As a matter of fact she was right. If she could have read her companion's thoughts at the moment she wouldhave known of a quite foolish but recurrent wish on his part. A wish that he might just run his fingers through all those brown and thickly-twisting curls, to find out if they felt as silky as they looked.
A lark was carolling over her head, soaring, poising, poising, soaring, and singing all the while....
"That's what we can't do, even yet;hover," he said. And again he went on talking to the Little Thing (in his mind this babyish-faced but quite quick-witted girl was now always to be "the Little Thing") about the chance of getting Colonel Conyers to take up that invention of his.
"I'm to go to spend the week-end at Ascot with him and have another talk about it," he said. "I know he's dead keen.Heknows that it's aeroplanes that are going to make all the difference; simply knock out, under some conditions, any other form of scouting. In modern warfare, you know—it's bound to come, some time—anybody with any sense knows that——"
"Yes, of course," agreed Gwenna, watching him as he stretched himself lazily out, chest downwards, elbows in, on the grass, chin propped in his hands, talking (all about the Machine).
"If he gave me a chance to build Her—make trial flights in the P.D.Q.! If he'd only back me——"
"Oh, he will, surely!" said Gwenna, her whole small face brightening or sobering in response to every modulation of his voice.
It was jolly, he thought, to find a girl who wasn't in the least bored by "Shop." Shewasa very jollyLittle Thing. So sensible. No nonsense about her, thought the boy.
And she, when at last they rose and left the place, threw a last look back at that patch of sky above the hedge, where the black crow had made a dihedral angle, at that brooding elm, at that hay field, golden in the level rays, at that patch of dusty road where the car had pulled up, at that black telegraph-pole where he had hung up his coat. That picture was graven, as by a tool, into the very heart of the girl.
At the end of an expedition that a young woman of more experience and less imagination would have pronounced "tame enough," Gwenna, bright-eyed and rosy from her day in the sunshine, could hardly believe that a whole lifetime had not elapsed since last she'd seen the everyday, the humdrum and incredibly dull Club where she lived.
She burst into her chum's bedroom as Leslie was going to bed.
"Taffy—back at last?" smiled Leslie, between the curtains of black hair on either side of her nightgown. "How's flying?—What?" she exclaimed, "you didn't go up at all? Broke down on the way to Brooklands? I say! How rotten for you, my poor lamb. Had anything to eat?"
"I think so—I mean, rather! He gave me alovelylunch on the road while we were waiting for the man to mend the car—and then we'd tea at a cottage whilehe was doing it—and then there wasn't time to do anything but come back to town," explained Gwenna breathlessly, untying her scarf; "and then we'd sort of dinner at the inn before we started back; they brought out a table and things into the garden under the trees."
"What did you have for dinner?"
"I don't know. Oh, there were gooseberries," said Gwenna vaguely, "and a lamp. And the moths all came. Oh, Leslie! It'sbeenso splendid!" She caught her breath. "I mean, it wasdreatful about no flying, but——"
"Glad the afternoon wasn't entirely a washout," said Miss Long, in an even voice as she plaited her hair.
"By the way, did the Dampier boy give you back that locket of yours?"
"I forgot all about it," said Gwenna, picking up the head of pink clover that had fallen out of her blouse. "I'll ask him next time. He's going to take me up soon, you know, again."
Just as an alarm is "set" to sound at some given hour, so the whole of the girl's innocent being was set, to wait and wait for that "next time" of meeting him—whenever it should be.
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 toGwenna, 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 asentiment! Surely you know that men (nice men) think very lightly of a girl who does not have to bewooed. With deference, Taffy. Withreverence. 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 satthere with her yellow jersey coat spread round her like a great dandelion in the grass.
"Oh, but supposing sheisn'thard 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-rulymaidenly 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!Stoplaughing 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'veknown lots of men.You'vehad 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, "Ohno! Ofcoursenot. I wasn'tthinkingof 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, Ihavebeen so worrying! All these days and days, Leslie! And to-day I felt I simplyhadto tell you about it—orburst! I haven't really been able to think of anything but him. And he—hehatesme, 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 creaturelookat 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. Itisengendered 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 Ido," 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. "Likethis." 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 flashin the sunlight and a sharp little "click" as the needle flew up and clung to the magnet.
"D'you see, Turtle-dove?"
"Yes; butthatisn't what you seemed to be talking about just now," objected Gwenna. "You seemed to think that a girlneedn'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 prettyas 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 ofthem. 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 offby. 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'severybody!"
"Arethey?" 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 whatIcall 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 girlwashed!
"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. Especiallywashing. I tell you, Taff"—she spoke sepulchrally—"half the 'nice' girls weknow don't wash enough.That'swhy 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 speciallyclean. 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—hesaid once that the scent of my hair was like cherry-wood. 'Course I didn't confide inhimthat 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 coldgrease 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; andhaveyou 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 goodthing, 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 shoesmen seem to notice as much as any other part of yourget-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.Youneedn'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,' youtieit, you fasten it with a plain silver brooch to your shirt, and it looksgood.)"
"I'll remember," murmured Gwenna devoutly, from the grass.
Leslie said, "One of the housemaids here—(never stoop to gossip with the servants, dearest. Itisso unhelpful and demoralising to both classes)—one of the housemaids once told me thatheryoung 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,hewas 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, "whyaren'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 itshabitof descending at the wrong moment.) And then, then, when all your good points are mobilised, you wait for the Enemy."
"Theenemy?" 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 ofthat," 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—nicegirls, I mean—not like that deplorably vulgar Miss Long. Whatshe'sdoing in a Club that's supposed to be forladiesI don't know. Thehorridthings she says! Bad!Badform! And I'm sure if she says those here, she must have heaps of other worse things shecouldsay, and probablydoes, to some people! Er—oh, wherewasI? 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 Iwantto? 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 thefields. It seems years. He hasn't written or anything. I've waited and waited.... And sometimes I feel as if perhaps Ishouldn'tever 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 littlechancesmake all the difference to who one sees or doesn't see? I can't know for certain that I shalleversee 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—heisn'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 sokind!" murmured the younger girl, overcome.
"Do you expect menotto 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'shadplenty to eat who's ready to snatch the bun out of the hand of thenext 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'syou! 'A Cherub.' That's what your fancy dress is to be," pronounced the elder girl. "Just your own little crop-curled head with nothing onit; 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.Strictlyspeaking, 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'mnot 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 believeyouhave '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!"
This injunction Gwenna carried out to the letter a week later. Never had she looked so pretty as when she smiled at her own reflection in her bedroom mirror above the cherub's ruff of wings on the evening of the dance.
It was given by some wealthy theatrical people whose "set" often intermingled with that to which Hugo Swayne belonged. And it was held in a couple of big marquees that had been set up on the lawn behind their house; a lawn of which the banks sloped down to the willows that fringed the river. There was a houseboat as buffet. There were Japanese lanterns and fairy-lights. Red carpet had been put down to save costumes from dewy grass or gravel.
For this dance was held at the height of that brief and grotesque period in the English history when dancing and costume—more particularly when the two were combined—became an affair of national moment. That was the time when tickets for an Artists' Ball were gambled with even as stocks and shares; when prizes for costume were given of which the value ran into hundreds of pounds. When columns of responsible newspapers were given up to descriptions of some"brilliant carnival." When Society, the Arts, Commerce, the Stage and the Middle Class joined hands to dance the maddest ring-o'-roses round some mulberry bush rooted in Heaven knew what soil of slackness. That was the time when women who were mothers and able-bodied men were ready to fritter away the remnant of their youth on what could be no longer pleasure, since they chased it with such deadly ardour, discussing the lightest types of merrymaking as if thereupon hung the fate of an empire!
Even little cherub-headed Gwenna Williams found something disquieting about the sight of this throng as she scanned it with anxious eyes, for—no, HE hadn't come! He was late. Not here. Perhaps it was merely this that caused her to dislike the look of some of these other people? That buxomly-formed young woman of twenty-five tricked out in the costume of a child of three! That tall, fragile youth in black grave-clothes, mouthing falsetto patter! That pretty "lady" in spreading Georgian brocade and a white wig, from whose crimsoned lips there came presently a robust masculine shout! That Madame Potiphar in the—Good gracious!—it was another boy! No! Gwennadidn'tlike them, somehow.... Perhaps it was just because they were here and he, the only partner she wished for, had not arrived. Oh,supposinghe were not coming, after all?
Under the canvas roof where garlands swung and an installation of electric light had been improvised, the crowd eddied and chattered and laughed from one endto the other of the marquee where the long tables were laid out. For it was a theatrical ball, late in beginning. Supper was to come first. Gwenna, sitting beside a Futurist Folly whom her friend Leslie had introduced vaguely as "one of my medical students," watched that supper-crowd (still he did not come), as they feasted, leaning across the tables to laugh and shriek to acquaintances. It was not the girls or the younger men who seemed most boisterous, but those well over thirty. This surprised her. And even when they were most unrestrained "they seemed," as the Welsh girl put it, "to bemakingthemselves do it, like." ...
Then she saw, by an opening in the canvas of the marquee, the apparition of a steady man's figure, dead-white against the purple gloom outside. A figure erect and neatly-shouldered under the close linen jacket of a Continental waiter. Gwenna wondered where she had seen him before? In a photograph? Or perhaps attending to one of the tables at Appenrodt's, when she and Leslie had had tea after a matinée somewhere? Shehadseen that young waiter, whose appearance was in such arresting contrast to the bizarre costumes and painted faces of the noisy, laughing rabble about him. His face was restrained and grave as that of some very young Daniel at the feast of some modern Belshazzar.
Suddenly besides that still, watching apparition there came up another boyish figure—typically English, in ordinary evening dress, and tall, towering above the young German waiter of whom he was making some inquiry. For a second they stood so; the waiter glancincup, the newcomer, Paul Dampier, with his blonde head tilted a little back, his eyes raking the crowd.
"Ah! he's come," cried Gwenna aloud, but unheard in the universal clatter. Her heart leaped....
But Paul Dampier, the airman, was swallowed up again almost directly in a forest of odd, luridly-coloured head-dresses. He had not seen her.
And she did not see him again until some time after supper was ended, and the throng was whirling and writhing in one-step and ragtime in the other marquee.
Gwenna had danced with an Apache, with a Primitive Man, with Mr. Hugo Swayne (in a mask and crazy-work domino as a Simultaneous Dynamism of Something), and she was standing waiting, one of a figure in a revived cotillon.
While the Viennese band swooped and tore through the waltz "Nights of Gladness" a sheet had been fetched and was held up at the end of the ballroom between a Morris-dancer and an incredibly handsome "Turco" (who presently revealed himself as Mr. Swayne's French engineer), as a screen before six of the girls. Six men were to be led up to it in turn; each to choose his partner by the feet that were just allowed to show below the sheet.
Soft laughter and twittering went on at the side where the half-dozen girls stood.
"I say," exclaimed a damsel dressed as an Austrian Peasant to her crinolined neighbour, "nowwe see why you were so anxious to explain why you were wearing scarlet——"
"Of course he'd know yours anywhere," retorted the next girl.
"Ssh! Play fair!" protested the next. "Mustn't be recognised by your voice!"
"Oh, look at the Cherub girl's little shoes! Aren't they sweet? Just like silver minnows peeping out——"
Here Gwenna, standing sedately beside the scintillating, mauve-limbed Nijinski, Leslie, lifted her head in quick attention. She had recognised a voice on the other side of the sheet. A voice deep and gentle and carrying through the clatter of talk and the mad, syncopated music. It protested with a laugh, "But, lookhere! I can't dance all these weird——" It was the Airman—her Airman.
"Oh, he's just there. He's going to choose. If only he'd choose me," thought Gwenna, breathlessly fluttering where she stood. Then she remembered. "Oh, but he won't know me. He doesn't know I was to have silver shoes. If there was onlysomething! Something to show him which I was, I believe he'd choose me. What could I do?"
Suddenly she thought what she could do.... Yes! Winged feet, of course, for a girl who longed to fly!
Hurriedly she put her hands up to the ruff made of those white wings. Hastily she plucked two of them out. How was she to fasten them to her feet, though? Alas, for the short curls that deprived her of woman's universal tool! She turned to her chum who was impatiently jigging in time to the music, with her longblack hair swathed for once securely under that purple casque.
"Leslie, quick, a hairpin! Lend me two hairpins," she whispered and snatched them from her friend's hand. Then, holding on to Leslie's mauve silken shoulder to support herself, Gwenna raised first one small foot, and then the other, fastening to each between the stocking and the silver shoe, one of those tiny wings.
They were the feathered heels of Mercury, the flying-god, that the girl who loved a flying-man allowed to peep under the curtain behind which she stood.
Above the commotion of people laughing and talking all about her and the music she felt that he was close, only just behind that sheet. She could have put out a hand and, through that sheet, have touched his shoulder.... Mustn't, of course.... Must play fair. Would he note the message of the winged feet? Would he stop and choose her?
Or would he pass on?
He did not pass.
He stopped—Gwenna felt the touch of his finger on the silver tip of her shoe. All a-tremble with delight she moved aside, and stepped from behind the screen to face the partner who had chosen her.
"Hullo!" exclaimed Paul Dampier, with real surprise in his smile. "I didn't know it wasyou!"
Gwenna felt a little dashed, even as he slipped his arm about her and they began to waltz. She looked up into the blonde face that seemed burned so very brown against his dress-shirt, and she ventured, "You didn't know it was me? I thought that was why you chose me—I mean, I thought because I was somebody you knew——"
"Didn't know you were here. I never thought those were your feet!" he said in that adorably deep and gentle voice of his. Adding, as they turned with the turning throng, something that lifted her heart again, "I chose them because they were the prettiest, I thought."
It was simply stated, as a fact. But this, the first compliment he'd paid her, kept her silent with delight. Even as they waltzed, his arm about her rainbow scarf, the girl felt the strongest wish—the wish that the dancewere at an end and she back in her bedroom at the Club, alone, so that she might think and think again over what he had said. He'd thought she had the prettiest feet!
"D'you think you could manage to spare me some others?" he asked at the end of that waltz. "You know, you're about the only girl here that I know except Miss Long."
"Leslie would introduce you to anybody you liked"—suggested little Gwenna, feeling very good for having done so. And virtue brought its reward. For with a glance about him at that coloured noisy crowd that seemed a handful of confetti tossed by a whirlwind, he told her he didn't think he wanted to be introduced, much. He wasn't really keen on a lot of people he'd never seen. But if she and Miss Long would give him a few dances——?
The girl from the country thought it almost too good to be true that she need not share him with any of these dangerously fascinating London people here, except Leslie!
In a pause they went up to where Leslie was standing near the band. Close beside her the Morris-dancer was wrangling with Hugo Swayne in his crazy-work domino, who declared, "Miss Long promisedmeevery other dance. A week ago, my dear man. Ten days ago——"
Yes; Leslie seemed to be engaged for every dance and every extra. She tossed a "sosorry, Mr. Dampier!" over her shoulder, following it with an imperceptible feminine grimace for Gwenna's benefit. With the firstbars of the next waltz she was whirled away by a tall youth garbed, becomingly enough, as a Black Panther. The room was still clear. The Black Panther and the boyishly slim girl in mauve tunic and tights waltzed, for one recurrence of the tune, alone....
Gwenna, looking after that shapely couple, knew whohewas; Monty Scott, the Dean's son who had been a medical student when Leslie was at the Hospital. He had followed her to the Slade to study sculpture, and already he had proposed to her twice.
The tall and supple youth held Leslie, now, by his black-taloned gloves on her strait hips. Leslie waltzed with hands clasped at the back of his neck. Then, with a backward fling of her head and body, she twisted herself out of his hold. She waltzed, holding the flat palms of her hands pressed lightly to the palms of his. The music altered; Leslie varying her step to suit it. She threw back her head again. Round and round her partner she revolved, undulating from nape to heels, not touching him, not holding him save by the attraction of her black eyes set upon his handsome eyes, and of her red lips of a flirt, from which (it was evident!) the boy could not take his gaze. Once more she shook her purple-casqued head; once more she let him catch her about the hips. Over the canvas floor they spun, Leslie and Monty, black-and-mauve, moving together with a voluptuous swing and zest that marked them as the best-matched dancers in the room. Well-matched, perhaps, for life, thought Leslie's chum.... But no; as they passed Gwenna saw that the black eyes and the redmouth were laughing cynically together; she caught, through the music, Leslie's clear "Don'ttalk!don'ttalk when you're dancing, my good boy.... Spoils everything.... Youcanwaltz.... You know you've never anything tosay, Mont!"
"I have. I say——"
Leslie waltzed on unheeding. Whatever he had to say she did not take it seriously. She laughed over his shoulder to little Gwenna, watching....
Couple after couple had joined in now, following the swift tall graceful black shape and the light-limbed mauve one as they circled by. A flutter of draperies and tinsel, a toss and jingle of stage accoutrements; the dancers were caught and sped by the music like a wreath of rainbow-bubbles on the rise and fall of a wave.
Gwenna, the Cherub-girl, was left standing for a wistful moment by the side of the tall Airman in evening dress.
He said, through the music, "Who's your partner for this?"
She had forgotten. It was the Futurist Folly again. He had to find another partner. Gwenna danced with her Airman again ... and again....
Scarcely realising how it happened—indeed, how do these arrangements make themselves?—this boy and girl from a simpler world than that of this tinsel Bohemia spent almost the whole of the rest of that evening as they had spent that day in the country, as she would have asked to spend the rest of their lives together.
Some of the time they danced in the brilliant, heated marquee under the swinging garlands and the lamps. Then again they strolled out into the Riverside garden. Here it was cool and dewy and dim except where, from the tent-openings, there was flung upon the grass a broad path of light, across which flitted, moth-like, the figures of the dancers. Above the marquee the summer night was purple velvet, be-diamonded with stars. At the end of the lawn the river whispered to the willows and reflected, here the point of a star, there the red blot of a lantern caught in a tree.
Hugo Swayne went by in this bewildering stage, light-and-shade with a very naughty-looking lady who declared that her white frock was merely "'Milk,' out of 'The Blue Bird.'" In passing he announced to his cousin that the whole scene was like a Conder fan that he had at his rooms. Groups of his friends were simply sitting about andmakingthemselves into quite good Fragonards. Little Gwenna did not even try to remember what Fragonard was. None of these people in this place seemed real to her but herself and her partner. And the purple dusk and velvet shadows, the lights and colours, the throb and thrill of the music were just the setting for this "night of gladness" that was only a little more substantial than her other fancies.
More quickly it seemed to be passing! Every now and again she exultantly reminded herself, "I am here, with him, out of all these people! He is only speaking to me! I have him to myself—I must feel that as hard as I can all the time now, for we shall be going homeat the end of this Ball, and then I shall be alone again.... IfonlyI could be with him for always! How extraordinary, that just to be with one particular person out of all the world should be enough to make all this happiness!"
With her crop-curled head close against his shoulder as they danced, she stole at her boyish partner the shy, defiantly possessive glance that a child gives sometimes to the favourite toy, the toy that focusses all his dreams. This was "the one particular person out of all the world" whose company answered every conscious and unconscious demand of the young girl's nature even as his waltz-step suited her own.
Yet she guessed that this special quiet rapture could not last. Even before the end of the dance the end ofthismust surely come.
It must have been long hours after the waltz-cotillon that they strolled down to a sitting-out arbour that had been arranged at the end of the path nearest the river. It was softly lighted by two big Chinese lanterns, primrose-coloured, ribbed like caterpillars, with a black base and a splash of patterned colour upon each; a rug had been thrown on the grass, and there were two big white-cane chairs, with house-boat cushions.
Here the two sat down, to munch sandwiches, drink hock-cup.
"I remembered to bring two glasses, this time," said Paul Dampier.
Gwenna smiled as she nodded. Her eyes were onthose silver white-finned minnows of her feet, that he had called pretty.
He followed her glance as he took another sandwich. "Rather a good idea, wings to your shoes because you're supposed to be a cherub."
"Oh, but that's not what the wings were supposed to be for," she said quickly. "I only put those in at the waltz-cotillon so that——"
Here she stopped dead, wishing that the carpeted grass might open at those winged feet of hers and swallow her up!
How could she have given herself away like this? Let himknowhow she had wanted him to choose her! when he hadn't even known she was there; hadn't been thinking about her!
She flurried on: "S-so that they should look more like fancy-dress shoes instead of real ones!"
He turned his head, dark and clean-cut against the lambent swaying lantern. He said, out of the gloom that spared her whelming blush, "Oh, was that it! I thought," he added with a teasing note in his voice, "I thought you were going to say it was to remind me that I'd promised to take you flying, and that it's never come off yet!"
Gwenna, hesitating for a moment, sat back against the cushions of the wicker-chair. She looked away from him, and then ventured a retort—a tiny reproach.
"Well—ithasn'tcome off."
"No, you know—it's too bad, really. I have been most frightfully busy," he apologised. "But we'll fixit up before you go to-night, shall we? You must come." At this he was glad to see that the Little Thing looked really pleased.
She was awfully nice and sensible, he thought for the severalth time. Again the odd wish took him that had taken him in that field. Yes! Hewouldlike to touch those babyish-looking curls of hers with a finger. Or even to rumple them against his cheek.... Another most foolish and incomprehensible wish had occurred to him about this girl, even in her absence. Apropos of nothing, one evening in his rooms he had remembered the look of that throat of hers; round and sturdy and white above her low collar. And he had thought he would rather like to put his own hands about it, and to pretend—quite gently, of course—to throttle the Little Thing. To-night she'd bundled it all up in that sort of feather boa.... Pity.... She was ever so much prettier without.
Fellow can't say that sort of thing to a girl, though, thought the simple Paul.
So he merely said, instead, "Let me stick that down for you somewhere," and he leant forward and took from her the plate that had held her cress-and-chicken sandwiches. Then he crossed his long legs and leant back again. It was jolly and restful here in the dim arbour with her; the sound of music and laughter came, much softened, from the marquee. Nearer to them, on the water below the willows, there was a little splashing and twittering of the moor-hen, roused by something, and the scarcely audible murmur of the Thames, speedingpast House-boat Country to London ... the workaday Embankment.... It was jolly to be so quiet....
Then, into the happy silence that had fallen between them, there came a sound—the sound of the crunching of gravel. Gwenna looked up. Two figures sauntered past down the path; both tall and shapely and black against the paling, star-sprinkled sky above the frieze of sighing willows. Then Leslie's clear, careless voice drifted to their ears.
"Afraid not.... Anyhow, what on earth would be the good of caring 'a little'?... I look upon you as such an infant—in arms——"
Here there was a bass mutter of, "Make ityourarms, and I don't mind!"
Then Leslie's insouciant: "Iknewyou'd say that obvious thing. I always do know what you're going to do or say next ... fatal, that.... A girlcan'twant to marry a man when——"
Apparently, then, the Dean's son was proposing again?
As the couple of free-limbed black shadows passed nearer, Paul Dampier kicked his heel against his chair. He moved in it to make it creak more noisily.
Good manners wasted!
For Leslie, as she afterwards told her chum, took for her motto upon such occasions, "And if the others see, what matter they?"
Her partner seemed oblivious that there were any"others" sitting in the shadows. The couple passed, leaving upon the night-breeze a trail of cigarette-smoke (Leslie's), and an indistinguishable growl, presumably from the Black Panther.
Leslie's voice floated back, "Not in the mood. Besides! Youhad, last time, 'to soften the edges,' as you call it."
More audibly her partner grumbled, "What's a kiss you'vehad? About as satisfying as last summer's strawberry-ice——"
A mere nothing—the incident.
Yet it brought (or hastened) a change into the atmosphere of that arbour where, under the giant glowworms of lights swinging above them, two young people sat at ease together without speaking.
For Gwenna, envious, thought, "Leslie can make a man think of nothing but her, even when she's 'not in the mood!' I can't. Yet I believe I could, but for one thing. Even now I don't know that he isn't thinking about That Other——"
"That Other" was her rival, that machine of his that Gwenna had not mentioned all the evening....
It had come, she knew, that duel between the Girl and the Aeroplane for the first place in the heart of a Flying Man. A duel as old as the world, between the thing a man greatly loves, and that which he loves more greatly still. She thought of Lovelace who "loved Honour more." She thought of the cold Sea that robs the patient, warm-hearted women ashore, of the icy Polewhose magnetism drew men from their wives. The work that drew the thoughts of her Airman was that Invention that was known already as hisFiancée....
"Leslie says it's not as bad as if it were another woman, but I see her as a woman," thought the silent, fanciful girl, "I see her as a sort of winged dragon with a figure-head—aeroplanes don't have figure-heads, but this one seems to me to have, just like some of those vessels that come into the harbour at Aberdovey. Or like those pictures of harps that are half a woman. Smooth red hair she has, and a long neck stretched out, and a rather thin, pale, don't-care sort of face like that girl called Muriel. And—and eagle's talons for hands. That's how I see thatFiancéeof his, with claws for hands that won't,won'tever let him go...."
A puff of wind knocked one of the lanterns above their heads softly against the other; the willows rustled silkily outside. Gwenna sat motionless, holding her breath. Suddenly her reverie had broken off with an abrupt, unspoken—"but it's me he's thinking ofnow...."
Paul Dampier had been lightly amused by that passing of the other couple. That friend of hers, Miss Long, was more than a bit of a flirt, he considered. This Little Thing wasn't. Couldn't imaginehergiving a kiss as some girls give a dance; or even to "soften" a refusal.... Her mouth, he found himself noticing, was full and curly and exactly the colour of the buds of those fox-gloves that grew all over the shop at herplace in Wales. It was probably softer than those curls of hers that he would (also) like to touch.
Idiotic idea, though——
But an idea which is transmittable.
Gwenna, thrilled by this message which she had caught by a method older and less demonstrable than Marconi's, realised: "He heardthat, just now; that boy wanting to kiss Leslie.... He's thinking, now, that he might kiss me."
The boy scarcely at arm's length from her thought a little confusedly, "I say, though.... Rotten thing to do...."
The girl thought, "He would like to.Whatis he waiting about? We shall have to go directly——"
For the sky outside had been swiftly paling. Now that pure pallor was changing to the glow of Abyssinian gold. Dawn! From the marquee came a louder blare of music; two long cornet notes and then a rollicking tune—The old "Post Horn" Galop—the last dance. Presently a distant noise of clapping and calls for "Extra"! There would be no time for extras, she'd heard. They would have to go after this. People were beginning to go. Already they had heard the noise of a car. His chair creaked as he moved a little sidewards.
He told himself, more emphatically, "Beastly rotten thing to do. This Little Thing would never speak to me again——"
And the girl sat there, without stirring, without glancingat him. Yet every curve of her little body, every eyelash, every soft breath she drew was calling him, was set upon "making" him. What could she do more to make herself, as Leslie called it, a magnet? Love and innocent longing filled her to the eyes, the tender fox-glove buds of lips that could have asked for nothing better. Even if thiswerethe only time! Even if she never saw him again!
Wasn't he going to set the crown upon her wonderful dream of a summer night?
"No, lookhere," the boy remonstrated silently with something in himself; something that seemed to mock him. He lifted his fair head with a gleam of that pride that goes so often before a fall. "Dash it all——"
"He will!" the girl thought breathlessly. And with her thought she seemed to cast all of her heart into the spell....
And then, quite suddenly, something happened whereby that spell was snapped. Even as she thought "he will," he rose from his chair.
He took a step to the entrance of their arbour, his shoulders blotting out the glowing light.
"Listen," he said.
And Gwenna, rising too, listened, breathlessly, angrily. He wouldnot—she had been cheated. What was it that had—interfered? Presently she heard it, she heard what she would have taken for the noise of another of the departing motors.
Through the clatter from the last galop it was like, yet unlike, the noise of a starting car. But there was in it anangriernote than that.
It is angry for want of any help but its own. A motor-car has solid earth against which to drive; a steamship has dense water. But the Machine that caused this noise was beating her metal thews against invisible air.
It was an aeroplane.
"Look!" said Paul Dampier.
Far away over the still benighted land she rose, and into that glory of Abyssinian gold beyond the river. Gwenna, moving out on to the path, watched the flight. Before, she had wondered that these soaring things didn't come down. Now, she would have wondered if they had done so.
Steady as if running on rails, the aeroplane came on overhead; her sound as she came now loud, now soft, but always angry, harsh—harshness like that of a woman who lives to herself and her strivings, with no comradeship of Earth on which to lean. Against the sky that was her playground she showed as a slate-coloured dragonfly—a purple Empress of the Air soaring on and on into the growing dazzle of the day.
"Oh, itisbeautiful, though," cried the girl on the path, looking up, and losing for that moment the angry sense that had fallen upon her of pleasure past, of the end of the song. "It is wonderful."
"Pooh, that old horse-bus," laughed Paul Dampierabove her shoulder, and mentioned the names of the machine, the flyer in her. He could pick them out of the note of her angry song.
"That will be nothing to my P.D.Q.," he declared exultantly as they walked on up the path towards the marquee. "You wait until I've got my aeroplane working! That'll be something new in aviation, you know. Nearest thing yet to the absolute identity of the Man with the Machine."
He yawned a little with natural sleepiness, but his interest was wide-awake. He could have gone on until breakfast-time explaining some fresh point about his invention, while the girl in those little silver-heeled shoes paced slowly up the path beside him.... He was going on.
"Make all those other types, English or foreign, as clumsy as the old-fashioned bone-shake bicycle. Fact," he declared. "Now, take the Taube—Hullo——"
"Bitte," said a voice.
The German word came across a pile of plates deftly balanced upon a young man's forearm. That arm was clad in the sleeve of a trim white jacket, buttoned over a thick and compact little chest. The waiter's hair was a short, upright golden stubble, and another little stubble of gold sprouted upon his steady upper lip. He had come up, very softly, behind them.
He spoke again in excellent English.
"By your leave, sir."
Dampier made way for him, and he passed. Gwenna, with a little shiver, looked after him. The sight of theyoung waiter whom she had noticed at the beginning of the evening had given her an unreasonable little chill.... Perhaps it was because his softly-moving, white figure against those willows had loomed so like a ghost....
Dampier said, "Rotten job for a man, I always think, hanging about and picking up things for other people like that."
"Yes," said Gwenna, absently, sadly. Itwasthe end now. Quite the end. They'd got to go home. Back to everyday life. The Club, the Works. Nothing to live for, except—Ah, yes! His promise that hewouldtake her flying, soon....
Above in the glowing sky the aeroplane was dwindling—to disappear. The waiter, turning a corner of the dark shrubbery, had also disappeared as they passed. From behind the shelter of the branches he was watching, watching....
He was looking after Paul Dampier, the Airman—the inventor of the newest aeroplane.
"Those dreams come true that are dreamed on Midsummer night!"
This saying Gwenna had read somewhere. But she had forgotten all about it until, on the night of June 24th, 1914, she dreamed the most vivid dream of all her twenty-two years.
Many people have that same dream—or versions of it—often in a lifetime. Scientists have written papers on the whys and hows of it. They tack a long name to it. But little Gwenna Williams had never heard of "levitation." To herself she called it afterwards "that flying dream."
It seemed to her that when it began she was still half-awake, lying in her narrow white bed with the blankets tossed on to the floor of her Club bedroom, for it was a sultry night and close, in spite of her window on to the garden being wide open and allowing what breeze there was to blow full upon the girl's face, stirring her curls on the pillow, the ruffle of her night-gown as she lay.
Suddenly a violent start ran over the whole of her body. And with that one jerk she seemed to have come out of herself. She realised, first, that she was nolonger lying down, curled up in the kitten-like ball which was her attitude for sleeping. She was upright as if she were standing.
But she was not standing. Her feet were not resting on anything. Looking down, she found, without very much surprise, that she was poised, as a lark is poised, in mid-air, at some immeasurable height. It was night, and the earth—a distant hassock of dim trees and fields—was far, far below her.
She found herself moving downwards through the air.
She was flying!
Gently, gently, she sped, full of a quiet happiness in her new power, which, after all, did not seem to be something new, but something restored to her.
"Dear me, I've flown before, I know I have," said Gwenna to herself as she swooped downwards in her dream, with the breeze cool on the soles of her little bare feet. "This is as lovely as swimming! It's lovelier, because one doesn't have todoanything. So silly to imagine that one has to havewingsto fly!"
Now she was nearer to earth, she was hovering over a dark stream of water with reflections that circled and broke. And beside it she saw something that seemed like a huge lambent mushroom set in the dim fields below her. This was a lighted tent, and from it there floated up to her faintly the throb and thrill of dance-music, the two long-drawn-out notes of the "Post Horn" Galop, the noise of laughter and clapping.... She wondered whom she would see, if she were to alight. Butthe Force in her dream bore her up again, higher, and away. She found presently that she had left the dancing-tent far behind, and that what streamed below her was no longer a river with reflections, but a road, white with dust, and by the side of it a car was standing idle by the dusty hedge. On the other side of the hedge, as she flew over, the grass was clean and full of flowers, and half-way up the field stood a brooding elm that cast a patch of shadow.
"Sunshine, now!" wondered Gwenna. "How quickly it's changed from night!"
She felt from head to foot her body light and buoyant as a drifting thistle-down as on she went through the air. Close beside her, against a bank of cloud, she noticed some black V-shaped thing that slanted and flapped slow wings, then planed downwards out of her sight. "That's that crow. A dihedral angle, they call it," said the dreaming girl. Her next downward glance, as she sped upwards now, without effort, above the earth, showed her a map of distant grey roofs and green trees, and something that looked like a giant soap-bubble looming out of the mist.
"St. Paul's! London!" thought Gwenna. "I wonder shall I be able to look down on our Westminster place."
Then, glancing about her, she saw that the scene had suddenly changed. She was no longer in the free air with clouds about her as she flew like a little white windblown feather with the earth small as a toy puzzle below.She was between walls, with her feet not further than her own height from the ground. Night again in a room. A long, narrowish room with an open window through which came the light of a street-lamp that flung a bright patch upon the carpet, the edge of a dressing-table, the end of a white bed. Upon the bed, from which the coverings had been flung down, there lay sleeping, curled up like a kitten, a figure in a white, ruffled night-gown, with a cherub's head thrown backwards against the pillow. Gwenna, looking down, thought, "Where have I seenher?"
In the next flash she had realised.
Herself!... Her own sleeping body that her dreaming soul had left for this brief flight....
A start more violent than that with which her dream had begun shook the dreamer as she came to herself again.
She woke. With a pitiful little "Oh," sounding in her own ears, she sat up in bed and stared about her Club bedroom with its patches of light from the street-lamp outside. She was trembling from head to foot, her curls were wet with fright, and her first thought as she sprang out of bed and to the door of that ghostly room was "I must go to Leslie."
But Leslie's bedroom was a story higher. Gwenna paused in the corridor outside the nearest bedroom to her own. A thread of light showed below the door. It was a Miss Armitage's, and she was one of the Club members, who wrote pamphlets on the Suffrage, and liketopics, far into the night. Gwenna, feeling already more normal and cheered by the sense of any human nearness, decided, "I won't go to her. She'll only want to read aloud to me.... She laughed at me because I said I adored 'The Forest Lovers,' but what books doesshelike? Only thosedreat-ful long novels all about nothing, except the diseases of people in the Potteries. Or else it'll be one of her own tracts.... Somehow she does make everything she's interested in sound sougly. All those intellectual ones here do! Whether it's Marriage or Not-getting-married, you really don't know which would be the mostdull, from these suffragettes," reflected the young girl, pattering down the corridor again. "I'll go back to bed."
She went back, snuggling under the clothes. But she could not go to sleep again for some time. She lay curled up, thinking.
She had thought too often and too long of that dance now three whole weeks behind her. She had recalled, too many times! every moment of it; every word and gesture of her partner's, going over and over his look, his laugh, the tone in which he'd said, "Givemethis waltz, will you?" All that memory had had the sweetness smelt out of it like a child's posy. By this time it was worn thin as heirloom silver. She turned from it.... It was then she remembered that saying about the Midsummer Night's Dream. If that were true, then Gwenna might expect soon to fly in reality.
For after all her plans and hopes, she had not evenyet been taken up by Paul Dampier in an aeroplane!
In that silent, unacknowledged conflict between the Girl and the Machine, so far scarcely a score could have been put down to the credit of the Girl. It was she who had always found herself put back, disappointed, frustrated. This had been by the merest accidents.
First of all, the Airman hadn't been able to ask her and Miss Long to his rooms in Camden Town to look at his model aeroplane. He had been kept hanging on, not knowing which Saturday-to-Monday Colonel Conyers ("the great Air-craft Conyers") was going to ask him down to stay at that house in Ascot, to have another talk over the subject of the new Machine. ("A score for the Machine," thought the girl; wakeful, tossing on her bed.)
She did not even know that the week after, on a glorious and cloudless Saturday, young Dampier, blankly unaware that there was any conflict going on in his world! had settled to ask "the Little Thing" to Hendon. On the Friday afternoon, however, his firm had sent him out of town, down to the factory near Aldershot. Here he had stayed until the following Tuesday, putting up at the house of a kindred soul employed at that factory, and wallowing in "Shop." ... Another win for the Machine!
The following Sunday the cup had been almost to Gwenna's lips. He had called for her. Not in the car, this time. They had taken the Tube to Golders Green; the motor-bus to Hendon Church; and then the pathover the fields together. Ah, delight! For even walking over the dusty grass beside that swinging boy's figure in the grey tweed jacket was a joyous adventure. It had been another when he had presently stooped and said, "Shoelace come untied; might trip over that. I'll do it up," and had fastened her broad brown shoe-ribbon securely for her. Her shoes had been powdered white. He had taken his handkerchief out of his pocket and had flicked the dust off, saying, as he did so, in a tone of some interest, "I say, what tiny feet girls do have!"