"Even to-day we hear Love's song of yore!Low in our hearts it rings for evermore.Footsteps may falter, weary grow the way,Still we can hear it at the close of day!"
"Even to-day we hear Love's song of yore!Low in our hearts it rings for evermore.Footsteps may falter, weary grow the way,Still we can hear it at the close of day!"
—"and it's at least as pleasant as any of their beastly 'artistic' music," thought Leslie, rebelliously, as she sang:
"Still to the end," (chord) "while Life's dim shadows fall,Love will be found the sweetest song of all!"
"Still to the end," (chord) "while Life's dim shadows fall,Love will be found the sweetest song of all!"
She ended in a ripple of arpeggios, triumphantly, for she had glanced at the two youngest people in the room. Little Gwenna's eyes were full of the facile tears of her race; and the Dampier boy's face was grave with enjoyment. Alas, for the musical taste of these two! Theyhadliked the old song....
The enlightened others were puzzled for a moment.Whatwas that thing——?
Mr. Swayne explained languidly. "Priceless old ditty entitled 'Love's Old Sweet Song.' A favourite of the dear late Queen's, long before any of US were thought of. Miss Long has been trying to pull our legs with it!"
"Oh, Leslie, dear, you are so amusing always," said Mrs. Rose-colour, turning with her little superior smile to the singer. "But won't you sing somethingreally?"
Leslie's quick black eyes caught a glance of half-conscious, half-inarticulate sympathy that was passing between the youngest girl in the room and the man who had taken her in to dinner. It was as if they'd said, together, "I wish she'd sing again. I wish she'd sing something likethatagain...."
They were alone in their wish!
For now Mrs. Smith sat down and played something. Something very long....
And still what Gwenna longed to happen did not happen. In spite of that glance of sympathy just now, it did not happen.
The Airman, sitting there on that brocadedpouffe, his long legs stretched out over the soft putty-coloured carpet, didnotcome up to her to speak again of that so miraculously proffered flight in his aeroplane. He went on being talked to by Mrs. Rose-colour.
And when that pretty lady and her husband rose to go, the young girl in her corner had a very blank and tense moment. For she heard those people offer to take Mr. Dampier with them and drop him at his rooms. Oh, that would mean that she, Gwenna, wouldn't have another word with him! He'd go! And his invitation had been unanswered!
"Care to go up?" he'd said—and Gwenna hadn't even had time to tell him "Yes!"
Ah, it would have been too good to be true!——
Very likely he'd forgotten what he'd said at, dinner....
He hadn't meant it....
He'd thought she'd meant "No."
He was going now——
But no. To her unspeakable relief she heard his deep "Thanks awfully, but I'm going on with Hugo presently. Taking him to meet some people at the Aero Club."
Now, just imagine that! thought the country girl. Here it was already half-past ten at night; but he was going on to meet some more people somewhere else. This wonderful party, which had marked an epoch in her life, was nothing to him; it was just the beginning of the evening. And, after days in the skies, all his evenings were like this! Hadn't Mrs. Smith said when he came in, "We know you are besieged with invitations?" Oh, the inconceivably interesting life that was his! Why, why was Gwenna nothing but a girl, a creature who, even nowadays, had to stay within the circumscribed limits where she was put, who could not see or be or doanything, really! Might as well be born atortoise....
Here the voice of Mr. Hugo Swayne (to which she'd paid scant attention so far) said something about taking Miss Long and her friend up to Hampstead first, and that Paul could come along.
Gwenna, enraptured, discovered that this meant in his, Mr. Swayne's, car. The four of them were to motor up to her and Leslie's Club together. All that lovely long drive?
But though "lovely," that journey back to Hampstead, speeding through the broad, uncrowded streets that the lights showed smooth and polished as a ballroom floor, with the giant shadows of plane-tree leaves a-dance upon the pavement—that journey was unbelievably, relentlessly short.
Mr. Swayne seemed to tear along! He was driving, with Leslie, gay and talkative and teasing, beside him in front. The younger girl sat behind with his cousin. The Airman was hatless; and he wore a light loose overcoat of which the big sleeve brushed the black satin of Gwenna's wrap.
"Warm enough?" he asked, gently, and (as carefully as if she'd been some old invalid, she thought) he tucked a rug about her. Eagerly Gwenna longed for him to return to that absorbing question he'd put to her at the dinner-table. But there seemed scarcely time to say a single word before, with a jarring of brakes, the car drew up in the slanting road before the big square block of the Club. The arc-lights blazed into the depths of the tall chestnut-trees beside the street, while the four young people stood for a moment clustered together on the asphalt walk before the glass-porch.
"All over now," thought Gwenna with quite a ridiculously sharp little pang as good-nights and good-byes were said.
Oh! Wasn't he going to say anything else? About the flying?Shecouldn't!
He was holding her hand (for good-night) while Mr. Swayne still laughed with Leslie.
"Look here," the Airman said abruptly. "About that flying——"
"Yes! Oh, yes!" Gwenna returned in a breathless little flurry. There mustn't be anymistakeabout what she wished. She looked up into his holding eyes once more, and said quiveringly, "I would so love it!"
"You would. Right," he said, and seemed to have forgotten that they had shaken hands, and that he had not yet loosed her fingers from his large and hearty grip. He shook hands again. "Then I'll come round And fix it up——"
And the next instant, it seemed, he was whirled away from her again, this Stranger who had dropped into the middle of her life as it were from the skies which were his hunting-ground. There was the noise of a retreating car droning down the hill (not unlike the receding drone of a biplane in full flight), then the grating of a key in the lock of the Club door....
Gwenna sighed. Then she went upstairs, humming softly, without knowing what the tune was, Leslie's song:
"Once in the dear, dead days beyond recall——"
"Once in the dear, dead days beyond recall——"
Leslie followed her into her room where she turned up the gas.
"I'll undo you, Taffy, shall I?... Enjoyed yourself rather, after all, didn't you?" said the elder girl, adding quickly, "What's the matter?"
For Gwenna before the glass stood with a dismayed look upon her face. Her hand was up to her roundwhite throat, touching the dimpled hollow where there had rested—where there rested no longer—that mother-of-pearl pendant.
"It's gone," she exclaimed ruefully.
"What has, child? What have you dropped?"
Gwenna, still with her hand at her throat, explained, "I've lost my heart".
The day after the dinner-party was spent by Gwenna metaphorically, at least, in the clouds.
By her vivid day-dreams she was carried off, as Ganymede was carried by the eagle, sky-high; she felt the rush of keen air on her face; she saw the khaki-green flying-ground beneath her with the clustered onlookers, as small as ants. And—thus she imagined it—she heard that megaphone announcement:
"Ladies and gentul MEN! Mis ter Paul Dampier on a Maurice Farman bi plane ac companied by Miss Williams!"
