CHAPTER X
LESLIE, ON "THE ROOTS OF THE ROSE"
Leslie Long was lounging in a rickety deck-chair under the acacia tree that overshadowed the small lawn behind the Ladies' Residential Club. Miss Long looked nonchalantly untidy and her hair was coming down again. But she had an eye to an occasion on which she meant to shine. She was carefully darning a pair of silk stockings, stockings she was to wear with her all-mauve Nijinski rig at a costume dance in a week's time. She was looking forward to that dance.
It was a late Saturday afternoon, a fortnight after that Saturday that Gwenna Williams had spent in the country with the Dampier boy. Most of the girls in the Club were out somewhere now. Only one of the students from the College of Music was practising Liszt's "Liebestraum." Presently however, a sunshine-yellow jersey coat appeared on the steps at the back entrance of the Club. Gwenna Williams was looking out. She saw her chum in the garden and ran down to her; dropping upon the lawn at her feet, and nestling her curly head down upon the lengthy knee that supported the darning-basket.
Gwenna's small face looked petulant, miserable. She felt it. Leslie, to whom, of course, the other girl was as an open book, asked no question. She left that to Gwenna, who had never, so far, made any spoken admission of what had happened—or not happened—since the evening when they had dressed together to go to that dinner-party at the Smiths'. It was Gwenna who asked the first question.
With a stormy and troubled sigh, she broke out, à propos of nothing: "How is one to make him? I mean how is one ever to get a young man to like one if he hardly ever sees one?"
Leslie looked down at her over the second mauve stocking that she was drawing over a yellow wooden darning mushroom.
"Tut," said Leslie, with her usual mock unction. "What is all this about 'getting' a young man to like one? What an expression, my love. And, worse; what a sentiment! Surely you know that men (nice men) think very lightly of a girl who does not have to be wooed. With deference, Taffy. With reverence. With hovering uncertainty and suspense and—er—the rest of that bag of tricks."
The soft, persistent notes of the "Liebestraum" coming through the open Club windows filled a short pause. Leslie threaded her needle with mauve silk, then took up her mushroom—and her theme—once more.
"Men care little for the girl who drops like a ripe plum (unripe fruit being obviously so much sweeter) into their mouths. (Query, why go about with their mouths open?) Not so. The girl who pleases is the girl who is hard to please."
A small discouraged sigh from Gwenna, as she sat there with her yellow jersey coat spread round her like a great dandelion in the grass.
"Oh, but supposing she isn't hard to please?" she faltered. "Supposing somebody pleased her awfully? If he'd let her, I mean—oh, I daresay you think I'm dreadful?"
"You outrage my most sacred what's-their-names—convictions, Taffy," declared Leslie, solemnly running her needle in and out of the stretched silk. "How many times must you be told that the girl a man prizes is she who knows how to set the very highest Value upon herself? The sweetly reserved Girl who keeps Him Guessing. The ter-ruly maidenly type who puts a Barrier about herself, and, as it were, says, 'Mind the barbed wire. Thus far—unless it's going to be made worth my while, for good.' Haggling little Hebrew!" concluded Miss Long.
For the girl at whom everybody is shocked has standards of her own. Yes! There are things at which she, even she, is shocked in turn.
Leslie, speaking of that other, belauded type, quoted:
"'Oh, the glory of the winning when she's won!'
(per-haps!)."
And in her voice there was honest disgust.
"No, but Leslie! Stop laughing about it all! And tell me, really, now—" appealed the younger girl, leaning an arm upon her friend's knee and looking up with eyes imploring guidance. "You've known lots of men. You've had them—well, admiring you and telling you so?"
"Thank you, yes," said Leslie, demurely darning. "You mightn't think it, to look at me in this blouse, but I have been—er—stood plenty of emotional drinks of that kind."
"Then you know. You tell me—" pleaded Gwenna, pathetically earnest. "Is it true that men don't like you if they think you like them very much?"
Leslie's impish face peeped at her over the silk stocking held up over the mushroom. And Leslie's mouth was one crooked scarlet curve of derision.
But it straightened into gravity again as she said, "I don't know, Taffy. Honest injun! One woman can't lay down rules for another woman. She's got to reckon with her own type—just pick up that hairpin, will you—and his. I can only tell you that what is one man's meat is—another man's won't meet."
Gwenna, at her knee, sighed stormily again.
Leslie, rearranging herself cautiously in the insecure deck-chair, put a finger through one of Gwenna's curls, and said very gently, "Doesn't the Dampier boy come to meet it, then?"
Gwenna, carnation red, cried, "Oh no! Of course not. I wasn't thinking of him."
In the same breath she added shamefacedly, "How did you know, Leslie? You are clever!" And then, in a soft burst of confidence, "Oh, I have been so worrying! All these days and days, Leslie! And to-day I felt I simply had to tell you about it—or burst! I haven't really been able to think of anything but him. And he—he hates me, I know."
