The Boy with Wings
For after all her plans and hopes, she had not even yet been taken up
by Paul Dampier in an aeroplane!
In that silent, unacknowledged conflict between the Girl and the
Machine, so far scarcely a score could have been put down to the credit
of the Girl. It was she who had always found herself put back,
disappointed, frustrated. This had been by the merest accidents.
First of all, the Airman hadn't been able to ask her and Miss Long to
his rooms in Camden Town to look at his model aeroplane. He had been
kept hanging on, not knowing which Saturday-to-Monday Colonel Conyers
("the great Air-craft Conyers") was going to ask him down to stay at
that house in Ascot, to have another talk over the subject of the new
Machine. ("A score for the Machine," thought the girl; wakeful, tossing
on her bed.)
She did not even know that the week after, on a glorious and cloudless
Saturday, young Dampier, blankly unaware that there was any conflict
going on in his world! had settled to ask "the Little Thing" to Hendon.
On the Friday afternoon, however, his firm had sent him out of town,
down to the factory near Aldershot. Here he had stayed until the
following Tuesday, putting up at the house of a kindred soul employed at
that factory, and wallowing in "Shop." ... Another win for the Machine!
The following Sunday the cup had been almost to Gwenna's lips. He had
called for her. Not in the car, this time. They had taken the Tube to
Golders Green; the motor-bus to Hendon Church; and then the path over
the fields together. Ah, delight! For even walking over the dusty grass
beside that swinging boy's figure in the grey tweed jacket was a joyous
adventure. It had been another when he had presently stooped and said,
"Shoelace come untied; might trip over that. I'll do it up," and had
fastened her broad brown shoe-ribbon securely for her. Her shoes had
been powdered white. He had taken his handkerchief out of his pocket and
had flicked the dust off, saying, as he did so, in a tone of some
interest, "I say, what tiny feet girls do have!"
("Pie for you, Taffy, of course," as Leslie had said later, when she'd
heard of this. "Second time he'd noticed them.")
Gwenna, in a tone half pleased, half piqued, had told him, "_All_ girls
don't have them so small! And yet you don't seem to notice anything
about people but their feet." She had walked on, delightedly conscious
of his laugh, his amused, "Oh, don't I?" and his downward glance....
Wasn't this, she had thought, something of a score at last for the Girl!
But hadn't even that small score been wiped out on the flying-ground?
There Gwenna had stood, waiting, gleeful and agitated; her mist-blue
scarf aflutter in the brisk breeze, but not fluttering as wildly as her
heart....
And then had come frustration once again! Paul Dampier's deep and
womanishly-soft tone saying, "I say, I'm afraid it's going to be a bit
too blowy, after all. Wind's rising all the time;" and that other giant
voice from the megaphone announcing:
"Ladies and gentul Men! As the wind is now blowing
forty miles an hour it will be im possible to make
passenger flights!"
Oh, bitter defeat for the Girl! For, this time, there had been no
idyllic picnic _a deux_ to console her for any disappointment. There had
been nothing but a rather noisy tea in the Pavilion, with a whole
chattering party of the young Airman's acquaintances; with another young
woman who had meant to fly, but who had seemed resigned enough that it
was "not to be, _this_ afternoon," and with half a dozen strange,
irrelevant young men; quite _silly_, Gwenna had thought them. Two of
them had given Gwenna a lift back to Hampstead in their car afterwards,
since Paul Dampier had explained that he "rather wanted to go on with
one of the other fellows"--somewhere! Gwenna didn't know where. Only,
out of her sight! Out of her world! And she was quite certain, even
though he hadn't said so, that he had been bent on some quest that had
something to do with the _Fiancee_ of his, the "P.D.Q.," the Machine!
CHAPTER XIV
AN AWAKENING
The sore of that jealousy still smarted in the girl's mind as she turned
her pillow restlessly.... She could not sleep until long after the
starlings had been twittering and the milk-carts rattling by in the
suburban road outside. She awoke, dispirited. She came down late for
breakfast; Leslie had already gone off to her old lady in Highgate. Over
the disordered breakfast-table Miss Armitage was making plans, with some
of the other Suffrage-workers, to "speak" at a meeting of the Fabian
Nursery. Those young women talked loudly enough, but they didn't
pronounce the ends of any of their words; hideously slipshod it all
sounded, thought the Welsh girl fretfully. Her world was a desert to
her, this fine June morning. For at the Westminster office things seemed
as dreary as they had at the Club. She began to see what people meant
when they said that on long sea-voyages one of the greatest hardships
was never to see a fresh face, but always the same ones, day after day,
well-known to weariness, all about one. It was just like that when one
was shut up to work day after day in an office with the same people. She
was sick to death of all the faces of all the people here. Miss Butcher
with her Cockney accent! Miss Baker with her eternal crochet! The men in
the yards with their _awful_ tobacco and trousers! Nearly all men, she
thought, were ugly. All old men. And most of the young ones; _round_
backs, _horrid_ hands, _disgusting_ skins--Mr. Grant, for instance!
(with a glance at that well-meaning engineer, when he brought in some
note for Mabel Butcher). Those swarthy men never looked as if they had
baths and proper shaves. He'd a head like a black hatpin. And his
accent, thought the girl from the land where every letter of a word is
pronounced, his accent was more excruciating than any in Westminster.
