The sore of that jealousy still smarted in the girl's mind as she turned her pillow restlessly.... She could not sleep until long after the starlings had been twittering and the milk-carts rattling by in the suburban road outside. She awoke, dispirited. She came down late for breakfast; Leslie had already gone off to her old lady in Highgate. Over the disordered breakfast-table Miss Armitage was making plans, with some of the other Suffrage-workers, to "speak" at a meeting of the Fabian Nursery. Those young women talked loudly enough, but they didn't pronounce the ends of any of their words; hideously slipshod it all sounded, thought the Welsh girl fretfully. Her world was a desert to her, this fine June morning. For at the Westminster office things seemed as dreary as they had at the Club. She began to see what people meant when they said that on long sea-voyages one of the greatest hardships was 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 one was shut up to work day after day in an office with the same people. She was sick to death of all the faces of all the people here. Miss Butcher with her Cockney accent! Miss Baker with her eternal crochet! The men in the yards with their awful tobacco and trousers! Nearly all men, she thought, 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 some note for Mabel Butcher). Those swarthy men never looked as if they had baths and proper shaves. He'd a head like a black hatpin. And his accent, thought the girl from the land where every letter of a word is pronounced, 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 this aft'noon," he was saying to Miss Butcher. "Young French Dook or Comp or something, he is; taking out a patent for a new crane. Coming in early with some swagger friends of his. Wants to be shown the beauties of the buildin', I s'pose. Better bring him in here and let him have a good look at you girls first thing, hadn't I? S'long! Duty calls. I must away."
And away he went, leaving Miss Butcher smiling fondly after him, while Miss Williams wondered how on earth any girl ever managed to fall in love, 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 just showed how different and wonderful a thing a lover might be! If one could 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 dissatisfied with all her surroundings. And for a girl of Gwenna's sort to be thoroughly dissatisfied predicts one thing only. She will not long stay where she is.
Impatiently she sighed over her typing-table. Irritably she fidgeted in her chair. This was what jerked the plump arm of Ottilie Becker, who was passing behind her, and who now dropped a handful of papers on to the new boards.
"Zere! Now see what you have made me do," said the German girl good-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 rose to Miss Becker's blue eyes. Miss Butcher, coming across to the centre table, saw those tears.
An Aberystwith Collegiate School expression rose naturally to her lips--"Cau dy geg!" She translated it: "Shut up!" she said, quite rudely.
Then, the moment after she had given way to this little outburst of temper she felt better. She was ready to be on the best of terms again with her fellow-typists. They, as Miss Butcher would have said, "weren't having any." They turned offended backs upon her. They talked pointedly to each other, not to her.
"That's a precious long letter you've got written there, Baker," said Miss Butcher, helping to gather up the half-dozen thin foreign sheets, covered with neat, pointed German writing. "Is that to the beloved brother?"
Miss Becker nodded her plait-wreathed head as she put the letter that began: "Geliebter Karl!" into the grey-lined envelope.
"He likes to hear what they make--do--at the works. Always he ask," she said, "after what they do. And who come hier; and where everythings is kept."
"Gracious! I do believe he's a regular German spy, like in the magazines, this brother of yours," smiled Miss Butcher lightly. "Don't you give away any of our State secrets, Baker, will you? We'd be having the authorities, whoever they are, poking round and inquiring. Awful if England and your country went to war, wouldn't it?--and you were supposed to be 'the Enemy'!"
She spoke as if of something that was more fantastic than Gwenna's flying dream of the night before. The German typist answered in the same strain.
"If it was war, I would speak to Karlchen's regiment that your house in Clapham and your people should be saved," she promised. "But he is not 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 to have our lunch, yes?"
The two went out together towards Whitehall. The Welsh girl was left in Coventry--and the deserted offices.
She didn't want any lunch. She drank a glass of tepid tap-water from the dressing-room. She ate some strawberries, bought in their little flat basket as she had come along. Then, hatless, and in her thin, one-piece dress 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-littered ground where the ubiquitous London pigeons strutted and flirted and "Croo--croo--do--I--do"-ed about her feet. Overhead, that giant lacework on its iron crochet-hooks looked as if its pattern had been drawn with a pen and black ink against the opaque blue-grey sky. The sight of that far-off pinnacle put into her head again the thought of flying.
"I don't believe that I shall ever be as high up as that, with the blue beneath me, like I've always wanted!" reflected the young girl, dolefully looking up. "I believe that last night in my dream is all the flying I'm ever going to have had!"
