The Boy with Wings
throttle. Again, for the last time, the propeller stopped.
The Taube was already a vanishing speck in the distance....
The P.D.Q. yawed, hung poised, began to slide tail first, and gathered
speed.
Up, up came the silver waves of the English Channel.
POSTSCRIPT
MYRTLE AND LAUREL LEAF
It was the week before Christmas, Nineteen-fourteen.
London wore her dreariest winter livery of mud-brown and fog-yellow, and
at three o'clock on such an afternoon there would have been brilliant
lights everywhere ... any other, ordinary year.
This year, Londoners had to find their way as best they could through
the gloom.
Across a wide Square with a railed and shrubberied garden in the centre
of it, there picked her way a very tall girl in furs that clung about
her as bushy ivy hangs about some slender tree. She wore a dark velvet
coat broadly belted over her strait hips, and upon her impish head there
was perched one of the little, back velvet, half-military caps that were
still the mode. This girl peered up at the numbers of the great houses
at the side of the Square; finally, seeing the gilt-lettered inscription
that she sought above one of the doors,
"ANNEXE TO THE CONVALESCENT HOME
FOR WOUNDED OFFICERS,"
she rang the bell.
The door was opened to her by a small trim damsel in the garb of the
Girl-Guides, who ushered her into a large and ornate hall, and into the
presence of a fresh-coloured, fair-haired Personage--she was evidently
no less--in nurse's uniform.
This Personage gazed upon the visitor with a suspicious and disapproving
look.
"I wonder why? It isn't because I'm not blamelessly tidy for once in my
life, and she can't guess that the furs and the brown velvet suit are
cast-offs from the opulent," thought the visitor swiftly. Aloud she
added in her clear, nonchalant tone: "I have come to see Mr. Scott,
please."
"There is the visiting-hour. It is not quite three yet," said the nurse
forbiddingly.
"I'll wait, then," said the visitor. For two minutes she waited. Then
the nurse approached her with a note-book and a pencil.
"Will you write your name down here?" she said austerely. And upon a
page inscribed "_Mr. M. Scott_" the visitor wrote her name, "Miss Leslie
Long."
"Will you come up?" the nurse said reluctantly. And Leslie ascended a
broad red-carpeted stairway, and was shown into a great room of parquet
floors and long windows and painted panels that had been a drawing-room,
and that was now turned by a row of small beds on great castors and by
several screens into a hospital-ward.
A blonde youth in a pink pyjama jacket, and with his arm in a black
silken sling, was sitting up in bed and chatting to a white-moustached
gentleman beside him; another of the wounded was sitting by one of the
great fire-places, reading; a couple were playing picquet in a corner,
under a smiling Academy portrait of the mistress of the mansion.
"Mr. Scott is sitting up to-day, in the ante-room," vouchsafed the
nurse. And Leslie Long entered, through a connecting door, a small room
to the right.
One wall of it was hung with a drapery of ancient brown tapestry,
showing giant figures amidst giant foliage; beneath it was a low couch.
Upon this, covered with a black, panther-skin rug, there lay, half
sitting up, supported on his elbow, the young wounded officer whom
Leslie had come to see.
"Frightfully good of you, this," he said cheerfully, as she appeared.
She looked down at him.
For the moment she could not speak. She set down on his couch the sheaf
of golden chrysanthemums that she had brought, and the copy of the
_Natal Newsletter_ that she had thought might cheer him. She found
herself about to say a very foolish thing: "So they left you your
handsome eyes, Monty."
The face in which those eyes shone now was thin and drawn; and it seemed
as if all the blood had been drained from it. His crutches stood in the
corner at the foot of the couch. He was Monty Scott, the Dean's son,
once a medical student and would-be sculptor. Yes; he had been a
dilettante artist once, but he looked a thorough soldier now. The small
moustache and the close-cropped hair suited him well. He had enlisted in
the Halberdiers at the beginning of the War. He had got his commission
and had lost his leg at Ypres.
Not again would he wear that Black Panther get-up to any fancy-dress
dance.... Never again.
This was the thought, trivial and irrelevant enough, that flashed
through Leslie's mind, bringing with it a rush of tears that she had to
bite her lips to check. She had to clench her nails into her palms, to
open her black eyes widely and smilingly, and to speak in the clearest
and most flippant tone that she could summon.
"Hullo, Monty! Nice to see you again; now that I _can_ see you. You
wounded warriors _are_ guarded by a dragon!--thanks, I'll sit down
here." She turned the low chair by the couch with its back to the light.
"Yes, I could hardly get your Ministering-Angel-Thou to let me through.
Glared at me as if she thought I was after the spoons. (I suppose that's
exactly what some of them _are_ after," suggested Miss Long, laughing
quite naturally.) "She evidently took me for just another predatory
feline come to send the patient's temperature soaring upwards. It's not
often I'm crushed, but----"
"Oh, Nurse Elsa is all right," said the patient, laughing too. "You
know, I think she feels bound to be careful about new people. She seems
to have a mania for imagining that everybody fresh may be a German spy!"
"A _German_? Why should she think that?"
"Oh, possibly because--well----" Young Scott lowered his voice and
glanced towards that connecting door. But it had been shut. "Because she
happens to be 'naturalised' herself, you know!"
