In the great hall young Dampier had turned to the Aeroplane Lady with his offer of motoring her to her Hotel first. She had good-naturedly laughed at him and said, "No. I'm going to be driven back by the rightful owner of the car this time. You take Miss Williams."
And then she had gone off with some friend of Paul's who had motors to lend, and Paul had taken Gwenna to find a taxi to drive up to Hampstead.
They drove slowly through Piccadilly Circus, now brighter than at midday. It was thronged with the theatre-crowds that surged towards the crossings. Coloured restaurant-coats and jewelled head-gear and laughing faces were gay in the lights that made that broad blazing belt about the fountain. Higher up the whole air was a soft haze of gold, melting into the hot, star-strewn purple of the night-sky. And against this there tapered, black and slender, the apex of the fountain, the downward-swooping shape that is not Mercury, but the flying Love--the Lad with Wings.
Paul Dampier leant back in the closed cab and would have drawn the girl to him.
She put both hands on his broad chest to hold him a little away from her.
"I want to ask you something," she began a little tremulously. "It's just--Is there going to be----"
"Well, what?" he asked, smiling close to her.
Of all things that he least expected came what the girl had to say.
"Is there going to be--a War, Paul?"
"A what?" he asked, thinking he had not heard aright.
She repeated it, tremulously. "A war. Real war."
"War?" he echoed, blankly, taken aback. He was silent from puzzled astonishment over her asking this, as they turned up Shaftesbury Avenue. They were held up outside the Hippodrome for some minutes. He was still silent. The taxi gave a jerk and went on. And she still waited for his reply. She had to remind him.
"Well," she said again, tremulous. "Is there going to be?"
"A war? A war indeed," he said again. "What an extraordinary--Who's--What put such a thing into your head?"
She said, "Is there?"
The boy gave a half-amazed, half-uneasy laugh. He retorted, "What d'you mean, Gwenna? A war where?"
She said flutteringly, "Anywhere."
"Oh," he said, and laughed as if relieved. "Always some war, somewhere. Frontier shows in India, and so on. There is some scrapping going on in Europe too, now, you know. Looks as if Austria and Servia were going to have a set-to. You mean that."
"No, I don't," persisted the Welsh girl, to whom these places seemed indescribably remote and beside the mark. "I mean ... a war to do with us, like."
"Us----?"
"To do with England."
"But----" he said, frowning. "Why, how absurd! A war with England? Why ... of course not. Why should you think of it?"
She cleared her throat and answered with another tremulous question.
"Why should you have--that gun-thing--on your aeroplane?"
"Not going to. Not on the P.D.Q.," he said, shaking his head. "Only an experiment, anyhow."
"Why should you have 'experiments' with those things?" she faltered. "'Have to be a rifle,' you said. Why should you talk about 'scouting' and 'modern warfare'?"
"I wasn't!" he said quite hotly.
"Yes, you were. That day we were together. That day in the field when you were talking to me about the Machine."
"Oh, then! Weeks ago."
"Yes. Why should there be all that, unless you meant that there'd be a war, with England in it. Paul!" she cried, almost accusingly, "you said yourself that it was 'bound to come!'"
"Oh, well! Everybody said that," he assured her lightly. "Can't help seeing Germany and that Fleet of hers, and her Zeppelins and things, going on build, build, build. They don't do that for their health, you bet! Scrap's bound to come; yes. Sooner or later."
"Yes, Paul; but when?"
"How should I know, my dear child?" retorted the young Airman. "Why didn't you ask Lord Thingummy, or Conyers at the Club just now?" he laughed. "Good speech of his, wasn't it?"
"Does he know?" persisted Gwenna, paling. "About the war coming, I mean?"
"More likely to know than I am, those people. Not that they'd give it away if they did. It won't be to-morrow, anyway. To-morrow; that's Sunday. Our holiday. Another day we shall have all to ourselves. Tell me what time I'm to call for you at the Club."
Not to be put off, she retorted, timid, persistent, "Tell me when you think it would come. Soon?"
Half laughing, half impatient, he said, "I don't know. Soon enough for it to be in my time, I hope."
"But--" she said, with a little catch in her voice, "you're not a soldier?"
He said quietly, "I'm an aviator."
An aviator; yes. That was what she meant. He belonged to the most daring and romantic of professions; the most dangerous, but not that danger. An inventor, part of his time; the rest of his time an airman at Hendon who made flights above what the man with the megaphone called the "Aer-rio-drome" above the khaki-green ground with the pylons and the border of summer-frocked spectators. Her boy! An aviator.... Would that mean presently a man flying above enemy country, to shoot and be shot at? ("Fired at by both friend and foe."). She said quiveringly: "You wouldn't have to fight?"
He said: "Hope so, I'm sure."
"Oh, Paul!" she cried, aghast, her hands on his arm. "Just when--when I've only just got you! To lose you again so soon----! Oh, no----!"
"Oh, I say, darling, don't be so silly," he said briskly and reassuringly. He patted the little hands. "We're not going to talk about this sort of thing, d'you hear? There's nothing to talk about. Actually, there's nothing. Understand?"
"Yes," she murmured slowly. She thought, "Actually, 'there's nothing to talk about' in what's between him and me. But it's there all the time."
And then, gradually, that presentiment of War began to fade in the reality of her joy at being with him now, with him still....
They turned up the Hampstead Road, flaring with naphtha-lights above the stalls, noisy with shouts of costers, crowded with the humble shoppers of Saturday night.
"Well, and what about to-morrow?" Dampier took up.
"I was going with Leslie to----"
"So you said. With Leslie, indeed! D'you think you're going to be allowed to go anywhere again, except with me?" he muttered as he put his arms about her.
He held her as close as he had done on the scaffolding, that afternoon when he had arranged with himself never to see the Little Thing again; close as he'd done next time he did see her, at the Factory.
"Oh, you don't know!" he said quite resentfully (while she laughed softly and happily in his hold), "you don't know how I've wanted you with me. I--I haven't been able to think of anything--You have got a fellow fond of you in a jolly short time, haven't you? How've you done it? M'm? I--Here!" he broke off savagely, "what is this dashed idiot stopping the taxi for?"
"Because I get out here. It's the Club," Gwenna explained to him gravely, opening the door of the cab for herself. "Good-night."
"What? No, you don't," protested the boy. "We're going up the Spaniards Road and down by the Whitestone Pond, and round by Hendon first. I must take you for a drive. It's not so late. Hang it, I haven't seen you to speak to----"
She had made a dash out and across the lamp-lighted asphalt, and now she nodded to him from the top step of the house, with her key already clicking in the lock.
"There," she thought.
For even in the tie that binds the most adoring heart there is twisted some little gay strand of retaliation.
Let him feel that after a whole evening of sitting in her pocket he hadn't seen anything of her. She'd known that sort of feeling long enough. Let him take his turn; let him have just a taste of it!
"Good-night!" she called softly to her lover before she disappeared. "See you to-morrow!"
