Gwenna, who was always bubbling over with young curiosity about the fresh people whom she was to meet at a party, had never taken overmuch interest in the places where the party might be held.
She had not yet reached the age when, for information about new acquaintances, one glances first at their background.
To her the well-appointed though slightly "Art"-y Smith establishment where her friend was taking her to dine was merely "a married house." She took for granted the arrangements thereof. She lumped them all--from the slim, deferential parlour-maid who ushered them through a thickly-carpeted corridor with framed French etchings into a spacious bedroom where the girls removed their wraps, down to the ivory, bemonogrammed pin-tray and powder-box in front of the big mirror--she lumped these all together as "things you have when you're married."
It never struck her--it never strikes eight out of ten young girls--that Marriage does not necessarily bring these "things" with their subtle assurance of ease, security, and dignity in its train. She never thought about it. Marriage indeed seemed to her a sort of dullish postscript to what she imagined must be a thrilling letter.
Why must nearly all married people become so stodgy? Gwenna simply couldn't imagine herself getting stodgy--or fat, like this married sister of Leslie Long's, who was receiving her guests in the large upstairs drawing-room into which the two girls were now shown.
This room, golden and creamy, seemed softly aglow. There were standard lamps with huge amber crinolines, bead-fringed; and flowers--yellow roses and white lilies--seemed everywhere.
Leslie Long drew one of the lilies out of a Venetian vase and held it out, like an usher's rod, towards Gwenna as she followed her into the bright, bewildering room, full of people. She announced, "Maudie, here's the stop-gap. Taffy Williams, your hostess."
Her hostess was a version of Leslie grown incredibly matronly. Her auricula-coloured velvet tea-gown looked as if it had been clutched about her at the last moment. (Which in point of fact it had. Mrs. Smith was quite an old-fashioned mother.) Yet from her eyes smiled the indestructible Girl that is embedded in so many a respectable matron, and she looked down very kindly at Gwenna, the cherub-headed, in her white frock.
Mr. Smith, who had a large smooth face and a bald head, gave Gwenna a less cordial glance. Had the truth been known, he was sulking over the non-appearance of the intelligent young woman (from the Poets' Club) whose place was taken by this vacuous-looking flapper (his summing-up of Miss Gwenna Williams). For Gwenna this bald and wedded patriarch of forty-five scarcely existed. She glanced, nervous and fluttered and interested, towards the group of other guests gathered about the nearer of the two flower-filled fireplaces; a pretty woman in rose-colour and two men of thirty or thereabouts, one of whom (rather stout, with an eye-glass, a black stock-tie, and a lock of brown hair brought down beside his ear like a tiny side-whisker) made straight for Leslie Long.
"Now don't attempt to pretend we haven't met," Gwenna heard him say in a voice of flirtatious yearning. "Last time you cut my dance----"
Here the maid announced, from the door, some name.... Gwenna, standing shyly, as if on the brink of the party, heard the hostess saying: "We hardly hoped you'd come ... we know you people always are besieged by invitations----"
"Dear me! All these people seem dreat-fully grand," thought the Welsh girl hastily to herself. "I wonder if it wouldn't have been better, now, if Leslie had left that cerise velvet trimming as it was on my dress?"
Instinctively she glanced about for the nearest mirror. There was a big oval gilt-framed one over the yellow brocaded Empire couch near which Gwenna stood. Her rather bewildered brown eyes strayed from the stranger faces about her to the reflection of the face and figure that she best knew. In the oval of gilded leaves she beheld herself framed. She looked small and very young with her cherub's curls and her soft babyish white gown and that heaven-coloured sash. But she looked pretty. She hoped she did....
Then suddenly in that mirror she caught sight of another face, a face she saw for the first time.
She beheld, looking over her white-mirrored shoulder, the reflection of a young man. Clear-featured, sunburnt but blonde, he carried his fair head tilted a little backward, and his eyes--strange eyes!--were looking straight into hers. They were clear and blue and space-daring eyes, with something about them that Gwenna, not recognising, would have summed up vaguely as "like a sailor's." ... They were eyes that seemed to have borrowed light and colour from long scanning of far horizons. And now all that keenness of theirs was turned, like a searchlight, to gaze into the wondering, receptive glance of a girl....
Who was this?
Before Gwenna turned to face this stranger who had followed their hostess up to her, his gaze seemed to hold hers, as a hand might have held her own, for longer than a minute....
Afterwards she told herself that it seemed, not a minute, but an age before that first look was loosed, before she had turned round to her hostess's, "I want to introduce Mr.----"
(Something or other. She did not catch the name.)
"He's nice!" was the young girl's pristine and uncoloured first impression.
Then she thought, "Oh, if it's this one who's going to take me in to dinner, I am glad!"
It was he who was to take her in.
For Mr. Smith took the pretty lady whose name, as far as Gwenna was concerned, remained "Mrs. Rose-colour." Her husband, a neutral-tinted being, went in with Mrs. Smith. The man with the side-whisker (who, if he'd been thinner, certainly might have looked rather like the portrait of Chopin) laughed and chattered to Leslie as they went downstairs together. Gwenna, falling to the lot of the blue-eyed young man as a dinner-partner, altered her mind about her "gladness" almost before she came to her third spoonful of clear soup.
For it seemed as if this young man whose name she hadn't caught were not really "nice" after all! That is, of course, he wasn't "not nice." But he seemed stupid! Nothing in him! Nothing to say! Or else very absent-minded, which is just as bad as far as the other people at a party are concerned. Or worse, because it's rude.
Gwenna, taking in every detail of the pretty round table and the lights under the enormous parasol of a pink shade, approving the banked flowers, the silver, the glass, those delicious-looking chocolates in the filigree dishes, the tiny "Steinlen-kitten" menu-holders, Gwenna, dazed yet stimulated by the soft glitter in her eyes, the subdued buzz of talk in her ears, stole a glance at Leslie (who was looking her best and probably behaving her worst) and felt that every prospect was pleasing--except that of spending all this time beside that silent, stodgy young man.
"Perhaps he thinks it's me that's too silly to talk to. I knew Leslie'd made me look too young with this sash! Yes! indeed I look like some advertisement for Baby's Outfitting Department," thought Gwenna, vexed. "Or is it because he's the kind of young man that just sits and eats and never really sees or thinks about anything at all?"
Now, had she known it at the time, the thoughts of the blonde and blue-eyed youth beside her were, with certain modifications, something on these lines.
"Dash that stud! Dash the thing. This pin's going into the back of my neck directly. I know it is. That beastly stud must have gone through a crack in the boards.... I shall buy a bushel of 'em to-morrow. Why a man's such a fool as to depend upon one stud.... I know this pin's going into the back of my neck when I'm not thinking about it. I shall squawk blue murder and terrify 'em into fits.... What have we here?" (with a glance from those waking eyes at the menu). "Good. Smiths always do themselves thundering well.... Now, who are all these frocks? The Pink 'Un. That's a Mrs.... Damsel in the bright yellow lampshade affair about six foot high, that old Hugo's giving the glad eye to. Old Hugo weighs about a stone and a half too much. Does himself a lot too well. Revolting sight. I wonder if I can work the blood-is-thicker-than-water touch on him for a fiver afterwards?... This little girl I've got to talk to, this little thing with the neck and the curly hair. Pretty. Very pretty. Knocks the shine out of the others. I know if I turn my head to speak to her, though, that dashed pin will cut adrift and run into the back of my neck. Dash that stud. Here goes, though----"
And, stiffly and cautiously moving his head in a piece with his shoulders, he turned, remarking at last to Gwenna in a voice that, though deep-toned and boyish, was almost womanishly gentle, "You don't live in town, I suppose?"
The girl from that remote Welsh valley straightened her back a little. "Yes, I do live in town, indeed!" she returned a trifle defensively. "What made you think I lived in the country?"