"Needn't b'lieve me, if you don't want. But it's true-oo! Vis'ters this
aft'noon," he was saying to Miss Butcher. "Young French Dook or Comp or
something, he is; taking out a patent for a new crane. Coming in early
with some swagger friends of his. Wants to be shown the beauties of the
buildin', I s'pose. Better bring him in here and let him have a good
look at you girls first thing, hadn't I? S'long! Duty calls. I must
away."
And away he went, leaving Miss Butcher smiling fondly after him, while
Miss Williams wondered how on earth any girl ever managed to fall in
love, considering there was nothing but young men to fall in love with.
All ordinary young men were awful. And all young men _were_ ordinary....
Except, now and again, one ... far away ... out of reach.... Who just
showed how different and wonderful a thing a lover might be! If one
could only, only ever get near him!--instead of being stuck down here,
in this perfectly beastly place----
As the morning wore on, she found herself more and more dissatisfied
with all her surroundings. And for a girl of Gwenna's sort to be
thoroughly dissatisfied predicts one thing only. She will not long stay
where she is.
Impatiently she sighed over her typing-table. Irritably she fidgeted in
her chair. This was what jerked the plump arm of Ottilie Becker, who was
passing behind her, and who now dropped a handful of papers on to the
new boards.
"Zere! Now see what you have made me do," said the German girl
good-naturedly enough. "My letter! Pick him up, Candlesticks-maker."
"Oh, pick him up yourself," retorted Gwenna school-girlishly, crossly.
"It wasn't my fault."
At this tone from a colleague of whom she was genuinely fond, tears rose
to Miss Becker's blue eyes. Miss Butcher, coming across to the centre
table, saw those tears.
"Well, really, anybody might _apologise_," she remarked reproachfully,
"when they've _upset_ anybody."
At this rebuke Gwenna's strained nerves snapped.
An Aberystwith Collegiate School expression rose naturally to her
lips--"_Cau dy geg_!" She translated it: "Shut _up_!" she said, quite
rudely.
Then, the moment after she had given way to this little outburst of
temper she felt better. She was ready to be on the best of terms again
with her fellow-typists. They, as Miss Butcher would have said, "weren't
having any." They turned offended backs upon her. They talked pointedly
to each other, not to her.
"That's a precious long letter you've got written there, Baker," said
Miss Butcher, helping to gather up the half-dozen thin foreign sheets,
covered with neat, pointed German writing. "Is that to the beloved
brother?"
Miss Becker nodded her plait-wreathed head as she put the letter that
began: "_Geliebter Karl!_" into the grey-lined envelope.
"He likes to hear what they make--do--at the works. Always he ask," she
said, "after what they do. And who come hier; and where everythings is
kept."
"Gracious! I do believe he's a regular German spy, like in the
magazines, this brother of yours," smiled Miss Butcher lightly. "Don't
you give away any of our State secrets, Baker, will you? We'd be having
the authorities, whoever they are, poking round and inquiring. Awful if
England and your country went to war, wouldn't it?--and you were
supposed to be 'the Enemy'!"
She spoke as if of something that was more fantastic than Gwenna's
flying dream of the night before. The German typist answered in the same
strain.
"If it _was_ war, I would speak to Karlchen's regiment that your house
in Clapham and your people should be saved," she promised. "But he is
not thinking now of war; he interests himself very much for buildings
(because our father is architect). And for maps of the river, and such.
So I must write on him every week a long letter.... We go out to-day to
have our lunch, yes?"
The two went out together towards Whitehall. The Welsh girl was left in
Coventry--and the deserted offices.
She didn't want any lunch. She drank a glass of tepid tap-water from the
dressing-room. She ate some strawberries, bought in their little flat
basket as she had come along. Then, hatless, and in her thin, one-piece
dress of grey linen, she strolled out into the yard for a breath of air.
It was empty and hot and sunny. Gwenna looked up from the wood-littered
ground where the ubiquitous London pigeons strutted and flirted and
"Croo--_croo_--do--I--do"-ed about her feet. Overhead, that giant
lacework on its iron crochet-hooks looked as if its pattern had been
drawn with a pen and black ink against the opaque blue-grey sky. The
sight of that far-off pinnacle put into her head again the thought of
flying.
"I don't believe that I shall ever be as high up as that, with the blue
beneath me, like I've always wanted!" reflected the young girl,
dolefully looking up. "I believe that last night in my dream is all the
flying I'm ever going to have had!"
And again that longing took her. That pure longing to be high; above the
Law that clogs the children of Man to the Earth from which he came. To
feel the unfettered air above and below and about her all at once!...
But what could she do to gratify the impulse even a little?
Only one thing.
She might _climb_.
The idea with which she started off on her mad prank was to climb up to
that iron lattice of lacework; to run up that as a sailor climbs the
rope-ladders of his masts, and thence from the very highest peak
attainable to look down on London, even as last night she had looked
down on it from her dream.
Her start was not in the open air at all, but from the bottom of the
scaffolding inside, where it was all beams and uprights and floors of
planks. It reminded Gwenna of being underneath the old wooden pier at
Aberdovey, and looking up. She went up ladders, through trap-doors,
walked over wooden floors to other ladders until she got up to the last