The Boy with Wings
girl kissed closely. Nothing could come between that kiss, she thought.
Then, sudden as a flash of summer lightning, _something came_.
A thought; a shadow; a fear at last.
All these halcyon hours she had known no fear. All those weeks that her
husband had been in France she had been certain, at the bottom of her
heart, of his safety. She had known by that queer sense of presentiment
she possessed that he would come back to her. He'd come back to make
this perfect time for which all her unawakened girlhood had been
waiting. And now, by that same queer sixth sense, she suddenly found
herself realising that he would not--No, no! _That he might not come
back to her the second time...._ Suddenly, suddenly the shadow crept
over her, taking the glow and colour out of their idyll even at this
golden moment. With his lips warms on hers she shivered as if the water
in which she swayed had suddenly grown many degrees colder. Supposing he
should not return? In two days' time now he was leaving her. Supposing
that she were never to see him again? She shut her eyes, felt herself
for a horrible second surrounded by darkness, and alone.... She heard
his sharp question, "What's the matter?" and opened her eyes again.
His head was dark against the blue little ripples of light passed over
his blonde face; ripples cast up from the water. The boat tilted, and
his arm held her more tightly. He said again, "What is it?"
Then, in her own ears, her voice said serenely, "It's all right."
The cloud had passed, as suddenly as it had fallen. She knew, somehow,
that it would be "all right." Whatever happened, this worst catastrophe
of all was not going to fall upon her. She was not going to be left
alone and in darkness, her sun of Love gone down. Such a light could not
have been kindled, just to be put out again. She would not be forced to
live without him. _That_ could not be. Why, the thing was unthinkable.
Yet, somehow that was going to be made "all right."
"You swim back again and get your things on, as quick as you can," he
ordered her. "That was a touch of cramp you got, I expect."
"I'm all right now," she again said.
She sighed when at last they left that lovely Paradise of theirs behind
them.
They went down hill at a good swinging pace, his arm again girdling the
dove-grey frock. He said, "We'll get tea and topping light-cakes at one
of those cottages before we come to the village, shall we? Are you
starving, Little Thing? I know I am. Soon be there now."
"I know," she said, "I wasn't sighing because I wanted my tea. Only
because ... It seems such a pity that we _ever_ have to come down from
here!" she told him, nestling in his arm.
But she did not tell him of her sudden fear, nor of its sudden passing,
though (in her heart that beat below his hand) the thought of both
remained.
CHAPTER III
A LAST FAVOUR
That thought at the heart of Gwenna seemed to grow with every hour that
passed.
And they were passing now so rapidly, the hours that remained to her
with her husband! One more blissful day spent on the mountains (but
always with that growing thought behind it: "_He has to go soon. Perhaps
he will not come back this time. The new machine may let him down
somehow, perhaps_").
One more train-journey, whizzing through country of twenty different
aspects, just him and her together (but still in her mind that thriving
dread: "_Very likely he may not come back. He has had so many narrow
escapes! That time he told me about when he came down from behind the
clouds and the machine was hit on both sides at once: our men firing on
him as well, thinking his was an enemy craft! He got up into the clouds
again and escaped that time. Next time as likely as not...._").
One more night they were together in the London hotel where Uncle Hugh
had always put up. Paul slept, with a smile on his face that looked so
utterly boyish while he was asleep: his blonde head nestled into her
neck. Gwenna, waking uneasily once or twice, and with his arms still
about her, was haunted by her fear as by a nightmare. "_It's more than
likely that he may not come back this time. This time I feel that he is
not going to come back!_" And the feeling grew with the growing light
outside the window, until she told herself: "_I know it! I know that I
am right_----"
Then came the wonder in her mind, "_Why am I not wretched about this?
Why do I feel that it's not going to matter after all, and that it's
going to be 'all right'?_"
Still wondering, she fell asleep again.
But in the morning her presentiment was a thing full-grown.
Paul, off to the Front, would never come back again.
Quite early they were at the Aircraft Works where he was to leave his
young wife and to fetch his machine, the completed P.D.Q. that was to
take him out to France.
He had spoken of her--that machine--in the train coming along. And
Gwenna, the dazed and fanciful, had thought sharply: "_Ah! That's her
revenge. That's what's going to be the end of this fight between the
Girl and the Machine. I won. I got him from her. This is how she takes
him back, the fiancee! He will be killed in that machine of his._"
Her headstrong, girlish fancy persisted. It was as real to her as any of
the crowd of everyday and concrete realities that they found, presently,
at the bustling Aircraft Works.
When Paul (who was to start at midday, flying across to France) changed
into his uniform and flying-kit, it seemed to her to set the seal upon
her premonition.
He would never wear other kit again now, upon this earth.
The Aeroplane Lady, bracingly cheerful, met them with a sheaf of
official documents for the young Army aviator.
"I'm going to steal him from you for a quarter of an hour, Mrs.
Dampier," she said with a little nod; and she took the young man into
her office.
Gwenna, left alone outside, walked up and down the sunny yard
mechanically.
She could not have said what her thoughts were. Probably she had no
thoughts. Nothing but the steady throb, quiet and reiterated as the
pulse of the machinery in the shops, of that conviction of fatality that
she felt.
