The Boy with Wings

by Berta Ruck

  CHAPTER IX

  A DAY IN THE COUNTRY

  Eagerly as Gwenna longed to fly, she was not to do so even yet.

  After that appointment made at Hugo Swayne's rooms she lived through afortnight of dreaming, tingling anticipation. Then came another of thosebrief direct notes from "_hers, P. Dampier_." The girl jumped for joy.It was not to be at Hendon this time, but at Brooklands. Was she notrapidly gaining experiences? First Hendon, then Brooklands; at this rateshe would soon know all the flying-grounds--Shoreham, Eastchurch,Farnborough, all of them!

  "I'll call for you," the note said, "in the car."

  "'_The_' car is good," commented Leslie, arranging a mist-blue scarfover Gwenna's small hat just before she started off on this expedition."_In the Army all things are in common, including money and tobacco_ butthe Dampier boy isn't in the Army."

  "Why shouldn't he?" took up Gwenna, ungrammatically and defiantly. Sheconsidered Mr. Swayne's motor was honoured by this other young man whocondescended to drive it, to fetch and whirl away with him a girl whofelt herself a nymph about to be swept up and up above the clouds tosome modern version of Elysium.

  So twelve o'clock that Saturday morning (Gwenna having obtained specialleave of absence from the office) found the young man and the girlspeeding through Kensington and Hammersmith, on the Woking Road.

  The sun was hot above them; the road white; the hedges so dusty thatthey seemed grey ribbons streaming past. Gwenna scarcely realised howthey went. She sat there beside him, thrilled and breathless, hardlyknowing to which delight to give herself up, that of the coming flight,that of the present swift drive in the fresh breeze, or that of thecompanionship of this Demigod of Modern Times, whose arm almost touchedhers sometimes as he moved or turned, or put on the brake.

  Except for an occasional remark to the car: "Come on, don't be funny,old lady, don't be funny," or "Now for the hills; watch her sit down andlaugh at 'em!" he spoke little; Gwenna didn't particularly want him tospeak. The girl was in a golden and moving dream, and scarcely knewwhere it carried her.

  She came out of that dream, not with a shock, but gradually. Was the carslowing down? It stopped; stopped in a wide part of that dust-white roadbetween the tall, dust-grey hedges, opposite to a creosotedtelegraph-pole spiked with nails. Through a gap in the hedge Gwennacaught sight of a moon-daisied field, with a dark hedge and treesbeyond. Not a house, not a cottage in sight. This couldn't beBrooklands?

  "Hul-lo," the boy was muttering. "What's up now?"

  "What is it?" she asked.

  He did not reply. This was not rudeness, as she guessed, but intentness;he took it for granted that she would not understand the mechanicalexplanation. Resignedly she said to herself, "Machinery gone wrong?Sometimes it really seems as if that were all machinery ever _did_ do!Yet that's what he said he was interested in, more than anything!"

  He was out of the car and had flung back the bonnet. Then he took offhis coat and hung it up on one of the nails on that telegraph-pole. Hepushed up his shirt-sleeves and bent over the tool-box on the step.

  Sitting there on the hot leather, Gwenna watched him, she heard thechinking of wrenches and spanners. Then he returned to the bonnet again,fumbling, handling, burrowing, grunting at things.... Ten minuteselapsed....

  He then broke out emphatically: "Oh, _Lord_! I _have_ done it _now_!"

  "Done what?" asked the girl anxiously.

  In tightening a nut with a spanner the spanner had slipped. He hadbroken the porcelain insulation of the plug controlling the current.

  And now, good-humouredly smiling at his guest, he leaned on the door ofthe car with his brown forearms crossed and said, "Short circuited. Yes.I'm afraid that's killed it."

  "Killed what?" asked little Gwenna, in affright.

  "Our flying for to-day," he said.

  He went on to speak about "spare parts," and how it would be necessaryto send some one back to fetch--something--Gwenna didn't care what itwas. Her heart sank in dismay. No flying? Must they go back after all,now?

  "Can't we get on?" she sighed.

  He shook his shining head.

  "We can make a picnic of it, anyhow," he said more encouragingly. "Shallyou be all right here if I run back to that inn we passed just now withthe bit of green outside? I shan't be ten minutes. Send some one off ona bicycle, and bring some grub back here."

