprawling French writing and blue French ink, "_AMademoiselle Langue. Salutation amicale. Remember, please, the privatesoldier Gaston, who carries always in his knapsack the memory of theCurate's Egg!_"

  "Fancy, two of the men who were at Mr. Swayne's that afternoon are offat the Front to-day," said Gwenna Dampier. "That is, all three, perhaps.Paul said something about his cousin enlisting."

  "Poor Hugo Swayne," said Leslie, with a laugh, that she stopped as ifshe were sorry she had begun it. "It's too bad, really."

  "What is? _Isn't_ he enlisting?"

  "Yes. Oh, yes, Taffy, he has. But merely enlisting isn't the whole job,"said Leslie. "He--to begin with, he could hardly get them to passhim----"

  "Why? Too fat?" asked Gwenna mercilessly.

  "Fat--Oh, no. They said three weeks' Swedish exercise _and_ drill wouldtake that off. He was quite fit, they said, physically. It was his_mental_ capacity they seemed to doubt," explained Leslie. "Of coursethat was rather a shock to Hugo to hear, after the years he's beenlooking up to himself as a rather advanced and enlightened and thinkingperson. However, he took it very well. He saw what they meant."

  "Who were 'they'?" asked Mrs. Crewe.

  "The soldier-men he went to first of all, old brother-officers of hisfather's, who'd been with his father in Egypt, and whom he asked to findhim a job of some sort. They told him, quite gently, of course, thatthey were afraid he was not 'up' to any soldiering job. They said theywere afraid there were heaps of young Englishmen like him, awfullyanxious to 'do their bits,' but simply _not clever enough_! (Rathernice, isn't it, the revenge, at last, of the Brainless Army Type on theCultured Civilian?) And he said to the old Colonel or General orwhatever it was, 'I know, sir. I see, sir. Yes, I suppose I have addledmyself up by too much reading and too much talk. I know I'm aStage-Society-and-Cafe-Royal rotter, and no earthly good at thiscrisis.' And then he turned round and said quite angrily, 'Why wasn't Ibrought up to be some use when the time came?' And the old soldier-mansaid quite quietly, 'My dear Swayne, none of you "enlightened" peoplebelieved us that there was any "time" coming. You see now that we wereright.' And Hugo said, 'You ought to have hammered it into me. Isn'tthere anything that I can do, sir?' And at last they got himsomething."

  "What?" demanded Gwenna.

  "Well, of
course it sounds _rather_ ludicrous when you come to say whatit is," admitted Leslie, her mouth curling into a smile that she couldnot suppress. "But it just shows the Philistines that there _is_ someuse (if not beauty) in Futurist painting, after all. One always knew'_there must be something, if one could but find it out_.'"

  "But your friend Mr. Swayne can't do Futurist paintings," objected theAeroplane Lady, "at the Front!"

  "Well, but that's just what he _is_ doing! He's in France; at Quisait.Painting motor-buses to be used for transport wagons," explained Leslie."You know the most disguising colour for those things at a distance issaid to be not khaki, or feld-grau, or dull green, or any other _single_colour. You have to have a sort of heather-mixture of all the mostbrilliant colours that can be got! This simply makes the thing invisiblea certain way off. It's the idea of the game-feather tweed on the moors,you know. So Hugo's using his talents by painting emerald-green andmagenta and scarlet and black triangles and cubes and splodges all overthose big Vanguards----"

  "Why, _I_ could do that," murmured the girl who was so busy varnishingthe aeroplane wings. "Sure I could."

  "Oh, but, Taffy, you haven't been educated up to it," protested Lesliegravely. "You _couldn't_ get it sufficiently dynamic and simultaneousand marinetic!"

  A message from the Central Shop to the Aeroplane Lady left the two girlsalone presently in the Wing-room. Then Leslie, putting her hand on therounded arm below the loose sleeve of Gwenna's working-pinafore, saidsoftly and quickly, "Look here, I came down because I had something totell you, Taffy."

  The Welsh girl glanced quickly up into her chum's black eyes.

  "Something to tell me?" Gwenna's heart sank.

  She didn't want to hear of Leslie having definitely made up her mind atlast to marry a--well, a man who was good-natured and well bred andgenerous enough about wedding-presents, but who confessed himself to beof "no earthly good" when "it came to the real things of life." "Oh,Leslie, is it----"

  "It is that you can congratulate me."

  "Oh, dear. I was _afraid_--You mean you _are_ engaged to him, Leslie. ToMr. Swayne."

  "No," said Leslie, holding her black head high. "No, not to Mr. Swayne.Why must 'congratulations' always mean 'Mister' Anybody? They don't,here. I mean you can congratulate me on coming to see reason. I know,now, that I mustn't think of marrying him."

  Gwenna drew a big breath of relief.

  She laid her dope-thickened brush carefully down in the tin, and clappedher little sticky hands.

  "I'm _so_ thankful," she cried childishly. "It wouldn't have done,Leslie!"

  "No," said Miss Long.

  "He wasn't a quarter good enough."

  "Pooh. What's _that_ got to do with caring? Nothing," declared Leslie,tilting her loose-limbed, mauve-clad figure back on the chair that PaulDampier had sat in, the day before the Aviation Dinner. "It's caringthat counts."

  "Haven't I _always_ been saying so?" said Gwenna earnestly as she tookup her brush again. "Not just because I'm a happily-married womanmyself, my dear."

  Here she drew herself up with the same little gesture of matronlydignity that had made Mrs. Crewe smile. It forced Leslie to bite herlips into gravity. And Paul Dampier's girl concluded innocently, "_I've_always known how much Love means. What's _money_?"

  "Nothing to run down, I assure you. Money's gorgeous. Money means_Power_," affirmed Leslie. "Apart from the silk-stockinged aspect of it,it lets you live a much fuller life mentally and spiritually. It canmake you almost everything you want to be, to yourself and to otherpeople, Taff. It's worth almost anything to get it. But there's onething it's not worth," said Leslie Long, really gravely: "_It's notworth marrying the wrong person for._"

  "I don't know why you didn't know that _before_," said little Gwenna,feeling for once in her life _so_ much older and much wiser than herchum. "What makes you know it now, Leslie?"

  "The War, perhaps. Everything's put down to the War nowadays.... But ithas simplified things. One knows better what's what. What one must keep,what one can throw overboard," said Leslie Long. "Everything ischanged."

  Gwenna thought for a moment of telling her that one thing did notchange. Love!

  Then she thought that that was not quite true, either.

  In its own way Love, too, was changed by this War.

  "There's _more_ of it!" thought Gwenna simply.

  For had not her own love to her absent lover burned with more steady aflame within her ever since the morning when she had seen him depart totake his own share in the struggle? And so she guessed it must be withmany a girl, less ardently in love than she had been, but now doublyproud of her man--and her soldier. She thought of the other hurriedWar-bridals and betrothals all over the country. She thought of thegentler voice and manner that she had noticed between the husbands andwives among the cottagers down here. They realised, perhaps, how manycouples were being swept apart by War. Yes, this thought seemed to giveMan and Woman an added value in the eyes of each other, Gwenna thought.She thought of the gradual disappearance of the suffragette type withher indictments against Man. She thought of the new courtesy with whichevery woman and girl seemed to be treated in the streets and tubes andomnibuses by every man who wore the livery of War.

  Of the two things greater than all things in this world, one fulfilledthe other. And, because War was in the world again, it was bringing homeundeniably to man and maid alike that "_the first is Love_."

  Then Gwenna sighed from her heart.

  How long? How much longer would it be before she could see her own loveragain?