It seemed to run on in her head as the belting ran on the shaft: "He
won't come back. He won't come back!"
It was in the middle of this monotonous inward muttering that the door
of the office opened, and there came out a shortish figure,
leather-jacketed and with enveloping overalls and wearing a cap with
goggles, peak behind. It was young Mr. Ryan.
He raised his cap and would have passed Gwenna quickly, but she stopped
him.
She didn't know why. Since her marriage she had (ungratefully enough)
almost forgotten the red-haired young man's existence, and perhaps it
was not so much himself as his cap and mufflings that caught her eye
now.
"Why, are you going up?" she asked.
"Yes," said young Ryan gloomily.
He seemed to be in the worst of tempers as he went on, grumblingly. He
was going up. Just his luck. Plenty of times he'd wanted to go and
hadn't been allowed. Now he'd got to go, just when he didn't want to.
"You don't want to?" Gwenna repeated.
Mr. Ryan coloured a little. "Well, if I've got to, that doesn't matter."
"Why don't you want to?" Gwenna asked, half indifferent, half surprised.
To her it had always appeared the one thing to want to do. She had been
put off time after time. Now here was he, grumbling that it was just his
luck to go.
Then she thought she could guess why he didn't want to go up just now.
She smiled faintly. Was it that Mr. Ryan had--somebody--to see?
Mr. Ryan blushed richly. Probably he did so not on this somebody's
account, but because it was Gwenna who asked the question. One does not
care for the sympathetic questions of the late idol, even when another
fills the shrine. He told Gwenna: "I've got to go with your husband as a
passenger. He's had a wire to bring another man over to one of the
repairing bases; and so he's spotted me."
"To bring over? D'you mean to France?"
"Yes. Not that they want _me_, of course; but just somebody. So I've got
to go, I suppose."
Gwenna was silent, absorbed. She glanced away across the flat
eighty-acre field beyond the yards, where the planes of Paul's new
biplane gleamed like a parallel ruler in the sun. A ruler marked with
inches, each inch being one of the seams that Gwenna had carefully doped
over. About the machine two or three dark figures moved, giving
finishing touches, seeing that all was right.
And young Ryan was to fly in her, with Paul!
It wasn't Ryan they wanted, but "just somebody." ... And then, all in a
moment, Gwenna, thinking, had a very curious little mental experience.
As once before she had had that "flying dream," and had floated up from
earth and had seen her own body lying inert and soulless on her bed, so
now the same thing happened. She seemed to see herself in the yard.
Herself, quite still and nonchalant, talking to this young man in cap
and goggles who had to go to France just when he particularly wanted to
go somewhere else. She saw all the details, quite clearly: his leather
jacket, herself, in her blouse and skirt, the cylindrical iron, steam
chambers where they steamed the skids, the Wing-room door, and beyond it
the new biplane waiting in the field two hundred yards away.
Then she saw herself put her hand on the young man's leathern sleeve.
She heard her own voice ascending, as it were, to her. It was saying
what seemed to be the most matter-of-fact thing in the world.
"Then don't go. You go later, Mr. Ryan. Follow him on. You go and meet
your girl instead; it will be all right."
He was staring blankly at her. She wondered what he saw to stare at.
"What? What d'you mean, Mrs. Dampier? I'm bound to go. Military orders."
"Yes; they are for him, not for you. _You_ aren't under military
orders." This was in her own, quite calm and detached little voice with
its un-English accent. "You say anybody'd do. He can take--somebody
else."
"Isn't anybody else," she heard young Ryan say. Then she heard from her
own lips the most surprising thing of all.
"Yes, there's somebody. You give me those things of yours. I'm going
instead of you."
Then Mr. Ryan laughed loudly. He seemed to see a joke that Gwenna did
not see. "Well, for a film-drama, that takes it!" he laughed.
She did not laugh. She heard herself say, softly, earnestly, swiftly:
"Listen to me. Paul is going away and I have never been up with him yet.
I was always promised a flight. And always something got in the way of
it. And now he's going. He will never----"
Her voice corrected itself.
"He _may_ never come back. I may never get another chance of flying with
him. Let me--let me have it! Say you will!"
But Mr. Ryan, instead of saying he would, became suddenly firm and
peremptory. Perhaps it was the change in his voice that brought Gwenna
Dampier, with a start, back to herself. She was no longer watching
herself. She was watching young Ryan's face, intently, desperately. But
she was still quite calm. It seemed to her that since an idea and a plan
had come to her out of nowhere, it would be mad to throw them away again
untried.
"Let me go; it will be all right! Let me get into your things."
"Quite out of the question," said young Ryan, with growing firmness--the
iron mask of the man who knows himself liable to turn wax in the hands
of a woman. "Not to be thought of."
She set her teeth. It was life and death to her now, what he refused.
She could have flown at him like a fury for his obstinacy. She knew,
however, that this is no road to a woman's attainment of her desires.
With honeyed sweetness, and always calmly, she murmured: "You were
always so nice to me, Mr. Ryan. I liked you so!"
"I say, don't----"