Eagerly as Gwenna longed to fly, she was not to do so even yet.
After that appointment made at Hugo Swayne's rooms she lived through a fortnight of dreaming, tingling anticipation. Then came another of those brief direct notes from "hers, P. Dampier." The girl jumped for joy. It was not to be at Hendon this time, but at Brooklands. Was she not rapidly gaining experiences? First Hendon, then Brooklands; at this rate she would soon know all the flying-grounds--Shoreham, Eastchurch, Farnborough, all of them!
"I'll call for you," the note said, "in the car."
"'The' car is good," commented Leslie, arranging a mist-blue scarf over Gwenna's small hat just before she started off on this expedition. "In the Army all things are in common, including money and tobacco but the Dampier boy isn't in the Army."
"Why shouldn't he?" took up Gwenna, ungrammatically and defiantly. She considered Mr. Swayne's motor was honoured by this other young man who condescended to drive it, to fetch and whirl away with him a girl who felt herself a nymph about to be swept up and up above the clouds to some modern version of Elysium.
So twelve o'clock that Saturday morning (Gwenna having obtained special leave of absence from the office) found the young man and the girl speeding through Kensington and Hammersmith, on the Woking Road.
The sun was hot above them; the road white; the hedges so dusty that they seemed grey ribbons streaming past. Gwenna scarcely realised how they went. She sat there beside him, thrilled and breathless, hardly knowing to which delight to give herself up, that of the coming flight, that of the present swift drive in the fresh breeze, or that of the companionship of this Demigod of Modern Times, whose arm almost touched hers sometimes as he moved or turned, or put on the brake.
Except for an occasional remark to the car: "Come on, don't be funny, old lady, don't be funny," or "Now for the hills; watch her sit down and laugh at 'em!" he spoke little; Gwenna didn't particularly want him to speak. The girl was in a golden and moving dream, and scarcely knew where it carried her.
She came out of that dream, not with a shock, but gradually. Was the car slowing down? It stopped; stopped in a wide part of that dust-white road between the tall, dust-grey hedges, opposite to a creosoted telegraph-pole spiked with nails. Through a gap in the hedge Gwenna caught sight of a moon-daisied field, with a dark hedge and trees beyond. Not a house, not a cottage in sight. This couldn't be Brooklands?
"Hul-lo," the boy was muttering. "What's up now?"
"What is it?" she asked.
He did not reply. This was not rudeness, as she guessed, but intentness; he took it for granted that she would not understand the mechanical explanation. Resignedly she said to herself, "Machinery gone wrong? Sometimes it really seems as if that were all machinery ever did do! Yet that's what he said he was interested in, more than anything!"
He was out of the car and had flung back the bonnet. Then he took off his coat and hung it up on one of the nails on that telegraph-pole. He pushed up his shirt-sleeves and bent over the tool-box on the step.
Sitting there on the hot leather, Gwenna watched him, she heard the chinking of wrenches and spanners. Then he returned to the bonnet again, fumbling, handling, burrowing, grunting at things.... Ten minutes elapsed....
He then broke out emphatically: "Oh, Lord! I have done it now!"
"Done what?" asked the girl anxiously.
In tightening a nut with a spanner the spanner had slipped. He had broken the porcelain insulation of the plug controlling the current.
And now, good-humouredly smiling at his guest, he leaned on the door of the car with his brown forearms crossed and said, "Short circuited. Yes. I'm afraid that's killed it."
"Killed what?" asked little Gwenna, in affright.
"Our flying for to-day," he said.
He went on to speak about "spare parts," and how it would be necessary to send some one back to fetch--something--Gwenna didn't care what it was. Her heart sank in dismay. No flying? Must they go back after all, now?
"Can't we get on?" she sighed.
He shook his shining head.
"We can make a picnic of it, anyhow," he said more encouragingly. "Shall you be all right here if I run back to that inn we passed just now with the bit of green outside? I shan't be ten minutes. Send some one off on a bicycle, and bring some grub back here."
He jerked on his coat and was off.
Little Gwenna, sitting there waiting in the useless car--her small, disconsolate face framed in the gauze scarf with which she'd meant to bind her curls for the flying--was passed by half a dozen other motors on the road to Brooklands. It did not strike her, dreamily downcast as she was, that surely what the messenger from the inn was being despatched to fetch might have been borrowed from one of these other motorists? Some of them, surely, would be men who knew young Paul Dampier quite well. Any of them might have come to the rescue?
