The Boy with Wings 7Part I · A Bachelor'S Tea-Party
18
Literature · Romance
The Boy with Wings 7
Part I · A Bachelor'S Tea-Party
RuckEnglish
The first of a series of "things that got in the way" of Gwenna's making an appointment to go flying occurred on that Sunday afternoon, when Leslie and she were to have tea at Paul Dampier's place.
"A mixture of chaos and comfy chairs, I expect; ash everywhere, and beastly cakes. (I know these bachelor tea-parties.) That," Leslie said, "is what his 'place' will be like."
Gwenna, as usual, hadn't wasted any thoughts over this. She had been too full of what their host himself would say and do--about the flying. She was all ready, in the white dress, the white hat with the wings, half an hour after Sunday mid-day dinner at the Ladies' Club. But it was very nearly half-past four by the time Mr. Dampier did come, as he had promised, to fetch the two girls.
He came in the car that had driven them back on the night of the dinner-party.
And he was hurried, and apologetic for his lateness. He even seemed a little shy. This had the effect of making Gwenna feel quite self-possessed as she took the seat beside him ("I hate sitting by the driver, really. Makes me so nervous!" Leslie had declared) and inquired whether he borrowed his cousin's car any time he had visitors.
"Well, but Hugo's got everything," he told her, with a twinkle, "so I always borrow anything of his that I can collar!"
"Studs, too?" asked Gwenna, quickly.
"Oh, come! I didn't think it of you. What a pun!" he retorted.
She coloured a little, shy again, hurt. But he turned his head to look at her, confided to her: "It was on the chest-of-drawers, all the time!"
And, as the car whizzed westwards, they laughed together. That dinner-table incident of the collar--or collared--stud brought, for the second time, a sudden homely glow of friendly feeling between this boy and girl.
She thought, "He's just as easy to get on with as if he were another girl, like Leslie----"
For always, at the beginning of things, the very young woman compares her first man-friend with the dearest girl-chum she has known.
--"Or as if he were just nobody, instead of being so wonder-ful, and an airman, good gracious!"
Appropriately enough for an airman, his place seemed to be nearly on the house-tops of a block of buildings near Victoria Street.
The lift carried them up past six landings and many boards inscribed with names of firms. It stopped at the seventh story, almost directly opposite a cream-coloured door with a small, old-fashioned brass knocker, polished like gold.
Paul Dampier tapped sharply at it.
The door was opened by a thick-set man in an excellent suit of clothes and with the face of a wooden sphinx.
"Tea as soon as you can, Johnson," said the young Airman over his shoulder, as the trio passed in.
The long sitting-room occupied half the flat and its windows took up the whole of one side. It was to these open windows that Gwenna turned.
"Oh, what a view!" she cried, looking out, enraptured at the height and airiness, looking past the leads, with their wooden tubs of standard laurel-bushes, among which pigeons were strutting and bridling and pecking crumbs. She looked down, down, at the bird's-eye view of London, spread far below her in a map of grey roofs and green tree-tops under a soft mist of smoke that seemed of the clouds themselves.
"Oh, can't you see for miles!" exclaimed Gwenna. "There's St. Paul's, looks like a big grey soap-bubble, coming up out of the mist! Oh, you can see between a crack in the houses, our place at Westminster! It's like a cottage from here! Oh, and that iron lacey thing on the roof! Even this must be something like being up in an aeroplane, I should think! Look, Leslie!"
Miss Long seemed more engrossed in looking round Mr. Dampier's bachelor sitting-room. It was incredibly luxurious compared to what she'd expected. The polished floor was black and shiny as the wood of the piano at the further end, the Persian rugs softly brilliant. In the middle of the Adams mantelpiece simpered an exquisite Chelsea shepherdess; to the left and right of her there stood squat toys in ivory, old slender-stalked champagne-glasses holding sweet-peas. And upon the leaf-brown walls were decorations that seemed complacently to draw attention to the catholic taste of their owner. A rare eighteenth-century print of Tom Jones upon his knees, asking "forgiveness" of his Sophia, hung just above a Futurist's grimace in paint; and there was a frieze of ultra-modern French fashion-designs, framed in passe-partout, from the "Bon Ton."
"What a--what a surprising number of pictures you have, Mr. Dampier," said Leslie, mildly. "Hasn't he, Taffy?"
