The Boy with Wings 22Part II · The Last Sunday of Peace
18
Literature · Romance
The Boy with Wings 22
Part II · The Last Sunday of Peace
RuckEnglish
Never had Gwenna risen so early after having spent so little of a night in sleep!
Into the small hours she had crouched in her kimono on the edge of Leslie's camp bedstead in the light that came from the street lamp outside the window; and she had talked and talked and talked.
For by "not saying anything about it" she had never meant keeping her happiness from that close chum.
Miss Long, sincerely delighted, had listened and had nodded her wise black head from the pillow. She had thrown in the confidante's running comments of "There! What did Leslie tell you?... Oh, he would, of course.... Good.... Oh, my dear, how exactly like them all.... No, no; I didn't mean that. (Of course there's nobody like him); I meant 'Fancy!' ... Yes and then what did Paul say, Virginia?" At last repetitions had cropped up again and again into the softly chattered recital, with all its girlish italics of: "Oh, but you don't know what he's like; oh, Leslie, no, you can't imagine!"--At last Leslie had sighed, a trifle enviously. And little Gwenna, pattering to the head of the bed, had put her cheek to the other girl's and had whispered earnestly: "Oh, Leslie, if I only could, d'you know what I'd do? I'd arrange so that he had a twin-brother exactly like him, to fall in love with you!"
"Taffy! you are too ... sweet," the elder girl had whispered back in a stifled voice.
Gwenna never guessed how Leslie Long had had much ado not to giggle aloud over that idea. To think of her, Leslie, finding rapture with any one of the type of the Dampier boy....
A twin-brother of his? Another equally bread-and-buttery blonde infant--an infant-in-arms who was even "simpler" than Monty Scott? Oh, Ishtar!... For thus does one woman count as profoundest boredom what brings to her sister Ecstasy itself.
And now here was Gwenna, all in white, coming down to the Club's Sunday breakfast with her broad hat already on her head and her gloves and her vanity-bag in her hand.
At the head of the table sat the Vicar's widow with the gold curb brooch and the look of resigned disapproval. Over the table Miss Armitage and the other suffrage-workers were discussing the Cat-and-Mouse Act. Opposite to them one of the art-students, with her hair cut a la Trilby, was listening bewildered, ready to be convinced.... Not one of the usual things remained unsaid....
Presently Gwenna's neighbour and bete noire, Miss Armitage, was denouncing the few remaining members of her sex who still seemed to acquiesce in the Oriental attitude towards Woman; who still remained serfs or chattels or toys.
"However! Thy needn't think thy caount," declared the lecturer firmly, stretching without apology across her neighbour to get the salt. With some distaste Gwenna regarded her. She had spots on her face. "Pleasers of Men!" she pursued, with noble scorn. "The remnant of the Slyve-girl Type, now happily extinct----"
"Loud cheers," from Leslie Long.
"The serpent's tile," continued the suffragette, "the serpent's tile that, after the reptile has been beaten to death, still gows on feebly wriggling----"
"Better wriggle off now, Taffy, my child," murmured Leslie, who sat facing the breakfast-room window. "Here's a degraded Oriental coming up the path now to call for his serf."
"You come," said Gwenna, warmly flushed as she rose. And she held her chum's long arm, dragging her with her as she came into the hall where the tall, typically English figure of her Airman stood, his straw hat in his hand. A splash of scarlet from the stained glass of the hall door fell upon his fair head and across his cheek as he turned.
"Good-morning," said Gwenna sedately, and without giving him so much as a glance. She felt at that moment that she would rather keep him at arm's length for ever than allow him even to hold her hand, with Leslie there. For it takes those who are cooler in temperament than was the little Welsh girl, or those who care less for their lovers than she did, to show themselves warmer in the presence of others.
"Hullo," said Paul Dampier to her. Then, "Hullo, Miss Long! How d'you do?"
Leslie gave him a very hearty shake of the hand, a more friendly glance and a still more demure inquiry about that Machine of his.
Paul Dampier laughed, returning her glance.
