Chapter 3

Gwenna, who was always bubbling over with young curiosity about the
fresh _people_ whom she was to meet at a party, had never taken overmuch
interest in the _places_ where the party might be held.

She had not yet reached the age when, for information about new
acquaintances, one glances first at their background.

To her the well-appointed though slightly "Art"-y Smith establishment
where her friend was taking her to dine was merely "a married house."
She took for granted the arrangements thereof. She lumped them all--from
the slim, deferential parlour-maid who ushered them through a
thickly-carpeted corridor with framed French etchings into a spacious
bedroom where the girls removed their wraps, down to the ivory,
bemonogrammed pin-tray and powder-box in front of the big mirror--she
lumped these all together as "things you have when you're _married_."

It never struck her--it never strikes eight out of ten young girls--that
Marriage does not necessarily bring these "things" with their subtle
assurance of ease, security, and dignity in its train. She never thought
about it. Marriage indeed seemed to her a sort of dullish postscript to
what she imagined must be a thrilling letter.

Why _must_ nearly all married people become so stodgy? Gwenna simply
couldn't imagine herself getting stodgy--or fat, like this married
sister of Leslie Long's, who was receiving her guests in the large
upstairs drawing-room into which the two girls were now shown.

This room, golden and creamy, seemed softly aglow. There were standard
lamps with huge amber crinolines, bead-fringed; and flowers--yellow
roses and white lilies--seemed everywhere.

Leslie Long drew one of the lilies out of a Venetian vase and held it
out, like an usher's rod, towards Gwenna as she followed her into the
bright, bewildering room, full of people. She announced, "Maudie, here's
the stop-gap. Taffy Williams, your hostess."

Her hostess was a version of Leslie grown incredibly matronly. Her
auricula-coloured velvet tea-gown looked as if it had been clutched
about her at the last moment. (Which in point of fact it had. Mrs. Smith
was quite an old-fashioned mother.) Yet from her eyes smiled the
indestructible Girl that is embedded in so many a respectable matron,
and she looked down very kindly at Gwenna, the cherub-headed, in her
white frock.

Mr. Smith, who had a large smooth face and a bald head, gave Gwenna a
less cordial glance. Had the truth been known, he was sulking over the
non-appearance of the intelligent young woman (from the Poets' Club)
whose place was taken by this vacuous-looking flapper (his summing-up
of Miss Gwenna Williams). For Gwenna this bald and wedded patriarch of
forty-five scarcely existed. She glanced, nervous and fluttered and
interested, towards the group of other guests gathered about the nearer
of the two flower-filled fireplaces; a pretty woman in rose-colour and
two men of thirty or thereabouts, one of whom (rather stout, with an
eye-glass, a black stock-tie, and a lock of brown hair brought down
beside his ear like a tiny side-whisker) made straight for Leslie Long.

"Now _don't_ attempt to pretend we haven't met," Gwenna heard him say in
a voice of flirtatious yearning. "Last time you cut my dance----"

Here the maid announced, from the door, some name.... Gwenna, standing
shyly, as if on the brink of the party, heard the hostess saying: "We
hardly hoped you'd come ... we know you people always are besieged by
invitations----"

"Dear me! All these people seem dreat-fully grand," thought the Welsh
girl hastily to herself. "I wonder if it wouldn't have been better, now,
if Leslie had left that cerise velvet trimming as it was on my dress?"

Instinctively she glanced about for the nearest mirror. There was a big
oval gilt-framed one over the yellow brocaded Empire couch near which
Gwenna stood. Her rather bewildered brown eyes strayed from the stranger
faces about her to the reflection of the face and figure that she best
knew. In the oval of gilded leaves she beheld herself framed. She looked
small and very young with her cherub's curls and her soft babyish
white gown and that heaven-coloured sash. But she looked pretty. She
hoped she did....

Then suddenly in that mirror she caught sight of another face, a face
she saw for the first time.

She beheld, looking over her white-mirrored shoulder, the reflection of
a young man. Clear-featured, sunburnt but blonde, he carried his fair
head tilted a little backward, and his eyes--strange eyes!--were looking
straight into hers. They were clear and blue and space-daring eyes, with
something about them that Gwenna, not recognising, would have summed up
vaguely as "like a sailor's." ... They were eyes that seemed to have
borrowed light and colour from long scanning of far horizons. And now
all that keenness of theirs was turned, like a searchlight, to gaze into
the wondering, receptive glance of a girl....

Who was this?

Before Gwenna turned to face this stranger who had followed their
hostess up to her, his gaze seemed to hold hers, as a hand might have
held her own, for longer than a minute....

Afterwards she told herself that it seemed, not a minute, but an age
before that first look was loosed, before she had turned round to her
hostess's, "I want to introduce Mr.----"

(Something or other. She did not catch the name.)

