The Boy with Wings Part 36

Now it was Leslie who was restless, strung-up, talkative.... A new Leslie, her dark eyes anxious and sombre, her usually nonchalant voice strained as she talked.

"Taffy! D'you realise what it all means? Supposing we don't go in. We may not go in to war with the others. I know lots of people in this country will do their best so that we don't lift a finger. People like the Smiths; my brother-in-law's people. Well-to-do, hating anything that might get in the way of their having a good year and grubbing up as much money as usual.... Oh! If we don't go in, I shall emigrate--I shall turn American--I shan't want to call myself English any more! P'raps you don't mind because you're Welsh."

Little Gwenna, who was rather pale, but who had a curious stillness over the growing anxiety in her heart, said, "Of course I mind."

She did not add her thoughts, "_He_ said he hoped the War would come in his time. I know _he_ would think it perfectly awful if England didn't fight. And even I can feel that it would be horribly mean--just _looking on_ at fighting when it came."

Leslie, striding beside her up the hill, went on bitterly, "War! Oh, it can't come. For years we've said so. Haven't we taken good care not to let ourselves get 'hysterical' over the German 'scare'? Haven't we disbanded regiments? Haven't we beaten our swords into cash-registers?

Haven't we even kept down the Navy? Haven't we spread and spread the idea that soldiering was a silly, obsolete kind of game? Aren't we quite clever and enlightened enough to look down upon soldiers as a kind of joke? The brainless Army type. Don't let's forget _that_ phrase," urged the soldier's daughter. "Why, Taffy, I'll tell you what happened only last May. I went to Gamage's to get a birthday present for Hilary, my sister Maudie's little boy. Of course he's _got_ heaps of everything a child wants. Delightful floor games. Beautiful hand-wrought artistic toys (made in Munich). Still, I thought he might like a change. I told the man in the shop I wanted a toy-book of soldiers. Nice simple drawings and jolly, crude, bright colours of all the different regiments. Like we used to have at home. And what d'you suppose the shopman said? He was very sorry, but 'they' hadn't stocked that cla.s.s of thing for some time now; so little demand for it! So little demand for anything that reminds us we've got an Empire to keep!"

Gwenna said half absently, "It was only toys, Leslie."

"Only one more sign of what we're coming to! _Teaching the young idea not to shoot_," said Leslie gloomily. "That, and a million other trifles, are going to settle it, I'm afraid. If England is to come down, _that's_ the sort of thing that will have done it.... Oh, Leslie's been in it, too, and all her friends. Dancing and drifting and dressing-up while Rome's been burning.... There'll be no war, Taffy."

Gwenna said, quietly and convinced, "Yes, there will." And she quoted the saying of the lady at the Aviation Dinner, "_If England is ever to be saved, it will be by the few._"

They walked round the Highgate Ponds and down the steep hill between the little, ramshackle, Victorian-looking shops of Heath Street. It was busy as ever on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. They pa.s.sed the usual troop of Boy Scouts; the usual straggle of cricketers and lovers from or for the Heath, and then a knot of rather boyish-looking girls and girlish-looking boys wearing the art-green school-cap of some co-educational inst.i.tution.

"What sort of soldiers do we expect those boys ever to make?" demanded Leslie.

Outside the dark-red-tiled entrance to the Hampstead Tube there was a little crowd of people gathered about the paper-sellers with their pink arresting posters of

"RUMOURS OF WAR ENGLAND'S DECISION."

"They'll publish a dozen before anything _is_ decided," said Leslie. She bought a paper, Gwenna another....

No; nothing in them but surmise--suspense--theories--they walked on, pa.s.sing Miss Armitage from the Club who had paused on the kerb to talk to one of her friends, a long-haired man in a broad-leafed brown hat. He seemed to be dispensing pamphlets to people in the street. As Miss Armitage smiled and nodded good-bye to him the two other girls came up.

He of the locks slipped a pamphlet into the hand of Leslie Long.

She glanced at it, stopped, and looked at it again. It was headed:

"BRITAIN, STAND ASIDE!"

