The Boy with Wings Part 5

"There was one topping little trout-stream," he told her in that deep and gentle voice. "Bubbly as soda-water, green and clear as bottle-gla.s.s. Awfully jolly pools under the shade of the branches. You look right down and it's all speckly at the bottom, with brown-and-grey stones and slates and things, under the green water. It's like----"

He was looking straight at her, and suddenly he stopped. He had caught her eyes, full; as he had caught them before dinner in that mirror. Now that he was so close to them he saw that they were clear and browny-green, with speckles of slate-colour. They were not unlike those pools themselves, by Jove.... Almost as if he had been fishing for something out of those depths he still looked down, hard into them....

He forgot that he had stopped talking. And then under his own eyes he saw the little thing begin to colour up; blushing from that st.u.r.dy white throat of hers to the brow where those thick brown cherub's-curls began to grow. He looked away, hastily. Hastily he said, "It--er--it had a pretty name, that stream. Quite a p.r.o.nounceable 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 pa.s.sengers 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.