The Boy with Wings
"I'm not afraid you won't get what you want," Leslie had said finally.
"All I hope is that your wish won't fail when you get it!"
And of that Gwenna was never afraid.
"I should not care for him so much if he were not the only one who could
make me so happy," she told herself; "and _unless_ the woman's very
happy, surely the man can't be. It must mean, then, that he'll feel,
some day, that this would be the way to happiness. I'm sure there are
_some_ marriages that are different from what Leslie says. Some where
you go on being sweethearts even after you're quite old friends, like.
I--I could make it like that for him. I _feel_ I could!"
Yes; she felt that some day (perhaps not soon) she must win him.
Sometimes she thought that this might be when her rival, the perfected
machine, had made his name and absorbed him no longer. Sometimes, again,
she told herself that he might have no success at all.
"Then, _then_ he'd see there was _something_ else in the world. Then he
would turn to me," said the girl to herself. She added, as every girl in
love must add, "No one _could_ care as I do."
And one day she found on the leaf of the tear-off calendar in her
cottage bedroom a line of verse that seemed to have been written for
her. It remained the whole of Browning as far as Gwenna Williams was
concerned. And it said:
"_What's Death? You'll love me yet!_"
CHAPTER XVIII
THE OBVIOUS THING
She was in this mood to win a waiting game on the day that Paul Dampier
came down to the Aircraft Works.
This was just one of the more wonderful happenings that waited round the
corner and that the young girl might hope to encounter any day.
The first she knew of it was from hearing a remark of the Aeroplane
Lady's to one of her French mechanics at the lathes.
"This will make the eighteenth pattern of machine that we've turned out
from this place," she said. "I wonder if it's going to answer, Andre?"
"Which machine, madame?" the man asked. He was a big fellow, dark and
thick-haired and floridly handsome in his blue overalls; and his bright
eyes were fixed interestedly upon his principal as she explained through
the buzz and the clack and the clang of machinery in the large room,
"This new model that Colonel Conyers wants us to make for him."
Gwenna caught the name. She thought breathlessly, "That's _his_ machine!
He's got Aircraft Conyers to take it up and have it made for him! It's
_his_!"
She'd thought this, even before the Aeroplane Lady concluded, "It's the
idea of a young aviator I know. Such a nice boy: Paul Dampier of
Hendon."
The French mechanic put some question, and the Aeroplane Lady answered,
"Might be an improvement. I hope so. I'd like him to have a show,
anyhow. He's sending the engine down to-morrow afternoon. They'll bring
it on a lorry. Ask Mr. Ryan to see about the unloading of it; I may not
get back from town before the thing comes."
Now Mr. Ryan was that red-haired pupil who had conducted Gwenna from the
station on the day of her first appearance at the Works. Probably Leslie
Long would have affirmed that this Mr. Ryan was also a factor in the
change that was coming over Gwenna and her outlook. Leslie considered
that no beauty treatment has more effect upon the body and mind of a
woman than has the regular application of masculine admiration.
Admiration was now being lavished by Mr. Ryan upon the little new typist
with the face of a baby-angel and the small, rounded figure; and Mr.
Ryan saw no point in hiding his approval. It did not stop at glances.
Before a week had gone by he had informed Miss Williams that she was a
public benefactor to bring anything so delightful to look at as herself
into those beastly, oily, dirty shops; that he hated, though, to see a
woman with such pretty fingers having to mess 'em up with that vile
dope; and that he wondered she hadn't thought of going on the stage.
"But I can't act," Gwenna had told him.
"What's that got to do with it?" the young man had inquired blithely.
"All they've got to do is to _look_. You could beat 'em at that."
"Oh, what nonsense, Mr. Ryan!" the girl had said, more pleased than she
admitted to herself, and holding her curly head erect as a brown tulip
on a sturdy stem.
"Not nonsense at all," he argued. "I tell you, if you went into musical
comedy and adopted a strong enough Cockney accent there'd be another
Stage and Society wedding before you could say 'knife.' You could get
any young peer to adore you, Miss Gwenna, if you smiled at him over the
head of a toy pom and called him 'Fice.' I can just see you becoming a
Gaiety puss and marrying some Duke----"
"I don't want to marry any Dukes, thanks."
"I'm sure I don't want you to," Mr. Ryan had said softly. "I'd miss you
too much myself...."
The fact is that he was a flirt for the moment out of work. He was also
of the type that delights in the proximity of "Girl"--using the word as
one who should say "Game." "Girl" suggested to him, as to many young
men, a collective mass of that which is pretty, soft, and
to-be-made-love-to. He found it pleasant to keep his hand in by paying
these compliments to this new instalment of Girl--who was rather a
little pet, he thought, though _rather_ slow.
As for Gwenna, she bloomed under it, gaining also in poise. She learned
to take a compliment as if it were an offered flower, instead of dodging
it like a brick-bat, which is the very young girl's failing. She found
that even if receiving a compliment from the wrong man is like wearing a
right-hand glove on the left hand, it is better than having no gloves.
(Especially it is better than _looking_ as if one had no gloves.)
The attentions of young Ryan, his comment on a new summer frock, the
rose laid by him on her desk in the morning; these things were not
without their effect--it was a different effect from any intended by the
red-haired pupil, who was her teacher in all this.
She would find herself thinking, "He doesn't look at me nearly so much,
I notice, in a trimmed-up hat, or a 'fussy' blouse. Men don't like them
on me, perhaps." (That blouse or hat would be discarded.) Or, "Well! if
so-and-so about me pleases him, it'll please other men."
And for "men" she read always, always the same one. She never realised
that if she had not met Paul Dampier she _might_ have fallen in love
with young Peter Ryan. Presently he had begged her to call him "Peter."
She wouldn't.
"I think I'd do anything for you," young Ryan had urged, "if you asked
for it, using my Christian name!"
Gwenna had replied: "Very well! If there's anything I ever want,
frightfully badly, that you could give me, I shall ask for it like
that."
"You mean there's nothing _I_ could give you?" he had reproached her, in
the true flirt's tone. It can sound so much more tender, at times, than
does the tone of the truest lover. A note or so of it had found its way
into Gwenna's soft voice these days.
Yes; she had half unconsciously learned a good deal from Mr. Ryan.
* * * * *
"I say! Miss Gwenna!"
Mr. Ryan's rust-red head was popped round the door of the Wing-room
where Gwenna, alone, was pouring dope out of the tilted ten-gallon can
on the floor into her little pannikin.
"Come out for just one minute."
"Too busy," demurred the girl. "No time."
"Not just to look," he pleaded, "at the really _pretty_ job I'm making
of unloading this lorry with Dampier's engine?"
Quickly Gwenna set down the can and came out, in her pinafore, to the
breezes and sunshine of the yard outside. It was as much because she
wanted to see what there was to be seen of that "_Fiancee_" of the
aviator's, as because this other young man wanted her to admire the work
of his hands.
Those hands themselves, Gwenna noticed, were masked and thick, half way
up his forearms, with soft soap. This he seemed to have been smearing on
certain boards, making a sliding way for that precious package that
stood on the low lorry. The boards were packed up in banks and stages,
an irregular stairway. This another assistant was carefully trying with
a long straight edge with a spirit level in the middle of it; and a
third man stood on the lorry, resting on a crowbar and considering the
package that held the heart of Paul Dampier's machine.
"You see if she doesn't come down as light as a bubble and stop exactly
_there_," said Mr. Ryan complacently, digging his heel into a pillowy
heap of debris. "Lay those other planks to take her inside, Andre." He
wiped his brow on a moderately clear patch of forearm, and moved away to
check the observations of the man in the shirt-sleeves.
Gwenna, watching, could not help admiring both this self-satisfied young
mudlark and his job. This was how women liked to see men busy: with
strenuous work that covered them with dirt and sweat, taxing their
brains and their muscles at the same time. Those girls who were so keen
on the Enfranchisement of Women and "Equal Opportunities" and those
things, those suffragettes at her Hampstead Club who "couldn't see where
the superiority of the male sex was supposed to come in"--Well! The
reason why they "couldn't" was (the more primitive Gwenna thought)
simply because they didn't see enough men at _this_ sort of thing. The
men these enlightened young women knew best sat indoors all day,
writing--_that_ sort of thing. Or talking about fans, like Mr. Swayne,
and about "the right tone of purple in the curtains" for a room. The
women, of course, could do that themselves. They could also go to
colleges and pass men's exams. Lots did. But (thought Gwenna) not many
of them could get through the day's work of Mr. Ryan, who had also been
at Oxford, and who not only had forearms that made her own look like
ivory toys, but who could plan out his work so that if he said that that
squat, ponderous case would "stop exactly _there_"--stop there it would.
She watched; the breeze rollicking in her curls, spreading the folds of
her grey-blue pinafore out behind her like a sail, moulding her skirt
to her rounded shape as she stood.
Then she turned with a very friendly and pretty smile to young Ryan.
It was thus that Paul Dampier, entering the yard from behind them, came
upon the girl whom he had decided not to see again.
He knew already that "his little friend," as old Hugo insisted upon
calling her, had taken a job at the Aircraft Works. He'd heard that from
his cousin, who'd been told all about it by Miss Long.
And considering that he'd made up his mind that it would be better all
round if he were to drop having anything more to say to the girl, young
Dampier was glad, of course, that she'd left town. That would make
things easier. He wouldn't seem to be avoiding her, yet he needn't set
eyes upon her again.
Of course he'd been glad. He hadn't _wanted_ to see her.
Then, at the end of his negotiations with Colonel Conyers, he'd
understood that he would have to go over and pay a visit to the
Aeroplane Lady. And even in the middle of the new excitement he had
remembered that this was where Gwenna Williams was working. And for a
moment he'd hesitated. That would mean seeing the Little Thing again
after all.
Then he'd thought, Well? Fellow can't _look_ as if he were trying to
keep out of a girl's way? Besides, chances were he wouldn't see her
when he did go, he'd thought.
It wasn't likely that the Aeroplane Lady kept her clerk, or whatever she
was, in her pocket, he'd thought.
He'd just be taken to where the P.D.Q. was being assembled, he'd
supposed. The Little Thing would be kept busy with her typing and one
thing and another in some special office, he'd expected!
What he had _not_ expected to find was the scene before him. The Little
Thing idling about outside the shops here; hatless, pinafored, looking