"Somewhere I've read that the gods, waxing wroth at our mad importunity,Hurl us our boon and it falls with the weight of a curse at our feet;Perilous thing to intrude on their lofty Olympian immunity!'Take it and die,' say the gods, and we die of our fondest conceit."
"Somewhere I've read that the gods, waxing wroth at our mad importunity,Hurl us our boon and it falls with the weight of a curse at our feet;Perilous thing to intrude on their lofty Olympian immunity!'Take it and die,' say the gods, and we die of our fondest conceit."
"Yes; 'of' it! Afterhavingit. Who'd mind dyingthen?"
"But if it hadn't been worth it, Taffy? Suppose you were air-sick?" Leslie had suggested. "Worse, suppose you were Paul-sick?"
"What?"
"Yes, supposing that Super-Boy of yours himself was the disappointment? Suppose none of his 'little ways' happened to please you? Men don't realise it, but, in love, a man is much easier to please than a woman!"
"No, Leslie. No," had come from the girl who knew nothing of love-making—less than nothing, since shethoughtshe knew.
Leslie had persisted. "The first pet-name a man calls you—awfully important, that!—may hash up Love'syoung dream for ever. Some men, I believe, begin with 'Dear old—something or other.' That's theend. Or something that you know you're obviouslynot. Such as 'Little Woman,' tome. Or they don't notice something that's specially there for them to notice. That's unforgivable. Or they do notice something that's quite beside the mark. Or they repeat themselves. Not good enough, a man who can't think ofonenew way of saying he cares, each day. (Even a calendar can do that.) Saying the wrong thing, though, isn't as bad as beingsilent. That's fatal. Gives a girlsucha lot of time to imagine all the things that another man might have been saying at the time. That's why men with no vocabularies ought never to get engaged or married. 'I'm a man of few words,' they say. They ought to be told, 'Very well. Outside! It simply means you won't trouble to amuse me.' Exit the Illusion.
'Alas, how easily things go wrong!A look too short, or a kiss too long——'
'Alas, how easily things go wrong!A look too short, or a kiss too long——'
(Especially with a look too short.) Yes," Leslie had concluded impressively, "suppose the worst tragedy happened?Supposethe Dampier boy did get engaged to you, and then you found out that he didn't in the least know how to make love? To make love toyou, I mean."
"There wouldn't have to be any love 'made,'" little Gwenna had murmured, flushing. "Where he was, the love wouldbe."
"My dear, youarewhat Hugo Swayne calls 'a Passé-iste' in love. Why, why wasn'tIbrought up in the heart of the mountains (and far away from any other kind of heart) until I was twenty-two, and then hurled into a love-affair with the first decent-looking young man?" Leslie had cried, with exaggerated envy. "The happier you! But, Taff, do remember that 'Love is a Lad with Wings'—like yours. Even if the engagement were all your fancy painted, that Grand Firework Display sort of feeling couldn'tlast. Don't shoot! It's true. People couldn't go on living their lives and earning their livings and making their careers and having their babies if itdidlast. Itmustalter. Itmustdie down into the usual dear old sun rising every morning. So, when your 'Oiseau de feu' married you, and you found he was just—a husband, like everybody else's——"
"Not 'like' anybody!"—indignantly.
"How d'you knowwhathe's like?" Leslie had demanded. "What d'you know of his temper? Men with that heather-honey kind of smile and those deep dimples very often have a beastly temper. Probably jealous——"
"I wouldlovehim to be that."
"You wouldn't love to be poor, though," Leslie had gone off on another tack. "Poor, and uncomfortable."
"I shall never be comfortable again without him," Gwenna had said obstinately. "Might as well be uncomfortablewithhim!"
"In a nasty little brick villa near Hendon, so as tobe close to the flying, perhaps? With a horrid dark bathroom? And the smell of cooking haddocks and of Lux all over it!" Leslie had enlarged. "And you having to use up all your own little tiny income to help pay the butcher, and the Gas Light and Coke Company, and the rates, and loathsome details of that sort that a woman never feels a ha'porth the better for! Instead of being able to get yourself fresh gloves and silk stockings and a few trifles of that sort that make absolutelyallthe difference to a woman's life!"
"Notallthe difference, indeed," Gwenna had said softly. But Leslie had continued to draw these fancy pictures of married life as lived with Mr. Paul Dampier.
"Taffy, for one thing, you've never seen him anything but nicely-groomed and attractive to look at. You try to imagine him in what Kipling calls 'the ungirt hour.' They talk of a woman's slatternliness killing love. Have they seen amanwhen he 'hasn't bothered' to groom himself? That sight——"
She had shaken her black head ineffably over the mental image of it, and had averred, "That sight ought to be added to the Valid and Legitimate Causes for Divorce! A wife ought to be able to consider herself as free as air after the first time that she sees her husband going about the house without a collar. Sordid, unbecoming grey flannel about his neck. Three half buttons, smashed in the wringer, hanging by their last threads to his shirt. And his old slippers bursting out at the side of the toe. And his 'comfortable' jacketon, with matches and fur in all the pockets and a dab of marmalade—also furred—on the front. And himself unshaved, with a zig-zag parting to his hair. I believe some men do go about like this before their wives, and then write wistful letters to theDaily Mirrorabout, 'Why is Marriage the Tomb of Romance?'"
Gwenna had sniffed. "Oh!Somemen!Those!"
"Valid cause for Divorce Number Ninety-three: The state of the bedroom floor," Leslie had pursued. "I, slut as I am, do pick things up sometimes. Men, never. Ask any married woman you know. Maudie toldme. Everything is hurled down, or stepped out of, or merely dropped. And left. Left, my child, foryouto gather up. Everything out of the chest-of-drawers tossed upon the carpet. Handkerchiefs, dirty old pipes, shirts, ties, 'in one red burial blent.' That means he's been 'looking for' something. Mind,you'vegot to find it. Men are born 'find-silly.' Men never yet have found anything (except the North Pole and a few things like that, that are no earthly good in a villa), but they are for everlosingthings!"
Gwenna had given a smile to the memory of a certain missing collar-stud that she had heard much of.
"Yes, I suppose to be allowed to find his collar-studs is what he'd consider 'Paradise enow' for any girl!" Leslie had mocked. "I misdoubt me that the Dampier boy would settle down after a year of marriage into a regular Sultan of the Hearthrug. Looking upon his wife as something that belongs to him, and goes about with him; like a portmanteau. Putting you in yourplace as 'less than the dust beneath his chariot,' that is, 'beneath his biplane wheels.'"
"Leslie! I shouldn't mind! I'dliketo be! I believe itismy place," Gwenna had interrupted, lifting towards her friend a small face quivering with conviction. "He could make anything he liked or chose of me. What do I care——"
"Not for clothes flung down in rings all over the floor like when a trout's been rising? Nor for trousers left standing there like a pair of opera-glasses—or concertinas? Braces all tangled up on the gas-bracket? Overcoat and boots crushing your new hat on the bed? Seventeen holey socks for you to mend?Allodd ones—foryouto sort——"
Little Gwenna had cried out: "I'dwantto!"
"I'm not afraid you won't get what you want," Leslie had said finally. "All I hope is that your wish won't fail when you get it!"
And of that Gwenna was never afraid.
"I should not care for him so much if he were not the only one who could make me so happy," she told herself; "andunlessthe woman's very happy, surely the man can't be. It must mean, then, that he'll feel, some day, that this would be the way to happiness. I'm sure there aresomemarriages that are different from what Leslie says. Some where you go on being sweethearts even after you're quite old friends, like. I—I could make it like that for him. IfeelI could!"
Yes; she felt that some day (perhaps not soon) she must win him.
Sometimes she thought that this might be when her rival, the perfected machine, had made his name and absorbed him no longer. Sometimes, again, she told herself that he might have no success at all.
"Then,thenhe'd see there wassomethingelse in the world. Then he would turn to me," said the girl to herself. She added, as every girl in love must add, "No onecouldcare as I do."
And one day she found on the leaf of the tear-off calendar in her cottage bedroom a line of verse that seemed to have been written for her. It remained the whole of Browning as far as Gwenna Williams was concerned. And it said:
"What's Death? You'll love me yet!"
She was in this mood to win a waiting game on the day that Paul Dampier came down to the Aircraft Works.
This was just one of the more wonderful happenings that waited round the corner and that the young girl might hope to encounter any day.
The first she knew of it was from hearing a remark of the Aeroplane Lady's to one of her French mechanics at the lathes.
"This will make the eighteenth pattern of machine that we've turned out from this place," she said. "I wonder if it's going to answer, André?"
"Which machine, madame?" the man asked. He was a big fellow, dark and thick-haired and floridly handsome in his blue overalls; and his bright eyes were fixed interestedly upon his principal as she explained through the buzz and the clack and the clang of machinery in the large room, "This new model that Colonel Conyers wants us to make for him."
Gwenna caught the name. She thought breathlessly, "That'shismachine! He's got Aircraft Conyers to take it up and have it made for him! It'shis!"
She'd thought this, even before the Aeroplane Lady concluded, "It's the idea of a young aviator I know. Such a nice boy: Paul Dampier of Hendon."