Gwenna, turning at last from the window, realised dimly that this sophisticated room did seem somehow out of keeping as an eyrie for this eagle. The view outside, yes! But these armchairs? And she wouldn't have thought that he would have bothered to have things pretty, like this----
"And what a lot of books you've got," she said. For the wall opposite to the windows was taken up by bookshelves, set under a trophy of swords of out-of-date patterns, and arranged with some thought.
The top shelves held volumes of verse, and of plays, from Beaumont and Fletcher to Galsworthy. The Russian novelists were ranged together; also the French. There was a corner for Sudermann and Schnitzler. A shelf further down came all the English moderns, and below that all the Yellow Books, a long blue line of all the English Reviews, from the beginning; a stack of The New Age, and a lurid pink-covered copy of Blast.
But before Gwenna could wonder further over these possessions of this young man, more incongruous possessions were brought in by the Sphinx-faced man-servant; a tea-table of beaten copper, a peasant-embroidered cloth, a tea-service of old Coalport; with a silver spirit-kettle, with an iced cake, with toast, and wafer, bread-and-butter and cress-sandwiches and Parisian petits-fours that all seemed, as the young girl put it simply to herself, "So unlike him!"
Her chum had already guessed the meaning of it all.
The Dampier boy's rooms? His library and ornaments? Ah, no. He'd never read one of all those books there. Not he! And these were not the type of "things" he'd buy, even if he'd had the money to throw away, thought Leslie. It was no surprise to that young woman when the legitimate owner of this lavishly appointed garconniere made his sudden appearance in the middle of tea.
The click of a latchkey outside. Two masculine voices in the hall. Then the door was thrown open.
There walked in a foreign-looking young man, with bright dark eyes and a small moustache, followed by Mr. Hugo Swayne, attired in a Victorian mode that, as Leslie put it afterwards, "cried 'Horse, horse!' where there was no horse." His tall bowler was dove-grey; his black stock allowed a quarter-inch of white collar to appear; below his striking waistcoat dangled a bunch of seals and a fob. This costume Leslie recognised as a revival of the Beggarstaff Touch. Gwenna wondered why this young man seemed always to be in fancy dress. Leslie could have told her that Mr. Swayne's laziness and vanity had led him to abandon himself on the coast of Bohemia, where he had not been born. His father had been quite a distinguished soldier in Egypt. His father's son took things more easily at the Grafton Gallery and the Cafe Royal and Artists' Clubs. He neither painted, wrote, nor composed, but his life was set largely among flatterers who did these things--after a fashion.
He came in saying, "Now this is where I live when I'm----"
He broke off with a start at the sight of the party within. The girls turned to him with surprised and smiling greeting.
Paul Dampier, fixing him with those blue eyes, remarked composedly, "Hullo, my dear chap. Have some tea, won't you? I'll ring for Johnson to bring in two more cups."
"That will be very nice," said Hugo Swayne, rising to the occasion with all the more grace because he was backed up by a tiny understanding glance from Miss Long. And he introduced his young Frenchman by a name that made Leslie exclaim, "Why! You are that Post-Impressionist painter, aren't you?"
"Not I, mademoiselle, but my brother," returned Hugo's French friend, slowly and very politely. His dark face was simple and intelligent as that of a nice child; he sat up as straight in his chair as he talked. "It is for that Mr. Swayne, who is admirer of my brother's pictures, is so amiable for to show me London. Me, I am not artiste. I am ingenieur only."
"'Only'!" thought Gwenna over her teacup.
Surely any one should be proud of being an engineer, considering that Mr. Dampier had thus begun his career; he who was now in what the romantic girl considered the First of All Professions? Perhaps her attitude towards the Airman as such was noted by the Airman's cousin. Hugo, who had dropped a little heavily into the softest chair near Miss Long, turned his Chopinesque profile against a purple cushion to shoot a rather satirical glance at the cleaner-built youth in the worn grey suit.
"Now, how like a man! He doesn't admire Taffy particularly, but he's piqued to see her admire another type." Leslie summed this up quickly to herself. "Not really a bad sort; he behaved well about the invasion of these rooms. But he's like all these well-off young men who potter about antique shops when they ought to be taking exercise--he's plenty of feminine little ways. Since they call spitefulness 'feminine'!"
There was a distinctly spiteful note in the young man's voice as he made his next remark to his cousin.
This remark surprised even Leslie for a moment.
And to Gwenna's heart it struck with a sudden, unreasonable shock of consternation.
For Mr. Swayne inquired blandly across the tea-table:
