The Boy with Wings Part 8

The day after the dinner-party was spent by Gwenna metaphorically, at least, in the clouds.

By her vivid day-dreams she was carried off, as Ganymede was carried by the eagle, sky-high; she felt the rush of keen air on her face; she saw the khaki-green flying-ground beneath her with the cl.u.s.tered onlookers, as small as ants. And--thus she imagined it--she heard that megaphone announcement:

"Ladies and gentul MEN! Mis ter Paul Dampier on a Maurice Farman bi plane ac companied by Miss Williams!"

with the sound of it dying down, faintly, below her.

Then in her musing mind she went over and over what had already happened. Those throbbing moments when her new friend had said, "Look here! Would you care to come up?" and, "Then I'll come up here and fix it----"

Would he? Oh, when would he? It was of course hardly to be thought that this flying-man ("besieged with invitations" as he was) would come to ratify his offer on Sunday, the very day after he'd made it. Too much to expect....

Therefore that Sunday Gwenna Williams refused to go out, even on the Heath for the shortest loitering stroll. Leslie Long, with an indescribable look that the younger girl did not catch, went out without her. Gwenna stayed on the green bench in the small, leafy garden at the back of the Club, reading and listening, listening for the sound of the bell at the front door, or for the summons to the telephone.

None came, of course.

Also, of course, no note to make an appointment to go flying appeared at that long, crowded breakfast-table of the Club on Monday morning for Miss Gwenna Williams.

That, too, she could hardly have expected.

Quite possibly he'd forgotten that the appointment had ever been made. A young man of that sort had got so many things to think about. So many people to make appointments with. So many other girls to take up.

"I wonder if he's promised to go up again soon with that girl called Muriel," she thought. "Sure to know millions of girls----"

And it was in a very chastened mood of reaction that Gwenna Williams, typist--now dressed in the business-girl's uniform of serge costume, light blouse, and small hat--left her Club that morning. She walked down the sunny morning road to the stopping-place of the motor-omnibuses and got on to a big scarlet "24" bus, bound for Charing Cross and her day's work.

The place where she worked was a huge new building in process of construction on the south side of the Embankment near Westminster Bridge.

Above the slowly sliding tides of the river, with its barges and boats, there towered several courses of granite blocks, clean as a freshly-split kernel. In contrast to them were the half demolished, dingy sh.e.l.ls of houses on either side, where the varied squares of wallpaper and the rusting, floorless fireplaces showed where one room had ended and the next begun. The scaffolding rose above the new pile like a mighty web. Above this again the enormous triangular lattice rose so high that it seemed like a length of ironwork lace stretched out on two crochet-needles against the blue-grey and hot vault of the London sky.

As she pa.s.sed the entrance Gwenna's eyes rose to this lattice.

"It looks almost as high up in the air as one could fly in that biplane," she thought. "Oh, to be right _up_! Looking down on everything, with the blue _beneath one_ instead of only above!"

She crossed the big yard, which was already vocal with the noises of chipping and hammering, the trampling and the voices of men. Two of them--the genial young electrician called Grant and the Yorkshire foreman who was a regular father to his gang, nodded good-morning to the youngest typist as she pa.s.sed. She walked quickly past the stacks of new timber and the gantries and travelling cranes (plenty of machinery here; it ought to please Mr. Dampier, since he'd said that was what he was interested in!). One great square of the hewn granite was swinging in mid-air from a crane as she left the hot sunlight and noise outside and entered the door of the square, corrugated iron building that held the office where she worked.

To reach it she had to pa.s.s through the clerk-of-the-works' offices, with long drawing-benches with bra.s.s handled drawers beneath, full of plans, and elevations. These details seemed mysteriously, tantalisingly incomprehensible and yet irritating to Gwenna's feminine mind. She was imaginative enough to realise that all these details, these "man's-things," from the T-squares on the benches to the immense iron safe in the corner, seemed to put her, Gwenna, "in her place." She was merely another detail in the big whole of man's work that was going on here. The place made her feel tiny, unimportant. She went on to the light and airy room, smelling of new wood and tracing-paper, the extension of the clerk-of-the-works' office that she shared with her two colleagues.

In the centre of this room there was a large square table with a telephone, a telephone-book, various other books of reference and a shallow wicker basket for letters. Besides this there were the typing tables for each of the three girl-clerks. Gwenna's and Miss Baker's were side by side. The German girl sat nearest to the window that gave the view up the river, with Lambeth Bridge and the Houses of Parliament looming grey and stately against the smiling June sky, and a distant glimpse of Westminster Abbey. On the frame of the pane just above her Miss Baker had fastened, with drawing-pins, two photographs. One was a crude coloured postcard of a red-roofed village among pine-forests. The other was a portrait of a young man, moustached and smiling under a spiked German helmet; across this photograph ran the autograph, "_Karl Becker_." Thus the blue and guileless eyes of this young foreigner in our midst could rest upon mementoes of her Fatherland and her family any time she raised her blonde head from bending over her work. Both girls looked up this morning as Gwenna, the last arrival, came in. They scolded her good-naturedly because she'd brought none of those chocolates she'd promised from the dinner-table. They asked how she'd enjoyed herself at that party.

