The Boy with Wings Part 43

CHAPTER X

LESLIE, ON "THE MOTLEY OF MARS"

Now, as it happened, Miss Leslie Long did not choose to wait for her invitation to the Aircraft Works. Unasked and unexpected, she turned up there the very next Sat.u.r.day afternoon.

She was given a chair in that s.p.a.cious, white, characteristically-scented room where Mrs. Crewe and Gwenna were again busy with the wings. She was told not to expect either of them to stop work to look at her, but to go on talking and to tell them if there were anything 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 her bridesmaid's attire for Gwenna's wedding. And she was looking well, Gwenna noticed, as she stole a glance at her chum; well, and happier than she had seen Leslie look since the beginning of this eventful summer.

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

She spoke of the darkened streets. The bright, purposely-misleading lights in the Park. Of the recruiting posters; the recruiting results.

Of the first of the refugees. Leslie's old lady had given hospitality to two ladies, a mother and a daughter from Brussels, and it was Leslie's new duty to translate English to them. Also of the departure of regiments she talked....

"Of course there are only two cla.s.ses into which you _can_ divide the young men who aren't getting ready to go out," decreed Leslie, the whole-hearted. "Either they're Objects of Pity, or else they're Objects of Contempt."

"Come, come!" put in the Aeroplane Lady, laughing a little, but without raising 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. "The most anaemic little plucky shop-a.s.sistant who's only just sc.r.a.ped through on his chest-measurement and who's never spent so many consecutive hours in the open air in his whole life before!" She patted the stately head of the Great Dane as he stepped up to her from his big wooden kennel in the 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's Westminsters coming up in sweaters and shorts to do Physical Ekkers on the cricket-pitch. Swagger young men, some of them, too. Driving up in cars. Wearing their Jermyn Street winter-sports kit of last year under common 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 fighter who 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 after twenty years!... Then, of course, there's the New Army Type Number Forty-three: the Honest Striver in Khaki, putting his back into learning a job that wasn't ever meant to be his. Not one bit thrilled by the idea of a sc.r.a.p. No fun to him. Civilian down to his bones. But--'_It is his duty, and he does_.'"

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

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

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

"Talking of duty, Mr. Grant has gone," said Gwenna as she worked. "You know, Leslie: the engineer at our Westminster place who was always talking to Mabel Butcher and then saying, 'Well! Duty calls. I must away.' I'm _sure_ he said that before he went off to enlist. He's in the R.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 garage with 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 see me, in uniform, last Sunday. I told him he'd only joined the Halberdiers because he thought the touch of black suited him. Then he told me of his weird billet in the country with these five other men. Two of them had lately come out of prison, he said; and they were really awfully interesting, comparing the grub they'd had there with what was served out to them here. I asked him (Monty) how he was getting on. He summed up 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 this young man.

"Why d'you sigh?" asked Gwenna quickly. A sigh meant, to her, only one thing. 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 of her 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 picturesque uniform of Eighteen-seventy, marching down a sunny, chestnut-bordered boulevard. The soldier in the immediate foreground showed under the jaunty _kepi_ a dark, intelligent, mobile face that Gwenna recognised.

She sighed and smiled over the card. It brought back to her that tea at Hugo Swayne's rooms with Leslie, and the tall, blonde Englishman who was to be her husband, and that dark young French engineer who had said, "But the Machine is also of the s.e.x of Mademoiselle!" He had written on this card in sprawling French writing and blue French ink, "_a Mademoiselle Langue. Salutation amicale. Remember, please, the private soldier Gaston, who carries always in his knapsack the memory of the Curate's Egg!_"

"Fancy, two of the men who were at Mr. Swayne's that afternoon are off at 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 if she 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 pa.s.s him----"

"Why? Too fat?" asked Gwenna mercilessly.

"Fat--Oh, no. They said three weeks' Swedish exercise _and_ drill would take that off. He was quite fit, they said, physically. It was his _mental_ capacity they seemed to doubt," explained Leslie. "Of course that was rather a shock to Hugo to hear, after the years he's been looking up to himself as a rather advanced and enlightened and thinking person. 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 his father's, who'd been with his father in Egypt, and whom he asked to find him a job of some sort. They told him, quite gently, of course, that they were afraid he was not 'up' to any soldiering job. They said they were afraid there were heaps of young Englishmen like him, awfully anxious to 'do their bits,' but simply _not clever enough_! (Rather nice, isn't it, the revenge, at last, of the Brainless Army Type on the Cultured Civilian?) And he said to the old Colonel or General or whatever it was, 'I know, sir. I see, sir. Yes, I suppose I have addled myself up by too much reading and too much talk. I know I'm a Stage-Society-and-Cafe-Royal rotter, and no earthly good at this crisis.' And then he turned round and said quite angrily, 'Why wasn't I brought up to be some use when the time came?' And the old soldier-man said quite quietly, 'My dear Swayne, none of you "enlightened" people believed us that there was any "time" coming. You see now that we were right.' And Hugo said, 'You ought to have hammered it into me. Isn't there anything that I can do, sir?' And at last they got him something."

"What?" demanded Gwenna.

"Well, of course it sounds _rather_ ludicrous when you come to say what it is," admitted Leslie, her mouth curling into a smile that she could not suppress. "But it just shows the Philistines that there _is_ some use (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 the Aeroplane 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 is said 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 most brilliant colours that can be got! This simply makes the thing invisible a 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 and magenta and scarlet and black triangles and cubes and splodges all over those big Vanguards----"

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

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

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

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

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