("Pie for you, Taffy, of course," as Leslie had said later, when she'd heard of this. "Second time he'd noticed them.")
Gwenna, in a tone half pleased, half piqued, had told him, "Allgirls don't have them so small! And yet you don't seem to notice anything about people but their feet." She had walked on, delightedly conscious of his laugh, his amused, "Oh, don't I?" and his downward glance.... Wasn't this, she had thought, something of a score at last for the Girl!
But hadn't even that small score been wiped out on the flying-ground? There Gwenna had stood, waiting, gleeful and agitated; her mist-blue scarf aflutter in the brisk breeze, but not fluttering as wildly as her heart....
And then had come frustration once again! Paul Dampier's deep and womanishly-soft tone saying, "I say, I'm afraid it's going to be a bit too blowy, after all.Wind's rising all the time;" and that other giant voice from the megaphone announcing:
"Ladies and gentul Men! As the wind is now blowing forty miles an hour it will be im possible to make passenger flights!"
"Ladies and gentul Men! As the wind is now blowing forty miles an hour it will be im possible to make passenger flights!"
Oh, bitter defeat for the Girl! For, this time, there had been no idyllic picnicà deuxto console her for any disappointment. There had been nothing but a rather noisy tea in the Pavilion, with a whole chattering party of the young Airman's acquaintances; with another young woman who had meant to fly, but who had seemed resigned enough that it was "not to be,thisafternoon," and with half a dozen strange, irrelevant young men; quitesilly, Gwenna had thought them. Two of them had given Gwenna a lift back to Hampstead in their car afterwards, since Paul Dampier had explained that he "rather wanted to go on with one of the other fellows"—somewhere! Gwenna didn't know where. Only, out of her sight! Out of her world! And she was quite certain, even though he hadn't said so, that he had been bent on some quest that had something to do with theFianceéof his, the "P.D.Q.," the Machine!
The sore of that jealousy still smarted in the girl's mind as she turned her pillow restlessly.... She could not sleep until long after the starlings had been twittering and the milk-carts rattling by in the suburban road outside. She awoke, dispirited. She came down late for breakfast; Leslie had already gone off to her old lady in Highgate. Over the disordered breakfast-table Miss Armitage was making plans, with some of the other Suffrage-workers, to "speak" at a meeting of the Fabian Nursery. Those young women talked loudly enough, but they didn't pronounce the ends of any of their words; hideously slipshod it all sounded, thought the Welsh girl fretfully. Her world was a desert to her, this fine June morning. For at the Westminster office things seemed as dreary as they had at the Club. She began to see what people meant when they said that on long sea-voyages one of the greatest hardships was never to see a fresh face, but always the same ones, day after day, well-known to weariness, all about one. It was just like that when one was shut up to work day after day in an office with the same people. She was sick to death of all the faces of all the people here. Miss Butcher with her Cockney accent! Miss Baker with her eternal crochet! The men in the yards with theirawfultobacco and trousers! Nearly all men, she thought, were ugly.All old men. And most of the young ones;roundbacks,horridhands,disgustingskins—Mr. Grant, for instance! (with a glance at that well-meaning engineer, when he brought in some note for Mabel Butcher). Those swarthy men never looked as if they had baths and proper shaves. He'd a head like a black hatpin. And his accent, thought the girl from the land where every letter of a word is pronounced, his accent was more excruciating than any in Westminster.
"Needn't b'lieve me, if you don't want. But it's true-oo! Vis'ters this aft'noon," he was saying to Miss Butcher. "Young French Dook or Comp or something, he is; taking out a patent for a new crane. Coming in early with some swagger friends of his. Wants to be shown the beauties of the buildin', I s'pose. Better bring him in here and let him have a good look at you girls first thing, hadn't I? S'long! Duty calls. I must away."
And away he went, leaving Miss Butcher smiling fondly after him, while Miss Williams wondered how on earth any girl ever managed to fall in love, considering there was nothing but young men to fall in love with. All ordinary young men were awful. And all young menwereordinary.... Except, now and again, one ... far away ... out of reach.... Who just showed how different and wonderful a thing a lover might be! If one could only, only ever get near him!—instead of being stuck down here, in this perfectly beastly place——
As the morning wore on, she found herself more andmore dissatisfied with all her surroundings. And for a girl of Gwenna's sort to be thoroughly dissatisfied predicts one thing only. She will not long stay where she is.
Impatiently she sighed over her typing-table. Irritably she fidgeted in her chair. This was what jerked the plump arm of Ottilie Becker, who was passing behind her, and who now dropped a handful of papers on to the new boards.
"Zere! Now see what you have made me do," said the German girl good-naturedly enough. "My letter! Pick him up, Candlesticks-maker."
"Oh, pick him up yourself," retorted Gwenna school-girlishly, crossly. "It wasn't my fault."
At this tone from a colleague of whom she was genuinely fond, tears rose to Miss Becker's blue eyes. Miss Butcher, coming across to the centre table, saw those tears.
"Well, really, anybody mightapologise," she remarked reproachfully, "when they'veupsetanybody."
At this rebuke Gwenna's strained nerves snapped.
An Aberystwith Collegiate School expression rose naturally to her lips—"Cau dy gêg!" She translated it: "Shutup!" she said, quite rudely.
Then, the moment after she had given way to this little outburst of temper she felt better. She was ready to be on the best of terms again with her fellow-typists. They, as Miss Butcher would have said, "weren't having any." They turned offended backs upon her. They talked pointedly to each other, not to her.
"That's a precious long letter you've got written there, Baker," said Miss Butcher, helping to gather up the half-dozen thin foreign sheets, covered with neat, pointed German writing. "Is that to the beloved brother?"
Miss Becker nodded her plait-wreathed head as she put the letter that began: "Geliebter Karl!" into the grey-lined envelope.
"He likes to hear what they make—do—at the works. Always he ask," she said, "after what they do. And who come hier; and where everythings is kept."
"Gracious! I do believe he's a regular German spy, like in the magazines, this brother of yours," smiled Miss Butcher lightly. "Don't you give away any of our State secrets, Baker, will you? We'd be having the authorities, whoever they are, poking round and inquiring. Awful if England and your country went to war, wouldn't it?—and you were supposed to be 'the Enemy'!"
She spoke as if of something that was more fantastic than Gwenna's flying dream of the night before. The German typist answered in the same strain.
"If itwaswar, I would speak to Karlchen's regiment that your house in Clapham and your people should be saved," she promised. "But he is not thinking now of war; he interests himself very much for buildings (because our father is architect). And for maps of the river, and such. So I must write on him every week a long letter.... We go out to-day to have our lunch, yes?"
The two went out together towards Whitehall. The Welsh girl was left in Coventry—and the deserted offices.
She didn't want any lunch. She drank a glass of tepid tap-water from the dressing-room. She ate some strawberries, bought in their little flat basket as she had come along. Then, hatless, and in her thin, one-piece dress of grey linen, she strolled out into the yard for a breath of air.
It was empty and hot and sunny. Gwenna looked up from the wood-littered ground where the ubiquitous London pigeons strutted and flirted and "Croo—croo—do—I—do"-ed about her feet. Overhead, that giant lacework on its iron crochet-hooks looked as if its pattern had been drawn with a pen and black ink against the opaque blue-grey sky. The sight of that far-off pinnacle put into her head again the thought of flying.
"I don't believe that I shall ever be as high up as that, with the blue beneath me, like I've always wanted!" reflected the young girl, dolefully looking up. "I believe that last night in my dream is all the flying I'm ever going to have had!"
And again that longing took her. That pure longing to be high; above the Law that clogs the children of Man to the Earth from which he came. To feel the unfettered air above and below and about her all at once!... But what could she do to gratify the impulse even a little?
Only one thing.
She mightclimb.
The idea with which she started off on her mad prank was to climb up to that iron lattice of lacework; to run up that as a sailor climbs the rope-ladders of his masts, and thence from the very highest peak attainable to look down on London, even as last night she had looked down on it from her dream.
Her start was not in the open air at all, but from the bottom of the scaffolding inside, where it was all beams and uprights and floors of planks. It reminded Gwenna of being underneath the old wooden pier at Aberdovey, and looking up. She went up ladders, through trap-doors, walked over wooden floors to other ladders until she got up to the last trap-door and through it out of the shadow and the stuffiness to the sunshine and the fresh air again. She stood on the top platform of the gantry which supported that engine and the wheels that worked (she supposed) the iron lattice that was still far above her head.
Presently she would climb that. She knew that she could. She was never afraid of heights. Her head was steady enough. Her feet in their brown shoes were as sure as the feet of the tiny sheep that picked their way up the rocky steeps of her Welsh mountains. She could climb as well as any of the men ... but for the moment she rested, standing by the platform hand-railing, breathing in the freshened breeze.
The birds of the City—pigeons and sparrows—were taking their short flights far beneath her perch. All London was spread below her, as it had been in thatflying dream, and with as strong a sense of security as in the dream she looked down upon it.
There, between the forests of chimney-pots, gleamed that highway of the Thames, blue-grey now as it reflected the sky, winding out of the distance that meant the clean, green country and the willows below the lawns where people had danced; flowing on into London that sullied it, and burdened it with her barges, and spanned it with her bridges, but could not stay it; on and out its waters passed towards Greenwich and the Docks and the tall ships and the North Sea!
And there on its bank was the office, the dwindled yard from which Gwenna had started. The men returning....
The whole place looked nothing more than a hen-run full of fowls. Their voices ascended, more loudly than she would have expected to hear from their diminished figures. How funny to see what midgets the creatures looked from here, and to remember how majestically important each considered himself! thought little Gwenna, forgetting that from the yard she herself, with her grey linen frock, her brown feet and ankles, must look no larger than a roosting pigeon.
She looked down, past the railing and the ends of timbers, feeling immeasurably aloof from everybody in her world. She wished she need never go down to it again.
"I've agoodmind to give notice at the office, whatever, and go somewhere quite different!" she thought defiantly, and immediately she felt elated. A weightof depression seemed to have dropped from her already. Up, up went the feather-weight spirits of Youth. She had forgotten for this moment the longing and frustration of the last weeks, the exasperations of this morning, her squabble with those other girls. She had climbed out of all that....
Now, before she left this place, she would do something that none of the girls she knew would dare. She'd climb further.
