The Boy with Wings
all over her like a shake given to a sheet of white aluminium at the
Works. "Isn't it quiet? Feels as if _everything_ was asleep." She opened
her eyes, blinking at the rays of the sun, now level in her face. "Oh, I
_should_ like some tea, wouldn't you?"
They rose to go and find a place for tea in Kew Gardens, among the
happy, lazing Sunday crowds of those whom it has been the fashion to
treat so condescendingly: England's big Middle-classes. There were the
conventional young married couples; "She" wearing out the long tussore
coat that seemed so voluminous; "He," pipe in mouth, wheeling the wicker
mail-cart that held their pink-and-white bud of a baby. There were also
courting couples innumerable....
(Not all of these were as reticent in the public eye as Gwenna had been
with her lover before Leslie.)
To Gwenna the bright landscape and the coloured figures seemed a page
out of some picture-book that she turned idly, her lover beside her. She
had to remind herself that to these other lovers she herself and Paul
were also part of a half-seen picture....
They sat down at one of the green wooden tea-tables, and a waiter in a
greasy black coat came out under the trees to take Dampier's order.
Perhaps that started another train of thought in the girl's mind, for
quite suddenly she exclaimed, "Ah! I've thought of _another_ German now
that he was like!"
"Who was that?" asked Paul.
"Only a picture I used to see every day. A photograph that our Miss
Baker kept pinned up over her desk at the works in Westminster,"
explained Gwenna. "The photograph of that brother of hers that she was
always writing those long letters to."
"Always writing, was she? Was _he_ a waiter?"
"No, he was a soldier. He was in uniform in that photo," Gwenna said, as
the little tray was set before her. "Karl was his name, Karl Becker....
Do you take sugar?"
"Yes. You'll have to remember that for later on," he said, looking at
her with his head tilted back and a laugh in his eyes, as she poured out
his tea. She handed it to him, and then sat sipping her own, looking
dreamily over the English gardens, over the green spaces flowered with
the light frocks and white flannels of other couples who perhaps called
themselves "in love," and who possibly imagined they could ever feel as
she and her lover felt. (Deluded beings!)
She murmured, "What do you suppose all these people are thinking
about?"
"Oh! Whether they'll go to Brighton or to South-end for their fortnight,
I expect," returned Paul Dampier. "Everybody's thinking about holidays
just now."
Later, they stood together in the hushed gloom of the big chestnut aisle
beside the river that slipped softly under Kew Bridge, passing the
willows and islands and the incongruously rural-looking street of
Strand-on-the-Green. One of the cottage-windows there showed red blinds,
lighted up and homely.
Young Dampier whispered to his girl--"Going on holidays myself, perhaps,
presently, eh?"
"Oh, Paul!" she said blankly, "you aren't going away for a holiday, are
you?"
"Not yet, thanks. Not without you."
"Oh!" she said. Then she sighed happily, watching the stars. "To-day's
been the loveliest holiday I've ever had in my life. Hasn't it been
perfect?"
"Not quite," he said, with his eyes on those red-lighted windows on the
opposite bank. "Not perfect, Gwen."
"Not----?" she took up quickly, wondering if she had said something that
he didn't like.
Almost roughly he broke out, "Oh, I say, darling! _Don't_ let's go and
have one of these infernally long engagements, shall we?"
She turned, surprised.
"We said," she reminded him, "that we weren't 'engaged' at all."
"I know," he said. Then he laughed as he stooped and kissed her little
ringless fingers and the palms of her hands. "But----"
There was a pause.
"Got to _marry_ me one day, you know," said young Paul Dampier
seriously.
He might have spoken more seriously still if he had known that what he
said must happen in ten days' time from then.
CHAPTER IV
THAT WEEK-END
For the following week-end saw, among many other things that had not
been bargained for, those lovers apart again.
The very next Saturday after that Aviation Dinner was that
not-to-be-forgotten day in England, when this country, still uncertain,
weighed the part that she was to play in the Great War.
Late on the Friday night of an eventful week, Paul Dampier, the Airman,
had received a summons from Colonel Conyers.
And Gwenna, who had left the Aircraft Works on Saturday morning to come
up to her Hampstead Club, found there her lover's message:
"_Away till Monday. Wait for me._"
She waited with Leslie.
On that bright afternoon the two girls had walked, as they had so often
walked together, about the summer-burnt Heath that was noisy with
cricketers on the grass. They had turned down by the ponds where bathers
dived from the platforms set above the willows; clean-built English
youths splashing and shouting and laughing joyously over their sport.
Last time Gwenna had been with her chum it was she, the girl in love,
who had done all the talking, while Leslie listened.
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 class 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 Saturday afternoon. They passed 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 institution.
"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,
passing 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 assumed, 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 passed 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