The Boy with Wings 20Part II · The Aviation Dinner
18
Literature · Romance
The Boy with Wings 20
Part II · The Aviation Dinner
RuckEnglish
Gwenna began to feel a little nervous and intimidated, even in the car that took herself and the Aeroplane Lady and the Airman to the Aviation dinner.
A hundred yards before they reached the portals of the Club in Pall Mall that car stopped. Then it began to advance again a yard or two at a time. A long row of other cars and taxis was ahead, and from them alighted guests in dull black opera hats, with mufflers; once or twice there was the light and jewelled gleam of a woman's wrap, but they were mostly men who were driving up.
"Colonel Conyers," said Paul Dampier to the attendant in the great marble-tiled entrance.
Then he was shown off to the right; Gwenna and the Aeroplane Lady to the dressing-rooms on the left. Before an immense glass they removed their wraps and came out to the waiting-room, the girl all misty-white with the sky-blue sash and the dancing-shoes; the Lady gowned in grey satin that had just the gleam of aluminium in that factory of hers, and with her brooch of the winged serpents fastened at her breast.
They sat down at one of the little polished tables in the waiting-room under the long windows on to Pall Mall; it was a high, light-panelled room, with a frieze of giant roses. A couple of ladies went by to the dressing-room, greeting Mrs. Crew as they passed.
Then there stopped to speak to her a third and older and very handsome lady all in black, with diamonds ablaze in her laces and in her grey, piled-up hair.
"There should be some good speeches to-night, shouldn't there?" said this lady. "All these splendid men!... You know, my dear, take us for all in all"--and she gave a little laugh--"we are splendid!"
"But there are so few of us," said the Aeroplane Lady, ruefully.
The other woman, about to pass on, stopped for a moment again, and looking over her white shoulder said, very seriously, something that both her hearers were to remember. "If England is ever to be saved, it will be by a few."
She went out; and Mrs. Crewe said to Gwenna, "That was Lady----" (Something) "the wife of the man who's as responsible as most people for the security of this Empire----"
Most of the people there seemed to know the Aeroplane Lady quite well, Gwenna noticed, when Paul Dampier came up and took them out into the Central Hall again, where the guests were assembling. The place seemed as high as a cathedral, with a marble floor, and alcoves, and tall, classic, brass tripod things to hold the end of men's cigarettes and ashes. The Aeroplane Lady was at once surrounded by a group of men. Gwenna, feeling very shy and little and of no account, turned to her Airman.
"You said," she murmured reproachfully, "that there weren't going to be a lot of grand people."
"These aren't 'grand,' bless you! People aren't, who are really--well, who 'do things,' as you say. Not nearly as frilly here as at the Smiths, that other dinner," he said, smiling down at her. "I'm going to bring up Colonel Conyers and introduce him to you----"
"Him? Good gracious!" thought the little Welsh girl in consternation to herself. "Colonel Conyers!--oh, no, please--I should be much too frightened----"
But the tall figure had detached itself from a group at a word from Paul Dampier, and Colonel Conyers came up. Gwenna recognised the lean, smiling, half-mischievous face of the soldier who--those ages ago!--had talked to those ladies in the motor-car at Hendon.
This was the man they called "Aircraft Conyers," the man practically at the head of Aeronautics, Paul had, said, the man in whose hands rested (among so many, many other things) the whole career of the inventor of the P.D.Q.! Gwenna, with her curly head whirling, felt inclined to drop a schoolchild's curtsy to this Great One of the Councils of the Earth.
He took her hand into his own long, lean one.
"How d'you do?" he drawled, smiling cheerfully. "Starving, what? I am, I can tell you. Always late here. Won't be long, now. You're at my table, I believe." Then, almost anxiously, "Fond of chocolates? You are? Good. Then I can collect the lot of those little silver dishes around us and pretend it's all for you. It's for me, really."
Gwenna, who was not able to help laughing at this unexpectedness on the part of the great Aircraft Conyers, said: "Are you fond of them?"
"Passionately. Passionately!" said Colonel Conyers with a nod, as he turned to find his own dinner-partner.
"Didn't frighten you much, did he?" laughed Paul Dampier to the Little Thing at his side. "Course he didn't. I'll tell you who most of the others are when we get into the supper-room."
In the great supper-room with its painted ceiling and gilded pillars dinner was laid on a number of small tables for parties of six or eight. Gwenna found herself the only woman at their table, the Aeroplane Lady sitting far down at the other end of the room.
All dazed, the young girl looked about her like a stray bird that has fluttered in through an open window. Beside her, Paul Dampier pointed out to her this celebrity and that at the tables.
