The Boy with Wings
think there's anything _quite_ so funny as men talking about what we
wear."
"Oh, all right," said the boy, and pretended to be offended. Then he
laughed again and said, "I've still got something of yours that you
wear, as a matter of fact----"
"Of mine?"
"Yes, I have; I've never given it you back yet. That locket of yours
that you lost."
"Oh----!" she exclaimed.
That locket! That little heart-shaped pendant of mother-o'-pearl that
she had worn the first evening that she'd ever seen him; and that
she had dropped in the car as they were driving back. So much had
happened ... she felt she was not even the same Gwenna as the girl who
had snapped the slender silver chain about her neck before they set out
for the party.... She'd given up wondering if her Airman had forgotten
to give it back to her. She'd forgotten all about it herself. And he'd
had it, one of her own personal belongings, somewhere in his keeping all
this time.
"Oh, yes; my--my little mascot," she said. "Have you got it?"
"Not here. It's in my other jac--it's at my rooms, I'll bring it to the
dinner for you. And--er--look here, Miss Gwenna----"
He tilted forward again as the girl passed his side of the table to
reach for the little wooden pattern by which she cut out a patch for the
end of the strip, and then passed back again.
"I say," he began again, a trifle awkwardly, "if you don't mind, I want
you to give me something in exchange for that locket."
"Oh, do you?" murmured Gwenna. "What?"
And a chill took her.
She didn't want him, here and now, to ask for--what Mr. Ryan might have
asked.
But it was not a kiss he asked for, after all.
He said, "You know those little white wings you put in your shoes? You
remember, the night of that river dance? Well, I wish you'd let me have
one of those to keep as my mascot."
He hadn't thought of wishing it until there had intruded into his ken
that other young man who made appointments--and who might have
the--cheek to ask for keepsakes, but who shouldn't be first, after all!
Anxiously, as if it were for much more than that feathered trifle of a
mascot that he asked, he said, "Will you?"
"Oh! If you like!"
"Sure you don't mind?"
"Mind? I should like you to have it," said Gwenna softly. "Really."
And across the great white aeroplane wing the girl looked very sweetly
and soberly at her Aviator, who had just asked that other tiny wing of
her, as a knight begged his lady's favour.
* * * * *
It was at this moment that the Aeroplane Lady, an alert figure in dark
blue, came into a room where a young man and a girl had been talking
idly enough together while one smoked and the other went on working with
that five-foot barrier of the wing between them.
The Aeroplane Lady, being a woman, was sensitive to atmosphere--not the
spirit-and-solution-scented atmosphere of this place of which she was
mistress, but another.
In it she caught a vibration of something that made her say to herself,
"Bless me, what's _this_? I never knew those two had even met! 'Not
saying so,' I suppose. But certainly engaged, or on the verge of it!"
--Which all went to prove that the rebuked, the absent Leslie, was not
far wrong in saying that it is the Obvious Thing that always succeeds!
CHAPTER XIX
THE SEALED BOX
Whatever the Aeroplane Lady thought to herself about the two in the
Wing-room, there was no trace of it in her brisk greeting to Paul
Dampier.
"I hope you haven't been waiting long?" she said. "I'm ready now."
Then she turned to her girl-assistant, who was once more laying the
tacky strips of linen along the seams. "That's right," she said. "You
can go straight on with that wing; that will take you some time. One of
the wings for _your_ machine," she added to the aviator. "I'm ready, Mr.
Dampier."
She and the young man left the Wing-room together and entered the
adjoining office, closing the door behind them.
Left alone, Gwenna went on swiftly working, and as swiftly dreaming.
Rapidly, but none the less surely, seam after long seam was covered; and
the busyness of her fingers seemed to help the fancies of her brain.
"One of the wings for _his_ Machine!" she thought. "And there was I,
thinking I should mind working for that--for 'Her,'" she smiled. "I
don't, after all. I needn't care, now."
Her heart seemed singing within her. Nothing had happened, really. Only,
she was sure of her lover. That was all. All! She worked; and her small
feet on the floor seemed set on air, as in that flying dream.
"Such a great, huge wing for 'Her,'" she murmured to herself. "Such a
little, little wing for himself that he asked for. My tiny one that I
put in my shoe. It was for him I put it there! And now it's begun to
bring him to me. It _has_!" she exulted. "He's begun to care. I _know_
he does."
From the other side of the door came a heightened murmur of voices in
the office. Something heavy seemed to be set down on the floor. That
sealed box, perhaps, that he'd brought with him in the car. Then came
the shutting of the outer door. Mr. Ryan passed the window. Then a sound
of hammering in the office, and the long squeak of a nail being prized
out of wood. They were opening that mysterious package of his. Gwenna's
fingers flew over her own task to the tune of her joyous thoughts.
"I don't care how long it lasts before _anything_ else happens. Don't
care how this flying-machine of his does try to keep him from me. She
won't. She can't. Nothing can!" triumphed the girl, smoothing the canvas
that was her Rival's plumage. "He's going to be mine, with everything
that he knows. So much better, and cleverer, and belonging to different
sort of people as he is, and yet he's going to have _me_ belonging to
him. She's had the last of him putting her always first!"
She heard in the office Paul Dampier's short laugh and his "Oh? you
think so?" to the Aeroplane Lady. Gwenna scarcely wondered what this
might be about. Some business to do with the Machine; but he would come
to an end of that, soon. He'd come back to her, with that look in his
blue eyes, that tone in his deep voice. She could wait patiently now for
the day, whenever it came, when he should tell her definitely that he
loved her and wanted her to be his. There would be that, of
course--Gwenna, the inexperienced, still saw "the proposal" as the scene
set and prepared; the inevitable milestone beside the course of true
love. Never mind that now, though. It didn't matter when. What mattered
was that it _would_ come. Then she would always be with him. It would be
for ever, like that blissful day in the hayfield, that summer night by
the river at the dance, those few bewildering seconds on the Westminster
scaffolding. And with no cruelty of separation afterwards to spoil it.
Nothing--nothing was going to part them, after all.
* * * * *
She had finished the wing. She looked about for the next thing to do.
There were three wings in the room, and all were finished. A fourth wing
still lay, a skeleton of fretted and glued wood, in the workshops; the
skin was not yet stretched over it.
And there were no more letters to write for the firm.
Gwenna had nothing to do.
"I shall _have_ to go into the office and ask," she said, admitting to
herself that she was glad enough to go. So often she had painted for
herself, out of mere memories, the picture of her Airman. He was now in
the office, in the flesh! She need not have to satisfy herself with
pictures of him. She slipped off her sticky pinafore; the white muslin
blouse beneath it was fresh and pretty enough. She moved to the
office-door. It was her room; she had never yet had to knock at that
door.
She pushed it open and stood waiting. For a moment she only saw the
Aeroplane Lady and the tall Aviator. They had their backs to her; they
were standing side by side and examining a plan that they had pinned up
on the matchboarding wall. Paul Dampier's finger was tracing a little
arc on the plan, and he was slowly shaking his head, with the gesture of
a man who says that something "won't do." The Aeroplane Lady's fingers
were meditatively at her lips, and her attitude echoed that of the young
man. Something that they had planned wouldn't do----
Then Gwenna's eyes fell, from these two people, to that "_Something_."
It was something that she had never seen about the Aircraft Works
before. Indeed, she did not remember having seen it ever before,
anywhere, except in pictures. This object was on the floor, half in and
half out of the sealed wooden box that Paul Dampier had brought down
with him in the car, and that he wouldn't let the workmen handle.... So
this was why....
This was it. Aghast, she stared at it.
It was a long, khaki-painted cylinder, and from one end of it a
wicked-looking little nozzle projected for an inch or so. The other
end, which disappeared into the box, showed a peep of a magazine and a
pistol-grip.
Even to Gwenna's unskilled eyes the thing appeared instantly what it
was.
A machine-gun.
"A gun?" she thought, stupefied; "dear me--on an aeroplane?"
"No," said Paul Dampier's voice suddenly, decisively, speaking to the
Aeroplane Lady, "it'll have to be a rifle after all."
And with the sudden breaking of his voice upon her ear, there seemed to
be torn from before the girl's eyes a corner of some veil.
Quite suddenly (how, she could not explain) she knew what all this
meant.
That plan for that new flying-machine. That gun. The whole object of the
ambitions of these people with their so romantic profession. Scraps of
her Aviator's talk about "scouting," and "the new Arm," and "modern
warfare." ...
Just now she had been swept up aloft by his look and tone into the
seventh heaven of a woman's delight. That was Love. Here, epitomised in
that cylinder with that vicious little nozzle, she saw the Power that
could take him from her yet. This was War!
A shudder ran over her.
Her mind took no notice of the facts that there was no War for him to go
to, that this grim preparation must be for experimenting only, for
manoeuvres, sham fights; that this was July, Nineteen-fourteen, an era
of sleepy peace (except for that gossip, half a joke, that we might
have civil war in Ireland yet), and that she and he and everybody they
had to do with lived in the Twentieth Century, in England....
Perhaps it was because she was not English, but British, Welsh. She
entirely lacked that Anglo-Saxon "balance" of which the English are so
proud, and that stolidity and that unimaginativeness. Her imagination
caught some of those unheard, unsuspected messages with which the air
must have been vibrant, all those midsummer weeks.
Her quick, unbalanced Celtic fancy had already shown her as clearly as
if she had seen it with her eyes that image of his Aeroplane as a winged
and taloned Woman-rival. Now it flashed before her, in a twink, another
picture:
Paul Dampier, seated in that Aeroplane, swooping through the air, _armed
and in danger_!
The danger was from below. She did not see that danger. She saw only the
image, against grey, scudding clouds, of the Beloved. But she could feel
it, that poignant Threat to him, to him in every second of his flight.
It was not the mere risk of accident or falling. It was a new peril of
which the shadow, cast before, fell upon the receptive fancy of the girl
who loved the adventurer. And, set to that shadow-picture in her mind,
there rang out to some inner sense of hers a Voice that sounded clear
and ominous words.
They called to her: "_Fired at both by friend and foe----_"
Then stopped.
The young girl didn't remember ever to have heard or even to have read
these words. How should she? It was the warning fore-echo of a phrase