And again that longing took her. That pure longing to be high; above the Law that clogs the children of Man to the Earth from which he came. To feel 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 to that iron lattice of lacework; to run up that as a sailor climbs the rope-ladders of his masts, and thence from the very highest peak attainable to look down on London, even as last night she had looked down on it from her dream.
Her start was not in the open air at all, but from the bottom of the scaffolding inside, where it was all beams and uprights and floors of planks. It reminded Gwenna of being underneath the old wooden pier at Aberdovey, and looking up. She went up ladders, through trap-doors, walked over wooden floors to other ladders until she got up to the last trap-door and through it out of the shadow and the stuffiness to the sunshine and the fresh air again. She stood on the top platform of the gantry which supported that engine and the wheels that worked (she supposed) the iron lattice that was still far above her head.
Presently she would climb that. She knew that she could. She was never afraid of heights. Her head was steady enough. Her feet in their brown shoes were as sure as the feet of the tiny sheep that picked their way up the rocky steeps of her Welsh mountains. She could climb as well as any of the men ... but for the moment she rested, standing by the platform hand-railing, breathing in the freshened breeze.
The birds of the City--pigeons and sparrows--were taking their short flights far beneath her perch. All London was spread below her, as it had been in that flying dream, and with as strong a sense of security as in the dream she looked down upon it.
There, between the forests of chimney-pots, gleamed that highway of the Thames, blue-grey now as it reflected the sky, winding out of the distance that meant the clean, green country and the willows below the lawns where people had danced; flowing on into London that sullied it, and burdened it with her barges, and spanned it with her bridges, but could not stay it; on and out its waters passed towards Greenwich and the Docks and the tall ships and the North Sea!
And there on its bank was the office, the dwindled yard from which Gwenna had started. The men returning....
The whole place looked nothing more than a hen-run full of fowls. Their voices ascended, more loudly than she would have expected to hear from their diminished figures. How funny to see what midgets the creatures looked from here, and to remember how majestically important each considered himself! thought little Gwenna, forgetting that from the yard she herself, with her grey linen frock, her brown feet and ankles, must look no larger than a roosting pigeon.
She looked down, past the railing and the ends of timbers, feeling immeasurably aloof from everybody in her world. She wished she need never go down to it again.
"I've a good mind to give notice at the office, whatever, and go somewhere quite different!" she thought defiantly, and immediately she felt elated. A weight of depression seemed to have dropped from her already. Up, up went the feather-weight spirits of Youth. She had forgotten 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 the girls 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 the sound of a voice. It had seemed to have come out of nothing, from behind her, 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 own thoughts, had heard nothing of the steps of five pairs of feet coming up the way that she had come. In the violence of her surprise of hearing a voice, so often heard in her daydreams now, here, in this unexpected place 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--one small foot and ankle stretched out over the giddy height as that crane was stretched. She clutched on the crook of a slender grey arm, the railing 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's figure across the planks from the trap-door.
"It's all right--I've got you," said Paul Dampier, and caught her up from the edge, in his arms.
They held her. That armful of a girl, soft and warm as one of the grey pigeons, was crushed for a moment against the boy's chest. She was closer to him than she had been in any of those waltzes. Yet it seemed no strangeness to be so near--feeling his heart beat below hers, feeling the 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 have known it all before."
Then, dazed but happy, resting where she seemed to belong, she thought in 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's getting his balance."
He had taken a step backwards.
Then she slid through his arms. She slipped, lightly as a squirrel slips down 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 must end, the Airman, when she left his enforced clasp, scarcely looked at her. He barely returned her greeting. He did not answer her breathless thanks. He turned away from her--whom he had saved. Yes! He left her to the meaningless babble of the others (she recognised now, in a dazed way, that there were other men with him on the scaffolding). He left her to 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 never looked again as Miss Williams was guided down the trap-door and the ladders by the scolding Yorkshire foreman, who didn't leave her until she 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 had been terrified. Miss Butcher now brought lavender salts. Miss Becker's pink moon of a face was blanched with horror over her colleague's danger.
"Do you know what could have happened, Candlesticks-maker, my dear?" cried the German girl with real emotion, as they all made tea together in the varnished, stifling office. "You could have been killed, you!"
Gwenna thought, "That would have been too bad. Because then--then I shouldn't have known when he held me!"
As it was, there were several things about that incident that the young girl--passionate and infatuated and innocent--did not know.
