He stopped--Gwenna felt the touch of his finger on the silver tip of her shoe. All a-tremble with delight she moved aside, and stepped from behind the screen to face the partner who had chosen her.
"Hullo!" exclaimed Paul Dampier, with real surprise in his smile. "I didn't know it was you!"
Gwenna felt a little dashed, even as he slipped his arm about her and they began to waltz. She looked up into the blonde face that seemed burned so very brown against his dress-shirt, and she ventured, "You didn't know it was me? I thought that was why you chose me--I mean, I thought because I was somebody you knew----"
"Didn't know you were here. I never thought those were your feet!" he said in that adorably deep and gentle voice of his. Adding, as they turned with the turning throng, something that lifted her heart again, "I chose them because they were the prettiest, I thought."
It was simply stated, as a fact. But this, the first compliment he'd paid her, kept her silent with delight. Even as they waltzed, his arm about her rainbow scarf, the girl felt the strongest wish--the wish that the dance were at an end and she back in her bedroom at the Club, alone, so that she might think and think again over what he had said. He'd thought she had the prettiest feet!
"D'you think you could manage to spare me some others?" he asked at the end of that waltz. "You know, you're about the only girl here that I know except Miss Long."
"Leslie would introduce you to anybody you liked"--suggested little Gwenna, feeling very good for having done so. And virtue brought its reward. For with a glance about him at that coloured noisy crowd that seemed a handful of confetti tossed by a whirlwind, he told her he didn't think he wanted to be introduced, much. He wasn't really keen on a lot of people he'd never seen. But if she and Miss Long would give him a few dances----?
The girl from the country thought it almost too good to be true that she need not share him with any of these dangerously fascinating London people here, except Leslie!
In a pause they went up to where Leslie was standing near the band. Close beside her the Morris-dancer was wrangling with Hugo Swayne in his crazy-work domino, who declared, "Miss Long promised me every other dance. A week ago, my dear man. Ten days ago----"
Yes; Leslie seemed to be engaged for every dance and every extra. She tossed a "so sorry, Mr. Dampier!" over her shoulder, following it with an imperceptible feminine grimace for Gwenna's benefit. With the first bars of the next waltz she was whirled away by a tall youth garbed, becomingly enough, as a Black Panther. The room was still clear. The Black Panther and the boyishly slim girl in mauve tunic and tights waltzed, for one recurrence of the tune, alone....
Gwenna, looking after that shapely couple, knew who he was; Monty Scott, the Dean's son who had been a medical student when Leslie was at the Hospital. He had followed her to the Slade to study sculpture, and already he had proposed to her twice.
The tall and supple youth held Leslie, now, by his black-taloned gloves on her strait hips. Leslie waltzed with hands clasped at the back of his neck. Then, with a backward fling of her head and body, she twisted herself out of his hold. She waltzed, holding the flat palms of her hands pressed lightly to the palms of his. The music altered; Leslie varying her step to suit it. She threw back her head again. Round and round her partner she revolved, undulating from nape to heels, not touching him, not holding him save by the attraction of her black eyes set upon his handsome eyes, and of her red lips of a flirt, from which (it was evident!) the boy could not take his gaze. Once more she shook her purple-casqued head; once more she let him catch her about the hips. Over the canvas floor they spun, Leslie and Monty, black-and-mauve, moving together with a voluptuous swing and zest that marked them as the best-matched dancers in the room. Well-matched, perhaps, for life, thought Leslie's chum.... But no; as they passed Gwenna saw that the black eyes and the red mouth were laughing cynically together; she caught, through the music, Leslie's clear "Don't talk! don't talk when you're dancing, my good boy.... Spoils everything.... You can waltz.... You know you've never anything to say, Mont!"
"I have. I say----"
Leslie waltzed on unheeding. Whatever he had to say she did not take it seriously. She laughed over his shoulder to little Gwenna, watching....
Couple after couple had joined in now, following the swift tall graceful black shape and the light-limbed mauve one as they circled by. A flutter of draperies and tinsel, a toss and jingle of stage accoutrements; the dancers were caught and sped by the music like a wreath of rainbow-bubbles on the rise and fall of a wave.
Gwenna, the Cherub-girl, was left standing for a wistful moment by the side of the tall Airman in evening dress.
He said, through the music, "Who's your partner for this?"
She had forgotten. It was the Futurist Folly again. He had to find another partner. Gwenna danced with her Airman again ... and again....
Scarcely realising how it happened--indeed, how do these arrangements make themselves?--this boy and girl from a simpler world than that of this tinsel Bohemia spent almost the whole of the rest of that evening as they had spent that day in the country, as she would have asked to spend the rest of their lives together.