Leslie stood for a moment and regarded this male. She said very gently, "You don't want any War?"

The long-haired person in the gutter gave a shrug and a little superior smile. "Oh, well, that's a.s.sumed, isn't it?" he said. "_We_ don't want any War."

"Or any _country_, I suppose?" said Leslie, walking on. She held the pamphlet a little gingerly between her finger and thumb. She had thought of tossing it into the gutter--but no. She kept it as a curiosity.

Late that night she sat on Gwenna Williams' bed at the Club, suspense eating at her heart. For all the soldier blood in her had taken her back to old times in barracks, or in shabby lodging-houses in garrison towns, or on echoing, sunny parade-grounds.... Times before she had drifted into the gay fringes of the cosmopolitan jungle of Bohemian life in London. Before the Hospital, the Art-school, the daily "job," with her evenings for the theatre and the Crab-tree Club, and the dances she loved. It is the first ten years of a child's life that are said to "count." They counted now. The twenty-six-year-old Leslie, whose childhood had been pa.s.sed within sound of the bugle-call, waited, waited, waited to know if the ideas of honour and country and glory which she had taken in unconsciously in those far-off times were now to be tossed down into the gutter as she would have tossed the leaflet of that coward. These things, as Miss Armitage and her friends could have told her, were mere sentimentalities--names--ideas. Yet what has ever proved stronger than an Idea?

"Oh, _Taffy_!" she sighed impatiently. "If we're told that we're to sit still and nothing will happen?"

And little Gwenna, lying curled up with a hand in her chum's, murmured again, "_That's_ not what's coming."

She was quiet because she was dazed with the sheer intensity of her own more personal anxiety. "What will happen about Paul? What will _he_ do?"

CHAPTER V

THE DIE IS CAST

On Sunday morning she and Leslie went to Church.

In the afternoon they walked again, aimlessly. She felt that she was only living until Monday, until his return to tell her something. In the evening the two girls sat out on a seat on Parliament Hill; near where the man with the standing telescope used to offer peeps at London for a penny a time. Far, far below, lay London under her web of twinkling lights. London, England's heart, with that silver ribbon of the river running through it. Leslie looked away over that prospect as though she had never seen it before. Little Gwenna turned from it to the view on the other side--the gra.s.s s.p.a.ces and the trees towards Hendon. She thought, "On a night as clear as this, aeroplanes could easily go up, even late."

As the two girls reached the Club again they found a motor drawn up beside the entrance. Steps came out of the darkness behind them. A man's voice said "Miss Long." Leslie turned.

There moved into the light of the street-lamp Hugo Swayne. His face, somehow, had never looked less like an imitation of Chopin; or more like an ordinary commonplace Englishman's. It was serious, set. Yet it was exultant. For he, too, was a soldier's son.

He spoke. "I say, I thought I'd bring you the news," he began gravely.

"It's all right. England goes in."

"Is that official?" Leslie asked sharply.

There was a shaky little "War?" from Gwenna.

Then came other, quick steps on the asphalt path, and the girls saw over Hugo's rather portly shoulder a taller, slighter figure coming up the road behind him.

It was hatless; the lamplight shone golden on its blonde head. Gwenna's heart leaped to her lips.

"Paul!" she cried, and made a running step towards him. In a moment young Dampier was up with the others; the quartette standing as they had stood on that spring night in this same place, after the Smiths'

dinner-party. There were hasty greetings, murmurs of "Not official?"

"Ah, that's all right----"

"They won't say for a day or so, but----"

Then, clear and distinct, young Dampier's boyish voice rang out in a curious announcement. "Glad _you're_ here, Hugo. I was coming to you. I want to borrow rather a lot of money of you, at once. Forty pounds, I think it is. Sorry. Must have it. It's for a marriage-licence!"

Hugo, utterly taken aback, stared and murmured, "My dear chap---- Certain---- A m----?"

"Yes. I shall have to be off, you know. Of course. And I shall get married before I go," announced Paul Dampier, brusquely. He turned as brusquely to the girl.

"You and I are going to get married by special licence," he told her, "the day after to-morrow."

CHAPTER VI