She used that word to console herself. Hate is so infinitely less discouraging than polite indifference!
Leslie glanced very kindly at the flushed face, at the compact yet lissom little body sitting up on its heels on the Club lawn. She asked, "Doesn't the creature look at you? The other day when he took you out and broke down the motor? Didn't he then?"
"Yes, he did," admitted Gwenna, "a little."
"That's a start, then. So 'Cheer up, Taff, don't let your spirits go down,'" hummed Leslie. "Ask your Fräulein at the works if she knows an excellent slang German phrase for falling in love. 'Der hat sich aber man ordentlich verguckt?' 'He's been and looked himself well into it'—I am glad the Dampier boy did look. It is engendered in the eyes, as poor old Bernard Shaw used to say. It will be all right."
"Will it, d'you think? Will it?"
Gwenna, kneeling beside the dishevelled, graceful figure with its long limbs stretched out far beyond the deck-chair, gazed up as if into the face of an oracle.
"What do I do," she persisted innocently, "to make him look—to make him like me?"
"You don't 'do.' You 'be,' and pretty hard too. You, my child, sit tight. It's what they call the Passive Rôle of Woman," explained Leslie, with a twinkle. "Like this." And she drew out of her darning-basket a slender horseshoe-shaped implement such as workwomen use to pick up a dropped needle, painted scarlet to within half an inch of its end. She held it motionless a little away from her darning. There was a flash in the sunlight and a sharp little "click" as the needle flew up and clung to the magnet.
"D'you see, Turtle-dove?"
"Yes; but that isn't what you seemed to be talking about just now," objected Gwenna. "You seemed to think that a girl needn't mind 'doing' something about it. Letting a person see that she liked him."
"That isn't 'doing.' A girl can get in such a lot of useful execution—excuse my calling spade work spade work—all the time she is going on being as passive as—as that magnet," pronounced the mentor. "Of course you've got to take care to look as nice as you know how to all the time.
"And here you score, Miss Williams. Allow a friend to say that you're not only as pretty as they make 'em, but you know how to take care that you're as pretty as they're made!"
The younger girl, puzzled, asked the difference.
"I mean that you've cultivated the garden, and haven't got to start digging up the weeds and sweeping the lawn five minutes before you expect the garden-party," explained Leslie, in the analogies that she loved. "Some girls don't seem to think of 'making the most of themselves' until the man comes along that they want to make much of them. Then it's so often a scramble. You've had the instinct. You haven't got your appearance into any of the little ways that put a man off without his knowing quite what he's been put off by. One excellent thing about you——"
"Yes?" said Gwenna, rapt, expectant.
The particular unsolicited testimonial that followed was unexpected enough.
"For one thing, Taffy, you're always—washed!"
"Why, of course. But, Leslie—surely—so's everybody!"
"Are they?" ejaculated Miss Long darkly. "They think they are. They simply haven't grasped how much soap and water and loofah go to that, in big towns. Half the girls aren't what I call tubbed. How many of them, with bathrooms a yard from their bedrooms, bother to have a scrub at night as well as in the mornings? It's at night they're grimy, Taff. It's at night they leave it on, powder and all, to work into themselves until that 'unfresh' look gets chronic. My dear, I tell you that the two-bath-a-day rule would give us much less of the Lonely-and-Neglected Women Problem. There!"
Gwenna Williams, twisting between finger and thumb the stalk of a daisy she had picked off the lawn, murmured something about it's being funny, love having anything to do with how often a girl washed!
"Of course you think Leslie is revoltingly unpoetic to suggest it. But it's sound enough," declared the elder girl. "Flowers don't look as if 'anything to do with' earth had ever touched them, do they? But aren't their roots bedded deep down in it right enough? All these hints I give you about Health and Body-culture, these are the Roots of the Rose. Some of them, anyhow. Especially washing. I tell you, Taff"—she spoke sepulchrally—"half the 'nice' girls we know don't wash enough. That's why they don't get half the attention they'd like. Men like what they call a 'healthy-looking' girl. As often as not it simply means the girl happens to be specially clean. Beauty's skin-deep; moral, look after your skin. Now, you do. No soap on your face, Taff?"
"No; just a 'clean' after washing, with Oatine and things like that."
"Right. Costs you about fourpence a week. It might cost four guineas, to judge from the economical spirit of some girls over that," said Leslie. "Then, to go on with this grossly material subject that is really the root of Poetry, do you shampoo your hair nice and often? It looks thick and soft and glossy and with the curls all big, as if you did."
"Oh, yes, I do. But then that's easy for me; it's short."