The French mechanic put some question, and theAeroplane Lady answered, "Might be an improvement. I hope so. I'd like him to have a show, anyhow. He's sending the engine down to-morrow afternoon. They'll bring it on a lorry. Ask Mr. Ryan to see about the unloading of it; I may not get back from town before the thing comes."
Now Mr. Ryan was that red-haired pupil who had conducted Gwenna from the station on the day of her first appearance at the Works. Probably Leslie Long would have affirmed that this Mr. Ryan was also a factor in the change that was coming over Gwenna and her outlook. Leslie considered that no beauty treatment has more effect upon the body and mind of a woman than has the regular application of masculine admiration. Admiration was now being lavished by Mr. Ryan upon the little new typist with the face of a baby-angel and the small, rounded figure; and Mr. Ryan saw no point in hiding his approval. It did not stop at glances. Before a week had gone by he had informed Miss Williams that she was a public benefactor to bring anything so delightful to look at as herself into those beastly, oily, dirty shops; that he hated, though, to see a woman with such pretty fingers having to mess 'em up with that vile dope; and that he wondered she hadn't thought of going on the stage.
"But I can't act," Gwenna had told him.
"What's that got to do with it?" the young man had inquired blithely. "All they've got to do is tolook. You could beat 'em at that."
"Oh, what nonsense, Mr. Ryan!" the girl had said,more pleased than she admitted to herself, and holding her curly head erect as a brown tulip on a sturdy stem.
"Not nonsense at all," he argued. "I tell you, if you went into musical comedy and adopted a strong enough Cockney accent there'd be another Stage and Society wedding before you could say 'knife.' You could get any young peer to adore you, Miss Gwenna, if you smiled at him over the head of a toy pom and called him 'Fice.' I can just see you becoming a Gaiety puss and marrying some Duke——"
"I don't want to marry any Dukes, thanks."
"I'm sure I don't want you to," Mr. Ryan had said softly. "I'd miss you too much myself...."
The fact is that he was a flirt for the moment out of work. He was also of the type that delights in the proximity of "Girl"—using the word as one who should say "Game." "Girl" suggested to him, as to many young men, a collective mass of that which is pretty, soft, and to-be-made-love-to. He found it pleasant to keep his hand in by paying these compliments to this new instalment of Girl—who was rather a little pet, he thought, thoughratherslow.
As for Gwenna, she bloomed under it, gaining also in poise. She learned to take a compliment as if it were an offered flower, instead of dodging it like a brick-bat, which is the very young girl's failing. She found that even if receiving a compliment from the wrong man is like wearing a right-hand glove on the left hand, it is better than having no gloves. (Especially it is better thanlookingas if one had no gloves.)
The attentions of young Ryan, his comment on a new summer frock, the rose laid by him on her desk in the morning; these things were not without their effect—it was a different effect from any intended by the red-haired pupil, who was her teacher in all this.
She would find herself thinking, "He doesn't look at me nearly so much, I notice, in a trimmed-up hat, or a 'fussy' blouse. Men don't like them on me, perhaps." (That blouse or hat would be discarded.) Or, "Well! if so-and-so about me pleases him, it'll please other men."
And for "men" she read always, always the same one. She never realised that if she had not met Paul Dampier shemighthave fallen in love with young Peter Ryan. Presently he had begged her to call him "Peter."
She wouldn't.
"I think I'd do anything for you," young Ryan had urged, "if you asked for it, using my Christian name!"
Gwenna had replied: "Very well! If there's anything I ever want, frightfully badly, that you could give me, I shall ask for it like that."
"You mean there's nothingIcould give you?" he had reproached her, in the true flirt's tone. It can sound so much more tender, at times, than does the tone of the truest lover. A note or so of it had found its way into Gwenna's soft voice these days.
Yes; she had half unconsciously learned a good deal from Mr. Ryan.
"I say! Miss Gwenna!"
Mr. Ryan's rust-red head was popped round the door of the Wing-room where Gwenna, alone, was pouring dope out of the tilted ten-gallon can on the floor into her little pannikin.
"Come out for just one minute."
"Too busy," demurred the girl. "No time."
"Not just to look," he pleaded, "at the reallyprettyjob I'm making of unloading this lorry with Dampier's engine?"
Quickly Gwenna set down the can and came out, in her pinafore, to the breezes and sunshine of the yard outside. It was as much because she wanted to see what there was to be seen of that "Fiancée" of the aviator's, as because this other young man wanted her to admire the work of his hands.
Those hands themselves, Gwenna noticed, were masked and thick, half way up his forearms, with soft soap. This he seemed to have been smearing on certain boards, making a sliding way for that precious package that stood on the low lorry. The boards were packed up in banks and stages, an irregular stairway. This another assistant was carefully trying with a long straight edge with a spirit level in the middle of it; and a third man stood on the lorry, resting on a crowbar and considering the package that held the heart of Paul Dampier's machine.