"Colonel Conyers you've seen...." (That personage had nodded to the young girl over a stack of pink roses and had made a little movement to show the basket of sweets beside his plate.) "Now that man with the Order, that's Lord" (So-and-So), "Director of Coast Defence. And that" (So-and-So), "Chief Engineer. And that little man one down--in the opposite direction from where I'm looking--that's" (So-and-So), "editor of The Air. Wonderful chap; brains enough to sink a ship."
An extraordinary mixture of men, Gwenna thought, as her glance followed his direction, and he went on talking. Soldiers, sailors, chemists, scientists, ministers; all banded together. Ranks and fortunes were merged. Here were men of position, men of brains, men of money. Men whose names were in all the newspapers, and men the papers had never heard of, all with one aim and object, the furtherance of Civilisation's newest advance: the Conquest of the Air.
The dinner proceeded. Pale amber wine whispered and bubbled in her glass, dishes came and went, but the girl scarcely knew what she ate or drank. She was in a new world, and he had brought her there. She felt it so intensely that presently it almost numbed her. She was long past the stage of excitement that manifests itself in gasps and exclamations. She could speak ordinarily and calmly when Paul Dampier, turning from his talk to a Physical Laboratory man in a very badly brushed coat, asked her: "Well? Find it interesting?"
"You know I do," she said, with a grave little glance.
He said, smiling, "What did you say to the red-haired youth about not going to the matinee with him first?"
"Mr. Ryan? Oh! I just told him I hadn't got over my headache from the smell of dope, and that I was afraid it would tire me too much to do both."
"Pretty annoyed, I expect, wasn't he?"
"Yes, he was," replied Gwenna, with the absolute callousness of a woman in love towards the feelings of any but the one man. She did not even trouble whether it had been the feelings or the vanity of Mr. Peter Ryan that had been hurt. What mattered was that Paul Dampier had not wished her to go to that matinee.
Paul Dampier said, "Well, I cried off an engagement to-night, too. Colonel Conyers wanted to take me back with him. But I'm seeing you home."
"Oh, but you mustn't; you needn't!" she protested happily. "I'm not going down to the Works, you know, to-night. I'm sleeping at the Club. I'm staying this week-end with Leslie."
"With Leslie, are you? M'm. But I'm taking you up to the Club afterwards," he persisted. "A fellow's got to look after"--here he laughed a little as if it were a joke that pleased him--"a fellow's got to look after his fiancee, hasn't he?"
She was a little subdued. She thought for the moment that he had put Colonel Conyers off, not for her, after all! but for that Machine of his. Then she thought: No!--the machine was second now. She said, half in hope, half in dread, "D'you mean the P.D.Q.?"
He turned, with his mouth full of salad, staring whimsically at her.
"The P.D.Q.? What you thinking of? I meant you."
"Me?" She gave a little gasp.
Life and happiness were too much for her again. She felt as if that whispering untouched champagne in her glass had gone to her head. Was it really true--that, that he had said?
"Well, aren't you?" he said gaily, but dropping his voice a little as the conversation rose about them. "Aren't you that to me? Engaged, aren't we?"
"Oh, I don't know," the young girl said, breathlessly. It was as if the moon that one had cried for had suddenly dropped, to lie like a round, silver mirror in one's lap. "Did you mean that, yesterday afternoon?"
"Didn't I mean it before that?" he said, half to himself. "What about all those dances? that time when Hugo dragged me off to that place by the river? Those would have been most incorrect," he teased her, "if we hadn't been. We shall have to be, my dear."
Then an impulse took her. (It is known to any young girl who is sincerely in Love.)
"No. Don't let's----" she said suddenly. "Don't let's be 'engaged'!"
For it seemed to her that a winged Dream was just about to alight and to become a clumsy creature of Earth--like that Aeroplane on the Flying Ground. The boy said, staring at her, "Not be engaged? Why on earth? How d'you mean?"
"I mean, everybody gets 'engaged,'" she explained very softly and rapidly over the bread that she was crumbling in her little fingers. "And it's such a sort of fuss, with writing home, and congratulations, and how-long-has-this-been-going-on, and all that sort of thing! People at tea-parties and things talking about us! I know they would!" declared the Welsh girl with distaste, "and saying, 'Dear me, she looks very young' and wondering about us! Oh, no, don't let's have it! It would seem to spoil it, for me! Don't let's call it anything, need we? Don't let's say anything yet, except to--just US."
"All right," said the boy with an easy shrug. (He was too young to know what he was escaping.) "Sure I don't mind, as long as you're just with me, all the time we can."
She said, wonderfully sedate above the tumult in her heart, "Did you bring my locket with you to-night?"
"No. I didn't. D'you know why? Can't you guess? Because I wanted to give it back to you when I could put it round my Girl's neck," he told her. And she turned away from him, so happily confused again that she could not speak.
