Читать книгу The Boy with Wings - Berta Ruck - Страница 12

Table of Contents

"Now isn't life extraordinary?" thought Gwenna Williams, incoherently in the drawing-room as she sat on the yellow Empire sofa under the mirror, holding a tiny coffee-cup and answering the small-talk of kindly Mrs. Smith. "Fancy, before this afternoon I'd never seen any flying! And now on the very same evening I'm asked to go flying myself! Me! Just like that girl who was with him in the race! (I wonder is she a great friend of his.) I wonder when he'll take me? Will he come and settle about it—oh, I do hope so!—before we all have to go away?"

But there was no chance of "settling" this for some time after the door opened to a little commotion of bass laughter, a trail of cigar-scent, and the entrance of the man.

Mrs. Rose-colour, with some coquettish remark that Gwenna didn't catch, summoned the tall airman to the yellow-brocaded pouffe at her feet. Her husband crossed over to Gwenna (who suddenly discovered that she hated him) and began talking Welsh folk-songs. Whereupon Hugo Swayne, fondling his Chopin curl, asked Leslie, who towered above him near the piano, if she were going to sing.

"I'm in such a mood," he told her, "to listen to something rawly and entirely modern!"

"You shall, then," agreed Miss Long, suddenly demure. "D'you know the—er—Skizzen Macabres, those deliciously perverse little things of Wedekind's? They've been quite well translated.... Righto, my dear"—in answer to a nervous glance from her sister, "I'll only sing the primmer verses. The music is by that wonderful new Hungarian person—er—Sjambok."

Her tall golden figure reflected itself in the ebony mirror of the piano as Leslie, with a malicious gleam in the tail of her eye, sat down.

"I shan't sing for him, all the same," she thought. "I shall sing for Taffy and that Air-boy. I bet I can hit on something that they'll both like.... Yes...."

And she struck the first chords of her accompaniment.

And what was it, this "crudely modern" song that Leslie had chosen for the sake of the two youngest people present at that party?

There is a quintette of banjo-players and harpists who are sometimes "on" at the Coliseum in London, but who are more often touring our Colonies from Capetown to Salter, Sask. And wherever they may go, it seems, they bring down the house with that same song. For, to the hearts of exiled and homesick and middle-aged toilers that simple tune means England, Home and Beauty still. They waltzed to it, long ago in the Nineteenth Century. They "turned over" for some pretty girl who "practised" it. So, when they hear it, they encore it still, with a lump in their throats....

It was the last verse of this song that drifted in Leslie's deep contralto, across this more enlightened drawing-room audience of Nineteen-fourteen. Softly the crooning, simply phrased melody stole out: