The Boy with Wings
pretty name, that stream. Quite a pronounceable Welsh name, for once:
The Dulas."
"Oh, dear me! Do _you_ know the Dulas?" cried Gwenna Williams in
delight, forgetting that she had just been feeling acutely conscious and
shy under the fixed stare of a pair of searching blue eyes. "Why! It's
not very far from there that's my home!"
They went on talking--about places. Unconsciously they were leading the
whole table after them; the jerkiness went out of sentences; the pitch
of the talk rose. It was all a buzz to Gwenna; but when, at the joint,
her neighbour turned at last to answer a comment of the rose-coloured
lady on his other hand, she amused herself by seeking to find out what
all the others were talking about.
"I like some of his things very much. Now, his water-colours at the----"
This was Mr. Smith, holding forth about pictures.... There appeared to
be a good deal of it. Ending up with, "And I know for a fact that he
only got two hundred guineas for that; two hundred! Incredible!"
It certainly did seem to Gwenna an incredible amount of money for a
picture, a thing you just hang on a wall and forgot all about. Two
hundred guineas! What couldn't she, Gwenna, do with that! Travel all
over the place for a year! Go flying every week, at Hendon!
"What an experience! What a change it's made in the whole of English
thought!" the pretty, rose-coloured lady was saying earnestly. "We can
never be the same again now. It's set us, as a nation, such an entirely
new and higher standard----"
This was very solemn, Gwenna thought. What was it about?
"I can't imagine, now, how we can have existed for so long without that
point of view," went on Mrs. Rose-colour. "As I say, the first time I
ever saw the Russian Ballet----"
The Russian Ballet--Ah! Gwenna had been with Leslie to see that; she had
thought herself in a fairyland of dazzling colour, and of movement as
wonderful as that of the flying biplanes. It had been a magic world of
enchanted creatures that seemed half-bird, half-flower, who whirled and
leaped, light as blown flame, to strangest music.... Gwenna had been
dazed with delight; but she could not have talked about it as these
people talked. "Mr. Rose-colour," Mr. Smith, and Leslie's whiskered
young man were all joining in together now.
"You won't deny that a trace of the Morbid----"
"But that hint of savagery is really the attraction," Mr. Smith
explained rather pompously. "We over-civilised peoples, who know no
savagery in modern life, who have done with that aspect of evolution, I
suppose we welcome something so----"
"Elemental----"
"Primitive----"
"Brutal?" suggested Mrs. Rose-colour, appreciatively.
"And that infinitude of gesture----" murmured the whiskered man, eating
asparagus.
"Yes, but Isadora----"
"Ah, but Karsavina!"
"You must admit that Nijinski is ultra-romantic----"
"_Define_ Romance!"
"Geltzer----"
"Scheherazade----"
Utterly bewildered by the strange words of the language spoken by half
London in early summer, Nineteen-fourteen, the young girl from the wilds
sought a glimpse of her friend's black-swathed head and vivid, impish
face above the banked flowers of the table-centre. Did Leslie know all
these words? Was she talking? She was laughing flippantly enough;
speaking as nonchalantly.
"Yes, I'm going to the next Chelsea Arts Ball in that all-mauve rig he
wears in the 'Spectre de la Rose.' I am. Watch the effect. 'Oh, Hades,
the Ladies! They'll leave their wooden huts!' _You_ needn't laugh, Mr.
Swayne"--this to the Chopin young man. "_Any_body would be taken in. I
can look quite as much of a man as Nijinski does. In fact, far----"
Here suddenly Gwenna's neighbour leaned forward over the table towards
his hostess and broke in, his deep, gentle voice carrying above the
buzz.
"Mrs. Smith! I say! I beg your pardon," he exclaimed quickly, "but isn't
that a baby crying like anything somewhere?"
This remark of the young man's, and that which followed it, surprised
and puzzled Gwenna even more than his curious remark about draughts. Who
was he? What sort of a young man was this who always sat in draughts and
who could catch the sound of a baby's cry when even its own mother
hadn't heard it through the thick _portiere_, the doors, the walls and
that high-pitched buzz of conversation round about the table?
For Mrs. Smith had fled from the table with a murmured word of apology,
and had presently returned just as the ornate fruit-and-jelly mould was
being handed round, and Gwenna heard her saying to Mrs. Rose-colour,
"Yes, it was. He's off again now. He simply won't go down for Nurse--I
always have to rush----"
Gwenna turned to her companion, whose collar was now well up over the
back of his neck. Wondering, she said to him, "_Fancy_ your hearing
that, through all this other noise!"
"Ah, one gets pretty quick at listening to, and placing, noises," he
told her, helping himself to the jelly and shrugging his shoulders and
that collar at the same time. "It's being accustomed to notice any
squeak that oughtn't to be there, you know, in the engines. One gets to
hear the tiniest sound, through anything."
Gwenna, more puzzled than before, turned from that delectable pudding on
her plate, to this strangely interesting young man beside her. She said:
"Are you an engineer?"
"I used to be," he said. "A mechanic, you know, in the shops, before I
got to be a pilot."
"A pilot?" She wondered if he thought it rude of her, if it bothered him
to be asked questions about himself like this, by just a girl? And still
she couldn't help asking yet another question.
She said, "Are you a sailor, then?"
"Me?" he said, as if surprised. "Oh, no----"
And then, quite simply and as if it were nothing, he made what was to
Gwenna an epic announcement.
"I'm an airman," he said.
She gasped.
He went on. "Belong to a firm that sends me flying. Taking up passengers
at Hendon, that sort of thing."
"An airman? _Are_ you?" was all that Gwenna could for the moment reply.
"Oh ... _Oh!_"
Perhaps her eyes, widening upon the face above her, were more eloquent
of what she felt.
That it was to her a miracle to find herself actually sitting next to
him! Actually speaking to one of these scarcely credible beings whom she
had watched this afternoon! _An airman_.... There was something about
the very word that seemed mysterious, uncanny. Was it because of its
comparative newness in the speech of man? Perhaps, ages ago, primitive
maids found something as arresting in the term "_A seaman_"? But this
was an airman! It was his part to ride the Winged Victory, the aeroplane
that dared those sapphire heights above the flying-ground. Oh! And she
had been chattering to him about the slate-margined brooks and the ferny
glens of her low-lying valley, just as if he'd been what this ingenuous
maid called to herself "_Any_ young man" who had spent holidays fishing
in Wales? She hadn't known. _That_ was why he had those queer, keen
eyes: blue and reckless, yet measuring.
Not a sailor's, not a soldier's ... but the eyes of Icarus!...
"I--I never heard your name," said Gwenna, a little breathless, timid.
"Which is it, please?"
For reply he dabbed a big, boyish finger down on the slender name-card
among the crumbs of his bread. "Here you are," he said, "Dampier; Paul
Dampier."
So whirling and bewildered was Gwenna's mind by this time that she
scarcely wondered over the added surprise. This, she just realised, was
the name she had first heard bellowed aloud through the megaphone from
the judges' stand. She hardly remembered then that a photograph of this
same aviator was tossed in among her wash-leather gloves, velvet
hair-bands, and her handkerchief-sachet in the top right-hand drawer of
her dressing-table at the Club. Certainly she did not remember at this
minute what she had said, laughing, over that portrait, to her two
friends on the flying-ground.
There, she had admired the machine; that un-Antaeus-like thing that was
not itself until it had shaken off the fetters of Earth from its skids
and wheels. Here, she marvelled over the man; _for he was part of it_.
He was its skill and its will. He was the planner of those curves and
bankings and soarings, those vol-planes that had left, as it were,
their lovely lines visible in the air. His Icarian mind had
determined--his large but supple body had executed them.
A girl could understand that, without understanding how it was all done.
Those big, boyish hands of his, of course, would grasp certain
mechanisms; his feet, too, would be busy; his knees--every inch of his
lithe length and breadth--every muscle of him; yes! even to the tiny
muscles that moved his wonderful eyes.
"I saw you, then," she told him, in a dazed little voice. "I was at
Hendon this afternoon! It was the first time in my life...."
"Really?" he said. "What did you think of it all?"
"Oh, splendid!" she said, ardently, though vaguely.
How she longed to be able to talk quickly and easily to anybody, as
Leslie could! How stupid he--the Airman--must think her! A little
shakily she forced herself to go on: "I did think it so wonderful, but I
can't explain, like. Ever. I _never_ can. But----"
Perhaps, again, she was explaining better than she knew, with that
small, eager face raised to his.
"Oh!" she begged. "Do _tell_ me about it!"
He laughed. "Tell you what? Isn't much to tell."
"Oh, yes, there must be! You tell me," she urged softly, unconscious
that her very tone was pure and concentrated flattery. "Do!"
And with another short, deprecating laugh, another shrug to his collar,
the boy began to "tell" her things, though the girl did not pretend to
understand. She listened to that voice, strong and deep, but womanishly
gentle. She forgot that by rights she ought to pay some attention to her
neighbour, the imitation Chopin. She listened to this other.
Words like "_controls_," "_pockets_," "_yawing_," went in at one of the
ears under her brown curls and out at the other, leaving nothing but a
quivering atmosphere of "the wonderfulness" of it all. Presently she saw
those hands of his, big, sensitive, clever, arranging forks and spoons
upon the sheeny tablecloth before her.
"Imagine that's your machine," he said. "Now you see there are three
possible movements. _This_"--he tilted a dessert-knife from side to
side--"_and this_"--he dipped it--"_and this_, which is yawing--you
understand?"
"No!" she confessed, with the quickest little gesture. "I couldn't
understand those sort of things. I shouldn't want to. What I really want
to know is--well, about _it_, like!"
"About what?"
"About _flying_!"
He laughed outright again. "But, that _is_ flying!"
She shook her head. "No, not what I mean. That's all--machinery!" She
pronounced the word "machinery" with something almost like disdain. He
looked at her as if puzzled.
"Sorry you aren't interested in machinery," he said quite reprovingly,
"because, you know, that's just what I _am_ interested in. I'm up to my
eyes in it just now, pretty well every minute that I can spare. In fact
I've got a machine--only the drawings for it, of course, but----"
"Do you mean you've _invented_ one?"
"Oh, I don't know about 'invent.' Call it an improvement. It should be
about as different from the lumbering concern you saw me go up in to-day
as that's different from--say from one of those old Cambrian Railway
steam engines," he declared exultantly. "It's----"
Here, he plunged into another vortex of mysterious jargon about
"automatic stability," about "skin friction," and a hundred other
matters that left the listening girl as giddy as a flight itself might
have done.
What she did understand from all this was that here, after all, in the