The Boy with Wings
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,