CHAPTER XIII

THE FLYING DREAM

"_Those dreams come true that are dreamed on Midsummer night!_"

This saying Gwenna had read somewhere. But she had forgotten all about

it until, on the night of June 24th, 1914, she dreamed the most vivid

dream of all her twenty-two years.

Many people have that same dream--or versions of it--often in a

lifetime. Scientists have written papers on the whys and hows of it.

They tack a long name to it. But little Gwenna Williams had never heard

of "_levitation_." To herself she called it afterwards "_that flying

dream_."

It seemed to her that when it began she was still half-awake, lying in

her narrow white bed with the blankets tossed on to the floor of her

Club bedroom, for it was a sultry night and close, in spite of her

window on to the garden being wide open and allowing what breeze there

was to blow full upon the girl's face, stirring her curls on the pillow,

the ruffle of her night-gown as she lay.

Suddenly a violent start ran over the whole of her body. And with that

one jerk she seemed to have come out of herself. She realised, first,

that she was no longer lying down, curled up in the kitten-like ball

which was her attitude for sleeping. She was upright as if she were

standing.

But she was not standing. Her feet were not resting on anything. Looking

down, she found, without very much surprise, that she was poised, as a

lark is poised, in mid-air, at some immeasurable height. It was night,

and the earth--a distant hassock of dim trees and fields--was far, far

below her.

She found herself moving downwards through the air.

_She was flying!_

Gently, gently, she sped, full of a quiet happiness in her new power,

which, after all, did not seem to be something new, but something

restored to her.

"Dear me, I've flown before, I know I have," said Gwenna to herself as

she swooped downwards in her dream, with the breeze cool on the soles of

her little bare feet. "This is as lovely as swimming! It's lovelier,

because one doesn't have to _do_ anything. So silly to imagine that one

has to have _wings_ to fly!"

Now she was nearer to earth, she was hovering over a dark stream of

water with reflections that circled and broke. And beside it she saw

something that seemed like a huge lambent mushroom set in the dim fields

below her. This was a lighted tent, and from it there floated up to her

faintly the throb and thrill of dance-music, the two long-drawn-out

notes of the "Post Horn" Galop, the noise of laughter and clapping....

She wondered whom she would see, if she were to alight. But the Force

in her dream bore her up again, higher, and away. She found presently

that she had left the dancing-tent far behind, and that what streamed

below her was no longer a river with reflections, but a road, white with

dust, and by the side of it a car was standing idle by the dusty hedge.

On the other side of the hedge, as she flew over, the grass was clean

and full of flowers, and half-way up the field stood a brooding elm that

cast a patch of shadow.

"Sunshine, now!" wondered Gwenna. "How quickly it's changed from night!"

She felt from head to foot her body light and buoyant as a drifting

thistle-down as on she went through the air. Close beside her, against a

bank of cloud, she noticed some black V-shaped thing that slanted and

flapped slow wings, then planed downwards out of her sight. "That's that

crow. A dihedral angle, they call it," said the dreaming girl. Her next

downward glance, as she sped upwards now, without effort, above the

earth, showed her a map of distant grey roofs and green trees, and

something that looked like a giant soap-bubble looming out of the mist.

"St. Paul's! London!" thought Gwenna. "I wonder shall I be able to look

down on our Westminster place."

Then, glancing about her, she saw that the scene had suddenly changed.

She was no longer in the free air with clouds about her as she flew like

a little white windblown feather with the earth small as a toy puzzle

below. She was between walls, with her feet not further than her own

height from the ground. Night again in a room. A long, narrowish room

with an open window through which came the light of a street-lamp that

flung a bright patch upon the carpet, the edge of a dressing-table, the

end of a white bed. Upon the bed, from which the coverings had been

flung down, there lay sleeping, curled up like a kitten, a figure in a

white, ruffled night-gown, with a cherub's head thrown backwards against

the pillow. Gwenna, looking down, thought, "Where have I seen _her_?"

In the next flash she had realised.

Herself!... Her own sleeping body that her dreaming soul had left for

this brief flight....

A start more violent than that with which her dream had begun shook the

dreamer as she came to herself again.

She woke. With a pitiful little "Oh," sounding in her own ears, she sat

up in bed and stared about her Club bedroom with its patches of light

from the street-lamp outside. She was trembling from head to foot, her

curls were wet with fright, and her first thought as she sprang out of

bed and to the door of that ghostly room was "I must go to Leslie."