"You see if she doesn't come down as light as a bubble and stop exactlythere," said Mr. Ryan complacently, digging his heel into a pillowy heap of debris."Lay those other planks to take her inside, André." He wiped his brow on a moderately clear patch of forearm, and moved away to check the observations of the man in the shirt-sleeves.
Gwenna, watching, could not help admiring both this self-satisfied young mudlark and his job. This was how women liked to see men busy: with strenuous work that covered them with dirt and sweat, taxing their brains and their muscles at the same time. Those girls who were so keen on the Enfranchisement of Women and "Equal Opportunities" and those things, those suffragettes at her Hampstead Club who "couldn't see where the superiority of the male sex was supposed to come in"—Well! The reason why they "couldn't" was (the more primitive Gwenna thought) simply because they didn't see enough men atthissort of thing. The men these enlightened young women knew best sat indoors all day, writing—thatsort of thing. Or talking about fans, like Mr. Swayne, and about "the right tone of purple in the curtains" for a room. The women, of course, could do that themselves. They could also go to colleges and pass men's exams. Lots did. But (thought Gwenna) not many of them could get through the day's work of Mr. Ryan, who had also been at Oxford, and who not only had forearms that made her own look like ivory toys, but who could plan out his work so that if he said that that squat, ponderous case would "stop exactlythere"—stop there it would. She watched; the breeze rollicking in her curls, spreading the folds of her grey-bluepinafore out behind her like a sail, moulding her skirt to her rounded shape as she stood.
Then she turned with a very friendly and pretty smile to young Ryan.
It was thus that Paul Dampier, entering the yard from behind them, came upon the girl whom he had decided not to see again.
He knew already that "his little friend," as old Hugo insisted upon calling her, had taken a job at the Aircraft Works. He'd heard that from his cousin, who'd been told all about it by Miss Long.
And considering that he'd made up his mind that it would be better all round if he were to drop having anything more to say to the girl, young Dampier was glad, of course, that she'd left town. That would make things easier. He wouldn't seem to be avoiding her, yet he needn't set eyes upon her again.
Of course he'd been glad. He hadn'twantedto see her.
Then, at the end of his negotiations with Colonel Conyers, he'd understood that he would have to go over and pay a visit to the Aeroplane Lady. And even in the middle of the new excitement he had remembered that this was where Gwenna Williams was working. And for a moment he'd hesitated. That would mean seeing the Little Thing again after all.
Then he'd thought, Well? Fellow can'tlookas if he were trying to keep out of a girl's way? Besides,chances were he wouldn't see her when he did go, he'd thought.
It wasn't likely that the Aeroplane Lady kept her clerk, or whatever she was, in her pocket, he'd thought.
He'd just be taken to where the P.D.Q. was being assembled, he'd supposed. The Little Thing would be kept busy with her typing and one thing and another in some special office, he'd expected!
What he hadnotexpected to find was the scene before him. The Little Thing idling about outside the shops here; hatless, pinafored, looking absolutely top-hole and perfectly at home, chatting with the ginger-haired bloke who was unloading the engine as if he were no end of a pal of hers! She was smiling up into his face and taking a most uncommon amount of interest, it seemed, in what the fellow had been doing!
And, before, she'd said she wasn't interested in machinery! thought Dampier as he came up, feeling suddenly unconscionably angry.
He forgot the hours that the Little Thing had already passed in hanging on every word, mostly about a machine, that had fallen from his own lips. He only remembered that moment at the Smiths' dinner-party, when she'd admitted that that sort of thing didn't appeal to her.
Yet, here she was!Deepin it, by Jove!
He had come right up to her and this other chap before they noticed him....
She turned sharply at the sound of the young aviator's rather stiff "Good afternoon."
She had expected that day to see his engine—no more. Here he stood, the maker of the engine, backed by the scorched, flat landscape, in the sunlight that picked out little clean-cut, intense shadows under the rim of his straw hat, below his cleft chin, along his sleeve and the lapel of his jacket, making him look (she thought) like a very good snapshot of himself. He had startled her again; but this time she was self-possessed.
She came forward and faced him; prettier than ever, somehow (he thought again), with tossed curls and pinafore blowing all about her. She might have been a little schoolgirl let loose from some class in those gaunt buildings behind her. But she spoke in a more "grown-up" manner, in some way, than he'd ever heard her speak before. Looking up, she said in the soft accent that always brought back to him his boyish holidays in her country, "How do you do, Mr. Dampier? I'm afraid I can't shake hands. Mine are all sticky with dope."
"Oh, are they," he said, and looked away from her (not without effort) to the ginger-haired fellow.
"This," said Gwenna Williams, a little self-consciously at last, "is Mr. Ryan."
Plenty of self-assurance abouthim! He nodded and said in a hail-fellow-well-met sort of voice, "Hullo; you're Dampier, are you? Glad to meet you. Yousee we're hard at it unpacking your engine here." Then he looked towards the opening, the road, and the car—borrowed as usual—in which the young aviator had motored down. There was another large package in the body of the car; a box, iron-clamped, with letters stencilled upon it, and sealed. "Something else interesting that you've brought with you?" said this in sufferable man called Ryan. "Here, André, fetch that box down——"
"No," interrupted young Dampier curtly. The curtness was only partly for this other chap. That sealed box, for reasons of his own and Colonel Conyers', was not to be hauled about by any mechanic in the place. "You and I'll fetch that in presently for Mrs. Crewe."
"Right. She'll be back at three o'clock," Ryan told him. "She told me to ask you to have a look round the place or do anything you cared to until she came in."
"Oh, thanks," said young Dampier.
At that moment what he would have "cared to do" would have been to get this girl to himself somewhere where he could say to the Little Humbug, "Look here. You aren't interested in machinery. You said so yourself. What are you getting this carroty-headed Ass to talk to you about it for?"
Seeing that this was out of the question he hesitated.... He didn't want to go round the shops with this fellow, to whom he'd taken a dislike. On sight. He did that sometimes. On the other hand, he couldn'tdo what he wanted to do—sit and talk to the Little Thing until the Aeroplane Lady returned. What about saying he'd got to look up some one in the village, and bolting, until three o'clock? No. No fear! Why should this other fellow imagine he could have the whole field to himself for talking to Her?
So the trio, the age-old group that is composed of two young men and a girl, stood there for a moment rather awkwardly.
Finally the Little Thing said, "Well, I've got to go back to my wings," and turned.
Then the fellow Ryan said, "One minute, Miss Gwenna——"
Miss Gwenna! All but her Christian name! And he, Paul Dampier, who'd known her a good deal longer—he'd never called her anything at all, but "you"! MissGwenna, if you please!
What followed was even more of a bit of dashed cheek.
For the fellow turned quickly aside to her and said, "I say, it's Friday afternoon. Supposing I don't see you again to-morrow morning—it's all right, isn't it, about your coming up to town for that matinée with me?"
"Oh, yes, thanks," said the Little Thing brightly. "I asked Mrs. Crewe, and it's all right."
Then the new note crept into her voice; the half-unconsciously-acquired note of coquetry. She said, smiling again at the red-haired Ryan, "I am so looking forward to that."
And, turning again to the Airman, she said with ahalf-shy, half-airy little smile that, also, he found new in her, "Have you seenThe Cinema Star? Mr. Ryan is going to take me to-morrow afternoon."
"Oh, is he?" said Paul Dampier shortly.
Washe, indeed?Neck!
"You do come up to town sometimes from here, then?" added Mr. Dampier to Miss Gwenna Williams, speaking a trifle more distinctly than usual, as he concluded, "I was just going to ask you whether you could manage to come out withmeto-morrow evening?"
Nobody was more surprised to hear these last words than he himself.
Until that moment he hadn't had the faintest intention of ever asking the girl out anywhere again. Now here he was; he'd done it. The Little Thing had murmured, "Oh——" and was looking—yes, she was looking pleased. The fellow was looking as if he'd been taken aback. Good. He'd probably thought he was going to have her to himself for the evening as well as for the matinée. Dinner at the "Petit Riche"—a music-hall afterwards—travel down home with her. Well, Dampier had put a stopper on that plan. But now that he had asked her, where was he going to take her himself? To another musical comedy? No. Too like the other chap. To one of the Exhibitions? No; not good enough. Anyhow, wherever he took her, he hadn't been out-bidden by this soft-soapy young idiot. Infernal cheek.... Then, all in a flash the brilliant solution came to Paul Dampier. Of course! Yes, he could work it! The Aviation Dinner! He'd meant togo. He would take her. It would involve taking Mrs. Crewe as well. Never mind. It was something to which that other young ass wouldn't have the chance of taking her, and that was enough.
"Yes," he went on saying, as coolly as if it had all been planned. "There's a show on at the Wilbur Club; Wilbur Wright, you know. I thought I'd ask if you and Mrs. Crewe would care to come with me to the dinner. Will you?—Just break that packing up a bit more," he added negligently to the red-haired youth. "And check those spaces—Will you take me into your place, Miss Williams?"
That, he thought, was the way to deal with poachers on his particular preserves!
It was only when he got inside the spacious white Wing-room and sat down, riding a chair, close to the trestle-table where the girl bent her curly head so conscientiously over the linen strips again, that he realised that this Little Thing wasn't his particular preserves at all!
Hadn't he, only a couple of weeks ago, definitely decided that she was never to mean anything of the sort to him? Hadn't he resolved——
Here, with his long arms crossed over the back of the chair as he sat facing and watching her, he put back his head and laughed.
"What are you laughing at?" she asked, straightening herself in the big pinafore with its front all stiff with that sticky mess she worked with.
He was laughing to think how dashed silly it wasto make these resolutions. Resolutions about which people you were or were not to see anything of! As if Fate didn't arrange that for you! As if you didn'thaveto leave that to Fate, and to take your chance!
Possibly Fate meant that he and the Little Thing should be friends, great friends. Not now, of course. Not yet. In some years' time, perhaps, when his position was assured; when he'd achieved some of the Big Things that he'd got to do; when hehadgot something to offer a girl. Ages to wait.... Still, he could leave it at that, now, he thought.... It might, or might not, come to anything. Only, it was ripping to see her!
He didn't tell her this.
He uttered some conventional boy's joke about being amused to see her actually at work for the first time since he'd met her. And she made a little bridling of her neck above that vast, gull-like wing that she was pasting; and retorted that, indeed, she worked very hard.
"Really," he teased her. "Always seem to be taking time off, whenever I've come."
"You've only come twice, Mr. Dampier; and then it's been sort of lunch-time."
"Oh, I see," he said. ("I may smoke, mayn't I?" and he lighted a cigarette.) "D'you always take your lunch out of doors, Miss Gwenna?" (He didn't see whyheshouldn't call her that.)
She said, "I'd like to." Then she was suddenly afraid he might think she was thinking of their open-air lunch in that field, weeks ago, and she said quickly (still working): "I—I was so glad when I heardabout the engine coming, and that Colonel Conyers had ordered the P.D.Q. to be made here. I—do congratulate you, Mr. Dampier. Tell me about the Machine, won't you?"
He said, "Oh, you'll hear all about that presently; but look here, you haven't told me aboutyou——"
Gwenna could scarcely believe her ears; but yes, it was true. He was turning, turning from talk about the Machine, the P.D.Q., theFiancée! Asking, for the first time, about herself. She drew a deep breath; she turned her bright, greeny-brown eyes sideways, longing at that moment for Leslie with whom to exchange a glance. Her own shyly triumphant look met only the deep, wise eyes of the Great Dane, lying in his corner of the Wing-room beside his kennel. He blinked, thumped his tail upon the floor.
"Darling," whispered Gwenna, a little shakily, as she passed the tawny dog. "Darling!" She had to say it to something just then.
Paul Dampier pursued, looking at her over his crossed arms on the back of that chair, "You haven't said whether you'll come to-morrow night."
She asked (as if it mattered to her where she went, as long as it was with him), "What is this dinner?"
"The Wilbur dinner? Oh, there's one every year. Just a meeting of those interested in flying. I thought you might care——"
"Who'll be there?"
"Oh, just people. Not many. Some ladies go. Why?"
"Only because I haven't got anything at all to wear," announced Gwenna, much more confidently, however, than she could have done before Mr. Ryan had told her so much about her own looks, "except my everlasting white and the blue sash like at the Smiths'."
"Well, that was awfully pretty; wasn't it? Only——"
"What?"
"Well, may I say something?"
"Well, what is it?"
"Frightfully rude, really," said Paul Dampier, tilting himself back on his chair, and still looking at her over a puff of smoke, staring even. She was something to stare at. Why was she such a lot prettier? Had heforgottenwhat her looks were? She seemed—she seemed, to-day, so much more of a woman than he'd ever seen her. He forgot that he was going to say something. She, with a little fluttering laugh for which he could have clasped her, reminded him.
"What's the rude thing you were going to say to me?"
"Oh! It's only this. Don't go muffling your neck up in that sort of ruff affair this time; looks ever so much nicer without," said the boy.
The girl retorted with quite a good show of disdainfulness, "I don't think there's anythingquiteso funny as men talking about what we wear."
"Oh, all right," said the boy, and pretended to be offended. Then he laughed again and said, "I've stillgot something of yours that you wear, as a matter of fact——"
"Of mine?"
"Yes, I have; I've never given it you back yet. That locket of yours that you lost."
"Oh——!" she exclaimed.
That locket! That little heart-shaped pendant of mother-o'-pearl that she had worn the first evening that she'd ever seen him; and that she had dropped in the car as they were driving back. So much had happened ... she felt she was not even the same Gwenna as the girl who had snapped the slender silver chain about her neck before they set out for the party.... She'd given up wondering if her Airman had forgotten to give it back to her. She'd forgotten all about it herself. And he'd had it, one of her own personal belongings, somewhere in his keeping all this time.