"Ladies and gentul MEN! Mis ter Paul Dampier on a Maurice Farman bi plane ac companied by Miss Williams!"
with the sound of it dying down, faintly, below her.
Then in her musing mind she went over and over what had already happened. Those throbbing moments when her new friend had said, "Look here! Would you care to come up?" and, "Then I'll come up here and fix it——"
Would he? Oh, when would he? It was of course hardly to be thought that this flying-man ("besieged with invitations" as he was) would come to ratify hisoffer on Sunday, the very day after he'd made it. Too much to expect....
Therefore that Sunday Gwenna Williams refused to go out, even on the Heath for the shortest loitering stroll. Leslie Long, with an indescribable look that the younger girl did not catch, went out without her. Gwenna stayed on the green bench in the small, leafy garden at the back of the Club, reading and listening, listening for the sound of the bell at the front door, or for the summons to the telephone.
None came, of course.
Also, of course, no note to make an appointment to go flying appeared at that long, crowded breakfast-table of the Club on Monday morning for Miss Gwenna Williams.
That, too, she could hardly have expected.
Quite possibly he'd forgotten that the appointment had ever been made. A young man of that sort had got so many things to think about. So many people to make appointments with. So many other girls to take up.
"I wonder if he's promised to go up again soon with that girl called Muriel," she thought. "Sure to know millions of girls——"
And it was in a very chastened mood of reaction that Gwenna Williams, typist—now dressed in the business-girl's uniform of serge costume, light blouse, and small hat—left her Club that morning. She walked down the sunny morning road to the stopping-placeof the motor-omnibuses and got on to a big scarlet "24" bus, bound for Charing Cross and her day's work.
The place where she worked was a huge new building in process of construction on the south side of the Embankment near Westminster Bridge.
Above the slowly sliding tides of the river, with its barges and boats, there towered several courses of granite blocks, clean as a freshly-split kernel. In contrast to them were the half demolished, dingy shells of houses on either side, where the varied squares of wallpaper and the rusting, floorless fireplaces showed where one room had ended and the next begun. The scaffolding rose above the new pile like a mighty web. Above this again the enormous triangular lattice rose so high that it seemed like a length of ironwork lace stretched out on two crochet-needles against the blue-grey and hot vault of the London sky.
As she passed the entrance Gwenna's eyes rose to this lattice.
"It looks almost as high up in the air as one could fly in that biplane," she thought. "Oh, to be rightup! Looking down on everything, with the bluebeneath oneinstead of only above!"
She crossed the big yard, which was already vocal with the noises of chipping and hammering, the trampling and the voices of men. Two of them—the genial young electrician called Grant and the Yorkshire foreman who was a regular father to his gang,nodded good-morning to the youngest typist as she passed. She walked quickly past the stacks of new timber and the gantries and travelling cranes (plenty of machinery here; it ought to please Mr. Dampier, since he'd said that was what he was interested in!). One great square of the hewn granite was swinging in mid-air from a crane as she left the hot sunlight and noise outside and entered the door of the square, corrugated iron building that held the office where she worked.
To reach it she had to pass through the clerk-of-the-works' offices, with long drawing-benches with brass handled drawers beneath, full of plans, and elevations. These details seemed mysteriously, tantalisingly incomprehensible and yet irritating to Gwenna's feminine mind. She was imaginative enough to realise that all these details, these "man's-things," from the T-squares on the benches to the immense iron safe in the corner, seemed to put her, Gwenna, "in her place." She was merely another detail in the big whole of man's work that was going on here. The place made her feel tiny, unimportant. She went on to the light and airy room, smelling of new wood and tracing-paper, the extension of the clerk-of-the-works' office that she shared with her two colleagues.
In the centre of this room there was a large square table with a telephone, a telephone-book, various other books of reference and a shallow wicker basket for letters. Besides this there were the typing tables for each of the three girl-clerks. Gwenna's and MissBaker's were side by side. The German girl sat nearest to the window that gave the view up the river, with Lambeth Bridge and the Houses of Parliament looming grey and stately against the smiling June sky, and a distant glimpse of Westminster Abbey. On the frame of the pane just above her Miss Baker had fastened, with drawing-pins, two photographs. One was a crude coloured postcard of a red-roofed village among pine-forests. The other was a portrait of a young man, moustached and smiling under a spiked German helmet; across this photograph ran the autograph, "Karl Becker." Thus the blue and guileless eyes of this young foreigner in our midst could rest upon mementoes of her Fatherland and her family any time she raised her blonde head from bending over her work. Both girls looked up this morning as Gwenna, the last arrival, came in. They scolded her good-naturedly because she'd brought none of those chocolates she'd promised from the dinner-table. They asked how she'd enjoyed herself at that party.
It would have been presumably natural to the young Welsh girl to have broken out into a bubblingly excited—"And, girls!Whod'you suppose I sat next. A real live airman!And, my dears!" (with a rapturous gasp), "who should it be but the one I bought the photo of on Saturday! You know; the one you called my young man—Mr. Dampier—Paul Dampier—Yes, but wait; that isn't all. Just fancy! He talked to me yards and yards about his new aeroplane, and I say,whatdo you think! This was the best. He'sasked me to come up one day—yes, indeed! He's going to take me flying—with him!"
But, as it was, Gwenna said not one word of all this. She could not have explained why, even to herself. Only she replied to Miss Butcher's, "What was the party like?" with a flavourless, "Oh, it was all right, thanks."
That soundedsoEnglish, she thought!
She had a dull day at the office. Dry-as-dust letters and specifications, builders' quantities, and so on, to type out. Tiresome calls on the telephone that had to be put through to the other office....
Never before had she seemed to mind the monotony of those clicking keys and that "I'll inquire. Hold the line, please." Never before had she found herself irritated by the constant procession of men who were in and out all day; including Mr. Grant, who sometimes seemed tomakeerrands to talk to Miss Butcher, but who never stayed for more than a moment, concluding invariably with the cheerful remark, "Well! Duty calls, I must away." Men seemed actually toenjoy"duty," Gwenna thought. At least the men here did. All of them, from Mr. Henderson in the other office to the brown-faced men in the yard with their shirt-sleeves rolled up above tattooed arms, seemed to be "keen" on the building, on the job in hand. They seemed glad to be together. Gwenna wondered how they could....
To-day she was all out of tune. She was quitecross when, for the second time, Albert, the seventeen-year old Cockney office-boy, bustled in, stamping a little louder than was strictly necessary on the echoing boards. He rubbed his hands together importantly, demanding in a voice that began in a bass roar and ended in a treble squeak, "Those specifications, miss. Quick, too, or you'll hear about it!"
"Goodnessme, what an ugly way you London boys do have of talking!" retorted the Welsh girl pettishly. "Sut-ch an accent!"
