The Boy with Wings
"_An afternoon in the country is always refreshing! Flying is always
interesting to watch!_"
In the dusty bit of lane mended by the wooden sleepers a line of
grass-green taxis was drawn up.
Gwenna hesitated.
Should she----? Taxi all the way home to the Ladies' Residential Club in
Hampstead where she lived?
Four shillings, perhaps.... Extravagance again! "But it's not an
everyday sort of day," Gwenna told herself as she hailed the taxi. "This
afternoon, the flying! This evening, a party with Leslie! Oh, and there
was I saying to the other girls that nothing exciting ever happened to
me!"
For even now every day of her life seemed to this enjoying Welsh
_ingenue_, packed with thrills. Thrills of anticipation, of
amusement--sometimes of disappointment and embarrassment. But what did
those matter? Supreme through all there glowed the conviction of youth
that, at any moment, Something-More-Exciting still might happen....
It might be waiting to happen, waiting now, just round the corner....
All young people know that feeling. And to many it remains the most
poignant pleasure that they are to know--that thought of "the party
to-night," that wonder "what may happen at it!"
CHAPTER II
THE BOSOM-CHUMS
Through leafy side-streets and little squares of Georgian houses,
Gwenna's taxi took her to a newer road that sloped sharply from the
Heath at the top to the church and schools at the bottom.
The taxi stopped at the glass porch of the large, red-brick building
with the many casement-windows, out of which some enterprising committee
had formed the Ladies' Residential Club. It was a place where a mixed
assembly of young women (governesses, art-students, earnest suffrage
workers, secretaries and so on) lived cheaply enough and with a good
deal of fun and noise, of feud and good-fellowship. The head of it was a
clergyman's widow and the sort of lady who is never to be seen otherwise
than wearing a neat delaine blouse of the Edwardian era, a gold curb
tie-pin, a hairnet and a disapproving glance.
Gwenna passed this lady in the tessellated hall; she then almost
collided with the object of the lady's most constant disapproval.
This was a very tall, dark girl with an impish face, a figure boyishly
slim. She looked almost insolently untidy, for she wore a shabby brown
hat, something after the pattern of a Boy Scout's, under which her black
hair was preparing to slide down over the collar of a rain-coat which
(as its owner would have told you) had seen at least two reigns. It was
also covered with loose white hairs, after the fashion of garments whose
wearers are continually with dogs.
Gwenna caught joyously at the long arm in the crumpled sleeve.
"Oh, Leslie!" she cried eagerly.
For this was the bosom-chum.
"Ha, Taffy-child! Got back early for this orgie of ours? Good,"
exclaimed Leslie Long in a clear, nonchalant voice. It was very much the
same voice, Gwenna noticed now, as those people's at the flying-ground,
who belonged to that easy, lordly world of which Gwenna knew nothing.
Leslie, now, did seem to know something about it. Yet she was the
hardest-up girl in the whole club. She had been for a short time a Slade
student, for a shorter time still a probationer at some hospital. Now
all her days were given up to being paid companion to an old lady in
Highgate who kept seventeen toy-Poms; but her evenings remained her own.
"Afraid this party isn't going to be much of a spree for you," she told
Gwenna as they went upstairs. "I don't know who's going, but my
brother-in-law's friends seldom are what you could describe as 'men.'
Being a stockbroker and rich, he feels he must go in heavily for Art and
Music. Long hair to take you in, probably. Hope you don't awfully mind
coming to the rescue----"
"Don't mind what it is, as long as I'm going out somewhere, and with
you, Leslie!" the younger girl returned blithely. "Will you do me up the
back, presently?"
"Rather! I'm dressing in your room. There's a better light there. Hurry
up!"
* * * * *
Gwenna's long, narrowish front bedroom at the club was soon breathing of
that characteristic atmosphere that surrounds the making of a full-dress
toilette; warm, scented soap-suds, hot curling-irons, powder, Odol,
perfume. The room possessed a large dressing-table, a long wardrobe, and
a fairly spacious chest-of-drawers. But all this did not prevent the
heaping of Gwenna's bed with the garments, with the gilded, high-heeled
cothurns and with the other gauds belonging to her self-invited guest.
That guest, with her hair turbaned in a towel and her lengthy young body
sheathed in tricot, towered above the toilet-table like some modern's
illustration of a genie in the Arabian Nights. The small, more
closely-knit Welsh girl, who wore a kimono of pink cotton crepe slipping
from shoulders noticeably well modelled for so young a girl, tried to
steal a glimpse at herself from under her friend's arm.
"Get out, Taffy," ordered the other coolly. "You're in my way."
"I like _that_," remonstrated Gwenna, laughing. "It's _my_ glass,
Leslie!"
But she was ready to give up her glass or any of her belongings to this
freakish-tongued, kind-hearted, unconventional Leslie Long. Nearly
everybody at the club, whether they were of the advanced suffrage party
or the orthodox set, were "shocked" at her. Gwenna loved her. Leslie had
taken a very homesick little Welsh exile under her wing from her first
night at the club; Leslie had mothered her with introductions, loans,
advice. Leslie had bestowed upon her that last favour which woman shows
to sister-woman when she tells her "_at which shops to buy what_."
Leslie had, practically, dressed her. And it was thanks to this that
Gwenna had all the freshness and bloom of the country-girl without any
of the country-girl's all-concealing frumpiness.
Leslie talked an obligato to everything that Leslie did.
