CHAPTER XIV

AN AWAKENING

The sore of that jealousy still smarted in the girl's mind as she turned

her pillow restlessly.... She could not sleep until long after the

starlings had been twittering and the milk-carts rattling by in the

suburban road outside. She awoke, dispirited. She came down late for

breakfast; Leslie had already gone off to her old lady in Highgate. Over

the disordered breakfast-table Miss Armitage was making plans, with some

of the other Suffrage-workers, to "speak" at a meeting of the Fabian

Nursery. Those young women talked loudly enough, but they didn't

pronounce the ends of any of their words; hideously slipshod it all

sounded, thought the Welsh girl fretfully. Her world was a desert to

her, this fine June morning. For at the Westminster office things seemed

as dreary as they had at the Club. She began to see what people meant

when they said that on long sea-voyages one of the greatest hardships

was never to see a fresh face, but always the same ones, day after day,

well-known to weariness, all about one. It was just like that when one

was shut up to work day after day in an office with the same people. She

was sick to death of all the faces of all the people here. Miss Butcher

with her Cockney accent! Miss Baker with her eternal crochet! The men in

the yards with their _awful_ tobacco and trousers! Nearly all men, she

thought, were ugly. All old men. And most of the young ones; _round_

backs, _horrid_ hands, _disgusting_ skins--Mr. Grant, for instance!

(with a glance at that well-meaning engineer, when he brought in some

note for Mabel Butcher). Those swarthy men never looked as if they had

baths and proper shaves. He'd a head like a black hatpin. And his

accent, thought the girl from the land where every letter of a word is

pronounced, his accent was more excruciating than any in Westminster.

"Needn't b'lieve me, if you don't want. But it's true-oo! Vis'ters this

aft'noon," he was saying to Miss Butcher. "Young French Dook or Comp or

something, he is; taking out a patent for a new crane. Coming in early

with some swagger friends of his. Wants to be shown the beauties of the

buildin', I s'pose. Better bring him in here and let him have a good

look at you girls first thing, hadn't I? S'long! Duty calls. I must

away."

And away he went, leaving Miss Butcher smiling fondly after him, while

Miss Williams wondered how on earth any girl ever managed to fall in

love, considering there was nothing but young men to fall in love with.

All ordinary young men were awful. And all young men _were_ ordinary....

Except, now and again, one ... far away ... out of reach.... Who just

showed how different and wonderful a thing a lover might be! If one

could only, only ever get near him!--instead of being stuck down here,

in this perfectly beastly place----

As the morning wore on, she found herself more and more dissatisfied

with all her surroundings. And for a girl of Gwenna's sort to be

thoroughly dissatisfied predicts one thing only. She will not long stay

where she is.

Impatiently she sighed over her typing-table. Irritably she fidgeted in

her chair. This was what jerked the plump arm of Ottilie Becker, who was

passing behind her, and who now dropped a handful of papers on to the

new boards.

"Zere! Now see what you have made me do," said the German girl

good-naturedly enough. "My letter! Pick him up, Candlesticks-maker."

"Oh, pick him up yourself," retorted Gwenna school-girlishly, crossly.

"It wasn't my fault."

At this tone from a colleague of whom she was genuinely fond, tears rose

to Miss Becker's blue eyes. Miss Butcher, coming across to the centre

table, saw those tears.

"Well, really, anybody might _apologise_," she remarked reproachfully,

"when they've _upset_ anybody."

At this rebuke Gwenna's strained nerves snapped.

An Aberystwith Collegiate School expression rose naturally to her

lips--"_Cau dy geg_!" She translated it: "Shut _up_!" she said, quite

rudely.

Then, the moment after she had given way to this little outburst of

temper she felt better. She was ready to be on the best of terms again

with her fellow-typists. They, as Miss Butcher would have said, "weren't

having any." They turned offended backs upon her. They talked pointedly

to each other, not to her.

"That's a precious long letter you've got written there, Baker," said

Miss Butcher, helping to gather up the half-dozen thin foreign sheets,

covered with neat, pointed German writing. "Is that to the beloved

brother?"

Miss Becker nodded her plait-wreathed head as she put the letter that

began: "_Geliebter Karl!_" into the grey-lined envelope.

"He likes to hear what they make--do--at the works. Always he ask," she

said, "after what they do. And who come hier; and where everythings is

kept."

"Gracious! I do believe he's a regular German spy, like in the

magazines, this brother of yours," smiled Miss Butcher lightly. "Don't

you give away any of our State secrets, Baker, will you? We'd be having

the authorities, whoever they are, poking round and inquiring. Awful if

England and your country went to war, wouldn't it?--and you were

supposed to be 'the Enemy'!"

She spoke as if of something that was more fantastic than Gwenna's

flying dream of the night before. The German typist answered in the same

strain.

"If it _was_ war, I would speak to Karlchen's regiment that your house

in Clapham and your people should be saved," she promised. "But he is

not thinking now of war; he interests himself very much for buildings

(because our father is architect). And for maps of the river, and such.

So I must write on him every week a long letter.... We go out to-day to

have our lunch, yes?"

The two went out together towards Whitehall. The Welsh girl was left in

Coventry--and the deserted offices.

She didn't want any lunch. She drank a glass of tepid tap-water from the

dressing-room. She ate some strawberries, bought in their little flat

basket as she had come along. Then, hatless, and in her thin, one-piece

dress of grey linen, she strolled out into the yard for a breath of air.

It was empty and hot and sunny. Gwenna looked up from the wood-littered

ground where the ubiquitous London pigeons strutted and flirted and

"Croo--_croo_--do--I--do"-ed about her feet. Overhead, that giant

lacework on its iron crochet-hooks looked as if its pattern had been

drawn with a pen and black ink against the opaque blue-grey sky. The

sight of that far-off pinnacle put into her head again the thought of

flying.

"I don't believe that I shall ever be as high up as that, with the blue

beneath me, like I've always wanted!" reflected the young girl,

dolefully looking up. "I believe that last night in my dream is all the

flying I'm ever going to have had!"

And again that longing took her. That pure longing to be high; above the

Law that clogs the children of Man to the Earth from which he came. To

feel the unfettered air above and below and about her all at once!...

But what could she do to gratify the impulse even a little?

Only one thing.

She might _climb_.

The idea with which she started off on her mad prank was to climb up to

that iron lattice of lacework; to run up that as a sailor climbs the

rope-ladders of his masts, and thence from the very highest peak

attainable to look down on London, even as last night she had looked

down on it from her dream.

Her start was not in the open air at all, but from the bottom of the

scaffolding inside, where it was all beams and uprights and floors of

planks. It reminded Gwenna of being underneath the old wooden pier at

Aberdovey, and looking up. She went up ladders, through trap-doors,

walked over wooden floors to other ladders until she got up to the last

trap-door and through it out of the shadow and the stuffiness to the

sunshine and the fresh air again. She stood on the top platform of the

gantry which supported that engine and the wheels that worked (she

supposed) the iron lattice that was still far above her head.

Presently she would climb that. She knew that she could. She was never

afraid of heights. Her head was steady enough. Her feet in their brown

shoes were as sure as the feet of the tiny sheep that picked their way

up the rocky steeps of her Welsh mountains. She could climb as well as

any of the men ... but for the moment she rested, standing by the

platform hand-railing, breathing in the freshened breeze.

The birds of the City--pigeons and sparrows--were taking their short

flights far beneath her perch. All London was spread below her, as it

had been in that flying dream, and with as strong a sense of security

as in the dream she looked down upon it.

There, between the forests of chimney-pots, gleamed that highway of the

Thames, blue-grey now as it reflected the sky, winding out of the

distance that meant the clean, green country and the willows below the

lawns where people had danced; flowing on into London that sullied it,

and burdened it with her barges, and spanned it with her bridges, but

could not stay it; on and out its waters passed towards Greenwich and

the Docks and the tall ships and the North Sea!

And there on its bank was the office, the dwindled yard from which

Gwenna had started. The men returning....

