Then Gwenna felt the tip and creak of the machine, as Paul climbed into his place behind her.
Andre dashed up to grasp his hand, calling "_Bonne chance!_"
"Thanks!" said Paul. "Right away."
Then, as the propeller pulsed like an angry nerve, Gwenna gave a start.
An appalling roar and wind seemed all about her. Faintly, very faintly, the noise of the good-bye cheer rose through it. The hat-waving group of men with wide-open mouths seemed to slide back. The Aeroplane b.u.mped over the rough field. And then it ceased to b.u.mp. Gwenna drew in her breath, sharply. To right of her, to left of her, the horizon seemed to sway ever so gently. She thought, but was not sure, that she heard Paul"s voice behind her, bawling, "Trim."
As she settled herself in her seat, the horizon fell away altogether....
All was sunlit blue! The swiftest run in the motor down the smoothest bit of hill had been nothing to this that was coming; faster, faster....
"There"s only one pity," she thought hastily. "He"s thinking now that I let him go without saying good-bye!"
Here she had a glimpse of the khaki-green earth far below, as blurred with height and speed as was the raving invisible propeller itself.
For at last--at last--it was flight!
CHAPTER V
THE NUPTIAL FLIGHT
Yes; at last it was flight.
She now, too, was perched up on this structure that had tucked those little bicycle wheels and skids underneath it, as a bird tucks its no longer required feet; she, too, was being borne up aloft on those vast cambered pinions that let the sunlight half through, like the roof of a transparent marquee. In this new machine of Paul"s, the pa.s.senger-seat was set on a slightly projecting platform, with aluminium-like uprights of a peculiar section. At first, all that Gwenna knew of this easy balancing and dipping and banking of the machine, was that there was a bright triangle of sunlight about her feet, and that this triangle grew sometimes small, sometimes large, and sometimes spread so that half of her was sitting in the warm September sunlight; presently to swerve into the shadow again.
Mechanically tightening her grip on one or other of the aluminium stays, instinctively yielding her body to this unexpected angle or that, she watched that triangle of sunlight. She was not giddy or breathless; she felt no fear at all, only a growing triumph and delight as the soaring biplane sped on--on----
Once she gave a little "Oh, look!" lost in the hum of the engine. It was when a tiny flicker of shadow fell upon her patch of sunlight and was gone; the shadow of some bird flying higher than they, a crow, perhaps.
It was just after this that she noticed, near that advancing and retiring wedge of sunlight at her feet, something else. This was a little oval hole in the floor of the platform. A hole for observation.
It brought home to her how frail a floor supported her weight and his; still she felt no terror; only wonder. She smiled under her m.u.f.flings, thinking that hole was like a knot-hole in a wooden bridge over the river at home. As a small child she had always been fascinated by that hole, and had gazed down through it at the rushing bottle-green water and the bubbles and the boulders below. She glanced down this one, but her unaccustomed eyes could hardly see anything. She leaned forward and looked down below the machine, but still could distinguish little.
Woods, roads, meadows, or whatever they were crossing, were still only a warm and moving blur. Once they pa.s.sed, quickly, a big patch of pink and purple, she thought it might be a town, but wasn"t sure.
She sat up again in her seat, giving herself up to her own feelings in this new and breathless experience; her feelings, that were as undistinguishable as the landscape over which the biplane swept--a warm blur of delights.
She gripped the stays; she laughed happily to herself behind the m.u.f.flings, she even sang aloud, knowing that it was drowned in the noise of the engine. She hummed the sheerest medley of sc.r.a.ps of things, tags of Musical Comedy picked up at Westminster--some verses out of Leslie"s love-songs. Once it was the then universal "Tipperary." And presently it resolved itself into a Welsh folk-song that the singing-cla.s.s at her school had practised over and over again--"The Rising of the Lark," a blithely defiant tune that seemed best to match her mood as the biplane sped.
Yes! All the bird-like, soaring spirit in her had come to its own.
Everything else was cast behind her.... She"d always felt, dimly and uncomfortably, that a great part of herself, Gwenna, was just an uninteresting, commonplace little girl.... That part had gone! It had been left behind her, just as her bodily form had been left sleeping on her bed, that midsummer night, while her soul flew through dreams.
"Dreams!" she thought incoherently. "It"s _not_ true what people say about the dream-come-true, and how one"s always disappointed in it. I"m not--ah, I"m not! This flying! This is more glorious than I expected--even with _him_----!"
Then came a thought that checked her singing rapture.
"If only _he_ knew! But he doesn"t."
Behind her, Paul, driving, had made no sign to the pa.s.senger. She could guess at the busyness of him. His dear, strong hands, she knew, were on the wheel. They were giving a touch to the throttle here and there. His feet, too, must be vigilantly busy; now this one doing something essential, now that. She supposed his whole body must be dipping from time to time, just as that triangle of sunlight dipped and crept. It was all automatic to him, she expected. He could work that machine while he was thinking, just as she herself could knit and think.
"He"s thinking of me," she told herself with a rueful little pang. "He"s wondering about my not saying good-bye. He must have minded that.
That"ll be all right, though. I"ll let him know, presently; I"ll pull down my m.u.f.fler and look round. Presently. Not yet. Not until it"s too late for him to turn back or set me down----"
And again she hummed to herself in her little tune; inaudible, exultant.
The shining triangle of sunlight disappeared from the platform. All became level light about her. It seemed growing colder. And beyond her, far ahead, she spied a sweep of monotonous grey.
She guessed what that meant.
"The sea!" she told herself, thrilled. "We"ll be flying over the sea soon. _Then_ he can"t do anything about sending me back. Then I shall put up these goggles and push this cap off my curls. Then he"ll see.
He"ll know that it"s me that"s flying with him!" And she held away from herself that thought that even so this flight could not last for ever, there would be the descent in France, the good-bye that she had evaded--No! It must last!
Again she forgot all else in the rushing joy of it.
Suddenly she felt something jolt hard against her left arm, for the first time Paul was trying to attract his pa.s.senger"s attention. Twice her arm was jolted by something. Then she put out her brown gloved hand to it, grasping what had jolted her. She drew it forward as he loosed it to her clutch.
It was a gun; a carbine.
What--Why----?
She remembered something that she had heard Paul say, dim ages ago, when she had watched him in the office, consulting with the Aeroplane Lady over that machine-gun with that wicked-looking little nozzle that he had decided not to mount upon the P.D.Q.
"_It"ll have to be a rifle after all._"
Little Gwenna in her brown disguise sat with this rifle across her knees, wondering.
Why did Paul wish Mr. Ryan to be armed with this? Why hadn"t he handed over that carbine just when they were about to start? Why only now, just when they had got as far as the sea?
For she was certain now that what was below them was the sea. There was a bright, silvery glitter to the right, but the floating floor of the biplane shut that out again. To the left all was of a slaty grey. The sun"s level rays shot along the length of the biplane as if it were down a gallery.
Gwenna sat there, holding that carbine across her brown wrapped knees, and still puzzling over it. Why had Paul handed the thing over, so suddenly? She could not see the reason.
Even when it appeared she did not at first see the reason.
Paul Dampier had been quicker to see it than she.
Of a sudden there broke out--there is no other word for it--a silence more startling than all that harsh raving of the propeller that had been stopped. At the same instant Gwenna felt the floor fall away suddenly on her left and mount as dizzily on her right. The biplane was tilted up in the air just as a ladder is tilted against the side of the house. And the engine was giving short staccato roars into the silences as Paul kept her going. He had shut off, and was making a giddy swoop down, down to the left. She heard his voice. Sharply he cried out:
"There! Out to the left! The Taube! There he is!"
The next moment the engine was roaring again. The biplane had lifted to the opposite curve of a swooping figure eight.
And now the girl in the pa.s.senger-seat saw in the air beside them, scarcely two hundred yards away, what the pilot had seen.
It was another aeroplane; a monoplane.