She was blushing warmly at her own thoughts.
"It"s only the flying-machine he cares about! He does like me, too; in a way.... If only he"d forget that other for a minute! But if he won"t,"
thought Gwenna, happening upon an ancient piece of feminine philosophy, "I"d rather have him talking about _her_ than not talking to me at all!"
She spoke aloud, sedately but interestedly.
"Oh, is _that_ a camber?" That light touch of his seemed still upon her wrist, though he had withdrawn it carelessly at once. She paused, then said, "And what was that other thing, Mr. Dampier? Something about an angle?"
"A dihedral angle?" he said, drawing at that pipe. "Oh, that"s the angle you see from the front of the thing. It"s--look, it"s like that."
This time it was not her hand he took as an ill.u.s.tration. He pointed, pipe in hand, to where, above the opposite hedge, a crow was sailing slowly, a vand.y.k.e of black across the cloudless blue.
"See that bird? It"s that very slight V he makes; _now_."
"And this machine of yours?" persisted the girl, with a little twitch of her mouth for the rival whom he, it seemed, always thought of as "the P.D.Q." and whom Gwenna must always think of as "the _Fiancee_." She wondered where it lived, the creature that meant all to him. She said, "Where--where d"you _make_ that machine?"
"Oh, I"m afraid it isn"t a machine yet, you see. It"s only a model of one, so far. You know, like a model yacht," he explained. "That"s the worst of it. You see, you can make a model do anything. It"s when you get the thing life-size that the trouble begins. Model doesn"t give a really fair idea of what you"ve got to get. The difficulties--it"s never the real thing."
Gwenna thought, "It must be like making love to the person you aren"t really in love with!" But what she said, with her hand stripping a spike of flowering gra.s.s, was, "I suppose it"s like practising scales and all that on a mute piano?"
"Never tried", he said. Then: "_The model"s_ at my own place, my rooms in"----here he broke off with a laugh. He looked straight into her face and said, still laughing, and in a more personal tone:
"Not in Victoria Street. I say, you spotted that _that_ place wasn"t mine, didn"t you?"
"Leslie "spotted" and said so, afterwards," admitted Gwenna demurely, picking and sniffing at a piece of pink clover before she fastened it into her white blouse. "I did think at the time that it wasn"t--wasn"t the sort of place where you"d find a man living who _did_ things, like."
"Rather rough on old Hugo."
"Well, but _does_ he do things?"
"He doesn"t have to. He"d be all right if he did. Sweat some of that beef off him, give him something to think about," averred his cousin, carelessly knocking out his pipe against the heel of his shoe. "But, you know, my place is in Camden Town; most inferior. Three rooms over a paper shop; two small cubby-holes where I sleep and eat, and a rather bigger one where I keep the "P.D.Q." stuff. I couldn"t have you there that Sunday."
"Why not?" Gwenna asked sharply, and jealous again. It was almost as if the _Fiancee_ had said to him, "_No, not here_!"
"Because," he said with a chuckle, "because at the last moment, when I"d got the tea ready and everything"--he tossed his fair head back--"a fall of soot down the chimney! Everything in the most ghastly mess! Pitch black wherever you put a finger. I simply couldn"t--it was four o"clock then; I expect you both thought it rotten of me. Still," he concluded, rather ruefully, "I couldn"t give you the sort of polite tea Hugo can, anyhow."
"I don"t want polite teas!" Gwenna protested, looking round at the field where she had feasted as if in Elysium. "You don"t suppose I care for things all grand like that, do you?"
He responded, "Would you care to see my Camden Town place, then, and the model? You and Miss Long. It"s quite near you, you know."
"Yes, I should," said Gwenna quietly, stripping her gra.s.s.
How could he, she wondered, ask if she "cared" for these things that opened out new worlds to her? If he only knew, just to be with him was part of that new, soaring freedom which to her was summed up in the idea of flying! This, she felt, _was_ flying. She didn"t care, after all, if there were no other flying that afternoon. Care? _She_ wouldn"t mind sitting there until the sun slipped slowly downwards towards the western hedge and the moon-daisies closed in the tall gra.s.s, and clouds of other tiny flying creatures poised and hovered above them. _She_ wasn"t sorry that the mechanic did not return in haste to minister to that broken-down car. When she did remember about it, it was almost to hope that he would not be back! Not just yet! Not to put an end to this golden afternoon of talk that, trivial as it was, seemed to her to be the endowment of a new faculty, and of comradeship that was as beguiling and satisfying as that of her bosom-chum, Leslie. Only newer, only more complete. So it seemed to Gwenna, as the shadows moved further up the gra.s.s where she sat with her new boy-friend.
