The Boy with Wings
"Time, how?" asked Gwenna guilelessly, without turning her head.
"Oh! As if you didn't know!" he retorted. "Wasting time talking about
the Machine, to you. Catching hold of your hand, to show you what the
camber was--and then letting it go! Instead of owning up at once, '_Yes.
All right. You've got me. Pax!_' And starting to do this----"
He was close up behind her now on the mountain-path, and because of the
steep ground on which they stood, her head was on a higher level than
his own. He drew it downwards and backwards, that brown, sun-warmed
head, to his tweed-clad shoulder.
"You'll break my neck. I know you will, one day. You are so _rough_,"
complained Gwenna; twisting round, however, and taking a step down to
him.
"I love you to be," she whispered. She kissed his coat-lapel. All the
red of that rose bloomed now on her mouth.... They walked on, with his
arm a close, close girdle about her. The luncheon basket was forgotten
on the turfy slope on which he'd dropped it. So they lunched, late, in
the farm-house four hundred feet above the Quarry village. It was a
lonely place enough, a hillside outpost, fenced by stunted damson trees;
a short slate-flagged end of path led to the open door where a great red
baking crock stood, full of water. Inside, the kitchen was a dark, cool
cave, with ancient, smooth-worn oaken furniture that squeaked on the
slate-slabbed floor, with a dresser rich with willow-pattern and lustre,
and an open fire-place, through which, looking up, they could see
through the wood smoke a glimpse of the blue sky.
And in this sort of place people still lived and worked as if it were
Seventeen Hundred and Something--and scarcely a day's journey away was
the Aircraft Factory where people lived for the work that will remake
the modern world; oh, most romantic of all ages, that can set such sharp
contrasts side by side!
An old Welshwoman, left there by her sheep-farming sons at home in the
chimney corner, set butter-milk before the lovers, and ambrosial
home-churned butter, and a farm-house loaf that tasted of nuts and
peatsmoke. They ate with astonishing appetites; Gwenna sitting in the
window-seat under the sill crowded with flower-pots and a family Bible.
Paul, man-like, stood as near as he could to the comfort of the fire
even on that warm day. The old woman, who wore clumping clogs on her
feet and a black mutch-cap on her head, beamed upon the pair with smiles
as toothless and as irresistible as those of an infant.
"You must have a plenty, whatever," she urged them, bringing out another
loaf, of _bara breeth_ (or currant bread). "Come on, Sir! Come, Miss
Williams, now. Mam, I mean. Yess, yess. You married lady now. Your
husband," with a skinny hand on his grey sleeve, "your husband is _not_
a minnyster?"
"He's a soldier, Mrs. Jones," explained Gwenna, proudly, and with a
strengthening of her own accent, such as occurs in any of her race when
revisiting their wilds. "He's an Airman."
"Ur?" queried Mrs. Jones, beaming.
"He goes flying. You know. On a machine. Up in the sky."
"Well, _oh_!" ejaculated the old woman. And laughed shrilly. To her this
was some eccentric form of English joke. Flying? Like the birds! _Dear_,
dear. "What else does he do, _cariad fach_?" she asked of Gwenna.
"He's been over in France, fighting the Germans," said the girl, while
the old woman on her settle by the fire nodded her mutched head with
the intense, delighted expression of some small child listening to a
fairy story. It was indeed no more, to her. She said, "Well, indeed. He
took a very _kind_ one, too." Then she added, "I not much English.
Pitty, pitty!" and said something in Welsh at which Gwenna coloured
richly and laughed a little and shook her head.
"What's she say?" demanded Paul, munching; but his girl-wife said it was
nothing--and turned her tip-tilted profile, dark against the diamond
window panes, to admire one of the geranium plants in the pots.
Afterwards, when the couple were outside again in the fresh sunlight on
the mountain lands, young Dampier persisted with his questioning about
what that old woman had said. He betted that he could guess what it was
all about. And he guessed.
Gwenna admitted that he had guessed right.
"She said," she told him shyly, "that it ought to be 'a very pretty one,
whatever.'"
"I've got a very pretty present for it," Paul whispered presently.
"What?"
"Don't you remember a locket I once took? A little mother-of-pearl
heart," he said. "That's what I shall keep it for----"
And there fell a little silence between them as they walked on, swinging
hands above the turf, gravely contented.
They had _had_ to spend the day together thus. It seemed to Gwenna that
all her life before had been just a waiting for this day.
Below the upland on which they swung along, grey figures on the green,
there lay other wide hill-spaces, spread as with turf-green carpets, on
which the squares of mellowing, golden-brown autumn woods seemed rugs
and skins cast down; below these again stretched the further valley with
the marsh, with the silver loops and windings of the river, and the
little white moving caterpillar of smoke from the distant train. There
was also a blue haze above the slate roofs of a town.
But here, in this sun-washed loneliness far above, here was their world;
hers and his.
They walked, sometimes climbing a crest where stag's-horn moss branched
and spread through the springy turf beneath their feet, sometimes
dipping into a hollow, for two miles and more. They could have walked
there for half a day and seen no face except that of a tiny mountain
sheep, cropping among the gorse; heard no voice but those of the calling
plovers, beating their wings in the free air. Then, passing a gap in two
hills, they came quite suddenly upon the cottage and the lake.
The sheet of water, silent, deserted, reflected the warm blue of the
afternoon sky and the deep green of the overhanging boughs of great
hassock-shaped bushes that covered two islands set upon its breast.
"Rhododendron bushes. When they're in blossom they're all simply
_covered_ with flowers, pink and rose-colour, and reflected in the
water! It _is_ so lovely," Gwenna told the lover beside her. "Oh, Paul!
You _must_ come here again and see that with me in the spring!"
On the further bank was another jungle of rhododendron and lauristinus,
half-hiding the grey stone walls and the latticed windows of the square
cottage, a fishing box of a place that had evidently been built for some
one who loved solitude.
Paul Dampier peered in through one of the cobwebby lattices. Just inside
on the sill there stood, left there long since, a man's shaving-tackle.
Blue mildew coated the piece of soap that lay in the dish. Further in he
caught a glimpse of dusty furniture, of rugs thrown down on a wooden
floor, of a man's old coat on a peg. A wall was decorated with sets of
horns, with a couple of framed photographs, with old fishing-rods.
"Make a jolly decent billet, for some one, this," said Paul.
Gwenna said, "It belongs to some people.... They're away, I think. It's
all locked up now. So's the boat for the lake, I expect. They used to
keep a boat up here for fishing."
The long flat boat they found moored to one of the stout-trunked
rhododendron bushes that dipped its pointed leaves in the peat-brown
water fringed with rushes.
Paul stepped in, examining her, picking up the oars. "Nice afternoon for
a row, Ma'am?" he said, smiling up at the girl clad in dove-grey on the
rushy bank, with the spongy dark-green moss about her shoes.
"Jump in, Gwenna. I'll row you across the lake."
"You can't row that old tub, boy."
"Can't I?"
"I'll race you round, then!"
"Right you are!"
The girl skipped round the clump of rhodos that hid the last flicker of
her skirt; and the boy bent to the short, home-made sculls.
The boat was a crank, unhandy little craft; and lacked thole-pins on one
side. Therefore Gwenna, swift-footed Little Thing that she was, had as
good a chance of winning as he.
"Like trying to row a bucket!" he laughed, as the boat spun. "Hi, Gwen!
I ought to have some start, you know!"
He rowed. Presently he rested on his oars and called, "Hullo, have you
started?"
"Started--" came back only the echo from the cottage roof. There was no
sign of any grey-frocked running figure on the bank. He scanned it on
both sides of him, gave a look towards each of those shrub-covered
islands on the smooth expanse.
"Gwenna--Why, where are you? What's become of the girl," he muttered.
"Gwen-na!"
She was nowhere to be seen.
CHAPTER II
THE SOUL OF UNDINE
"Hul-lo!" he shouted. The echo answered as he sat in the boat staring
about him....
Then he felt a twitch at one of his sculls. It turned in his hand; was
wrenched from him.
"What the deuce----" he began, surprised.
Then he heard a laugh.
"What on earth----"
It was nothing on earth that had greeted him. It was something of the
water that laughed up into his face and called, "Hullo, husband!"
A mermaid, a water-nymph, a little white-shouldered Undine was peeping
up and mocking him! She trod water, turned over on her side, swam with
easy strokes.
For always Gwenna had been proud of her swimming.
She had won a medal for it at that Aberystwith school of hers; but she
wanted more than a mere medal for it now. She wanted her boy to see her
swimming, and to praise her stroke. She had looked forward to that. She
wanted to show him that she could make as graceful movements with her
own body in the water as he could make with his biplane in the air. She
could! He should see! She made these movements. She had thought of
making them--just _so_--on the morning of her marriage. Only then she
had thought it would be in the sea off Brighton beach, with whole
crowds of other stupid people about in dark-blue or Turkey-red
"costumes." Here it was so much lovelier; a whole mountain-side and a
clear lake to herself in which to show off her pet accomplishment to her
lover. She was one innocent and pretty Vanity incarnate as she glided
along beside his boat. She gave a quick twist. There was a commotion of
translucent amber water, a gleam of coral white that shaded down into
peaty brown as she dived, reappearing on the other side of the boat,
looking up at him, blinking as her curls streamed water into her eyes.
His eyes, blue and direct and adoring, were upon her.
"I say," he said admiringly, "I didn't know you could _swim_ like that.
Jolly!"
This moment of achievement was possibly the most exquisite in the whole
of Gwenna's life.
Shaking the wet from her hair, she laughed with pure, completed,
rapturous joy; glorying in her youth, in the life that charged each
little blue vein of her, in this power of swimming that she felt had
been given her only to please him.
"Why, I could swim you to--Oh! Mind you don't upset!" she exclaimed.
For Paul had stooped; leaning over the side of the boat he had passed
one arm beneath her shoulders; he was bending over her to take a kiss,
all fresh with lake-water.
"You'll topple over," she warned him.
"Pooh," he said. "One, Gwenna!"
He always said her name as if it were "darling"--he did not call her
"dear" or "darling" much. She found that she adored him for this, as for
everything that he said or did. Once, in one of those old-time talks of
theirs, Leslie had said, "For every three times a man asks for a kiss
refuse him twice. An excellent plan, Taffy----" The happy girl-wife
thought there need be no use of "plans" with him and her. She teased
him--if she wanted to.
Eyes laughed into eyes now. She threw back her head, evading him, but
only for a second. His mouth met hers, dewy as a lotus-bud. The boy and