It would have been presumably natural to the young Welsh girl to have broken out into a bubblingly excited--"And, girls! _Who_ d'you suppose I sat next. A real live airman! _And_, my dears!" (with a rapturous gasp), "who should it be but the one I bought the photo of on Sat.u.r.day! You know; the one you called my young man--Mr. Dampier--Paul Dampier--Yes, but wait; that isn't all. Just fancy! He talked to me yards and yards about his new aeroplane, and I say, _what_ do you think! This was the best. He's asked me to come up one day--yes, indeed! He's going to take me flying--with him!"

But, as it was, Gwenna said not one word of all this. She could not have explained why, even to herself. Only she replied to Miss Butcher's, "What was the party like?" with a flavourless, "Oh, it was all right, thanks."

That sounded _so_ English, she thought!

She had a dull day at the office. Dry-as-dust letters and specifications, builders' quant.i.ties, and so on, to type out. Tiresome calls on the telephone that had to be put through to the other office....

Never before had she seemed to mind the monotony of those clicking keys and that "_I'll inquire. Hold the line, please._" Never before had she found herself irritated by the constant procession of men who were in and out all day; including Mr. Grant, who sometimes seemed to _make_ errands to talk to Miss Butcher, but who never stayed for more than a moment, concluding invariably with the cheerful remark, "Well! Duty calls, I must away." Men seemed actually to _enjoy_ "duty," Gwenna thought. At least the men here did. All of them, from Mr. Henderson in the other office to the brown-faced men in the yard with their shirt-sleeves rolled up above tattooed arms, seemed to be "keen" on the building, on the job in hand. They seemed glad to be together. Gwenna wondered how they could....

To-day she was all out of tune. She was quite cross when, for the second time, Albert, the seventeen-year old c.o.c.kney office-boy, bustled in, stamping a little louder than was strictly necessary on the echoing boards. He rubbed his hands together importantly, demanding in a voice that began in a ba.s.s roar and ended in a treble squeak, "Those specifications, miss. Quick, too, or you'll hear about it!"

"Goodness _me_, what an ugly way you London boys do have of talking!"

retorted the Welsh girl pettishly. "_Sut_-ch an accent!"

The rebuked Albert only snorted with laughter as he took her sheaf of papers. Then, looking back over his shoulder at the pretty typist perched on the edge of the centre table to refill her fountain pen, he added in his breaking treble, "Don't you sit on that tyble, Miss!

_Sittin' on the tyble's s'posed to mean you want to be kissed_, and it looks so bad! Don't it, Miss Butcher? There's other ways of gittin' orf than that, isn't there?"

"Outside!" snapped Miss Butcher, blushing, as the boy stumped away.

Gwenna sighed angrily and longed for lunch-time, so that she could get out.

At one o'clock, an hour after the buzzer had sounded for the mid-day meal of the yard-men, the other two girls in the office would not even come out for a breath of air. They had brought fruit and cake. They made Bovril (with a kettle of hot water begged from the fatherly foreman) and lunched where they'd sat all the morning. Miss Butcher, munching, was deep in a library-book lent to her by the young electrician. Miss Baker counted st.i.tches in a new pattern for a crochet-work _Kante_, or length of fine thread insertion. It was not unlike the pattern of the iron trellis above the scaffolding, that tapered black against the sky; man's fancy-work.

What hideously tame things women had to fill their lives with, Gwenna thought as she sat in the upper window of her tea-shop at the corner of the Embankment. She watched the luncheon-time crowd walking over Westminster Bridge. So many of these people were business-girls just like herself and the Butcher and the Baker! Would anything more amusing ever happen to them, or to her?

But that German girl, Gwenna thought, would stare to hear her work called "hideous" or "tame." It was her greatest interest. Already, she'd told Gwenna, her bottom drawer at her boarding-house was crammed with long, rolled-up crochet-work strips of white or creamy lace. There were also her piles of tray-cloths, petticoat flounces and chemise-tops, all hand-embroidered and bemonogrammed by Miss Baker herself. She was not engaged to be married, but, as she'd artlessly said, "_Something_ a young girl can have always ready."

Day-dreams in crochet!

"I'd rather never fall in love than have it all spoilt by mixing it up with such a lot of sewing and cookery that it wouldn't get disentangled, like," thought the dreamy, impatient Gwenna. She returned, to find the German girl measuring her crochet lace against her arm and crying, "Since Sat.u.r.day I have made till there." ...

Then Miss Baker turned to her German version of an English trade firm's letter. Miss Butcher unfastened another packet of stationery. Miss Williams fetched a number of envelopes from the inner office to be addressed....

Would the afternoon _never_ come to an end?

CHAPTER VI

THE INVITATION

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."