She was a sport, he thought. She could be trusted not to claim, just yet, the bet she'd won from his cousin; the laughing wager about the Aeroplane versus the Girl. Fifteen to one on the Girl, wasn't it? And here was the Girl home in his heart now, with the whole of a gorgeous July Sunday before them for their first holiday together.
"I say, I'm not too early now, am I?" he asked as he and the girl walked down the Club steps together. "I was the first time, so I just went for a walk round the cricket-pitch and back. Sickening thing I couldn't rake up a car anywhere for to-day. Put up with trains or tubes and taxis instead, I'm afraid. D'you mind? Where shall we go?"
"Flying, of course," was Gwenna's first thought. "Now at last he'll take me up." But that would be for the afternoon.
For the morning they wanted country, and grass, and trees to sit under.... Not Hampstead; Richmond Park was finally decided upon.
"We'll taxi to Waterloo," the boy said, with an inward doubt. He dived a long brown hand into his pocket as they walked together down the road that Gwenna used to take every morning to her Westminster bus. He was particularly short of money just then. Dashed nuisance! Just when he would have wished to be particularly flush! That's what came of buying a clock for the Machine before it was wanted. Still, he couldn't let the Little Thing here know that. Manage somehow. A taxi came rattling down the Pond Street Hill from Belsize Park as they reached the stopping-place of the buses, and Paul held up his hand.
"Taxi!"
But the driver shook his head. He pulled up the taxi in front of a small, rather mean-looking house close to where Gwenna and Paul were standing on the pavement. Then his fare came out of the house, a kit-bag in each hand and a steamer-rug thrown over his arm; he was a small, compactly-built young man in clothes so new and so smart that they seemed oddly out of place with the slatternly entrance of his lodging-house. It was this that made Paul Dampier look a little hard at him. Gwenna was wondering where she'd seen that blonde, grave face of his before.
He sprang lightly into the cab; a pink-faced girl was sitting there, whom Gwenna did not see. If she had seen her, she would have recognised her Westminster colleague, Ottilie Becker.
"Liverpool Street," ordered Miss Becker's companion, setting down his luggage.
Then, raising his head, he caught the eyes upon him of the other young man in the street. He put a hand to his hat, gave a quick little odd smile, and leaned forward out of the cab.
"Auf Wiedersehen!" he called, as the taxi started off--for Liverpool Street.
"Deuce did he mean by that?" exclaimed the young Englishman, staring after the cab. "Who on earth was that fellow? I didn't know him."
"Nor did I. But I have seen him," said Gwenna.
"I believe I have, somewhere," said Paul, musing.
They puzzled over it for a bit as they went on to Waterloo on the top of their bus.
And then, when they were passing "The Horse Shoe" in Tottenham Court Road, and when they were talking about something quite different (about the river-dance, in fact), they both broke off talking sharply. Gwenna, with a little jump on the slanting front seat, exclaimed, "I know--!" Just as Paul said, "By Jove! I've got it! I know who that fellow was. That German fellow just now. He was one of the waiters at that very dance, Gwenna!"
Gwenna, turning, said breathlessly, "Yes, I know. The one who passed us on the path. But I've thought of something else, too. I thought then his face reminded me of somebody's; I know now who it is. It's that fair young man who came down to try and be taken on at the Works."
"At Westminster?" Paul asked quickly.
"No; at the Aircraft Works one afternoon. He talked English awfully well, and he said he was Swiss. And then Andre--you know, the big, dark French workman--talked to him for quite a long time in French; he said he seemed very intelligent. But he wouldn't give him a job, whatever."
"He wouldn't?"
"No. I heard him tell the Aeroplane Lady that the young man ('ce garcon-la') came from the wrong canton," said Gwenna. "So he went away. I saw him go out. He was awfully like that German waiter. I suppose most Germans look alike, to us."
"S'pose so," said the Aviator, adding, "Was that the day that drawing of mine was missing from the Aircraft Works, I wonder?"
She looked at him, surprised. "I didn't know one of your drawings was missing, Paul."
"Yes. It didn't matter, as it happened. Drawing of a detail for my Machine. I've taken jolly good care not to have complete drawings of it anywhere," he said, with a little nod.
And some minutes later they had begun to talk of something else again, as the bus lurched on through the hot, deserted Sunday streets.