The whole place looked nothing more than a hen-run full of fowls. Their

voices ascended, more loudly than she would have expected to hear from

their diminished figures. How funny to see what midgets the creatures

looked from here, and to remember how majestically important each

considered himself! thought little Gwenna, forgetting that from the yard

she herself, with her grey linen frock, her brown feet and ankles, must

look no larger than a roosting pigeon.

She looked down, past the railing and the ends of timbers, feeling

immeasurably aloof from everybody in her world. She wished she need

never go down to it again.

"I've a _good_ mind to give notice at the office, whatever, and go

somewhere quite different!" she thought defiantly, and immediately she

felt elated. A weight of depression seemed to have dropped from her

already. Up, up went the feather-weight spirits of Youth. She had

forgotten for this moment the longing and frustration of the last weeks,

the exasperations of this morning, her squabble with those other girls.

She had climbed out of all that....

Now, before she left this place, she would do something that none of the

girls she knew would dare. She'd climb further.

She turned to take a step towards the crane.

Then something gave her a start as violent as that in which she had,

that night before, been jerked out of her dream.

For now, into her absorbed musing there had broken without warning the

sound of a voice. It had seemed to have come out of nothing, from behind

her, and it had said, with a laugh deep and soft at once, "_My_ machine?

Oh, yes.... Good of you to remember her----"

Paul Dampier's voice!

Little Gwenna, with her back to the trap-door, and wrapped in her own

thoughts, had heard nothing of the steps of five pairs of feet coming up

the way that she had come. In the violence of her surprise of hearing a

voice, so often heard in her daydreams now, here, in this unexpected

place between sky and ground, she started so that she lost her balance.

The girl's foot slipped. She fell. She was half over the platform--one

small foot and ankle stretched out over the giddy height as that crane

was stretched. She clutched on the crook of a slender grey arm, the

railing of the platform--So, for an agonised moment, she hung.

But hardly had she cried out before there was the dash of a tall man's

figure across the planks from the trap-door.

"It's all right--I've got you," said Paul Dampier, and caught her up

from the edge, in his arms.

They held her. That armful of a girl, soft and warm as one of the grey

pigeons, was crushed for a moment against the boy's chest. She was

closer to him than she had been in any of those waltzes. Yet it seemed

no strangeness to be so near--feeling his heart beat below hers, feeling

the roughness of his tweed jacket through the thin linen of her frock.

She felt as she'd felt about flying, in that dream of hers. "I must have

known it all before."

Then, dazed but happy, resting where she seemed to belong, she thought

in a twink, "I shall have to let go. _Why_ can't I stay like this?...

Oh, it's very cruel. There! Now I have let go. But he won't.... He's

getting his balance."

He had taken a step backwards.

Then she slid through his arms. She slipped, lightly as a squirrel slips

down the length of a beech, to the wooden floor of the platform.

Cruel; yes, _cruel_! And to add to the cruelty that such a moment must

end, the Airman, when she left his enforced clasp, scarcely looked at

her. He barely returned her greeting. He did not answer her breathless

thanks. He turned away from her--whom he had saved. Yes! He left her to

the meaningless babble of the others (she recognised now, in a dazed

way, that there were other men with him on the scaffolding). He left her

to the politenesses of his cousin Hugo and of that young French engineer

(Mr. Grant's "Comp" who had come up to inspect the crane). He never

looked again as Miss Williams was guided down the trap-door and the

ladders by the scolding Yorkshire foreman, who didn't leave her until

she was safely at the bottom.

She was met by the two other typists who had, from the office window,

seen her perched up, small as a bird, on the heights. Both girls had

been terrified. Miss Butcher now brought lavender salts. Miss Becker's

pink moon of a face was blanched with horror over her colleague's

danger.

"Do you know what could have happened, Candlesticks-maker, my dear?"

cried the German girl with real emotion, as they all made tea together

in the varnished, stifling office. "You could have been killed, you!"

Gwenna thought, "That would have been too bad. Because then--_then_ I

shouldn't have known when he held me!"

* * * * *

As it was, there were several things about that incident that the young

girl--passionate and infatuated and innocent--did not know.

