There, she had admired the machine; that un-Antaeus-like thing that was not itself until it had shaken off the fetters of Earth from its skids and wheels. Here, she marvelled over the man; _for he was part of it_.
He was its skill and its will. He was the planner of those curves and bankings and soarings, those vol-planes that had left, as it were, their lovely lines visible in the air. His Icarian mind had determined--his large but supple body had executed them.
A girl could understand that, without understanding how it was all done.
Those big, boyish hands of his, of course, would grasp certain mechanisms; his feet, too, would be busy; his knees--every inch of his lithe length and breadth--every muscle of him; yes! even to the tiny muscles that moved his wonderful eyes.
"I saw you, then," she told him, in a dazed little voice. "I was at Hendon this afternoon! It was the first time in my life...."
"Really?" he said. "What did you think of it all?"
"Oh, splendid!" she said, ardently, though vaguely.
How she longed to be able to talk quickly and easily to anybody, as Leslie could! How stupid he--the Airman--must think her! A little shakily she forced herself to go on: "I did think it so wonderful, but I can"t explain, like. Ever. I _never_ can. But----"
Perhaps, again, she was explaining better than she knew, with that small, eager face raised to his.
"Oh!" she begged. "Do _tell_ me about it!"
He laughed. "Tell you what? Isn"t much to tell."
"Oh, yes, there must be! You tell me," she urged softly, unconscious that her very tone was pure and concentrated flattery. "Do!"
And with another short, deprecating laugh, another shrug to his collar, the boy began to "tell" her things, though the girl did not pretend to understand. She listened to that voice, strong and deep, but womanishly gentle. She forgot that by rights she ought to pay some attention to her neighbour, the imitation Chopin. She listened to this other.
Words like "_controls_," "_pockets_," "_yawing_," went in at one of the ears under her brown curls and out at the other, leaving nothing but a quivering atmosphere of "the wonderfulness" of it all. Presently she saw those hands of his, big, sensitive, clever, arranging forks and spoons upon the sheeny tablecloth before her.
"Imagine that"s your machine," he said. "Now you see there are three possible movements. _This_"--he tilted a dessert-knife from side to side--"_and this_"--he dipped it--"_and this_, which is yawing--you understand?"
"No!" she confessed, with the quickest little gesture. "I couldn"t understand those sort of things. I shouldn"t want to. What I really want to know is--well, about _it_, like!"
"About what?"
"About _flying_!"
He laughed outright again. "But, that _is_ flying!"
She shook her head. "No, not what I mean. That"s all--machinery!" She p.r.o.nounced the word "machinery" with something almost like disdain. He looked at her as if puzzled.
"Sorry you aren"t interested in machinery," he said quite reprovingly, "because, you know, that"s just what I _am_ interested in. I"m up to my eyes in it just now, pretty well every minute that I can spare. In fact I"ve got a machine--only the drawings for it, of course, but----"
"Do you mean you"ve _invented_ one?"
"Oh, I don"t know about "invent." Call it an improvement. It should be about as different from the lumbering concern you saw me go up in to-day as that"s different from--say from one of those old Cambrian Railway steam engines," he declared exultantly. "It"s----"
Here, he plunged into another vortex of mysterious jargon about "automatic stability," about "skin friction," and a hundred other matters that left the listening girl as giddy as a flight itself might have done.
What she did understand from all this was that here, after all, in the Machine, must be the secret of all the magic. This was what interested the Man. An inventor, too, he talked as if he loved to talk of it--even to her; his steel-blue eyes holding her own. Perhaps he didn"t even see her, she thought; perhaps he scarcely remembered there was a girl there, leaving strawberries and cream untasted on an apple-green plate, listening with all her ears, with all of _herself_--as he, with all of himself, guided a machine. Ah, he talked of a just-invented machine as in the same tone Gwenna had heard young mothers talk of their new-born babies.
This was what he lived for!