She turned to take a step towards the crane.
Then something gave her a start as violent as that in which she had, that night before, been jerked out of her dream.
For now, into her absorbed musing there had broken without warning the sound of a voice. It had seemed to have come out of nothing, from behind her, and it had said, with a laugh deep and soft at once, "Mymachine? Oh, yes.... Good of you to remember her——"
Paul Dampier's voice!
Little Gwenna, with her back to the trap-door, and wrapped in her own thoughts, had heard nothing of the steps of five pairs of feet coming up the way that she had come. In the violence of her surprise of hearing a voice, so often heard in her daydreams now, here, in this unexpected place between sky and ground, she started so that she lost her balance.
The girl's foot slipped. She fell. She was half over the platform—one small foot and ankle stretched outover the giddy height as that crane was stretched. She clutched on the crook of a slender grey arm, the railing of the platform—So, for an agonised moment, she hung.
But hardly had she cried out before there was the dash of a tall man's figure across the planks from the trap-door.
"It's all right—I've got you," said Paul Dampier, and caught her up from the edge, in his arms.
They held her. That armful of a girl, soft and warm as one of the grey pigeons, was crushed for a moment against the boy's chest. She was closer to him than she had been in any of those waltzes. Yet it seemed no strangeness to be so near—feeling his heart beat below hers, feeling the roughness of his tweed jacket through the thin linen of her frock. She felt as she'd felt about flying, in that dream of hers. "I must have known it all before."
Then, dazed but happy, resting where she seemed to belong, she thought in a twink, "I shall have to let go.Whycan't I stay like this?... Oh, it's very cruel. There! Now I have let go. But he won't.... He's getting his balance."
He had taken a step backwards.
Then she slid through his arms. She slipped, lightly as a squirrel slips down the length of a beech, to the wooden floor of the platform.
Cruel; yes,cruel! And to add to the cruelty that such a moment must end, the Airman, when she left his enforced clasp, scarcely looked at her. He barelyreturned her greeting. He did not answer her breathless thanks. He turned away from her—whom he had saved. Yes! He left her to the meaningless babble of the others (she recognised now, in a dazed way, that there were other men with him on the scaffolding). He left her to the politenesses of his cousin Hugo and of that young French engineer (Mr. Grant's "Comp" who had come up to inspect the crane). He never looked again as Miss Williams was guided down the trap-door and the ladders by the scolding Yorkshire foreman, who didn't leave her until she was safely at the bottom.
She was met by the two other typists who had, from the office window, seen her perched up, small as a bird, on the heights. Both girls had been terrified. Miss Butcher now brought lavender salts. Miss Becker's pink moon of a face was blanched with horror over her colleague's danger.
"Do you know what could have happened, Candlesticks-maker, my dear?" cried the German girl with real emotion, as they all made tea together in the varnished, stifling office. "You could have been killed, you!"
Gwenna thought, "That would have been too bad. Because then—thenI shouldn't have known when he held me!"
As it was, there were several things about that incident that the young girl—passionate and infatuated and innocent—did not know.
For one thing, there was the resolution that Paul Dampier took just after he had turned abruptly from her, had taken short leave of the others, and when he was striding down Whitehall to the bus that went past the door of his Camden Town rooms. And for another thing, there was the reason for that resolution.
Now, in the fairy-stories of modern life, it is (of the two principals) not always the Princess who has to be woken by a kiss, a touch, from the untroubled sleep of years. Sometimes it is the Prince who is suddenly stirred, jarred, or jolted broad awake by the touch, in some form or other, of Love. In Paul Dampier's case the every-day miracle had been wrought by the soft weight of that dove-breasted girl against his heart for no longer than he could count ten, by her sliding to the earth through an embrace that he had not intended for an embrace at all.
It hadn't seemed to matter whathehad intended!
In a flock as of homing pigeons there flew back upon the young aviator all at once his thoughts of the Little Thing ever since he'd met her.
How he'd thought her so jolly to look at ("So sensible"—this he forgot). How topping and natural it had seemed to sit there with her in that field, talking to her, drinking with her out of one silver cup. How he'd found himself wanting to touch her curls; to span and squeeze her throat with his hands. How he'd been within an inch of summarily kissing that fox-glove pink mouth of hers, that night at the Dance....
And to-day, when he'd come to Westminster foranother talk with that rather decent young Frenchman of Hugo's, when he hadn't thought of seeing the girl at all, what had happened? He'd actually held her clasped in his arms, as a sweetheart is clasped.
Only by a sheer accident, of course.
Yes, but an accident that had left impressed on every fibre of him the feeling of that warm and breathing burden which seemed even yet to rest against his quickened heart.
In that heart there surged up a clamorous impulse to go back at once. To snatch her up for the second time in his arms, and not to let her go again, either. To satisfy that hunger of his fingers and lips for the touch of her——
"Holdhard!" muttered the boy to himself. "Hang it all, this won't do."
For he had found himself actually turning back, his face set towards the Abbey.
He spun round on the hot pavement towards home again.
"Look here; can't have this!" he told himself grimly as he walked on, swinging his straw hat in his hand, towards Trafalgar Square. "At this rate I shall be making an ass of myself before I know where I am; going and falling in—going and getting myself much too dashed fond of the Little Thing."
Yes! He now saw that he was in some danger of that.
And if it did come to anything, he mused, walking among the London summer crowd, it wouldn't be oneof these Fancy-dress-dance flirtations. Not that sort of girl. "Nor was he; really." Not that sort of man, he meant. Sort of thing never had amused him, much; not, he knew, because he was cold-blooded ("Lord, no!") but partly because he'd had such stacks of other things to do, partly because—because he'd always thought it ought to be (and could be) so much more—well, amusing than it was. This other. This with the Little Thing—he somehow knew that it would have to be "for keeps."
Andthathe couldn't have. Good Lord, no! There could be no question—Great Scott!
For yes, if therewasanything between him and the Little Thing, it would have to be an engagement. Marriage, and all that.
And Paul Dampier didn't intend to get married. Out of the question for him.
He'd only just managed to scrape through and make "some sort of a footing" for himself in the world as it was. His father, a hard-up Civil engineer, and his mother (who had been looked askance at by her people, the Swaynes, for marrying the penniless and undistinguished Paul Dampier, senior)—they'd only just managed to give their boy "some kind of an education" before they pegged out. Lessons at home when he'd been a little fellow. Afterwards one of the (much) smaller public-schools. For friends and pleasures and holidays he had been dependent on what he could "pick up" for himself. Old Hugo had been decent enough. He'd asked his cousin to fish with him inWales, twice, and he hadn't allowed Paul to feel that he was—the poor relation.
Only Paul remembered the day that Hugo was going back to Harrow for the last time. He, Paul, had then been a year in the shops, to the day. He remembered the sudden resentment of that. It was not snobbery, not envy. It was Youth in him crying out, "I will be served! I won't be put off, and stopped doing things, and shoved out of things for ever, just because I'm poor. If being poor means being 'out of it,' having no Power of any kind, I'm dashed if Istaypoor. I'll show that I can make good——"
And, gradually, step by step, the young mechanic, pilot, aero-racer and inventor had been "making good."
He'd made friends, too. People had been decent. He'd been made to feel thattheyfelt he was going to be a useful sort of chap. He'd quailed a bit under the eyes of butlers in these houses where he'd stayed, but he'd been asked again. That Mrs. What's-her-name (the woman in the pink frock at the Smiths) had been awfully kind. Introducing him to her brothers with capital; asking him down to the New Forest to meet some other influential person; and knowing that he couldn't entertain in return. (He'd just sent her some flowers and some tickets for Brooklands.) Then there was Colonel Conyers. He'd asked whether he (Dampier) were engaged. And, at his answer, had replied, "Good. Much easier for a bachelor, these days."
And now! Supposing he got married?
On his screw? Paul Dampier laughed bitterly.
Well, but supposing he got engaged; got some wretched girl to wait for——
Years of it! Thanks!
Then, quite apart from the money-question, what about all his work?
Everything he wanted to do! Everything he was really in earnest about.
His scheme—his invention—his Machine!
"End of it all, if he went complicating matters by starting agirl!"
Take up all his time. Interrupt—putting him off his job—yes, he knew! Putting him off, like this afternoon in the yard, and that other night at the Dance. Only more so. Incessant. "Mustn't have it; quite simply, he mustnot."
Messing up his whole chance of a career, if——
But he was pulling himself up in time from that danger.
Up to now he hadn't realised that there might be something in all that rot of old Hugo's about the struggle in a man's mind between an Aeroplane and a Girl. Now—well, he'd realised. All the better. Now he was forewarned. Good thing he could take a side for himself now.
By the time he'd reached the door of the National Portrait Gallery and stood waiting for his motor omnibus, he had definitely taken that resolution of which Gwenna Williams did not know.
Namely, that he must drop seeing the Girl. Have nothing more to say to her. It was better so; wiser. Whatever he'd promised about taking her up would have to be "off."
A pity—! Dashed shame a man couldn't haveeverything! She was ... so awfully sweet....
Still, got to decide one way or the other.
This would fix it before it was too late, before he'd perhaps managed to put ideas into the head of the Little Thing. She shouldn't ever come flying, with him!
Thatendedit! he thought. He'd made uphismind. He would not allow himself to wonder whatshemight think.
After all, whatwoulda girl think? Probably nothing.
Nothing at all, probably.
It seemed to be decided for Gwenna that she should, after all, give notice at the office.
For on the evening of the day of her climb up the scaffolding she met the tall, sketchily-dressed figure of her chum coming down the hill that she was ascending on her way to the Club. And Leslie accosted her with the words, "Child, d'you happen to want to leave your place and take another job? Because, if so, come along for a walk and we'll talk about it."
So the two "inseparables" strolled on together up past the Club, passing at the crest of the hill a troop of Boy Scouts with their band.
"Only chance one ever gets of hearing a drum; jolly sound," sighed Leslie, watching the brown faces, the sturdy legs marching by. "I wonder how many of those lads will be soldiers? Very few, I suppose. We're told that the authorities aresocareful to keep the Boy Scout Movement apart from any pernicious militarism, and ideas about National Service!"
And the girls took the road that dips downward from Hampstead, and the chestnut avenue that leads into the Park of Golders Green. They passed the Bandstand ringed by nurse-girls and perambulators. They crossed the rustic bridge above the lily-pond, where children tossed crumbs to the minnows. Theywent in at the door of the little flower-garden.