"Came up yesterday, I s'pose," the young man told himself as the soup-plates were whisked away.
Gwenna suspected a twinkle in those unusual blue eyes as he said next, "Haven't you lived in Wales, though?"
"Well, yes, I have," admitted Gwenna Williams in her soft, quaint accent, "but how did you know?"
"Oh, I guessed. I've stayed there myself, fishing, one time and another," her neighbour told her. "Used to go down to a farmhouse there, sort of place that's all slate slabs, and china dogs, and light-cakes for tea; ages ago, with my cousin. That cousin," and he gave a little jerk of his fair head towards the black-stocked, Trelawney-whiskered young man who was engrossed with Miss Long. "We used to--Ah! Dash!" he broke off suddenly and violently. "It's gone down my back now."
Gwenna, startled, gazed upon this stranger who was so good to look at and so extremely odd to listen to. Gone down his back? She simply could not help asking, "What has?"
"That pin," he answered ruefully.
Then he tilted back his fair head and smiled, with deep dimples creasing his sunburnt cheeks and a flash of even white showing between his care-free, strongly-modelled lips. And hereupon Gwenna realised that after all she'd been right. He was "nice." He began to laugh outright, adding, "You must think me an absolute lunatic: I'd better tell you what it's all about----"
He took a mouthful of sole and told her, "Fact is, I lost my collar-stud when I was dressing, the stud for the back of my collar; and I had to fasten my collar down at the last minute with a pin. It's been getting on my nerves. Has, really. I've been waiting for it to run into the back of my neck----"
"So that was why he seemed so absent-minded!" thought Gwenna, feeling quite disproportionately glad and amused over this trifle. She said, "I thought you turned as if you'd got a stiff neck! I thought you'd been sitting in a draught."
He made another puzzling remark.
"Draught, by Jove!" he laughed. "It's always fairly draughty where I have to sit!"
He went on again to mourn over his collar. "Worse than before, now," he said. "It's going to hitch up to the back of my head, and I shall have to keep wiggling my shoulder-blades about as if I'd got St. Vitus's dance!"
Gwenna felt she would have liked to have taken a tiny safety-pin that there was hidden away under her sky-blue sash, and to have given it to him to fasten that collar securely and without danger of pricking. Leslie, she knew, would have done that. She, Gwenna, would have been too shy, with a perfect stranger--only, now that he'd broken the ice with that collar-stud, so to speak, she couldn't feel as if this keen-eyed, deep-voiced young man were any longer quite a stranger. In her own dialect, he seemed, now, "so homely, like----"
And over the next course he was talking to her about home, about the places where he'd fished in Wales.
"There was one topping little trout-stream," he told her in that deep and gentle voice. "Bubbly as soda-water, green and clear as bottle-glass. Awfully jolly pools under the shade of the branches. You look right down and it's all speckly at the bottom, with brown-and-grey stones and slates and things, under the green water. It's like----"
He was looking straight at her, and suddenly he stopped. He had caught her eyes, full; as he had caught them before dinner in that mirror. Now that he was so close to them he saw that they were clear and browny-green, with speckles of slate-colour. They were not unlike those pools themselves, by Jove.... Almost as if he had been fishing for something out of those depths he still looked down, hard into them.... He forgot that he had stopped talking. And then under his own eyes he saw the little thing begin to colour up; blushing from that sturdy white throat of hers to the brow where those thick brown cherub's-curls began to grow. He looked away, hastily. Hastily he said, "It--er--it had a pretty name, that stream. Quite a pronounceable Welsh name, for once: The Dulas."
"Oh, dear me! Do you know the Dulas?" cried Gwenna Williams in delight, forgetting that she had just been feeling acutely conscious and shy under the fixed stare of a pair of searching blue eyes. "Why! It's not very far from there that's my home!"
