CHAPTER IX

A DAY IN THE COUNTRY

Eagerly as Gwenna longed to fly, she was not to do so even yet.

After that appointment made at Hugo Swayne's rooms she lived through a

fortnight of dreaming, tingling anticipation. Then came another of those

brief direct notes from "_hers, P. Dampier_." The girl jumped for joy.

It was not to be at Hendon this time, but at Brooklands. Was she not

rapidly gaining experiences? First Hendon, then Brooklands; at this rate

she would soon know all the flying-grounds--Shoreham, Eastchurch,

Farnborough, all of them!

"I'll call for you," the note said, "in the car."

"'_The_' car is good," commented Leslie, arranging a mist-blue scarf

over Gwenna's small hat just before she started off on this expedition.

"_In the Army all things are in common, including money and tobacco_ but

the Dampier boy isn't in the Army."

"Why shouldn't he?" took up Gwenna, ungrammatically and defiantly. She

considered Mr. Swayne's motor was honoured by this other young man who

condescended to drive it, to fetch and whirl away with him a girl who

felt herself a nymph about to be swept up and up above the clouds to

some modern version of Elysium.

So twelve o'clock that Saturday morning (Gwenna having obtained special

leave of absence from the office) found the young man and the girl

speeding through Kensington and Hammersmith, on the Woking Road.

The sun was hot above them; the road white; the hedges so dusty that

they seemed grey ribbons streaming past. Gwenna scarcely realised how

they went. She sat there beside him, thrilled and breathless, hardly

knowing to which delight to give herself up, that of the coming flight,

that of the present swift drive in the fresh breeze, or that of the

companionship of this Demigod of Modern Times, whose arm almost touched

hers sometimes as he moved or turned, or put on the brake.

Except for an occasional remark to the car: "Come on, don't be funny,

old lady, don't be funny," or "Now for the hills; watch her sit down and

laugh at 'em!" he spoke little; Gwenna didn't particularly want him to

speak. The girl was in a golden and moving dream, and scarcely knew

where it carried her.

She came out of that dream, not with a shock, but gradually. Was the car

slowing down? It stopped; stopped in a wide part of that dust-white road

between the tall, dust-grey hedges, opposite to a creosoted

telegraph-pole spiked with nails. Through a gap in the hedge Gwenna

caught sight of a moon-daisied field, with a dark hedge and trees

beyond. Not a house, not a cottage in sight. This couldn't be

Brooklands?

"Hul-lo," the boy was muttering. "What's up now?"

"What is it?" she asked.

He did not reply. This was not rudeness, as she guessed, but intentness;

he took it for granted that she would not understand the mechanical

explanation. Resignedly she said to herself, "Machinery gone wrong?

Sometimes it really seems as if that were all machinery ever _did_ do!

Yet that's what he said he was interested in, more than anything!"

He was out of the car and had flung back the bonnet. Then he took off

his coat and hung it up on one of the nails on that telegraph-pole. He

pushed up his shirt-sleeves and bent over the tool-box on the step.

Sitting there on the hot leather, Gwenna watched him, she heard the

chinking of wrenches and spanners. Then he returned to the bonnet again,

fumbling, handling, burrowing, grunting at things.... Ten minutes

elapsed....

He then broke out emphatically: "Oh, _Lord_! I _have_ done it _now_!"

"Done what?" asked the girl anxiously.

In tightening a nut with a spanner the spanner had slipped. He had

broken the porcelain insulation of the plug controlling the current.

And now, good-humouredly smiling at his guest, he leaned on the door of

the car with his brown forearms crossed and said, "Short circuited. Yes.

I'm afraid that's killed it."

"Killed what?" asked little Gwenna, in affright.

"Our flying for to-day," he said.

He went on to speak about "spare parts," and how it would be necessary

to send some one back to fetch--something--Gwenna didn't care what it

was. Her heart sank in dismay. No flying? Must they go back after all,

now?

"Can't we get on?" she sighed.

He shook his shining head.

"We can make a picnic of it, anyhow," he said more encouragingly. "Shall

you be all right here if I run back to that inn we passed just now with

the bit of green outside? I shan't be ten minutes. Send some one off on

a bicycle, and bring some grub back here."

He jerked on his coat and was off.