Here, except for an occasional sauntering couple, London seemed shut out. In the late sunlight above the maze of paths, the roses were just at their best. Over the pergolas and arbours they hung in garlands, they were massed in great posies of pink and cream and crimson. The little fountain set in the square of velvet turf tossed up a spray of white mist touched with a rainbow, not unlike Gwenna's dance-frock.
The girls sat down on a shaded seat facing that fountain. Gwenna, turning to her chum, said, "Now do tell me about that job you asked if I'd take. What is it?"
"Oh! it's a woman who used to know some of my people; she came to the Club this afternoon, and then on to my old lady's to see me about it," said Leslie. "She wants a girl—partly to do secretarial work, partly to keep her company, partly to help her in the 'odd bits' of her work down there where she has her business."
Gwenna, rather listlessly thinking of typewriting offices, of blouses, or tea-shops, asked what the lady did.
Leslie gave the extraordinary answer, "She builds aeroplanes."
"Shedoes?" cried Gwenna, all thrilled. "Aeroplanes?"
"Yes. She's the only woman who's got an Aircraft Factory, men, shops and all. It's about an hour's run from town. She's a pilot herself, and her son's an aviator," said Leslie, speaking as though of everydaythings. "Everything supplied, from the Man to the Machine, what?"
"Oh! But what agorgeoussort of Life for a woman, Leslie!" cried the younger girl, her face suddenly alight. "Fancy spending her time making things likethat! Things that are going to make a difference to the whole world! Instead of her just 'settling down' and embroidering 'duchesse sets,' and sitting with tea-cups, like Uncle Hugh's 'Lady parishioners,' and talking to callers about servants; and operations! Oh, oh, don'tyouwant to take her job?"
"I'm not especially keen on one job more than another. And my old lady would be rather upset if I did leave her in the lurch," said Leslie, more unselfishly than her chum suspected. The truth was that this much disapproved-of Leslie had resigned a congenial post because it might mean what Gwenna loved. "I told the Aeroplane Lady about you," she added. "And she'd like you to go down and interview her at the Factory next Saturday, if you'd care to."
"Care? OfcourseI'd care! Aeroplanes! After silly buildings and specifications!" exclaimed Gwenna, clasping her hands in her grey linen lap. But her face fell suddenly as she added, "But—it's an hour's run from London, you say? I should have to live there?"
"'Away from Troilus, and away from Troy,'" quoted Leslie, smiling. "You could come back to Troy for week-ends, Taffy. And I'll tell you what.It's no bad thing for a young man who's always thought of a girl as being planted in one particular place, to realisesuddenly that she's been uprooted and set up in quite another place.Gives him just a little jerk. By the way, is there any fresh news of Troilus—of the Dampier boy?"
And Gwenna, sitting there with troubled eyes upon the roses, gave her the history of that afternoon's adventure. She ended up sadly, "Never even said 'Good-bye' to me!"
"Getting nervous that he's going to like you too well!" translated Leslie, without difficulty. "Probably deciding at this minute that he'd better not see much more of you——"
"Oh, Leslie!" exclaimed the younger girl, alarmed.
"Sort of thing theydodecide," said Leslie, lightly. "Well, we'll see what it amounts to. And we'll wire to-morrow to the Aeroplane Lady. Or telephone down to-night. I am going to telephone to Hugo Swayne to tell him I don't feel in the mood to have dinner out to-night again."
"Again?" said Gwenna, rather wistfully, as they rose from the arbour and walked slowly down the path by the peach-houses. "Has he been asking you outseveraltimes, then?"
"Several," said Leslie with a laugh. She added in her insouciant way, "You know,hewants to marry me now."
Gwenna regarded her with envy. Leslie spoke of what should be the eighth wonder of the world, the making or rejecting of a man's life, as if it were an everyday affair.
"Don't look so unflatteringlysurprised, Taffy. Strictly pretty I may not be. But a scrupulously neat and lady-like appearance," mocked Leslie, putting out a long arm in a faded-silk sleeve that was torn at the cuff, "has often (they tell one) done more to win husbands than actual good looks!"
Little Gwenna said, startled, "You aren't—aren't going toletMr. Swayne be your husband, are you?"
"I don't know," said Leslie, reflectively, a little wearily. "I don't know, yet. He's fat—but of coursethatwould come off after I'd worried him for a year or so. He's flabby. He's rather like Kipling's person whose 'rooms at College was beastly!' but he's good-natured, and his people were all right, and, Taffy, he's delightfully well-off. And when one's turned twenty-six, one does want to besureof what's coming. One must have some investment that'll bring in one's frocks and one's railway-fares and one's proper setting."
"There are other things," protested little Gwenna with a warm memory of that moment's clasping on the heights that afternoon. "There are things one wants more."
"Not me."
"Ah! That's because you don'tknowthem," declared Gwenna, flushed.
And at that the elder girl gave a very rueful laugh.
"Not know them? I've known them too well," she admitted. "Listen, Taffy, I'll tell you the sort of girl I am. I'm afraid there are plenty of us about."
She sighed, and went on with a little nod.
