An exquisite May afternoon, still and sunny. Above, a canopy of unflecked sapphire-blue. Below, the broad khaki-green expanse of the flying-ground, whence the tall, red-white-and-blue pylons pointed giant fingers to the sky.
Against the iron railings of the ground the border of chairs was thronged with spectators; women and girls in summery frocks, men in light overcoats with field-glasses slung by a strap about them. The movement of this crowd was that of a breeze in a drift of coloured petals; the talk and laughter rose and fell as people looked about at the great sheds with their huge lettered names, at the big stand, at the parked-up motors behind the seats; at the men in uniform carrying their brass instruments slowly across to the bandstand on the left.
At intervals everybody said to everybody else: "Isn't this just a perfect afternoon for the flying?"
Presently, there passed the turnstile entrance at the back of the parked motor-cars a group of three young girls, chattering together.
One was in pink; one was in cornflower-blue. The girl who walked between them wore all white, with a sunshine-yellow jersey-coat flung over her arm. Crammed well down upon her head she wore a shady white hat, bristling with a flight of white wings; it seemed to overshadow the whole of her small compact, but supple little person, which was finished off by a pair of tiny, white-canvas-shod feet. She was the youngest as well as the smallest of the trio standing at the turnstile. (Observe her, if you please; then leave or follow her, for she is the Girl of this story.)
"This is my show!" she declared. Her softly-modulated voice had a trace of Welsh accent as she added, "I'm paying for this, indeed!"
"No, you aren't, then, Gwenna Williams!" protested the girl in pink (whose accent was Higher Cockney). "We were all to pay for ourselves!"
"Yes; but wasn't it me that made you come into the half-crown places because I was so keen to see a flying-machine close?... I'll pay the difference then, if you must make a fuss. We'll settle up at the office on Monday," said the girl who had been addressed as Gwenna Williams.
With a girlish, self-conscious little gesture she took half a sovereign out of her wash-leather glove and handed it to the tall, be-medalledd commissionaire.
"Come on, now, girls," she said. "This is going to be lovely!" And she led the way forward to that line of seats, where there were just three green chairs vacant together.
Laughing, chattering, gay with the ease of Youth in its own company, the three, squeezed rather close together by the press, sat down; Gwenna, the Welsh girl, in the middle. The broad brim of her hat brushed against the roses of the pink-clad girl's cheaper hat as Gwenna leaned forward.
"Sorry, Butcher," she said. She moved.
This time one of the white wings caught a pin in the hat of the plump blonde in blue, who exclaimed resignedly and in an accent that was neither of Wales nor of England, "Now komm I also into this hat-business of Candlestick-maker. It is a bit of oll right!"
"So sorry, Baker," apologised the girl in white again, putting up her hands to disengage the hat. "I'll take it off, like a matinee. Yes, I will, indeed. We shall all see better." She removed the hat from a small head that was very prettily overgrown with brown, thick, cropped curls. The bright eyes with which she blinked at first in the strong sunlight were of the colour of the flying-ground before them: earth-brown and turf-green mixed.
"I will hold your hat, since it is for me that you take him off," said the girl whom they called Baker.
Her real name was Becker; Ottilie Becker. She worked at the German correspondence of that London office where the other two girls, Gwenna Williams and Mabel Butcher, were typists. It was one of the many small jokes of the place to allude to themselves as the Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick-maker.
All three were excellent friends....
The other two scarcely realised that Gwenna, the Celt, was different from themselves; more absent-minded, yet more alive. A passer-by might have summed her up as "a pretty, commonplace little thing;" a girl like millions of others. But under the ready-made muslin blouse of that season's style there was ripening, all unsuspected, the dormant bud of Passion. This is no flower of the commonplace. And her eyes were full of dreams, innocent dreams. Some of them had come true already. For hadn't she broken away from home to follow them? Hadn't she left the valley where nothing ever went on except the eternal Welsh rain that blurred the skylines of the mountains opposite, and that drooped in curtains of silver-grey gauze over the slate roofs of the quarry-village, set in that brook-threaded wedge between wooded hillsides? Hadn't she escaped from that cage of a chapel house sitting-room with its kitchen-range and its many bookshelves and its steel print of John Bunyan and its maddening old grandfather-clock that always said half-pastt two and its everlasting smell of singeing hearthrug, and never a window open? Yes! she'd given her uncle-guardian no peace until he'd washed his hands over Gwenna's coming up to London. So here she was in London now, making fresh discoveries every day, and enjoying that mixture of drudgery and frivolling that makes up the life of the London bachelor-girl. She was still "fancy-free," as people say of a girl who loves and lives in fancies, and she was still at the age for bosom-friendships. One sincerely adored girl-chum had her confidence. This was a young woman at the Residential Club, where Gwenna lived; not one of these from the office.