"I must dress first. I need it more, because I'm so much plainer than
you," said she. "But never mind; it won't take me more than half an hour
to transform myself into a credit to my brother-in-law's table. '_I am
a chrysoberyl, and 'tis night._' The Sometimes-Lvely Girl, that's the
type I belong to. I was told that, once, by one of the nicest boys who
ever loved me. Once I get my hair done, I'll show you. In the meantime
you get well out of my way on the bed, Taffy, like a sweet little cherub
that sits up aloft. And then I'll explain to you why Romance is
dead--oh, shove that anywhere; on the floor--and what the matter is with
us modern girls. Fact is, we're losing our Femininity. We're losing the
power, dear Miss Williams, to please Men."
She took up a jar of some white paste, and smeared it in a scented mask
above her features. As she did so she did not for one moment cease to
rattle.
"Men--that is, Nice Men," she gave out unctuously, as she worked the
paste with her palms over her Pierrot-like face, "detest all this
skin-food--and massage. It's Pampering the Person. No nice girl would
think of it. As for this powder-to-finish business, it's only another
form of make-up. They always see through it. (Hem!) And they abhor
anything that makes a girl--a nice girl--look in the least----" The
mocking voice was lowered at the word--"Actressy ...! This is what I was
told to-day, Taff, dear, by my old lady I take the Poms and Pekes out
for. I suppose she's never heard of any actress marrying. But she's a
mine of information. Always telling me where I've missed it, and how."
Here the tall girl reached for the silver shoe-horn off Gwenna's
dressing-table, and proceeded to use it as the Greek youth used his
strigil, stripping the warmed unguent from her face and neck. She went
on talking while Gwenna, putting a gloss on her short curls with a brush
in each hand, listened and laughed, and watched her from the bed with
greeny-brown eyes full of an unreserved admiration. So far, Leslie
Long's was the society in which Gwenna Williams most delighted. The
younger, less sophisticated girl poured out upon her chum that affection
which is not to be bribed or begged. It is not even to be found in any
but a heart which is yet untouched, save in its dreams, by Love.
"No Charm about us modern girls. No Mystery," enlarged Miss Long. "No
Glamour. (What is glamour? Is it a herb? State reasons for your answer.)
What Nice Men love to see in a girl is The Being Apart. (Gem of
Information Number Sixty-three.) Sweet, refined, modest; in every look
and tone the _gentlewoman_. Not a mere slangy imitation of themselves.
(Chuck us that other towel.) Not a creature who makes herself cheap,
calls out 'Hi!' and waves to them from the top of omnibuses. Ah, no, my
dear; the girl who'll laugh and 'lark' with men on equal terms may
_seem_ popular with them in a way, but"--here the voice was again
lowered impressively--"that's not the girl they marry. She's just 'very
good fun,' 'a good sort,' a 'pal.' She's treated just as they'd treat
another young man. (I'd watch it!) Which is the girl with whom they fall
in love, though? The shrinking, clinging, feminine creature who is
all-wool--I mean all-woman, Taffy. _She_"--with enormous expression--"is
_never_ left long without her mate!"
"But," objected Gwenna doubtfully, "she--this old lady of yours--wasn't
married ever?"
"Oh, never. Always lets you know that she has 'loved and lost.' Whether
that means 'Killed at the Battle of Waterloo' or merely 'Didn't propose'
I couldn't say.... Poor old dear, she's rather lonely, in spite of the
great cloud of Poms," said the old lady's paid "daily companion,"
dropping the mockery for the moment, "and I believe she's thankful to
have even me to talk to and scold about the horrid, unsexed girl of
To-day.... Our lack of ... everything! Our clothes! Why, she, as a girl,
would have sunk into the ground rather than be seen in--you know the
kind of thing. Our general shapelessness!--Well, of course," turning to
meet that adoring glance from the little heroine-worshipper on the bed,
"you never see a young woman nowadays with what you could call a
_figure_!"
Here Leslie, reaching for the giant powder-puff she had flung on to the
foot of the bed, gave a backward bend and a "straighten" that would not
have disgraced an acrobat.
"No waists! Now if there is a feature that a man admires in a girl it's
her tiny, trimly-corseted waist. My old lady went to a fancy-dress dance
once, in a black-and-yellow plush bodice as '_A Wasp_,' and everybody
said how splendid. She never allowed herself to spread into anything
more than Eighteens until she was thirty! But now the girls are allowed
to slop about in these loud, fast-looking, golf-jackets or whatever they
call them, made just like a man's--and the young men simply aren't
marrying any more. No wonder!"
"Oh, Leslie! do you think it's true?" put in Gwenna, a trifle nervously.
"So she told me, my dear. Told Bonnie Leslie, whose bag had been two
proposals that same week," said Miss Long nonchalantly. "One of 'em with
me in the act of wearing that Futurist Harlequin's get-up at the Art
Rebel's Revel. You know; the one I got the idea of from noticing the
reflections of the ground-glass diamond patterns on me through the
bath-room window. I say! she'd have sunk pretty well through into the
Antipodes at the sight of me in that rig, what? Yet here was an
infatuated youth swearing that:
'_He would like to have the chance
All his life with me to dance,
For he liked his partner best of all!_'"
Leslie hummed the old musical-comedy tune. "Son of a _Dean_, too!"
Gwenna looked wistfully thrilled. "Wasn't he--nice enough?"
"Oh, a sweet boy. Handsome eyes. (I always want to pick them out with a
fork and put them into my own head.) But too simple for me, thanks,"