The Boy with Wings Part 25

She had shaken her black head ineffably over the mental image of it, and had averred, "That sight ought to be added to the Valid and Legitimate Causes for Divorce! A wife ought to be able to consider herself as free as air after the first time that she sees her husband going about the house without a collar. Sordid, unbecoming grey flannel about his neck.

Three half b.u.t.tons, smashed in the wringer, hanging by their last threads to his s.h.i.+rt. And his old slippers bursting out at the side of the toe. And his 'comfortable' jacket on, with matches and fur in all the pockets and a dab of marmalade--also furred--on the front. And himself unshaved, with a zig-zag parting to his hair. I believe some men do go about like this before their wives, and then write wistful letters to the _Daily Mirror_ about, 'Why is Marriage the Tomb of Romance?'"

Gwenna had sniffed. "Oh! _Some_ men! _Those!_"

"Valid cause for Divorce Number Ninety-three: The state of the bedroom floor," Leslie had pursued. "I, s.l.u.t as I am, do pick things up sometimes. Men, never. Ask any married woman you know. Maudie told _me_.

Everything is hurled down, or stepped out of, or merely dropped. And left. Left, my child, for _you_ to gather up. Everything out of the chest-of-drawers tossed upon the carpet. Handkerchiefs, dirty old pipes, s.h.i.+rts, ties, '_in one red burial blent_.' That means he's been 'looking for' something. Mind, _you've_ got to find it. Men are born 'find-silly.' Men never yet have found anything (except the North Pole and a few things like that, that are no earthly good in a villa), but they are for ever _losing_ things!"

Gwenna had given a smile to the memory of a certain missing collar-stud that she had heard much of.

"Yes, I suppose to be allowed to find his collar-studs is what he'd consider '_Paradise enow_' for any girl!" Leslie had mocked. "I mis...o...b.. me that the Dampier boy would settle down after a year of marriage into a regular Sultan of the Hearthrug. Looking upon his wife as something that belongs to him, and goes about with him; like a portmanteau.

Putting you in your place as '_less than the dust beneath his chariot_,' that is, '_beneath his biplane wheels_.'"

"Leslie! I shouldn't mind! I'd _like_ to be! I believe it _is_ my place," Gwenna had interrupted, lifting towards her friend a small face quivering with conviction. "He could make anything he liked or chose of me. What do I care----"

"Not for clothes flung down in rings all over the floor like when a trout's been rising? Nor for trousers left standing there like a pair of opera-gla.s.ses--or concertinas? Braces all tangled up on the gas-bracket?

Overcoat and boots crus.h.i.+ng your new hat on the bed? Seventeen holey socks for you to mend? _All_ odd ones--for _you_ to sort----"

Little Gwenna had cried out: "I'd _want_ to!"

"I'm not afraid you won't get what you want," Leslie had said finally.

"All I hope is that your wish won't fail when you get it!"

And of that Gwenna was never afraid.

"I should not care for him so much if he were not the only one who could make me so happy," she told herself; "and _unless_ the woman's very happy, surely the man can't be. It must mean, then, that he'll feel, some day, that this would be the way to happiness. I'm sure there are _some_ marriages that are different from what Leslie says. Some where you go on being sweethearts even after you're quite old friends, like.

I--I could make it like that for him. I _feel_ I could!"

Yes; she felt that some day (perhaps not soon) she must win him.

Sometimes she thought that this might be when her rival, the perfected machine, had made his name and absorbed him no longer. Sometimes, again, she told herself that he might have no success at all.

"Then, _then_ he'd see there was _something_ else in the world. Then he would turn to me," said the girl to herself. She added, as every girl in love must add, "No one _could_ care as I do."

And one day she found on the leaf of the tear-off calendar in her cottage bedroom a line of verse that seemed to have been written for her. It remained the whole of Browning as far as Gwenna Williams was concerned. And it said:

"_What's Death? You'll love me yet!_"

CHAPTER XVIII

THE OBVIOUS THING

She was in this mood to win a waiting game on the day that Paul Dampier came down to the Aircraft Works.

This was just one of the more wonderful happenings that waited round the corner and that the young girl might hope to encounter any day.

The first she knew of it was from hearing a remark of the Aeroplane Lady's to one of her French mechanics at the lathes.

"This will make the eighteenth pattern of machine that we've turned out from this place," she said. "I wonder if it's going to answer, Andre?"

