At this tone from a colleague of whom she was genuinely fond, tears rose to Miss Becker"s blue eyes. Miss Butcher, coming across to the centre table, saw those tears.
"Well, really, anybody might _apologise_," she remarked reproachfully, "when they"ve _upset_ anybody."
At this rebuke Gwenna"s strained nerves snapped.
An Aberystwith Collegiate School expression rose naturally to her lips--"_Cau dy geg_!" She translated it: "Shut _up_!" she said, quite rudely.
Then, the moment after she had given way to this little outburst of temper she felt better. She was ready to be on the best of terms again with her fellow-typists. They, as Miss Butcher would have said, "weren"t having any." They turned offended backs upon her. They talked pointedly to each other, not to her.
"That"s a precious long letter you"ve got written there, Baker," said Miss Butcher, helping to gather up the half-dozen thin foreign sheets, covered with neat, pointed German writing. "Is that to the beloved brother?"
Miss Becker nodded her plait-wreathed head as she put the letter that began: "_Geliebter Karl!_" into the grey-lined envelope.
"He likes to hear what they make--do--at the works. Always he ask," she said, "after what they do. And who come hier; and where everythings is kept."
"Gracious! I do believe he"s a regular German spy, like in the magazines, this brother of yours," smiled Miss Butcher lightly. "Don"t you give away any of our State secrets, Baker, will you? We"d be having the authorities, whoever they are, poking round and inquiring. Awful if England and your country went to war, wouldn"t it?--and you were supposed to be "the Enemy"!"
She spoke as if of something that was more fantastic than Gwenna"s flying dream of the night before. The German typist answered in the same strain.
"If it _was_ war, I would speak to Karlchen"s regiment that your house in Clapham and your people should be saved," she promised. "But he is not thinking now of war; he interests himself very much for buildings (because our father is architect). And for maps of the river, and such.
So I must write on him every week a long letter.... We go out to-day to have our lunch, yes?"
The two went out together towards Whitehall. The Welsh girl was left in Coventry--and the deserted offices.
She didn"t want any lunch. She drank a gla.s.s of tepid tap-water from the dressing-room. She ate some strawberries, bought in their little flat basket as she had come along. Then, hatless, and in her thin, one-piece dress of grey linen, she strolled out into the yard for a breath of air.
It was empty and hot and sunny. Gwenna looked up from the wood-littered ground where the ubiquitous London pigeons strutted and flirted and "Croo--_croo_--do--I--do"-ed about her feet. Overhead, that giant lacework on its iron crochet-hooks looked as if its pattern had been drawn with a pen and black ink against the opaque blue-grey sky. The sight of that far-off pinnacle put into her head again the thought of flying.
"I don"t believe that I shall ever be as high up as that, with the blue beneath me, like I"ve always wanted!" reflected the young girl, dolefully looking up. "I believe that last night in my dream is all the flying I"m ever going to have had!"
And again that longing took her. That pure longing to be high; above the Law that clogs the children of Man to the Earth from which he came. To feel the unfettered air above and below and about her all at once!...
But what could she do to gratify the impulse even a little?
Only one thing.
She might _climb_.
The idea with which she started off on her mad prank was to climb up to that iron lattice of lacework; to run up that as a sailor climbs the rope-ladders of his masts, and thence from the very highest peak attainable to look down on London, even as last night she had looked down on it from her dream.
Her start was not in the open air at all, but from the bottom of the scaffolding inside, where it was all beams and uprights and floors of planks. It reminded Gwenna of being underneath the old wooden pier at Aberdovey, and looking up. She went up ladders, through trap-doors, walked over wooden floors to other ladders until she got up to the last trap-door and through it out of the shadow and the stuffiness to the sunshine and the fresh air again. She stood on the top platform of the gantry which supported that engine and the wheels that worked (she supposed) the iron lattice that was still far above her head.
Presently she would climb that. She knew that she could. She was never afraid of heights. Her head was steady enough. Her feet in their brown shoes were as sure as the feet of the tiny sheep that picked their way up the rocky steeps of her Welsh mountains. She could climb as well as any of the men ... but for the moment she rested, standing by the platform hand-railing, breathing in the freshened breeze.
The birds of the City--pigeons and sparrows--were taking their short flights far beneath her perch. All London was spread below her, as it had been in that flying dream, and with as strong a sense of security as in the dream she looked down upon it.