This, as a matter of fact, had struck Paul Dampier at once. But he didn't want to go on to Brooklands! Brooklands? Beastly hot day; crowds of people; go up in an affair like an old Vanguard?
What he wanted, after a hard day's work yesterday on his own (so different) Machine, was a day's peace and quiet and to think things a bit over about her (the Machine) lying on his back somewhere shady, with a pipe. Actually, he would rather have been alone. But this little girl, Miss Williams.... She was all right. Not only pretty ... but such a quiet, sensible sort of little thing. He'd take her up another time, since she was keen. He certainly would take her up. Not to-day. To-day they'd just picnic. She wouldn't want to be giggling and chattering about herself the whole time, and all that sort of thing, like some of them. She liked to listen.
She'd be interested to hear what he'd been doing lately, about the Machine. For a girl, she was pretty bright, and even if she didn't grasp things at once, she evidently liked hearing about the Machine; besides which, it often cleared one's own ideas to one's self, to have to set 'em out and explain about the machinery very simply, to some one who was keen, but who hadn't a notion. They'd have a nice, peaceful time, this afternoon; somewhere cool, instead of Brooklands. And a nice long talk--all about the Machine.
He returned to the girl waiting in the car. Gwenna, cheering up at the sight of him, saw that his pockets were bulging with bottles, and that he carried a square, straw basket.
"There. I might have taken Hugo's luncheon-basket and filled that while I was about it; only I forgot there was one," he said, standing on the road and screwing up his eyes a little in the midday sun as he faced the car. "It's nicer eating out of doors, when you get a chance. Beastly dusty on the road here, though, and things going by all the time and kicking up clouds of it all over you. We'll find a pitch in that field."
So she jumped down from her seat and the two left the glaring road and got through that gap in the hedgerow where maybush and blackberry trail and grass and campion alike were all thickly powdered and drooping with dust.
The boy and girl skirted another hedge that ran at right angles to the road. Half-way up that field a big elm tree spread a patch of shade at its base like a dark-green rug for them to sit on. Paul Dampier put his coat down also. They sat, with moon-daisies and branching buttercups, and cow-parsley all sweet and clean about them.
Here the country-bred girl, forgetting her disappointment, gave a quick little sigh of content. She glanced about her at the known faces of flower-friends in the grass; a diaper of colours. Each year she had loved the time when white daisies and red sorrel and yellow rattle flaunted together over the heads of the lower-growing clovers and speedwells and potentillas. This year it seemed lovelier than ever. She put out her hand and pulled up a lance of jointed grass, nibbling the soft, pale-green end of it.
"Here, are you as hungry as all that?" laughed young Dampier at her side. "We'll feed."
He let Gwenna spread out upon the clean dinner-napkin in which they were wrapped the provisions that he had brought from the inn.
"All I could get. Bread-and-cheese. Couple of hunks of cold beef. Butter--salt," he said, giving her the things as he named them. "Plates I said we wouldn't worry about; chuck the crumbs to the birds. Here's what I got to drink; cider. D'you like it?"
"Love it," said Gwenna, who had never happened to taste it. But she knew that she would love it.
"Good. Oh! Now I've forgotten the glass, though," exclaimed young Dampier, sitting up on his knees on the shaded patch of grass beside her. "We shall both have to use the lower half of my flask. Sorry--hope you don't mind."
Gwenna, taking her first taste of cider in bird-like sips from that oblong silver thing, remembered the old saying, "Drink from my cup and you will think my thoughts." Then he put down upon the dinner napkin the half-loaf and the lump of cheese that he had been munching. He took the half of the flask, simply, out of the girl's hand, poured out more cider, and drank in turn.
"That's better," he said, smiling. She smiled back at him.
She had ceased to feel any shyness of this fair-haired aviator who rested there beside her in this oasis of shade from the elm, while beyond them stretched the wide, dazzlingly bright desert of the flowering meadow, bounded by its hedges. He cut off the crusty part of the loaf for her (since she said she liked it). He sliced for her the damp and pinkish beef, since she would not confide to him her deep and feminine loathing of this fare. The woman is not yet born who can look upon cold meat as a food. And they drank in turn from his silver flask. This was their third meal together; yet Gwenna felt that she had been grown-up and conscious of delight in the world about her only since they had met.
