Berta Ruck

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?"