The Boy with Wings

by Berta Ruck

  CHAPTER XIII

  THE FLYING DREAM

  "_Those dreams come true that are dreamed on Midsummer night!_"

  This saying Gwenna had read somewhere. But she had forgotten all aboutit until, on the night of June 24th, 1914, she dreamed the most vividdream of all her twenty-two years.

  Many people have that same dream--or versions of it--often in alifetime. Scientists have written papers on the whys and hows of it.They tack a long name to it. But little Gwenna Williams had never heardof "_levitation_." To herself she called it afterwards "_that flyingdream_."

  It seemed to her that when it began she was still half-awake, lying inher narrow white bed with the blankets tossed on to the floor of herClub bedroom, for it was a sultry night and close, in spite of herwindow on to the garden being wide open and allowing what breeze therewas to blow full upon the girl's face, stirring her curls on the pillow,the ruffle of her night-gown as she lay.

  Suddenly a violent start ran over the whole of her body. And with thatone jerk she seemed to have come out of herself. She realised, first,that she was no longer lying down, curled up in the kitten-like ballwhich was her attitude for sleeping. She was upright as if she werestanding.

  But she was not standing. Her feet were not resting on anything. Lookingdown, she found, without very much surprise, that she was poised, as alark is poised, in mid-air, at some immeasurable height. It was night,and the earth--a distant hassock of dim trees and fields--was far, farbelow her.

  She found herself moving downwards through the air.

  _She was flying!_

  Gently, gently, she sped, full of a quiet happiness in her new power,which, after all, did not seem to be something new, but somethingrestored to her.

  "Dear me, I've flown before, I know I have," said Gwenna to herself asshe swooped downwards in her dream, with the breeze cool on the soles ofher little bare feet. "This is as lovely as swimming! It's lovelier,because one doesn't have to _do_ anything. So silly to imagine that onehas to have _wings_ to fly!"

  Now she was nearer to earth, she was hovering over a dark stream ofwater with reflections that circled and broke. And beside it she sawsomething that seemed like a huge lambent mushroom set in the dim fieldsbelow her. This was a lighted tent, and from it there floated up to herfaintly the throb and thrill of dance-music, the two long-drawn-outnotes of the "Post Horn" Galop, the noise of laughter and clapping....She wondered whom she would see, if she were to alight. But the Forcein her dream bore her up again, higher, and away. She found presentlythat she had left the dancing-tent far behind, and that what streamedbelow her was no longer a river with reflections, but a road, white withdust, and by the side of it a car was standing idle by the dusty hedge.On the other side of the hedge, as she flew over, the grass was cleanand full of flowers, and half-way up the field stood a brooding elm thatcast a patch of shadow.

  "Sunshine, now!" wondered Gwenna. "How quickly it's changed from night!"

  She felt from head to foot her body light and buoyant as a driftingthistle-down as on she went through the air. Close beside her, against abank of cloud, she noticed some black V-shaped thing that slanted andflapped slow wings, then planed downwards out of her sight. "That's thatcrow. A dihedral angle, they call it," said the dreaming girl. Her nextdownward glance, as she sped upwards now, without effort, above theearth, showed her a map of distant grey roofs and green trees, andsomething that looked like a giant soap-bubble looming out of the mist.

  "St. Paul's! London!" thought Gwenna. "I wonder shall I be able to lookdown on our Westminster place."

  Then, glancing about her, she saw that the scene had suddenly changed.She was no longer in the free air with clouds about her as she flew likea little white windblown feather with the earth small as a toy puzzlebelow. She was between walls, with her feet not further than her ownheight from the ground. Night again in a room. A long, narrowish roomwith an open window through which came the light of a street-lamp thatflung a bright patch upon the carpet, the edge of a dressing-table, theend of a white bed. Upon the bed, from which the coverings had beenflung down, there lay sleeping, curled up like a kitten, a figure in awhite, ruffled night-gown, with a cherub's head thrown backwards againstthe pillow. Gwenna, looking down, thought, "Where have I seen _her_?"

  In the next flash she had realised.

  Herself!... Her own sleeping body that her dreaming soul had left forthis brief flight....

  A start more violent than that with which her dream had begun shook thedreamer as she came to herself again.

  She woke. With a pitiful little "Oh," sounding in her own ears, she satup in bed and stared about her Club bedroom with its patches of lightfrom the street-lamp outside. She was trembling from head to foot, hercurls were wet with fright, and her first thought as she sprang out ofbed and to the door of that ghostly room was "I must go to Leslie."

  But Leslie's bedroom was a story higher. Gwenna paused in the corridoroutside the nearest bedroom to her own. A thread of light showed belowthe door. It was a Miss Armitage's, and she was one of the Club members,who wrote pamphlets on the Suffrage, and like topics, far into thenight. Gwenna, feeling already more normal and cheered by the sense ofany human nearness, decided, "I won't go to her. She'll only want toread aloud to me.... She laughed at me because I said I adored 'TheForest Lovers,' but what books does _she_ like? Only those _dreat_-fullong novels all about nothing, except the diseases of people in thePotteries. Or else it'll be one of her own tracts.... Somehow she doesmake everything she's interested in sound so _ugly_. All thoseintellectual ones here do! Whether it's Marriage or Not-getting-married,you really don't know which would be the most _dull_, from thesesuffragettes," reflected the young girl, pattering down the corridoragain. "I'll go back to bed."

  She went back, snuggling under the clothes. But she could not go tosleep again for some time. She lay curled up, thinking.

  She had thought too often and too long of that dance now three wholeweeks behind her. She had recalled, too many times! every moment of it;every word and gesture of her partner's, going over and over his look,his laugh, the tone in which he'd said, "Give _me_ this waltz, willyou?" All that memory had had the sweetness smelt out of it like achild's posy. By this time it was worn thin as heirloom silver. Sheturned from it.... It was then she remembered that saying about theMidsummer Night's Dream. If that were true, then Gwenna might expectsoon to fly in reality.

  For after all her plans and hopes, she had not even yet been taken upby Paul Dampier in an aeroplane!

  In that silent, unacknowledged conflict between the Girl and theMachine, so far scarcely a score could have been put down to the creditof the Girl. It was she who had always found herself put back,disappointed, frustrated. This had been by the merest accidents.

  First of all, the Airman hadn't been able to ask her and Miss Long tohis rooms in Camden Town to look at his model aeroplane. He had beenkept hanging on, not knowing which Saturday-to-Monday Colonel Conyers("the great Air-craft Conyers") was going to ask him down to stay atthat house in Ascot, to have another talk over the subject of the newMachine. ("A score for the Machine," thought the girl; wakeful, tossingon her bed.)

  She did not even know that the week after, on a glorious and cloudlessSaturday, young Dampier, blankly unaware that there was any conflictgoing on in his world! had settled to ask "the Little Thing" to Hendon.On the Friday afternoon, however, his firm had sent him out of town,down to the factory near Aldershot. Here he had stayed until thefollowing Tuesday, putting up at the house of a kindred soul employed atthat factory, and wallowing in "Shop." ... Another win for the Machine!

  The following Sunday the cup had been almost to Gwenna's lips. He hadcalled for her. Not in the car, this time. They had taken the Tube toGolders Green; the motor-bus to Hendon Church; and then the path overthe fields together. Ah, delight! For even walking over the dusty grassbeside that swinging boy's figure in the grey tweed jacket was a joyousadventure. It had been another when he had presently stooped and said,"Shoelace come untie
d; might trip over that. I'll do it up," and hadfastened her broad brown shoe-ribbon securely for her. Her shoes hadbeen powdered white. He had taken his handkerchief out of his pocket andhad flicked the dust off, saying, as he did so, in a tone of someinterest, "I say, what tiny feet girls do have!"

  ("Pie for you, Taffy, of course," as Leslie had said later, when she'dheard of this. "Second time he'd noticed them.")

  Gwenna, in a tone half pleased, half piqued, had told him, "_All_ girlsdon't have them so small! And yet you don't seem to notice anythingabout people but their feet." She had walked on, delightedly consciousof 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-bluescarf aflutter in the brisk breeze, but not fluttering as wildly as herheart....

  And then had come frustration once again! Paul Dampier's deep andwomanishly-soft tone saying, "I say, I'm afraid it's going to be a bittoo blowy, after all. Wind's rising all the time;" and that other giantvoice 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!"

  Oh, bitter defeat for the Girl! For, this time, there had been noidyllic picnic _a deux_ to console her for any disappointment. There hadbeen nothing but a rather noisy tea in the Pavilion, with a wholechattering party of the young Airman's acquaintances; with another youngwoman who had meant to fly, but who had seemed resigned enough that itwas "not to be, _this_ afternoon," and with half a dozen strange,irrelevant young men; quite _silly_, Gwenna had thought them. Two ofthem had given Gwenna a lift back to Hampstead in their car afterwards,since Paul Dampier had explained that he "rather wanted to go on withone of the other fellows"--somewhere! Gwenna didn't know where. Only,out of her sight! Out of her world! And she was quite certain, eventhough he hadn't said so, that he had been bent on some quest that hadsomething to do with the _Fiancee_ of his, the "P.D.Q.," the Machine!