Ease and gaiety rose between them in a haze like that which vibrated over the warm hay-field where they feasted.
"I say, I shall have to give a lunch at the Carlton to everybody I know," he laughed, half to himself, presently, "if I do get Colonel Conyers to make 'em take up the P.D.Q." Then, turning more directly to her. "Sorry--you don't know that joke. It's my Aeroplane, you know."
"Oh, yes, the one Mr. Swayne calls your Fiancee!" took up Gwenna quickly. Then she wished she hadn't said that. She reddened. She turned her supple little body to toss crumbs to a yellow-hammer that was eyeing them from a branch in the hedge behind her. And then she asked. "Why 'the P.D.Q.'?"
"Because she will be the Paul Dampier One, I hope," explained the young inventor, "and I always think of her as that other because it means 'Pretty Dam--Dashed Quick.'"
"Oh, is that it?" said Gwenna.
She echoed crossly to herself, "'I always think of her' indeed! It sounds like----"
And she finished her thought with the hardest-working word in her native tongue; the Welsh for sweetheart.
"It does sound just as if he were talking about his cariad."
Absently she brushed more crumbs off her side of the dinner-napkin.
For one-half only of Gwenna now seemed to note that they were eating crusty loaf and drinking cider out of doors between a lupin-blue sky and a flowerful meadow; the other was conscious of nothing but her companion; of the clear friendliness of his eyes, those eyes of Icarus! Of his deep and gentle voice saying, "Mind if I smoke? You don't, I know," of those brown hard-looking forearms from which he had not troubled to pull down the sleeves, of his nearness.
Suddenly he came nearer still.
He had not stopped talking of his aeroplane, but she hardly remembered that she had asked him the meaning of one of the expressions that he had used.
He was repeating it.
"'Camber?' ... Well, it's a curve. A curve like----" He glanced about for an example of the soft, end-wise curve on the great wings of an aeroplane; his eyes passing quickly from the green hedge to the ground, to the things on the picnic cloth, to Gwenna Williams's small hand as it rested in the grass.
She wondered, thrilled, if the young Airman were actually going to take hold of her hand.
He did take her hand, as simply as he had taken the silver cup from it. He bent it over so that her wrist made a gentle curve. He passed his own large fingers across it.
"Yes; there--that's the curve," he said. "Almost exactly."
It might have been a caress.
But, done as he did it, the light movement was nothing of the kind. Instinct told the girl that. It wasn't her small and soft and pink-palmed hand that he was thinking of holding. She looked at him as he said, "That's the curve," and she caught a gleam of quickened interest in his eyes. But in one mortified flash she knew that this had nothing to do with her. She guessed that at this moment he'd forgotten that there was a girl sitting there beside him at all.
And she knew why.
Angrily she said to herself, "He's thinking of nothing but that old machine of his! And I do--yes, I do, do hate her!"
Then she sat for a moment still as the elm-trunk against which she'd been leaning.
She had been struck thus motionless by a thought.
Something had been brought home to her by that sharp and sudden twinge of--Jealousy!
Yes! She knew now! What she felt, and must have been feeling for days past, was what they meant by falling in love.
"That's what I've done!" she thought rapidly; half in consternation, half in delight. "It's beginning to happen what Mr. Swayne was talking about at that tea: the Girl or the Flying Machine!"
She glanced towards the gap in the hedge as if to look at the car that had brought them, motionless by the road-side; she turned her face away from the Airman, who sat lighting a pipe with the shadows of the elm-branches dappling his fair head and shirt-sleeved shoulders.
She was blushing warmly at her own thoughts.
"It's only the flying-machine he cares about! He does like me, too; in a way.... If only he'd forget that other for a minute! But if he won't," thought Gwenna, happening upon an ancient piece of feminine philosophy, "I'd rather have him talking about her than not talking to me at all!"
She spoke aloud, sedately but interestedly.
"Oh, is that a camber?" That light touch of his seemed still upon her wrist, though he had withdrawn it carelessly at once. She paused, then said, "And what was that other thing, Mr. Dampier? Something about an angle?"