"Oh, yes; my—my little mascot," she said. "Have you got it?"
"Not here. It's in my other jac—it's at my rooms, I'll bring it to the dinner for you. And—er—look here, Miss Gwenna——"
He tilted forward again as the girl passed his side of the table to reach for the little wooden pattern by which she cut out a patch for the end of the strip, and then passed back again.
"I say," he began again, a trifle awkwardly, "if you don't mind, I want you to give me something in exchange for that locket."
"Oh, do you?" murmured Gwenna. "What?"
And a chill took her.
She didn't want him, here and now, to ask for—what Mr. Ryan might have asked.
But it was not a kiss he asked for, after all.
He said, "You know those little white wings you put in your shoes? You remember, the night of that river dance? Well, I wish you'd let me have one of those to keep as my mascot."
He hadn't thought of wishing it until there had intruded into his ken that other young man who made appointments—and who might have the—cheek to ask for keepsakes, but who shouldn't be first, after all!
Anxiously, as if it were for much more than that feathered trifle of a mascot that he asked, he said, "Will you?"
"Oh! If you like!"
"Sure you don't mind?"
"Mind? I should like you to have it," said Gwenna softly. "Really."
And across the great white aeroplane wing the girl looked very sweetly and soberly at her Aviator, who had just asked that other tiny wing of her, as a knight begged his lady's favour.
It was at this moment that the Aeroplane Lady, an alert figure in dark blue, came into a room where a young man and a girl had been talking idly enough together while one smoked and the other went on working with that five-foot barrier of the wing between them.
The Aeroplane Lady, being a woman, was sensitive to atmosphere—not the spirit-and-solution-scented atmosphere of this place of which she was mistress, but another.
In it she caught a vibration of something that made her say to herself, "Bless me, what'sthis? I never knew those two had even met! 'Not saying so,' I suppose. But certainly engaged, or on the verge of it!"
—Which all went to prove that the rebuked, the absent Leslie, was not far wrong in saying that it is the Obvious Thing that always succeeds!
Whatever the Aeroplane Lady thought to herself about the two in the Wing-room, there was no trace of it in her brisk greeting to Paul Dampier.
"I hope you haven't been waiting long?" she said. "I'm ready now."
Then she turned to her girl-assistant, who was once more laying the tacky strips of linen along the seams. "That's right," she said. "You can go straight on with that wing; that will take you some time. One of the wings foryourmachine," she added to the aviator. "I'm ready, Mr. Dampier."
She and the young man left the Wing-room together and entered the adjoining office, closing the door behind them.
Left alone, Gwenna went on swiftly working, and as swiftly dreaming. Rapidly, but none the less surely, seam after long seam was covered; and the busyness of her fingers seemed to help the fancies of her brain.
"One of the wings forhisMachine!" she thought. "And there was I, thinking I should mind working for that—for 'Her,'" she smiled. "I don't, after all. I needn't care, now."
Her heart seemed singing within her. Nothing had happened, really. Only, she was sure of her lover.That was all. All! She worked; and her small feet on the floor seemed set on air, as in that flying dream.
"Such a great, huge wing for 'Her,'" she murmured to herself. "Such a little, little wing for himself that he asked for. My tiny one that I put in my shoe. It was for him I put it there! And now it's begun to bring him to me. Ithas!" she exulted. "He's begun to care. Iknowhe does."
From the other side of the door came a heightened murmur of voices in the office. Something heavy seemed to be set down on the floor. That sealed box, perhaps, that he'd brought with him in the car. Then came the shutting of the outer door. Mr. Ryan passed the window. Then a sound of hammering in the office, and the long squeak of a nail being prized out of wood. They were opening that mysterious package of his. Gwenna's fingers flew over her own task to the tune of her joyous thoughts.
"I don't care how long it lasts beforeanythingelse happens. Don't care how this flying-machine of his does try to keep him from me. She won't. She can't. Nothing can!" triumphed the girl, smoothing the canvas that was her Rival's plumage. "He's going to be mine, with everything that he knows. So much better, and cleverer, and belonging to different sort of people as he is, and yet he's going to havemebelonging to him. She's had the last of him putting her always first!"
She heard in the office Paul Dampier's short laugh and his "Oh? you think so?" to the Aeroplane Lady.Gwenna scarcely wondered what this might be about. Some business to do with the Machine; but he would come to an end of that, soon. He'd come back to her, with that look in his blue eyes, that tone in his deep voice. She could wait patiently now for the day, whenever it came, when he should tell her definitely that he loved her and wanted her to be his. There would be that, of course—Gwenna, the inexperienced, still saw "the proposal" as the scene set and prepared; the inevitable milestone beside the course of true love. Never mind that now, though. It didn't matter when. What mattered was that itwouldcome. Then she would always be with him. It would be for ever, like that blissful day in the hayfield, that summer night by the river at the dance, those few bewildering seconds on the Westminster scaffolding. And with no cruelty of separation afterwards to spoil it. Nothing—nothing was going to part them, after all.
She had finished the wing. She looked about for the next thing to do.
There were three wings in the room, and all were finished. A fourth wing still lay, a skeleton of fretted and glued wood, in the workshops; the skin was not yet stretched over it.
And there were no more letters to write for the firm.
Gwenna had nothing to do.
"I shallhaveto go into the office and ask," she said, admitting to herself that she was glad enough to go. So often she had painted for herself, out of merememories, the picture of her Airman. He was now in the office, in the flesh! She need not have to satisfy herself with pictures of him. She slipped off her sticky pinafore; the white muslin blouse beneath it was fresh and pretty enough. She moved to the office-door. It was her room; she had never yet had to knock at that door.
She pushed it open and stood waiting. For a moment she only saw the Aeroplane Lady and the tall Aviator. They had their backs to her; they were standing side by side and examining a plan that they had pinned up on the matchboarding wall. Paul Dampier's finger was tracing a little arc on the plan, and he was slowly shaking his head, with the gesture of a man who says that something "won't do." The Aeroplane Lady's fingers were meditatively at her lips, and her attitude echoed that of the young man. Something that they had planned wouldn't do——
Then Gwenna's eyes fell, from these two people, to that "Something." It was something that she had never seen about the Aircraft Works before. Indeed, she did not remember having seen it ever before, anywhere, except in pictures. This object was on the floor, half in and half out of the sealed wooden box that Paul Dampier had brought down with him in the car, and that he wouldn't let the workmen handle.... So this was why....
This was it. Aghast, she stared at it.
It was a long, khaki-painted cylinder, and from one end of it a wicked-looking little nozzle projected for aninch or so. The other end, which disappeared into the box, showed a peep of a magazine and a pistol-grip.
Even to Gwenna's unskilled eyes the thing appeared instantly what it was.
A machine-gun.
"A gun?" she thought, stupefied; "dear me—on an aeroplane?"
"No," said Paul Dampier's voice suddenly, decisively, speaking to the Aeroplane Lady, "it'll have to be a rifle after all."
And with the sudden breaking of his voice upon her ear, there seemed to be torn from before the girl's eyes a corner of some veil.
Quite suddenly (how, she could not explain) she knew what all this meant.
That plan for that new flying-machine. That gun. The whole object of the ambitions of these people with their so romantic profession. Scraps of her Aviator's talk about "scouting," and "the new Arm," and "modern warfare." ...
Just now she had been swept up aloft by his look and tone into the seventh heaven of a woman's delight. That was Love. Here, epitomised in that cylinder with that vicious little nozzle, she saw the Power that could take him from her yet. This was War!
A shudder ran over her.
Her mind took no notice of the facts that there was no War for him to go to, that this grim preparation must be for experimenting only, for manœuvres, sham fights; that this was July, Nineteen-fourteen, an era of sleepypeace (except for that gossip, half a joke, that we might have civil war in Ireland yet), and that she and he and everybody they had to do with lived in the Twentieth Century, in England....
Perhaps it was because she was not English, but British, Welsh. She entirely lacked that Anglo-Saxon "balance" of which the English are so proud, and that stolidity and that unimaginativeness. Her imagination caught some of those unheard, unsuspected messages with which the air must have been vibrant, all those midsummer weeks.
Her quick, unbalanced Celtic fancy had already shown her as clearly as if she had seen it with her eyes that image of his Aeroplane as a winged and taloned Woman-rival. Now it flashed before her, in a twink, another picture:
Paul Dampier, seated in that Aeroplane, swooping through the air,armed and in danger!
The danger was from below. She did not see that danger. She saw only the image, against grey, scudding clouds, of the Beloved. But she could feel it, that poignant Threat to him, to him in every second of his flight. It was not the mere risk of accident or falling. It was a new peril of which the shadow, cast before, fell upon the receptive fancy of the girl who loved the adventurer. And, set to that shadow-picture in her mind, there rang out to some inner sense of hers a Voice that sounded clear and ominous words.
They called to her: "Fired at both by friend and foe——"
Then stopped.
The young girl didn't remember ever to have heard or even to have read these words. How should she? It was the warning fore-echo of a phrase now historic, but then as yet unuttered, that had transmitted itself to some heightened sense of hers:
"Fired at both by friend and foe!"[A]