Little Gwenna, sitting there waiting in the useless car--her small,

disconsolate face framed in the gauze scarf with which she'd meant to

bind her curls for the flying--was passed by half a dozen other motors

on the road to Brooklands. It did not strike her, dreamily downcast as

she was, that surely what the messenger from the inn was being

despatched to fetch might have been borrowed from one of these other

motorists? Some of them, surely, would be men who knew young Paul

Dampier quite well. Any of them might have come to the rescue?

This, as a matter of fact, had struck Paul Dampier at once. But he

didn't want to go on to Brooklands! Brooklands? Beastly hot day; crowds

of people; go up in an affair like an old Vanguard?

What he wanted, after a hard day's work yesterday on his own (so

different) Machine, was a day's peace and quiet and to think things a

bit over about her (the Machine) lying on his back somewhere shady, with

a pipe. Actually, he would rather have been alone. But this little girl,

Miss Williams.... She was all right. Not only pretty ... but such a

quiet, sensible sort of little thing. He'd take her up another time,

since she was keen. He certainly would take her up. Not to-day. To-day

they'd just picnic. _She_ wouldn't want to be giggling and chattering

about herself the whole time, and all that sort of thing, like some of

them. She liked to listen.

She'd be interested to hear what he'd been doing lately, about the

Machine. For a girl, she was pretty bright, and even if she didn't grasp

things at once, she evidently liked hearing about the Machine; besides

which, it often cleared one's own ideas to one's self, to have to set

'em out and explain about the machinery very simply, to some one who was

keen, but who hadn't a notion. They'd have a nice, peaceful time, this

afternoon; somewhere cool, instead of Brooklands. And a nice long

talk--_all_ about the Machine.

He returned to the girl waiting in the car. Gwenna, cheering up at the

sight of him, saw that his pockets were bulging with bottles, and that

he carried a square, straw basket.

"There. I might have taken Hugo's luncheon-basket and filled that while

I was about it; only I forgot there was one," he said, standing on the

road and screwing up his eyes a little in the midday sun as he faced

the car. "It's nicer eating out of doors, when you get a chance. Beastly

dusty on the road here, though, and things going by all the time and

kicking up clouds of it all over you. We'll find a pitch in that field."

So she jumped down from her seat and the two left the glaring road and

got through that gap in the hedgerow where maybush and blackberry trail

and grass and campion alike were all thickly powdered and drooping with

dust.

The boy and girl skirted another hedge that ran at right angles to the

road. Half-way up that field a big elm tree spread a patch of shade at

its base like a dark-green rug for them to sit on. Paul Dampier put his

coat down also. They sat, with moon-daisies and branching buttercups,

and cow-parsley all sweet and clean about them.

Here the country-bred girl, forgetting her disappointment, gave a quick

little sigh of content. She glanced about her at the known faces of

flower-friends in the grass; a diaper of colours. Each year she had

loved the time when white daisies and red sorrel and yellow rattle

flaunted together over the heads of the lower-growing clovers and

speedwells and potentillas. This year it seemed lovelier than ever. She

put out her hand and pulled up a lance of jointed grass, nibbling the

soft, pale-green end of it.

"Here, are you as hungry as all that?" laughed young Dampier at her

side. "We'll feed."

He let Gwenna spread out upon the clean dinner-napkin in which they were

wrapped the provisions that he had brought from the inn.

"All I could get. Bread-and-cheese. Couple of hunks of cold beef.

Butter--salt," he said, giving her the things as he named them. "Plates

I said we wouldn't worry about; chuck the crumbs to the birds. Here's

what I got to drink; cider. D'you like it?"

"Love it," said Gwenna, who had never happened to taste it. But she knew

that she would love it.

"Good. Oh! _Now_ I've forgotten the glass, though," exclaimed young

Dampier, sitting up on his knees on the shaded patch of grass beside

her. "We shall both have to use the lower half of my flask. Sorry--hope

you don't mind."

Gwenna, taking her first taste of cider in bird-like sips from that

oblong silver thing, remembered the old saying, "Drink from my cup and

you will think my thoughts." Then he put down upon the dinner napkin the

half-loaf and the lump of cheese that he had been munching. He took the

half of the flask, simply, out of the girl's hand, poured out more

cider, and drank in turn.

"That's better," he said, smiling. She smiled back at him.

She had ceased to feel any shyness of this fair-haired aviator who

rested there beside her in this oasis of shade from the elm, while

beyond them stretched the wide, dazzlingly bright desert of the

flowering meadow, bounded by its hedges. He cut off the crusty part of

the loaf for her (since she said she liked it). He sliced for her the

damp and pinkish beef, since she would not confide to him her deep and

feminine loathing of this fare. The woman is not yet born who can look

upon cold meat as a food. And they drank in turn from his silver flask.

