The Boy with Wings Part 26

Yes; she had half unconsciously learned a good deal from Mr. Ryan.

"I say! Miss Gwenna!"

Mr. Ryan's rust-red head was popped round the door of the Wing-room where Gwenna, alone, was pouring dope out of the tilted ten-gallon can on the floor into her little pannikin.

"Come out for just one minute."

"Too busy," demurred the girl. "No time."

"Not just to look," he pleaded, "at the really _pretty_ job I'm making of unloading this lorry with Dampier's engine?"

Quickly Gwenna set down the can and came out, in her pinafore, to the breezes and suns.h.i.+ne of the yard outside. It was as much because she wanted to see what there was to be seen of that "_Fiancee_" of the aviator's, as because this other young man wanted her to admire the work of his hands.

Those hands themselves, Gwenna noticed, were masked and thick, half way up his forearms, with soft soap. This he seemed to have been smearing on certain boards, making a sliding way for that precious package that stood on the low lorry. The boards were packed up in banks and stages, an irregular stairway. This another a.s.sistant was carefully trying with a long straight edge with a spirit level in the middle of it; and a third man stood on the lorry, resting on a crowbar and considering the package that held the heart of Paul Dampier's machine.

"You see if she doesn't come down as light as a bubble and stop exactly _there_," said Mr. Ryan complacently, digging his heel into a pillowy heap of debris. "Lay those other planks to take her inside, Andre." He wiped his brow on a moderately clear patch of forearm, and moved away to check the observations of the man in the s.h.i.+rt-sleeves.

Gwenna, watching, could not help admiring both this self-satisfied young mudlark and his job. This was how women liked to see men busy: with strenuous work that covered them with dirt and sweat, taxing their brains and their muscles at the same time. Those girls who were so keen on the Enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of Women and "Equal Opportunities" and those things, those suffragettes at her Hampstead Club who "couldn't see where the superiority of the male s.e.x was supposed to come in"--Well! The reason why they "couldn't" was (the more primitive Gwenna thought) simply because they didn't see enough men at _this_ sort of thing. The men these enlightened young women knew best sat indoors all day, writing--_that_ sort of thing. Or talking about fans, like Mr. Swayne, and about "the right tone of purple in the curtains" for a room. The women, of course, could do that themselves. They could also go to colleges and pa.s.s men's exams. Lots did. But (thought Gwenna) not many of them could get through the day's work of Mr. Ryan, who had also been at Oxford, and who not only had forearms that made her own look like ivory toys, but who could plan out his work so that if he said that that squat, ponderous case would "stop exactly _there_"--stop there it would.

She watched; the breeze rollicking in her curls, spreading the folds of her grey-blue pinafore out behind her like a sail, moulding her skirt to her rounded shape as she stood.

Then she turned with a very friendly and pretty smile to young Ryan.

It was thus that Paul Dampier, entering the yard from behind them, came upon the girl whom he had decided not to see again.

He knew already that "his little friend," as old Hugo insisted upon calling her, had taken a job at the Aircraft Works. He'd heard that from his cousin, who'd been told all about it by Miss Long.

And considering that he'd made up his mind that it would be better all round if he were to drop having anything more to say to the girl, young Dampier was glad, of course, that she'd left town. That would make things easier. He wouldn't seem to be avoiding her, yet he needn't set eyes upon her again.

Of course he'd been glad. He hadn't _wanted_ to see her.

Then, at the end of his negotiations with Colonel Conyers, he'd understood that he would have to go over and pay a visit to the Aeroplane Lady. And even in the middle of the new excitement he had remembered that this was where Gwenna Williams was working. And for a moment he'd hesitated. That would mean seeing the Little Thing again after all.

Then he'd thought, Well? Fellow can't _look_ as if he were trying to keep out of a girl's way? Besides, chances were he wouldn't see her when he did go, he'd thought.

It wasn't likely that the Aeroplane Lady kept her clerk, or whatever she was, in her pocket, he'd thought.

He'd just be taken to where the P.D.Q. was being a.s.sembled, he'd supposed. The Little Thing would be kept busy with her typing and one thing and another in some special office, he'd expected!

What he had _not_ expected to find was the scene before him. The Little Thing idling about outside the shops here; hatless, pinafored, looking absolutely top-hole and perfectly at home, chatting with the ginger-haired bloke who was unloading the engine as if he were no end of a pal of hers! She was smiling up into his face and taking a most uncommon amount of interest, it seemed, in what the fellow had been doing!

