The Boy with Wings Part 19

"_Those dreams come true that are dreamed on Midsummer night!_"

This saying Gwenna had read somewhere. But she had forgotten all about it until, on the night of June 24th, 1914, she dreamed the most vivid dream of all her twenty-two years.

Many people have that same dream--or versions of it--often in a lifetime. Scientists have written papers on the whys and hows of it.

They tack a long name to it. But little Gwenna Williams had never heard of "_levitation_." To herself she called it afterwards "_that flying dream_."

It seemed to her that when it began she was still half-awake, lying in her narrow white bed with the blankets tossed on to the floor of her Club bedroom, for it was a sultry night and close, in spite of her window on to the garden being wide open and allowing what breeze there was to blow full upon the girl's face, stirring her curls on the pillow, the ruffle of her night-gown as she lay.

Suddenly a violent start ran over the whole of her body. And with that one jerk she seemed to have come out of herself. She realised, first, that she was no longer lying down, curled up in the kitten-like ball which was her att.i.tude for sleeping. She was upright as if she were standing.

But she was not standing. Her feet were not resting on anything. Looking down, she found, without very much surprise, that she was poised, as a lark is poised, in mid-air, at some immeasurable height. It was night, and the earth--a distant ha.s.sock of dim trees and fields--was far, far below her.

She found herself moving downwards through the air.

_She was flying!_

Gently, gently, she sped, full of a quiet happiness in her new power, which, after all, did not seem to be something new, but something restored to her.

"Dear me, I've flown before, I know I have," said Gwenna to herself as she swooped downwards in her dream, with the breeze cool on the soles of her little bare feet. "This is as lovely as swimming! It's lovelier, because one doesn't have to _do_ anything. So silly to imagine that one has to have _wings_ to fly!"

Now she was nearer to earth, she was hovering over a dark stream of water with reflections that circled and broke. And beside it she saw something that seemed like a huge lambent mushroom set in the dim fields below her. This was a lighted tent, and from it there floated up to her faintly the throb and thrill of dance-music, the two long-drawn-out notes of the "Post Horn" Galop, the noise of laughter and clapping....

She wondered whom she would see, if she were to alight. But the Force in her dream bore her up again, higher, and away. She found presently that she had left the dancing-tent far behind, and that what streamed below her was no longer a river with reflections, but a road, white with dust, and by the side of it a car was standing idle by the dusty hedge.

On the other side of the hedge, as she flew over, the gra.s.s was clean and full of flowers, and half-way up the field stood a brooding elm that cast a patch of shadow.

"Sunshine, now!" wondered Gwenna. "How quickly it's changed from night!"

She felt from head to foot her body light and buoyant as a drifting thistle-down as on she went through the air. Close beside her, against a bank of cloud, she noticed some black V-shaped thing that slanted and flapped slow wings, then planed downwards out of her sight. "That's that crow. A dihedral angle, they call it," said the dreaming girl. Her next downward glance, as she sped upwards now, without effort, above the earth, showed her a map of distant grey roofs and green trees, and something that looked like a giant soap-bubble looming out of the mist.

"St. Paul's! London!" thought Gwenna. "I wonder shall I be able to look down on our Westminster place."

Then, glancing about her, she saw that the scene had suddenly changed.

She was no longer in the free air with clouds about her as she flew like a little white windblown feather with the earth small as a toy puzzle below. She was between walls, with her feet not further than her own height from the ground. Night again in a room. A long, narrowish room with an open window through which came the light of a street-lamp that flung a bright patch upon the carpet, the edge of a dressing-table, the end of a white bed. Upon the bed, from which the coverings had been flung down, there lay sleeping, curled up like a kitten, a figure in a white, ruffled night-gown, with a cherub's head thrown backwards against the pillow. Gwenna, looking down, thought, "Where have I seen _her_?"

In the next flash she had realised.

Herself!... Her own sleeping body that her dreaming soul had left for this brief flight....

A start more violent than that with which her dream had begun shook the dreamer as she came to herself again.

She woke. With a pitiful little "Oh," sounding in her own ears, she sat up in bed and stared about her Club bedroom with its patches of light from the street-lamp outside. She was trembling from head to foot, her curls were wet with fright, and her first thought as she sprang out of bed and to the door of that ghostly room was "I must go to Leslie."

But Leslie's bedroom was a story higher. Gwenna paused in the corridor outside the nearest bedroom to her own. A thread of light showed below the door. It was a Miss Armitage's, and she was one of the Club members, who wrote pamphlets on the Suffrage, and like topics, far into the night. Gwenna, feeling already more normal and cheered by the sense of any human nearness, decided, "I won't go to her. She'll only want to read aloud to me.... She laughed at me because I said I adored 'The Forest Lovers,' but what books does _she_ like? Only those _dreat_-ful long novels all about nothing, except the diseases of people in the Potteries. Or else it'll be one of her own tracts.... Somehow she does make everything she's interested in sound so _ugly_. All those intellectual ones here do! Whether it's Marriage or Not-getting-married, you really don't know which would be the most _dull_, from these suffragettes," reflected the young girl, pattering down the corridor again. "I'll go back to bed."

She went back, snuggling under the clothes. But she could not go to sleep again for some time. She lay curled up, thinking.

She had thought too often and too long of that dance now three whole weeks behind her. She had recalled, too many times! every moment of it; every word and gesture of her partner's, going over and over his look, his laugh, the tone in which he'd said, "Give _me_ this waltz, will you?" All that memory had had the sweetness smelt out of it like a child's posy. By this time it was worn thin as heirloom silver. She turned from it.... It was then she remembered that saying about the Midsummer Night's Dream. If that were true, then Gwenna might expect soon to fly in reality.

For after all her plans and hopes, she had not even yet been taken up by Paul Dampier in an aeroplane!

In that silent, unacknowledged conflict between the Girl and the Machine, so far scarcely a score could have been put down to the credit of the Girl. It was she who had always found herself put back, disappointed, frustrated. This had been by the merest accidents.

First of all, the Airman hadn't been able to ask her and Miss Long to his rooms in Camden Town to look at his model aeroplane. He had been kept hanging on, not knowing which Sat.u.r.day-to-Monday Colonel Conyers ("the great Air-craft Conyers") was going to ask him down to stay at that house in Ascot, to have another talk over the subject of the new Machine. ("A score for the Machine," thought the girl; wakeful, tossing on her bed.)

She did not even know that the week after, on a glorious and cloudless Sat.u.r.day, young Dampier, blankly unaware that there was any conflict going on in his world! had settled to ask "the Little Thing" to Hendon.

On the Friday afternoon, however, his firm had sent him out of town, down to the factory near Aldershot. Here he had stayed until the following Tuesday, putting up at the house of a kindred soul employed at that factory, and wallowing in "Shop." ... Another win for the Machine!

The following Sunday the cup had been almost to Gwenna's lips. He had called for her. Not in the car, this time. They had taken the Tube to Golders Green; the motor-bus to Hendon Church; and then the path over the fields together. Ah, delight! For even walking over the dusty gra.s.s beside that swinging boy's figure in the grey tweed jacket was a joyous adventure. It had been another when he had presently stooped and said, "Shoelace come untied; might trip over that. I'll do it up," and had fastened her broad brown shoe-ribbon securely for her. Her shoes had been powdered white. He had taken his handkerchief out of his pocket and had flicked the dust off, saying, as he did so, in a tone of some interest, "I say, what tiny feet girls do have!"

("Pie for you, Taffy, of course," as Leslie had said later, when she'd heard of this. "Second time he'd noticed them.")

Gwenna, in a tone half pleased, half piqued, had told him, "_All_ girls don't have them so small! And yet you don't seem to notice anything about people but their feet." She had walked on, delightedly conscious of his laugh, his amused, "Oh, don't I?" and his downward glance....

Wasn't this, she had thought, something of a score at last for the Girl!

But hadn't even that small score been wiped out on the flying-ground?

There Gwenna had stood, waiting, gleeful and agitated; her mist-blue scarf aflutter in the brisk breeze, but not fluttering as wildly as her heart....

And then had come frustration once again! Paul Dampier's deep and womanishly-soft tone saying, "I say, I'm afraid it's going to be a bit too blowy, after all. Wind's rising all the time;" and that other giant voice from the megaphone announcing:

"Ladies and gentul Men! As the wind is now blowing forty miles an hour it will be im possible to make pa.s.senger flights!"

Oh, bitter defeat for the Girl! For, this time, there had been no idyllic picnic _a deux_ to console her for any disappointment. There had been nothing but a rather noisy tea in the Pavilion, with a whole chattering party of the young Airman's acquaintances; with another young woman who had meant to fly, but who had seemed resigned enough that it was "not to be, _this_ afternoon," and with half a dozen strange, irrelevant young men; quite _silly_, Gwenna had thought them. Two of them had given Gwenna a lift back to Hampstead in their car afterwards, since Paul Dampier had explained that he "rather wanted to go on with one of the other fellows"--somewhere! Gwenna didn't know where. Only, out of her sight! Out of her world! And she was quite certain, even though he hadn't said so, that he had been bent on some quest that had something to do with the _Fiancee_ of his, the "P.D.Q.," the Machine!

CHAPTER XIV

AN AWAKENING

The sore of that jealousy still smarted in the girl's mind as she turned her pillow restlessly.... She could not sleep until long after the starlings had been twittering and the milk-carts rattling by in the suburban road outside. She awoke, dispirited. She came down late for breakfast; Leslie had already gone off to her old lady in Highgate. Over the disordered breakfast-table Miss Armitage was making plans, with some of the other Suffrage-workers, to "speak" at a meeting of the Fabian Nursery. Those young women talked loudly enough, but they didn't p.r.o.nounce the ends of any of their words; hideously slipshod it all sounded, thought the Welsh girl fretfully. Her world was a desert to her, this fine June morning. For at the Westminster office things seemed as dreary as they had at the Club. She began to see what people meant when they said that on long sea-voyages one of the greatest hardships was never to see a fresh face, but always the same ones, day after day, well-known to weariness, all about one. It was just like that when one was shut up to work day after day in an office with the same people. She was sick to death of all the faces of all the people here. Miss Butcher with her c.o.c.kney accent! Miss Baker with her eternal crochet! The men in the yards with their _awful_ tobacco and trousers! Nearly all men, she thought, were ugly. All old men. And most of the young ones; _round_ backs, _horrid_ hands, _disgusting_ skins--Mr. Grant, for instance!

(with a glance at that well-meaning engineer, when he brought in some note for Mabel Butcher). Those swarthy men never looked as if they had baths and proper shaves. He'd a head like a black hatpin. And his accent, thought the girl from the land where every letter of a word is p.r.o.nounced, his accent was more excruciating than any in Westminster.

"Needn't b'lieve me, if you don't want. But it's true-oo! Vis'ters this aft'noon," he was saying to Miss Butcher. "Young French Dook or Comp or something, he is; taking out a patent for a new crane. Coming in early with some swagger friends of his. Wants to be shown the beauties of the buildin', I s'pose. Better bring him in here and let him have a good look at you girls first thing, hadn't I? S'long! Duty calls. I must away."

And away he went, leaving Miss Butcher smiling fondly after him, while Miss Williams wondered how on earth any girl ever managed to fall in love, considering there was nothing but young men to fall in love with.

All ordinary young men were awful. And all young men _were_ ordinary....

Except, now and again, one ... far away ... out of reach.... Who just showed how different and wonderful a thing a lover might be! If one could only, only ever get near him!--instead of being stuck down here, in this perfectly beastly place----

As the morning wore on, she found herself more and more dissatisfied with all her surroundings. And for a girl of Gwenna's sort to be thoroughly dissatisfied predicts one thing only. She will not long stay where she is.

Impatiently she sighed over her typing-table. Irritably she fidgeted in her chair. This was what jerked the plump arm of Ottilie Becker, who was pa.s.sing behind her, and who now dropped a handful of papers on to the new boards.

"Zere! Now see what you have made me do," said the German girl good-naturedly enough. "My letter! Pick him up, Candlesticks-maker."

"Oh, pick him up yourself," retorted Gwenna school-girlishly, crossly.

"It wasn't my fault."