CHAPTER XI

THE HEELS OF MERCURY

This injunction Gwenna carried out to the letter a week later. Never had

she looked so pretty as when she smiled at her own reflection in her

bedroom mirror above the cherub's ruff of wings on the evening of the

dance.

It was given by some wealthy theatrical people whose "set" often

intermingled with that to which Hugo Swayne belonged. And it was held in

a couple of big marquees that had been set up on the lawn behind their

house; a lawn of which the banks sloped down to the willows that fringed

the river. There was a houseboat as buffet. There were Japanese lanterns

and fairy-lights. Red carpet had been put down to save costumes from

dewy grass or gravel.

For this dance was held at the height of that brief and grotesque period

in the English history when dancing and costume--more particularly when

the two were combined--became an affair of national moment. That was the

time when tickets for an Artists' Ball were gambled with even as stocks

and shares; when prizes for costume were given of which the value ran

into hundreds of pounds. When columns of responsible newspapers were

given up to descriptions of some "brilliant carnival." When Society,

the Arts, Commerce, the Stage and the Middle Class joined hands to dance

the maddest ring-o'-roses round some mulberry bush rooted in Heaven knew

what soil of slackness. That was the time when women who were mothers

and able-bodied men were ready to fritter away the remnant of their

youth on what could be no longer pleasure, since they chased it with

such deadly ardour, discussing the lightest types of merrymaking as if

thereupon hung the fate of an empire!

Even little cherub-headed Gwenna Williams found something disquieting

about the sight of this throng as she scanned it with anxious eyes,

for--no, HE hadn't come! He was late. Not here. Perhaps it was merely

this that caused her to dislike the look of some of these other people?

That buxomly-formed young woman of twenty-five tricked out in the

costume of a child of three! That tall, fragile youth in black

grave-clothes, mouthing falsetto patter! That pretty "lady" in spreading

Georgian brocade and a white wig, from whose crimsoned lips there came

presently a robust masculine shout! That Madame Potiphar in the--Good

gracious!--it was another boy! No! Gwenna _didn't_ like them,

somehow.... Perhaps it was just because they were here and he, the only

partner she wished for, had not arrived. Oh, _supposing_ he were not

coming, after all?

Under the canvas roof where garlands swung and an installation of

electric light had been improvised, the crowd eddied and chattered and

laughed from one end to the other of the marquee where the long tables

were laid out. For it was a theatrical ball, late in beginning. Supper

was to come first. Gwenna, sitting beside a Futurist Folly whom her

friend Leslie had introduced vaguely as "one of my medical students,"

watched that supper-crowd (still he did not come), as they feasted,

leaning across the tables to laugh and shriek to acquaintances. It was

not the girls or the younger men who seemed most boisterous, but those

well over thirty. This surprised her. And even when they were most

unrestrained "they seemed," as the Welsh girl put it, "to be _making_

themselves do it, like." ...

Then she saw, by an opening in the canvas of the marquee, the apparition

of a steady man's figure, dead-white against the purple gloom outside. A

figure erect and neatly-shouldered under the close linen jacket of a

Continental waiter. Gwenna wondered where she had seen him before? In a

photograph? Or perhaps attending to one of the tables at Appenrodt's,

when she and Leslie had had tea after a matinee somewhere? She _had_

seen that young waiter, whose appearance was in such arresting contrast

to the bizarre costumes and painted faces of the noisy, laughing rabble

about him. His face was restrained and grave as that of some very young

Daniel at the feast of some modern Belshazzar.

Suddenly besides that still, watching apparition there came up another

boyish figure--typically English, in ordinary evening dress, and tall,

towering above the young German waiter of whom he was making some

inquiry. For a second they stood so; the waiter glancinc up, the

newcomer, Paul Dampier, with his blonde head tilted a little back, his

eyes raking the crowd.

"Ah! he's come," cried Gwenna aloud, but unheard in the universal

clatter. Her heart leaped....

But Paul Dampier, the airman, was swallowed up again almost directly in

a forest of odd, luridly-coloured head-dresses. He had not seen her.

And she did not see him again until some time after supper was ended,

and the throng was whirling and writhing in one-step and ragtime in the

other marquee.

Gwenna had danced with an Apache, with a Primitive Man, with Mr. Hugo

Swayne (in a mask and crazy-work domino as a Simultaneous Dynamism of

Something), and she was standing waiting, one of a figure in a revived

cotillon.

While the Viennese band swooped and tore through the waltz "Nights of

Gladness" a sheet had been fetched and was held up at the end of the

ballroom between a Morris-dancer and an incredibly handsome "Turco" (who

presently revealed himself as Mr. Swayne's French engineer), as a screen

before six of the girls. Six men were to be led up to it in turn; each

to choose his partner by the feet that were just allowed to show below

the sheet.

Soft laughter and twittering went on at the side where the half-dozen

girls stood.

"I say," exclaimed a damsel dressed as an Austrian Peasant to her

crinolined neighbour, "_now_ we see why you were so anxious to explain

why you were wearing scarlet----"

"Of course he'd know yours anywhere," retorted the next girl.

"Ssh! Play fair!" protested the next. "Mustn't be recognised by your

voice!"

"Oh, look at the Cherub girl's little shoes! Aren't they sweet? Just

like silver minnows peeping out----"

Here Gwenna, standing sedately beside the scintillating, mauve-limbed

Nijinski, Leslie, lifted her head in quick attention. She had recognised

a voice on the other side of the sheet. A voice deep and gentle and

carrying through the clatter of talk and the mad, syncopated music. It

protested with a laugh, "But, look _here_! I can't dance all these

weird----" It was the Airman--her Airman.

"Oh, he's just there. He's going to choose. If only he'd choose me,"

thought Gwenna, breathlessly fluttering where she stood. Then she

remembered. "Oh, but he won't know me. He doesn't know I was to have

silver shoes. If there was only _some_thing! Something to show him which

I was, I believe he'd choose me. What could I do?"

Suddenly she thought what she could do.... Yes! Winged feet, of course,

for a girl who longed to fly!

Hurriedly she put her hands up to the ruff made of those white wings.

Hastily she plucked two of them out. How was she to fasten them to her

feet, though? Alas, for the short curls that deprived her of woman's

universal tool! She turned to her chum who was impatiently jigging in

time to the music, with her long black hair swathed for once securely

under that purple casque.

"Leslie, quick, a hairpin! Lend me two hairpins," she whispered and

snatched them from her friend's hand. Then, holding on to Leslie's mauve

silken shoulder to support herself, Gwenna raised first one small foot,

and then the other, fastening to each between the stocking and the

silver shoe, one of those tiny wings.

They were the feathered heels of Mercury, the flying-god, that the girl

who loved a flying-man allowed to peep under the curtain behind which

she stood.

Above the commotion of people laughing and talking all about her and the

music she felt that he was close, only just behind that sheet. She could

have put out a hand and, through that sheet, have touched his

shoulder.... Mustn't, of course.... Must play fair. Would he note the

message of the winged feet? Would he stop and choose her?

Or would he pass on?