"We're the girl who works in the sweetshop and who never wants to touch chocolates again. We're the sort of girl who's been turned loose too early at dances and studio-parties and theatricals and so forth. The girl who's come in for too much excitement and flattery and love-making. Yes! For in spite of all my natural disadvantages (tuck in that bit of hair for me, will you?) and inspiteof not being quite a fool—I've been made too much of, by men. The Monties and so forth.Here's where I pay for it.I and the girls like me. We can't ever take a real live interest in men again!"
"But——!" objected Gwenna, seeing a mental image of Leslie as she had been at that dance, whirling and flushed and radiant. "Youseemto like——"
"'The chase, not the quarry,'" quoted Leslie. "For when I've brought down my bird, what happens?—He doesn't amuse me any more! It's like having sweets to eat and such a cold that one can't taste 'em."
"But—that's such apity!"
"D'you suppose I don'tknowthat?" retorted Miss Long. "D'you suppose I don't wish to Heaven that I could be 'in Love' with somebody? I can't though. I see through men. And I don't see as much in them as there is in myself. They can't bossme, or takemeout of myself, or surprisemeinto admiring them. Why can't they,dashthem? they can't evensayanything that I can't think of, quicker, first!" complained the girl with many admirers, resentfully. "And that'sa fatal thing to any woman's happiness. Remember, there's no fun for a woman in justbeingadored!"
The girl in love, kicking her small brown shoe against the pebbles of the garden path, sighed that she wished that she could try "being adored." Just for a change.
"Ah, but you, Taffy, you're lucky. You're so fresh, so eager. You're as much in love with that aviator's job as you are with anything else about him. You're as much amused by 'ordinary things' as any other girl is amused by getting a young man. As for what you feel about the young man himself, well!—I supposethat'sa tune played half a yard to the right of the keyboard of an ordinary girl's capacity. You're keen for Life; you've got what men call 'a thirst you couldn't buy.' Wish I were like that!"
"Well, but it's so easy to be," argued Gwenna, "when youdomeet some one so wonderful——"
"It's not so easy to see 'wonder,' let me tell you. It's a gift. I've had it; lost it; spoilt it," mourned the elder girl. "To you everything's thrilling: their blessed airships—the men in them—the Air itself. All miracles to you! Everything's an Adventure. So would Marriage be——"
"Oh, I don't—don't ever think ofthat. Being alwayswitha person! Oh, it would betoowonderful—— I shouldn't expect—Even to be a littleliked, if he once told me so, would be enough," whispered the little Welsh girl, so softly that her chum did not catch it.
Leslie, striding along, said, "To a girl like me allthat's as far behind as the school-room. At the stage where I am, a girl looks upon Marriage—how? As 'The Last 'Bus Home, or A Settled Job at last.' That's why she so often ends up as an old man's darling—with some very young man as her slave. That's what makes me ready to accept Hugo Swayne. And now forget I ever told you so."
The two girls turned homewards; Gwenna a little sad.
To think that Leslie should lack what even ordinary little Mabel Butcher had! To think that Leslie, underneath all her gaiety and rattle, should not know any more the taste of real delight!
Gwenna, the simple-hearted, did not know the ways of self-critics. She did not guess that possibly Miss Long had been analysing her own character with less truth than gusto.... And she was surprised when, as they passed the Park gates again, her chum broke the silence with all her old lightness of tone.
"Talking of young men—a habit for which Leslie never bothers to apologise—talking of young men, I believe there might be some at the Aeroplane Lady's place. She often has some one there. A gentleman—'prentice or pupil or something of that sort. Might be rather glad to see a new pretty face about with real curls."
It was then that Gwenna turned up that blushing but rather indignant little face. "But, Leslie! Don't youunderstand? If there were a million other young men about, all thinking me—all thinking what yousay, it wouldn't make abitof difference tome!"
"Possibly not," said Miss Long, "but there's no reason why it shouldn't be made to make a difference to the Dampier boy, is there?"
"What d'you mean, Leslie?" demanded the other girl as they climbed the hill together. For the first time a look of austerity crossed Gwenna's small face. For the first time it seemed to her that the adored girl-chum was in the wrong. Yes! She had never before been shocked at Leslie, whatever wild thing she said. But now—now she was shocked. She was disappointed in her. She repeated, rebukefully, "What do you mean?"
"What," took up Leslie, defiantly, "do you think I meant?"
"Well—didyou mean make—make Mr. Dampier think other people liked me, and that I might like somebody else better thanhim?"
"Something of the sorthadcrossed the mind of Leslie the Limit."
"Well, then, it isn'tlikeyou——"
"Think not?" There was more than a hint of quarrel in both the girlish voices. Up to now they had never exchanged a word that was not of affection, of comradeship.
Gwenna, flushing deeper, said, "It's—it'shorridof you, Leslie."
"Why, pray?"
"Because it would be sort ofdeceivingMr. Dampier, for one thing. It's atrick."
"M'yes!"
"And not a pretty one, either," said little Gwenna, red and angry now. "It's—it's——"
"What?"
"Well, it's what I should have thought that you yourself, Leslie, would have called 'so obvious.'"
