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, a 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 Fraeulein 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 Role 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 beloved 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!"