She was in this mood to win a waiting game on the day that Paul Dampier came down to the Aircraft Works.
This was just one of the more wonderful happenings that waited round the corner and that the young girl might hope to encounter any day.
The first she knew of it was from hearing a remark of the Aeroplane Lady's to one of her French mechanics at the lathes.
"This will make the eighteenth pattern of machine that we've turned out from this place," she said. "I wonder if it's going to answer, Andre?"
"Which machine, madame?" the man asked. He was a big fellow, dark and thick-haired and floridly handsome in his blue overalls; and his bright eyes were fixed interestedly upon his principal as she explained through the buzz and the clack and the clang of machinery in the large room, "This new model that Colonel Conyers wants us to make for him."
Gwenna caught the name. She thought breathlessly, "That's his machine! He's got Aircraft Conyers to take it up and have it made for him! It's his!"
She'd thought this, even before the Aeroplane Lady concluded, "It's the idea of a young aviator I know. Such a nice boy: Paul Dampier of Hendon."
The French mechanic put some question, and the Aeroplane Lady answered, "Might be an improvement. I hope so. I'd like him to have a show, anyhow. He's sending the engine down to-morrow afternoon. They'll bring it on a lorry. Ask Mr. Ryan to see about the unloading of it; I may not get back from town before the thing comes."
Now Mr. Ryan was that red-haired pupil who had conducted Gwenna from the station on the day of her first appearance at the Works. Probably Leslie Long would have affirmed that this Mr. Ryan was also a factor in the change that was coming over Gwenna and her outlook. Leslie considered that no beauty treatment has more effect upon the body and mind of a woman than has the regular application of masculine admiration. Admiration was now being lavished by Mr. Ryan upon the little new typist with the face of a baby-angel and the small, rounded figure; and Mr. Ryan saw no point in hiding his approval. It did not stop at glances. Before a week had gone by he had informed Miss Williams that she was a public benefactor to bring anything so delightful to look at as herself into those beastly, oily, dirty shops; that he hated, though, to see a woman with such pretty fingers having to mess 'em up with that vile dope; and that he wondered she hadn't thought of going on the stage.
"But I can't act," Gwenna had told him.
"What's that got to do with it?" the young man had inquired blithely. "All they've got to do is to look. You could beat 'em at that."
"Oh, what nonsense, Mr. Ryan!" the girl had said, more pleased than she admitted to herself, and holding her curly head erect as a brown tulip on a sturdy stem.
"Not nonsense at all," he argued. "I tell you, if you went into musical comedy and adopted a strong enough Cockney accent there'd be another Stage and Society wedding before you could say 'knife.' You could get any young peer to adore you, Miss Gwenna, if you smiled at him over the head of a toy pom and called him 'Fice.' I can just see you becoming a Gaiety puss and marrying some Duke----"
"I don't want to marry any Dukes, thanks."
"I'm sure I don't want you to," Mr. Ryan had said softly. "I'd miss you too much myself...."
The fact is that he was a flirt for the moment out of work. He was also of the type that delights in the proximity of "Girl"--using the word as one who should say "Game." "Girl" suggested to him, as to many young men, a collective mass of that which is pretty, soft, and to-be-made-love-to. He found it pleasant to keep his hand in by paying these compliments to this new instalment of Girl--who was rather a little pet, he thought, though rather slow.
As for Gwenna, she bloomed under it, gaining also in poise. She learned to take a compliment as if it were an offered flower, instead of dodging it like a brick-bat, which is the very young girl's failing. She found that even if receiving a compliment from the wrong man is like wearing a right-hand glove on the left hand, it is better than having no gloves. (Especially it is better than looking as if one had no gloves.)
The attentions of young Ryan, his comment on a new summer frock, the rose laid by him on her desk in the morning; these things were not without their effect--it was a different effect from any intended by the red-haired pupil, who was her teacher in all this.
She would find herself thinking, "He doesn't look at me nearly so much, I notice, in a trimmed-up hat, or a 'fussy' blouse. Men don't like them on me, perhaps." (That blouse or hat would be discarded.) Or, "Well! if so-and-so about me pleases him, it'll please other men."
And for "men" she read always, always the same one. She never realised that if she had not met Paul Dampier she might have fallen in love with young Peter Ryan. Presently he had begged her to call him "Peter."
She wouldn't.
"I think I'd do anything for you," young Ryan had urged, "if you asked for it, using my Christian name!"
