The Boy with Wings
seams with braid, eyelets and cord, like an old-fashioned woman's
corset. The second was half-covered. The third was all as yet uncovered,
and looked like the skeleton of a vast seagull cast up on some
prehistoric shore.
Wondering, the girl passed on, to find her employer. She found her in
the fitter's shop. In a corner, the red-haired pupil, with goggles over
his eyes, was sitting at a stand working an acetylene blow-pipe; holding
in his hand the intense jet that shot out showers of squib-like sparks,
and wielding a socket, the Lady directing him. She took the girl's
message, then walked back with her to the office, her tawny dog
following at her heels.
"Letters finished?... then I'd like you to help me on with the wings of
that machine that's all but done," she said. "That is"--she smiled--"if
you don't mind getting your hands all over this beastly stuff----"
Mind? Gwenna would have plastered her whole little white body with that
warmed and strongly-smelling dope if she'd thought that by so doing she
was actually taking a hand in the launching of a Ship for the Clouds.
The rest of the afternoon she spent in the hot and reeking Wing-room,
working side by side with the Aeroplane Lady. Industriously she pasted
the linen strips, patting them down with her little fingers on to the
seams of those wide sails that would presently be spread--for whom?
In her mind it was always one large and springy figure that she saw
ascending into the small plaited wicker seat of the Machine. It was
always the same careless, blonde, lad's face that she saw tilted
slightly against the background of plane and wires....
"I would love to work, even a little, on a machine that he was going to
fly in," thought Gwenna.
She stood, enveloped in a grey-blue overall, at the trestle-table,
cutting out fresh strips of linen with scissors that were sticky and
clogged with dope. She peeled the stuff from her hands in flakes like
the bark of a silver-birch as she added to her thought, "But I shouldn't
want to do anything for that aeroplane; his _Fiancee_, for the P.D.Q.
Hateful creature, with her claws that she doesn't think are going to let
him go!"
Here she set the pannikin of dope to reheat, and there was a smile of
defiance on the girl's lips as she moved about from the trestles to the
radiator or the sewing-table.
For ever since she had been at the Works a change had come over Gwenna.
Curiously enough, she was happier now than she had been in her life. She
was more contented with what the present brought her; more steadily
hopeful about the future. It didn't seem to matter to her now that, the
last time she had seen him, her Aviator had turned almost sullenly away.
She laughed to herself over that, for she believed at last in Leslie's
theory: "Afraid he's going to like me." She did not fret because she
hadn't had even one of his brief notes since she had left London; nor
sigh over the fact that she, living down here in this Bedfordshire
village, was so much further away from those rooms of his at Camden Town
than she had been when she had stayed at the Hampstead Club.
For somehow she felt nearer to him now.
Absence can, in some subtle, unexplained way, spin fine threads of
communication over the gulf between a boy and a girl....
She found a conviction growing stronger and stronger in her girl's mind,
that gay, tangled chaos where faults and faculties, blindness and
intuitions flourish entwined and inseparable. _She was meant to be his._
She'd no "reason" for thinking so, of course. There was very little
reason about Gwenna's whole make-up.
For instance, Leslie had tried "reasoning" with her, the night before
she'd left the Hampstead Club. Leslie had taken it into her impish black
head to be philosophical, and to attempt to talk her chum into the same
mood.
Leslie, the nonchalant, had given a full hour to her comments on
Marriage. We will allow her a full chapter--but a short one.
CHAPTER XVII
LESLIE ON "MARRIAGE"
She'd said, "Supposing the moon _did_ fall into your lap, Taffy? Suppose
that young Cloud-Dweller of yours did (a) take you flying, and (b)
propose to you?" and she'd recited solemnly:
"_Somewhere I've read that the gods, waxing wroth at our mad
importunity,
Hurl us our boon and it falls with the weight of a curse at our feet;
Perilous thing to intrude on their lofty Olympian immunity!
'Take it and die,' say the gods, and we die of our fondest conceit._"
"Yes; 'of' it! After _having_ it. Who'd mind dying _then_?"
"But if it hadn't been worth it, Taffy? Suppose you were air-sick?"
Leslie had suggested. "Worse, suppose you were Paul-sick?"
"_What?_"
"Yes, supposing that Super-Boy of yours himself was the disappointment?
Suppose none of his 'little ways' happened to please you? Men don't
realise it, but, in love, a man is much easier to please than a woman!"
"No, Leslie. No," had come from the girl who knew nothing of
love-making--less than nothing, since she _thought_ she knew.
Leslie had persisted. "The first pet-name a man calls you--awfully
important, that!--may hash up Love's young dream for ever. Some men, I
believe, begin with 'Dear old--something or other.' That's the _end_. Or
something that you know you're obviously _not_. Such as 'Little Woman,'
to _me_. Or they don't notice something that's specially there for them
to notice. That's unforgivable. Or they do notice something that's quite
beside the mark. Or they repeat themselves. Not good enough, a man who
can't think of _one_ new way of saying he cares, each day. (Even a
calendar can do that.) Saying the wrong thing, though, isn't as bad as
being _silent_. That's fatal. Gives a girl _such_ a lot of time to
imagine all the things that another man might have been saying at the
time. That's why men with no vocabularies ought never to get engaged or
married. '_I'm a man of few words_,' they say. They ought to be told,
'_Very well. Outside! It simply means you won't trouble to amuse me._'
Exit the Illusion.
'_Alas, how easily things go wrong!
A look too short, or a kiss too long----_'
(Especially with a look too short.) Yes," Leslie had concluded
impressively, "suppose the worst tragedy happened? _Suppose_ the Dampier
boy did get engaged to you, and then you found out that he didn't in the
least know how to make love? To make love to _you_, I mean."
"There wouldn't have to be any love '_made_,'" little Gwenna had
murmured, flushing. "Where he was, the love would _be_."
"My dear, you _are_ what Hugo Swayne calls '_a Passe-iste_' in love.
Why, why wasn't _I_ brought up in the heart of the mountains (and far
away from any other kind of heart) until I was twenty-two, and then
hurled into a love-affair with the first decent-looking young man?"
Leslie had cried, with exaggerated envy. "The happier you! But, Taff, do
remember that 'Love is a Lad with Wings'--like yours. Even if the
engagement were all your fancy painted, that Grand Firework Display sort
of feeling couldn't _last_. Don't shoot! It's true. People couldn't go
on living their lives and earning their livings and making their careers
and having their babies if it _did_ last. It _must_ alter. It _must_ die
down into the usual dear old sun rising every morning. So, when your
'_Oiseau de feu_' married you, and you found he was just--a husband,
like everybody else's----"
"Not 'like' anybody!"--indignantly.
"How d'you know _what_ he's like?" Leslie had demanded. "What d'you know
of his temper? Men with that heather-honey kind of smile and those deep
dimples very often have a beastly temper. Probably jealous----"
"I would _love_ him to be that."
"You wouldn't love to be poor, though," Leslie had gone off on another
tack. "Poor, and uncomfortable."
"I shall never be comfortable again without him," Gwenna had said
obstinately. "Might as well be uncomfortable _with_ him!"
"In a nasty little brick villa near Hendon, so as to be close to the
flying, perhaps? With a horrid dark bathroom? And the smell of cooking
haddocks and of Lux all over it!" Leslie had enlarged. "And you having
to use up all your own little tiny income to help pay the butcher, and
the Gas Light and Coke Company, and the rates, and loathsome details of
that sort that a woman never feels a ha'porth the better for! Instead of
being able to get yourself fresh gloves and silk stockings and a few
trifles of that sort that make absolutely _all_ the difference to a
woman's life!"
"Not _all_ the difference, indeed," Gwenna had said softly. But Leslie
had continued to draw these fancy pictures of married life as lived with
Mr. Paul Dampier.
"Taffy, for one thing, you've never seen him anything but nicely-groomed
and attractive to look at. You try to imagine him in what Kipling calls
'_the ungirt hour_.' They talk of a woman's slatternliness killing love.
Have they seen a _man_ when he '_hasn't bothered_' to groom himself?
That sight----"
She had shaken her black head ineffably over the mental image of it, and
had averred, "That sight ought to be added to the Valid and Legitimate
Causes for Divorce! A wife ought to be able to consider herself as free
as air after the first time that she sees her husband going about the
house without a collar. Sordid, unbecoming grey flannel about his neck.
Three half buttons, smashed in the wringer, hanging by their last
threads to his shirt. And his old slippers bursting out at the side of
the toe. And his 'comfortable' jacket on, with matches and fur in all
the pockets and a dab of marmalade--also furred--on the front. And
himself unshaved, with a zig-zag parting to his hair. I believe some men
do go about like this before their wives, and then write wistful letters
to the _Daily Mirror_ about, 'Why is Marriage the Tomb of Romance?'"
Gwenna had sniffed. "Oh! _Some_ men! _Those!_"
"Valid cause for Divorce Number Ninety-three: The state of the bedroom
floor," Leslie had pursued. "I, slut as I am, do pick things up
sometimes. Men, never. Ask any married woman you know. Maudie told _me_.
Everything is hurled down, or stepped out of, or merely dropped. And
left. Left, my child, for _you_ to gather up. Everything out of the
chest-of-drawers tossed upon the carpet. Handkerchiefs, dirty old pipes,
shirts, ties, '_in one red burial blent_.' That means he's been 'looking
for' something. Mind, _you've_ got to find it. Men are born
'find-silly.' Men never yet have found anything (except the North Pole
and a few things like that, that are no earthly good in a villa), but
they are for ever _losing_ things!"
Gwenna had given a smile to the memory of a certain missing collar-stud
that she had heard much of.
"Yes, I suppose to be allowed to find his collar-studs is what he'd
consider '_Paradise enow_' for any girl!" Leslie had mocked. "I misdoubt
me that the Dampier boy would settle down after a year of marriage into
a regular Sultan of the Hearthrug. Looking upon his wife as something
that belongs to him, and goes about with him; like a portmanteau.
Putting you in your place as '_less than the dust beneath his
chariot_,' that is, '_beneath his biplane wheels_.'"
"Leslie! I shouldn't mind! I'd _like_ to be! I believe it _is_ my
place," Gwenna had interrupted, lifting towards her friend a small face
quivering with conviction. "He could make anything he liked or chose of
me. What do I care----"
"Not for clothes flung down in rings all over the floor like when a
trout's been rising? Nor for trousers left standing there like a pair of
opera-glasses--or concertinas? Braces all tangled up on the gas-bracket?
Overcoat and boots crushing your new hat on the bed? Seventeen holey
socks for you to mend? _All_ odd ones--for _you_ to sort----"
Little Gwenna had cried out: "I'd _want_ to!"