The rebuked Albert only snorted with laughter as he took her sheaf of papers. Then, looking back over his shoulder at the pretty typist perched on the edge of the centre table to refill her fountain pen, he added in his breaking treble, "Don't you sit on that tyble, Miss!Sittin' on the tyble's s'posed to mean you want to be kissed, and it looks so bad! Don't it, Miss Butcher? There's other ways of gittin' orf than that, isn't there?"
"Outside!" snapped Miss Butcher, blushing, as the boy stumped away.
Gwenna sighed angrily and longed for lunch-time, so that she could get out.
At one o'clock, an hour after the buzzer had sounded for the mid-day meal of the yard-men, the other two girls in the office would not even come out for a breath of air. They had brought fruit and cake. They made Bovril (with a kettle of hot water begged from the fatherly foreman) and lunched where they'd satall the morning. Miss Butcher, munching, was deep in a library-book lent to her by the young electrician. Miss Baker counted stitches in a new pattern for a crochet-workKante, or length of fine thread insertion. It was not unlike the pattern of the iron trellis above the scaffolding, that tapered black against the sky; man's fancy-work.
What hideously tame things women had to fill their lives with, Gwenna thought as she sat in the upper window of her tea-shop at the corner of the Embankment. She watched the luncheon-time crowd walking over Westminster Bridge. So many of these people were business-girls just like herself and the Butcher and the Baker! Would anything more amusing ever happen to them, or to her?
But that German girl, Gwenna thought, would stare to hear her work called "hideous" or "tame." It was her greatest interest. Already, she'd told Gwenna, her bottom drawer at her boarding-house was crammed with long, rolled-up crochet-work strips of white or creamy lace. There were also her piles of tray-cloths, petticoat flounces and chemise-tops, all hand-embroidered and bemonogrammed by Miss Baker herself. She was not engaged to be married, but, as she'd artlessly said, "Somethinga young girl can have always ready."
Day-dreams in crochet!
"I'd rather never fall in love than have it all spoilt by mixing it up with such a lot of sewing and cookery that it wouldn't get disentangled, like," thought the dreamy, impatient Gwenna. She returned, to find theGerman girl measuring her crochet lace against her arm and crying, "Since Saturday I have made till there." ...
Then Miss Baker turned to her German version of an English trade firm's letter. Miss Butcher unfastened another packet of stationery. Miss Williams fetched a number of envelopes from the inner office to be addressed....
Would the afternoonnevercome to an end?
At last six o'clock found her, released from the day's work and back at her Club.
But still, still there was no envelope addressed to Miss Gwenna Williams stuck up in the criss-cross tapes of the green-baize-covered letter-board in the hall.
She went upstairs rather slowly to take off her hat. On the landing the voice of Leslie Long called to her from the bathroom.
"Come in here, Taffy. I'm washing blouses. I want to tell you some news."
Gwenna entered the steamy bathroom, to find her chum's tall figure bent in two over the bath and up to its bare elbows in suds of Lux.
"I say, child, you know your locket that you lost at my sister's?" announced Leslie. "It's all right. It's been found."
"Has it?" said Gwenna, not very enthusiastically. "Did I leave it in Mrs. Smith's room?"
"You didn't. You left it in Hugo Swayne's car," said Leslie, wringing out the wet handful of transparent net that would presently serve her as a garment. "That young man came up about half an hour ago to tell you."
"Mr. Swayne did? How kind of him."
"Yes, wasn't it? But not of Mr. Swayne," saidLeslie, wringing. "It was—just let out the water and turn me on some fresh hot, will you?—It was the other one that came: the aviator boy."
"What?" cried Gwenna sharply. "Mr. Dampier?"
"Yes. Your bird-man. He came up here—in full plumage and song! Nice grey suit—rather old; brown boots awfully well cleaned—by himself; blue tie, very expensive Burlington Arcade one—lifted from his cousin Hugo, I bet," enlarged Leslie, spreading the blouse out over the white china edge of the bath. "I met him at the gate just as I got back from my old lady's. He asked for my friend—meaning you. Hadn't grasped your name. He came in for ten minutes. But he couldn't wait, Taffy, so——"
Here, straightening herself, Leslie suddenly stopped. She stopped at the sight of the small, blankly dismayed face with which her chum had been listening to this chatter.
And Gwenna, standing aghast against the frosted glass panes of the bathroom door, pronounced, in her softest, most agitated Welsh accent, an everyday Maid's Tragedy in just six words:
"He came! When I was out!"
"He was awfully sorry——"
But Gwenna, seeming not to hear her friend, broke out: "Hesaidhe'd come and settle about taking me flying, and there was Ithink-ing he'd forgotten all about it, and then he did come after all, and I wasn't here! Oh,Leslie!—--"
Leslie, sitting on the edge of the bath, gave her aglance that was serious and whimsical, rueful and tender, all at once.
"Yes, you can't understand," mourned Gwenna, "but Ididso want to go up in an aeroplane for once in my life! I'd set my heart on it, Leslie, ever since he said about it. It's only now I see how badly I wanted it," explained the younger girl, flushed with emotion, and relapsing into her Welshiest accent, as do all the Welsh in their moments of stress. "AndnowI shan't get another chance. I know I shan't——"
And such was the impetus of her grief that Leslie could hardly get her to listen to the rest of the news that should be balm for this wound of disappointment; namely, that Mr. Dampier was going to make an appointment with both girls to come and have tea with him at his rooms, either on Saturday or Sunday.
"He'll write to you," concluded Leslie Long, "and let you know which. I said we'd go either day, Taffy."
Gwenna, caught up into delight again from the lowest depths of disappointment, could hardly trust herself to speak. Surely Leslie must think her a mostawfulbaby, nearly crying because she'd had an outing postponed! So the young girl (laughing a little shakily) put up quite a plucky fight to treat it all as quite a trifle....
Even the next morning at breakfast she took it quite casually that there was a note upon her plate stamped with the address of the Aero Club. She even waited a moment before she opened it and read in a handwritingas small as if it had been traced by a crow-quill:
"Monday night."Dear Miss Williams,"Will you and Miss Long come to tea with me at my place about 4.30 on Sunday? I find I shall not have to go to Hendon on that day. I'll come and call for you if I may."Yours sincerely,"P. Dampier."
"Monday night.
"Dear Miss Williams,
"Will you and Miss Long come to tea with me at my place about 4.30 on Sunday? I find I shall not have to go to Hendon on that day. I'll come and call for you if I may.
"Yours sincerely,"P. Dampier."
"At last!" thought Gwenna to herself, rather breathlessly, as she put the note back into the envelope. "Now he'll settle about when I'm to go flying with him. Oh! I do,dohope there's nothing going to get in the way of that!"