"A dihedral angle?" he said, drawing at that pipe. "Oh, that's the angle you see from the front of the thing. It's--look, it's like that."
This time it was not her hand he took as an illustration. He pointed, pipe in hand, to where, above the opposite hedge, a crow was sailing slowly, a vandyke of black across the cloudless blue.
"See that bird? It's that very slight V he makes; now."
"And this machine of yours?" persisted the girl, with a little twitch of her mouth for the rival whom he, it seemed, always thought of as "the P.D.Q." and whom Gwenna must always think of as "the Fiancee." She wondered where it lived, the creature that meant all to him. She said, "Where--where d'you make that machine?"
"Oh, I'm afraid it isn't a machine yet, you see. It's only a model of one, so far. You know, like a model yacht," he explained. "That's the worst of it. You see, you can make a model do anything. It's when you get the thing life-size that the trouble begins. Model doesn't give a really fair idea of what you've got to get. The difficulties--it's never the real thing."
Gwenna thought, "It must be like making love to the person you aren't really in love with!" But what she said, with her hand stripping a spike of flowering grass, was, "I suppose it's like practising scales and all that on a mute piano?"
"Never tried", he said. Then: "The model's at my own place, my rooms in"----here he broke off with a laugh. He looked straight into her face and said, still laughing, and in a more personal tone:
"Not in Victoria Street. I say, you spotted that that place wasn't mine, didn't you?"
"Leslie 'spotted' and said so, afterwards," admitted Gwenna demurely, picking and sniffing at a piece of pink clover before she fastened it into her white blouse. "I did think at the time that it wasn't--wasn't the sort of place where you'd find a man living who did things, like."
"Rather rough on old Hugo."
"Well, but does he do things?"
"He doesn't have to. He'd be all right if he did. Sweat some of that beef off him, give him something to think about," averred his cousin, carelessly knocking out his pipe against the heel of his shoe. "But, you know, my place is in Camden Town; most inferior. Three rooms over a paper shop; two small cubby-holes where I sleep and eat, and a rather bigger one where I keep the 'P.D.Q.' stuff. I couldn't have you there that Sunday."
"Why not?" Gwenna asked sharply, and jealous again. It was almost as if the Fiancee had said to him, "No, not here!"
"Because," he said with a chuckle, "because at the last moment, when I'd got the tea ready and everything"--he tossed his fair head back--"a fall of soot down the chimney! Everything in the most ghastly mess! Pitch black wherever you put a finger. I simply couldn't--it was four o'clock then; I expect you both thought it rotten of me. Still," he concluded, rather ruefully, "I couldn't give you the sort of polite tea Hugo can, anyhow."
"I don't want polite teas!" Gwenna protested, looking round at the field where she had feasted as if in Elysium. "You don't suppose I care for things all grand like that, do you?"
He responded, "Would you care to see my Camden Town place, then, and the model? You and Miss Long. It's quite near you, you know."
"Yes, I should," said Gwenna quietly, stripping her grass.
How could he, she wondered, ask if she "cared" for these things that opened out new worlds to her? If he only knew, just to be with him was part of that new, soaring freedom which to her was summed up in the idea of flying! This, she felt, was flying. She didn't care, after all, if there were no other flying that afternoon. Care? She wouldn't mind sitting there until the sun slipped slowly downwards towards the western hedge and the moon-daisies closed in the tall grass, and clouds of other tiny flying creatures poised and hovered above them. She wasn't sorry that the mechanic did not return in haste to minister to that broken-down car. When she did remember about it, it was almost to hope that he would not be back! Not just yet! Not to put an end to this golden afternoon of talk that, trivial as it was, seemed to her to be the endowment of a new faculty, and of comradeship that was as beguiling and satisfying as that of her bosom-chum, Leslie. Only newer, only more complete. So it seemed to Gwenna, as the shadows moved further up the grass where she sat with her new boy-friend.
For it is a commonplace that in all comradeship between man and woman passionate love claims a share. But also in all passionate love there is more comradeship than the unimaginative choose to admit; there is a happy inner meaning to the cottage phrase, "To keep company with."
What he thought about it she did not know. Except that he surely must like talking to her? He could not go on like this out of politeness.
Ah, besides--! Besides, she knew, without reasoning about it, that, even with that absorbing interest of the aeroplane in the background, he did like her. Just as Leslie, her other friend, who also knew so much more than she did, had liked her at once.
"Only," decided Gwenna, in the uttermost depths of her shy and daring heart, "only he's got to like me, some day, better than Leslie ever could. He must. Yes; he must!"
And she thought it so ardently that she almost expected him, catching her thought, to answer it in words. She looked--no, he had caught nothing. But, meeting his eyes again, her own read a message that her fluttered mind had been told before this, but would scarcely let her believe. He thought she was pretty to look at. She had taken off her hat now, as she liked to do in the open air, and the light breeze tossed her short locks about.
"I believe he thinks," Gwenna told herself, "that my hair's nice."
As a matter of fact she was right. If she could have read her companion's thoughts at the moment she would have known of a quite foolish but recurrent wish on his part. A wish that he might just run his fingers through all those brown and thickly-twisting curls, to find out if they felt as silky as they looked.
A lark was carolling over her head, soaring, poising, poising, soaring, and singing all the while....
"That's what we can't do, even yet; hover," he said. And again he went on talking to the Little Thing (in his mind this babyish-faced but quite quick-witted girl was now always to be "the Little Thing") about the chance of getting Colonel Conyers to take up that invention of his.
"I'm to go to spend the week-end at Ascot with him and have another talk about it," he said. "I know he's dead keen. He knows that it's aeroplanes that are going to make all the difference; simply knock out, under some conditions, any other form of scouting. In modern warfare, you know--it's bound to come, some time--anybody with any sense knows that----"
"Yes, of course," agreed Gwenna, watching him as he stretched himself lazily out, chest downwards, elbows in, on the grass, chin propped in his hands, talking (all about the Machine).
"If he gave me a chance to build Her--make trial flights in the P.D.Q.! If he'd only back me----"
"Oh, he will, surely!" said Gwenna, her whole small face brightening or sobering in response to every modulation of his voice.
It was jolly, he thought, to find a girl who wasn't in the least bored by "Shop." She was a very jolly Little Thing. So sensible. No nonsense about her, thought the boy.
And she, when at last they rose and left the place, threw a last look back at that patch of sky above the hedge, where the black crow had made a dihedral angle, at that brooding elm, at that hay field, golden in the level rays, at that patch of dusty road where the car had pulled up, at that black telegraph-pole where he had hung up his coat. That picture was graven, as by a tool, into the very heart of the girl.
At the end of an expedition that a young woman of more experience and less imagination would have pronounced "tame enough," Gwenna, bright-eyed and rosy from her day in the sunshine, could hardly believe that a whole lifetime had not elapsed since last she'd seen the everyday, the humdrum and incredibly dull Club where she lived.
She burst into her chum's bedroom as Leslie was going to bed.
"Taffy--back at last?" smiled Leslie, between the curtains of black hair on either side of her nightgown. "How's flying?--What?" she exclaimed, "you didn't go up at all? Broke down on the way to Brooklands? I say! How rotten for you, my poor lamb. Had anything to eat?"
"I think so--I mean, rather! He gave me a lovely lunch on the road while we were waiting for the man to mend the car--and then we'd tea at a cottage while he was doing it--and then there wasn't time to do anything but come back to town," explained Gwenna breathlessly, untying her scarf; "and then we'd sort of dinner at the inn before we started back; they brought out a table and things into the garden under the trees."
"What did you have for dinner?"
"I don't know. Oh, there were gooseberries," said Gwenna vaguely, "and a lamp. And the moths all came. Oh, Leslie! It's been so splendid!" She caught her breath. "I mean, it was dreatful about no flying, but----"
"Glad the afternoon wasn't entirely a washout," said Miss Long, in an even voice as she plaited her hair.
"By the way, did the Dampier boy give you back that locket of yours?"
"I forgot all about it," said Gwenna, picking up the head of pink clover that had fallen out of her blouse. "I'll ask him next time. He's going to take me up soon, you know, again."
Just as an alarm is "set" to sound at some given hour, so the whole of the girl's innocent being was set, to wait and wait for that "next time" of meeting him--whenever it should be.