But Leslie's bedroom was a story higher. Gwenna paused in the corridor

outside the nearest bedroom to her own. A thread of light showed below

the door. It was a Miss Armitage's, and she was one of the Club members,

who wrote pamphlets on the Suffrage, and like topics, far into the

night. Gwenna, feeling already more normal and cheered by the sense of

any human nearness, decided, "I won't go to her. She'll only want to

read aloud to me.... She laughed at me because I said I adored 'The

Forest Lovers,' but what books does _she_ like? Only those _dreat_-ful

long novels all about nothing, except the diseases of people in the

Potteries. Or else it'll be one of her own tracts.... Somehow she does

make everything she's interested in sound so _ugly_. All those

intellectual ones here do! Whether it's Marriage or Not-getting-married,

you really don't know which would be the most _dull_, from these

suffragettes," reflected the young girl, pattering down the corridor

again. "I'll go back to bed."

She went back, snuggling under the clothes. But she could not go to

sleep again for some time. She lay curled up, thinking.

She had thought too often and too long of that dance now three whole

weeks behind her. She had recalled, too many times! every moment of it;

every word and gesture of her partner's, going over and over his look,

his laugh, the tone in which he'd said, "Give _me_ this waltz, will

you?" All that memory had had the sweetness smelt out of it like a

child's posy. By this time it was worn thin as heirloom silver. She

turned from it.... It was then she remembered that saying about the

Midsummer Night's Dream. If that were true, then Gwenna might expect

soon to fly in reality.

For after all her plans and hopes, she had not even yet been taken up

by Paul Dampier in an aeroplane!

In that silent, unacknowledged conflict between the Girl and the

Machine, so far scarcely a score could have been put down to the credit

of the Girl. It was she who had always found herself put back,

disappointed, frustrated. This had been by the merest accidents.

First of all, the Airman hadn't been able to ask her and Miss Long to

his rooms in Camden Town to look at his model aeroplane. He had been

kept hanging on, not knowing which Saturday-to-Monday Colonel Conyers

("the great Air-craft Conyers") was going to ask him down to stay at

that house in Ascot, to have another talk over the subject of the new

Machine. ("A score for the Machine," thought the girl; wakeful, tossing

on her bed.)

She did not even know that the week after, on a glorious and cloudless

Saturday, young Dampier, blankly unaware that there was any conflict

going on in his world! had settled to ask "the Little Thing" to Hendon.

On the Friday afternoon, however, his firm had sent him out of town,

down to the factory near Aldershot. Here he had stayed until the

following Tuesday, putting up at the house of a kindred soul employed at

that factory, and wallowing in "Shop." ... Another win for the Machine!

The following Sunday the cup had been almost to Gwenna's lips. He had

called for her. Not in the car, this time. They had taken the Tube to

Golders Green; the motor-bus to Hendon Church; and then the path over

the fields together. Ah, delight! For even walking over the dusty grass

beside that swinging boy's figure in the grey tweed jacket was a joyous

adventure. It had been another when he had presently stooped and said,

"Shoelace come untied; might trip over that. I'll do it up," and had

fastened her broad brown shoe-ribbon securely for her. Her shoes had

been powdered white. He had taken his handkerchief out of his pocket and

had flicked the dust off, saying, as he did so, in a tone of some

interest, "I say, what tiny feet girls do have!"

("Pie for you, Taffy, of course," as Leslie had said later, when she'd

heard of this. "Second time he'd noticed them.")

Gwenna, in a tone half pleased, half piqued, had told him, "_All_ girls

don't have them so small! And yet you don't seem to notice anything

about people but their feet." She had walked on, delightedly conscious

of his laugh, his amused, "Oh, don't I?" and his downward glance....

Wasn't this, she had thought, something of a score at last for the Girl!

But hadn't even that small score been wiped out on the flying-ground?

There Gwenna had stood, waiting, gleeful and agitated; her mist-blue

scarf aflutter in the brisk breeze, but not fluttering as wildly as her

heart....

And then had come frustration once again! Paul Dampier's deep and

womanishly-soft tone saying, "I say, I'm afraid it's going to be a bit

too blowy, after all. Wind's rising all the time;" and that other giant

voice from the megaphone announcing:

"Ladies and gentul Men! As the wind is now blowing

forty miles an hour it will be im possible to make

passenger flights!"

Oh, bitter defeat for the Girl! For, this time, there had been no

idyllic picnic _a deux_ to console her for any disappointment. There had

been nothing but a rather noisy tea in the Pavilion, with a whole

chattering party of the young Airman's acquaintances; with another young

woman who had meant to fly, but who had seemed resigned enough that it

was "not to be, _this_ afternoon," and with half a dozen strange,

irrelevant young men; quite _silly_, Gwenna had thought them. Two of

them had given Gwenna a lift back to Hampstead in their car afterwards,

since Paul Dampier had explained that he "rather wanted to go on with

one of the other fellows"--somewhere! Gwenna didn't know where. Only,

out of her sight! Out of her world! And she was quite certain, even

though he hadn't said so, that he had been bent on some quest that had

something to do with the _Fiancee_ of his, the "P.D.Q.," the Machine!