"Nothing would happen," Hugo a.s.sured her, holding out a lighted match.
"That"s why it would be rather interesting to watch. The complication of the Aeroplane or the Lady. The struggle in the mind of the young Inventor, what? The Girl"--he tossed aside the match and glanced fleetingly at the grave cherub"s-face under Gwenna"s white-winged hat--"The Girl versus the Flying Machine. I"d lay fifteen to one on the Machine, Miss Long."
"Done," said Leslie, demurely but promptly. "In half-crowns."
"Yes! You"d back your s.e.x, of course," Hugo took up gaily. The young Frenchman murmured: "But the Machine--the Machine is also of the s.e.x of Mademoiselle."
Here, suddenly, the silently listening Gwenna gave a tiny shiver. She turned her head abruptly towards the open windows behind her with the strutting pigeons and the sailing clouds beyond. It had seemed to the fanciful Celt that there in that too dainty room now hazy with cigarette-smoke, in that careless company of two girls and three young men, she had felt the hint of another Presence. It was rather horrid and ghostly--all this talk of a Machine that was made more of than a Woman!
A Machine who "clawed" the man that owned her, just like a jealous betrothed who will not let her lover out of her sight! And supposing that Conflict did come, on which Gwenna"s chum and Mr. Dampier"s cousin had laid their laughing bets? The struggle between the sweetheart of steel springs and the sweetheart of soft flesh and warm blood? For one clear instant Gwenna knew that this fight would, must come. It was coming----
Then she turned her head and forgot her presentiments; coming back to the light-hearted Present. She watched Leslie, to whom the young Frenchman had been talking; he was now fixing dark earnest eyes upon "Mademoiselle Langue" as she, in the rather stilted phraseology with which our nation speaks its own language for the benefit of foreigners, expounded to him an English story.
There was a short pause.
Then the room rang to the laughter of the foreigner. "Ha! Yes! I have understood him! It is very amusing, that! It is good!" he cried delightedly, with a flash of white teeth and dark eyes. "He say, "There are parts of it that are excellent!" Aha! _Tres spirituel_," and he laughed again joyously over the story of the Curate"s Egg, while Hugo murmured something about how stimulating it was to hear, for once, the Immemorial Anecdote fall upon Virgin Soil.
The young Airman moved nearer to Gwenna, who, still watching Leslie, gave a little start to hear that deep and gentle voice so close beside her as he spoke.
"Look here, we haven"t settled up yet," he said, his voice gentle but carrying above the chatter of the others. "About that flying. Sunday this week I have got to be off somewhere. Now, are you free next Sat.u.r.day?"
Gwenna, eager and tremulous, was just about to say, "Yes." But Hugo Swayne interrupted.
"I say, I hate to make mischief. But if you"re talking about Sat.u.r.day----? D"you remember, Paul? It was the only day I could take you down to Ascot to see Colonel Conyers."
"Oh, Lord, so it was," said the young Airman, turning an apologetic face to the girl. "I"m so sorry," he explained, "but this is a man I"ve simply got to get hold of if I can. It"s the Air-craft Conyers--"Cuckoo"
Conyers they call him. And he was a friend of Hugo"s father, and what I"ve been trying to see him about is working the War-office to take up my new Machine----"
"The _Fiancee_ again, you notice," laughed his cousin, with an imperceptible aside to Leslie. "Score to the Aeroplane."
"Yes, I see," said Gwenna, nodding at the Airman. "Of course! I mean of course I don"t mind!"
"Then shall we say Sat.u.r.day week for you to come up with me instead?"
suggested young Dampier.
And Gwenna agreed to the date, thinking, "If only nothing stops it again! If only there isn"t something else, then, to do with his Machine!
That Machine! I----" Here she paused.
After all, it would be too ridiculous to allow oneself even to think that one "_hated_" a machine!
CHAPTER IX
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
Eagerly as Gwenna longed to fly, she was not to do so even yet.
After that appointment made at Hugo Swayne"s rooms she lived through a fortnight of dreaming, tingling antic.i.p.ation. Then came another of those brief direct notes from "_hers, P. Dampier_." The girl jumped for joy.
It was not to be at Hendon this time, but at Brooklands. Was she not rapidly gaining experiences? First Hendon, then Brooklands; at this rate she would soon know all the flying-grounds--Sh.o.r.eham, Eastchurch, Farnborough, all of them!
"I"ll call for you," the note said, "in the car."
""_The_" car is good," commented Leslie, arranging a mist-blue scarf over Gwenna"s small hat just before she started off on this expedition.
"_In the Army all things are in common, including money and tobacco_ but the Dampier boy isn"t in the Army."
"Why shouldn"t he?" took up Gwenna, ungrammatically and defiantly. She considered Mr. Swayne"s motor was honoured by this other young man who condescended to drive it, to fetch and whirl away with him a girl who felt herself a nymph about to be swept up and up above the clouds to some modern version of Elysium.
So twelve o"clock that Sat.u.r.day morning (Gwenna having obtained special leave of absence from the office) found the young man and the girl speeding through Kensington and Hammersmith, on the Woking Road.
The sun was hot above them; the road white; the hedges so dusty that they seemed grey ribbons streaming past. Gwenna scarcely realised how they went. She sat there beside him, thrilled and breathless, hardly knowing to which delight to give herself up, that of the coming flight, that of the present swift drive in the fresh breeze, or that of the companionship of this DemiG.o.d of Modern Times, whose arm almost touched hers sometimes as he moved or turned, or put on the brake.
Except for an occasional remark to the car: "Come on, don"t be funny, old lady, don"t be funny," or "Now for the hills; watch her sit down and laugh at "em!" he spoke little; Gwenna didn"t particularly want him to speak. The girl was in a golden and moving dream, and scarcely knew where it carried her.
She came out of that dream, not with a shock, but gradually. Was the car slowing down? It stopped; stopped in a wide part of that dust-white road between the tall, dust-grey hedges, opposite to a creosoted telegraph-pole spiked with nails. Through a gap in the hedge Gwenna caught sight of a moon-daisied field, with a dark hedge and trees beyond. Not a house, not a cottage in sight. This couldn"t be Brooklands?
"Hul-lo," the boy was muttering. "What"s up now?"
"What is it?" she asked.
He did not reply. This was not rudeness, as she guessed, but intentness; he took it for granted that she would not understand the mechanical explanation. Resignedly she said to herself, "Machinery gone wrong?
Sometimes it really seems as if that were all machinery ever _did_ do!
Yet that"s what he said he was interested in, more than anything!"
He was out of the car and had flung back the bonnet. Then he took off his coat and hung it up on one of the nails on that telegraph-pole. He pushed up his shirt-sleeves and bent over the tool-box on the step.
Sitting there on the hot leather, Gwenna watched him, she heard the c.h.i.n.king of wrenches and spanners. Then he returned to the bonnet again, fumbling, handling, burrowing, grunting at things.... Ten minutes elapsed....
He then broke out emphatically: "Oh, _Lord_! I _have_ done it _now_!"
"Done what?" asked the girl anxiously.
In tightening a nut with a spanner the spanner had slipped. He had broken the porcelain insulation of the plug controlling the current.
And now, good-humouredly smiling at his guest, he leaned on the door of the car with his brown forearms crossed and said, "Short circuited. Yes.
I"m afraid that"s killed it."
"Killed what?" asked little Gwenna, in affright.
"Our flying for to-day," he said.
He went on to speak about "spare parts," and how it would be necessary to send some one back to fetch--something--Gwenna didn"t care what it was. Her heart sank in dismay. No flying? Must they go back after all, now?
"Can"t we get on?" she sighed.