The first of a series of "things that got in the way" of Gwenna's making an appointment to go flying occurred on that Sunday afternoon, when Leslie and she were to have tea at Paul Dampier's place.
"A mixture of chaos and comfy chairs, I expect; ash everywhere, andbeastlycakes. (I know these bachelor tea-parties.) That," Leslie said, "is what his 'place' will be like."
Gwenna, as usual, hadn't wasted any thoughts over this. She had been too full of what their host himself would say and do—about the flying. She was all ready, in the white dress, the white hat with the wings, half an hour after Sunday mid-day dinner at the Ladies' Club. But it was very nearly half-past four by the time Mr. Dampier did come, as he had promised, to fetch the two girls.
He came in the car that had driven them back on the night of the dinner-party.
And he was hurried, and apologetic for his lateness. He even seemed a little shy. This had the effect of making Gwenna feel quite self-possessed as she took the seat beside him ("I hate sitting by the driver, really.Makes mesonervous!" Leslie had declared) and inquired whether he borrowed his cousin's car any time he had visitors.
"Well, but Hugo'sgoteverything," he told her, with a twinkle, "so I always borrow anything of his that I can collar!"
"Studs, too?" asked Gwenna, quickly.
"Oh, come! I didn't think it of you.Whata pun!" he retorted.
She coloured a little, shy again, hurt. But he turned his head to look at her, confided to her: "It wasonthe chest-of-drawers, all the time!"
And, as the car whizzed westwards, they laughed together. That dinner-table incident of the collar—or collared—stud brought, for the second time, a sudden homely glow of friendly feeling between this boy and girl.
She thought, "He's just as easy to get on with as if he were another girl, like Leslie——"
For always, at the beginning of things, the very young woman compares her first man-friend with the dearest girl-chum she has known.
—"Or as if he were just nobody, instead of being so wonder-ful, and an airman, good gracious!"
Appropriately enough for an airman, his place seemed to be nearly on the house-tops of a block of buildings near Victoria Street.
The lift carried them up past six landings and many boards inscribed with names of firms. It stopped at the seventh story, almost directly opposite a cream-coloureddoor with a small, old-fashioned brass knocker, polished like gold.
Paul Dampier tapped sharply at it.
The door was opened by a thick-set man in an excellent suit of clothes and with the face of a wooden sphinx.
"Tea as soon as you can, Johnson," said the young Airman over his shoulder, as the trio passed in.
The long sitting-room occupied half the flat and its windows took up the whole of one side. It was to these open windows that Gwenna turned.
"Oh, what a view!" she cried, looking out, enraptured at the height and airiness, looking past the leads, with their wooden tubs of standard laurel-bushes, among which pigeons were strutting and bridling and pecking crumbs. She looked down, down, at the bird's-eye view of London, spread far below her in a map of grey roofs and green tree-tops under a soft mist of smoke that seemed of the clouds themselves.
"Oh, can't you see for miles!" exclaimed Gwenna. "There's St. Paul's, looks like a big grey soap-bubble, coming up out of the mist! Oh, you can see between a crack in the houses, our place at Westminster! It's like a cottage from here! Oh, and that iron lacey thing on the roof! Even this must be something like being up in an aeroplane, I should think! Look, Leslie!"
Miss Long seemed more engrossed in looking round Mr. Dampier's bachelor sitting-room. It was incredibly luxurious compared to what she'd expected. The polished floor was black and shiny as the wood of the piano at the further end, the Persian rugs softly brilliant.In the middle of the Adams mantelpiece simpered an exquisite Chelsea shepherdess; to the left and right of her there stood squat toys in ivory, old slender-stalked champagne-glasses holding sweet-peas. And upon the leaf-brown walls were decorations that seemed complacently to draw attention to the catholic taste of their owner. A rare eighteenth-century print of Tom Jones upon his knees, asking "forgiveness" of his Sophia, hung just above a Futurist's grimace in paint; and there was a frieze of ultra-modern French fashion-designs, framed inpasse-partout, from the "Bon Ton."
"What a—what a surprising number of pictures you have, Mr. Dampier," said Leslie, mildly. "Hasn't he, Taffy?"
Gwenna, turning at last from the window, realised dimly that this sophisticated room did seem somehow out of keeping as an eyrie for this eagle. The view outside, yes! But these armchairs? And she wouldn't have thought that he would have bothered to have thingspretty, like this——
"And what a lot of books you've got," she said. For the wall opposite to the windows was taken up by bookshelves, set under a trophy of swords of out-of-date patterns, and arranged with some thought.
The top shelves held volumes of verse, and of plays, from Beaumont and Fletcher to Galsworthy. The Russian novelists were ranged together; also the French. There was a corner for Sudermann and Schnitzler. A shelf further down came all the English moderns, and below that all theYellow Books, a long blue line of alltheEnglish Reviews, from the beginning; a stack ofThe New Age, and a lurid pink-covered copy ofBlast.
But before Gwenna could wonder further over these possessions of this young man, more incongruous possessions were brought in by the Sphinx-faced man-servant; a tea-table of beaten copper, a peasant-embroidered cloth, a tea-service of old Coalport; with a silver spirit-kettle, with an iced cake, with toast, and wafer, bread-and-butter and cress-sandwiches and Parisianpetits-foursthat all seemed, as the young girl put it simply to herself, "So unlikehim!"
Her chum had already guessed the meaning of it all.
The Dampier boy's rooms?Hislibrary and ornaments? Ah, no. He'd never read one of all those books there. Not he! And these were not the type of "things" he'd buy, even if he'd had the money to throw away, thought Leslie. It was no surprise to that young woman when the legitimate owner of this lavishly appointedgarçonnièremade his sudden appearance in the middle of tea.
The click of a latchkey outside. Two masculine voices in the hall. Then the door was thrown open.
There walked in a foreign-looking young man, with bright dark eyes and a small moustache, followed by Mr. Hugo Swayne, attired in a Victorian mode that, as Leslie put it afterwards, "cried 'Horse, horse!' where there was no horse." His tall bowler was dove-grey; his black stock allowed a quarter-inch of white collar to appear; below his striking waistcoat dangled a bunchof seals and a fob. This costume Leslie recognised as a revival of the Beggarstaff Touch. Gwenna wondered why this young man seemed always to be in fancy dress. Leslie could have told her that Mr. Swayne's laziness and vanity had led him to abandon himself on the coast of Bohemia, where he had not been born. His father had been quite a distinguished soldier in Egypt. His father's son took things more easily at the Grafton Gallery and the Café Royal and Artists' Clubs. He neither painted, wrote, nor composed, but his life was set largely among flatterers who did these things—after a fashion.
He came in saying, "Now this is where I live when I'm——"
He broke off with a start at the sight of the party within. The girls turned to him with surprised and smiling greeting.