"_He's_ nice!" was the young girl's pristine and uncoloured first
impression.

Then she thought, "Oh, if it's this one who's going to take me in to
dinner, I _am_ glad!"

It was he who was to take her in.

For Mr. Smith took the pretty lady whose name, as far as Gwenna was
concerned, remained "Mrs. Rose-colour." Her husband, a neutral-tinted
being, went in with Mrs. Smith. The man with the side-whisker (who, if
he'd been thinner, certainly might have looked rather like the portrait
of Chopin) laughed and chattered to Leslie as they went downstairs
together. Gwenna, falling to the lot of the blue-eyed young man as a
dinner-partner, altered her mind about her "gladness" almost before she
came to her third spoonful of clear soup.

For it seemed as if this young man whose name she hadn't caught were not
really "nice" after all! That is, of course, he wasn't "_not_ nice." But
he seemed stupid! Nothing in him! Nothing to say! Or else very
absent-minded, which is just as bad as far as the other people at a
party are concerned. Or worse, because it's rude.

Gwenna, taking in every detail of the pretty round table and the lights
under the enormous parasol of a pink shade, approving the banked
flowers, the silver, the glass, those delicious-looking chocolates in
the filigree dishes, the tiny "Steinlen-kitten" menu-holders, Gwenna,
dazed yet stimulated by the soft glitter in her eyes, the subdued buzz
of talk in her ears, stole a glance at Leslie (who was looking her best
and probably behaving her worst) and felt that every prospect was
pleasing--except that of spending all this time beside that silent,
stodgy young man.

"Perhaps he thinks it's me that's too silly to talk to. I knew Leslie'd
made me look too young with this sash! Yes! _indeed_ I look like some
advertisement for Baby's Outfitting Department," thought Gwenna, vexed.
"Or is it because he's the kind of young man that just sits and eats and
never really sees or thinks about anything at all?"

Now, had she known it at the time, the thoughts of the blonde and
blue-eyed youth beside her were, with certain modifications, something
on these lines.

"Dash that stud! Dash the thing. This pin's going into the back of my
neck directly. I know it is. That beastly stud must have gone through a
crack in the boards.... I shall buy a bushel of 'em to-morrow. Why a
man's such a fool as to depend upon one stud.... I know this pin's going
into the back of my neck when I'm not thinking about it. I shall squawk
blue murder and terrify 'em into fits.... What have we here?" (with a
glance from those waking eyes at the menu). "Good. Smiths always do
themselves thundering well.... Now, who are all these frocks? The Pink
'Un. That's a Mrs.... Damsel in the bright yellow lampshade affair
about six foot high, that old Hugo's giving the glad eye to. Old
Hugo weighs about a stone and a half too much. Does _him_self
a lot _too_ well. Revolting sight. I wonder if I can work the
blood-is-thicker-than-water touch on him for a fiver afterwards?...
This little girl I've got to talk to, this little thing with the neck
and the curly hair. Pretty. _Very_ pretty. Knocks the shine out of the
others. I know if I turn my head to speak to her, though, that dashed
pin will cut adrift and run into the back of my neck. _Dash_ that stud.
Here goes, though----"

And, stiffly and cautiously moving his head in a piece with his
shoulders, he turned, remarking at last to Gwenna in a voice that,
though deep-toned and boyish, was almost womanishly gentle, "You don't
live in town, I suppose?"

The girl from that remote Welsh valley straightened her back a little.
"Yes, I do live in town, indeed!" she returned a trifle defensively.
"What made you think I lived in the country?"

"Came up yesterday, I s'pose," the young man told himself as the
soup-plates were whisked away.

Gwenna suspected a twinkle in those unusual blue eyes as he said next,
"_Haven't_ you lived in Wales, though?"

"Well, yes, I have," admitted Gwenna Williams in her soft, quaint
accent, "but how did you know?"

"Oh, I guessed. I've stayed there myself, fishing, one time and
another," her neighbour told her. "Used to go down to a farmhouse there,
sort of place that's all slate slabs, and china dogs, and light-cakes
for tea; ages ago, with my cousin. _That_ cousin," and he gave a little
jerk of his fair head towards the black-stocked, Trelawney-whiskered
young man who was engrossed with Miss Long. "We used to--Ah! _Dash!_"
he broke off suddenly and violently. "It's gone down my back now."

Gwenna, startled, gazed upon this stranger who was so good to look at
and so extremely odd to listen to. Gone down his back? She simply could
not help asking, "What has?"

"That pin," he answered ruefully.