For one thing, there was the resolution that Paul Dampier took just after he had turned abruptly from her, had taken short leave of the others, and when he was striding down Whitehall to the bus that went past the door of his Camden Town rooms. And for another thing, there was the 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 the untroubled sleep of years. Sometimes it is the Prince who is suddenly stirred, jarred, or jolted broad awake by the touch, in some form or other, of Love. In Paul Dampier's case the every-day miracle had been wrought by the soft weight of that dove-breasted girl against his heart for no longer than he could count ten, by her sliding to the earth through 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 aviator all 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 he forgot). How topping and natural it had seemed to sit there with her in that field, talking to her, drinking with her out of one silver cup. How he'd found himself wanting to touch her curls; to span and squeeze her throat with his hands. How he'd been within an inch of summarily kissing that fox-glove pink mouth of hers, that night at the Dance....
And to-day, when he'd come to Westminster for another talk with that rather decent young Frenchman of Hugo's, when he hadn't thought of seeing the girl at all, what had happened? He'd actually held her clasped 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 the feeling of that warm and breathing burden which seemed even yet to rest against his quickened heart.
In that heart there surged up a clamorous impulse to go back at once. To snatch her up for the second time in his arms, and not to let her go again, either. To satisfy that hunger of his fingers and lips for the touch of her----
"Hold hard!" muttered the boy to himself. "Hang it all, this won't do."
For he had found himself actually turning back, his face set towards the Abbey.
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 this rate I shall be making an ass of myself before I know where I am; going and falling in--going and getting myself much too dashed fond of the Little 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 London summer crowd, it wouldn't be one of these Fancy-dress-dance flirtations. Not that sort of girl. "Nor was he; really." Not that sort of man, he meant. Sort of thing never had amused him, much; not, he knew, because he was cold-blooded ("Lord, no!") but partly because he'd had such stacks of other things to do, partly because--because he'd always thought it ought to be (and could be) so much more--well, amusing than it was. This other. This with the Little Thing--he somehow knew that it would have to be "for keeps."
And that he couldn't have. Good Lord, no! There could be no question--Great Scott!
For yes, if there was anything between him and the Little Thing, it would have to be an engagement. Marriage, and all that.
And Paul Dampier didn't intend to get married. Out of the question for him.
He'd only just managed to scrape through and make "some sort of a footing" for himself in the world as it was. His father, a hard-up Civil engineer, and his mother (who had been looked askance at by her people, the Swaynes, for marrying the penniless and undistinguished Paul Dampier, senior)--they'd only just managed to give their boy "some kind of an education" before they pegged out. Lessons at home when he'd been a little fellow. Afterwards one of the (much) smaller public-schools. For friends and pleasures and holidays he had been dependent on what he could "pick up" for himself. Old Hugo had been decent enough. He'd asked his cousin to fish with him in Wales, twice, and he hadn't allowed Paul to feel that he was--the poor relation.
Only Paul remembered the day that Hugo was going back to Harrow for the last time. He, Paul, had then been a year in the shops, to the day. He remembered 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, just because I'm poor. If being poor means being 'out of it,' having no Power of any kind, I'm dashed if I stay poor. I'll show that I can make good----"
And, gradually, step by step, the young mechanic, pilot, aero-racer and inventor had been "making good."
He'd made friends, too. People had been decent. He'd been made to feel that they felt he was going to be a useful sort of chap. He'd quailed a bit under the eyes of butlers in these houses where he'd stayed, but he'd been asked again. That Mrs. What's-her-name (the woman in the pink frock at the Smiths) had been awfully kind. Introducing him to her brothers with capital; asking him down to the New Forest to meet some other influential person; and knowing that he couldn't entertain in return. (He'd just sent her some flowers and some tickets for Brooklands.) Then there was Colonel Conyers. He'd asked whether he (Dampier) were engaged. And, at his answer, had replied, "Good. Much easier 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 wait for----
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 night at 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 that rot of old Hugo's about the struggle in a man's mind between an Aeroplane and a Girl. Now--well, he'd realised. All the better. Now he was forewarned. Good thing he could take a side for himself now.
By the time he'd reached the door of the National Portrait Gallery and stood waiting for his motor omnibus, he had definitely taken that resolution of which Gwenna Williams did not know.
Namely, that he must drop seeing the Girl. Have nothing more to say to her. It was better so; wiser. Whatever he'd promised about taking her up would have to be "off."
A pity--! Dashed shame a man couldn't have everything! She was ... so awfully sweet....
Still, got to decide one way or the other.
This would fix it before it was too late, before he'd perhaps managed to put ideas into the head of the Little Thing. She shouldn't ever come flying, with him!
That ended it! he thought. He'd made up his mind. He would not allow himself to wonder what she might think.
After all, what would a girl think? Probably nothing.