Paul Dampier, fixing him with those blue eyes, remarked composedly, "Hullo, my dear chap. Have some tea, won't you? I'll ring for Johnson to bring in two more cups."
"That will be very nice," said Hugo Swayne, rising to the occasion with all the more grace because he was backed up by a tiny understanding glance from Miss Long. And he introduced his young Frenchman by a name that made Leslie exclaim, "Why! You are that Post-Impressionist painter, aren't you?"
"Not I, mademoiselle, but my brother," returned Hugo's French friend, slowly and very politely. His dark face was simple and intelligent as that of a nicechild; he sat up as straight in his chair as he talked. "It is for that Mr. Swayne, who is admirer of my brother's pictures, is so amiable for to show me London. Me, I am not artiste. I am ingénieur only."
"'Only'!" thought Gwenna over her teacup.
Surely any one should be proud of being an engineer, considering that Mr. Dampier had thus begunhiscareer; he who was now in what the romantic girl considered the First of All Professions? Perhaps her attitude towards the Airman as such was noted by the Airman's cousin. Hugo, who had dropped a little heavily into the softest chair near Miss Long, turned his Chopinesque profile against a purple cushion to shoot a rather satirical glance at the cleaner-built youth in the worn grey suit.
"Now, how like a man! He doesn't admire Taffy particularly, but he's piqued to see her admire another type." Leslie summed this up quickly to herself. "Not really a bad sort; he behaved well about the invasion of these rooms. But he's like all these well-off young men who potter about antique shops when they ought to be taking exercise—he's plenty of feminine little ways. Since they call spitefulness 'feminine'!"
There was a distinctly spiteful note in the young man's voice as he made his next remark to his cousin.
This remark surprised even Leslie for a moment.
And to Gwenna's heart it struck with a sudden, unreasonable shock of consternation.
For Mr. Swayne inquired blandly across the tea-table:
"Well, Paul; how's yourfiancée?"
Before he answered, Gwenna had time to think smartingly, "Hisfiancée! There! I might haveknownhe was engaged. I might have guessed it! It's nothing to do with me.... Only ... I believethat'swhat's going to get in the way of my flying with him. She won't let him. I mean he'll always be taking her up! And I know who it is, too. It's sure to be the one called Muriel that I saw go up with him at Hendon with the red hair and the scarf. I sort of guessed when I heard they were going up together that she must be hisfiancée."
And all the while her eyes were, apparently, on the silver stand of the spirit-kettle, they watched the young Airman's face (which looked a little sheepish). She listened, tensely, for his reply. Quite shortly Paul Dampier, still munching cake, said, "Who? Oh! Going on as usual, thanks."
"Now I may tell you thatthat'smerely a pose to conceal devotion," laughed his cousin, turning to Gwenna. "Just as if every moment were not grudged that he spends away from HER!"
"Is it?" said the young girl with a smile. There was a bad lump in her throat, but she spoke with hermost carefully-fostered "English" accent. "I—I suppose that's natural!" she remarked.
Hugo, fondling his Chopin curl again, went on amusing himself with this chosen subject.
"But, as is so often the case with a young man's fancy," he announced, "nobody else sees anything in 'her'!"
The stricken Gwenna looked quickly at young Dampier, who was cutting the Titan wedges that men call "slices," of cake. How wouldhetake it that it had been said of his adored one that no one saw anything in her?
He only gave a short laugh, a confident nod of his fair head and said, "They will, though."
"Infatuated youth!" commented Hugo Swayne, resignedly, leaning back. "And he tries to cover it up by seeming casual. 'Going on as usual' is said just as a blind. It sounds so much more like a mere wife than afiancée, don't you think?"
"Ah, but you are cynique, monsieur," protested the young Frenchman, looking mildly shocked. "For you it is not sacred, the love for a wife?"
"Oh, look here! Hadn't you better explain to them," broke in Paul Dampier boyishly, having finished a large mouthful of his cake, "that you're rotting?Fiancée, indeed. Haven't got such a thing in the world, of course."
At this Gwenna suddenly felt as if some crushing weight of disappointment had fallen from her. "It's because I shall be able to go flying with him after all," she thought.
Young Dampier, rising to take her cup, grumbled laughingly, "D'you suppose girls will look at a man nowadays who can't afford to spend the whole of his time gadding about after 'em, Hugo, as you can, or blowing what's my salary for an entire year on their engagement-rings——"
"My dear fellow, no girl in the world exacts as much of a man's time and money as thatgrande passionof yours does," retorted Hugo Swayne, not ill-naturedly. And turning to Leslie, he explained: "What I call Paul'sfiancéeis that eternal aeroplane he's supposed to be making."
"Ah!" said Gwenna, and then blushed violently; partly because she hadn't meant to speak, and partly because this had drawn the blue eyes of the Airman quickly upon herself.
"Yes, that incessant flying-machine of his," enlarged Mr. Swayne, lolling back in his chair and addressing the meeting. "She—I believe it's correct to call the thing 'she'?—is more of a nuisance even than any engaged girl I've ever met. She interferes with everything this man does. Ask him to come along to a dance or the Opera or to see some amusing people, and it's always 'Can't; I'm working on the cylinder or the spiral or the Fourth Dimension' or whatever it is he does think he's working on. Practically 'she' spends all the time he's away from her ringing him up, or getting him rung up, on the telephone. 'She' eats all his spare cash, too——"
"In steel instead of chocolate, I suppose?" smiledLeslie. "And must she be humoured? She seems to have every drawback of a young woman with 'a diamond half-hoop.' Is she jealous, as well?"
And then, while taking a cigarette from Hugo's case, the elder girl made, lightly, a suggestion that the listening Gwenna was fated to remember.
"What would happen," asked Leslie dryly, "if a real flesh-and-bloodfiancéewere to come along as a rival to the one of machinery?"
"Nothing would happen," Hugo assured her, holding out a lighted match. "That's why it would be rather interesting to watch. The complication of the Aeroplane or the Lady. The struggle in the mind of the young Inventor, what? The Girl"—he tossed aside the match and glanced fleetingly at the grave cherub's-face under Gwenna's white-winged hat—"The Girl versus the Flying Machine. I'd lay fifteen to one on the Machine, Miss Long."
"Done," said Leslie, demurely but promptly. "In half-crowns."
"Yes! You'd back your sex, of course," Hugo took up gaily. The young Frenchman murmured: "But the Machine—the Machine is also of the sex of Mademoiselle."
