The Boy with Wings

by Berta Ruck

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE AEROPLANE LADY

  Curiously enough, Gwenna did think of it again.

  On the Saturday morning after that walk and talk she took that long dulltrain-journey. The only bright spot on it was the passing of HendonFlying Ground. Over an hour afterwards she arrived at the littlestation, set in a sunburnt waste, for the Aircraft Works.

  She asked her way of the ticket-collector at the booking-office. Butbefore he could speak, she was answered by some one else, who had comedown to the station for a parcel. This was a shortish young man ingreasy blue overalls. He had a smiling, friendly, freckled face under athatch of brilliant red hair; and a voice that seemed oddly out ofkeeping with his garments. It was an "Oxford" voice.

  "The Works? I'm just going on there myself. I'll come with you and showyou, if I may," he said with evident zest.

  Gwenna, walking beside him, wished that she had not immediatelyremembered Leslie's remarks about young men at aircraft works who mightbe glad of the arrival of a new pretty face. This young man, pilotingher down a straggling village street that seemed neither town norcountry, told her at once that he was a pupil at the Works and askedwhether she herself were going to help Mrs. Crewe there.

  "I don't know yet," said Gwenna. "I hope so."

  "So do I," said the young man gravely, but with a glint of unreservedadmiration in the eyes under the red thatch.

  Little Gwenna, walking very erect, wished that she were strong andself-reliant enough not to feel cheered by that admiration.

  (But she was cheered. No denying that!)

  The young man took her down a road flanked on either hand by sparsehedges dividing it from that parched and uninteresting plain. Themountain-bred girl found all this flat country incredibly ugly. Only, onher purple Welsh heights and in the green ferny depths threaded bycrystal water, nothing ever happened. It was here, in this half-ruraldesert littered by builders' rubbish and empty cans, that Enterprise wasafoot. Strange!

  * * * * *

  On the right came an opening. She saw a yard with wooden debris and whatlooked like the wrecks of a couple of motor-cars. Beyond was a clusterof buildings with corrugated iron roofs.

  The red-haired pupil mentioned the name of the Aeroplane Lady and said,"I think you'll find her in the new Wing-room, over here----"

  "What a wonderful name for it," thought the little enthusiast, catchingher breath, as she was shown through a door. "The Wing-room!"

  It was high and clean and spacious, with white distempered walls and afloor of wood-dura, firm yet comforting to the feet. The atmosphere ofit was, on that July day, somewhat overpowering. Two radiators wereworking, and the air was heavy with a smell of what seemed likerubber-solution and spirits mixed: this, Gwenna presently found, was the"dope" to varnish the strong linen stretched across the wings ofaeroplanes. Two of those great wings were laid out horizontally ontrestles to dry. Another of the huge sails with cambered sections wasset up on end across a corner; and from behind it there moved, steppingdaintily and majestically across the floor, the tawny shape of a GreatDane, who came inquiringly up to the stranger.

  Then from behind the screening wing there came a slight, woman's figurein dark blue. She followed the dog. Little Gwenna Williams, standingtimidly in that great room so strange and white, and characteristicallyscented, found herself face to face with the mistress of the place; theAeroplane Lady.

  Her hair was greying and fluffy as a head of windblown Traveller'sJoy; beneath it her eyes were blue and young and bright and--yes! with alittle glad start Gwenna recognised that in these eyes too there wassomething of that space-daring gleam of the eyes of Icarus, of her ownFlying Man.

  "Ah ... I know," said the lady briskly. "You're the girl Leslie's sentdown to see me."

  "Yes," said Gwenna, thinking it nice of her to say "Leslie" and not"Miss Long." She noticed also that the Aeroplane Lady wore at the collarof her shirt a rather wonderful brooch in the shape of the _caducaeus_,the serpent-twisted rod of Mercury. "Oh, I _do_ hope she'll take me!"thought the young girl, agitated. "I do want more than anything to comehere to work with her. Oh, supposing she thinks I'm too silly and youngto be any use--supposing she won't take me----"

  She was tense with nervousness while the Aeroplane Lady, fondling theGreat Dane's tawny ear with a small, capable hand as she spoke, put thegirl through a short catechism; asking questions about her age, herpeople, her previous experience, her salary.... And then she was toldthat she might come and work on a month's trial at the Factory,occupying a room in the Aeroplane Lady's own cottage in the village. Theyoung girl, enraptured, put down her success to the certificates fromthat Aberystwith school of hers, where she had passed "with distinction"the Senior Cambridge and other examinations. She did not guess that theAeroplane Lady had taken less than two minutes to make sure that thislittle Welsh typist-girl carried out what Leslie Long had said of her.

  Namely that "she was so desperately keen on anything to do with flyingand flyers that she'd scrub the floors of the shops for you if youwished it, besides doing your business letters as carefully as if eachone was about some important Diplomatic secret ... try her!"

  So on the following Monday Gwenna began her new life.

  At first this new work of Gwenna's consisted very largely of what Lesliehad mentioned; the writing-out of business letters at the table setunder the window in the small private office adjoining the greatWing-room.

  (Curious that the Wings for Airships, the giant butterfly aeroplanesthemselves, should grow out of a chrysalis of ordinary business, withletters that began, "_Sir, we beg to thank you for your favour of the2nd instant, and to assure you that same shall receive our immediateattention_," exactly the sort of letters that Gwenna had typed duringall those weeks at Westminster!)

  Then there were orders to send off for more bales of the linen that wasstretched over the membranes of those wings; or for the great reels ofwire which strung the machines, and which cost fifteen pounds apiece;orders for the metal which was to be worked in the shops across theparched yard, where men of three nationalities toiled at thelathe; turning-screws, strainers, washers, and all the tiny,complicated-looking parts that were to be the bones and the sinewsand the muscles of the finished Flying Machine.

  Gwenna, the typist, had at first only a glimpse or so of these othersides of the Works.

  Once, on a message from some visitor to the Aeroplane Lady she passedthrough the great central room, larger than her Uncle's chapel at home,with its concrete floor and the clear diffused light coming through themany windows, and the never-ceasing throb of the gas-driven enginepulsing through the lighter sounds of chinking and hammering. Mechanicswere busy all down the sides of this hall; in the aisle of it, threemachines in the making were set up on the stands. One was ready all butthe wings; its body seemed now more than it would ever seem that of agiant fish; it was covered with the doped linen that was laced at theseams with braid, eyelets and cord, like an old-fashioned woman'scorset. The second was half-covered. The third was all as yet uncovered,and looked like the skeleton of a vast seagull cast up on someprehistoric shore.

  Wondering, the girl passed on, to find her employer. She found her inthe fitter's shop. In a corner, the red-haired pupil, with goggles overhis eyes, was sitting at a stand working an acetylene blow-pipe; holdingin his hand the intense jet that shot out showers of squib-like sparks,and wielding a socket, the Lady directing him. She took the girl'smessage, then walked back with her to the office, her tawny dogfollowing at her heels.

  "Letters finished?... then I'd like you to help me on with the wings ofthat machine that's all but done," she said. "That is"--she smiled--"ifyou don't mind getting your hands all over this beastly stuff----"

  Mind? Gwenna would have plastered her whole little white body with thatwarmed and strongly-smelling dope if she'd thought that by so doing shewas actually taking a hand in the launching of a Ship for the Clouds.

  The rest of the afternoon she spent in the ho
t and reeking Wing-room,working side by side with the Aeroplane Lady. Industriously she pastedthe linen strips, patting them down with her little fingers on to theseams of those wide sails that would presently be spread--for whom?

  In her mind it was always one large and springy figure that she sawascending into the small plaited wicker seat of the Machine. It wasalways the same careless, blonde, lad's face that she saw tiltedslightly against the background of plane and wires....

  "I would love to work, even a little, on a machine that he was going tofly in," thought Gwenna.

  She stood, enveloped in a grey-blue overall, at the trestle-table,cutting out fresh strips of linen with scissors that were sticky andclogged with dope. She peeled the stuff from her hands in flakes likethe bark of a silver-birch as she added to her thought, "But I shouldn'twant to do anything for that aeroplane; his _Fiancee_, for the P.D.Q.Hateful creature, with her claws that she doesn't think are going to lethim go!"

  Here she set the pannikin of dope to reheat, and there was a smile ofdefiance on the girl's lips as she moved about from the trestles to theradiator or the sewing-table.

  For ever since she had been at the Works a change had come over Gwenna.

  Curiously enough, she was happier now than she had been in her life. Shewas more contented with what the present brought her; more steadilyhopeful about the future. It didn't seem to matter to her now that, thelast time she had seen him, her Aviator had turned almost sullenly away.She laughed to herself over that, for she believed at last in Leslie'stheory: "Afraid he's going to like me." She did not fret because shehadn't had even one of his brief notes since she had left London; norsigh over the fact that she, living down here in this Bedfordshirevillage, was so much further away from those rooms of his at Camden Townthan she had been when she had stayed at the Hampstead Club.

  For somehow she felt nearer to him now.

  Absence can, in some subtle, unexplained way, spin fine threads ofcommunication over the gulf between a boy and a girl....

  She found a conviction growing stronger and stronger in her girl's mind,that gay, tangled chaos where faults and faculties, blindness andintuitions flourish entwined and inseparable. _She was meant to be his._

  She'd no "reason" for thinking so, of course. There was very littlereason about Gwenna's whole make-up.

  For instance, Leslie had tried "reasoning" with her, the night beforeshe'd left the Hampstead Club. Leslie had taken it into her impish blackhead to be philosophical, and to attempt to talk her chum into the samemood.

  Leslie, the nonchalant, had given a full hour to her comments onMarriage. We will allow her a full chapter--but a short one.