"Exactly," agreed Miss Long, with a flippant little laugh that covered smarting feelings.Taffyhad turned against her now! Taffy, who used to think that Leslie could do no wrong! This was what happened when one's inseparable chum fell in love....
Leslie said impenitently, "I've never yet found that 'the obvious thing' was 'the unsuccessful thing.' Especially when it comes to anything to do with young men. My good child, you and the Dampier boy, you
'Really constitute a pair,Each being rather like an artless woodland elf.'
'Really constitute a pair,Each being rather like an artless woodland elf.'
I mean, can't you see that the dear old-fashioned simple remedies and recipes remain the best? For a sore throat, black-currant tea. (Never fails!) For the hair, Macassar oil. (Unsurpassed since the Year Eighteen-dot!) For the stimulation of an admirer's interest, jealousy. Jealousy and competition, Taffy."
"He isn't an admirer," protested the younger girl, mollified. Then they smiled together. The cloud of the first squabble had passed.
Leslie said, "Never mind. If you don't approve of my specific, don't think of it again."
Curiously enough, Gwenna did think of it again.
On the Saturday morning after that walk and talk she took that long dull train-journey. The only bright spot on it was the passing of Hendon Flying Ground. Over an hour afterwards she arrived at the little station, set in a sunburnt waste, for the Aircraft Works.
She asked her way of the ticket-collector at the booking-office. But before he could speak, she was answered by some one else, who had come down to the station for a parcel. This was a shortish young man in greasy blue overalls. He had a smiling, friendly, freckled face under a thatch of brilliant red hair; and a voice that seemed oddly out of keeping with his garments. It was an "Oxford" voice.
"The Works? I'm just going on there myself. I'll come with you and show you, if I may," he said with evident zest.
Gwenna, walking beside him, wished that she had not immediately remembered Leslie's remarks about young men at aircraft works who might be glad of the arrival of a new pretty face. This young man, piloting her down a straggling village street that seemed neither town nor country, told her at once that he was a pupilat the Works and asked whether she herself were going to help Mrs. Crewe there.
"I don't know yet," said Gwenna. "I hope so."
"So do I," said the young man gravely, but with a glint of unreserved admiration in the eyes under the red thatch.
Little Gwenna, walking very erect, wished that she were strong and self-reliant enough not to feel cheered by that admiration.
(But she was cheered. No denying that!)
The young man took her down a road flanked on either hand by sparse hedges dividing it from that parched and uninteresting plain. The mountain-bred girl found all this flat country incredibly ugly. Only, on her purple Welsh heights and in the green ferny depths threaded by crystal water, nothing ever happened. It was here, in this half-rural desert littered by builders' rubbish and empty cans, that Enterprise was afoot. Strange!
On the right came an opening. She saw a yard with wooden debris and what looked like the wrecks of a couple of motor-cars. Beyond was a cluster of buildings with corrugated iron roofs.
The red-haired pupil mentioned the name of the Aeroplane Lady and said, "I think you'll find her in the new Wing-room, over here——"
"What a wonderful name for it," thought the little enthusiast, catching her breath, as she was shown through a door. "The Wing-room!"
It was high and clean and spacious, with white distempered walls and a floor of wood-dura, firm yet comforting to the feet. The atmosphere of it was, on that July day, somewhat overpowering. Two radiators were working, and the air was heavy with a smell of what seemed like rubber-solution and spirits mixed: this, Gwenna presently found, was the "dope" to varnish the strong linen stretched across the wings of aeroplanes. Two of those great wings were laid out horizontally on trestles to dry. Another of the huge sails with cambered sections was set up on end across a corner; and from behind it there moved, stepping daintily and majestically across the floor, the tawny shape of a Great Dane, who came inquiringly up to the stranger.
Then from behind the screening wing there came a slight, woman's figure in dark blue. She followed the dog. Little Gwenna Williams, standing timidly in that great room so strange and white, and characteristically scented, found herself face to face with the mistress of the place; the Aeroplane Lady.
Her hair was greying and fluffy as a head of windblown Traveller's Joy; beneath it her eyes were blue and young and bright and—yes! with a little glad start Gwenna recognised that in these eyes too there was something of that space-daring gleam of the eyes of Icarus, of her own Flying Man.
"Ah ... I know," said the lady briskly. "You're the girl Leslie's sent down to see me."
"Yes," said Gwenna, thinking it nice of her to say"Leslie" and not "Miss Long." She noticed also that the Aeroplane Lady wore at the collar of her shirt a rather wonderful brooch in the shape of thecaducæus, the serpent-twisted rod of Mercury. "Oh, Idohope she'll take me!" thought the young girl, agitated. "I do want more than anything to come here to work with her. Oh, supposing she thinks I'm too silly and young to be any use—supposing she won't take me——"
She was tense with nervousness while the Aeroplane Lady, fondling the Great Dane's tawny ear with a small, capable hand as she spoke, put the girl through a short catechism; asking questions about her age, her people, her previous experience, her salary.... And then she was told that she might come and work on a month's trial at the Factory, occupying a room in the Aeroplane Lady's own cottage in the village. The young girl, enraptured, put down her success to the certificates from that Aberystwith school of hers, where she had passed "with distinction" the Senior Cambridge and other examinations. She did not guess that the Aeroplane Lady had taken less than two minutes to make sure that this little Welsh typist-girl carried out what Leslie Long had said of her.