Some of the time they danced in the brilliant, heated marquee under the swinging garlands and the lamps. Then again they strolled out into the Riverside garden. Here it was cool and dewy and dim except where, from the tent-openings, there was flung upon the grass a broad path of light, across which flitted, moth-like, the figures of the dancers. Above the marquee the summer night was purple velvet, be-diamonded with stars. At the end of the lawn the river whispered to the willows and reflected, here the point of a star, there the red blot of a lantern caught in a tree.
Hugo Swayne went by in this bewildering stage, light-and-shade with a very naughty-looking lady who declared that her white frock was merely "'Milk,' out of 'The Blue Bird.'" In passing he announced to his cousin that the whole scene was like a Conder fan that he had at his rooms. Groups of his friends were simply sitting about and making themselves into quite good Fragonards. Little Gwenna did not even try to remember what Fragonard was. None of these people in this place seemed real to her but herself and her partner. And the purple dusk and velvet shadows, the lights and colours, the throb and thrill of the music were just the setting for this "night of gladness" that was only a little more substantial than her other fancies.
More quickly it seemed to be passing! Every now and again she exultantly reminded herself, "I am here, with him, out of all these people! He is only speaking to me! I have him to myself--I must feel that as hard as I can all the time now, for we shall be going home at the end of this Ball, and then I shall be alone again.... If only I could be with him for always! How extraordinary, that just to be with one particular person out of all the world should be enough to make all this happiness!"
With her crop-curled head close against his shoulder as they danced, she stole at her boyish partner the shy, defiantly possessive glance that a child gives sometimes to the favourite toy, the toy that focusses all his dreams. This was "the one particular person out of all the world" whose company answered every conscious and unconscious demand of the young girl's nature even as his waltz-step suited her own.
Yet she guessed that this special quiet rapture could not last. Even before the end of the dance the end of this must surely come.
It must have been long hours after the waltz-cotillon that they strolled down to a sitting-out arbour that had been arranged at the end of the path nearest the river. It was softly lighted by two big Chinese lanterns, primrose-coloured, ribbed like caterpillars, with a black base and a splash of patterned colour upon each; a rug had been thrown on the grass, and there were two big white-cane chairs, with house-boat cushions.
Here the two sat down, to munch sandwiches, drink hock-cup.
"I remembered to bring two glasses, this time," said Paul Dampier.
Gwenna smiled as she nodded. Her eyes were on those silver white-finned minnows of her feet, that he had called pretty.
He followed her glance as he took another sandwich. "Rather a good idea, wings to your shoes because you're supposed to be a cherub."
"Oh, but that's not what the wings were supposed to be for," she said quickly. "I only put those in at the waltz-cotillon so that----"
Here she stopped dead, wishing that the carpeted grass might open at those winged feet of hers and swallow her up!
How could she have given herself away like this? Let him know how she had wanted him to choose her! when he hadn't even known she was there; hadn't been thinking about her!
She flurried on: "S-so that they should look more like fancy-dress shoes instead of real ones!"
He turned his head, dark and clean-cut against the lambent swaying lantern. He said, out of the gloom that spared her whelming blush, "Oh, was that it! I thought," he added with a teasing note in his voice, "I thought you were going to say it was to remind me that I'd promised to take you flying, and that it's never come off yet!"
Gwenna, hesitating for a moment, sat back against the cushions of the wicker-chair. She looked away from him, and then ventured a retort--a tiny reproach.
"Well--it hasn't come off."
"No, you know--it's too bad, really. I have been most frightfully busy," he apologised. "But we'll fix it up before you go to-night, shall we? You must come." At this he was glad to see that the Little Thing looked really pleased.
She was awfully nice and sensible, he thought for the severalth time. Again the odd wish took him that had taken him in that field. Yes! He would like to touch those babyish-looking curls of hers with a finger. Or even to rumple them against his cheek.... Another most foolish and incomprehensible wish had occurred to him about this girl, even in her absence. Apropos of nothing, one evening in his rooms he had remembered the look of that throat of hers; round and sturdy and white above her low collar. And he had thought he would rather like to put his own hands about it, and to pretend--quite gently, of course--to throttle the Little Thing. To-night she'd bundled it all up in that sort of feather boa.... Pity.... She was ever so much prettier without.
Fellow can't say that sort of thing to a girl, though, thought the simple Paul.
So he merely said, instead, "Let me stick that down for you somewhere," and he leant forward and took from her the plate that had held her cress-and-chicken sandwiches. Then he crossed his long legs and leant back again. It was jolly and restful here in the dim arbour with her; the sound of music and laughter came, much softened, from the marquee. Nearer to them, on the water below the willows, there was a little splashing and twittering of the moor-hen, roused by something, and the scarcely audible murmur of the Thames, speeding past House-boat Country to London ... the workaday Embankment.... It was jolly to be so quiet....
Then, into the happy silence that had fallen between them, there came a sound--the sound of the crunching of gravel. Gwenna looked up. Two figures sauntered past down the path; both tall and shapely and black against the paling, star-sprinkled sky above the frieze of sighing willows. Then Leslie's clear, careless voice drifted to their ears.
"Afraid not.... Anyhow, what on earth would be the good of caring 'a little'?... I look upon you as such an infant--in arms----"
Here there was a bass mutter of, "Make it your arms, and I don't mind!"
Then Leslie's insouciant: "I knew you'd say that obvious thing. I always do know what you're going to do or say next ... fatal, that.... A girl can't want to marry a man when----"
Apparently, then, the Dean's son was proposing again?
As the couple of free-limbed black shadows passed nearer, Paul Dampier kicked his heel against his chair. He moved in it to make it creak more noisily.
Good manners wasted!
For Leslie, as she afterwards told her chum, took for her motto upon such occasions, "And if the others see, what matter they?"
Her partner seemed oblivious that there were any "others" sitting in the shadows. The couple passed, leaving upon the night-breeze a trail of cigarette-smoke (Leslie's), and an indistinguishable growl, presumably from the Black Panther.
Leslie's voice floated back, "Not in the mood. Besides! You had, last time, 'to soften the edges,' as you call it."
More audibly her partner grumbled, "What's a kiss you've had? About as satisfying as last summer's strawberry-ice----"
A mere nothing--the incident.
Yet it brought (or hastened) a change into the atmosphere of that arbour where, under the giant glowworms of lights swinging above them, two young people sat at ease together without speaking.
For Gwenna, envious, thought, "Leslie can make a man think of nothing but her, even when she's 'not in the mood!' I can't. Yet I believe I could, but for one thing. Even now I don't know that he isn't thinking about That Other----"
"That Other" was her rival, that machine of his that Gwenna had not mentioned all the evening....
It had come, she knew, that duel between the Girl and the Aeroplane for the first place in the heart of a Flying Man. A duel as old as the world, between the thing a man greatly loves, and that which he loves more greatly still. She thought of Lovelace who "loved Honour more." She thought of the cold Sea that robs the patient, warm-hearted women ashore, of the icy Pole whose magnetism drew men from their wives. The work that drew the thoughts of her Airman was that Invention that was known already as his Fiancee....
"Leslie says it's not as bad as if it were another woman, but I see her as a woman," thought the silent, fanciful girl, "I see her as a sort of winged dragon with a figure-head--aeroplanes don't have figure-heads, but this one seems to me to have, just like some of those vessels that come into the harbour at Aberdovey. Or like those pictures of harps that are half a woman. Smooth red hair she has, and a long neck stretched out, and a rather thin, pale, don't-care sort of face like that girl called Muriel. And--and eagle's talons for hands. That's how I see that Fiancee of his, with claws for hands that won't, won't ever let him go...."
A puff of wind knocked one of the lanterns above their heads softly against the other; the willows rustled silkily outside. Gwenna sat motionless, holding her breath. Suddenly her reverie had broken off with an abrupt, unspoken--"but it's me he's thinking of now...."
Paul Dampier had been lightly amused by that passing of the other couple. That friend of hers, Miss Long, was more than a bit of a flirt, he considered. This Little Thing wasn't. Couldn't imagine her giving a kiss as some girls give a dance; or even to "soften" a refusal.... Her mouth, he found himself noticing, was full and curly and exactly the colour of the buds of those fox-gloves that grew all over the shop at her place in Wales. It was probably softer than those curls of hers that he would (also) like to touch.
Idiotic idea, though----
But an idea which is transmittable.
Gwenna, thrilled by this message which she had caught by a method older and less demonstrable than Marconi's, realised: "He heard that, just now; that boy wanting to kiss Leslie.... He's thinking, now, that he might kiss me."
The boy scarcely at arm's length from her thought a little confusedly, "I say, though.... Rotten thing to do...."
