The Boy with Wings
trap-door and through it out of the shadow and the stuffiness to the
sunshine and the fresh air again. She stood on the top platform of the
gantry which supported that engine and the wheels that worked (she
supposed) the iron lattice that was still far above her head.
Presently she would climb that. She knew that she could. She was never
afraid of heights. Her head was steady enough. Her feet in their brown
shoes were as sure as the feet of the tiny sheep that picked their way
up the rocky steeps of her Welsh mountains. She could climb as well as
any of the men ... but for the moment she rested, standing by the
platform hand-railing, breathing in the freshened breeze.
The birds of the City--pigeons and sparrows--were taking their short
flights far beneath her perch. All London was spread below her, as it
had been in that flying dream, and with as strong a sense of security
as in the dream she looked down upon it.
There, between the forests of chimney-pots, gleamed that highway of the
Thames, blue-grey now as it reflected the sky, winding out of the
distance that meant the clean, green country and the willows below the
lawns where people had danced; flowing on into London that sullied it,
and burdened it with her barges, and spanned it with her bridges, but
could not stay it; on and out its waters passed towards Greenwich and
the Docks and the tall ships and the North Sea!
And there on its bank was the office, the dwindled yard from which
Gwenna had started. The men returning....
The whole place looked nothing more than a hen-run full of fowls. Their
voices ascended, more loudly than she would have expected to hear from
their diminished figures. How funny to see what midgets the creatures
looked from here, and to remember how majestically important each
considered himself! thought little Gwenna, forgetting that from the yard
she herself, with her grey linen frock, her brown feet and ankles, must
look no larger than a roosting pigeon.
She looked down, past the railing and the ends of timbers, feeling
immeasurably aloof from everybody in her world. She wished she need
never go down to it again.
"I've a _good_ mind to give notice at the office, whatever, and go
somewhere quite different!" she thought defiantly, and immediately she
felt elated. A weight of depression seemed to have dropped from her
already. Up, up went the feather-weight spirits of Youth. She had
forgotten for this moment the longing and frustration of the last weeks,
the exasperations of this morning, her squabble with those other girls.
She had climbed out of all that....
Now, before she left this place, she would do something that none of the
girls she knew would dare. She'd climb further.
She turned to take a step towards the crane.
Then something gave her a start as violent as that in which she had,
that night before, been jerked out of her dream.
For now, into her absorbed musing there had broken without warning the
sound of a voice. It had seemed to have come out of nothing, from behind
her, and it had said, with a laugh deep and soft at once, "_My_ machine?
Oh, yes.... Good of you to remember her----"
Paul Dampier's voice!
Little Gwenna, with her back to the trap-door, and wrapped in her own
thoughts, had heard nothing of the steps of five pairs of feet coming up
the way that she had come. In the violence of her surprise of hearing a
voice, so often heard in her daydreams now, here, in this unexpected
place between sky and ground, she started so that she lost her balance.
The girl's foot slipped. She fell. She was half over the platform--one
small foot and ankle stretched out over the giddy height as that crane
was stretched. She clutched on the crook of a slender grey arm, the
railing of the platform--So, for an agonised moment, she hung.
But hardly had she cried out before there was the dash of a tall man's
figure across the planks from the trap-door.
"It's all right--I've got you," said Paul Dampier, and caught her up
from the edge, in his arms.
They held her. That armful of a girl, soft and warm as one of the grey
pigeons, was crushed for a moment against the boy's chest. She was
closer to him than she had been in any of those waltzes. Yet it seemed
no strangeness to be so near--feeling his heart beat below hers, feeling
the roughness of his tweed jacket through the thin linen of her frock.
She felt as she'd felt about flying, in that dream of hers. "I must have
known it all before."
Then, dazed but happy, resting where she seemed to belong, she thought
in a twink, "I shall have to let go. _Why_ can't I stay like this?...
Oh, it's very cruel. There! Now I have let go. But he won't.... He's
getting his balance."
He had taken a step backwards.
Then she slid through his arms. She slipped, lightly as a squirrel slips
down the length of a beech, to the wooden floor of the platform.
Cruel; yes, _cruel_! And to add to the cruelty that such a moment must
end, the Airman, when she left his enforced clasp, scarcely looked at
her. He barely returned her greeting. He did not answer her breathless
thanks. He turned away from her--whom he had saved. Yes! He left her to
the meaningless babble of the others (she recognised now, in a dazed
way, that there were other men with him on the scaffolding). He left her
to the politenesses of his cousin Hugo and of that young French engineer
(Mr. Grant's "Comp" who had come up to inspect the crane). He never
looked again as Miss Williams was guided down the trap-door and the
ladders by the scolding Yorkshire foreman, who didn't leave her until
she was safely at the bottom.
She was met by the two other typists who had, from the office window,
seen her perched up, small as a bird, on the heights. Both girls had
been terrified. Miss Butcher now brought lavender salts. Miss Becker's
pink moon of a face was blanched with horror over her colleague's
danger.
