The Boy with Wings
couldn't imagine herself getting stodgy--or fat, like this married
sister of Leslie Long's, who was receiving her guests in the large
upstairs drawing-room into which the two girls were now shown.
This room, golden and creamy, seemed softly aglow. There were standard
lamps with huge amber crinolines, bead-fringed; and flowers--yellow
roses and white lilies--seemed everywhere.
Leslie Long drew one of the lilies out of a Venetian vase and held it
out, like an usher's rod, towards Gwenna as she followed her into the
bright, bewildering room, full of people. She announced, "Maudie, here's
the stop-gap. Taffy Williams, your hostess."
Her hostess was a version of Leslie grown incredibly matronly. Her
auricula-coloured velvet tea-gown looked as if it had been clutched
about her at the last moment. (Which in point of fact it had. Mrs. Smith
was quite an old-fashioned mother.) Yet from her eyes smiled the
indestructible Girl that is embedded in so many a respectable matron,
and she looked down very kindly at Gwenna, the cherub-headed, in her
white frock.
Mr. Smith, who had a large smooth face and a bald head, gave Gwenna a
less cordial glance. Had the truth been known, he was sulking over the
non-appearance of the intelligent young woman (from the Poets' Club)
whose place was taken by this vacuous-looking flapper (his summing-up
of Miss Gwenna Williams). For Gwenna this bald and wedded patriarch of
forty-five scarcely existed. She glanced, nervous and fluttered and
interested, towards the group of other guests gathered about the nearer
of the two flower-filled fireplaces; a pretty woman in rose-colour and
two men of thirty or thereabouts, one of whom (rather stout, with an
eye-glass, a black stock-tie, and a lock of brown hair brought down
beside his ear like a tiny side-whisker) made straight for Leslie Long.
"Now _don't_ attempt to pretend we haven't met," Gwenna heard him say in
a voice of flirtatious yearning. "Last time you cut my dance----"
Here the maid announced, from the door, some name.... Gwenna, standing
shyly, as if on the brink of the party, heard the hostess saying: "We
hardly hoped you'd come ... we know you people always are besieged by
invitations----"
"Dear me! All these people seem dreat-fully grand," thought the Welsh
girl hastily to herself. "I wonder if it wouldn't have been better, now,
if Leslie had left that cerise velvet trimming as it was on my dress?"
Instinctively she glanced about for the nearest mirror. There was a big
oval gilt-framed one over the yellow brocaded Empire couch near which
Gwenna stood. Her rather bewildered brown eyes strayed from the stranger
faces about her to the reflection of the face and figure that she best
knew. In the oval of gilded leaves she beheld herself framed. She looked
small and very young with her cherub's curls and her soft babyish
white gown and that heaven-coloured sash. But she looked pretty. She
hoped she did....
Then suddenly in that mirror she caught sight of another face, a face
she saw for the first time.
She beheld, looking over her white-mirrored shoulder, the reflection of
a young man. Clear-featured, sunburnt but blonde, he carried his fair
head tilted a little backward, and his eyes--strange eyes!--were looking
straight into hers. They were clear and blue and space-daring eyes, with
something about them that Gwenna, not recognising, would have summed up
vaguely as "like a sailor's." ... They were eyes that seemed to have
borrowed light and colour from long scanning of far horizons. And now
all that keenness of theirs was turned, like a searchlight, to gaze into
the wondering, receptive glance of a girl....
Who was this?
Before Gwenna turned to face this stranger who had followed their
hostess up to her, his gaze seemed to hold hers, as a hand might have
held her own, for longer than a minute....
Afterwards she told herself that it seemed, not a minute, but an age
before that first look was loosed, before she had turned round to her
hostess's, "I want to introduce Mr.----"
(Something or other. She did not catch the name.)
"_He's_ nice!" was the young girl's pristine and uncoloured first
impression.
Then she thought, "Oh, if it's this one who's going to take me in to
dinner, I _am_ glad!"
It was he who was to take her in.
For Mr. Smith took the pretty lady whose name, as far as Gwenna was
concerned, remained "Mrs. Rose-colour." Her husband, a neutral-tinted
being, went in with Mrs. Smith. The man with the side-whisker (who, if
he'd been thinner, certainly might have looked rather like the portrait
of Chopin) laughed and chattered to Leslie as they went downstairs
together. Gwenna, falling to the lot of the blue-eyed young man as a
dinner-partner, altered her mind about her "gladness" almost before she
came to her third spoonful of clear soup.
For it seemed as if this young man whose name she hadn't caught were not
really "nice" after all! That is, of course, he wasn't "_not_ nice." But
he seemed stupid! Nothing in him! Nothing to say! Or else very
absent-minded, which is just as bad as far as the other people at a
party are concerned. Or worse, because it's rude.
Gwenna, taking in every detail of the pretty round table and the lights
under the enormous parasol of a pink shade, approving the banked
flowers, the silver, the glass, those delicious-looking chocolates in
the filigree dishes, the tiny "Steinlen-kitten" menu-holders, Gwenna,
dazed yet stimulated by the soft glitter in her eyes, the subdued buzz
of talk in her ears, stole a glance at Leslie (who was looking her best
and probably behaving her worst) and felt that every prospect was
pleasing--except that of spending all this time beside that silent,
stodgy young man.
"Perhaps he thinks it's me that's too silly to talk to. I knew Leslie'd
made me look too young with this sash! Yes! _indeed_ I look like some
advertisement for Baby's Outfitting Department," thought Gwenna, vexed.
"Or is it because he's the kind of young man that just sits and eats and
never really sees or thinks about anything at all?"
Now, had she known it at the time, the thoughts of the blonde and
blue-eyed youth beside her were, with certain modifications, something
on these lines.
"Dash that stud! Dash the thing. This pin's going into the back of my
neck directly. I know it is. That beastly stud must have gone through a
crack in the boards.... I shall buy a bushel of 'em to-morrow. Why a
man's such a fool as to depend upon one stud.... I know this pin's going
into the back of my neck when I'm not thinking about it. I shall squawk
blue murder and terrify 'em into fits.... What have we here?" (with a
glance from those waking eyes at the menu). "Good. Smiths always do
themselves thundering well.... Now, who are all these frocks? The Pink
'Un. That's a Mrs.... Damsel in the bright yellow lampshade affair
about six foot high, that old Hugo's giving the glad eye to. Old
Hugo weighs about a stone and a half too much. Does _him_self
a lot _too_ well. Revolting sight. I wonder if I can work the
blood-is-thicker-than-water touch on him for a fiver afterwards?...
This little girl I've got to talk to, this little thing with the neck
and the curly hair. Pretty. _Very_ pretty. Knocks the shine out of the
others. I know if I turn my head to speak to her, though, that dashed
pin will cut adrift and run into the back of my neck. _Dash_ that stud.
Here goes, though----"
And, stiffly and cautiously moving his head in a piece with his
shoulders, he turned, remarking at last to Gwenna in a voice that,
though deep-toned and boyish, was almost womanishly gentle, "You don't
live in town, I suppose?"
The girl from that remote Welsh valley straightened her back a little.
"Yes, I do live in town, indeed!" she returned a trifle defensively.
"What made you think I lived in the country?"
"Came up yesterday, I s'pose," the young man told himself as the
soup-plates were whisked away.
Gwenna suspected a twinkle in those unusual blue eyes as he said next,
"_Haven't_ you lived in Wales, though?"
"Well, yes, I have," admitted Gwenna Williams in her soft, quaint
accent, "but how did you know?"
"Oh, I guessed. I've stayed there myself, fishing, one time and
another," her neighbour told her. "Used to go down to a farmhouse there,
sort of place that's all slate slabs, and china dogs, and light-cakes
for tea; ages ago, with my cousin. _That_ cousin," and he gave a little
jerk of his fair head towards the black-stocked, Trelawney-whiskered
young man who was engrossed with Miss Long. "We used to--Ah! _Dash!_"
he broke off suddenly and violently. "It's gone down my back now."
Gwenna, startled, gazed upon this stranger who was so good to look at
and so extremely odd to listen to. Gone down his back? She simply could
not help asking, "What has?"
"That pin," he answered ruefully.
Then he tilted back his fair head and smiled, with deep dimples creasing
his sunburnt cheeks and a flash of even white showing between his
care-free, strongly-modelled lips. And hereupon Gwenna realised that
after all she'd been right. He _was_ "nice." He began to laugh outright,
adding, "You must think me an absolute lunatic: I'd better tell you what
it's all about----"
He took a mouthful of sole and told her, "Fact is, I lost my collar-stud
when I was dressing, the stud for the back of my collar; and I had to
fasten my collar down at the last minute with a pin. It's been getting
on my nerves. Has, really. I've been waiting for it to run into the back
of my neck----"
"So that was why he seemed so absent-minded!" thought Gwenna, feeling
quite disproportionately glad and amused over this trifle. She said, "I
_thought_ you turned as if you'd got a stiff neck! I thought you'd been
sitting in a draught."
He made another puzzling remark.
"Draught, by Jove!" he laughed. "It's always fairly _draughty_ where I
have to sit!"
He went on again to mourn over his collar. "Worse than before, now," he
said. "It's going to hitch up to the back of my head, and I shall have
to keep wiggling my shoulder-blades about as if I'd got St. Vitus's
dance!"
Gwenna felt she would have liked to have taken a tiny safety-pin that
there was hidden away under her sky-blue sash, and to have given it to
him to fasten that collar securely and without danger of pricking.
Leslie, she knew, would have done that. She, Gwenna, would have been too
shy, with a perfect stranger--only, now that he'd broken the ice with
that collar-stud, so to speak, she couldn't feel as if this keen-eyed,
deep-voiced young man were any longer quite a stranger. In her own
dialect, he seemed, now, "so homely, like----"
And over the next course he was talking to her about home, about the
places where he'd fished in Wales.
"There was one topping little trout-stream," he told her in that deep
and gentle voice. "Bubbly as soda-water, green and clear as
bottle-glass. Awfully jolly pools under the shade of the branches. You
look right down and it's all speckly at the bottom, with brown-and-grey
stones and slates and things, under the green water. It's like----"
He was looking straight at her, and suddenly he stopped. He had caught
her eyes, full; as he had caught them before dinner in that mirror. Now
that he was so close to them he saw that they were clear and
browny-green, with speckles of slate-colour. They were not unlike those
pools themselves, by Jove.... Almost as if he had been fishing for
something out of those depths he still looked down, hard into them....
He forgot that he had stopped talking. And then under his own eyes he
saw the little thing begin to colour up; blushing from that sturdy white
throat of hers to the brow where those thick brown cherub's-curls began
to grow. He looked away, hastily. Hastily he said, "It--er--it had a