CHAPTER VI
THE WINGED VICTORY
Now Gwenna, although she"d been clerk and a.s.sistant to the Aeroplane Lady herself, and although she loved the idea of aeroplanes as other girls have loved the idea of jewels, scarcely knew one pattern of monoplane from another.
They were all the same to her as far as overlapping the seams with the doped strips was concerned. Nevertheless, in this machine that seemed suddenly to have appeared out of nowhere, there struck her something that was quite unfamiliar. Never before had she seen that little blade-shaped drag from the tips of the wings. It gave to this machine the look of a flying pigeon.... She had only noticed it for a moment, as the monoplane had lurched, as it were, into view over the edge of their own lower plane. Then it lurched out of sight again.
Again their engine was shut off; and again she heard Paul"s voice, excited, curt.
"Can you get him, do you think?"
Get him? Bewilderingly she wondered what Paul could mean. Then came another staccato rush of sound. Then another silence, and Paul"s voice through it.
"All right. I"ll get above him; and you can shoot through the floor."
The engine brayed again, this time continuously.
"Shoot!" gasped Gwenna.
Shoot at that machine through the hole in the floor of this one? It was a German craft, then? And Paul meant Mr. Ryan to shoot whoever was in that machine. And she, Gwenna, who had never had a gun in her hands before in her life, found herself in the midst of War, told to shoot----
Hardly knowing one end of the thing from the other, she grasped the carbine. She guessed that the flyer in the other machine must have realised what Paul meant to do.
They were rising; he was rising too.
And suddenly she became aware that there was sunlight about them no longer. All was a dun and chilly white. Paul, trying to get above the other, and the other trying to prevent him, had both run up together into a cloud. Once before the Welsh girl had had this experience. On a rocky mountain-path up Cader Idris she had walked into a thick mist that wrapped her from seeing anything in front of her, even though she could hear the voices of tourists just a little ahead.
And now here they saw nothing, but they could hear.
Even through the noise of their propeller Gwenna"s ears caught a smaller noise. It seemed to come from just below.
She had got the muzzle of the carbine through the hole at her feet.
Desperately, blindly she fumbled at what she thought must be the trigger. Behind her goggles, she shut her eyes tightly. The thing went off before she knew how it had done so.
Then, nothing....
Then the propeller had stopped again. She felt her shoulder touched from behind. Paul"s voice called, "Got him, Ryan?"
"I--I don"t know," she gasped, turning. "I--_Paul! It"s me!_"
It was a wonder that the biplane did not completely overturn.
Paul Dampier had wrenched himself forward out of the straps and had taken one hand from the wheel. His other clutched Gwenna"s shoulder, and the clutch dragged away the m.u.f.fler at her white throat and her goggles slipped aside. Aghast he glared at her. The Little Thing herself? Here?
"Good---- here, keep still. Great----! For Heaven"s sake, don"t move.
I"ll run for it. He can"t catch me. I was trying to catch him. He can"t touch us---- We"ll race--hold tight, Gwen--ready." He opened the throttle again; while Gwenna, white-faced, took in the tornado of wind with parted lips and turned sideways to stare with wide-open eyes.
Then a number of things seemed to happen very quickly.
The first of these was a sharp "Ping!" on one of the aluminium stays.
Gwenna found herself gazing blankly at the round hole in the wing a yard to the right of her. The next thing was that the fog--mist--or cloud, had disappeared. All was clear sky about them once more. The third thing was that, hardly a stone"s toss away, and only missed by a miracle in the cloud, they saw the monoplane and the aviator in her.
He was bareheaded, for that blind, wild shot of the British girl"s had stripped away his head-covering, and there was a trickle of scarlet down his cheek. His hair was a gilded stubble, his eyes hard and blue and Teutonic. His flying-gear was b.u.t.toned plastron-wise above his chest, just as that white linen jacket of his had been; and Karl Becker, waiter, spy and aviator, gave a little nod, as much as to say that he recognised that they were meeting not for the first time....
One glimpse showed all this. The next instant both German and Englishman had turned to avoid the imminent collision. But the German did more than turn.
He had been fired on and hit; now was his shot. Dampier, with no thought now but to get his wife out of danger, crowded the biplane on. As the machines missed one another by hardly ten feet, she heard the four cracks of Paul"s revolver.
Little Gwenna thought she had never heard anything so fascinating, horrible, and sweet. He was fighting not for his own life only. And he was not now being fired at, far from her, hoping that she need never know. For she also, she was in danger with him; she who did not want to die before him but who would not wish to live for one moment after him.
Moments? When every moment was a whole life, what could be more perilously, unimaginedly sweet than this?
"I knew I had to come," she gasped to herself. "Never away from him again! Never----"
Her heart was racing like the propeller itself with just such speed, such power. More love than it could bear was crowded into every throb of it. For one more of those moments that were more than years she must look at him and see him look at her....
One look!
As they tore through the air she turned in her straps, pushing the curls back from her brow. Her eyes met his, set and intent over the wheel.
She smiled at him.
Up out of the depths of his intentness she saw the answering smile come into his own eyes. He nodded. He meant that it was all right. His lips moved.
"He can"t--touch--us!" he was shouting. His girl threw back her head as far as it would go, offering her face for the kiss that she knew he could not give. He nodded again, laughed outright, and stretched his own head forward. It was all a kiss, despite the constraining straps--or almost all.
More of a kiss than many lovers know, more of a marriage!
For then it was that the German"s shot rang out, completing their caress. Never was dearer nor more precious union, never less pain, so lost was it in rapture. As gently as if he had only just said Good-night the boy"s head sank on the wheel; as for hers, it never moved. She still lay, leaning back with lips parted, as if to-morrow would see her kissed awake again.... His hands twitched once only. That movement cut off the throttle. Again, for the last time, the propeller stopped.
The Taube was already a vanishing speck in the distance....
The P.D.Q. yawed, hung poised, began to slide tail first, and gathered speed.
Up, up came the silver waves of the English Channel.
POSTSCRIPT
MYRTLE AND LAUREL LEAF
It was the week before Christmas, Nineteen-fourteen.