The Boy with Wings
At last six o'clock found her, released from the day's work and back at
her Club.
But still, still there was no envelope addressed to Miss Gwenna Williams
stuck up in the criss-cross tapes of the green-baize-covered
letter-board in the hall.
She went upstairs rather slowly to take off her hat. On the landing the
voice of Leslie Long called to her from the bathroom.
"Come in here, Taffy. I'm washing blouses. I want to tell you some
news."
Gwenna entered the steamy bathroom, to find her chum's tall figure bent
in two over the bath and up to its bare elbows in suds of Lux.
"I say, child, you know your locket that you lost at my sister's?"
announced Leslie. "It's all right. It's been found."
"Has it?" said Gwenna, not very enthusiastically. "Did I leave it in
Mrs. Smith's room?"
"You didn't. You left it in Hugo Swayne's car," said Leslie, wringing
out the wet handful of transparent net that would presently serve her as
a garment. "That young man came up about half an hour ago to tell you."
"Mr. Swayne did? How kind of him."
"Yes, wasn't it? But not of Mr. Swayne," said Leslie, wringing. "It
was--just let out the water and turn me on some fresh hot, will you?--It
was the other one that came: the aviator boy."
"What?" cried Gwenna sharply. "Mr. Dampier?"
"Yes. Your bird-man. He came up here--in full plumage and song! Nice
grey suit--rather old; brown boots awfully well cleaned--by himself;
blue tie, very expensive Burlington Arcade one--lifted from his cousin
Hugo, I bet," enlarged Leslie, spreading the blouse out over the white
china edge of the bath. "I met him at the gate just as I got back from
my old lady's. He asked for my friend--meaning you. Hadn't grasped your
name. He came in for ten minutes. But he couldn't wait, Taffy, so----"
Here, straightening herself, Leslie suddenly stopped. She stopped at the
sight of the small, blankly dismayed face with which her chum had been
listening to this chatter.
And Gwenna, standing aghast against the frosted glass panes of the
bathroom door, pronounced, in her softest, most agitated Welsh accent,
an everyday Maid's Tragedy in just six words:
"_He came! When I was out!_"
"He was awfully sorry----"
But Gwenna, seeming not to hear her friend, broke out: "He _said_ he'd
come and settle about taking me flying, and there was I _think_-ing he'd
forgotten all about it, and then he did come after all, and I wasn't
here! Oh, _Leslie_!----"
Leslie, sitting on the edge of the bath, gave her a glance that was
serious and whimsical, rueful and tender, all at once.
"Yes, you can't understand," mourned Gwenna, "but I _did_ so want to go
up in an aeroplane for once in my life! I'd set my heart on it, Leslie,
ever since he said about it. It's only now I see how badly I wanted it,"
explained the younger girl, flushed with emotion, and relapsing into her
Welshiest accent, as do all the Welsh in their moments of stress. "And
_now_ I shan't get another chance. I know I shan't----"
And such was the impetus of her grief that Leslie could hardly get her
to listen to the rest of the news that should be balm for this wound of
disappointment; namely, that Mr. Dampier was going to make an
appointment with both girls to come and have tea with him at his rooms,
either on Saturday or Sunday.
"He'll write to you," concluded Leslie Long, "and let you know which. I
said we'd go either day, Taffy."
Gwenna, caught up into delight again from the lowest depths of
disappointment, could hardly trust herself to speak. Surely Leslie must
think her a most _awful_ baby, nearly crying because she'd had an outing
postponed! So the young girl (laughing a little shakily) put up quite
a plucky fight to treat it all as quite a trifle....
Even the next morning at breakfast she took it quite casually that there
was a note upon her plate stamped with the address of the Aero Club. She
even waited a moment before she opened it and read in a handwriting as
small as if it had been traced by a crow-quill:
"Monday night.
"DEAR MISS WILLIAMS,
"Will you and Miss Long come to tea with me at my place about 4.30
on Sunday? I find I shall not have to go to Hendon on that day.
I'll come and call for you if I may.
"Yours sincerely,
"P. DAMPIER."
"At last!" thought Gwenna to herself, rather breathlessly, as she put
the note back into the envelope. "Now he'll settle about when I'm to go
flying with him. Oh! I do, _do_ hope there's nothing going to get in the
way of that!"
CHAPTER VII
A BACHELOR'S TEA-PARTY
The first of a series of "things that got in the way" of Gwenna's making
an appointment to go flying occurred on that Sunday afternoon, when
Leslie and she were to have tea at Paul Dampier's place.
"A mixture of chaos and comfy chairs, I expect; ash everywhere, and
_beastly_ cakes. (I know these bachelor tea-parties.) That," Leslie
said, "is what his 'place' will be like."
Gwenna, as usual, hadn't wasted any thoughts over this. She had been too
full of what their host himself would say and do--about the flying. She
was all ready, in the white dress, the white hat with the wings, half an
hour after Sunday mid-day dinner at the Ladies' Club. But it was very
nearly half-past four by the time Mr. Dampier did come, as he had
promised, to fetch the two girls.
He came in the car that had driven them back on the night of the
dinner-party.
And he was hurried, and apologetic for his lateness. He even seemed a
little shy. This had the effect of making Gwenna feel quite
self-possessed as she took the seat beside him ("I hate sitting by the
driver, really. Makes me _so_ nervous!" Leslie had declared) and
inquired whether he borrowed his cousin's car any time he had visitors.
