The Boy with Wings
the Hendon aviator. They laughed; they read aloud the name "_P.
Dampier_;" they compared his looks with those of other airmen, treating
the whole subject precisely as they would have treated the dancing or
singing of their favourite actresses in the revues....
For it was still May, Nineteen-fourteen in England. The feeling of warm
and drowsy peace in the air was only intensified by the brisk, sharp
strains of the military band on the left of the flying-ground, playing
the "Light-Cavalry" march....
"Dear me! Are we going on like this for ever?" remonstrated Gwenna
presently. "Aren't they _ever_ going up?"
She was answered by a shattering roar from the right.
It ceased. Then, on the field before her excited eyes, there was brought
out of one of the hangars by a cluster of mechanics in khaki-brown
overalls the Winged Romance that came into this tired and _blase_ world
with that most wondrous of all Ages--the Twentieth Century. At first
only a long gleaming upper plane, jolting over the uneven ground, could
be seen over the heads of the watchers. Then it reached the enclosure.
For the first time in her life Gwenna beheld a Maurice Farman biplane.
And for the moment she was a little disappointed, for she had said it
was "going to be so lovely!"
She had expected--what? Something that would look more like what it was,
the new Bird of man's making. Here the sunlight gleamed on the taut,
cambered wings, on the bamboo spars, the varnished blade of the
motionless propeller, all shiny as a new toyshop. But the girl saw no
grace in it. Its skids rested on the sunburned grass like a couple of
_ski_ in the _Sketch_ photographs of winter sports. It had absurd
little wheels, too, looking as if, when it had finished skiing, the
machine might take to roller-skating. The whole thing seemed gaunt and
cumbrous and clogged to the earth. Gwenna did not then know that, unlike
Antaeus, this half-godlike creature only awoke to life and beauty when it
felt the earth no more.
Then, as she watched, a mechanic, the Daedalus who strapped on the wings
for the Icarus seized the propeller, which kicked thrice, rebelliously,
and then, with another roar, dissolved into a circle of mist. Other
brown figures were clinging to the under parts of the structure, holding
it back; Gwenna did not see the signal to let go. All that she saw was
the clumsy forward run of the thing as, like a swan that tries to clear
its feet of the water, the biplane struggled to free itself from the
drag of Earth....
Then, as the wonder happened, the untried and imaginative little Welsh
country-girl, watching, gave a gasp. "_Ah----!_"
The machine was fettered no longer.
Suddenly those absurd skids and wheels had become no more than the tiny
feet that a seagull tucks away under itself, and like a gull the biplane
rose. It soared, its engine shouting triumph as it sped. Gwenna's heart
beat as tensely as that engine. Her eyes sparkled. What they saw was not
now a machine, but the beauty of those curves it cut in the conquered
air. It soared, it banked, it swayed gently as if on a keel. Swiftly
circling, up and up it went, until it seemed to dwindle to something not
even larger than the seagull it resembled; then it was a flying-fish,
then a dragonfly wheeling in the blue immensity above.
Suddenly, like a fog-signal, there boomed out the voice of the man with
the megaphone, the man who made from the judges' stand, behind the
committee-enclosure all announcements for the meeting:
"Ladies and gentul MEN," it boomed.
"Mis ter Paul Dampier on a Maurice Farman bi plane!"
The huge convolvulus-trumpet of the megaphone swung round. The
announcement was made from the other side of the stand; the sound of
that booming voice being subdued as it reached the group of three girls.
"Mister Paul Dampier----"
"You hear, Gwenna? It is _your_ young man," said Miss Baker; Miss
Butcher adding, "Hope you had a good look at him and saw if that photo
did him justice?"
"From here? Well, how could I? It's not much I could see of him,"
complained Gwenna, laughing. "He only looked about as big as a knot in a
cat's cradle!"
Another roar, another small commotion on the ground. Another of those
ramshackle looking giant grasshoppers slid forward and upward into the
air. Presently three aeroplanes, then four together were circling and
soaring together in the sapphire-blue arena.
Below, a pair of swallows, swift as light, chased each other over the
ground, above their own shadows, towards the tea-pavilion.
Yet another flyer winged his tireless way across the aerodrome. He was a
droning bee, buzzing and hovering unheeded over a tuft of dusty white
clover growing by the rails that were so closely thronged by human
beings come to watch and wonder over man's still new miracle of flight.
"Oh, flying! Mustn't it be too glorious!" sighed the Welsh girl,
watching the aeroplane that was now scarcely larger than a winged bullet
in the blue. "Oh, wouldn't I love to go up! Wouldn't it be Heaven!"
"It's been Heaven for several poor fellows lately," suggested the
shrewd, Cockney-voiced little Miss Butcher, grimly, from her right.
"What about that poor young What's-his-name, fallen and killed on the
spot at twenty-one!"
"I don't call him 'poor,'" declared Gwenna Williams softly. "I should
think there could be worse things happen to one than get killed,
quickly, right in the middle of being so young and jolly and doing such
things----"
"Ah, look! That's it! See that?" murmured a voice near them. "Flying
upside down, now, that first one--see him?"
And now Gwenna, at gaze, watched breathlessly the wonder that seemed
already natural enough to the multitude; the swoop and curve, the loop
and dash and recover of the biplane that seemed for the moment a winged
white quill held in a hand unseen, writing its challenge on the blue
wall of Heaven itself.