Here, suddenly, the silently listening Gwenna gave a tiny shiver. She turned her head abruptly towards the open windows behind her with the strutting pigeons and the sailing clouds beyond. It had seemed to the fanciful Celt that there in that too dainty room now hazywith cigarette-smoke, in that careless company of two girls and three young men, she had felt the hint of another Presence. It was rather horrid and ghostly—all this talk of a Machine that was made more of than a Woman! A Machine who "clawed" the man that owned her, just like a jealous betrothed who will not let her lover out of her sight! And supposing that Conflict did come, on which Gwenna's chum and Mr. Dampier's cousin had laid their laughing bets? The struggle between the sweetheart of steel springs and the sweetheart of soft flesh and warm blood? For one clear instant Gwenna knew that this fight would, must come. It was coming——
Then she turned her head and forgot her presentiments; coming back to the light-hearted Present. She watched Leslie, to whom the young Frenchman had been talking; he was now fixing dark earnest eyes upon "Mademoiselle Langue" as she, in the rather stilted phraseology with which our nation speaks its own language for the benefit of foreigners, expounded to him an English story.
There was a short pause.
Then the room rang to the laughter of the foreigner. "Ha! Yes! I have understood him! It is very amusing, that! It is good!" he cried delightedly, with a flash of white teeth and dark eyes. "He say, 'There are parts of it that are excellent!' Aha!Très spirituel," and he laughed again joyously over the story of the Curate's Egg, while Hugo murmured somethingabout how stimulating it was to hear, for once, the Immemorial Anecdote fall upon Virgin Soil.
The young Airman moved nearer to Gwenna, who, still watching Leslie, gave a little start to hear that deep and gentle voice so close beside her as he spoke.
"Look here, we haven't settled up yet," he said, his voice gentle but carrying above the chatter of the others. "About that flying. Sunday this week I have got to be off somewhere. Now, are you free next Saturday?"
Gwenna, eager and tremulous, was just about to say, "Yes." But Hugo Swayne interrupted.
"I say, I hate to make mischief. But if you're talking about Saturday——? D'you remember, Paul? It was the only day I could take you down to Ascot to see Colonel Conyers."
"Oh, Lord, so it was," said the young Airman, turning an apologetic face to the girl. "I'm so sorry," he explained, "but this is a man I've simply got to get hold of if I can. It's the Air-craft Conyers—'Cuckoo' Conyers they call him. And he was a friend of Hugo's father, and what I've been trying to see him about is working the War-office to take up my new Machine——"
"TheFiancéeagain, you notice," laughed his cousin, with an imperceptible aside to Leslie. "Score to the Aeroplane."
"Yes, I see," said Gwenna, nodding at the Airman. "Of course! I mean of course I don't mind!"
"Then shall we say Saturday week for you to come up with me instead?" suggested young Dampier.
And Gwenna agreed to the date, thinking, "If onlynothing stops it again! If only there isn't something else, then, to do with his Machine! That Machine! I——" Here she paused.
After all, it would be too ridiculous to allow oneself even to think that one "hated" a machine!
Eagerly as Gwenna longed to fly, she was not to do so even yet.
After that appointment made at Hugo Swayne's rooms she lived through a fortnight of dreaming, tingling anticipation. Then came another of those brief direct notes from "hers, P. Dampier." The girl jumped for joy. It was not to be at Hendon this time, but at Brooklands. Was she not rapidly gaining experiences? First Hendon, then Brooklands; at this rate she would soon know all the flying-grounds—Shoreham, Eastchurch, Farnborough, all of them!
"I'll call for you," the note said, "in the car."
"'The' car is good," commented Leslie, arranging a mist-blue scarf over Gwenna's small hat just before she started off on this expedition. "In the Army all things are in common, including money and tobaccobut the Dampier boy isn't in the Army."
"Why shouldn't he?" took up Gwenna, ungrammatically and defiantly. She considered Mr. Swayne's motor was honoured by this other young man who condescended to drive it, to fetch and whirl away with him a girl who felt herself a nymph about to be swept up and up above the clouds to some modern version of Elysium.
So twelve o'clock that Saturday morning (Gwenna having obtained special leave of absence from theoffice) found the young man and the girl speeding through Kensington and Hammersmith, on the Woking Road.
The sun was hot above them; the road white; the hedges so dusty that they seemed grey ribbons streaming past. Gwenna scarcely realised how they went. She sat there beside him, thrilled and breathless, hardly knowing to which delight to give herself up, that of the coming flight, that of the present swift drive in the fresh breeze, or that of the companionship of this Demigod of Modern Times, whose arm almost touched hers sometimes as he moved or turned, or put on the brake.
Except for an occasional remark to the car: "Come on, don't be funny, old lady, don't be funny," or "Now for the hills; watch her sit down and laugh at 'em!" he spoke little; Gwenna didn't particularly want him to speak. The girl was in a golden and moving dream, and scarcely knew where it carried her.
She came out of that dream, not with a shock, but gradually. Was the car slowing down? It stopped; stopped in a wide part of that dust-white road between the tall, dust-grey hedges, opposite to a creosoted telegraph-pole spiked with nails. Through a gap in the hedge Gwenna caught sight of a moon-daisied field, with a dark hedge and trees beyond. Not a house, not a cottage in sight. This couldn't be Brooklands?
"Hul-lo," the boy was muttering. "What's up now?"
"What is it?" she asked.
He did not reply. This was not rudeness, as she guessed, but intentness; he took it for granted that she would not understand the mechanical explanation. Resignedly she said to herself, "Machinery gone wrong? Sometimes it really seems as if that were all machinery everdiddo! Yet that's what he said he was interested in, more than anything!"
He was out of the car and had flung back the bonnet. Then he took off his coat and hung it up on one of the nails on that telegraph-pole. He pushed up his shirt-sleeves and bent over the tool-box on the step.
Sitting there on the hot leather, Gwenna watched him, she heard the chinking of wrenches and spanners. Then he returned to the bonnet again, fumbling, handling, burrowing, grunting at things.... Ten minutes elapsed....
He then broke out emphatically: "Oh,Lord! Ihavedone itnow!"
"Done what?" asked the girl anxiously.
In tightening a nut with a spanner the spanner had slipped. He had broken the porcelain insulation of the plug controlling the current.
And now, good-humouredly smiling at his guest, he leaned on the door of the car with his brown forearms crossed and said, "Short circuited. Yes. I'm afraid that's killed it."
"Killed what?" asked little Gwenna, in affright.
"Our flying for to-day," he said.
He went on to speak about "spare parts," and howit would be necessary to send some one back to fetch—something—Gwenna didn't care what it was. Her heart sank in dismay. No flying? Must they go back after all, now?
"Can't we get on?" she sighed.
He shook his shining head.
"We can make a picnic of it, anyhow," he said more encouragingly. "Shall you be all right here if I run back to that inn we passed just now with the bit of green outside? I shan't be ten minutes. Send some one off on a bicycle, and bring some grub back here."
He jerked on his coat and was off.
Little Gwenna, sitting there waiting in the useless car—her small, disconsolate face framed in the gauze scarf with which she'd meant to bind her curls for the flying—was passed by half a dozen other motors on the road to Brooklands. It did not strike her, dreamily downcast as she was, that surely what the messenger from the inn was being despatched to fetch might have been borrowed from one of these other motorists? Some of them, surely, would be men who knew young Paul Dampier quite well. Any of them might have come to the rescue?
This, as a matter of fact, had struck Paul Dampier at once. But he didn't want to go on to Brooklands! Brooklands? Beastly hot day; crowds of people; go up in an affair like an old Vanguard?
What he wanted, after a hard day's work yesterday on his own (so different) Machine, was a day's peace andquiet and to think things a bit over about her (the Machine) lying on his back somewhere shady, with a pipe. Actually, he would rather have been alone. But this little girl, Miss Williams.... She was all right. Not only pretty ... but such a quiet, sensible sort of little thing. He'd take her up another time, since she was keen. He certainly would take her up. Not to-day. To-day they'd just picnic.Shewouldn't want to be giggling and chattering about herself the whole time, and all that sort of thing, like some of them. She liked to listen.
She'd be interested to hear what he'd been doing lately, about the Machine. For a girl, she was pretty bright, and even if she didn't grasp things at once, she evidently liked hearing about the Machine; besides which, it often cleared one's own ideas to one's self, to have to set 'em out and explain about the machinery very simply, to some one who was keen, but who hadn't a notion. They'd have a nice, peaceful time, this afternoon; somewhere cool, instead of Brooklands. And a nice long talk—allabout the Machine.
He returned to the girl waiting in the car. Gwenna, cheering up at the sight of him, saw that his pockets were bulging with bottles, and that he carried a square, straw basket.
"There. I might have taken Hugo's luncheon-basket and filled that while I was about it; only I forgot there was one," he said, standing on the road and screwing up his eyes a little in the midday sun as hefaced the car. "It's nicer eating out of doors, when you get a chance. Beastly dusty on the road here, though, and things going by all the time and kicking up clouds of it all over you. We'll find a pitch in that field."
So she jumped down from her seat and the two left the glaring road and got through that gap in the hedgerow where maybush and blackberry trail and grass and campion alike were all thickly powdered and drooping with dust.
The boy and girl skirted another hedge that ran at right angles to the road. Half-way up that field a big elm tree spread a patch of shade at its base like a dark-green rug for them to sit on. Paul Dampier put his coat down also. They sat, with moon-daisies and branching buttercups, and cow-parsley all sweet and clean about them.
Here the country-bred girl, forgetting her disappointment, gave a quick little sigh of content. She glanced about her at the known faces of flower-friends in the grass; a diaper of colours. Each year she had loved the time when white daisies and red sorrel and yellow rattle flaunted together over the heads of the lower-growing clovers and speedwells and potentillas. This year it seemed lovelier than ever. She put out her hand and pulled up a lance of jointed grass, nibbling the soft, pale-green end of it.
"Here, are you as hungry as all that?" laughed young Dampier at her side. "We'll feed."
He let Gwenna spread out upon the clean dinner-napkin in which they were wrapped the provisions that he had brought from the inn.
"All I could get. Bread-and-cheese. Couple of hunks of cold beef. Butter—salt," he said, giving her the things as he named them. "Plates I said we wouldn't worry about; chuck the crumbs to the birds. Here's what I got to drink; cider. D'you like it?"
"Love it," said Gwenna, who had never happened to taste it. But she knew that she would love it.
"Good. Oh!NowI've forgotten the glass, though," exclaimed young Dampier, sitting up on his knees on the shaded patch of grass beside her. "We shall both have to use the lower half of my flask. Sorry—hope you don't mind."
Gwenna, taking her first taste of cider in bird-like sips from that oblong silver thing, remembered the old saying, "Drink from my cup and you will think my thoughts." Then he put down upon the dinner napkin the half-loaf and the lump of cheese that he had been munching. He took the half of the flask, simply, out of the girl's hand, poured out more cider, and drank in turn.
"That's better," he said, smiling. She smiled back at him.
She had ceased to feel any shyness of this fair-haired aviator who rested there beside her in this oasis of shade from the elm, while beyond them stretched the wide,dazzlingly bright desert of the flowering meadow, bounded by its hedges. He cut off the crusty part of the loaf for her (since she said she liked it). He sliced for her the damp and pinkish beef, since she would not confide to him her deep and feminine loathing of this fare. The woman is not yet born who can look upon cold meat as a food. And they drank in turn from his silver flask. This was their third meal together; yet Gwenna felt that she had been grown-up and conscious of delight in the world about her only since they had met.
Ease and gaiety rose between them in a haze like that which vibrated over the warm hay-field where they feasted.
"I say, I shall have to give a lunch at the Carlton to everybody I know," he laughed, half to himself, presently, "if I do get Colonel Conyers to make 'em take up the P.D.Q." Then, turning more directly to her. "Sorry—you don't know that joke. It's my Aeroplane, you know."
"Oh, yes, the one Mr. Swayne calls yourFiancée!" took up Gwenna quickly. Then she wished she hadn't said that. She reddened. She turned her supple little body to toss crumbs to a yellow-hammer that was eyeing them from a branch in the hedge behind her. And then she asked. "Why 'the P.D.Q.'?"
"Because she will be the Paul Dampier One, I hope," explained the young inventor, "and I always think of her as that other because it means 'Pretty Dam—Dashed Quick.'"
"Oh, is that it?" said Gwenna.
She echoed crossly to herself, "'I always think of her' indeed! It sounds like——"
And she finished her thought with the hardest-working word in her native tongue; the Welsh for sweetheart.
"It does sound just as if he were talking about hiscariad."
Absently she brushed more crumbs off her side of the dinner-napkin.
For one-half only of Gwenna now seemed to note that they were eating crusty loaf and drinking cider out of doors between a lupin-blue sky and a flowerful meadow; the other was conscious of nothing but her companion; of the clear friendliness of his eyes, those eyes of Icarus! Of his deep and gentle voice saying, "Mind if I smoke? You don't, I know," of those brown hard-looking forearms from which he had not troubled to pull down the sleeves, of his nearness.
Suddenly he came nearer still.
He had not stopped talking of his aeroplane, but she hardly remembered that she had asked him the meaning of one of the expressions that he had used.
He was repeating it.
"'Camber?' ... Well, it's a curve. A curve like——" He glanced about for an example of the soft, end-wise curve on the great wings of an aeroplane; his eyes passing quickly from the green hedge to the ground, to the things on the picnic cloth, to Gwenna Williams's small hand as it rested in the grass.
She wondered, thrilled, if the young Airman were actually going to take hold of her hand.
He did take her hand, as simply as he had taken the silver cup from it. He bent it over so that her wrist made a gentle curve. He passed his own large fingers across it.
"Yes; there—that's the curve," he said. "Almost exactly."
It might have been a caress.
But, done as he did it, the light movement was nothing of the kind. Instinct told the girl that. It wasn't her small and soft and pink-palmed hand that he was thinking of holding. She looked at him as he said, "That's the curve," and she caught a gleam of quickened interest in his eyes. But in one mortified flash she knew that this had nothing to do with her. She guessed that at this moment he'd forgotten that there was a girl sitting there beside him at all.
And she knew why.
Angrily she said to herself, "He's thinking of nothing but that old machine of his! And I do—yes, I do,dohate her!"
Then she sat for a moment still as the elm-trunk against which she'd been leaning.
She had been struck thus motionless by a thought.
Something had been brought home to her by that sharp and sudden twinge of—Jealousy!
Yes! She knew now! What she felt, and must have been feeling for days past, was what they meant by falling in love.
"That's what I've done!" she thought rapidly; half in consternation, half in delight. "It's beginning to happen what Mr. Swayne was talking about at that tea: the Girl or the Flying Machine!"
She glanced towards the gap in the hedge as if to look at the car that had brought them, motionless by the road-side; she turned her face away from the Airman, who sat lighting a pipe with the shadows of the elm-branches dappling his fair head and shirt-sleeved shoulders.
She was blushing warmly at her own thoughts.
"It's only the flying-machine he cares about! He does like me, too; in a way.... If only he'd forget that other for a minute! But if he won't," thought Gwenna, happening upon an ancient piece of feminine philosophy, "I'd rather have him talking aboutherthan not talking to me at all!"
She spoke aloud, sedately but interestedly.
"Oh, isthata camber?" That light touch of his seemed still upon her wrist, though he had withdrawn it carelessly at once. She paused, then said, "And what was that other thing, Mr. Dampier? Something about an angle?"
"A dihedral angle?" he said, drawing at that pipe. "Oh, that's the angle you see from the front of the thing. It's—look, it's like that."
This time it was not her hand he took as an illustration. He pointed, pipe in hand, to where, above the opposite hedge, a crow was sailing slowly, a vandyke of black across the cloudless blue.
"See that bird? It's that very slight V he makes;now."
"And this machine of yours?" persisted the girl, with a little twitch of her mouth for the rival whom he, it seemed, always thought of as "the P.D.Q." and whom Gwenna must always think of as "theFiancée." She wondered where it lived, the creature that meant all to him. She said, "Where—where d'youmakethat machine?"
"Oh, I'm afraid it isn't a machine yet, you see. It's only a model of one, so far. You know, like a model yacht," he explained. "That's the worst of it. You see, you can make a model do anything. It's when you get the thing life-size that the trouble begins. Model doesn't give a really fair idea of what you've got to get. The difficulties—it's never the real thing."
Gwenna thought, "It must be like making love to the person you aren't really in love with!" But what she said, with her hand stripping a spike of flowering grass, was, "I suppose it's like practising scales and all that on a mute piano?"
"Never tried", he said. Then: "The model'sat my own place, my rooms in"——here he broke off with a laugh. He looked straight into her face and said, still laughing, and in a more personal tone:
"Not in Victoria Street. I say, you spotted thatthatplace wasn't mine, didn't you?"
"Leslie 'spotted' and said so, afterwards," admitted Gwenna demurely, picking and sniffing at a piece of pink clover before she fastened it into her white blouse. "Idid think at the time that it wasn't—wasn't the sort of place where you'd find a man living whodidthings, like."
"Rather rough on old Hugo."
"Well, butdoeshe do things?"
"He doesn't have to. He'd be all right if he did. Sweat some of that beef off him, give him something to think about," averred his cousin, carelessly knocking out his pipe against the heel of his shoe. "But, you know, my place is in Camden Town; most inferior. Three rooms over a paper shop; two small cubby-holes where I sleep and eat, and a rather bigger one where I keep the 'P.D.Q.' stuff. I couldn't have you there that Sunday."
"Why not?" Gwenna asked sharply, and jealous again. It was almost as if theFiancéehad said to him, "No, not here!"
"Because," he said with a chuckle, "because at the last moment, when I'd got the tea ready and everything"—he tossed his fair head back—"a fall of soot down the chimney! Everything in the most ghastly mess! Pitch black wherever you put a finger. I simply couldn't—it was four o'clock then; I expect you both thought it rotten of me. Still," he concluded, rather ruefully, "I couldn't give you the sort of polite tea Hugo can, anyhow."
"I don't want polite teas!" Gwenna protested, looking round at the field where she had feasted as if in Elysium. "You don't suppose I care for things all grand like that, do you?"
He responded, "Would you care to see my Camden Town place, then, and the model? You and Miss Long. It's quite near you, you know."
"Yes, I should," said Gwenna quietly, stripping her grass.
How could he, she wondered, ask if she "cared" for these things that opened out new worlds to her? If he only knew, just to be with him was part of that new, soaring freedom which to her was summed up in the idea of flying! This, she felt,wasflying. She didn't care, after all, if there were no other flying that afternoon. Care?Shewouldn't mind sitting there until the sun slipped slowly downwards towards the western hedge and the moon-daisies closed in the tall grass, and clouds of other tiny flying creatures poised and hovered above them.Shewasn't sorry that the mechanic did not return in haste to minister to that broken-down car. When she did remember about it, it was almost to hope that he would not be back! Not just yet! Not to put an end to this golden afternoon of talk that, trivial as it was, seemed to her to be the endowment of a new faculty, and of comradeship that was as beguiling and satisfying as that of her bosom-chum, Leslie. Only newer, only more complete. So it seemed to Gwenna, as the shadows moved further up the grass where she sat with her new boy-friend.
For it is a commonplace that in all comradeship between man and woman passionate love claims a share. But also in all passionate love there is more comradeshipthan the unimaginative choose to admit; there is a happy inner meaning to the cottage phrase, "To keep company with."
What he thought about it she did not know. Except that he surely must like talking to her? He could not go on like this out of politeness.
Ah, besides—! Besides, she knew, without reasoning about it, that, even with that absorbing interest of the aeroplane in the background, he did like her. Just as Leslie, her other friend, who also knew so much more than she did, had liked her at once.
"Only," decided Gwenna, in the uttermost depths of her shy and daring heart, "only he'sgotto like me, some day, better than Leslie ever could. He must. Yes; hemust!"
And she thought it so ardently that she almost expected him, catching her thought, to answer it in words. She looked—no, he had caught nothing. But, meeting his eyes again, her own read a message that her fluttered mind had been told before this, but would scarcely let her believe. He thought she was pretty to look at. She had taken off her hat now, as she liked to do in the open air, and the light breeze tossed her short locks about.
"Ibelievehe thinks," Gwenna told herself, "that my hair's nice."