The morning that had brought Gwenna to her lover left Gwenna's chum for once at a loose end.
"Leslie, my child, aren't you a little tired of being the looker-on who sees most of the game? Won't you take a hand?" Miss Long asked herself as she went back into her Club bedroom. It was scented with the fresh smell of the rosemary and bay-rum that Leslie used for her ink-black sheaf of hair, and there drifted in through the open window the sound of bells from all the churches.
"Sunday. My free morning! 'The better the day.' So I'll settle up at last what I am going to do about this little matter of my future," she decided.
She sat down at the little bamboo writing-table set against the bedroom wall. Above it there hung (since this was a girl's room!) a looking-glass; and about the looking-glass there was festooned a little garland made up of dance-programmes, dangling by their pencils, of gaudy paper-fans from restaurants, and of strung beads. Stuck crookedly into a corner of the glass there was a cockling snapshot. It showed Monty Scott's dark head above his sculptor's blouse. Leslie picked it out and looked at it.
"Handsome, wicked eyes," she said to it lightly. "The only wicked things about you, you unsophisticated infant-in-arms!" Then she said, "You and your sculpturing!... Just like a baby with its box of bricks. Besides, I don't suppose you'll ever have a penny. One doesn't marry a man because one may like the look of him. No, boy."
She flicked the snapshot aside. There was conscientious carelessness in the flick.
Then she took out the leather-cased ink-bottle from her dressing-bag, and some paper.
She wrote: "MY DEAR HUGO----"
Then she stopped and thought--"Maudie and Hilary Smith will be pleased with me. So will the cousins, the opulent cousins who've always been kind about clothes they've finished wearing, and invitations to parties where they want another girl to brighten things up. You can give some bright parties for them now, Leslie! Good Reason Number Ninety-nine for saying 'Yes.'"
She took up her pen.
"Nothing," she murmured, "Nothing will ever kill the idea that the girl who isn't married is the girl who hasn't been asked. Nothing will ever spoil the satisfaction of that girl when showing that she has!"
She wrote down the date, which she had forgotten.
"Poor Monty would be so much more decorative for 'show' purposes. But I explained quite frankly to Hugo that it would be his money I'd want!"
She wrote, "After thinking it well over----"
Then again she meditated.
"Great things, reasons! The reason why so many marriages aren't a success is because they haven't enough 'reasons why' behind them. Now, how far had I got with mine--ah, yes. Reason Number a Hundred: I'm twenty-six; I shall never been any better-looking than I am now. Not unless I'm better-dressed. Which (Reason a Hundred and One) I should be if I married Hugo. Reason a Hundred and Two: my old lady won't live for ever, and I should never get a better job than hers. Except his. Reason Number a Hundred and Two and a Half: I do quite like him. He doesn't expect anything more, so there's the other half-reason for taking him. Reason a Hundred and Four: he's never disapproved of me. Whereas Monty always likes me against his better judgment. Much nicer for me, but annoying for a husband. I should make Hugo an excellent wife." She added this half-aloud (to the snapshot).
"I should never shock him. Never bore him. Never interfere with him. Never make him look silly--any sillier than he can't help looking with that hair and that necktie he will wear. Leslie would have the sense, when she wasn't amusing him at the moment, to retire to her own rooms (Reason a Hundred and Five for marrying well), and to stay there until she was fetched. Reason a----"
Here, in the full flow of her reasoning, Miss Long cast suddenly and rather violently down her pen, and tore the sheet with Hugo's name in it into tiny strips that she cast into the empty fireplace.
"I can't think to write a good letter to-day!" she excused herself to herself as she got up from her chair. "I'm tired.... It was all that talking from Taffy last night. Bother the child. Bother her. It's unsettling!--Bother all engaged girls. (And all the people shall say Amen.) I wonder where they went to?... I shall ring up somebody to take me on the river, I think. Plenty of time to say 'Yes' to Hugo later."
The letter to Hugo, between the lines of which there had come the vision of an engaged girl's happy face, remained, for the present, unfinished.
Leslie went to the telephone.
"O-o-o Chelsea," she called. "I want to speak to Mr. Scott, please."
She thought, "This shall be my last free Sunday, and I'll have it in peace!"
In Richmond Park the grass was doubly cool and green beneath the shade both of the oaks and of the breast-high bracken where Gwenna and Paul Dampier sat, eating the fruit and cake that they had bought on the way, and talking with long stretches of contented silence.
They were near enough actually to London and the multitude. But town and people seemed far away, out of their world to-day.
Gwenna's soft, oddly-accented voice said presently into the warm stillness, "You'll take me up this afternoon?"
"Up?" he said idly. "Where to?"
"Up flying, of course."
"No, I don't think so," said the young Airman quietly, putting his chin in his hand as he lay in his favourite attitude, chest downwards in the grass, looking at her.
"Not flying? Not this afternoon?"
"Don't think so, Little Thing."
"Oh, you're lazy," she teased him, touching a finger to his fair head and taking it quickly back again. "You don't want to move."
"Not going to move, either; not until I've got to."
She sighed, not too disappointed.
Here in the dappled shade and the solitude with him it was heavenly enough; even if she did glance upward at the peeps of sapphire-blue through the leaves and wonder what added rapture it would be to soar to those heights with her lover.
"D'you know how many times you've put me off?" she said presently, fanning the midges away from herself with her broad white hat. "Always you've said you'd take me flying with you, Paul. And always there's been something to stop it. Let's settle it now. Now, when will you?"
"Ah," he said, and flung the stone of the peach he'd been eating into the dark green jungle of bracken ahead of them. "Good shot. I wanted to see if I could get that knob on that branch."
She moved nearer to him and said coaxingly, "What about next Sunday?"
"Hope it'll be as fine as this," he said, smiling at her. "I'd like all the Sundays to be just like this one. Can't think what I did with all the ripping days before this, Gwenna."
She said, "I meant, what about your taking me up next Sunday?"
"Nothing about it," he said, shaking his head. There was a little pause. He crossed his long legs in the grass and said, "Not next Sunday. Nor the Sunday after that. Nor any Sunday. Nor any time. I may as well tell you now. You aren't ever coming flying," said the young aviator firmly to his sweetheart. "I've settled that."
The cherub face of the girl looked blankly into his. "But, Paul! No flying? Why? Surely--It's safe enough now!"
"Safe enough for me--and for most people."
"But you've taken Miss Conyers and plenty of girls flying."
"Girls. Yes."
"And you promised to take me!"
"That was ages ago. That was when you were a girl too."
"Well, what am I now, pray?"
"Don't you know? Not 'a girl.' My Girl!" he said.
Then he moved. He knelt up beside her. He made love to her sweetly enough to cause her to forget all else for a time. And presently, flushed and shy and enraptured, she brought out of her vanity-bag the tiny white wing that was to be his mascot, and she safety-pinned it inside the breast of his old grey jacket.
"That ought to be fastened somewhere to the P.D.Q.," he suggested. But she shook her head. No. It was not for the P.D.Q. It was for him to wear.
Then she saw him weighing in his hand her own mascot, the little mother-of-pearl heart with the silver chain.
"Ah! You did remember to bring it, at last?" she said.
Nestling against his arm, she lifted her chin and waited for him to snap the trinket about her neck.
He laughed and hesitated. She looked at him rather wonderingly. Then he made a confession.
"D'you know, I--I do hate to have to give it back again, Gwenna. I've had it so long. Might as well let me hold on to it. May I?"
"Oh, you are greedy for keepsakes," she said, delighted. "What would you do with a thing like that?"
"I've thought of something," said he, nodding at her.
She asked, "What?"
"Tell you another time," he smiled, with the locket clutched in the hand that was about her waist. She flung back her head happily against his shoulder, curling herself up like a kitten in his hold. They had settled that they were going to walk on to Kew Gardens to tea, but it was not time yet, and it was so peaceful here. Scarcely any one passed them in that nook of the Park. Another happy silence fell upon the lovers. It was long before the boy broke it, asking softly, "You do like being with me, don't you?" There was no answer from the girl.
"Do you, Gwenna?" It seemed still odd to be able to call her whatever he liked, now! "Do you, my Little Sweet Thing?"
Still she didn't answer. He bent closer to look at her.... Her long eyelashes lay like two little dark half-moons upon her cheeks and her white blouse fell and rose softly to her breathing. Drowsy from the late hours she'd kept last night and from the sun-warmed silence under the trees, she had fallen asleep in his arms. Her eyes were still shut when at last she heard his deep and gentle voice again in her ear, "I suppose you know you owe me several pairs of gloves, miss!"
She laughed sleepily, returning (still a little shyly and unfamiliarly!) the next kiss that he put on her parted lips.
"I was nearly asleep," she said, with a little sudden stretch that ran all over her like a shake given to a sheet of white aluminium at the Works. "Isn't it quiet? Feels as if everything was asleep." She opened her eyes, blinking at the rays of the sun, now level in her face. "Oh, I should like some tea, wouldn't you?"
They rose to go and find a place for tea in Kew Gardens, among the happy, lazing Sunday crowds of those whom it has been the fashion to treat so condescendingly: England's big Middle-classes. There were the conventional young married couples; "She" wearing out the long tussore coat that seemed so voluminous; "He," pipe in mouth, wheeling the wicker mail-cart that held their pink-and-white bud of a baby. There were also courting couples innumerable....
(Not all of these were as reticent in the public eye as Gwenna had been with her lover before Leslie.)
To Gwenna the bright landscape and the coloured figures seemed a page out of some picture-book that she turned idly, her lover beside her. She had to remind herself that to these other lovers she herself and Paul were also part of a half-seen picture....
They sat down at one of the green wooden tea-tables, and a waiter in a greasy black coat came out under the trees to take Dampier's order. Perhaps that started another train of thought in the girl's mind, for quite suddenly she exclaimed, "Ah! I've thought of another German now that he was like!"
"Who was that?" asked Paul.
"Only a picture I used to see every day. A photograph that our Miss Baker kept pinned up over her desk at the works in Westminster," explained Gwenna. "The photograph of that brother of hers that she was always writing those long letters to."
"Always writing, was she? Was he a waiter?"
"No, he was a soldier. He was in uniform in that photo," Gwenna said, as the little tray was set before her. "Karl was his name, Karl Becker.... Do you take sugar?"
"Yes. You'll have to remember that for later on," he said, looking at her with his head tilted back and a laugh in his eyes, as she poured out his tea. She handed it to him, and then sat sipping her own, looking dreamily over the English gardens, over the green spaces flowered with the light frocks and white flannels of other couples who perhaps called themselves "in love," and who possibly imagined they could ever feel as she and her lover felt. (Deluded beings!)
She murmured, "What do you suppose all these people are thinking about?"
"Oh! Whether they'll go to Brighton or to South-end for their fortnight, I expect," returned Paul Dampier. "Everybody's thinking about holidays just now."
Later, they stood together in the hushed gloom of the big chestnut aisle beside the river that slipped softly under Kew Bridge, passing the willows and islands and the incongruously rural-looking street of Strand-on-the-Green. One of the cottage-windows there showed red blinds, lighted up and homely.
Young Dampier whispered to his girl--"Going on holidays myself, perhaps, presently, eh?"
"Oh, Paul!" she said blankly, "you aren't going away for a holiday, are you?"
"Not yet, thanks. Not without you."
"Oh!" she said. Then she sighed happily, watching the stars. "To-day's been the loveliest holiday I've ever had in my life. Hasn't it been perfect?"
"Not quite," he said, with his eyes on those red-lighted windows on the opposite bank. "Not perfect, Gwen."
"Not----?" she took up quickly, wondering if she had said something that he didn't like.
Almost roughly he broke out, "Oh, I say, darling! Don't let's go and have one of these infernally long engagements, shall we?"
She turned, surprised.
"We said," she reminded him, "that we weren't 'engaged' at all."
"I know," he said. Then he laughed as he stooped and kissed her little ringless fingers and the palms of her hands. "But----"
There was a pause.
"Got to marry me one day, you know," said young Paul Dampier seriously.
He might have spoken more seriously still if he had known that what he said must happen in ten days' time from then.