Again the megaphone boomed out through the still and soft June air:
"Ladies and gentul MEN! Pass enger flights from this
aer riodrome may now be booked at the office un der
this Stand!"
"Two guineas, my dears, for the chance of breaking your necks,"
commented Miss Butcher. "Three guineas for a longer flight, I believe;
that is, a better chance. Well, I bet that if I did happen to have two
gleaming golden jimmyohgoblins to my name, I'd find something else to
spend 'em on, first!"
"I also!" agreed Miss Baker.
Gwenna moved a little impatiently. She hadn't two guineas, either, to
spend. She still owed a guinea, now, for that unjustifiable
extravagance, that white hat with the wings. In spite of earning her own
living, in spite of having a little money of her own, left her by her
father who had owned shares in a Welsh quarry, she _never_ had any
guineas! But oh, if she had! _Wouldn't_ she go straight off to that
stand and book for a passenger-flight!...
While her covetous eyes were still on the biplane, her ears caught a
stir of discussion that came from the motor nearest to the chairs.
A lady was speaking in a softly dominant voice, the voice of a class
that recognises no overhearing save by its chosen friends.
"My dear woman, it's as safe as the Tubes and the motor-buses. These
exhibition passenger-flights aren't really _flying_, Cuckoo said. Didn't
you, Cuckoo?"
A short deep masculine laugh sounded from behind the ladies, then a
drawled "What are they then, what? Haw? Flip-flap, White City, what?"
"Men always pretend afterwards that they've never said _anything_.
Cuckoo told me that when these people 'mean business' they can fly
_millions_ of times higher and faster than we _ever_ see them here. He
said there wasn't the _slightest_ reason why Muriel shouldn't----"
Here the sound, hard and clear as an icicle, of a very young girl's
voice, ringing out:
"And anyhow, mother, I'm _going_ to!"
Glancing round, Gwenna saw a lanky girl younger than herself spring down
from the big, dove-grey car, and stride, followed by a tall man wearing
a top-hat, to the booking-office below the stand. This girl wore a long
brown oilskin coat over her white sweater and her short, admirably-cut
skirt; a brown chiffon veil tied over her head showed the shape and the
auburn gleam of it without giving a hair to the breeze.
"Lovely to be those sort of people," sighed the enviously watching
Gwenna, as other girls from the cars strolled into the enclosure with
the notice "COMMITTEE ONLY," and seemed to be discussing, laying bets,
perhaps, about the impending race for machines carrying a
lady-passenger. "Fancy, whenever any of _them_ want to do or to see or
even to _be_ anything, they've only got to say, 'Anyhow, I'm going to!'
and there they are! _That's_ the way to live!"
Presently the three London typists were sitting at a table under the
green awning and the hanging flower-baskets; one of a score of tables
where folk sat and chattered and turned their eyes ceaselessly upwards
to the blue sky, pointed at by those giant pylon-fingers, invaded by
those soaring, whirring, insolent, space daring creatures of man.
The first biplane had been preparing for the Ladies' Race. Now came the
start; with the dropped white flag the announcement from that dominating
magnified voice:
"Mis ter Damp ier on a Maurice Far man bi plane ac
companied by Miss Mu riel Con yers----"
The German girl put in, "Your man again, Gwenna!"
"My man indeed. And I haven't seen him, even yet," complained the Welsh
girl again, laughing over her cup of cooling tea, "only in the
photograph! Don't suppose I ever shall, either. It's my fate, girls.
Nothing really exciting ever happens to me!" She sighed, then
brightened again as she remembered something. "I must be off now....
I've got to go out this evening."
"Anywhere thrilling?" asked Miss Butcher.
"I don't know what it'll be like. It's Leslie Long; it's my friend at
the Club's married sister somewhere in Kensington, giving a
dinner-party," Gwenna answered in the scrambling New English in which
she was learning to disguise her Welshiness, "and there's a girl fallen
through at the last minute. So she 'phoned through this morning to ask
if this girl could rake any one up."
"How mouldy for you, my dear," said Mabel Butcher in her sympathetic
Cockney as the Welsh girl rose, took up her sunshine-yellow coat from
the back of her chair and chinked down a shilling upon her thick white
plate. "Means you'll have to sit next some youth who only forced himself
into his dress-suit for the sake of taking that 'fallen through' girl
into dinner. He'll be scowling fit to murder you, I expect, for being
you and not her. (I know their ways.) Never mind. Pinch a couple of
liqueur-choc'lates off the table for me when the Blighted Being isn't
looking, will you? And tell us what he's like on Monday, won't you?"
"All right," promised the Welsh girl, smiling back at her friends. She
threaded her way through the tables with the plates of coloured cakes,
the brown teapots, the coarse white crockery. She passed behind that
park of cars with that leisured, well-dressed, upward-gazing throng. She
turned her back on the glimpse beyond them of the green field where the
brown-clad mechanics ran up towards the slowly downward swooping
biplane.
As she reached the entrance she caught again the announcement of that
distant megaphone:
"Ladies and gentul men Pass enger flights may now
be booked----"
The band in the distance was playing the dashing tune of the
"Uhlanenritt."
Gwenna Williams passed out of the gates beside the big poster of the
aeroplane in full flight carrying a girl-passenger who waved a scarf. It
was everywhere, that Spring. So was the other notice: