The Boy with Wings
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wrist, though he had withdrawn it carelessly at once.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 _dreat_ful about no flying, but----"
"Glad the afternoon wasn't entirely a washout," said Miss Long, in an