The Boy with Wings
drew was calling him, was set upon "making" him. What could she do more
to make herself, as Leslie called it, a magnet? Love and innocent
longing filled her to the eyes, the tender fox-glove buds of lips that
could have asked for nothing better. Even if this _were_ the only time!
Even if she never saw him again!
Wasn't he going to set the crown upon her wonderful dream of a summer
night?
"No, look _here_," the boy remonstrated silently with something in
himself; something that seemed to mock him. He lifted his fair head with
a gleam of that pride that goes so often before a fall. "Dash it
all----"
"He will!" the girl thought breathlessly. And with her thought she
seemed to cast all of her heart into the spell....
And then, quite suddenly, something happened whereby that spell was
snapped. Even as she thought "_he will_," he rose from his chair.
He took a step to the entrance of their arbour, his shoulders blotting
out the glowing light.
"Listen," he said.
And Gwenna, rising too, listened, breathlessly, angrily. He would
_not_--she had been cheated. What was it that had--_interfered_?
Presently she heard it, she heard what she would have taken for the
noise of another of the departing motors.
Through the clatter from the last galop it was like, yet unlike, the
noise of a starting car. But there was in it an _angrier_ note than
that.
It is angry for want of any help but its own. A motor-car has solid
earth against which to drive; a steamship has dense water. But the
Machine that caused this noise was beating her metal thews against
invisible air.
It was an aeroplane.
"Look!" said Paul Dampier.
Far away over the still benighted land she rose, and into that glory of
Abyssinian gold beyond the river. Gwenna, moving out on to the path,
watched the flight. Before, she had wondered that these soaring things
didn't come down. Now, she would have wondered if they had done so.
Steady as if running on rails, the aeroplane came on overhead; her sound
as she came now loud, now soft, but always angry, harsh--harshness like
that of a woman who lives to herself and her strivings, with no
comradeship of Earth on which to lean. Against the sky that was her
playground she showed as a slate-coloured dragonfly--a purple Empress of
the Air soaring on and on into the growing dazzle of the day.
"Oh, it _is_ beautiful, though," cried the girl on the path, looking up,
and losing for that moment the angry sense that had fallen upon her of
pleasure past, of the end of the song. "It is wonderful."
"Pooh, that old horse-bus," laughed Paul Dampier above her shoulder,
and mentioned the names of the machine, the flyer in her. He could pick
them out of the note of her angry song.
"That will be nothing to my P.D.Q.," he declared exultantly as they
walked on up the path towards the marquee. "You wait until I've got my
aeroplane working! That'll be something new in aviation, you know.
Nearest thing yet to the absolute identity of the Man with the Machine."
He yawned a little with natural sleepiness, but his interest was
wide-awake. He could have gone on until breakfast-time explaining some
fresh point about his invention, while the girl in those little
silver-heeled shoes paced slowly up the path beside him.... He was going
on.
"Make all those other types, English or foreign, as clumsy as the
old-fashioned bone-shake bicycle. Fact," he declared. "Now, take the
Taube--Hullo----"
"_Bitte_," said a voice.
The German word came across a pile of plates deftly balanced upon a
young man's forearm. That arm was clad in the sleeve of a trim white
jacket, buttoned over a thick and compact little chest. The waiter's
hair was a short, upright golden stubble, and another little stubble of
gold sprouted upon his steady upper lip. He had come up, very softly,
behind them.
He spoke again in excellent English.
"By your leave, sir."
Dampier made way for him, and he passed. Gwenna, with a little shiver,
looked after him. The sight of the young waiter whom she had noticed at
the beginning of the evening had given her an unreasonable little
chill.... Perhaps it was because his softly-moving, white figure against
those willows had loomed so like a ghost....
Dampier said, "Rotten job for a man, I always think, hanging about and
picking up things for other people like that."
"Yes," said Gwenna, absently, sadly. It _was_ the end now. Quite the
end. They'd got to go home. Back to everyday life. The Club, the Works.
Nothing to live for, except--Ah, yes! His promise that he _would_ take
her flying, soon....
Above in the glowing sky the aeroplane was dwindling--to disappear. The
waiter, turning a corner of the dark shrubbery, had also disappeared as
they passed. From behind the shelter of the branches he was watching,
watching....
He was looking after Paul Dampier, the Airman--the inventor of the
newest aeroplane.
CHAPTER XIII
THE FLYING DREAM
"_Those dreams come true that are dreamed on Midsummer night!_"
This saying Gwenna had read somewhere. But she had forgotten all about
it until, on the night of June 24th, 1914, she dreamed the most vivid
dream of all her twenty-two years.
Many people have that same dream--or versions of it--often in a
lifetime. Scientists have written papers on the whys and hows of it.
They tack a long name to it. But little Gwenna Williams had never heard
of "_levitation_." To herself she called it afterwards "_that flying
dream_."
It seemed to her that when it began she was still half-awake, lying in
her narrow white bed with the blankets tossed on to the floor of her
Club bedroom, for it was a sultry night and close, in spite of her
window on to the garden being wide open and allowing what breeze there
was to blow full upon the girl's face, stirring her curls on the pillow,
the ruffle of her night-gown as she lay.