But the office trio could take an occasional Saturday jaunt together as enjoyingly as if they never met during the week.
"Postcards, picture postcards!" chanted a shrill treble voice above the buzz of the talking, waiting crowds.
Before the seats a small boy passed with a tray of photographs. These showed views of the hangars and of the ground; portraits of the aviators.
"Postcards!" He paused before that cluster of blue and white and pink frocks. "Any picture postcards?"
"Yes! Wait a minute. Let's choose some," said Miss Butcher. And three heads bent together over the display of glazed cards. "Tell you what, Baker; we'll send one off to your soldier-brother in Germany. Shall we? All sign it, like we did that one to your mother, from the Zoo."
"Ah, yes. A bier-karte!" said the German girl, with her good-natured giggle. "Here, I choose this one. View of Hendon. We write 'Es lassen gruessen unbekannter Weise'--'there send greeting to Karl, the Unknown.'"
"Oh, but hadn't we better send him this awfully nice-looking airman, just as a sort of example of what a young man really can do in the way of appearance, what?" suggested Miss Butcher, picking out another card. "Peach, isn't he? Look! He's standing up in the thingamagig just like an archangel in his car; or do I mean Apollo?--Gwenna'd know.... Which are you going to choose, Gwenna?"
Gwenna had picked out three cards. A view of the ground, a picture of a biplane in mid-air, and a portrait of one of the other airmen.
He had been taken in his machine against the blank background of sky. The big, boyish hands gripped the wheel, the cap, goggles in front, peak behind, was pushed back from the careless, clean-shaven lad's face, with its cheeks creased with deep dimples of a smile.
"This one," said Gwenna Williams. And there was no whisper of Fate at her heart as she announced lightly, "This is my love." (She did not guess, as you do, that here was the portrait of the Boy of this story.)
The other girls leaned across her to look as she added: "He's the most like Icarus, I think."
"Who's Icarus, when he's at home?" inquired Miss Butcher. And Gwenna, out of one of her skimmed books, gave a hurried explanation of Icarus, the first flying-man, the classic youth who "dared the sun" on wings of wax.... Together the girls inspected the postcard of his modern type, the Hendon aviator. They laughed; they read aloud the name "P. Dampier;" they compared his looks with those of other airmen, treating the whole subject precisely as they would have treated the dancing or singing of their favourite actresses in the revues....
For it was still May, Nineteen-fourteen in England. The feeling of warm and drowsy peace in the air was only intensified by the brisk, sharp strains of the military band on the left of the flying-ground, playing the "Light-Cavalry" march....
"Dear me! Are we going on like this for ever?" remonstrated Gwenna presently. "Aren't they ever going up?"
She was answered by a shattering roar from the right.
It ceased. Then, on the field before her excited eyes, there was brought out of one of the hangars by a cluster of mechanics in khaki-brown overalls the Winged Romance that came into this tired and blase world with that most wondrous of all Ages--the Twentieth Century. At first only a long gleaming upper plane, jolting over the uneven ground, could be seen over the heads of the watchers. Then it reached the enclosure. For the first time in her life Gwenna beheld a Maurice Farman biplane.
And for the moment she was a little disappointed, for she had said it was "going to be so lovely!"
She had expected--what? Something that would look more like what it was, the new Bird of man's making. Here the sunlight gleamed on the taut, cambered wings, on the bamboo spars, the varnished blade of the motionless propeller, all shiny as a new toyshop. But the girl saw no grace in it. Its skids rested on the sunburned grass like a couple of ski in the Sketch photographs of winter sports. It had absurd little wheels, too, looking as if, when it had finished skiing, the machine might take to roller-skating. The whole thing seemed gaunt and cumbrous and clogged to the earth. Gwenna did not then know that, unlike Antaeus, this half-godlike creature only awoke to life and beauty when it felt the earth no more.
Then, as she watched, a mechanic, the Daedalus who strapped on the wings for the Icarus seized the propeller, which kicked thrice, rebelliously, and then, with another roar, dissolved into a circle of mist. Other brown figures were clinging to the under parts of the structure, holding it back; Gwenna did not see the signal to let go. All that she saw was the clumsy forward run of the thing as, like a swan that tries to clear its feet of the water, the biplane struggled to free itself from the drag of Earth....
Then, as the wonder happened, the untried and imaginative little Welsh country-girl, watching, gave a gasp. "Ah----!"
The machine was fettered no longer.
Suddenly those absurd skids and wheels had become no more than the tiny feet that a seagull tucks away under itself, and like a gull the biplane rose. It soared, its engine shouting triumph as it sped. Gwenna's heart beat as tensely as that engine. Her eyes sparkled. What they saw was not now a machine, but the beauty of those curves it cut in the conquered air. It soared, it banked, it swayed gently as if on a keel. Swiftly circling, up and up it went, until it seemed to dwindle to something not even larger than the seagull it resembled; then it was a flying-fish, then a dragonfly wheeling in the blue immensity above.
Suddenly, like a fog-signal, there boomed out the voice of the man with the megaphone, the man who made from the judges' stand, behind the committee-enclosure all announcements for the meeting:
"Ladies and gentul MEN," it boomed.
"Mis ter Paul Dampier on a Maurice Farman bi plane!"
The huge convolvulus-trumpet of the megaphone swung round. The announcement was made from the other side of the stand; the sound of that booming voice being subdued as it reached the group of three girls.
"Mister Paul Dampier----"
"You hear, Gwenna? It is your young man," said Miss Baker; Miss Butcher adding, "Hope you had a good look at him and saw if that photo did him justice?"
"From here? Well, how could I? It's not much I could see of him," complained Gwenna, laughing. "He only looked about as big as a knot in a cat's cradle!"
Another roar, another small commotion on the ground. Another of those ramshackle looking giant grasshoppers slid forward and upward into the air. Presently three aeroplanes, then four together were circling and soaring together in the sapphire-blue arena.
Below, a pair of swallows, swift as light, chased each other over the ground, above their own shadows, towards the tea-pavilion.
Yet another flyer winged his tireless way across the aerodrome. He was a droning bee, buzzing and hovering unheeded over a tuft of dusty white clover growing by the rails that were so closely thronged by human beings come to watch and wonder over man's still new miracle of flight.
"Oh, flying! Mustn't it be too glorious!" sighed the Welsh girl, watching the aeroplane that was now scarcely larger than a winged bullet in the blue. "Oh, wouldn't I love to go up! Wouldn't it be Heaven!"
"It's been Heaven for several poor fellows lately," suggested the shrewd, Cockney-voiced little Miss Butcher, grimly, from her right. "What about that poor young What's-his-name, fallen and killed on the spot at twenty-one!"
"I don't call him 'poor,'" declared Gwenna Williams softly. "I should think there could be worse things happen to one than get killed, quickly, right in the middle of being so young and jolly and doing such things----"
"Ah, look! That's it! See that?" murmured a voice near them. "Flying upside down, now, that first one--see him?"
And now Gwenna, at gaze, watched breathlessly the wonder that seemed already natural enough to the multitude; the swoop and curve, the loop and dash and recover of the biplane that seemed for the moment a winged white quill held in a hand unseen, writing its challenge on the blue wall of Heaven itself.
Again the megaphone boomed out through the still and soft June air:
"Ladies and gentul MEN! Pass enger flights from this aer riodrome may now be booked at the office un der this Stand!"
"Two guineas, my dears, for the chance of breaking your necks," commented Miss Butcher. "Three guineas for a longer flight, I believe; that is, a better chance. Well, I bet that if I did happen to have two gleaming golden jimmyohgoblins to my name, I'd find something else to spend 'em on, first!"
"I also!" agreed Miss Baker.
Gwenna moved a little impatiently. She hadn't two guineas, either, to spend. She still owed a guinea, now, for that unjustifiable extravagance, that white hat with the wings. In spite of earning her own living, in spite of having a little money of her own, left her by her father who had owned shares in a Welsh quarry, she never had any guineas! But oh, if she had! Wouldn't she go straight off to that stand and book for a passenger-flight!...
While her covetous eyes were still on the biplane, her ears caught a stir of discussion that came from the motor nearest to the chairs.
A lady was speaking in a softly dominant voice, the voice of a class that recognises no overhearing save by its chosen friends.
"My dear woman, it's as safe as the Tubes and the motor-buses. These exhibition passenger-flights aren't really flying, Cuckoo said. Didn't you, Cuckoo?"
A short deep masculine laugh sounded from behind the ladies, then a drawled "What are they then, what? Haw? Flip-flap, White City, what?"
"Men always pretend afterwards that they've never said anything. Cuckoo told me that when these people 'mean business' they can fly millions of times higher and faster than we ever see them here. He said there wasn't the slightest reason why Muriel shouldn't----"
Here the sound, hard and clear as an icicle, of a very young girl's voice, ringing out:
"And anyhow, mother, I'm going to!"
Glancing round, Gwenna saw a lanky girl younger than herself spring down from the big, dove-grey car, and stride, followed by a tall man wearing a top-hat, to the booking-office below the stand. This girl wore a long brown oilskin coat over her white sweater and her short, admirably-cut skirt; a brown chiffon veil tied over her head showed the shape and the auburn gleam of it without giving a hair to the breeze.
"Lovely to be those sort of people," sighed the enviously watching Gwenna, as other girls from the cars strolled into the enclosure with the notice "COMMITTEE ONLY," and seemed to be discussing, laying bets, perhaps, about the impending race for machines carrying a lady-passenger. "Fancy, whenever any of them want to do or to see or even to be anything, they've only got to say, 'Anyhow, I'm going to!' and there they are! That's the way to live!"
Presently the three London typists were sitting at a table under the green awning and the hanging flower-baskets; one of a score of tables where folk sat and chattered and turned their eyes ceaselessly upwards to the blue sky, pointed at by those giant pylon-fingers, invaded by those soaring, whirring, insolent, space daring creatures of man.
The first biplane had been preparing for the Ladies' Race. Now came the start; with the dropped white flag the announcement from that dominating magnified voice:
"Mis ter Damp ier on a Maurice Far man bi plane ac companied by Miss Mu riel Con yers----"
The German girl put in, "Your man again, Gwenna!"
"My man indeed. And I haven't seen him, even yet," complained the Welsh girl again, laughing over her cup of cooling tea, "only in the photograph! Don't suppose I ever shall, either. It's my fate, girls. Nothing really exciting ever happens to me!" She sighed, then brightened again as she remembered something. "I must be off now.... I've got to go out this evening."
"Anywhere thrilling?" asked Miss Butcher.
"I don't know what it'll be like. It's Leslie Long; it's my friend at the Club's married sister somewhere in Kensington, giving a dinner-party," Gwenna answered in the scrambling New English in which she was learning to disguise her Welshiness, "and there's a girl fallen through at the last minute. So she 'phoned through this morning to ask if this girl could rake any one up."
"How mouldy for you, my dear," said Mabel Butcher in her sympathetic Cockney as the Welsh girl rose, took up her sunshine-yellow coat from the back of her chair and chinked down a shilling upon her thick white plate. "Means you'll have to sit next some youth who only forced himself into his dress-suit for the sake of taking that 'fallen through' girl into dinner. He'll be scowling fit to murder you, I expect, for being you and not her. (I know their ways.) Never mind. Pinch a couple of liqueur-choc'lates off the table for me when the Blighted Being isn't looking, will you? And tell us what he's like on Monday, won't you?"
"All right," promised the Welsh girl, smiling back at her friends. She threaded her way through the tables with the plates of coloured cakes, the brown teapots, the coarse white crockery. She passed behind that park of cars with that leisured, well-dressed, upward-gazing throng. She turned her back on the glimpse beyond them of the green field where the brown-clad mechanics ran up towards the slowly downward swooping biplane.
As she reached the entrance she caught again the announcement of that distant megaphone:
"Ladies and gentul men Pass enger flights may now be booked----"
The band in the distance was playing the dashing tune of the "Uhlanenritt."
Gwenna Williams passed out of the gates beside the big poster of the aeroplane in full flight carrying a girl-passenger who waved a scarf. It was everywhere, that Spring. So was the other notice:
"An afternoon in the country is always refreshing! Flying is always interesting to watch!"
In the dusty bit of lane mended by the wooden sleepers a line of grass-green taxis was drawn up.
Gwenna hesitated.
Should she----? Taxi all the way home to the Ladies' Residential Club in Hampstead where she lived?
Four shillings, perhaps.... Extravagance again! "But it's not an everyday sort of day," Gwenna told herself as she hailed the taxi. "This afternoon, the flying! This evening, a party with Leslie! Oh, and there was I saying to the other girls that nothing exciting ever happened to me!"
For even now every day of her life seemed to this enjoying Welsh ingenue, packed with thrills. Thrills of anticipation, of amusement--sometimes of disappointment and embarrassment. But what did those matter? Supreme through all there glowed the conviction of youth that, at any moment, Something-More-Exciting still might happen....
It might be waiting to happen, waiting now, just round the corner....
All young people know that feeling. And to many it remains the most poignant pleasure that they are to know--that thought of "the party to-night," that wonder "what may happen at it!"