She was his Girl; his. And because he was one of this band of brothers, sitting here feasting and talking, each making it his business to contribute his share to the sum of what was to be one of the World's greatest Forces, why! because of that, even she, little Gwenna Williams, could feel herself to be a tiny part of that Force. She was an Aviator's girl--even if it were a wonderful secret that nobody knew, so far, but he and she.
(Already everybody at that table and many others in the room had remarked what a pretty little creature young Dampier's sweetheart was.)
"The King!" announced the President of the Dinner.
There was a movement and a rustle all round the great supper-room as the guests rose to the toast; another rustle as they reseated themselves. One of the celebrities whom Paul had pointed out to her began to speak upon the achievements of Wilbur Wright. At the table next to Gwenna some journalists bent absorbed over scribbling pads. Speech followed speech as the toasts were gone through. The opal-blue haze of cigarette smoke drifted up above the white tables with their rose-pink and ferny decorations. Chairs were pushed sidewards as guests turned alert and listening faces towards the head of the room; and every now and again the grave and concise and pleasantly modulated tones of some speaker-on-the-subject of his heart were broken in upon by a soft storm of applause.
"Colonel Conyers to speak now," murmured Paul to Gwenna, as the long, lean figure that had been sitting opposite to them rose. He stepped backwards, to stand against one of those gilded pillars as he made his speech, responding to the toast that had coupled his name with that of the Flying Wing of the Army.
Gwenna listened with even more breathless attention than she had paid to the other speakers.
Colonel Conyers spoke easily and lightly, as if he had been, not making a speech, but talking to a knot of friends at his house. He reviewed, in terms so simple that even the young girl at his table could follow all he said, the difficulties and the risks of aviation, and the steps that had been taken to minimise those risks. Wind, it seemed, had been in a great measure overcome. Risk from faulty workmanship of machines--that, too, was overcome. Workmanship was now well-nigh as perfect as it could be made.
Here Gwenna glowed with pride, exchanging a glance with her employer far down the tables. This meant their workmanship at Aircraft Factories; their Factory, too! This meant the labours of Mrs. Crewe and of Mr. Ryan, and of Andre, and of the workmen in overalls at the lathes in that noisy central shop. Even the brushful of dope that she, Gwenna, spread conscientiously over each seam of the great wings, played its tiny part in helping to preserve a Flyer's life!
The risk in stability, too, Colonel Conyers said, had been successfully combatted by the gyroscope. There remained, however, Fog and Darkness as the chief perils, which, at the present moment, of July, Nineteen-fourteen, our Airmen had to fight....
In the soldier's lean face that shrewd, half-mischievous smile was flickering as he spoke; his grey trim head turning now and again against the gilded column, his keen eyes fixed upon some objective of his own, his strong hand fidgeting in the small mechanical gesture of a man who is less accustomed to speaking about things than to doing them.
Gwenna thought how different, how entirely different were all these people here from that other dinner-party at the house of the prosperous and artistic Smiths who had found so much to say about the Russian Ballet!
Definitely now Gwenna saw what the chief difference between them was.
Those other people treated and spoke of a pastime as though it were a matter of Life and Death. These people here made Life and Death matters their pastime.
"And these splendid real people are the ones I'm going to belong to," the girl told herself with a glance at the tall boy beside her who had decided her fate. That thought was to glow in the very depths of her, like a firefly nestling at the heart of a rose, for as long as she lived.
The even, pleasant tones of Colonel Conyers went on to give as one of the most hopeful features of aviation the readiness of the quite young man of the present day to volunteer. No sooner was a fatality announced than for one airman who, cheerfully giving his life for the service of his country, had been put out of action, half a dozen promising young fellows were eager to come forward and take his place.
"Two of 'em again yesterday.... Two of his lieutenants, killed in Yorkshire," whispered Paul Dampier, leaning to Gwenna.
She missed the next sentence of Colonel Conyers, which concluded cheerily enough with the hard-worked but heartening reminder that whom the Gods love die young....
Then, with a broadening of that humorous smile and with a glint in his eyes, he referred to "those other people (plump and well-to-do--and quite young people) who do, still, really appear to consider that the whole of a man's duty to his country is to preserve his health for as long as possible and then, having reached a ripe old age, to die comfortably and respectably in his bed!----"
There was a short ripple of laughter about the room; but after this Gwenna heard very little.
Not only was she incapable of taking any more in, but this last sentence pulled her up with a sudden memory of what she had seen, yesterday.
That gun at the Aircraft Works. That pictured presentiment in her own mind.
And she heard again, through Colonel Conyers' pleasant voice, the queer, unexplained words that had haunted her:
"Fired at by both friend and foe."
She thought, "I must ask! I must say something to Paul about that----"