Suddenly a violent start ran over the whole of her body. And with that
one jerk she seemed to have come out of herself. She realised, first,
that she was no longer lying down, curled up in the kitten-like ball
which was her attitude for sleeping. She was upright as if she were
standing.
But she was not standing. Her feet were not resting on anything. Looking
down, she found, without very much surprise, that she was poised, as a
lark is poised, in mid-air, at some immeasurable height. It was night,
and the earth--a distant hassock of dim trees and fields--was far, far
below her.
She found herself moving downwards through the air.
_She was flying!_
Gently, gently, she sped, full of a quiet happiness in her new power,
which, after all, did not seem to be something new, but something
restored to her.
"Dear me, I've flown before, I know I have," said Gwenna to herself as
she swooped downwards in her dream, with the breeze cool on the soles of
her little bare feet. "This is as lovely as swimming! It's lovelier,
because one doesn't have to _do_ anything. So silly to imagine that one
has to have _wings_ to fly!"
Now she was nearer to earth, she was hovering over a dark stream of
water with reflections that circled and broke. And beside it she saw
something that seemed like a huge lambent mushroom set in the dim fields
below her. This was a lighted tent, and from it there floated up to her
faintly the throb and thrill of dance-music, the two long-drawn-out
notes of the "Post Horn" Galop, the noise of laughter and clapping....
She wondered whom she would see, if she were to alight. But the Force
in her dream bore her up again, higher, and away. She found presently
that she had left the dancing-tent far behind, and that what streamed
below her was no longer a river with reflections, but a road, white with
dust, and by the side of it a car was standing idle by the dusty hedge.
On the other side of the hedge, as she flew over, the grass was clean
and full of flowers, and half-way up the field stood a brooding elm that
cast a patch of shadow.
"Sunshine, now!" wondered Gwenna. "How quickly it's changed from night!"
She felt from head to foot her body light and buoyant as a drifting
thistle-down as on she went through the air. Close beside her, against a
bank of cloud, she noticed some black V-shaped thing that slanted and
flapped slow wings, then planed downwards out of her sight. "That's that
crow. A dihedral angle, they call it," said the dreaming girl. Her next
downward glance, as she sped upwards now, without effort, above the
earth, showed her a map of distant grey roofs and green trees, and
something that looked like a giant soap-bubble looming out of the mist.
"St. Paul's! London!" thought Gwenna. "I wonder shall I be able to look
down on our Westminster place."
Then, glancing about her, she saw that the scene had suddenly changed.
She was no longer in the free air with clouds about her as she flew like
a little white windblown feather with the earth small as a toy puzzle
below. She was between walls, with her feet not further than her own
height from the ground. Night again in a room. A long, narrowish room
with an open window through which came the light of a street-lamp that
flung a bright patch upon the carpet, the edge of a dressing-table, the
end of a white bed. Upon the bed, from which the coverings had been
flung down, there lay sleeping, curled up like a kitten, a figure in a
white, ruffled night-gown, with a cherub's head thrown backwards against
the pillow. Gwenna, looking down, thought, "Where have I seen _her_?"
In the next flash she had realised.
Herself!... Her own sleeping body that her dreaming soul had left for
this brief flight....
A start more violent than that with which her dream had begun shook the
dreamer as she came to herself again.
She woke. With a pitiful little "Oh," sounding in her own ears, she sat
up in bed and stared about her Club bedroom with its patches of light
from the street-lamp outside. She was trembling from head to foot, her
curls were wet with fright, and her first thought as she sprang out of
bed and to the door of that ghostly room was "I must go to Leslie."
But Leslie's bedroom was a story higher. Gwenna paused in the corridor
outside the nearest bedroom to her own. A thread of light showed below
the door. It was a Miss Armitage's, and she was one of the Club members,
who wrote pamphlets on the Suffrage, and like topics, far into the
night. Gwenna, feeling already more normal and cheered by the sense of
any human nearness, decided, "I won't go to her. She'll only want to
read aloud to me.... She laughed at me because I said I adored 'The
Forest Lovers,' but what books does _she_ like? Only those _dreat_-ful
long novels all about nothing, except the diseases of people in the
Potteries. Or else it'll be one of her own tracts.... Somehow she does
make everything she's interested in sound so _ugly_. All those
intellectual ones here do! Whether it's Marriage or Not-getting-married,
you really don't know which would be the most _dull_, from these
suffragettes," reflected the young girl, pattering down the corridor
again. "I'll go back to bed."
She went back, snuggling under the clothes. But she could not go to
sleep again for some time. She lay curled up, thinking.
She had thought too often and too long of that dance now three whole
weeks behind her. She had recalled, too many times! every moment of it;
every word and gesture of her partner's, going over and over his look,
his laugh, the tone in which he'd said, "Give _me_ this waltz, will
you?" All that memory had had the sweetness smelt out of it like a
child's posy. By this time it was worn thin as heirloom silver. She
turned from it.... It was then she remembered that saying about the
Midsummer Night's Dream. If that were true, then Gwenna might expect
soon to fly in reality.