The Boy with Wings Part 9

"Has it?" said Gwenna, not very enthusiastically. "Did I leave it in Mrs. Smith's room?"

"You didn't. You left it in Hugo Swayne's car," said Leslie, wringing out the wet handful of transparent net that would presently serve her as a garment. "That young man came up about half an hour ago to tell you."

"Mr. Swayne did? How kind of him."

"Yes, wasn't it? But not of Mr. Swayne," said Leslie, wringing. "It was--just let out the water and turn me on some fresh hot, will you?--It was the other one that came: the aviator boy."

"What?" cried Gwenna sharply. "Mr. Dampier?"

"Yes. Your bird-man. He came up here--in full plumage and song! Nice grey suit--rather old; brown boots awfully well cleaned--by himself; blue tie, very expensive Burlington Arcade one--lifted from his cousin Hugo, I bet," enlarged Leslie, spreading the blouse out over the white china edge of the bath. "I met him at the gate just as I got back from my old lady's. He asked for my friend--meaning you. Hadn't grasped your name. He came in for ten minutes. But he couldn't wait, Taffy, so----"

Here, straightening herself, Leslie suddenly stopped. She stopped at the sight of the small, blankly dismayed face with which her chum had been listening to this chatter.

And Gwenna, standing aghast against the frosted gla.s.s panes of the bathroom door, p.r.o.nounced, in her softest, most agitated Welsh accent, an everyday Maid's Tragedy in just six words:

"_He came! When I was out!_"

"He was awfully sorry----"

But Gwenna, seeming not to hear her friend, broke out: "He _said_ he'd come and settle about taking me flying, and there was I _think_-ing he'd forgotten all about it, and then he did come after all, and I wasn't here! Oh, _Leslie_!----"

Leslie, sitting on the edge of the bath, gave her a glance that was serious and whimsical, rueful and tender, all at once.

"Yes, you can't understand," mourned Gwenna, "but I _did_ so want to go up in an aeroplane for once in my life! I'd set my heart on it, Leslie, ever since he said about it. It's only now I see how badly I wanted it,"

explained the younger girl, flushed with emotion, and relapsing into her Welshiest accent, as do all the Welsh in their moments of stress. "And _now_ I shan't get another chance. I know I shan't----"

And such was the impetus of her grief that Leslie could hardly get her to listen to the rest of the news that should be balm for this wound of disappointment; namely, that Mr. Dampier was going to make an appointment with both girls to come and have tea with him at his rooms, either on Sat.u.r.day or Sunday.

"He'll write to you," concluded Leslie Long, "and let you know which. I said we'd go either day, Taffy."

Gwenna, caught up into delight again from the lowest depths of disappointment, could hardly trust herself to speak. Surely Leslie must think her a most _awful_ baby, nearly crying because she'd had an outing postponed! So the young girl (laughing a little shakily) put up quite a plucky fight to treat it all as quite a trifle....

Even the next morning at breakfast she took it quite casually that there was a note upon her plate stamped with the address of the Aero Club. She even waited a moment before she opened it and read in a handwriting as small as if it had been traced by a crow-quill:

"Monday night.

"DEAR MISS WILLIAMS,

"Will you and Miss Long come to tea with me at my place about 4.30 on Sunday? I find I shall not have to go to Hendon on that day.

I'll come and call for you if I may.

"Yours sincerely, "P. DAMPIER."

"At last!" thought Gwenna to herself, rather breathlessly, as she put the note back into the envelope. "Now he'll settle about when I'm to go flying with him. Oh! I do, _do_ hope there's nothing going to get in the way of that!"

CHAPTER VII

A BACHELOR'S TEA-PARTY

The first of a series of "things that got in the way" of Gwenna's making an appointment to go flying occurred on that Sunday afternoon, when Leslie and she were to have tea at Paul Dampier's place.

"A mixture of chaos and comfy chairs, I expect; ash everywhere, and _beastly_ cakes. (I know these bachelor tea-parties.) That," Leslie said, "is what his 'place' will be like."

Gwenna, as usual, hadn't wasted any thoughts over this. She had been too full of what their host himself would say and do--about the flying. She was all ready, in the white dress, the white hat with the wings, half an hour after Sunday mid-day dinner at the Ladies' Club. But it was very nearly half-past four by the time Mr. Dampier did come, as he had promised, to fetch the two girls.

He came in the car that had driven them back on the night of the dinner-party.

And he was hurried, and apologetic for his lateness. He even seemed a little shy. This had the effect of making Gwenna feel quite self-possessed as she took the seat beside him ("I hate sitting by the driver, really. Makes me _so_ nervous!" Leslie had declared) and inquired whether he borrowed his cousin's car any time he had visitors.

"Well, but Hugo's _got_ everything," he told her, with a twinkle, "so I always borrow anything of his that I can collar!"

"Studs, too?" asked Gwenna, quickly.

"Oh, come! I didn't think it of you. _What_ a pun!" he retorted.

She coloured a little, shy again, hurt. But he turned his head to look at her, confided to her: "It was _on_ the chest-of-drawers, all the time!"

And, as the car whizzed westwards, they laughed together. That dinner-table incident of the collar--or collared--stud brought, for the second time, a sudden homely glow of friendly feeling between this boy and girl.

She thought, "He's just as easy to get on with as if he were another girl, like Leslie----"

For always, at the beginning of things, the very young woman compares her first man-friend with the dearest girl-chum she has known.

--"Or as if he were just n.o.body, instead of being so wonder-ful, and an airman, good gracious!"

Appropriately enough for an airman, his place seemed to be nearly on the house-tops of a block of buildings near Victoria Street.

The lift carried them up past six landings and many boards inscribed with names of firms. It stopped at the seventh story, almost directly opposite a cream-coloured door with a small, old-fashioned bra.s.s knocker, polished like gold.

Paul Dampier tapped sharply at it.

The door was opened by a thick-set man in an excellent suit of clothes and with the face of a wooden sphinx.

"Tea as soon as you can, Johnson," said the young Airman over his shoulder, as the trio pa.s.sed in.

The long sitting-room occupied half the flat and its windows took up the whole of one side. It was to these open windows that Gwenna turned.

"Oh, what a view!" she cried, looking out, enraptured at the height and airiness, looking past the leads, with their wooden tubs of standard laurel-bushes, among which pigeons were strutting and bridling and pecking crumbs. She looked down, down, at the bird's-eye view of London, spread far below her in a map of grey roofs and green tree-tops under a soft mist of smoke that seemed of the clouds themselves.

"Oh, can't you see for miles!" exclaimed Gwenna. "There's St. Paul's, looks like a big grey soap-bubble, coming up out of the mist! Oh, you can see between a crack in the houses, our place at Westminster! It's like a cottage from here! Oh, and that iron lacey thing on the roof!

Even this must be something like being up in an aeroplane, I should think! Look, Leslie!"

Miss Long seemed more engrossed in looking round Mr. Dampier's bachelor sitting-room. It was incredibly luxurious compared to what she'd expected. The polished floor was black and shiny as the wood of the piano at the further end, the Persian rugs softly brilliant. In the middle of the Adams mantelpiece simpered an exquisite Chelsea shepherdess; to the left and right of her there stood squat toys in ivory, old slender-stalked champagne-gla.s.ses holding sweet-peas. And upon the leaf-brown walls were decorations that seemed complacently to draw attention to the catholic taste of their owner. A rare eighteenth-century print of Tom Jones upon his knees, asking "forgiveness" of his Sophia, hung just above a Futurist's grimace in paint; and there was a frieze of ultra-modern French fashion-designs, framed in _pa.s.se-partout_, from the "_Bon Ton_."