"Yes," concluded the enthusiast with a long sigh, "if I could get that completed, and upon the market----"
"Well?" Gwenna took up softly; ignorant, but following his every change of tone. "Why can"t you?"
"Why not? For the usual reason that people who are keen to get things done can"t do "em," the boy said ruefully, watching that responsive shadow cloud her face as he told her. "It"s a question of the dashed money."
"Oh!" said the girl more softly still. "I see."
So he, too, even he knew what it was to find that fettering want of guineas clog a soaring impulse? What a _shame_, she thought....
He thought (as many another young man with a Subject has thought of some rapt and girlish listener!) that the little thing was jolly intelligent, _for_ a girl, more so than you were supposed to expect of such a pretty face---- Pretty? Come to look at her she was quite lovely.
Made that baggage in the yellow dress and the Mrs. in the Pink look like a couple of half-artificial florists" blooms by the side of a lily-of-the-valley freshly-plucked from some country garden, sappy and st.u.r.dy, and sweet. And her skin was like the bit of mother-of-pearl she was wearing as a heart-shaped locket.
Quite suddenly he said to her: "Look here! Should you care to go up?"
Gwenna gasped.
The whole room, the bright table and the chattering guests seemed now to whirl about her in a circle of shiny mist--as that aeroplane propeller had whirled.... Care to go up? "_Care!_" Would she? Would she _not_?
"Oh----" she began.
But this throbbing moment was the moment chosen by her hostess to glance smilingly at Mrs. Rose-colour and to rise, marshalling the women from the room.
CHAPTER IV
THE SONG OF ALL THE AGES
"Now isn"t life _extraordinary_?" thought Gwenna Williams, incoherently in the drawing-room as she sat on the yellow Empire sofa under the mirror, holding a tiny coffee-cup and answering the small-talk of kindly Mrs. Smith. "Fancy, before this afternoon I"d never seen any flying! And now on the very same evening I"m asked to go flying myself! Me! Just like that girl who was with him in the race! (I wonder is she a great friend of his.) I wonder when he"ll take me? Will he come and settle about it--oh, I do hope so!--before we all have to go away?"
But there was no chance of "settling" this for some time after the door opened to a little commotion of ba.s.s laughter, a trail of cigar-scent, and the entrance of the man.
Mrs. Rose-colour, with some coquettish remark that Gwenna didn"t catch, summoned the tall airman to the yellow-brocaded pouffe at her feet. Her husband crossed over to Gwenna (who suddenly discovered that she hated him) and began talking Welsh folk-songs. Whereupon Hugo Swayne, fondling his Chopin curl, asked Leslie, who towered above him near the piano, if she were going to sing.
"I"m in such a mood," he told her, "to listen to something rawly and entirely modern!"
"You shall, then," agreed Miss Long, suddenly demure. "D"you know the--er--_Skizzen Macabres_, those deliciously perverse little things of Wedekind"s? They"ve been quite well translated.... Righto, my dear"--in answer to a nervous glance from her sister, "I"ll only sing the _primmer_ verses. The music is by that wonderful new Hungarian person--er--Sjambok."
Her tall golden figure reflected itself in the ebony mirror of the piano as Leslie, with a malicious gleam in the tail of her eye, sat down.
"I shan"t sing for _him_, all the same," she thought. "I shall sing for Taffy and that Air-boy. I bet I can hit on something that _they"ll_ both like.... Yes...."
And she struck the first chords of her accompaniment.
And what was it, this "crudely modern" song that Leslie had chosen for the sake of the two youngest people present at that party?
There is a quintette of banjo-players and harpists who are sometimes "on" at the Coliseum in London, but who are more often touring our Colonies from Capetown to Salter, Sask. And wherever they may go, it seems, they bring down the house with that same song. For, to the hearts of exiled and homesick and middle-aged toilers that simple tune means England, Home and Beauty still. They waltzed to it, long ago in the Nineteenth Century. They "turned over" for some pretty girl who "practised" it. So, when they hear it, they encore it still, with a lump in their throats....