They talked; Leslie ever more lightly as she was more deeply touched by
the sight of the young man on his couch. So helpless, he who had been so
full of movement and fitness and supple youth! So pluckily, resolutely
gay, he who had been so early put out of the fun!
Lightly he told Leslie the bare details of his wound. It had been in a
field of beet that he had been pipped; when he had been seeing to some
barbed wire with a sergeant and a couple of his men, at nightfall. One
of those snipers had got him.
"And I was downed in a second," he said ruefully. "_I_ couldn't get the
beggar!"
Leslie thought of the young, mortally-wounded Mercutio and his impatient
cry of "_What! Is he gone, and hath nothing?_" It was the only complaint
at his lot that was ever to pass the lips of this other fighter.
She looked at him, and her heart swelled with pride for him. It sank
with shame for herself. She had always held him--well, not as lightly as
she said she had. There had been always the sneaking tenderness for the
tall, infatuated boy whom she'd laughed at. But why "sneaking"? Why had
she laughed? She had thought him so much less than herself. She said she
knew so much more. What vanity and crass, superficial folly! A new
thrill took her suddenly. Could it be that War, that had cut everybody's
life in two, had worked another wonder?
Presently he remarked, "I say, your friends, the poor Dampiers! I
suppose nothing's ever been heard of them, after that day that they
found out at the Works that his wife had started with him, when he set
off for France, and disappeared?"
"Nothing," said Leslie quietly, "Whether it was an accident with his new
engine, or whether they were killed by a shot from a German aeroplane
they met, we shan't ever know now. It must have been over the sea....
Nothing has ever been found. Much the best way, I think. I said so to
poor young Mr. Ryan, the man who let her take his place. He was beside
himself when he turned up at the Aircraft place again and found that
nothing had been heard. He said he'd killed her. I told him she would
think he'd done more for her than anybody she knew. The best time to go
out! No growing old and growing dull and perhaps growing ill and being
kept half alive by bothering doctors, for years.... No growing out of
love with each other, ever! They, at least, have had something that
nothing can spoil."
Monty Scott, turning his small, close-cropped head of a soldier and his
white face towards the tapestry, blurted out: "Well! At all events
they've _had_ it. But even having it 'spoilt' is better than never
having had any----"
He checked himself abruptly.
He was not going to whine now over his own ill-luck in love to her, to
Leslie, who had turned him down three times. Not much.
In the suddenly tense atmosphere of the little room overlooking the
wide, dim Square, the girl felt the young man's resolution--a
resolution that he would keep. He would never ask her for another
favour.
He cleared his throat and spoke in an altered tone, casual,
matter-of-fact.
"Awfully pretty, the little girl that Dampier married, wasn't she?
Usen't she to live at that Club of yours? I think I saw her once,
somewhere or other----"
"Yes. You did," said Leslie quickly, and a little breathlessly as though
she, too, had just taken a resolution. "At that dance. That river dance.
She was the Cherub-girl. And I wore my mauve Nijinski things. You
remember that time, Monty?"
"Oh, yes," said the wounded man shortly, "I remember."
There was a slight, uneasy movement under the panther-skin rug.
He hadn't thought that Leslie would have reminded him of those times.
Not of that dance, when, with his hands on her hips and her hands
clasped at the back of his neck, he had swung round with her in the
maddest of waltzes.... He wouldn't have expected her to _remind_ him!
Nor was he expecting the next thing that Leslie did. She slipped from
that low chair on to her knees by the couch. Her furs touched his hand,
delicate and whiter now than a woman's, and he took it quickly away. He
could not look at the vivid, impish face with the black, mocking eyes
and the red, mocking mouth that had always bewitched him. Had he looked,
he would have seen that the mockery was gone from both. It was gone,
too, from Leslie's voice when she next spoke, close to him.
"Monty! At that dance---- Have you forgotten? We were walking by the
river--and you said--you asked----"
"Yes, yes; all right. Please don't mind," muttered the man who had been
the Black Panther hastily. It was pretty awful, having girls _sorry_ for
one!
She went on kneeling by him. "I told you that I wasn't in the mood!"
"Yes; but--I say, it doesn't matter one scrap, thanks," declared Monty
Scott, very hoarsely.
This was the hardest thing he'd ever yet had to bear; harder than lying
out wounded in that wet beetroot-field for nine hours before he could be
picked up; harder than the pain, the agonising, jolting journeys; harder
even than the sleepless nights when he had tossed and turned on his bed,
next to the bed where a delirious man who had won the D.S.O. cried out
in his nightmare unceasingly: "Stick it, boys! Stick it, boys! Stick it,
boys!" He (Monty) didn't think he could stick this. There could never be
any one in the world but Leslie for him, that laughing, devil-may-care
Leslie at whom "nice" girls looked askance. Leslie who didn't care.
Leslie who _pitied_ him! Ghastly! Desperately he wished she'd get up and
go--_go_----
Suddenly her voice sounded in his ear. Far from being pitying it was so
petulant as to convince even him. It cried: "Monty! I said then that
you were an infant-in-arms! If you weren't an infant you could _see_!"
He turned his head quickly on the couch-cushion. But even then he didn't
really see. Even then he scarcely took in, for the moment, what he
heard.
For the kneeling, radiant girl had to go on, laughing shakily: "I always