And, before, she'd said she wasn't interested in machinery! thought Dampier as he came up, feeling suddenly unconscionably angry.

He forgot the hours that the Little Thing had already pa.s.sed in hanging on every word, mostly about a machine, that had fallen from his own lips. He only remembered that moment at the Smiths' dinner-party, when she'd admitted that that sort of thing didn't appeal to her.

Yet, here she was! _Deep_ in it, by Jove!

He had come right up to her and this other chap before they noticed him....

She turned sharply at the sound of the young aviator's rather stiff "Good afternoon."

She had expected that day to see his engine--no more. Here he stood, the maker of the engine, backed by the scorched, flat landscape, in the sunlight that picked out little clean-cut, intense shadows under the rim of his straw hat, below his cleft chin, along his sleeve and the lapel of his jacket, making him look (she thought) like a very good snapshot of himself. He had startled her again; but this time she was self-possessed.

She came forward and faced him; prettier than ever, somehow (he thought again), with tossed curls and pinafore blowing all about her. She might have been a little schoolgirl let loose from some cla.s.s in those gaunt buildings behind her. But she spoke in a more "grown-up" manner, in some way, than he'd ever heard her speak before. Looking up, she said in the soft accent that always brought back to him his boyish holidays in her country, "How do you do, Mr. Dampier? I'm afraid I can't shake hands.

Mine are all sticky with dope."

"Oh, are they," he said, and looked away from her (not without effort) to the ginger-haired fellow.

"This," said Gwenna Williams, a little self-consciously at last, "is Mr.

Ryan."

Plenty of self-a.s.surance about _him_! He nodded and said in a hail-fellow-well-met sort of voice, "Hullo; you're Dampier, are you?

Glad to meet you. You see we're hard at it unpacking your engine here."

Then he looked towards the opening, the road, and the car--borrowed as usual--in which the young aviator had motored down. There was another large package in the body of the car; a box, iron-clamped, with letters stencilled upon it, and sealed. "Something else interesting that you've brought with you?" said this in sufferable man called Ryan. "Here, Andre, fetch that box down----"

"No," interrupted young Dampier curtly. The curtness was only partly for this other chap. That sealed box, for reasons of his own and Colonel Conyers', was not to be hauled about by any mechanic in the place. "You and I'll fetch that in presently for Mrs. Crewe."

"Right. She'll be back at three o'clock," Ryan told him. "She told me to ask you to have a look round the place or do anything you cared to until she came in."

"Oh, thanks," said young Dampier.

At that moment what he would have "cared to do" would have been to get this girl to himself somewhere where he could say to the Little Humbug, "Look here. You aren't interested in machinery. You said so yourself.

What are you getting this carroty-headed a.s.s to talk to you about it for?"

Seeing that this was out of the question he hesitated.... He didn't want to go round the shops with this fellow, to whom he'd taken a dislike. On sight. He did that sometimes. On the other hand, he couldn't do what he wanted to do--sit and talk to the Little Thing until the Aeroplane Lady returned. What about saying he'd got to look up some one in the village, and bolting, until three o'clock? No. No fear! Why should this other fellow imagine he could have the whole field to himself for talking to Her?

So the trio, the age-old group that is composed of two young men and a girl, stood there for a moment rather awkwardly.

Finally the Little Thing said, "Well, I've got to go back to my wings,"

and turned.

Then the fellow Ryan said, "One minute, Miss Gwenna----"

Miss Gwenna! All but her Christian name! And he, Paul Dampier, who'd known her a good deal longer--he'd never called her anything at all, but "_you_"! Miss _Gwenna_, if you please!

What followed was even more of a bit of dashed cheek.

For the fellow turned quickly aside to her and said, "I say, it's Friday afternoon. Supposing I don't see you again to-morrow morning--it's all right, isn't it, about your coming up to town for that matinee with me?"

"Oh, yes, thanks," said the Little Thing brightly. "I asked Mrs. Crewe, and it's all right."

Then the new note crept into her voice; the half-unconsciously-acquired note of coquetry. She said, smiling again at the red-haired Ryan, "I am so looking forward to that."

And, turning again to the Airman, she said with a half-shy, half-airy little smile that, also, he found new in her, "Have you seen _The Cinema Star_? Mr. Ryan is going to take me to-morrow afternoon."

"Oh, is he?" said Paul Dampier shortly.