Then he tilted back his fair head and smiled, with deep dimples creasing
his sunburnt cheeks and a flash of even white showing between his
care-free, strongly-modelled lips. And hereupon Gwenna realised that
after all she'd been right. He _was_ "nice." He began to laugh outright,
adding, "You must think me an absolute lunatic: I'd better tell you what
it's all about----"

He took a mouthful of sole and told her, "Fact is, I lost my collar-stud
when I was dressing, the stud for the back of my collar; and I had to
fasten my collar down at the last minute with a pin. It's been getting
on my nerves. Has, really. I've been waiting for it to run into the back
of my neck----"

"So that was why he seemed so absent-minded!" thought Gwenna, feeling
quite disproportionately glad and amused over this trifle. She said, "I
_thought_ you turned as if you'd got a stiff neck! I thought you'd been
sitting in a draught."

He made another puzzling remark.

"Draught, by Jove!" he laughed. "It's always fairly _draughty_ where I
have to sit!"

He went on again to mourn over his collar. "Worse than before, now," he
said. "It's going to hitch up to the back of my head, and I shall have
to keep wiggling my shoulder-blades about as if I'd got St. Vitus's
dance!"

Gwenna felt she would have liked to have taken a tiny safety-pin that
there was hidden away under her sky-blue sash, and to have given it to
him to fasten that collar securely and without danger of pricking.
Leslie, she knew, would have done that. She, Gwenna, would have been too
shy, with a perfect stranger--only, now that he'd broken the ice with
that collar-stud, so to speak, she couldn't feel as if this keen-eyed,
deep-voiced young man were any longer quite a stranger. In her own
dialect, he seemed, now, "so homely, like----"

And over the next course he was talking to her about home, about the
places where he'd fished in Wales.

"There was one topping little trout-stream," he told her in that deep
and gentle voice. "Bubbly as soda-water, green and clear as
bottle-glass. Awfully jolly pools under the shade of the branches. You
look right down and it's all speckly at the bottom, with brown-and-grey
stones and slates and things, under the green water. It's like----"

He was looking straight at her, and suddenly he stopped. He had caught
her eyes, full; as he had caught them before dinner in that mirror. Now
that he was so close to them he saw that they were clear and
browny-green, with speckles of slate-colour. They were not unlike those
pools themselves, by Jove.... Almost as if he had been fishing for
something out of those depths he still looked down, hard into them....
He forgot that he had stopped talking. And then under his own eyes he
saw the little thing begin to colour up; blushing from that sturdy white
throat of hers to the brow where those thick brown cherub's-curls began
to grow. He looked away, hastily. Hastily he said, "It--er--it had a
pretty name, that stream. Quite a pronounceable Welsh name, for once:
The Dulas."

"Oh, dear me! Do _you_ know the Dulas?" cried Gwenna Williams in
delight, forgetting that she had just been feeling acutely conscious and
shy under the fixed stare of a pair of searching blue eyes. "Why! It's
not very far from there that's my home!"

They went on talking--about places. Unconsciously they were leading the
whole table after them; the jerkiness went out of sentences; the pitch
of the talk rose. It was all a buzz to Gwenna; but when, at the joint,
her neighbour turned at last to answer a comment of the rose-coloured
lady on his other hand, she amused herself by seeking to find out what
all the others were talking about.

"I like some of his things very much. Now, his water-colours at the----"
This was Mr. Smith, holding forth about pictures.... There appeared to
be a good deal of it. Ending up with, "And I know for a fact that he
only got two hundred guineas for that; two hundred! Incredible!"

It certainly did seem to Gwenna an incredible amount of money for a
picture, a thing you just hang on a wall and forgot all about. Two
hundred guineas! What couldn't she, Gwenna, do with that! Travel all
over the place for a year! Go flying every week, at Hendon!

"What an experience! What a change it's made in the whole of English
thought!" the pretty, rose-coloured lady was saying earnestly. "We can
never be the same again now. It's set us, as a nation, such an entirely
new and higher standard----"

This was very solemn, Gwenna thought. What was it about?

"I can't imagine, now, how we can have existed for so long without that
point of view," went on Mrs. Rose-colour. "As I say, the first time I
ever saw the Russian Ballet----"

The Russian Ballet--Ah! Gwenna had been with Leslie to see that; she had
thought herself in a fairyland of dazzling colour, and of movement as
wonderful as that of the flying biplanes. It had been a magic world of
enchanted creatures that seemed half-bird, half-flower, who whirled and
leaped, light as blown flame, to strangest music.... Gwenna had been
dazed with delight; but she could not have talked about it as these
people talked. "Mr. Rose-colour," Mr. Smith, and Leslie's whiskered
young man were all joining in together now.

"You won't deny that a trace of the Morbid----"

"But that hint of savagery is really the attraction," Mr. Smith
explained rather pompously. "We over-civilised peoples, who know no
savagery in modern life, who have done with that aspect of evolution, I
suppose we welcome something so----"

"Elemental----"

"Primitive----"

"Brutal?" suggested Mrs. Rose-colour, appreciatively.

"And that infinitude of gesture----" murmured the whiskered man, eating
asparagus.

"Yes, but Isadora----"

"Ah, but Karsavina!"

