The Boy with Wings Part 46

"I've always, always wanted to be with you in the real country, and I never have," she told him, as together they ran down the slate steps of Uncle Hugh's porch after breakfast and turned up a path between the sunny larch-grown steeps. That path would be a torrent in the winter time. Now the slate pebbles of it were hot under the sun. "I don't really count that _country_, that field, that day----"

"Didn't seem to mind it when we were there," he teased her as he walked beside her swinging the luncheon basket that Margaret had put up for them. "I mean of course when _I_ was there."

Gwenna affected to gasp over the conceit of men. "If I've _got_ to be with one," she told him as if wearily, "I'd rather it was in a nice place for me to listen to his nonsense."

"Wasn't any 'nonsense,' as you call it, in that field."

"No," agreed Gwenna, "there wasn't."

He looked sideways and down at her as she climbed that hill-path, hatless, sure-footed and supple. Then a narrow turn in the path made her walk a little ahead of him. She was wearing a very simple little sheath of a grey cotton or muslin or something frock, with a white turn-down collar that he hadn't seen her in before, he thought. Suited her awfully well. (Being a man, he could not be expected to recognise it for the grey linen that she'd had on when he'd come upon her that afternoon, high up on the scaffolding at Westminster.)

"Yes, though, there was 'nonsense,'" he said, now suddenly answering her last speech. "Fact of the matter is, it was dashed nonsense to waste such a lot of time."

"Time, how?" asked Gwenna guilelessly, without turning her head.

"Oh! As if you didn't know!" he retorted. "Wasting time talking about the Machine, to you. Catching hold of your hand, to show you what the camber was--and then letting it go! Instead of owning up at once, '_Yes.

All right. You've got me. Pax!_' And starting to do this----"

He was close up behind her now on the mountain-path, and because of the steep ground on which they stood, her head was on a higher level than his own. He drew it downwards and backwards, that brown, sun-warmed head, to his tweed-clad shoulder.

"You'll break my neck. I know you will, one day. You are so _rough_,"

complained Gwenna; twisting round, however, and taking a step down to him.

"I love you to be," she whispered. She kissed his coat-lapel. All the red of that rose bloomed now on her mouth.... They walked on, with his arm a close, close girdle about her. The luncheon basket was forgotten on the turfy slope on which he'd dropped it. So they lunched, late, in the farm-house four hundred feet above the Quarry village. It was a lonely place enough, a hillside outpost, fenced by stunted damson trees; a short slate-flagged end of path led to the open door where a great red baking crock stood, full of water. Inside, the kitchen was a dark, cool cave, with ancient, smooth-worn oaken furniture that squeaked on the slate-slabbed floor, with a dresser rich with willow-pattern and l.u.s.tre, and an open fire-place, through which, looking up, they could see through the wood smoke a glimpse of the blue sky.

And in this sort of place people still lived and worked as if it were Seventeen Hundred and Something--and scarcely a day's journey away was the Aircraft Factory where people lived for the work that will remake the modern world; oh, most romantic of all ages, that can set such sharp contrasts side by side!

An old Welshwoman, left there by her sheep-farming sons at home in the chimney corner, set b.u.t.ter-milk before the lovers, and ambrosial home-churned b.u.t.ter, and a farm-house loaf that tasted of nuts and peatsmoke. They ate with astonishing appet.i.tes; Gwenna sitting in the window-seat under the sill crowded with flower-pots and a family Bible.

Paul, man-like, stood as near as he could to the comfort of the fire even on that warm day. The old woman, who wore clumping clogs on her feet and a black mutch-cap on her head, beamed upon the pair with smiles as toothless and as irresistible as those of an infant.

"You must have a plenty, whatever," she urged them, bringing out another loaf, of _bara breeth_ (or currant bread). "Come on, Sir! Come, Miss Williams, now. Mam, I mean. Yess, yess. You married lady now. Your husband," with a skinny hand on his grey sleeve, "your husband is _not_ a minnyster?"

"He's a soldier, Mrs. Jones," explained Gwenna, proudly, and with a strengthening of her own accent, such as occurs in any of her race when revisiting their wilds. "He's an Airman."

"Ur?" queried Mrs. Jones, beaming.

"He goes flying. You know. On a machine. Up in the sky."

"Well, _oh_!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the old woman. And laughed shrilly. To her this was some eccentric form of English joke. Flying? Like the birds! _Dear_, dear. "What else does he do, _cariad fach_?" she asked of Gwenna.

"He's been over in France, fighting the Germans," said the girl, while the old woman on her settle by the fire nodded her mutched head with the intense, delighted expression of some small child listening to a fairy story. It was indeed no more, to her. She said, "Well, indeed. He took a very _kind_ one, too." Then she added, "I not much English.

Pitty, pitty!" and said something in Welsh at which Gwenna coloured richly and laughed a little and shook her head.

"What's she say?" demanded Paul, munching; but his girl-wife said it was nothing--and turned her tip-tilted profile, dark against the diamond window panes, to admire one of the geranium plants in the pots.

Afterwards, when the couple were outside again in the fresh sunlight on the mountain lands, young Dampier persisted with his questioning about what that old woman had said. He betted that he could guess what it was all about. And he guessed.

Gwenna admitted that he had guessed right.

"She said," she told him shyly, "that it ought to be 'a very pretty one, whatever.'"

"I've got a very pretty present for it," Paul whispered presently.

"What?"

"Don't you remember a locket I once took? A little mother-of-pearl heart," he said. "That's what I shall keep it for----"

And there fell a little silence between them as they walked on, swinging hands above the turf, gravely contented.

They had _had_ to spend the day together thus. It seemed to Gwenna that all her life before had been just a waiting for this day.

Below the upland on which they swung along, grey figures on the green, there lay other wide hill-s.p.a.ces, spread as with turf-green carpets, on which the squares of mellowing, golden-brown autumn woods seemed rugs and skins cast down; below these again stretched the further valley with the marsh, with the silver loops and windings of the river, and the little white moving caterpillar of smoke from the distant train. There was also a blue haze above the slate roofs of a town.

But here, in this sun-washed loneliness far above, here was their world; hers and his.

They walked, sometimes climbing a crest where stag's-horn moss branched and spread through the springy turf beneath their feet, sometimes dipping into a hollow, for two miles and more. They could have walked there for half a day and seen no face except that of a tiny mountain sheep, cropping among the gorse; heard no voice but those of the calling plovers, beating their wings in the free air. Then, pa.s.sing a gap in two hills, they came quite suddenly upon the cottage and the lake.

The sheet of water, silent, deserted, reflected the warm blue of the afternoon sky and the deep green of the overhanging boughs of great ha.s.sock-shaped bushes that covered two islands set upon its breast.

"Rhododendron bushes. When they're in blossom they're all simply _covered_ with flowers, pink and rose-colour, and reflected in the water! It _is_ so lovely," Gwenna told the lover beside her. "Oh, Paul!

You _must_ come here again and see that with me in the spring!"

On the further bank was another jungle of rhododendron and lauristinus, half-hiding the grey stone walls and the latticed windows of the square cottage, a fishing box of a place that had evidently been built for some one who loved solitude.

Paul Dampier peered in through one of the cobwebby lattices. Just inside on the sill there stood, left there long since, a man's shaving-tackle.

Blue mildew coated the piece of soap that lay in the dish. Further in he caught a glimpse of dusty furniture, of rugs thrown down on a wooden floor, of a man's old coat on a peg. A wall was decorated with sets of horns, with a couple of framed photographs, with old fishing-rods.

"Make a jolly decent billet, for some one, this," said Paul.

Gwenna said, "It belongs to some people.... They're away, I think. It's all locked up now. So's the boat for the lake, I expect. They used to keep a boat up here for fishing."

The long flat boat they found moored to one of the stout-trunked rhododendron bushes that dipped its pointed leaves in the peat-brown water fringed with rushes.

Paul stepped in, examining her, picking up the oars. "Nice afternoon for a row, Ma'am?" he said, smiling up at the girl clad in dove-grey on the rushy bank, with the spongy dark-green moss about her shoes.

"Jump in, Gwenna. I'll row you across the lake."

"You can't row that old tub, boy."

"Can't I?"

"I'll race you round, then!"

"Right you are!"

The girl skipped round the clump of rhodos that hid the last flicker of her skirt; and the boy bent to the short, home-made sculls.

The boat was a crank, unhandy little craft; and lacked thole-pins on one side. Therefore Gwenna, swift-footed Little Thing that she was, had as good a chance of winning as he.