This was their third meal together; yet Gwenna felt that she had been

grown-up and conscious of delight in the world about her only since they

had met.

Ease and gaiety rose between them in a haze like that which vibrated

over the warm hay-field where they feasted.

"I say, I shall have to give a lunch at the Carlton to everybody I

know," he laughed, half to himself, presently, "if I do get Colonel

Conyers to make 'em take up the P.D.Q." Then, turning more directly to

her. "Sorry--you don't know that joke. It's my Aeroplane, you know."

"Oh, yes, the one Mr. Swayne calls your _Fiancee_!" took up Gwenna

quickly. Then she wished she hadn't said that. She reddened. She turned

her supple little body to toss crumbs to a yellow-hammer that was eyeing

them from a branch in the hedge behind her. And then she asked. "Why

'the P.D.Q.'?"

"Because she will be the Paul Dampier One, I hope," explained the young

inventor, "and I always think of her as that other because it means

'Pretty Dam--Dashed Quick.'"

"Oh, is that it?" said Gwenna.

She echoed crossly to herself, "'_I always think of her_' indeed! It

sounds like----"

And she finished her thought with the hardest-working word in her native

tongue; the Welsh for sweetheart.

"It does sound just as if he were talking about his _cariad_."

Absently she brushed more crumbs off her side of the dinner-napkin.

For one-half only of Gwenna now seemed to note that they were eating

crusty loaf and drinking cider out of doors between a lupin-blue sky and

a flowerful meadow; the other was conscious of nothing but her

companion; of the clear friendliness of his eyes, those eyes of Icarus!

Of his deep and gentle voice saying, "Mind if I smoke? You don't, I

know," of those brown hard-looking forearms from which he had not

troubled to pull down the sleeves, of his nearness.

Suddenly he came nearer still.

He had not stopped talking of his aeroplane, but she hardly remembered

that she had asked him the meaning of one of the expressions that he had

used.

He was repeating it.

"'Camber?' ... Well, it's a curve. A curve like----" He glanced about

for an example of the soft, end-wise curve on the great wings of an

aeroplane; his eyes passing quickly from the green hedge to the ground,

to the things on the picnic cloth, to Gwenna Williams's small hand as it

rested in the grass.

She wondered, thrilled, if the young Airman were actually going to take

hold of her hand.

He did take her hand, as simply as he had taken the silver cup from it.

He bent it over so that her wrist made a gentle curve. He passed his own

large fingers across it.

"Yes; there--that's the curve," he said. "Almost exactly."

It might have been a caress.

But, done as he did it, the light movement was nothing of the kind.

Instinct told the girl that. It wasn't her small and soft and

pink-palmed hand that he was thinking of holding. She looked at him as

he said, "That's the curve," and she caught a gleam of quickened

interest in his eyes. But in one mortified flash she knew that this had

nothing to do with her. She guessed that at this moment he'd forgotten

that there was a girl sitting there beside him at all.

And she knew why.

Angrily she said to herself, "He's thinking of nothing but that old

machine of his! And I do--yes, I do, _do_ hate her!"

Then she sat for a moment still as the elm-trunk against which she'd

been leaning.

She had been struck thus motionless by a thought.

Something had been brought home to her by that sharp and sudden twinge

of--Jealousy!

Yes! She knew now! What she felt, and must have been feeling for days

past, was what they meant by falling in love.

"That's what I've done!" she thought rapidly; half in consternation,

half in delight. "It's beginning to happen what Mr. Swayne was talking

about at that tea: the Girl or the Flying Machine!"

She glanced towards the gap in the hedge as if to look at the car that

had brought them, motionless by the road-side; she turned her face away

from the Airman, who sat lighting a pipe with the shadows of the

elm-branches dappling his fair head and shirt-sleeved shoulders.

She was blushing warmly at her own thoughts.

"It's only the flying-machine he cares about! He does like me, too; in a

way.... If only he'd forget that other for a minute! But if he won't,"

thought Gwenna, happening upon an ancient piece of feminine philosophy,

"I'd rather have him talking about _her_ than not talking to me at all!"

She spoke aloud, sedately but interestedly.

"Oh, is _that_ a camber?" That light touch of his seemed still upon her

wrist, though he had withdrawn it carelessly at once. She paused, then

said, "And what was that other thing, Mr. Dampier? Something about an

angle?"