They went on talking--about places. Unconsciously they were leading the whole table after them; the jerkiness went out of sentences; the pitch of the talk rose. It was all a buzz to Gwenna; but when, at the joint, her neighbour turned at last to answer a comment of the rose-coloured lady on his other hand, she amused herself by seeking to find out what all the others were talking about.
"I like some of his things very much. Now, his water-colours at the----" This was Mr. Smith, holding forth about pictures.... There appeared to be a good deal of it. Ending up with, "And I know for a fact that he only got two hundred guineas for that; two hundred! Incredible!"
It certainly did seem to Gwenna an incredible amount of money for a picture, a thing you just hang on a wall and forgot all about. Two hundred guineas! What couldn't she, Gwenna, do with that! Travel all over the place for a year! Go flying every week, at Hendon!
"What an experience! What a change it's made in the whole of English thought!" the pretty, rose-coloured lady was saying earnestly. "We can never be the same again now. It's set us, as a nation, such an entirely new and higher standard----"
This was very solemn, Gwenna thought. What was it about?
"I can't imagine, now, how we can have existed for so long without that point of view," went on Mrs. Rose-colour. "As I say, the first time I ever saw the Russian Ballet----"
The Russian Ballet--Ah! Gwenna had been with Leslie to see that; she had thought herself in a fairyland of dazzling colour, and of movement as wonderful as that of the flying biplanes. It had been a magic world of enchanted creatures that seemed half-bird, half-flower, who whirled and leaped, light as blown flame, to strangest music.... Gwenna had been dazed with delight; but she could not have talked about it as these people talked. "Mr. Rose-colour," Mr. Smith, and Leslie's whiskered young man were all joining in together now.
"You won't deny that a trace of the Morbid----"
"But that hint of savagery is really the attraction," Mr. Smith explained rather pompously. "We over-civilised peoples, who know no savagery in modern life, who have done with that aspect of evolution, I suppose we welcome something so----"
"And that infinitude of gesture----" murmured the whiskered man, eating asparagus.
"Yes, but Isadora----"
"Ah, but Karsavina!"
"You must admit that Nijinski is ultra-romantic----"
"Define Romance!"
"Geltzer----"
"Scheherazade----"
Utterly bewildered by the strange words of the language spoken by half London in early summer, Nineteen-fourteen, the young girl from the wilds sought a glimpse of her friend's black-swathed head and vivid, impish face above the banked flowers of the table-centre. Did Leslie know all these words? Was she talking? She was laughing flippantly enough; speaking as nonchalantly.
"Yes, I'm going to the next Chelsea Arts Ball in that all-mauve rig he wears in the 'Spectre de la Rose.' I am. Watch the effect. 'Oh, Hades, the Ladies! They'll leave their wooden huts!' You needn't laugh, Mr. Swayne"--this to the Chopin young man. "Anybody would be taken in. I can look quite as much of a man as Nijinski does. In fact, far----"
Here suddenly Gwenna's neighbour leaned forward over the table towards his hostess and broke in, his deep, gentle voice carrying above the buzz.
"Mrs. Smith! I say! I beg your pardon," he exclaimed quickly, "but isn't that a baby crying like anything somewhere?"
This remark of the young man's, and that which followed it, surprised and puzzled Gwenna even more than his curious remark about draughts. Who was he? What sort of a young man was this who always sat in draughts and who could catch the sound of a baby's cry when even its own mother hadn't heard it through the thick portiere, the doors, the walls and that high-pitched buzz of conversation round about the table?
For Mrs. Smith had fled from the table with a murmured word of apology, and had presently returned just as the ornate fruit-and-jelly mould was being handed round, and Gwenna heard her saying to Mrs. Rose-colour, "Yes, it was. He's off again now. He simply won't go down for Nurse--I always have to rush----"
Gwenna turned to her companion, whose collar was now well up over the back of his neck. Wondering, she said to him, "Fancy your hearing that, through all this other noise!"