"Do you know what could have happened, Candlesticks-maker, my dear?"
cried the German girl with real emotion, as they all made tea together
in the varnished, stifling office. "You could have been killed, you!"
Gwenna thought, "That would have been too bad. Because then--_then_ I
shouldn't have known when he held me!"
* * * * *
As it was, there were several things about that incident that the young
girl--passionate and infatuated and innocent--did not know.
For one thing, there was the resolution that Paul Dampier took just
after he had turned abruptly from her, had taken short leave of the
others, and when he was striding down Whitehall to the bus that went
past the door of his Camden Town rooms. And for another thing, there was
the reason for that resolution.
Now, in the fairy-stories of modern life, it is (of the two principals)
not always the Princess who has to be woken by a kiss, a touch, from the
untroubled sleep of years. Sometimes it is the Prince who is suddenly
stirred, jarred, or jolted broad awake by the touch, in some form or
other, of Love. In Paul Dampier's case the every-day miracle had been
wrought by the soft weight of that dove-breasted girl against his heart
for no longer than he could count ten, by her sliding to the earth
through an embrace that he had not intended for an embrace at all.
It hadn't seemed to matter what _he_ had intended!
In a flock as of homing pigeons there flew back upon the young aviator
all at once his thoughts of the Little Thing ever since he'd met her.
How he'd thought her so jolly to look at ("So sensible"--this he
forgot). How topping and natural it had seemed to sit there with her in
that field, talking to her, drinking with her out of one silver cup. How
he'd found himself wanting to touch her curls; to span and squeeze her
throat with his hands. How he'd been within an inch of summarily kissing
that fox-glove pink mouth of hers, that night at the Dance....
And to-day, when he'd come to Westminster for another talk with that
rather decent young Frenchman of Hugo's, when he hadn't thought of
seeing the girl at all, what had happened? He'd actually held her
clasped in his arms, as a sweetheart is clasped.
Only by a sheer accident, of course.
Yes, but an accident that had left impressed on every fibre of him the
feeling of that warm and breathing burden which seemed even yet to rest
against his quickened heart.
In that heart there surged up a clamorous impulse to go back at once. To
snatch her up for the second time in his arms, and not to let her go
again, either. To satisfy that hunger of his fingers and lips for the
touch of her----
"_Hold_ hard!" muttered the boy to himself. "Hang it all, this won't
do."
For he had found himself actually turning back, his face set towards the
Abbey.
He spun round on the hot pavement towards home again.
"Look here; can't have this!" he told himself grimly as he walked on,
swinging his straw hat in his hand, towards Trafalgar Square. "At this
rate I shall be making an ass of myself before I know where I am; going
and falling in--going and getting myself much too dashed fond of the
Little Thing."
Yes! He now saw that he was in some danger of that.
And if it did come to anything, he mused, walking among the London
summer crowd, it wouldn't be one of these Fancy-dress-dance
flirtations. Not that sort of girl. "Nor was he; really." Not that sort
of man, he meant. Sort of thing never had amused him, much; not, he
knew, because he was cold-blooded ("Lord, no!") but partly because he'd
had such stacks of other things to do, partly because--because he'd
always thought it ought to be (and could be) so much more--well, amusing
than it was. This other. This with the Little Thing--he somehow knew
that it would have to be "for keeps."
And _that_ he couldn't have. Good Lord, no! There could be no
question--Great Scott!
For yes, if there _was_ anything between him and the Little Thing, it
would have to be an engagement. Marriage, and all that.
And Paul Dampier didn't intend to get married. Out of the question for
him.
He'd only just managed to scrape through and make "some sort of a
footing" for himself in the world as it was. His father, a hard-up Civil
engineer, and his mother (who had been looked askance at by her people,
the Swaynes, for marrying the penniless and undistinguished Paul
Dampier, senior)--they'd only just managed to give their boy "some kind
of an education" before they pegged out. Lessons at home when he'd been
a little fellow. Afterwards one of the (much) smaller public-schools.
For friends and pleasures and holidays he had been dependent on what he
could "pick up" for himself. Old Hugo had been decent enough. He'd asked
his cousin to fish with him in Wales, twice, and he hadn't allowed Paul
to feel that he was--the poor relation.
Only Paul remembered the day that Hugo was going back to Harrow for the
last time. He, Paul, had then been a year in the shops, to the day. He
remembered the sudden resentment of that. It was not snobbery, not envy.
It was Youth in him crying out, "I will be served! I won't be put off,
and stopped doing things, and shoved out of things for ever, just
because I'm poor. If being poor means being 'out of it,' having no Power
of any kind, I'm dashed if I _stay_ poor. I'll show that I can make
good----"
And, gradually, step by step, the young mechanic, pilot, aero-racer and
inventor had been "making good."
He'd made friends, too. People had been decent. He'd been made to feel
that _they_ felt he was going to be a useful sort of chap. He'd quailed
a bit under the eyes of butlers in these houses where he'd stayed, but
he'd been asked again. That Mrs. What's-her-name (the woman in the pink
frock at the Smiths) had been awfully kind. Introducing him to her