Gwenna had replied: "Very well! If there's anything I ever want, frightfully badly, that you could give me, I shall ask for it like that."
"You mean there's nothing I could give you?" he had reproached her, in the true flirt's tone. It can sound so much more tender, at times, than does the tone of the truest lover. A note or so of it had found its way into Gwenna's soft voice these days.
Yes; she had half unconsciously learned a good deal from Mr. Ryan.
"I say! Miss Gwenna!"
Mr. Ryan's rust-red head was popped round the door of the Wing-room where Gwenna, alone, was pouring dope out of the tilted ten-gallon can on the floor into her little pannikin.
"Come out for just one minute."
"Too busy," demurred the girl. "No time."
"Not just to look," he pleaded, "at the really pretty job I'm making of unloading this lorry with Dampier's engine?"
Quickly Gwenna set down the can and came out, in her pinafore, to the breezes and sunshine of the yard outside. It was as much because she wanted to see what there was to be seen of that "Fiancee" of the aviator's, as because this other young man wanted her to admire the work of his hands.
Those hands themselves, Gwenna noticed, were masked and thick, half way up his forearms, with soft soap. This he seemed to have been smearing on certain boards, making a sliding way for that precious package that stood on the low lorry. The boards were packed up in banks and stages, an irregular stairway. This another assistant was carefully trying with a long straight edge with a spirit level in the middle of it; and a third man stood on the lorry, resting on a crowbar and considering the package that held the heart of Paul Dampier's machine.
"You see if she doesn't come down as light as a bubble and stop exactly there," said Mr. Ryan complacently, digging his heel into a pillowy heap of debris. "Lay those other planks to take her inside, Andre." He wiped his brow on a moderately clear patch of forearm, and moved away to check the observations of the man in the shirt-sleeves.
Gwenna, watching, could not help admiring both this self-satisfied young mudlark and his job. This was how women liked to see men busy: with strenuous work that covered them with dirt and sweat, taxing their brains and their muscles at the same time. Those girls who were so keen on the Enfranchisement of Women and "Equal Opportunities" and those things, those suffragettes at her Hampstead Club who "couldn't see where the superiority of the male sex was supposed to come in"--Well! The reason why they "couldn't" was (the more primitive Gwenna thought) simply because they didn't see enough men at this sort of thing. The men these enlightened young women knew best sat indoors all day, writing--that sort of thing. Or talking about fans, like Mr. Swayne, and about "the right tone of purple in the curtains" for a room. The women, of course, could do that themselves. They could also go to colleges and pass men's exams. Lots did. But (thought Gwenna) not many of them could get through the day's work of Mr. Ryan, who had also been at Oxford, and who not only had forearms that made her own look like ivory toys, but who could plan out his work so that if he said that that squat, ponderous case would "stop exactly there"--stop there it would. She watched; the breeze rollicking in her curls, spreading the folds of her grey-blue pinafore out behind her like a sail, moulding her skirt to her rounded shape as she stood.
Then she turned with a very friendly and pretty smile to young Ryan.
It was thus that Paul Dampier, entering the yard from behind them, came upon the girl whom he had decided not to see again.
He knew already that "his little friend," as old Hugo insisted upon calling her, had taken a job at the Aircraft Works. He'd heard that from his cousin, who'd been told all about it by Miss Long.
And considering that he'd made up his mind that it would be better all round if he were to drop having anything more to say to the girl, young Dampier was glad, of course, that she'd left town. That would make things easier. He wouldn't seem to be avoiding her, yet he needn't set eyes upon her again.
Of course he'd been glad. He hadn't wanted to see her.
Then, at the end of his negotiations with Colonel Conyers, he'd understood that he would have to go over and pay a visit to the Aeroplane Lady. And even in the middle of the new excitement he had remembered that this was where Gwenna Williams was working. And for a moment he'd hesitated. That would mean seeing the Little Thing again after all.
Then he'd thought, Well? Fellow can't look as if he were trying to keep out of a girl's way? Besides, chances were he wouldn't see her when he did go, he'd thought.
It wasn't likely that the Aeroplane Lady kept her clerk, or whatever she was, in her pocket, he'd thought.
He'd just be taken to where the P.D.Q. was being assembled, he'd supposed. The Little Thing would be kept busy with her typing and one thing and another in some special office, he'd expected!
