The Boy with Wings
employer had taken any sort of holiday. That sacred right of the English
worker, the "Saturday half-day off," existed no more at those busy
Aircraft Works. Just as if it were any ordinary day of the week, the
whistle sounded after the midday rest. And just as if it were any other
day of the week, Mrs. Crewe's men (all picked workers, of whom not one
happened to be a Trades Unionist) stacked up the bicycles on which
they'd ridden back from their meal at home in the near-by town, and
trooped into the shops. They continued to hurry up with those ships and
guns.
Again the whirring and the chinking and the other forge-like noises
would fill the place. Again the quick, achieving movements of clever
hands, black and soaked in oil, would be carried on, sometimes until,
from the training-camps on the surrounding ugly, useful plains, the
bugles had sounded "_Lights Out_." ...
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 Saturday afternoon.
She was given a chair in that spacious, 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 classes 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-assistant who's only just scraped 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 scrap. 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 sex 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 pass
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.
She didn't want to hear of Leslie having definitely made up her mind at
last to marry a--well, a man who was good-natured and well bred and
generous enough about wedding-presents, but who confessed himself to be
of "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. To
Mr. Swayne."
"No," said Leslie, holding her black head high. "No, not to Mr. Swayne.
Why must 'congratulations' always mean 'Mister' Anybody? They don't,