"A dihedral angle?" he said, drawing at that pipe. "Oh, that's the angle

you see from the front of the thing. It's--look, it's like that."

This time it was not her hand he took as an illustration. He pointed,

pipe in hand, to where, above the opposite hedge, a crow was sailing

slowly, a vandyke of black across the cloudless blue.

"See that bird? It's that very slight V he makes; _now_."

"And this machine of yours?" persisted the girl, with a little twitch of

her mouth for the rival whom he, it seemed, always thought of as "the

P.D.Q." and whom Gwenna must always think of as "the _Fiancee_." She

wondered where it lived, the creature that meant all to him. She said,

"Where--where d'you _make_ that machine?"

"Oh, I'm afraid it isn't a machine yet, you see. It's only a model of

one, so far. You know, like a model yacht," he explained. "That's the

worst of it. You see, you can make a model do anything. It's when you

get the thing life-size that the trouble begins. Model doesn't give a

really fair idea of what you've got to get. The difficulties--it's never

the real thing."

Gwenna thought, "It must be like making love to the person you aren't

really in love with!" But what she said, with her hand stripping a spike

of flowering grass, was, "I suppose it's like practising scales and all

that on a mute piano?"

"Never tried", he said. Then: "_The model's_ at my own place, my rooms

in"----here he broke off with a laugh. He looked straight into her face

and said, still laughing, and in a more personal tone:

"Not in Victoria Street. I say, you spotted that _that_ place wasn't

mine, didn't you?"

"Leslie 'spotted' and said so, afterwards," admitted Gwenna demurely,

picking and sniffing at a piece of pink clover before she fastened it

into her white blouse. "I did think at the time that it wasn't--wasn't

the sort of place where you'd find a man living who _did_ things, like."

"Rather rough on old Hugo."

"Well, but _does_ he do things?"

"He doesn't have to. He'd be all right if he did. Sweat some of that

beef off him, give him something to think about," averred his cousin,

carelessly knocking out his pipe against the heel of his shoe. "But, you

know, my place is in Camden Town; most inferior. Three rooms over a

paper shop; two small cubby-holes where I sleep and eat, and a rather

bigger one where I keep the 'P.D.Q.' stuff. I couldn't have you there

that Sunday."

"Why not?" Gwenna asked sharply, and jealous again. It was almost as if

the _Fiancee_ had said to him, "_No, not here_!"

"Because," he said with a chuckle, "because at the last moment, when I'd

got the tea ready and everything"--he tossed his fair head back--"a fall

of soot down the chimney! Everything in the most ghastly mess! Pitch

black wherever you put a finger. I simply couldn't--it was four o'clock

then; I expect you both thought it rotten of me. Still," he concluded,

rather ruefully, "I couldn't give you the sort of polite tea Hugo can,

anyhow."

"I don't want polite teas!" Gwenna protested, looking round at the field

where she had feasted as if in Elysium. "You don't suppose I care for

things all grand like that, do you?"

He responded, "Would you care to see my Camden Town place, then, and the

model? You and Miss Long. It's quite near you, you know."

"Yes, I should," said Gwenna quietly, stripping her grass.

How could he, she wondered, ask if she "cared" for these things that

opened out new worlds to her? If he only knew, just to be with him was

part of that new, soaring freedom which to her was summed up in the idea

of flying! This, she felt, _was_ flying. She didn't care, after all, if

there were no other flying that afternoon. Care? _She_ wouldn't mind

sitting there until the sun slipped slowly downwards towards the western

hedge and the moon-daisies closed in the tall grass, and clouds of other

tiny flying creatures poised and hovered above them. _She_ wasn't sorry

that the mechanic did not return in haste to minister to that

broken-down car. When she did remember about it, it was almost to hope

that he would not be back! Not just yet! Not to put an end to this

golden afternoon of talk that, trivial as it was, seemed to her to be

the endowment of a new faculty, and of comradeship that was as beguiling

and satisfying as that of her bosom-chum, Leslie. Only newer, only more

complete. So it seemed to Gwenna, as the shadows moved further up the

grass where she sat with her new boy-friend.

For it is a commonplace that in all comradeship between man and woman

passionate love claims a share. But also in all passionate love there is

more comradeship than the unimaginative choose to admit; there is a

happy inner meaning to the cottage phrase, "To keep company with."

What he thought about it she did not know. Except that he surely must

like talking to her? He could not go on like this out of politeness.

Ah, besides--! Besides, she knew, without reasoning about it, that, even

with that absorbing interest of the aeroplane in the background, he did

like her. Just as Leslie, her other friend, who also knew so much more

than she did, had liked her at once.

"Only," decided Gwenna, in the uttermost depths of her shy and daring

heart, "only he's _got_ to like me, some day, better than Leslie ever

could. He must. Yes; he _must_!"

And she thought it so ardently that she almost expected him, catching

her thought, to answer it in words. She looked--no, he had caught

nothing. But, meeting his eyes again, her own read a message that her

fluttered mind had been told before this, but would scarcely let her

believe. He thought she was pretty to look at. She had taken off her hat

now, as she liked to do in the open air, and the light breeze tossed her

short locks about.

"I _believe_ he thinks," Gwenna told herself, "that my hair's nice."

As a matter of fact she was right. If she could have read her

companion's thoughts at the moment she would have known of a quite

foolish but recurrent wish on his part. A wish that he might just run

his fingers through all those brown and thickly-twisting curls, to find

out if they felt as silky as they looked.

A lark was carolling over her head, soaring, poising, poising, soaring,

and singing all the while....

"That's what we can't do, even yet; _hover_," he said. And again he went

on talking to the Little Thing (in his mind this babyish-faced but quite

quick-witted girl was now always to be "the Little Thing") about the

chance of getting Colonel Conyers to take up that invention of his.

"I'm to go to spend the week-end at Ascot with him and have another talk

about it," he said. "I know he's dead keen. _He_ knows that it's

aeroplanes that are going to make all the difference; simply knock out,

under some conditions, any other form of scouting. In modern warfare,

you know--it's bound to come, some time--anybody with any sense knows

that----"

"Yes, of course," agreed Gwenna, watching him as he stretched himself

lazily out, chest downwards, elbows in, on the grass, chin propped in

his hands, talking (all about the Machine).

"If he gave me a chance to build Her--make trial flights in the P.D.Q.!

If he'd only back me----"

"Oh, he will, surely!" said Gwenna, her whole small face brightening or

sobering in response to every modulation of his voice.

It was jolly, he thought, to find a girl who wasn't in the least bored

by "Shop." She _was_ a very jolly Little Thing. So sensible. No

nonsense about her, thought the boy.

And she, when at last they rose and left the place, threw a last look

back at that patch of sky above the hedge, where the black crow had made

a dihedral angle, at that brooding elm, at that hay field, golden in the

level rays, at that patch of dusty road where the car had pulled up, at

that black telegraph-pole where he had hung up his coat. That picture

was graven, as by a tool, into the very heart of the girl.

At the end of an expedition that a young woman of more experience and

less imagination would have pronounced "tame enough," Gwenna,

bright-eyed and rosy from her day in the sunshine, could hardly believe

that a whole lifetime had not elapsed since last she'd seen the

everyday, the humdrum and incredibly dull Club where she lived.

She burst into her chum's bedroom as Leslie was going to bed.

"Taffy--back at last?" smiled Leslie, between the curtains of black hair

on either side of her nightgown. "How's flying?--_What?_" she exclaimed,

"you didn't go up at all? Broke down on the way to Brooklands? I say!

How rotten for you, my poor lamb. Had anything to eat?"

"I think so--I mean, rather! He gave me a _lovely_ lunch on the road

while we were waiting for the man to mend the car--and then we'd tea at

a cottage while he was doing it--and then there wasn't time to do

anything but come back to town," explained Gwenna breathlessly,

untying her scarf; "and then we'd sort of dinner at the inn before we

started back; they brought out a table and things into the garden under

the trees."

"What did you have for dinner?"

"I don't know. Oh, there were gooseberries," said Gwenna vaguely, "and a

lamp. And the moths all came. Oh, Leslie! It's _been_ so splendid!" She

caught her breath. "I mean, it was _dreat_ful about no flying, but----"

"Glad the afternoon wasn't entirely a washout," said Miss Long, in an

even voice as she plaited her hair.

"By the way, did the Dampier boy give you back that locket of yours?"

"I forgot all about it," said Gwenna, picking up the head of pink clover

that had fallen out of her blouse. "I'll ask him next time. He's going

to take me up soon, you know, again."

Just as an alarm is "set" to sound at some given hour, so the whole of

the girl's innocent being was set, to wait and wait for that "next time"

of meeting him--whenever it should be.