"Mine's long enough, but I do it religiously every fortnight. Pays me," said Miss Long candidly as she went on working. "Untidy it may be, but it does feel and smell all right. One of my medical students at the hospital where I trained for five minutes—the boy Monty, the Dean's son—he said once that the scent of my hair was like cherry-wood. 'Course I didn't confide in him that I watered it well with bay rum and rosemary every night. Better than being like Miss Armitage, the suffragette-woman here, who's so nice-minded that she's 'above' pampering the body. What's the consequence? She, and half the girls here, go about smelling—to put it plainly—like cold grease and goloshes! Can they wonder that men don't seem to think they'd be—be very nice to marry?"
"Some suffragettes, and sort of brainy women," hesitated Gwenna, "are married."
"Yes; and have you observed the usual type of their husbands?" scoffed Leslie. "Eugh!"
Gwenna, set upon her own subject, drew her back with innocent directness to the matter in hand.
"What else ought one to do? Besides lots of washing, besides taking care of one's hair and skin?"
"One's shape, of course," mused Leslie. "There you're all right. Thank goodness—and me—that you've left off those weird, those unearthly stays you came up to town in. My dear, they were like a hamper strapped round the middle of you and sending your shoulders up, squared, into your ears! You've got a pretty slope there now, besides setting free all your 'lines.' I suppose elastic has pretty well solved the great corset question at last."
"Thirty shillings was a dreat-ful lot to give for just an elastic belt," murmured Gwenna, with her little hand at her supple waist. "Still, you said I must, even if I didn't have a new blouse over it for eighteen months." Again she looked up for guidance. "What else? What's a good thing, Leslie? About clothes and that?"
"Oh, child, you know it all now, practically. Let's see—shoes"—she glanced at the tiny brown one half-tucked under Gwenna's knee. "Boots and shoes men seem to notice as much as any other part of your get-up. Attractive shoes, even with an unfashionable skirt, will pull you through, when shabby shoes would ruin the look of the smartest rig. They see that, even when they've no idea what colour you've got on."
She went on to another hole in the stocking and continued: "As for colours, a man does seem to notice 'a girl in black,' or all-white, or pale blue. I read once that pale blue is 'the sex colour'—couldn't tell you, never worn it myself. Managed well enough without it, too!" mused Leslie. "Then 'a girl in pink' is very often a success in the evening. Men seem to have settled vaguely that pink is 'the pretty girl's colour.' So then they fondly imagine that anything that dares to wear it must be lovely. You needn't yet. Keep it for later. Pink—judicious pink—takes off ten years, Taffy!"
"I—I suppose I shall still care what I look like," murmured the young girl wistfully, "at thirty-two...."
"Pearl of Wisdom Number Forty-eight: When in doubt, wear the coat-and-skirt (if it's decently cut) rather than the frock," decreed Leslie. "White silk shirts they seem to like, always. (I'm glad I weaned you of the pin-on tie, Taffy. It always looked like 'sixpence-three-farthings.' Whereas you buy a piece of narrow ribbon for 'six-three,' you tie it, you fasten it with a plain silver brooch to your shirt, and it looks good.)"
"I'll remember," murmured Gwenna devoutly, from the grass.
Leslie said, "One of the housemaids here—(never stoop to gossip with the servants, dearest. It is so unhelpful and demoralising to both classes)—one of the housemaids once told me that her young man had told her that 'nothing in the wide world set a young woman off like a nice, fresh, clean, simple shirt blouse, same as what she was wearing then!' Of course, he was a policeman. Not an aviator or a dean's son. But when it comes to a girl in the case, I expect they're 'brothers under their skins,'" said Leslie Long.
Husky with much talking, she cleared her throat.
"Pearl of Wisdom Number Forty-nine: Be awfully careful about your collar, the ends of your sleeves and the hem of your skirt. (Keeping a strong force on the Frontier; that is always important.) Don't ever let your clothes be 'picturesque,' except for indoors. A man loathes walking along beside anything that flaps in the wind, or anything that looks like what he calls 'fancy dress.' Outside, don't wear anything that you can't skip easily on to the last bus in. Don't have 'bits' of anything about you. Try to be as neat as the very dowdiest girl you know, without the dowdiness. Neatness, my belovèd sisters, is the—— (Here am I talking like this; but why," she interrupted herself, laughing, "why aren't I neater myself when in mufti? I mean, when there's nobody about? 'In time of Peace, prepare for War.' It would be better. Might get my hair out of its habit of descending at the wrong moment.) And then, then, when all your good points are mobilised, you wait for the Enemy."
"The enemy?" said little Gwenna, doubtfully.
"Yes. The Man. The opposing force, if you like. You can think and think and wish and wish about him then until the whole air about you goes shivery-quivery with it. 'Creating an atmosphere' is what they call it, I believe. And get him well into the zone of that," advised Leslie. "For it's no use the magnet being a magnet if it doesn't allow itself to get within miles of a needle, is it? Might as well be any old bit of scrap-iron. Plenty of girls—nice girls, I mean—not like that deplorably vulgar Miss Long. What she's doing in a Club that's supposed to be for ladies I don't know. The horrid things she says! Bad! Bad form! And I'm sure if she says those here, she must have heaps of other worse things she could say, and probably does, to some people! Er—oh, where was I? Ah, yes!" rattled on Leslie, with her black head flung against the striped canvas back of the chair, her eyes on her surprisingly neat darning. "I was going to say—plenty of nice girls muff everything by putting too much distance that doesn't lend enchantment to the view between themselves and the men that aren't often sharp enough to deserve being called 'the needle.' Don't you make the mistake of those nice girls, Taffy."
"Well, do I want to? But how can I help it? How can I even try to 'be' anything, if he isn't there to know anything at all about it? I don't see him! I don't meet him!" mourned the Welsh girl in the soft accent that was very unmistakable to-day. "It's a whole fortnight, Leslie, since that lovely day in the fields. It seems years. He hasn't written or anything. I've waited and waited.... And sometimes I feel as if perhaps I shouldn't ever see him again. After all, I never did see him properly before we went to your sister's that night. Oh, isn't it awful to think what little chances make all the difference to who one sees or doesn't see? I can't know for certain that I shall ever see him again. Oh, Leslie!"
Leslie cut her last needleful of lilac silk and answered in the most reassuringly matter-of-fact tone:
"But of course you will. If you want to enough. For instance—should you like to see him at this dance?"
"Dance?" inquired Gwenna, dazed.
"Yes. This fancy-dress affair that I'm doing these stockings for. (I won these in a bet from one of my Woolwich cadets.) This tamasha next week?"
"But—he isn't going, is he? And I'm not even asked."
"And can't these things ever be arranged?" demanded her chum, laughing. "Can do, Taffy. Leslie will manage."
"Oh—but that's so kind!" murmured the younger girl, overcome.
"Do you expect me not to be 'kind'? To another girl, in love? Nay, oh Taffy! I leave that to the 'nicest' of the girls who think it 'horrid' to think about young men, even. Gem of Truth Number Eighty: It isn't the little girl who's had plenty to eat who's ready to snatch the bun out of the hand of the next little girl," said Leslie. She rolled the silk stockings into a ball, and rose in sections from that sagging chair. "Leslie will see you're done all right. All that remains to be discussed is the question of what you're to wear at the dance."
This question Leslie settled as the two girls went for an after-supper stroll. They went past the summer crowd patrolling the Spaniards Road, past the patch of common and the benches and the pond by the flagstaff that make that part of Hampstead so like a bit of the seaside. It was a golden evening. In the hazy distance a small, greyish, winged object rose above the plane which was Hendon, and moved to the left towards the blue taper of Harrow Church, then sank out of sight again.
"There's one," sighed Gwenna, her eyes on the glowing sky, where the biplane had been circling. "He's in it, perhaps."
"Little recking what plans are now being made for his welfare by me," observed Miss Long, as the two girls descended the hill and found at last a birch thicket that was not held by Cockney lovers. She let herself down cross-legged into the bracken. The Welsh girl perched herself on a branch of the birch tree that was polished smooth as an old bench. Thus she sat among the stirring leaves, head on one side, listening, her babyish face looking down intent against the sky.
"Ah! That's you! 'A Cherub.' That's what your fancy dress is to be," pronounced the elder girl. "Just your own little crop-curled head with nothing on it; and a ruff of cherub's wings up to your chin. Those little wings off your hat will do beautifully. Below the ruff, clouds. Appropriate background for cherubs. Your misty-white frock with no sash this time, and one of those soap-bubble coloured scarves of Liberty gauze draped over it to represent a rainbow. Little silver shoes. Strictly speaking, cherubs don't have those, of course. But if you can't become a Queen of Spain—if you can't be realistic, be pretty. Your own, nearly-always expression of dreamy innocence will come in nicely for the costume," added Leslie. "Quite in keeping."
"I'm sure I'm not that," protested the Welsh girl, piqued. "I'm not what they call 'innocent.'"
"No, I don't think you are. 'What they call innocent' in a girl is such a mixture. It means (a) no sense of humour at all; (b) the chilliest temperament you can shiver at, and (c) a complete absence of observation. But I believe you have 'beneath your little frostings the brilliance of your fires,' Taffy. Yours is the real innocence."
"It isn't, indeed," protested the girl, who was young enough to wish to be everything but what she was. "Why, look at the way you say anything to me, Leslie!"
Leslie laughed, with a remoter glance. Then suddenly she dropped her black head and put a light caress on the corner of the sunshine-yellow jersey coat.
"Be as sweet always," she said, lightly too. "Look as sweet—at the dance!"