The girl thought, "He would like to. What is he waiting about? We shall have to go directly----"
For the sky outside had been swiftly paling. Now that pure pallor was changing to the glow of Abyssinian gold. Dawn! From the marquee came a louder blare of music; two long cornet notes and then a rollicking tune--The old "Post Horn" Galop--the last dance. Presently a distant noise of clapping and calls for "Extra"! There would be no time for extras, she'd heard. They would have to go after this. People were beginning to go. Already they had heard the noise of a car. His chair creaked as he moved a little sidewards.
He told himself, more emphatically, "Beastly rotten thing to do. This Little Thing would never speak to me again----"
And the girl sat there, without stirring, without glancing at him. Yet every curve of her little body, every eyelash, every soft breath she drew was calling him, was set upon "making" him. What could she do more to make herself, as Leslie called it, a magnet? Love and innocent longing filled her to the eyes, the tender fox-glove buds of lips that could have asked for nothing better. Even if this were the only time! Even if she never saw him again!
Wasn't he going to set the crown upon her wonderful dream of a summer night?
"No, look here," the boy remonstrated silently with something in himself; something that seemed to mock him. He lifted his fair head with a gleam of that pride that goes so often before a fall. "Dash it all----"
"He will!" the girl thought breathlessly. And with her thought she seemed to cast all of her heart into the spell....
And then, quite suddenly, something happened whereby that spell was snapped. Even as she thought "he will," he rose from his chair.
He took a step to the entrance of their arbour, his shoulders blotting out the glowing light.
"Listen," he said.
And Gwenna, rising too, listened, breathlessly, angrily. He would not--she had been cheated. What was it that had--interfered? Presently she heard it, she heard what she would have taken for the noise of another of the departing motors.
Through the clatter from the last galop it was like, yet unlike, the noise of a starting car. But there was in it an angrier note than that.
It is angry for want of any help but its own. A motor-car has solid earth against which to drive; a steamship has dense water. But the Machine that caused this noise was beating her metal thews against invisible air.
It was an aeroplane.
"Look!" said Paul Dampier.
Far away over the still benighted land she rose, and into that glory of Abyssinian gold beyond the river. Gwenna, moving out on to the path, watched the flight. Before, she had wondered that these soaring things didn't come down. Now, she would have wondered if they had done so.
Steady as if running on rails, the aeroplane came on overhead; her sound as she came now loud, now soft, but always angry, harsh--harshness like that of a woman who lives to herself and her strivings, with no comradeship of Earth on which to lean. Against the sky that was her playground she showed as a slate-coloured dragonfly--a purple Empress of the Air soaring on and on into the growing dazzle of the day.
"Oh, it is beautiful, though," cried the girl on the path, looking up, and losing for that moment the angry sense that had fallen upon her of pleasure past, of the end of the song. "It is wonderful."
"Pooh, that old horse-bus," laughed Paul Dampier above her shoulder, and mentioned the names of the machine, the flyer in her. He could pick them out of the note of her angry song.
"That will be nothing to my P.D.Q.," he declared exultantly as they walked on up the path towards the marquee. "You wait until I've got my aeroplane working! That'll be something new in aviation, you know. Nearest thing yet to the absolute identity of the Man with the Machine."
He yawned a little with natural sleepiness, but his interest was wide-awake. He could have gone on until breakfast-time explaining some fresh point about his invention, while the girl in those little silver-heeled shoes paced slowly up the path beside him.... He was going on.
"Make all those other types, English or foreign, as clumsy as the old-fashioned bone-shake bicycle. Fact," he declared. "Now, take the Taube--Hullo----"
"Bitte," said a voice.
The German word came across a pile of plates deftly balanced upon a young man's forearm. That arm was clad in the sleeve of a trim white jacket, buttoned over a thick and compact little chest. The waiter's hair was a short, upright golden stubble, and another little stubble of gold sprouted upon his steady upper lip. He had come up, very softly, behind them.
He spoke again in excellent English.
"By your leave, sir."
Dampier made way for him, and he passed. Gwenna, with a little shiver, looked after him. The sight of the young waiter whom she had noticed at the beginning of the evening had given her an unreasonable little chill.... Perhaps it was because his softly-moving, white figure against those willows had loomed so like a ghost....
Dampier said, "Rotten job for a man, I always think, hanging about and picking up things for other people like that."
"Yes," said Gwenna, absently, sadly. It was the end now. Quite the end. They'd got to go home. Back to everyday life. The Club, the Works. Nothing to live for, except--Ah, yes! His promise that he would take her flying, soon....
Above in the glowing sky the aeroplane was dwindling--to disappear. The waiter, turning a corner of the dark shrubbery, had also disappeared as they passed. From behind the shelter of the branches he was watching, watching....
He was looking after Paul Dampier, the Airman--the inventor of the newest aeroplane.