"Ah, one gets pretty quick at listening to, and placing, noises," he told her, helping himself to the jelly and shrugging his shoulders and that collar at the same time. "It's being accustomed to notice any squeak that oughtn't to be there, you know, in the engines. One gets to hear the tiniest sound, through anything."
Gwenna, more puzzled than before, turned from that delectable pudding on her plate, to this strangely interesting young man beside her. She said: "Are you an engineer?"
"I used to be," he said. "A mechanic, you know, in the shops, before I got to be a pilot."
"A pilot?" She wondered if he thought it rude of her, if it bothered him to be asked questions about himself like this, by just a girl? And still she couldn't help asking yet another question.
She said, "Are you a sailor, then?"
"Me?" he said, as if surprised. "Oh, no----"
And then, quite simply and as if it were nothing, he made what was to Gwenna an epic announcement.
"I'm an airman," he said.
She gasped.
He went on. "Belong to a firm that sends me flying. Taking up passengers at Hendon, that sort of thing."
"An airman? Are you?" was all that Gwenna could for the moment reply. "Oh ... Oh!"
Perhaps her eyes, widening upon the face above her, were more eloquent of what she felt.
That it was to her a miracle to find herself actually sitting next to him! Actually speaking to one of these scarcely credible beings whom she had watched this afternoon! An airman.... There was something about the very word that seemed mysterious, uncanny. Was it because of its comparative newness in the speech of man? Perhaps, ages ago, primitive maids found something as arresting in the term "A seaman"? But this was an airman! It was his part to ride the Winged Victory, the aeroplane that dared those sapphire heights above the flying-ground. Oh! And she had been chattering to him about the slate-margined brooks and the ferny glens of her low-lying valley, just as if he'd been what this ingenuous maid called to herself "Any young man" who had spent holidays fishing in Wales? She hadn't known. That was why he had those queer, keen eyes: blue and reckless, yet measuring.
Not a sailor's, not a soldier's ... but the eyes of Icarus!...
"I--I never heard your name," said Gwenna, a little breathless, timid. "Which is it, please?"
For reply he dabbed a big, boyish finger down on the slender name-card among the crumbs of his bread. "Here you are," he said, "Dampier; Paul Dampier."
So whirling and bewildered was Gwenna's mind by this time that she scarcely wondered over the added surprise. This, she just realised, was the name she had first heard bellowed aloud through the megaphone from the judges' stand. She hardly remembered then that a photograph of this same aviator was tossed in among her wash-leather gloves, velvet hair-bands, and her handkerchief-sachet in the top right-hand drawer of her dressing-table at the Club. Certainly she did not remember at this minute what she had said, laughing, over that portrait, to her two friends on the flying-ground.
There, she had admired the machine; that un-Antaeus-like thing that was not itself until it had shaken off the fetters of Earth from its skids and wheels. Here, she marvelled over the man; for he was part of it. He was its skill and its will. He was the planner of those curves and bankings and soarings, those vol-planes that had left, as it were, their lovely lines visible in the air. His Icarian mind had determined--his large but supple body had executed them.
A girl could understand that, without understanding how it was all done. Those big, boyish hands of his, of course, would grasp certain mechanisms; his feet, too, would be busy; his knees--every inch of his lithe length and breadth--every muscle of him; yes! even to the tiny muscles that moved his wonderful eyes.
"I saw you, then," she told him, in a dazed little voice. "I was at Hendon this afternoon! It was the first time in my life...."
"Really?" he said. "What did you think of it all?"
"Oh, splendid!" she said, ardently, though vaguely.
How she longed to be able to talk quickly and easily to anybody, as Leslie could! How stupid he--the Airman--must think her! A little shakily she forced herself to go on: "I did think it so wonderful, but I can't explain, like. Ever. I never can. But----"
Perhaps, again, she was explaining better than she knew, with that small, eager face raised to his.
"Oh!" she begged. "Do tell me about it!"
He laughed. "Tell you what? Isn't much to tell."
"Oh, yes, there must be! You tell me," she urged softly, unconscious that her very tone was pure and concentrated flattery. "Do!"
And with another short, deprecating laugh, another shrug to his collar, the boy began to "tell" her things, though the girl did not pretend to understand. She listened to that voice, strong and deep, but womanishly gentle. She forgot that by rights she ought to pay some attention to her neighbour, the imitation Chopin. She listened to this other.
Words like "controls," "pockets," "yawing," went in at one of the ears under her brown curls and out at the other, leaving nothing but a quivering atmosphere of "the wonderfulness" of it all. Presently she saw those hands of his, big, sensitive, clever, arranging forks and spoons upon the sheeny tablecloth before her.
"Imagine that's your machine," he said. "Now you see there are three possible movements. This"--he tilted a dessert-knife from side to side--"and this"--he dipped it--"and this, which is yawing--you understand?"
"No!" she confessed, with the quickest little gesture. "I couldn't understand those sort of things. I shouldn't want to. What I really want to know is--well, about it, like!"
"About what?"
"About flying!"
He laughed outright again. "But, that is flying!"
She shook her head. "No, not what I mean. That's all--machinery!" She pronounced the word "machinery" with something almost like disdain. He looked at her as if puzzled.
"Sorry you aren't interested in machinery," he said quite reprovingly, "because, you know, that's just what I am interested in. I'm up to my eyes in it just now, pretty well every minute that I can spare. In fact I've got a machine--only the drawings for it, of course, but----"
"Do you mean you've invented one?"
"Oh, I don't know about 'invent.' Call it an improvement. It should be about as different from the lumbering concern you saw me go up in to-day as that's different from--say from one of those old Cambrian Railway steam engines," he declared exultantly. "It's----"
Here, he plunged into another vortex of mysterious jargon about "automatic stability," about "skin friction," and a hundred other matters that left the listening girl as giddy as a flight itself might have done.
What she did understand from all this was that here, after all, in the Machine, must be the secret of all the magic. This was what interested the Man. An inventor, too, he talked as if he loved to talk of it--even to her; his steel-blue eyes holding her own. Perhaps he didn't even see her, she thought; perhaps he scarcely remembered there was a girl there, leaving strawberries and cream untasted on an apple-green plate, listening with all her ears, with all of herself--as he, with all of himself, guided a machine. Ah, he talked of a just-invented machine as in the same tone Gwenna had heard young mothers talk of their new-born babies.
This was what he lived for!
"Yes," concluded the enthusiast with a long sigh, "if I could get that completed, and upon the market----"
"Well?" Gwenna took up softly; ignorant, but following his every change of tone. "Why can't you?"
"Why not? For the usual reason that people who are keen to get things done can't do 'em," the boy said ruefully, watching that responsive shadow cloud her face as he told her. "It's a question of the dashed money."
"Oh!" said the girl more softly still. "I see."
So he, too, even he knew what it was to find that fettering want of guineas clog a soaring impulse? What a shame, she thought....
He thought (as many another young man with a Subject has thought of some rapt and girlish listener!) that the little thing was jolly intelligent, for a girl, more so than you were supposed to expect of such a pretty face---- Pretty? Come to look at her she was quite lovely. Made that baggage in the yellow dress and the Mrs. in the Pink look like a couple of half-artificial florists' blooms by the side of a lily-of-the-valley freshly-plucked from some country garden, sappy and sturdy, and sweet. And her skin was like the bit of mother-of-pearl she was wearing as a heart-shaped locket.
Quite suddenly he said to her: "Look here! Should you care to go up?"
Gwenna gasped.
The whole room, the bright table and the chattering guests seemed now to whirl about her in a circle of shiny mist--as that aeroplane propeller had whirled.... Care to go up? "Care!" Would she? Would she not?
"Oh----" she began.
But this throbbing moment was the moment chosen by her hostess to glance smilingly at Mrs. Rose-colour and to rise, marshalling the women from the room.