  He jerked on his coat and was off.

  Little Gwenna, sitting there waiting in the useless car--her small,disconsolate face framed in the gauze scarf with which she'd meant tobind her curls for the flying--was passed by half a dozen other motorson the road to Brooklands. It did not strike her, dreamily downcast asshe was, that surely what the messenger from the inn was beingdespatched to fetch might have been borrowed from one of these othermotorists? Some of them, surely, would be men who knew young PaulDampier quite well. Any of them might have come to the rescue?

  This, as a matter of fact, had struck Paul Dampier at once. But hedidn't want to go on to Brooklands! Brooklands? Beastly hot day; crowdsof people; go up in an affair like an old Vanguard?

  What he wanted, after a hard day's work yesterday on his own (sodifferent) Machine, was a day's peace and quiet and to think things abit over about her (the Machine) lying on his back somewhere shady, witha pipe. Actually, he would rather have been alone. But this little girl,Miss Williams.... She was all right. Not only pretty ... but such aquiet, sensible sort of little thing. He'd take her up another time,since she was keen. He certainly would take her up. Not to-day. To-daythey'd just picnic. _She_ wouldn't want to be giggling and chatteringabout herself the whole time, and all that sort of thing, like some ofthem. She liked to listen.

  She'd be interested to hear what he'd been doing lately, about theMachine. For a girl, she was pretty bright, and even if she didn't graspthings at once, she evidently liked hearing about the Machine; besideswhich, it often cleared one's own ideas to one's self, to have to set'em out and explain about the machinery very simply, to some one who waskeen, but who hadn't a notion. They'd have a nice, peaceful time, thisafternoon; somewhere cool, instead of Brooklands. And a nice longtalk--_all_ about the Machine.

  He returned to the girl waiting in the car. Gwenna, cheering up at thesight of him, saw that his pockets were bulging with bottles, and thathe carried a square, straw basket.

  "There. I might have taken Hugo's luncheon-basket and filled that whileI was about it; only I forgot there was one," he said, standing on theroad and screwing up his eyes a little in the midday sun as he facedthe car. "It's nicer eating out of doors, when you get a chance. Beastlydusty on the road here, though, and things going by all the time andkicking up clouds of it all over you. We'll find a pitch in that field."

  So she jumped down from her seat and the two left the glaring road andgot through that gap in the hedgerow where maybush and blackberry trailand grass and campion alike were all thickly powdered and drooping withdust.

  The boy and girl skirted another hedge that ran at right angles to theroad. Half-way up that field a big elm tree spread a patch of shade atits base like a dark-green rug for them to sit on. Paul Dampier put hiscoat down also. They sat, with moon-daisies and branching buttercups,and cow-parsley all sweet and clean about them.

  Here the country-bred girl, forgetting her disappointment, gave a quicklittle sigh of content. She glanced about her at the known faces offlower-friends in the grass; a diaper of colours. Each year she hadloved the time when white daisies and red sorrel and yellow rattleflaunted together over the heads of the lower-growing clovers andspeedwells and potentillas. This year it seemed lovelier than ever. Sheput out her hand and pulled up a lance of jointed grass, nibbling thesoft, pale-green end of it.

  "Here, are you as hungry as all that?" laughed young Dampier at herside. "We'll feed."

  He let Gwenna spread out upon the clean dinner-napkin in which they werewrapped the provisions that he had brought from the inn.

  "All I could get. Bread-and-cheese. Couple of hunks of cold beef.Butter--sal
t," he said, giving her the things as he named them. "PlatesI said we wouldn't worry about; chuck the crumbs to the birds. Here'swhat I got to drink; cider. D'you like it?"

  "Love it," said Gwenna, who had never happened to taste it. But she knewthat she would love it.

  "Good. Oh! _Now_ I've forgotten the glass, though," exclaimed youngDampier, sitting up on his knees on the shaded patch of grass besideher. "We shall both have to use the lower half of my flask. Sorry--hopeyou don't mind."

  Gwenna, taking her first taste of cider in bird-like sips from thatoblong silver thing, remembered the old saying, "Drink from my cup andyou will think my thoughts." Then he put down upon the dinner napkin thehalf-loaf and the lump of cheese that he had been munching. He took thehalf of the flask, simply, out of the girl's hand, poured out morecider, and drank in turn.