There, between the forests of chimney-pots, gleamed that highway of the Thames, blue-grey now as it reflected the sky, winding out of the distance that meant the clean, green country and the willows below the lawns where people had danced; flowing on into London that sullied it, and burdened it with her barges, and spanned it with her bridges, but could not stay it; on and out its waters pa.s.sed towards Greenwich and the Docks and the tall ships and the North Sea!
And there on its bank was the office, the dwindled yard from which Gwenna had started. The men returning....
The whole place looked nothing more than a hen-run full of fowls. Their voices ascended, more loudly than she would have expected to hear from their diminished figures. How funny to see what midgets the creatures looked from here, and to remember how majestically important each considered himself! thought little Gwenna, forgetting that from the yard she herself, with her grey linen frock, her brown feet and ankles, must look no larger than a roosting pigeon.
She looked down, past the railing and the ends of timbers, feeling immeasurably aloof from everybody in her world. She wished she need never go down to it again.
"I"ve a _good_ mind to give notice at the office, whatever, and go somewhere quite different!" she thought defiantly, and immediately she felt elated. A weight of depression seemed to have dropped from her already. Up, up went the feather-weight spirits of Youth. She had forgotten for this moment the longing and frustration of the last weeks, the exasperations of this morning, her squabble with those other girls.
She had climbed out of all that....
Now, before she left this place, she would do something that none of the girls she knew would dare. She"d climb further.
She turned to take a step towards the crane.
Then something gave her a start as violent as that in which she had, that night before, been jerked out of her dream.
For now, into her absorbed musing there had broken without warning the sound of a voice. It had seemed to have come out of nothing, from behind her, and it had said, with a laugh deep and soft at once, "_My_ machine?
Oh, yes.... Good of you to remember her----"
Paul Dampier"s voice!
Little Gwenna, with her back to the trap-door, and wrapped in her own thoughts, had heard nothing of the steps of five pairs of feet coming up the way that she had come. In the violence of her surprise of hearing a voice, so often heard in her daydreams now, here, in this unexpected place between sky and ground, she started so that she lost her balance.
The girl"s foot slipped. She fell. She was half over the platform--one small foot and ankle stretched out over the giddy height as that crane was stretched. She clutched on the crook of a slender grey arm, the railing of the platform--So, for an agonised moment, she hung.
But hardly had she cried out before there was the dash of a tall man"s figure across the planks from the trap-door.
"It"s all right--I"ve got you," said Paul Dampier, and caught her up from the edge, in his arms.
They held her. That armful of a girl, soft and warm as one of the grey pigeons, was crushed for a moment against the boy"s chest. She was closer to him than she had been in any of those waltzes. Yet it seemed no strangeness to be so near--feeling his heart beat below hers, feeling the roughness of his tweed jacket through the thin linen of her frock.
She felt as she"d felt about flying, in that dream of hers. "I must have known it all before."
Then, dazed but happy, resting where she seemed to belong, she thought in a twink, "I shall have to let go. _Why_ can"t I stay like this?...
Oh, it"s very cruel. There! Now I have let go. But he won"t.... He"s getting his balance."
He had taken a step backwards.
Then she slid through his arms. She slipped, lightly as a squirrel slips down the length of a beech, to the wooden floor of the platform.
Cruel; yes, _cruel_! And to add to the cruelty that such a moment must end, the Airman, when she left his enforced clasp, scarcely looked at her. He barely returned her greeting. He did not answer her breathless thanks. He turned away from her--whom he had saved. Yes! He left her to the meaningless babble of the others (she recognised now, in a dazed way, that there were other men with him on the scaffolding). He left her to the politenesses of his cousin Hugo and of that young French engineer (Mr. Grant"s "Comp" who had come up to inspect the crane). He never looked again as Miss Williams was guided down the trap-door and the ladders by the scolding Yorkshire foreman, who didn"t leave her until she was safely at the bottom.
She was met by the two other typists who had, from the office window, seen her perched up, small as a bird, on the heights. Both girls had been terrified. Miss Butcher now brought lavender salts. Miss Becker"s pink moon of a face was blanched with horror over her colleague"s danger.
"Do you know what could have happened, Candlesticks-maker, my dear?"
cried the German girl with real emotion, as they all made tea together in the varnished, stifling office. "You could have been killed, you!"
Gwenna thought, "That would have been too bad. Because then--_then_ I shouldn"t have known when he held me!"
As it was, there were several things about that incident that the young girl--pa.s.sionate and infatuated and innocent--did not know.