The Boy with Wings

by Berta Ruck

  CHAPTER XI

  THE HEELS OF MERCURY

  This injunction Gwenna carried out to the letter a week later. Never hadshe looked so pretty as when she smiled at her own reflection in herbedroom mirror above the cherub's ruff of wings on the evening of thedance.

  It was given by some wealthy theatrical people whose "set" oftenintermingled with that to which Hugo Swayne belonged. And it was held ina couple of big marquees that had been set up on the lawn behind theirhouse; a lawn of which the banks sloped down to the willows that fringedthe river. There was a houseboat as buffet. There were Japanese lanternsand fairy-lights. Red carpet had been put down to save costumes fromdewy grass or gravel.

  For this dance was held at the height of that brief and grotesque periodin the English history when dancing and costume--more particularly whenthe two were combined--became an affair of national moment. That was thetime when tickets for an Artists' Ball were gambled with even as stocksand shares; when prizes for costume were given of which the value raninto hundreds of pounds. When columns of responsible newspapers weregiven up to descriptions of some "brilliant carnival." When Society,the Arts, Commerce, the Stage and the Middle Class joined hands to dancethe maddest ring-o'-roses round some mulberry bush rooted in Heaven knewwhat soil of slackness. That was the time when women who were mothersand able-bodied men were ready to fritter away the remnant of theiryouth on what could be no longer pleasure, since they chased it withsuch deadly ardour, discussing the lightest types of merrymaking as ifthereupon hung the fate of an empire!

  Even little cherub-headed Gwenna Williams found something disquietingabout the sight of this throng as she scanned it with anxious eyes,for--no, HE hadn't come! He was late. Not here. Perhaps it was merelythis that caused her to dislike the look of some of these other people?That buxomly-formed young woman of twenty-five tricked out in thecostume of a child of three! That tall, fragile youth in blackgrave-clothes, mouthing falsetto patter! That pretty "lady" in spreadingGeorgian brocade and a white wig, from whose crimsoned lips there camepresently a robust masculine shout! That Madame Potiphar in the--Goodgracious!--it was another boy! No! Gwenna _didn't_ like them,somehow.... Perhaps it was just because they were here and he, the onlypartner she wished for, had not arrived. Oh, _supposing_ he were notcoming, after all?

  Under the canvas roof where garlands swung and an installation ofelectric light had been improvised, the crowd eddied and chattered andlaughed from one end to the other of the marquee where the long tableswere laid out. For it was a theatrical ball, late in beginning. Supperwas to come first. Gwenna, sitting beside a Futurist Folly whom herfriend Leslie had introduced vaguely as "one of my medical students,"watched that supper-crowd (still he did not come), as they feasted,leaning across the tables to laugh and shriek to acquaintances. It wasnot the girls or the younger men who seemed most boisterous, but thosewell over thirty. This surprised her. And even when they were mostunrestrained "they seemed," as the Welsh girl put it, "to be _making_themselves do it, like." ...

  Then she saw, by an opening in the canvas of the marquee, the apparitionof a steady man's figure, dead-white against the purple gloom outside. Afigure erect and neatly-shouldered under the close linen jacket of aContinental waiter. Gwenna wondered where she had seen him before? In aphotograph? Or perhaps attending to one of the tables at Appenrodt's,when she and Leslie had had tea after a matinee somewhere? She _had_seen that young waiter, whose appearance was in such arresting contrastto the bizarre costumes and painted faces of the noisy, laughing rabbleabout him. His face was restrained and grave as that of some very youngDaniel at the feast of some modern Belshazzar.

  Suddenly besides that still, watching apparition there came up anotherboyish figure--typically English, in ordinary evening dress, and tall,towering above the young German waiter of whom he was making someinquiry. For a second they stood so; the waiter glancinc up, thenewcomer, Paul Dampier, with his blonde head tilted a little back, hiseyes raking the crowd.

  "Ah! he's come," cried Gwenna aloud, but unheard in the universalclatter. Her heart leaped....

  But Paul Dampier, the airman, was swallowed up again almost directly ina forest of odd, luridly-coloured head-dresses. He had not seen her.

  And she did not see him again until some time after supper was ended,and the throng was whirling and writhing in one-step and ragtime in theother marquee.

  Gwenna had danced with an Apache, with a Primitive Man, with Mr. HugoSwayne (in a mask and crazy-work domino as a Simultaneous Dynamism ofSomething), and she was standing waiting, one of a figure in a revivedcotillon.

  While the Viennese band swooped and tore through the waltz "Nights ofGladness" a sheet had been fetched and was held up at the end of theballroom between a Morris-dancer and an incredibly handsome "Turco" (whopresently revealed himself as Mr. Swayne's French engineer), as a screenbefore six of the girls. Six men were to be led up to it in turn; eachto choose his partner by the feet that were just allowed to show belowthe sheet.

  Soft laughter and twittering went on at the side where the half-dozengirls stood.

  "I say," exclaimed a damsel dressed as an Austrian Peasant to hercrinolined neighbour, "_now_ we see why you were so anxious to explainwhy you were wearing scarlet----"

  "Of course he'd know yours anywhere," retorted the next girl.

  "Ssh! Play fair!" protested the next. "Mustn't be recognised by yourvoice!"

  "Oh, look at the Cherub girl's little shoes! Aren't they sweet? Justlike silver minnows peeping out----"

  Here Gwenna, standing sedately beside the scintillating, mauve-limbedNijinski, Leslie, lifted her head in quick attention. She had recogniseda voice on the other side of the sheet. A voice deep and gentle andcarrying through the clatter of talk and the mad, syncopated music. Itprotested with a laugh, "But, look _here_! I can't dance all theseweird----" It was the Airman--her Airman.

  "Oh, he's just there. He's going to choose. If only he'd choose me,"thought Gwenna, breathlessly fluttering where she stood. Then sheremembered. "Oh, but he won't know me. He doesn't know I was to havesilver shoes. If there was only _some_thing! Something to show him whichI was, I believe he'd choose me. What could I do?"

  Suddenly she thought what she could do.... Yes! Winged feet, of course,for a girl who longed to fly!

  Hurriedly she put her hands up to the ruff made of those white wings.Hastily she plucked two of them out. How was she to fasten them to herfeet, though? Alas, for the short curls that deprived her of woman'suniversal tool! She turned to her chum who was impatiently jigging intime to the music, with her long black hair swathed for once securelyunder that purple casque.

  "Leslie, quick, a hairpin! Lend me two hairpins," she whispered andsnatched them from her friend's hand. Then, holding on to Leslie's mauvesilken shoulder to support herself, Gwenna raised first one small foot,and then the other, fastening to each between the stocking and thesilver shoe, one of those tiny wings.

  They were the feathered heels of Mercury, the flying-god, that the girlwho loved a flying-man allowed to peep under the curtain behind whichshe stood.

  Above the commotion of people laughing and talking all about her and themusic she felt that he was close, only just behind that sheet. She couldhave put out a hand and, through that sheet, have touched hisshoulder.... Mustn't, of course.... Must play fair. Would he note themessage of the winged feet? Would he stop and choose her?

  Or would he pass on?