The Boy with Wings
school had practised over and over again--"The Rising of the Lark," a
blithely defiant tune that seemed best to match her mood as the biplane
sped.
Yes! All the bird-like, soaring spirit in her had come to its own.
Everything else was cast behind her.... She'd always felt, dimly and
uncomfortably, that a great part of herself, Gwenna, was just an
uninteresting, commonplace little girl.... That part had gone! It had
been left behind her, just as her bodily form had been left sleeping on
her bed, that midsummer night, while her soul flew through dreams.
"Dreams!" she thought incoherently. "It's _not_ true what people say
about the dream-come-true, and how one's always disappointed in it. I'm
not--ah, I'm not! This flying! This is more glorious than I
expected--even with _him_----!"
Then came a thought that checked her singing rapture.
"If only _he_ knew! But he doesn't."
Behind her, Paul, driving, had made no sign to the passenger. She could
guess at the busyness of him. His dear, strong hands, she knew, were on
the wheel. They were giving a touch to the throttle here and there. His
feet, too, must be vigilantly busy; now this one doing something
essential, now that. She supposed his whole body must be dipping from
time to time, just as that triangle of sunlight dipped and crept. It
was all automatic to him, she expected. He could work that machine
while he was thinking, just as she herself could knit and think.
"He's thinking of me," she told herself with a rueful little pang. "He's
wondering about my not saying good-bye. He must have minded that.
That'll be all right, though. I'll let him know, presently; I'll pull
down my muffler and look round. Presently. Not yet. Not until it's too
late for him to turn back or set me down----"
And again she hummed to herself in her little tune; inaudible, exultant.
The shining triangle of sunlight disappeared from the platform. All
became level light about her. It seemed growing colder. And beyond her,
far ahead, she spied a sweep of monotonous grey.
She guessed what that meant.
"The sea!" she told herself, thrilled. "We'll be flying over the sea
soon. _Then_ he can't do anything about sending me back. Then I shall
put up these goggles and push this cap off my curls. Then he'll see.
He'll know that it's me that's flying with him!" And she held away from
herself that thought that even so this flight could not last for ever,
there would be the descent in France, the good-bye that she had
evaded--No! It must last!
Again she forgot all else in the rushing joy of it.
Suddenly she felt something jolt hard against her left arm, for the
first time Paul was trying to attract his passenger's attention. Twice
her arm was jolted by something. Then she put out her brown gloved hand
to it, grasping what had jolted her. She drew it forward as he loosed it
to her clutch.
It was a gun; a carbine.
What--Why----?
She remembered something that she had heard Paul say, dim ages ago, when
she had watched him in the office, consulting with the Aeroplane Lady
over that machine-gun with that wicked-looking little nozzle that he had
decided not to mount upon the P.D.Q.
"_It'll have to be a rifle after all._"
Little Gwenna in her brown disguise sat with this rifle across her
knees, wondering.
Why did Paul wish Mr. Ryan to be armed with this? Why hadn't he handed
over that carbine just when they were about to start? Why only now, just
when they had got as far as the sea?
For she was certain now that what was below them was the sea. There was
a bright, silvery glitter to the right, but the floating floor of the
biplane shut that out again. To the left all was of a slaty grey. The
sun's level rays shot along the length of the biplane as if it were down
a gallery.
Gwenna sat there, holding that carbine across her brown wrapped knees,
and still puzzling over it. Why had Paul handed the thing over, so
suddenly? She could not see the reason.
Even when it appeared she did not at first see the reason.
Paul Dampier had been quicker to see it than she.
Of a sudden there broke out--there is no other word for it--a silence
more startling than all that harsh raving of the propeller that had been
stopped. At the same instant Gwenna felt the floor fall away suddenly on
her left and mount as dizzily on her right. The biplane was tilted up in
the air just as a ladder is tilted against the side of the house. And
the engine was giving short staccato roars into the silences as Paul
kept her going. He had shut off, and was making a giddy swoop down, down
to the left. She heard his voice. Sharply he cried out:
"There! Out to the left! The Taube! There he is!"
The next moment the engine was roaring again. The biplane had lifted to
the opposite curve of a swooping figure eight.
And now the girl in the passenger-seat saw in the air beside them,
scarcely two hundred yards away, what the pilot had seen.
It was another aeroplane; a monoplane.
CHAPTER VI
THE WINGED VICTORY
Now Gwenna, although she'd been clerk and assistant to the Aeroplane
Lady herself, and although she loved the idea of aeroplanes as other
girls have loved the idea of jewels, scarcely knew one pattern of
monoplane from another.
They were all the same to her as far as overlapping the seams with the
doped strips was concerned. Nevertheless, in this machine that seemed
suddenly to have appeared out of nowhere, there struck her something
that was quite unfamiliar. Never before had she seen that little
blade-shaped drag from the tips of the wings. It gave to this machine
the look of a flying pigeon.... She had only noticed it for a moment, as
the monoplane had lurched, as it were, into view over the edge of their
own lower plane. Then it lurched out of sight again.
Again their engine was shut off; and again she heard Paul's voice,
excited, curt.
"Can you get him, do you think?"
Get him? Bewilderingly she wondered what Paul could mean. Then came
another staccato rush of sound. Then another silence, and Paul's voice
through it.
"All right. I'll get above him; and you can shoot through the floor."
The engine brayed again, this time continuously.
"Shoot!" gasped Gwenna.
Shoot at that machine through the hole in the floor of this one? It was
a German craft, then? And Paul meant Mr. Ryan to shoot whoever was in
that machine. And she, Gwenna, who had never had a gun in her hands
before in her life, found herself in the midst of War, told to shoot----
Hardly knowing one end of the thing from the other, she grasped the
carbine. She guessed that the flyer in the other machine must have
realised what Paul meant to do.
They were rising; he was rising too.
And suddenly she became aware that there was sunlight about them no
longer. All was a dun and chilly white. Paul, trying to get above the
other, and the other trying to prevent him, had both run up together
into a cloud. Once before the Welsh girl had had this experience. On a
rocky mountain-path up Cader Idris she had walked into a thick mist that
wrapped her from seeing anything in front of her, even though she could
hear the voices of tourists just a little ahead.
And now here they saw nothing, but they could hear.
Even through the noise of their propeller Gwenna's ears caught a smaller
noise. It seemed to come from just below.
She had got the muzzle of the carbine through the hole at her feet.
Desperately, blindly she fumbled at what she thought must be the
trigger. Behind her goggles, she shut her eyes tightly. The thing went
off before she knew how it had done so.
Then, nothing....
Then the propeller had stopped again. She felt her shoulder touched
from behind. Paul's voice called, "Got him, Ryan?"
"I--I don't know," she gasped, turning. "I--_Paul! It's me!_"
It was a wonder that the biplane did not completely overturn.
Paul Dampier had wrenched himself forward out of the straps and had
taken one hand from the wheel. His other clutched Gwenna's shoulder, and
the clutch dragged away the muffler at her white throat and her goggles
slipped aside. Aghast he glared at her. The Little Thing herself? Here?
"Good---- here, keep still. Great----! For Heaven's sake, don't move.
I'll run for it. He can't catch me. I was trying to catch him. He can't
touch us---- We'll race--hold tight, Gwen--ready." He opened the throttle
again; while Gwenna, white-faced, took in the tornado of wind with
parted lips and turned sideways to stare with wide-open eyes.
Then a number of things seemed to happen very quickly.
The first of these was a sharp "Ping!" on one of the aluminium stays.
Gwenna found herself gazing blankly at the round hole in the wing a yard
to the right of her. The next thing was that the fog--mist--or cloud,
had disappeared. All was clear sky about them once more. The third thing
was that, hardly a stone's toss away, and only missed by a miracle in
the cloud, they saw the monoplane and the aviator in her.
He was bareheaded, for that blind, wild shot of the British girl's had
stripped away his head-covering, and there was a trickle of scarlet down
his cheek. His hair was a gilded stubble, his eyes hard and blue and
Teutonic. His flying-gear was buttoned plastron-wise above his chest,
just as that white linen jacket of his had been; and Karl Becker,
waiter, spy and aviator, gave a little nod, as much as to say that he
recognised that they were meeting not for the first time....
One glimpse showed all this. The next instant both German and Englishman
had turned to avoid the imminent collision. But the German did more than
turn.
He had been fired on and hit; now was his shot. Dampier, with no thought
now but to get his wife out of danger, crowded the biplane on. As the
machines missed one another by hardly ten feet, she heard the four
cracks of Paul's revolver.
Little Gwenna thought she had never heard anything so fascinating,
horrible, and sweet. He was fighting not for his own life only. And he
was not now being fired at, far from her, hoping that she need never
know. For she also, she was in danger with him; she who did not want to
die before him but who would not wish to live for one moment after him.
Moments? When every moment was a whole life, what could be more
perilously, unimaginedly sweet than this?
"I knew I had to come," she gasped to herself. "Never away from him
again! Never----"
Her heart was racing like the propeller itself with just such speed,
such power. More love than it could bear was crowded into every throb of
it. For one more of those moments that were more than years she must
look at him and see him look at her....
One look!
As they tore through the air she turned in her straps, pushing the curls
back from her brow. Her eyes met his, set and intent over the wheel.
She smiled at him.
Up out of the depths of his intentness she saw the answering smile come
into his own eyes. He nodded. He meant that it was all right. His lips
moved.
"He can't--touch--us!" he was shouting. His girl threw back her head as
far as it would go, offering her face for the kiss that she knew he
could not give. He nodded again, laughed outright, and stretched his own
head forward. It was all a kiss, despite the constraining straps--or
almost all.
More of a kiss than many lovers know, more of a marriage!
For then it was that the German's shot rang out, completing their
caress. Never was dearer nor more precious union, never less pain, so
lost was it in rapture. As gently as if he had only just said Good-night
the boy's head sank on the wheel; as for hers, it never moved. She still
lay, leaning back with lips parted, as if to-morrow would see her kissed
awake again.... His hands twitched once only. That movement cut off the