"Which machine, madame?" the man asked. He was a big fellow, dark and thick-haired and floridly handsome in his blue overalls; and his bright eyes were fixed interestedly upon his princ.i.p.al as she explained through the buzz and the clack and the clang of machinery in the large room, "This new model that Colonel Conyers wants us to make for him."

Gwenna caught the name. She thought breathlessly, "That's _his_ machine!

He's got Aircraft Conyers to take it up and have it made for him! It's _his_!"

She'd thought this, even before the Aeroplane Lady concluded, "It's the idea of a young aviator I know. Such a nice boy: Paul Dampier of Hendon."

The French mechanic put some question, and the Aeroplane Lady answered, "Might be an improvement. I hope so. I'd like him to have a show, anyhow. He's sending the engine down to-morrow afternoon. They'll bring it on a lorry. Ask Mr. Ryan to see about the unloading of it; I may not get back from town before the thing comes."

Now Mr. Ryan was that red-haired pupil who had conducted Gwenna from the station on the day of her first appearance at the Works. Probably Leslie Long would have affirmed that this Mr. Ryan was also a factor in the change that was coming over Gwenna and her outlook. Leslie considered that no beauty treatment has more effect upon the body and mind of a woman than has the regular application of masculine admiration.

Admiration was now being lavished by Mr. Ryan upon the little new typist with the face of a baby-angel and the small, rounded figure; and Mr.

Ryan saw no point in hiding his approval. It did not stop at glances.

Before a week had gone by he had informed Miss Williams that she was a public benefactor to bring anything so delightful to look at as herself into those beastly, oily, dirty shops; that he hated, though, to see a woman with such pretty fingers having to mess 'em up with that vile dope; and that he wondered she hadn't thought of going on the stage.

"But I can't act," Gwenna had told him.

"What's that got to do with it?" the young man had inquired blithely.

"All they've got to do is to _look_. You could beat 'em at that."

"Oh, what nonsense, Mr. Ryan!" the girl had said, more pleased than she admitted to herself, and holding her curly head erect as a brown tulip on a st.u.r.dy stem.

"Not nonsense at all," he argued. "I tell you, if you went into musical comedy and adopted a strong enough c.o.c.kney accent there'd be another Stage and Society wedding before you could say 'knife.' You could get any young peer to adore you, Miss Gwenna, if you smiled at him over the head of a toy pom and called him 'Fice.' I can just see you becoming a Gaiety puss and marrying some Duke----"

"I don't want to marry any Dukes, thanks."

"I'm sure I don't want you to," Mr. Ryan had said softly. "I'd miss you too much myself...."

The fact is that he was a flirt for the moment out of work. He was also of the type that delights in the proximity of "Girl"--using the word as one who should say "Game." "Girl" suggested to him, as to many young men, a collective ma.s.s of that which is pretty, soft, and to-be-made-love-to. He found it pleasant to keep his hand in by paying these compliments to this new instalment of Girl--who was rather a little pet, he thought, though _rather_ slow.

As for Gwenna, she bloomed under it, gaining also in poise. She learned to take a compliment as if it were an offered flower, instead of dodging it like a brick-bat, which is the very young girl's failing. She found that even if receiving a compliment from the wrong man is like wearing a right-hand glove on the left hand, it is better than having no gloves.

(Especially it is better than _looking_ as if one had no gloves.)

The attentions of young Ryan, his comment on a new summer frock, the rose laid by him on her desk in the morning; these things were not without their effect--it was a different effect from any intended by the red-haired pupil, who was her teacher in all this.

She would find herself thinking, "He doesn't look at me nearly so much, I notice, in a trimmed-up hat, or a 'fussy' blouse. Men don't like them on me, perhaps." (That blouse or hat would be discarded.) Or, "Well! if so-and-so about me pleases him, it'll please other men."

And for "men" she read always, always the same one. She never realised that if she had not met Paul Dampier she _might_ have fallen in love with young Peter Ryan. Presently he had begged her to call him "Peter."

She wouldn't.

"I think I'd do anything for you," young Ryan had urged, "if you asked for it, using my Christian name!"

Gwenna had replied: "Very well! If there's anything I ever want, frightfully badly, that you could give me, I shall ask for it like that."

"You mean there's nothing _I_ could give you?" he had reproached her, in the true flirt's tone. It can sound so much more tender, at times, than does the tone of the truest lover. A note or so of it had found its way into Gwenna's soft voice these days.