What he had not expected to find was the scene before him. The Little Thing idling about outside the shops here; hatless, pinafored, looking absolutely top-hole and perfectly at home, chatting with the ginger-haired bloke who was unloading the engine as if he were no end of a pal of hers! She was smiling up into his face and taking a most uncommon amount of interest, it seemed, in what the fellow had been doing!
And, before, she'd said she wasn't interested in machinery! thought Dampier as he came up, feeling suddenly unconscionably angry.
He forgot the hours that the Little Thing had already passed in hanging on every word, mostly about a machine, that had fallen from his own lips. He only remembered that moment at the Smiths' dinner-party, when she'd admitted that that sort of thing didn't appeal to her.
Yet, here she was! Deep in it, by Jove!
He had come right up to her and this other chap before they noticed him....
She turned sharply at the sound of the young aviator's rather stiff "Good afternoon."
She had expected that day to see his engine--no more. Here he stood, the maker of the engine, backed by the scorched, flat landscape, in the sunlight that picked out little clean-cut, intense shadows under the rim of his straw hat, below his cleft chin, along his sleeve and the lapel of his jacket, making him look (she thought) like a very good snapshot of himself. He had startled her again; but this time she was self-possessed.
She came forward and faced him; prettier than ever, somehow (he thought again), with tossed curls and pinafore blowing all about her. She might have been a little schoolgirl let loose from some class in those gaunt buildings behind her. But she spoke in a more "grown-up" manner, in some way, than he'd ever heard her speak before. Looking up, she said in the soft accent that always brought back to him his boyish holidays in her country, "How do you do, Mr. Dampier? I'm afraid I can't shake hands. Mine are all sticky with dope."
"Oh, are they," he said, and looked away from her (not without effort) to the ginger-haired fellow.
"This," said Gwenna Williams, a little self-consciously at last, "is Mr. Ryan."
Plenty of self-assurance about him! He nodded and said in a hail-fellow-well-met sort of voice, "Hullo; you're Dampier, are you? Glad to meet you. You see we're hard at it unpacking your engine here." Then he looked towards the opening, the road, and the car--borrowed as usual--in which the young aviator had motored down. There was another large package in the body of the car; a box, iron-clamped, with letters stencilled upon it, and sealed. "Something else interesting that you've brought with you?" said this in sufferable man called Ryan. "Here, Andre, fetch that box down----"
"No," interrupted young Dampier curtly. The curtness was only partly for this other chap. That sealed box, for reasons of his own and Colonel Conyers', was not to be hauled about by any mechanic in the place. "You and I'll fetch that in presently for Mrs. Crewe."
"Right. She'll be back at three o'clock," Ryan told him. "She told me to ask you to have a look round the place or do anything you cared to until she came in."
"Oh, thanks," said young Dampier.
At that moment what he would have "cared to do" would have been to get this girl to himself somewhere where he could say to the Little Humbug, "Look here. You aren't interested in machinery. You said so yourself. What are you getting this carroty-headed Ass to talk to you about it for?"
Seeing that this was out of the question he hesitated.... He didn't want to go round the shops with this fellow, to whom he'd taken a dislike. On sight. He did that sometimes. On the other hand, he couldn't do what he wanted to do--sit and talk to the Little Thing until the Aeroplane Lady returned. What about saying he'd got to look up some one in the village, and bolting, until three o'clock? No. No fear! Why should this other fellow imagine he could have the whole field to himself for talking to Her?
So the trio, the age-old group that is composed of two young men and a girl, stood there for a moment rather awkwardly.
Finally the Little Thing said, "Well, I've got to go back to my wings," and turned.
Then the fellow Ryan said, "One minute, Miss Gwenna----"
Miss Gwenna! All but her Christian name! And he, Paul Dampier, who'd known her a good deal longer--he'd never called her anything at all, but "you"! Miss Gwenna, if you please!
What followed was even more of a bit of dashed cheek.
For the fellow turned quickly aside to her and said, "I say, it's Friday afternoon. Supposing I don't see you again to-morrow morning--it's all right, isn't it, about your coming up to town for that matinee with me?"
"Oh, yes, thanks," said the Little Thing brightly. "I asked Mrs. Crewe, and it's all right."
Then the new note crept into her voice; the half-unconsciously-acquired note of coquetry. She said, smiling again at the red-haired Ryan, "I am so looking forward to that."