"You must admit that Nijinski is ultra-romantic----"

"_Define_ Romance!"

"Geltzer----"

"Scheherazade----"

Utterly bewildered by the strange words of the language spoken by half
London in early summer, Nineteen-fourteen, the young girl from the wilds
sought a glimpse of her friend's black-swathed head and vivid, impish
face above the banked flowers of the table-centre. Did Leslie know all
these words? Was she talking? She was laughing flippantly enough;
speaking as nonchalantly.

"Yes, I'm going to the next Chelsea Arts Ball in that all-mauve rig he
wears in the 'Spectre de la Rose.' I am. Watch the effect. 'Oh, Hades,
the Ladies! They'll leave their wooden huts!' _You_ needn't laugh, Mr.
Swayne"--this to the Chopin young man. "_Any_body would be taken in. I
can look quite as much of a man as Nijinski does. In fact, far----"

Here suddenly Gwenna's neighbour leaned forward over the table towards
his hostess and broke in, his deep, gentle voice carrying above the
buzz.

"Mrs. Smith! I say! I beg your pardon," he exclaimed quickly, "but isn't
that a baby crying like anything somewhere?"

This remark of the young man's, and that which followed it, surprised
and puzzled Gwenna even more than his curious remark about draughts. Who
was he? What sort of a young man was this who always sat in draughts and
who could catch the sound of a baby's cry when even its own mother
hadn't heard it through the thick _portiere_, the doors, the walls and
that high-pitched buzz of conversation round about the table?

For Mrs. Smith had fled from the table with a murmured word of apology,
and had presently returned just as the ornate fruit-and-jelly mould was
being handed round, and Gwenna heard her saying to Mrs. Rose-colour,
"Yes, it was. He's off again now. He simply won't go down for Nurse--I
always have to rush----"

Gwenna turned to her companion, whose collar was now well up over the
back of his neck. Wondering, she said to him, "_Fancy_ your hearing
that, through all this other noise!"

"Ah, one gets pretty quick at listening to, and placing, noises," he
told her, helping himself to the jelly and shrugging his shoulders and
that collar at the same time. "It's being accustomed to notice any
squeak that oughtn't to be there, you know, in the engines. One gets to
hear the tiniest sound, through anything."

Gwenna, more puzzled than before, turned from that delectable pudding on
her plate, to this strangely interesting young man beside her. She said:
"Are you an engineer?"

"I used to be," he said. "A mechanic, you know, in the shops, before I
got to be a pilot."

"A pilot?" She wondered if he thought it rude of her, if it bothered him
to be asked questions about himself like this, by just a girl? And still
she couldn't help asking yet another question.

She said, "Are you a sailor, then?"

"Me?" he said, as if surprised. "Oh, no----"

And then, quite simply and as if it were nothing, he made what was to
Gwenna an epic announcement.

"I'm an airman," he said.

She gasped.

He went on. "Belong to a firm that sends me flying. Taking up passengers
at Hendon, that sort of thing."

"An airman? _Are_ you?" was all that Gwenna could for the moment reply.
"Oh ... _Oh!_"

Perhaps her eyes, widening upon the face above her, were more eloquent
of what she felt.

That it was to her a miracle to find herself actually sitting next to
him! Actually speaking to one of these scarcely credible beings whom she
had watched this afternoon! _An airman_.... There was something about
the very word that seemed mysterious, uncanny. Was it because of its
comparative newness in the speech of man? Perhaps, ages ago, primitive
maids found something as arresting in the term "_A seaman_"? But this
was an airman! It was his part to ride the Winged Victory, the aeroplane
that dared those sapphire heights above the flying-ground. Oh! And she
had been chattering to him about the slate-margined brooks and the ferny
glens of her low-lying valley, just as if he'd been what this ingenuous
maid called to herself "_Any_ young man" who had spent holidays fishing
in Wales? She hadn't known. _That_ was why he had those queer, keen
eyes: blue and reckless, yet measuring.

Not a sailor's, not a soldier's ... but the eyes of Icarus!...

"I--I never heard your name," said Gwenna, a little breathless, timid.
"Which is it, please?"

For reply he dabbed a big, boyish finger down on the slender name-card
among the crumbs of his bread. "Here you are," he said, "Dampier; Paul
Dampier."

So whirling and bewildered was Gwenna's mind by this time that she
scarcely wondered over the added surprise. This, she just realised, was
the name she had first heard bellowed aloud through the megaphone from
the judges' stand. She hardly remembered then that a photograph of this
same aviator was tossed in among her wash-leather gloves, velvet
hair-bands, and her handkerchief-sachet in the top right-hand drawer of
her dressing-table at the Club. Certainly she did not remember at this
minute what she had said, laughing, over that portrait, to her two
friends on the flying-ground.

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
pronounced 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
sturdy, 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.