For it is a commonplace that in all comradeship between man and woman pa.s.sionate love claims a share. But also in all pa.s.sionate love there is more comradeship than the unimaginative choose to admit; there is a happy inner meaning to the cottage phrase, "To keep company with."
What he thought about it she did not know. Except that he surely must like talking to her? He could not go on like this out of politeness.
Ah, besides--! Besides, she knew, without reasoning about it, that, even with that absorbing interest of the aeroplane in the background, he did like her. Just as Leslie, her other friend, who also knew so much more than she did, had liked her at once.
"Only," decided Gwenna, in the uttermost depths of her shy and daring heart, "only he"s _got_ to like me, some day, better than Leslie ever could. He must. Yes; he _must_!"
And she thought it so ardently that she almost expected him, catching her thought, to answer it in words. She looked--no, he had caught nothing. But, meeting his eyes again, her own read a message that her fluttered mind had been told before this, but would scarcely let her believe. He thought she was pretty to look at. She had taken off her hat now, as she liked to do in the open air, and the light breeze tossed her short locks about.
"I _believe_ he thinks," Gwenna told herself, "that my hair"s nice."
As a matter of fact she was right. If she could have read her companion"s thoughts at the moment she would have known of a quite foolish but recurrent wish on his part. A wish that he might just run his fingers through all those brown and thickly-twisting curls, to find out if they felt as silky as they looked.
A lark was carolling over her head, soaring, poising, poising, soaring, and singing all the while....
"That"s what we can"t do, even yet; _hover_," he said. And again he went on talking to the Little Thing (in his mind this babyish-faced but quite quick-witted girl was now always to be "the Little Thing") about the chance of getting Colonel Conyers to take up that invention of his.
"I"m to go to spend the week-end at Ascot with him and have another talk about it," he said. "I know he"s dead keen. _He_ knows that it"s aeroplanes that are going to make all the difference; simply knock out, under some conditions, any other form of scouting. In modern warfare, you know--it"s bound to come, some time--anybody with any sense knows that----"
"Yes, of course," agreed Gwenna, watching him as he stretched himself lazily out, chest downwards, elbows in, on the gra.s.s, chin propped in his hands, talking (all about the Machine).
"If he gave me a chance to build Her--make trial flights in the P.D.Q.!
If he"d only back me----"
"Oh, he will, surely!" said Gwenna, her whole small face brightening or sobering in response to every modulation of his voice.
It was jolly, he thought, to find a girl who wasn"t in the least bored by "Shop." She _was_ a very jolly Little Thing. So sensible. No nonsense about her, thought the boy.
And she, when at last they rose and left the place, threw a last look back at that patch of sky above the hedge, where the black crow had made a dihedral angle, at that brooding elm, at that hay field, golden in the level rays, at that patch of dusty road where the car had pulled up, at that black telegraph-pole where he had hung up his coat. That picture was graven, as by a tool, into the very heart of the girl.
At the end of an expedition that a young woman of more experience and less imagination would have p.r.o.nounced "tame enough," Gwenna, bright-eyed and rosy from her day in the sunshine, could hardly believe that a whole lifetime had not elapsed since last she"d seen the everyday, the humdrum and incredibly dull Club where she lived.
She burst into her chum"s bedroom as Leslie was going to bed.
"Taffy--back at last?" smiled Leslie, between the curtains of black hair on either side of her nightgown. "How"s flying?--_What?_" she exclaimed, "you didn"t go up at all? Broke down on the way to Brooklands? I say!
How rotten for you, my poor lamb. Had anything to eat?"
"I think so--I mean, rather! He gave me a _lovely_ lunch on the road while we were waiting for the man to mend the car--and then we"d tea at a cottage while he was doing it--and then there wasn"t time to do anything but come back to town," explained Gwenna breathlessly, untying her scarf; "and then we"d sort of dinner at the inn before we started back; they brought out a table and things into the garden under the trees."
"What did you have for dinner?"
"I don"t know. Oh, there were gooseberries," said Gwenna vaguely, "and a lamp. And the moths all came. Oh, Leslie! It"s _been_ so splendid!" She caught her breath. "I mean, it was _dreat_ful about no flying, but----"
"Glad the afternoon wasn"t entirely a washout," said Miss Long, in an even voice as she plaited her hair.
"By the way, did the Dampier boy give you back that locket of yours?"
"I forgot all about it," said Gwenna, picking up the head of pink clover that had fallen out of her blouse. "I"ll ask him next time. He"s going to take me up soon, you know, again."