And, turning again to the Airman, she said with a half-shy, half-airy little smile that, also, he found new in her, "Have you seen The Cinema Star? Mr. Ryan is going to take me to-morrow afternoon."
"Oh, is he?" said Paul Dampier shortly.
Was he, indeed? Neck!
"You do come up to town sometimes from here, then?" added Mr. Dampier to Miss Gwenna Williams, speaking a trifle more distinctly than usual, as he concluded, "I was just going to ask you whether you could manage to come out with me to-morrow evening?"
Nobody was more surprised to hear these last words than he himself.
Until that moment he hadn't had the faintest intention of ever asking the girl out anywhere again. Now here he was; he'd done it. The Little Thing had murmured, "Oh----" and was looking--yes, she was looking pleased. The fellow was looking as if he'd been taken aback. Good. He'd probably thought he was going to have her to himself for the evening as well as for the matinee. Dinner at the "Petit Riche"--a music-hall afterwards--travel down home with her. Well, Dampier had put a stopper on that plan. But now that he had asked her, where was he going to take her himself? To another musical comedy? No. Too like the other chap. To one of the Exhibitions? No; not good enough. Anyhow, wherever he took her, he hadn't been out-bidden by this soft-soapy young idiot. Infernal cheek.... Then, all in a flash the brilliant solution came to Paul Dampier. Of course! Yes, he could work it! The Aviation Dinner! He'd meant to go. He would take her. It would involve taking Mrs. Crewe as well. Never mind. It was something to which that other young ass wouldn't have the chance of taking her, and that was enough.
"Yes," he went on saying, as coolly as if it had all been planned. "There's a show on at the Wilbur Club; Wilbur Wright, you know. I thought I'd ask if you and Mrs. Crewe would care to come with me to the dinner. Will you?--Just break that packing up a bit more," he added negligently to the red-haired youth. "And check those spaces--Will you take me into your place, Miss Williams?"
That, he thought, was the way to deal with poachers on his particular preserves!
It was only when he got inside the spacious white Wing-room and sat down, riding a chair, close to the trestle-table where the girl bent her curly head so conscientiously over the linen strips again, that he realised that this Little Thing wasn't his particular preserves at all!
Hadn't he, only a couple of weeks ago, definitely decided that she was never to mean anything of the sort to him? Hadn't he resolved----
Here, with his long arms crossed over the back of the chair as he sat facing and watching her, he put back his head and laughed.
"What are you laughing at?" she asked, straightening herself in the big pinafore with its front all stiff with that sticky mess she worked with.
He was laughing to think how dashed silly it was to make these resolutions. Resolutions about which people you were or were not to see anything of! As if Fate didn't arrange that for you! As if you didn't have to leave that to Fate, and to take your chance!
Possibly Fate meant that he and the Little Thing should be friends, great friends. Not now, of course. Not yet. In some years' time, perhaps, when his position was assured; when he'd achieved some of the Big Things that he'd got to do; when he had got something to offer a girl. Ages to wait.... Still, he could leave it at that, now, he thought.... It might, or might not, come to anything. Only, it was ripping to see her!
He didn't tell her this.
He uttered some conventional boy's joke about being amused to see her actually at work for the first time since he'd met her. And she made a little bridling of her neck above that vast, gull-like wing that she was pasting; and retorted that, indeed, she worked very hard.
"Really," he teased her. "Always seem to be taking time off, whenever I've come."
"You've only come twice, Mr. Dampier; and then it's been sort of lunch-time."
"Oh, I see," he said. ("I may smoke, mayn't I?" and he lighted a cigarette.) "D'you always take your lunch out of doors, Miss Gwenna?" (He didn't see why he shouldn't call her that.)
She said, "I'd like to." Then she was suddenly afraid he might think she was thinking of their open-air lunch in that field, weeks ago, and she said quickly (still working): "I--I was so glad when I heard about the engine coming, and that Colonel Conyers had ordered the P.D.Q. to be made here. I--do congratulate you, Mr. Dampier. Tell me about the Machine, won't you?"
He said, "Oh, you'll hear all about that presently; but look here, you haven't told me about you----"
Gwenna could scarcely believe her ears; but yes, it was true. He was turning, turning from talk about the Machine, the P.D.Q., the Fiancee! Asking, for the first time, about herself. She drew a deep breath; she turned her bright, greeny-brown eyes sideways, longing at that moment for Leslie with whom to exchange a glance. Her own shyly triumphant look met only the deep, wise eyes of the Great Dane, lying in his corner of the Wing-room beside his kennel. He blinked, thumped his tail upon the floor.
"Darling," whispered Gwenna, a little shakily, as she passed the tawny dog. "Darling!" She had to say it to something just then.
Paul Dampier pursued, looking at her over his crossed arms on the back of that chair, "You haven't said whether you'll come to-morrow night."
She asked (as if it mattered to her where she went, as long as it was with him), "What is this dinner?"
"The Wilbur dinner? Oh, there's one every year. Just a meeting of those interested in flying. I thought you might care----"
"Who'll be there?"
"Oh, just people. Not many. Some ladies go. Why?"
"Only because I haven't got anything at all to wear," announced Gwenna, much more confidently, however, than she could have done before Mr. Ryan had told her so much about her own looks, "except my everlasting white and the blue sash like at the Smiths'."
"Well, that was awfully pretty; wasn't it? Only----"
"What?"
"Well, may I say something?"
"Well, what is it?"
"Frightfully rude, really," said Paul Dampier, tilting himself back on his chair, and still looking at her over a puff of smoke, staring even. She was something to stare at. Why was she such a lot prettier? Had he forgotten what her looks were? She seemed--she seemed, to-day, so much more of a woman than he'd ever seen her. He forgot that he was going to say something. She, with a little fluttering laugh for which he could have clasped her, reminded him.
"What's the rude thing you were going to say to me?"
"Oh! It's only this. Don't go muffling your neck up in that sort of ruff affair this time; looks ever so much nicer without," said the boy.
The girl retorted with quite a good show of disdainfulness, "I don't think there's anything quite so funny as men talking about what we wear."
"Oh, all right," said the boy, and pretended to be offended. Then he laughed again and said, "I've still got something of yours that you wear, as a matter of fact----"
"Of mine?"
"Yes, I have; I've never given it you back yet. That locket of yours that you lost."
"Oh----!" she exclaimed.
That locket! That little heart-shaped pendant of mother-o'-pearl that she had worn the first evening that she'd ever seen him; and that she had dropped in the car as they were driving back. So much had happened ... she felt she was not even the same Gwenna as the girl who had snapped the slender silver chain about her neck before they set out for the party.... She'd given up wondering if her Airman had forgotten to give it back to her. She'd forgotten all about it herself. And he'd had it, one of her own personal belongings, somewhere in his keeping all this time.
"Oh, yes; my--my little mascot," she said. "Have you got it?"
"Not here. It's in my other jac--it's at my rooms, I'll bring it to the dinner for you. And--er--look here, Miss Gwenna----"
He tilted forward again as the girl passed his side of the table to reach for the little wooden pattern by which she cut out a patch for the end of the strip, and then passed back again.
"I say," he began again, a trifle awkwardly, "if you don't mind, I want you to give me something in exchange for that locket."
"Oh, do you?" murmured Gwenna. "What?"
And a chill took her.
She didn't want him, here and now, to ask for--what Mr. Ryan might have asked.
But it was not a kiss he asked for, after all.
He said, "You know those little white wings you put in your shoes? You remember, the night of that river dance? Well, I wish you'd let me have one of those to keep as my mascot."
He hadn't thought of wishing it until there had intruded into his ken that other young man who made appointments--and who might have the--cheek to ask for keepsakes, but who shouldn't be first, after all!
Anxiously, as if it were for much more than that feathered trifle of a mascot that he asked, he said, "Will you?"
"Oh! If you like!"
"Sure you don't mind?"
"Mind? I should like you to have it," said Gwenna softly. "Really."
And across the great white aeroplane wing the girl looked very sweetly and soberly at her Aviator, who had just asked that other tiny wing of her, as a knight begged his lady's favour.
It was at this moment that the Aeroplane Lady, an alert figure in dark blue, came into a room where a young man and a girl had been talking idly enough together while one smoked and the other went on working with that five-foot barrier of the wing between them.
The Aeroplane Lady, being a woman, was sensitive to atmosphere--not the spirit-and-solution-scented atmosphere of this place of which she was mistress, but another.
In it she caught a vibration of something that made her say to herself, "Bless me, what's this? I never knew those two had even met! 'Not saying so,' I suppose. But certainly engaged, or on the verge of it!"
--Which all went to prove that the rebuked, the absent Leslie, was not far wrong in saying that it is the Obvious Thing that always succeeds!