  "That's better," he said, smiling. She smiled back at him.

  She had ceased to feel any shyness of this fair-haired aviator whorested there beside her in this oasis of shade from the elm, whilebeyond them stretched the wide, dazzlingly bright desert of theflowering meadow, bounded by its hedges. He cut off the crusty part ofthe loaf for her (since she said she liked it). He sliced for her thedamp and pinkish beef, since she would not confide to him her deep andfeminine loathing of this fare. The woman is not yet born who can lookupon cold meat as a food. And they drank in turn from his silver flask.This was their third meal together; yet Gwenna felt that she had beengrown-up and conscious of delight in the world about her only since theyhad met.

  Ease and gaiety rose between them in a haze like that which vibratedover the warm hay-field where they feasted.

  "I say, I shall have to give a lunch at the Carlton to everybody Iknow," he laughed, half to himself, presently, "if I do get ColonelConyers to make 'em take up the P.D.Q." Then, turning more directly toher. "Sorry--you don't know that joke. It's my Aeroplane, you know."

  "Oh, yes, the one Mr. Swayne calls your _Fiancee_!" took up Gwennaquickly. Then she wished she hadn't said that. She reddened. She turnedher supple little body to toss crumbs to a yellow-hammer that was eyeingthem from a branch in the hedge behind her. And then she asked. "Why'the P.D.Q.'?"

  "Because she will be the Paul Dampier One, I hope," explained the younginventor, "and I always think of her as that other because it means'Pretty Dam--Dashed Quick.'"

  "Oh, is that it?" said Gwenna.

  She echoed crossly to herself, "'_I always think of her_' indeed! Itsounds like----"

  And she finished her thought with the hardest-working word in her nativetongue; the Welsh for sweetheart.

  "It does sound just as if he were talking about his _cariad_."

  Absently she brushed more crumbs off her side of the dinner-napkin.

  For one-half only of Gwenna now seemed to note that they were eatingcrusty loaf and drinking cider out of doors between a lupin-blue sky anda flowerful meadow; the other was conscious of nothing but hercompanion; of the clear friendliness of his eyes, those eyes of Icarus!Of his deep and gentle voice saying, "Mind if I smoke? You don't, Iknow," of those brown hard-looking forearms from which he had nottroubled to pull down the sleeves, of his nearness.

  Suddenly he came nearer still.

  He had not stopped talking of his aeroplane, but she hardly rememberedthat she had asked him the meaning of one of the expressions that he hadused.

  He was repeating it.

  "'Camber?' ... Well, it's a curve. A curve like----" He glanced aboutfor an example of the soft, end-wise curve on the great wings of anaeroplane; his eyes passing quickly from the green hedge to the ground,to the things on the picnic cloth, to Gwenna Williams's small hand as itrested in the grass.

  She wondered, thrilled, if the young Airman were actually going to takehold of her hand.

  He did take her hand, as simply as he had taken the silver cup from it.He bent it over so that her wrist made a gentle curve. He passed his ownlarge fingers across it.

  "Yes; there--that's the curve," he said. "Almost exactly."

  It might have been a caress.

  But, done as he did it, the light movement was nothing of the kind.Instinct told the girl that. It wasn't her small and soft andpink-palmed hand that he was thinking of holding. She looked at him ashe said, "That's the curve," and she caught a gleam of quickenedinterest in his eyes. But in one mortified flash she knew that this hadnothing to do with her. She guessed that at this moment he'd forgottenthat there was a girl sitting there beside him at all.

  And she knew why.

  Angrily she said to herself, "He's thinking of nothing but that oldmachine of his! And I do--yes, I do, _do_ hate her!"

  Then she sat for a moment still as the elm-trunk against which she'dbeen leaning.

  She had been struck thus motionless by a thought.

  Something had been brought home to her by that sharp and sudden twingeof--Jealousy!

  Yes! She knew now! What she felt, and must have been feeling for dayspast, was what they meant by falling in love.

  "That's what I've done!" she thought rapidly; half in consternation,half in delight. "It's beginning to happen what Mr. Swayne was talkingabout at that tea: the Girl or the Flying Machine!"

  She glanced towards the gap in the hedge as if to look at the car thathad brought them, motionless by the road-side; she turned her face awayfrom the Airman, who sat lighting a pipe with the shadows of theelm-branches dappling his fair head and shirt-sleeved shoulders.

  She was blushing warmly at her own thoughts.

  "It's only the flying-machine he cares about! He does like me, too; in away.... If only he'd forget that other for a minute! But if he won't,"thought Gwenna, happening upon an ancient piece of feminine philosophy,"I'd rather have him talking about _her_ than not talking to me at all!"

  She spoke aloud, sedately but interestedly.

  "Oh, is _that_ a camber?" That light touch of his seemed still upon herwrist, though he had withdrawn it carelessly at once. She paused, thensaid, "And what was that other thing, Mr. Dampier? Something about anangle?"

  "A dihedral angle?" he said, drawing at that pipe. "Oh, that's the angleyou see from the front of the thing. It's--look, it's like that."

  This time it was not her hand he took as an illustration. He pointed,pipe in hand, to where, above the opposite hedge, a crow was sailingslowly, a vandyke of black across the cloudless blue.

  "See that bird? It's that very slight V he makes; _now_."

  "And this machine of yours?" persisted the girl, with a little twitch ofher mouth for the rival whom he, it seemed, always thought of as "theP.D.Q." and whom Gwenna must always think of as "the _Fiancee_." Shewondered where it lived, the creature that meant all to him. She said,"Where--where d'you _make_ that machine?"

  "Oh, I'm afraid it isn't a machine yet, you see. It's only a model ofone, so far. You know, like a model yacht," he explained. "That's theworst of it. You see, you can make a model do anything. It's when youget the thing life-size that the trouble begins. Model doesn't give areally fair idea of what you've got to get. The difficulties--it's neverthe real thing."

  Gwenna thought, "It must be like making love to the person you aren'treally in love with!" But what she said, with her hand stripping a spikeof flowering grass, was, "I suppose it's like practising scales and allthat on a mute piano?"

  "Never tried", he said. Then: "_The model's_ at my own place, my roomsin"----here he broke off with a laugh. He looked straight into her faceand said, still laughing, and in a more personal tone:

  "Not in Victoria Street. I say, you spotted that _that_ place wasn'tmine, didn't you?"

  "Leslie 'spotted' and said so, afterwards," admitted Gwenna demurely,picking and sniffing at a piece of pink clover before she fastened itinto her white blouse. "I did think at the time that it wasn't--wasn'tthe sort of place where you'd find a man living who _did_ things, like."

  "Rather rough on old Hugo."

  "Well, but _does_ he do things?"

  "He doesn't have to. He'd be all right if he did. Sweat som
e of thatbeef off him, give him something to think about," averred his cousin,carelessly knocking out his pipe against the heel of his shoe. "But, youknow, my place is in Camden Town; most inferior. Three rooms over apaper shop; two small cubby-holes where I sleep and eat, and a ratherbigger one where I keep the 'P.D.Q.' stuff. I couldn't have you therethat Sunday."

  "Why not?" Gwenna asked sharply, and jealous again. It was almost as ifthe _Fiancee_ had said to him, "_No, not here_!"

  "Because," he said with a chuckle, "because at the last moment, when I'dgot the tea ready and everything"--he tossed his fair head back--"a fallof soot down the chimney! Everything in the most ghastly mess! Pitchblack wherever you put a finger. I simply couldn't--it was four o'clockthen; I expect you both thought it rotten of me. Still," he concluded,rather ruefully, "I couldn't give you the sort of polite tea Hugo can,anyhow."

  "I don't want polite teas!" Gwenna protested, looking round at the fieldwhere she had feasted as if in Elysium. "You don't suppose I care forthings all grand like that, do you?"

  He responded, "Would you care to see my Camden Town place, then, and themodel? You and Miss Long. It's quite near you, you know."

  "Yes, I should," said Gwenna quietly, stripping her grass.

  How could he, she wondered, ask if she "cared" for these things thatopened out new worlds to her? If he only knew, just to be with him waspart of that new, soaring freedom which to her was summed up in the ideaof flying! This, she felt, _was_ flying. She didn't care, after all, ifthere were no other flying that afternoon. Care? _She_ wouldn't mindsitting there until the sun slipped slowly downwards towards the westernhedge and the moon-daisies closed in the tall grass, and clouds of othertiny flying creatures poised and hovered above them. _She_ wasn't sorrythat the mechanic did not return in haste to minister to thatbroken-down car. When she did remember about it, it was almost to hopethat he would not be back! Not just yet! Not to put an end to thisgolden afternoon of talk that, trivial as it was, seemed to her to bethe endowment of a new faculty, and of comradeship that was as beguilingand satisfying as that of her bosom-chum, Leslie. Only newer, only morecomplete. So it seemed to Gwenna, as the shadows moved further up thegrass where she sat with her new boy-friend.

  For it is a commonplace that in all comradeship between man and womanpassionate love claims a share. But also in all passionate love there ismore comradeship than the unimaginative choose to admit; there is ahappy inner meaning to the cottage phrase, "To keep company with."

  What he thought about it she did not know. Except that he surely mustlike talking to her? He could not go on like this out of politeness.

  Ah, besides--! Besides, she knew, without reasoning about it, that, evenwith that absorbing interest of the aeroplane in the background, he didlike her. Just as Leslie, her other friend, who also knew so much morethan she did, had liked her at once.

  "Only," decided Gwenna, in the uttermost depths of her shy and daringheart, "only he's _got_ to like me, some day, better than Leslie evercould. He must. Yes; he _must_!"

  And she thought it so ardently that she almost expected him, catchingher thought, to answer it in words. She looked--no, he had caughtnothing. But, meeting his eyes again, her own read a message that herfluttered mind had been told before this, but would scarcely let herbelieve. He thought she was pretty to look at. She had taken off her hatnow, as she liked to do in the open air, and the light breeze tossed hershort locks about.

  "I _believe_ he thinks," Gwenna told herself, "that my hair's nice."

  As a matter of fact she was right. If she could have read hercompanion's thoughts at the moment she would have known of a quitefoolish but recurrent wish on his part. A wish that he might just runhis fingers through all those brown and thickly-twisting curls, to findout 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 wenton talking to the Little Thing (in his mind this babyish-faced but quitequick-witted girl was now always to be "the Little Thing") about thechance 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 talkabout it," he said. "I know he's dead keen. _He_ knows that it'saeroplanes 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 knowsthat----"

  "Yes, of course," agreed Gwenna, watching him as he stretched himselflazily out, chest downwards, elbows in, on the grass, chin propped inhis 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 orsobering in response to every modulation of his voice.

  It was jolly, he thought, to find a girl who wasn't in the least boredby "Shop." She _was_ a very jolly Little Thing. So sensible. Nononsense about her, thought the boy.

  And she, when at last they rose and left the place, threw a last lookback at that patch of sky above the hedge, where the black crow had madea dihedral angle, at that brooding elm, at that hay field, golden in thelevel rays, at that patch of dusty road where the car had pulled up, atthat black telegraph-pole where he had hung up his coat. That picturewas 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 andless imagination would have pronounced "tame enough," Gwenna,bright-eyed and rosy from her day in the sunshine, could hardly believethat a whole lifetime had not elapsed since last she'd seen theeveryday, 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 hairon 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 a _lovely_ lunch on the roadwhile we were waiting for the man to mend the car--and then we'd tea ata cottage while he was doing it--and then there wasn't time to doanything but come back to town," explained Gwenna breathlessly,untying her scarf; "and then we'd sort of dinner at the inn before westarted back; they brought out a table and things into the garden underthe trees."

  "What did you have for dinner?"

  "I don't know. Oh, there were gooseberries," said Gwenna vaguely, "and alamp. And the moths all came. Oh, Leslie! It's _been_ so splendid!" Shecaught her breath. "I mean, it was _dreat_ful about no flying, but----"

  "Glad the afternoon wasn't entirely a washout," said Miss Long, in aneven 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 cloverthat had fallen out of her blouse. "I'll ask him next time. He's goingto take me up soon, you know, again."

  Just as an alarm is "set" to sound at some given hour, so the whole ofthe girl's innocent being was set, to wait and wait for that "next time"of meeting him--whenever it should be.