The Boy with Wings
now historic, but then as yet unuttered, that had transmitted itself to
some heightened sense of hers:
"_Fired at both by friend and foe!_"[A]
[A] This phrase occurred in a despatch from Sir David Henderson.
There! It was gone, the waking vision that left her trembling, with a
certainty.
Yes; here was the meaning of the sealed box, of the long confabulation
of her Airman with the Aeroplane Lady.... War was coming. And _they
knew_.
Gwenna, standing there in the doorway, drawing a long breath and feeling
suddenly rather giddy, knew that she had come upon something that she
had not been meant to guess.
What was she to do about it?
Her hand was on the knob of the door.
Must she close it upon herself, or behind her?
Should she come forward and cry, "Oh, if it was a dreadful secret, why
didn't you lock the door?"
Or should she go out noiselessly, taking that burden of a secret with
her? She might confess to the Aeroplane Lady afterwards....
Here she saw that the Airman had half turned. His boyish, determined
profile was dark in shadow against the plan on the wall; the plan of the
P.D.Q. Sunlight through the office window touched and gilded the edge
of his blonde head.
"Yes; I thought so. Have to be a rifle after all," he repeated in a
matter-of-fact tone. Then, turning more round, his glance met the
startled eyes of the girl in the doorway.
And that finished the dilemma for Gwenna.
Something rose up in her and was too strong to let her be silent.
"Oh! I've _seen_ it!" she cried sharply. "_Paul!_"
He took one stride towards her and slipped his arm about her as she
swayed. She was white to the lips.
"Is there any water----" began young Dampier, but already the Aeroplane
Lady had poured out a glassful.
It was he, however, who put it to Gwenna's lips, holding her still.
"It's all _right_, darling," he said reassuringly (and the give-away
word slipped very easily from his tongue). "Better, aren't you?
Frightfully muggy in that room with those radiators! You oughtn't to
be---- Here!" He took some of the cold water and dabbed it on her curls.
"I suppose he knew he could trust the child," thought the Aeroplane Lady
as she closed the door of the Wing-room between herself and those two in
the office, "but I don't know that I should have engaged her if I'd
known. I don't want lovers about the place, here. Of course, this
explains his Aviation dinner and everything----"
* * * * *
Little Gwenna, standing with her small face buried against the Aviator's
tweed jacket, was sighing out that she hadn't _meant_ to come in, hadn't
_meant_ to look at that horrible gun....
The girl didn't know what she was saying. The boy scarcely heard it. He
was rumpling with his cheek the short, silky curls he had always longed
to touch. Presently he tilted her cherub's head back against his
shoulder, then put both his hands about that throat of hers.
She gave an unsteady little laugh.
"You'll throttle me," she murmured.
Without loosening his clasp, he bent his fair head further down, and
kissed her, very gently, on the mouth.
"Don't mind, do you?" he said, into another kiss. "_Do_ you?"
At that moment the Little Thing in his arms had banished all thought of
those Big Things from his mind.
PART II
_JULY, AUGUST, SEPTEMBER, 1914_
CHAPTER I
THE AVIATION DINNER
Gwenna began to feel a little nervous and intimidated, even in the car
that took herself and the Aeroplane Lady and the Airman to the Aviation
dinner.
A hundred yards before they reached the portals of the Club in Pall Mall
that car stopped. Then it began to advance again a yard or two at a
time. A long row of other cars and taxis was ahead, and from them
alighted guests in dull black opera hats, with mufflers; once or twice
there was the light and jewelled gleam of a woman's wrap, but they were
mostly men who were driving up.
"Colonel Conyers," said Paul Dampier to the attendant in the great
marble-tiled entrance.
Then he was shown off to the right; Gwenna and the Aeroplane Lady to the
dressing-rooms on the left. Before an immense glass they removed their
wraps and came out to the waiting-room, the girl all misty-white with
the sky-blue sash and the dancing-shoes; the Lady gowned in grey satin
that had just the gleam of aluminium in that factory of hers, and with
her brooch of the winged serpents fastened at her breast.
They sat down at one of the little polished tables in the waiting-room
under the long windows on to Pall Mall; it was a high, light-panelled
room, with a frieze of giant roses. A couple of ladies went by to the
dressing-room, greeting Mrs. Crew as they passed.
Then there stopped to speak to her a third and older and very handsome
lady all in black, with diamonds ablaze in her laces and in her grey,
piled-up hair.
"There should be some good speeches to-night, shouldn't there?" said
this lady. "All these splendid men!... You know, my dear, take us for
all in all"--and she gave a little laugh--"we _are_ splendid!"
"But there are so few of us," said the Aeroplane Lady, ruefully.
The other woman, about to pass on, stopped for a moment again, and
looking over her white shoulder said, very seriously, something that
both her hearers were to remember. "If England is ever to be saved, it
will be by a few."
She went out; and Mrs. Crewe said to Gwenna, "That was Lady----"
(Something) "the wife of the man who's as responsible as most people for
the security of this Empire----"
Most of the people there seemed to know the Aeroplane Lady quite well,
Gwenna noticed, when Paul Dampier came up and took them out into the
Central Hall again, where the guests were assembling. The place seemed
as high as a cathedral, with a marble floor, and alcoves, and tall,
classic, brass tripod things to hold the end of men's cigarettes and
ashes. The Aeroplane Lady was at once surrounded by a group of men.
Gwenna, feeling very shy and little and of no account, turned to her
Airman.
"You said," she murmured reproachfully, "that there _weren't_ going to
be a lot of grand people."
"These aren't 'grand,' bless you! People aren't, who are really--well,
who 'do things,' as you say. Not nearly as frilly here as at the Smiths,
that other dinner," he said, smiling down at her. "I'm going to bring up
Colonel Conyers and introduce him to you----"
"_Him?_ Good _gracious_!" thought the little Welsh girl in consternation
to herself. "Colonel Conyers!--oh, no, please--I should be much too
frightened----"
But the tall figure had detached itself from a group at a word from Paul
Dampier, and Colonel Conyers came up. Gwenna recognised the lean,
smiling, half-mischievous face of the soldier who--those ages ago!--had
talked to those ladies in the motor-car at Hendon.
This was the man they called "Aircraft Conyers," the man practically at
the head of Aeronautics, Paul had, said, the man in whose hands rested
(among so many, many other things) the whole career of the inventor of
the P.D.Q.! Gwenna, with her curly head whirling, felt inclined to drop
a schoolchild's curtsy to this Great One of the Councils of the Earth.
He took her hand into his own long, lean one.
"How d'you do?" he drawled, smiling cheerfully. "Starving, what? I am, I
can tell you. Always late here. Won't be long, now. You're at my table,
I believe." Then, almost anxiously, "Fond of chocolates? You are? Good.
Then I can collect the lot of those little silver dishes around us and
pretend it's all for you. It's for me, really."
Gwenna, who was not able to help laughing at this unexpectedness on the
part of the great Aircraft Conyers, said: "Are _you_ fond of them?"
"Passionately. Passionately!" said Colonel Conyers with a nod, as he
turned to find his own dinner-partner.
"Didn't frighten you much, did he?" laughed Paul Dampier to the Little
Thing at his side. "Course he didn't. I'll tell you who most of the
others are when we get into the supper-room."
In the great supper-room with its painted ceiling and gilded pillars
dinner was laid on a number of small tables for parties of six or eight.
Gwenna found herself the only woman at their table, the Aeroplane Lady
sitting far down at the other end of the room.
All dazed, the young girl looked about her like a stray bird that has
fluttered in through an open window. Beside her, Paul Dampier pointed
out to her this celebrity and that at the tables.
"Colonel Conyers you've seen...." (That personage had nodded to the
young girl over a stack of pink roses and had made a little movement to
show the basket of sweets beside his plate.) "Now that man with the
Order, that's Lord" (So-and-So), "Director of Coast Defence. And that"
(So-and-So), "Chief Engineer. And that little man one down--in the
opposite direction from where I'm looking--that's" (So-and-So), "editor
of _The Air_. Wonderful chap; brains enough to sink a ship."
An extraordinary mixture of men, Gwenna thought, as her glance followed
his direction, and he went on talking. Soldiers, sailors, chemists,
scientists, ministers; all banded together. Ranks and fortunes were
merged. Here were men of position, men of brains, men of money. Men
whose names were in all the newspapers, and men the papers had never
heard of, all with one aim and object, the furtherance of Civilisation's
newest advance: the Conquest of the Air.
The dinner proceeded. Pale amber wine whispered and bubbled in her
glass, dishes came and went, but the girl scarcely knew what she ate or
drank. She was in a new world, and _he_ had brought her there. She felt
it so intensely that presently it almost numbed her. She was long past
the stage of excitement that manifests itself in gasps and exclamations.
She could speak ordinarily and calmly when Paul Dampier, turning from
his talk to a Physical Laboratory man in a very badly brushed coat,
asked her: "Well? Find it interesting?"
"You know I do," she said, with a grave little glance.
He said, smiling, "What did you say to the red-haired youth about not
going to the matinee with him first?"
"Mr. Ryan? Oh! I just told him I hadn't got over my headache from the
smell of dope, and that I was afraid it would tire me too much to do
both."
"Pretty annoyed, I expect, wasn't he?"
"Yes, he was," replied Gwenna, with the absolute callousness of a woman
in love towards the feelings of any but the one man. She did not even
trouble whether it had been the feelings or the vanity of Mr. Peter Ryan
that had been hurt. What mattered was that Paul Dampier had not wished
her to go to that matinee.
Paul Dampier said, "Well, I cried off an engagement to-night, too.
Colonel Conyers wanted to take me back with him. But I'm seeing you
home."
"Oh, but you mustn't; you needn't!" she protested happily. "I'm not
going down to the Works, you know, to-night. I'm sleeping at the Club.
I'm staying this week-end with Leslie."
"With Leslie, are you? M'm. But I'm taking you up to the Club
afterwards," he persisted. "A fellow's got to look after"--here he
laughed a little as if it were a joke that pleased him--"a fellow's got
to look after his _fiancee_, hasn't he?"
She was a little subdued. She thought for the moment that he had put
Colonel Conyers off, not for her, after all! but for that Machine of
his. Then she thought: No!--the machine was second now. She said, half
in hope, half in dread, "D'you mean the P.D.Q.?"
He turned, with his mouth full of salad, staring whimsically at her.
"The P.D.Q.? What you thinking of? I meant _you_."
"_Me?_" She gave a little gasp.
Life and happiness were too much for her again. She felt as if that
whispering untouched champagne in her glass had gone to her head. Was
it really true--_that_, that he had said?