"Well, but Hugo's _got_ everything," he told her, with a twinkle, "so I
always borrow anything of his that I can collar!"
"Studs, too?" asked Gwenna, quickly.
"Oh, come! I didn't think it of you. _What_ a pun!" he retorted.
She coloured a little, shy again, hurt. But he turned his head to look
at her, confided to her: "It was _on_ the chest-of-drawers, all the
time!"
And, as the car whizzed westwards, they laughed together. That
dinner-table incident of the collar--or collared--stud brought, for the
second time, a sudden homely glow of friendly feeling between this boy
and girl.
She thought, "He's just as easy to get on with as if he were another
girl, like Leslie----"
For always, at the beginning of things, the very young woman compares
her first man-friend with the dearest girl-chum she has known.
--"Or as if he were just nobody, instead of being so wonder-ful, and an
airman, good gracious!"
Appropriately enough for an airman, his place seemed to be nearly on the
house-tops of a block of buildings near Victoria Street.
The lift carried them up past six landings and many boards inscribed
with names of firms. It stopped at the seventh story, almost directly
opposite a cream-coloured door with a small, old-fashioned brass
knocker, polished like gold.
Paul Dampier tapped sharply at it.
The door was opened by a thick-set man in an excellent suit of clothes
and with the face of a wooden sphinx.
"Tea as soon as you can, Johnson," said the young Airman over his
shoulder, as the trio passed in.
The long sitting-room occupied half the flat and its windows took up the
whole of one side. It was to these open windows that Gwenna turned.
"Oh, what a view!" she cried, looking out, enraptured at the height and
airiness, looking past the leads, with their wooden tubs of standard
laurel-bushes, among which pigeons were strutting and bridling and
pecking crumbs. She looked down, down, at the bird's-eye view of London,
spread far below her in a map of grey roofs and green tree-tops under a
soft mist of smoke that seemed of the clouds themselves.
"Oh, can't you see for miles!" exclaimed Gwenna. "There's St. Paul's,
looks like a big grey soap-bubble, coming up out of the mist! Oh, you
can see between a crack in the houses, our place at Westminster! It's
like a cottage from here! Oh, and that iron lacey thing on the roof!
Even this must be something like being up in an aeroplane, I should
think! Look, Leslie!"
Miss Long seemed more engrossed in looking round Mr. Dampier's bachelor
sitting-room. It was incredibly luxurious compared to what she'd
expected. The polished floor was black and shiny as the wood of the
piano at the further end, the Persian rugs softly brilliant. In the
middle of the Adams mantelpiece simpered an exquisite Chelsea
shepherdess; to the left and right of her there stood squat toys in
ivory, old slender-stalked champagne-glasses holding sweet-peas. And
upon the leaf-brown walls were decorations that seemed complacently to
draw attention to the catholic taste of their owner. A rare
eighteenth-century print of Tom Jones upon his knees, asking
"forgiveness" of his Sophia, hung just above a Futurist's grimace in
paint; and there was a frieze of ultra-modern French fashion-designs,
framed in _passe-partout_, from the "_Bon Ton_."
"What a--what a surprising number of pictures you have, Mr. Dampier,"
said Leslie, mildly. "Hasn't he, Taffy?"
Gwenna, turning at last from the window, realised dimly that this
sophisticated room did seem somehow out of keeping as an eyrie for this
eagle. The view outside, yes! But these armchairs? And she wouldn't have
thought that he would have bothered to have things _pretty_, like
this----
"And what a lot of books you've got," she said. For the wall opposite to
the windows was taken up by bookshelves, set under a trophy of swords of
out-of-date patterns, and arranged with some thought.
The top shelves held volumes of verse, and of plays, from Beaumont and
Fletcher to Galsworthy. The Russian novelists were ranged together; also
the French. There was a corner for Sudermann and Schnitzler. A shelf
further down came all the English moderns, and below that all the
_Yellow Books_, a long blue line of all the _English Reviews_, from the
beginning; a stack of _The New Age_, and a lurid pink-covered copy of
_Blast_.
But before Gwenna could wonder further over these possessions of this
young man, more incongruous possessions were brought in by the
Sphinx-faced man-servant; a tea-table of beaten copper, a
peasant-embroidered cloth, a tea-service of old Coalport; with a silver
spirit-kettle, with an iced cake, with toast, and wafer,
bread-and-butter and cress-sandwiches and Parisian _petits-fours_ that
all seemed, as the young girl put it simply to herself, "So unlike
_him_!"
Her chum had already guessed the meaning of it all.
The Dampier boy's rooms? _His_ library and ornaments? Ah, no. He'd never
read one of all those books there. Not he! And these were not the type
of "things" he'd buy, even if he'd had the money to throw away, thought
Leslie. It was no surprise to that young woman when the legitimate owner
of this lavishly appointed _garconniere_ made his sudden appearance in
the middle of tea.
The click of a latchkey outside. Two masculine voices in the hall. Then
the door was thrown open.
There walked in a foreign-looking young man, with bright dark eyes and a
small moustache, followed by Mr. Hugo Swayne, attired in a Victorian
mode that, as Leslie put it afterwards, "cried '_Horse, horse!_' where
there was no horse." His tall bowler was dove-grey; his black stock
allowed a quarter-inch of white collar to appear; below his striking
waistcoat dangled a bunch of seals and a fob. This costume Leslie
recognised as a revival of the Beggarstaff Touch. Gwenna wondered why