by Berta Ruck
CHAPTER XIV
AN AWAKENING
The sore of that jealousy still smarted in the girl's mind as she turnedher pillow restlessly.... She could not sleep until long after thestarlings had been twittering and the milk-carts rattling by in thesuburban road outside. She awoke, dispirited. She came down late forbreakfast; Leslie had already gone off to her old lady in Highgate. Overthe disordered breakfast-table Miss Armitage was making plans, with someof the other Suffrage-workers, to "speak" at a meeting of the FabianNursery. Those young women talked loudly enough, but they didn'tpronounce the ends of any of their words; hideously slipshod it allsounded, thought the Welsh girl fretfully. Her world was a desert toher, this fine June morning. For at the Westminster office things seemedas dreary as they had at the Club. She began to see what people meantwhen they said that on long sea-voyages one of the greatest hardshipswas 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 onewas shut up to work day after day in an office with the same people. Shewas sick to death of all the faces of all the people here. Miss Butcherwith her Cockney accent! Miss Baker with her eternal crochet! The men inthe yards with their _awful_ tobacco and trousers! Nearly all men, shethought, were ugly. All old men. And most of the young ones; _round_backs, _horrid_ hands, _disgusting_ skins--Mr. Grant, for instance!(with a glance at that well-meaning engineer, when he brought in somenote for Mabel Butcher). Those swarthy men never looked as if they hadbaths and proper shaves. He'd a head like a black hatpin. And hisaccent, thought the girl from the land where every letter of a word ispronounced, 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 thisaft'noon," he was saying to Miss Butcher. "Young French Dook or Comp orsomething, he is; taking out a patent for a new crane. Coming in earlywith some swagger friends of his. Wants to be shown the beauties of thebuildin', I s'pose. Better bring him in here and let him have a goodlook at you girls first thing, hadn't I? S'long! Duty calls. I mustaway."
And away he went, leaving Miss Butcher smiling fondly after him, whileMiss Williams wondered how on earth any girl ever managed to fall inlove, considering there was nothing but young men to fall in love with.All ordinary young men were awful. And all young men _were_ ordinary....Except, now and again, one ... far away ... out of reach.... Who justshowed how different and wonderful a thing a lover might be! If onecould 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 and more dissatisfiedwith all her surroundings. And for a girl of Gwenna's sort to bethoroughly dissatisfied predicts one thing only. She will not long staywhere she is.
Impatiently she sighed over her typing-table. Irritably she fidgeted inher chair. This was what jerked the plump arm of Ottilie Becker, who waspassing behind her, and who now dropped a handful of papers on to thenew boards.
"Zere! Now see what you have made me do," said the German girlgood-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 roseto Miss Becker's blue eyes. Miss Butcher, coming across to the centretable, saw those tears.
"Well, really, anybody might _apologise_," she remarked reproachfully,"when they've _upset_ anybody."
At this rebuke Gwenna's strained nerves snapped.
An Aberystwith Collegiate School expression rose naturally to herlips--"_Cau dy geg_!" She translated it: "Shut _up_!" she said, quiterudely.
Then, the moment after she had given way to this little outburst oftemper she felt better. She was ready to be on the best of terms againwith her fellow-typists. They, as Miss Butcher would have said, "weren'thaving any." They turned offended backs upon her. They talked pointedlyto each other, not to her.
"That's a precious long letter you've got written there, Baker," saidMiss Butcher, helping to gather up the half-dozen thin foreign sheets,covered with neat, pointed German writing. "Is that to the belovedbrother?"
Miss Becker nodded her plait-wreathed head as she put the letter thatbegan: "_Geliebter Karl!_" into the grey-lined envelope.
"He likes to hear what they make--do--at the works. Always he ask," shesaid, "after what they do. And who come hier; and where everythings iskept."
"Gracious! I do believe he's a regular German spy, like in themagazines, this brother of yours," smiled Miss Butcher lightly. "Don'tyou give away any of our State secrets, Baker, will you? We'd be havingthe authorities, whoever they are, poking round and inquiring. Awful ifEngland and your country went to war, wouldn't it?--and you weresupposed to be 'the Enemy'!"
She spoke as if of something that was more fantastic than Gwenna'sflying dream of the night before. The German typist answered in the samestrain.
"If it _was_ war, I would speak to Karlchen's regiment that your housein Clapham and your people should be saved," she promised. "But he isnot 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 tohave our lunch, yes?"
The two went out together towards Whitehall. The Welsh girl was left inCoventry--and the deserted offices.
She didn't want any lunch. She drank a glass of tepid tap-water from thedressing-room. She ate some strawberries, bought in their little flatbasket as she had come along. Then, hatless, and in her thin, one-piecedress 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-litteredground where the ubiquitous London pigeons strutted and flirted and"Croo--_croo_--do--I--do"-ed about her feet. Overhead, that giantlacework on its iron crochet-hooks looked as if its pattern had beendrawn with a pen and black ink against the opaque blue-grey sky. Thesight of that far-off pinnacle put into her head again the thought offlying.
"I don't believe that I shall ever be as high up as that, with the bluebeneath me, like I've always wanted!" reflected the young girl,dolefully looking up. "I believe that last night in my dream is all theflying I'm ever going to have had!"
And again that longing took her. That pure longing to be high; above theLaw that clogs the children of Man to the Earth from which he came. Tofeel 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 might _climb_.
The idea with which she started off on her mad prank was to climb up tothat iron lattice of lacework; to run up that as a sailor climbs therope-ladders of his masts, and thence from the very highest peakattainable to look down on London, even as last night she had lookeddown on it from her dream.
Her start was not in the open air at all, but from the bottom of thescaffolding inside, where it was all beams and uprights and floors ofplanks. It reminded Gwenna of being underneath the old wooden pier atAberdovey, and looking up. She went up ladders, through trap-doors,walked over wooden floors to other ladders until she got up to the lasttrap-door and through it out of the shadow and the stuffiness to thesunshine and the fresh air again. She stood on the top platform of thegantry which supported that engine and the wheels that worked (shesupposed) the iron lattice that was still far above her head.
Presently she would climb that. She knew that she could. She was neverafraid of heights. Her head was steady enough. Her feet in their brownshoes were as sure as the feet of the tiny sheep that picked their wayup the rocky steeps of her Welsh mountains. She could climb as well asany of the men ... but for the moment she rested, standing by theplatform hand-railing, breathing in the freshened breeze.
The birds of the City--pigeons and sparrows--were taking their shortflights far beneath her perch. All London was spread below her, as ithad been in that flying dream, a
nd with as strong a sense of securityas in the dream she looked down upon it.
There, between the forests of chimney-pots, gleamed that highway of theThames, blue-grey now as it reflected the sky, winding out of thedistance that meant the clean, green country and the willows below thelawns where people had danced; flowing on into London that sullied it,and burdened it with her barges, and spanned it with her bridges, butcould not stay it; on and out its waters passed towards Greenwich andthe Docks and the tall ships and the North Sea!
And there on its bank was the office, the dwindled yard from whichGwenna had started. The men returning....
The whole place looked nothing more than a hen-run full of fowls. Theirvoices ascended, more loudly than she would have expected to hear fromtheir diminished figures. How funny to see what midgets the creatureslooked from here, and to remember how majestically important eachconsidered himself! thought little Gwenna, forgetting that from the yardshe herself, with her grey linen frock, her brown feet and ankles, mustlook no larger than a roosting pigeon.
She looked down, past the railing and the ends of timbers, feelingimmeasurably aloof from everybody in her world. She wished she neednever go down to it again.
"I've a _good_ mind to give notice at the office, whatever, and gosomewhere quite different!" she thought defiantly, and immediately shefelt elated. A weight of depression seemed to have dropped from heralready. Up, up went the feather-weight spirits of Youth. She hadforgotten 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 thegirls 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 thesound of a voice. It had seemed to have come out of nothing, from behindher, and it had said, with a laugh deep and soft at once, "_My_ machine?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 ownthoughts, had heard nothing of the steps of five pairs of feet coming upthe way that she had come. In the violence of her surprise of hearing avoice, so often heard in her daydreams now, here, in this unexpectedplace 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--onesmall foot and ankle stretched out over the giddy height as that cranewas stretched. She clutched on the crook of a slender grey arm, therailing 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'sfigure across the planks from the trap-door.
"It's all right--I've got you," said Paul Dampier, and caught her upfrom the edge, in his arms.
They held her. That armful of a girl, soft and warm as one of the greypigeons, was crushed for a moment against the boy's chest. She wascloser to him than she had been in any of those waltzes. Yet it seemedno strangeness to be so near--feeling his heart beat below hers, feelingthe 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 haveknown it all before."
Then, dazed but happy, resting where she seemed to belong, she thoughtin a twink, "I shall have to let go. _Why_ can't I stay like this?...Oh, it's very cruel. There! Now I have let go. But he won't.... He'sgetting his balance."
He had taken a step backwards.
Then she slid through his arms. She slipped, lightly as a squirrel slipsdown 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 mustend, the Airman, when she left his enforced clasp, scarcely looked ather. He barely returned her greeting. He did not answer her breathlessthanks. He turned away from her--whom he had saved. Yes! He left her tothe meaningless babble of the others (she recognised now, in a dazedway, that there were other men with him on the scaffolding). He left herto 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 neverlooked again as Miss Williams was guided down the trap-door and theladders by the scolding Yorkshire foreman, who didn't leave her untilshe 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 hadbeen terrified. Miss Butcher now brought lavender salts. Miss Becker'spink moon of a face was blanched with horror over her colleague'sdanger.
"Do you know what could have happened, Candlesticks-maker, my dear?"cried the German girl with real emotion, as they all made tea togetherin the varnished, stifling office. "You could have been killed, you!"
Gwenna thought, "That would have been too bad. Because then--_then_ Ishouldn't have known when he held me!"
* * * * *
As it was, there were several things about that incident that the younggirl--passionate and infatuated and innocent--did not know.
For one thing, there was the resolution that Paul Dampier took justafter he had turned abruptly from her, had taken short leave of theothers, and when he was striding down Whitehall to the bus that wentpast the door of his Camden Town rooms. And for another thing, there wasthe 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 theuntroubled sleep of years. Sometimes it is the Prince who is suddenlystirred, jarred, or jolted broad awake by the touch, in some form orother, of Love. In Paul Dampier's case the every-day miracle had beenwrought by the soft weight of that dove-breasted girl against his heartfor no longer than he could count ten, by her sliding to the earththrough an embrace that he had not intended for an embrace at all.
It hadn't seemed to matter what _he_ had intended!
In a flock as of homing pigeons there flew back upon the young aviatorall 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 heforgot). How topping and natural it had seemed to sit there with her inthat field, talking to her, drinking with her out of one silver cup. Howhe'd found himself wanting to touch her curls; to span and squeeze herthroat with his hands. How he'd been within an inch of summarily kissingthat fox-glove pink mouth of hers, that night at the Dance....
And to-day, when he'd come to Westminster for another talk with thatrather decent young Frenchman of Hugo's, when he hadn't thought ofseeing the girl at all, what had happened? He'd actually held herclasped 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 thefeeling of that warm and breathing burden which seemed even yet to restagainst his quickened heart.
In that heart there surged up a clamorous impulse to go back at once. Tosnatch her up for the second time in his arms, and not to let her goagain, either. To satisfy that hunger of his fingers and lips for thetouch of her----
"_Hold_ hard!" muttered the boy to himself. "Hang it all, this won'tdo."
For he had found himself actually turning back, his face set towards theAbbey.
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 thisrate I shall be making an ass of myself before I know where I am; goingand falling in--going and getting myself much too dashed fond of theLittle 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 Londonsummer crowd, it wouldn't be one of these Fancy-dress-dance
flirtations. Not that sort of girl. "Nor was he; really." Not that sortof man, he meant. Sort of thing never had amused him, much; not, heknew, because he was cold-blooded ("Lord, no!") but partly because he'dhad such stacks of other things to do, partly because--because he'dalways thought it ought to be (and could be) so much more--well, amusingthan it was. This other. This with the Little Thing--he somehow knewthat it would have to be "for keeps."
And _that_ he couldn't have. Good Lord, no! There could be noquestion--Great Scott!
For yes, if there _was_ anything between him and the Little Thing, itwould have to be an engagement. Marriage, and all that.
And Paul Dampier didn't intend to get married. Out of the question forhim.
He'd only just managed to scrape through and make "some sort of afooting" for himself in the world as it was. His father, a hard-up Civilengineer, and his mother (who had been looked askance at by her people,the Swaynes, for marrying the penniless and undistinguished PaulDampier, senior)--they'd only just managed to give their boy "some kindof an education" before they pegged out. Lessons at home when he'd beena little fellow. Afterwards one of the (much) smaller public-schools.For friends and pleasures and holidays he had been dependent on what hecould "pick up" for himself. Old Hugo had been decent enough. He'd askedhis cousin to fish with him in Wales, twice, and he hadn't allowed Paulto feel that he was--the poor relation.
Only Paul remembered the day that Hugo was going back to Harrow for thelast time. He, Paul, had then been a year in the shops, to the day. Heremembered 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, justbecause I'm poor. If being poor means being 'out of it,' having no Powerof any kind, I'm dashed if I _stay_ poor. I'll show that I can makegood----"
And, gradually, step by step, the young mechanic, pilot, aero-racer andinventor had been "making good."
He'd made friends, too. People had been decent. He'd been made to feelthat _they_ felt he was going to be a useful sort of chap. He'd quaileda bit under the eyes of butlers in these houses where he'd stayed, buthe'd been asked again. That Mrs. What's-her-name (the woman in the pinkfrock at the Smiths) had been awfully kind. Introducing him to herbrothers with capital; asking him down to the New Forest to meet someother influential person; and knowing that he couldn't entertain inreturn. (He'd just sent her some flowers and some tickets forBrooklands.) Then there was Colonel Conyers. He'd asked whether he(Dampier) were engaged. And, at his answer, had replied, "Good. Mucheasier 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 waitfor----
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 a _girl_!"
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 nightat the Dance. Only more so. Incessant. "Mustn't have it; quite simply,he must _not_."
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 thatrot of old Hugo's about the struggle in a man's mind between anAeroplane and a Girl. Now--well, he'd realised. All the better. Now hewas forewarned. Good thing he could take a side for himself now.
By the time he'd reached the door of the National Portrait Gallery andstood waiting for his motor omnibus, he had definitely taken thatresolution of which Gwenna Williams did not know.
Namely, that he must drop seeing the Girl. Have nothing more to say toher. It was better so; wiser. Whatever he'd promised about taking her upwould have to be "off."
A pity--! Dashed shame a man couldn't have _everything_! She was ... soawfully sweet....
Still, got to decide one way or the other.
This would fix it before it was too late, before he'd perhaps managed toput ideas into the head of the Little Thing. She shouldn't ever comeflying, with him!
That _ended_ it! he thought. He'd made up _his_ mind. He would not allowhimself to wonder what _she_ might think.
After all, what _would_ a girl think? Probably nothing.
Nothing at all, probably.