Namely that "she was so desperately keen on anything to do with flying and flyers that she'd scrub the floors of the shops for you if you wished it, besides doing your business letters as carefully as if eachone was about some important Diplomatic secret ... try her!"
So on the following Monday Gwenna began her new life.
At first this new work of Gwenna's consisted very largely of what Leslie had mentioned; the writing-out of business letters at the table set under the window in the small private office adjoining the great Wing-room.
(Curious that the Wings for Airships, the giant butterfly aeroplanes themselves, should grow out of a chrysalis of ordinary business, with letters that began, "Sir, we beg to thank you for your favour of the 2nd instant, and to assure you that same shall receive our immediate attention," exactly the sort of letters that Gwenna had typed during all those weeks at Westminster!)
Then there were orders to send off for more bales of the linen that was stretched over the membranes of those wings; or for the great reels of wire which strung the machines, and which cost fifteen pounds apiece; orders for the metal which was to be worked in the shops across the parched yard, where men of three nationalities toiled at the lathe; turning-screws, strainers, washers, and all the tiny, complicated-looking parts that were to be the bones and the sinews and the muscles of the finished Flying Machine.
Gwenna, the typist, had at first only a glimpse or so of these other sides of the Works.
Once, on a message from some visitor to the Aeroplane Lady she passed through the great central room, larger than her Uncle's chapel at home, with its concrete floor and the clear diffused light coming throughthe many windows, and the never-ceasing throb of the gas-driven engine pulsing through the lighter sounds of chinking and hammering. Mechanics were busy all down the sides of this hall; in the aisle of it, three machines in the making were set up on the stands. One was ready all but the wings; its body seemed now more than it would ever seem that of a giant fish; it was covered with the doped linen that was laced at the seams with braid, eyelets and cord, like an old-fashioned woman's corset. The second was half-covered. The third was all as yet uncovered, and looked like the skeleton of a vast seagull cast up on some prehistoric shore.
Wondering, the girl passed on, to find her employer. She found her in the fitter's shop. In a corner, the red-haired pupil, with goggles over his eyes, was sitting at a stand working an acetylene blow-pipe; holding in his hand the intense jet that shot out showers of squib-like sparks, and wielding a socket, the Lady directing him. She took the girl's message, then walked back with her to the office, her tawny dog following at her heels.
"Letters finished?... then I'd like you to help me on with the wings of that machine that's all but done," she said. "That is"—she smiled—"if you don't mind getting your hands all over this beastly stuff——"
Mind? Gwenna would have plastered her whole little white body with that warmed and strongly-smelling dope if she'd thought that by so doing she was actually taking a hand in the launching of a Ship for the Clouds.
The rest of the afternoon she spent in the hot andreeking Wing-room, working side by side with the Aeroplane Lady. Industriously she pasted the linen strips, patting them down with her little fingers on to the seams of those wide sails that would presently be spread—for whom?
In her mind it was always one large and springy figure that she saw ascending into the small plaited wicker seat of the Machine. It was always the same careless, blonde, lad's face that she saw tilted slightly against the background of plane and wires....
"I would love to work, even a little, on a machine that he was going to fly in," thought Gwenna.
She stood, enveloped in a grey-blue overall, at the trestle-table, cutting out fresh strips of linen with scissors that were sticky and clogged with dope. She peeled the stuff from her hands in flakes like the bark of a silver-birch as she added to her thought, "But I shouldn't want to do anything for that aeroplane; hisFiancée, for the P.D.Q. Hateful creature, with her claws that she doesn't think are going to let him go!"
Here she set the pannikin of dope to reheat, and there was a smile of defiance on the girl's lips as she moved about from the trestles to the radiator or the sewing-table.
For ever since she had been at the Works a change had come over Gwenna.
Curiously enough, she was happier now than she had been in her life. She was more contented with what the present brought her; more steadily hopeful about the future. It didn't seem to matter to her now that, thelast time she had seen him, her Aviator had turned almost sullenly away. She laughed to herself over that, for she believed at last in Leslie's theory: "Afraid he's going to like me." She did not fret because she hadn't had even one of his brief notes since she had left London; nor sigh over the fact that she, living down here in this Bedfordshire village, was so much further away from those rooms of his at Camden Town than she had been when she had stayed at the Hampstead Club.
For somehow she felt nearer to him now.
Absence can, in some subtle, unexplained way, spin fine threads of communication over the gulf between a boy and a girl....
She found a conviction growing stronger and stronger in her girl's mind, that gay, tangled chaos where faults and faculties, blindness and intuitions flourish entwined and inseparable.She was meant to be his.
She'd no "reason" for thinking so, of course. There was very little reason about Gwenna's whole make-up.
For instance, Leslie had tried "reasoning" with her, the night before she'd left the Hampstead Club. Leslie had taken it into her impish black head to be philosophical, and to attempt to talk her chum into the same mood.
Leslie, the nonchalant, had given a full hour to her comments on Marriage. We will allow her a full chapter—but a short one.
She'd said, "Supposing the moondidfall into your lap, Taffy? Suppose that young Cloud-Dweller of yours did (a) take you flying, and (b) propose to you?" and she'd recited solemnly: