The Boy with Wings Part 48

Then came the wonder in her mind, "_Why am I not wretched about this?

Why do I feel that it's not going to matter after all, and that it's going to be 'all right'?_"

Still wondering, she fell asleep again.

But in the morning her presentiment was a thing full-grown.

Paul, off to the Front, would never come back again.

Quite early they were at the Aircraft Works where he was to leave his young wife and to fetch his machine, the completed P.D.Q. that was to take him out to France.

He had spoken of her--that machine--in the train coming along. And Gwenna, the dazed and fanciful, had thought sharply: "_Ah! That's her revenge. That's what's going to be the end of this fight between the Girl and the Machine. I won. I got him from her. This is how she takes him back, the fiancee! He will be killed in that machine of his._"

Her headstrong, girlish fancy persisted. It was as real to her as any of the crowd of everyday and concrete realities that they found, presently, at the bustling Aircraft Works.

When Paul (who was to start at midday, flying across to France) changed into his uniform and flying-kit, it seemed to her to set the seal upon her premonition.

He would never wear other kit again now, upon this earth.

The Aeroplane Lady, bracingly cheerful, met them with a sheaf of official doc.u.ments for the young Army aviator.

"I'm going to steal him from you for a quarter of an hour, Mrs.

Dampier," she said with a little nod; and she took the young man into her office.

Gwenna, left alone outside, walked up and down the sunny yard mechanically.

She could not have said what her thoughts were. Probably she had no thoughts. Nothing but the steady throb, quiet and reiterated as the pulse of the machinery in the shops, of that conviction of fatality that she felt.

It seemed to run on in her head as the belting ran on the shaft: "He won't come back. He won't come back!"

It was in the middle of this monotonous inward muttering that the door of the office opened, and there came out a shortish figure, leather-jacketed and with enveloping overalls and wearing a cap with goggles, peak behind. It was young Mr. Ryan.

He raised his cap and would have pa.s.sed Gwenna quickly, but she stopped him.

She didn't know why. Since her marriage she had (ungratefully enough) almost forgotten the red-haired young man's existence, and perhaps it was not so much himself as his cap and m.u.f.flings that caught her eye now.

"Why, are you going up?" she asked.

"Yes," said young Ryan gloomily.

He seemed to be in the worst of tempers as he went on, grumblingly. He was going up. Just his luck. Plenty of times he'd wanted to go and hadn't been allowed. Now he'd got to go, just when he didn't want to.

"You don't want to?" Gwenna repeated.

Mr. Ryan coloured a little. "Well, if I've got to, that doesn't matter."

"Why don't you want to?" Gwenna asked, half indifferent, half surprised.

To her it had always appeared the one thing to want to do. She had been put off time after time. Now here was he, grumbling that it was just his luck to go.

Then she thought she could guess why he didn't want to go up just now.

She smiled faintly. Was it that Mr. Ryan had--somebody--to see?

Mr. Ryan blushed richly. Probably he did so not on this somebody's account, but because it was Gwenna who asked the question. One does not care for the sympathetic questions of the late idol, even when another fills the shrine. He told Gwenna: "I've got to go with your husband as a pa.s.senger. He's had a wire to bring another man over to one of the repairing bases; and so he's spotted me."

"To bring over? D'you mean to France?"

"Yes. Not that they want _me_, of course; but just somebody. So I've got to go, I suppose."

Gwenna was silent, absorbed. She glanced away across the flat eighty-acre field beyond the yards, where the planes of Paul's new biplane gleamed like a parallel ruler in the sun. A ruler marked with inches, each inch being one of the seams that Gwenna had carefully doped over. About the machine two or three dark figures moved, giving finishing touches, seeing that all was right.

And young Ryan was to fly in her, with Paul!

It wasn't Ryan they wanted, but "just somebody." ... And then, all in a moment, Gwenna, thinking, had a very curious little mental experience.

As once before she had had that "flying dream," and had floated up from earth and had seen her own body lying inert and soulless on her bed, so now the same thing happened. She seemed to see herself in the yard.

Herself, quite still and nonchalant, talking to this young man in cap and goggles who had to go to France just when he particularly wanted to go somewhere else. She saw all the details, quite clearly: his leather jacket, herself, in her blouse and skirt, the cylindrical iron, steam chambers where they steamed the skids, the Wing-room door, and beyond it the new biplane waiting in the field two hundred yards away.

Then she saw herself put her hand on the young man's leathern sleeve.

She heard her own voice ascending, as it were, to her. It was saying what seemed to be the most matter-of-fact thing in the world.

"Then don't go. You go later, Mr. Ryan. Follow him on. You go and meet your girl instead; it will be all right."

He was staring blankly at her. She wondered what he saw to stare at.

"What? What d'you mean, Mrs. Dampier? I'm bound to go. Military orders."

"Yes; they are for him, not for you. _You_ aren't under military orders." This was in her own, quite calm and detached little voice with its un-English accent. "You say anybody'd do. He can take--somebody else."

"Isn't anybody else," she heard young Ryan say. Then she heard from her own lips the most surprising thing of all.

"Yes, there's somebody. You give me those things of yours. I'm going instead of you."

Then Mr. Ryan laughed loudly. He seemed to see a joke that Gwenna did not see. "Well, for a film-drama, that takes it!" he laughed.

She did not laugh. She heard herself say, softly, earnestly, swiftly: "Listen to me. Paul is going away and I have never been up with him yet.

I was always promised a flight. And always something got in the way of it. And now he's going. He will never----"

Her voice corrected itself.

"He _may_ never come back. I may never get another chance of flying with him. Let me--let me have it! Say you will!"

But Mr. Ryan, instead of saying he would, became suddenly firm and peremptory. Perhaps it was the change in his voice that brought Gwenna Dampier, with a start, back to herself. She was no longer watching herself. She was watching young Ryan's face, intently, desperately. But she was still quite calm. It seemed to her that since an idea and a plan had come to her out of nowhere, it would be mad to throw them away again untried.

"Let me go; it will be all right! Let me get into your things."

"Quite out of the question," said young Ryan, with growing firmness--the iron mask of the man who knows himself liable to turn wax in the hands of a woman. "Not to be thought of."

She set her teeth. It was life and death to her now, what he refused.

She could have flown at him like a fury for his obstinacy. She knew, however, that this is no road to a woman's attainment of her desires.

With honeyed sweetness, and always calmly, she murmured: "You were always so nice to me, Mr. Ryan. I liked you so!"