For one thing, there was the resolution that Paul Dampier took just

after he had turned abruptly from her, had taken short leave of the

others, and when he was striding down Whitehall to the bus that went

past the door of his Camden Town rooms. And for another thing, there was

the reason for that resolution.

Now, in the fairy-stories of modern life, it is (of the two principals)

not always the Princess who has to be woken by a kiss, a touch, from the

untroubled sleep of years. Sometimes it is the Prince who is suddenly

stirred, jarred, or jolted broad awake by the touch, in some form or

other, of Love. In Paul Dampier's case the every-day miracle had been

wrought by the soft weight of that dove-breasted girl against his heart

for no longer than he could count ten, by her sliding to the earth

through an embrace that he had not intended for an embrace at all.

It hadn't seemed to matter what _he_ had intended!

In a flock as of homing pigeons there flew back upon the young aviator

all at once his thoughts of the Little Thing ever since he'd met her.

How he'd thought her so jolly to look at ("So sensible"--this he

forgot). How topping and natural it had seemed to sit there with her in

that field, talking to her, drinking with her out of one silver cup. How

he'd found himself wanting to touch her curls; to span and squeeze her

throat with his hands. How he'd been within an inch of summarily kissing

that fox-glove pink mouth of hers, that night at the Dance....

And to-day, when he'd come to Westminster for another talk with that

rather decent young Frenchman of Hugo's, when he hadn't thought of

seeing the girl at all, what had happened? He'd actually held her

clasped in his arms, as a sweetheart is clasped.

Only by a sheer accident, of course.

Yes, but an accident that had left impressed on every fibre of him the

feeling of that warm and breathing burden which seemed even yet to rest

against his quickened heart.

In that heart there surged up a clamorous impulse to go back at once. To

snatch her up for the second time in his arms, and not to let her go

again, either. To satisfy that hunger of his fingers and lips for the

touch of her----

"_Hold_ hard!" muttered the boy to himself. "Hang it all, this won't

do."

For he had found himself actually turning back, his face set towards the

Abbey.

He spun round on the hot pavement towards home again.

"Look here; can't have this!" he told himself grimly as he walked on,

swinging his straw hat in his hand, towards Trafalgar Square. "At this

rate I shall be making an ass of myself before I know where I am; going

and falling in--going and getting myself much too dashed fond of the

Little Thing."

Yes! He now saw that he was in some danger of that.

And if it did come to anything, he mused, walking among the London

summer crowd, it wouldn't be one of these Fancy-dress-dance

flirtations. Not that sort of girl. "Nor was he; really." Not that sort

of man, he meant. Sort of thing never had amused him, much; not, he

knew, because he was cold-blooded ("Lord, no!") but partly because he'd

had such stacks of other things to do, partly because--because he'd

always thought it ought to be (and could be) so much more--well, amusing

than it was. This other. This with the Little Thing--he somehow knew

that it would have to be "for keeps."

And _that_ he couldn't have. Good Lord, no! There could be no

question--Great Scott!

For yes, if there _was_ anything between him and the Little Thing, it

would have to be an engagement. Marriage, and all that.

And Paul Dampier didn't intend to get married. Out of the question for

him.

He'd only just managed to scrape through and make "some sort of a

footing" for himself in the world as it was. His father, a hard-up Civil

engineer, and his mother (who had been looked askance at by her people,

the Swaynes, for marrying the penniless and undistinguished Paul

Dampier, senior)--they'd only just managed to give their boy "some kind

of an education" before they pegged out. Lessons at home when he'd been

a little fellow. Afterwards one of the (much) smaller public-schools.

For friends and pleasures and holidays he had been dependent on what he

could "pick up" for himself. Old Hugo had been decent enough. He'd asked

his cousin to fish with him in Wales, twice, and he hadn't allowed Paul

to feel that he was--the poor relation.

Only Paul remembered the day that Hugo was going back to Harrow for the

last time. He, Paul, had then been a year in the shops, to the day. He

remembered the sudden resentment of that. It was not snobbery, not envy.

It was Youth in him crying out, "I will be served! I won't be put off,

and stopped doing things, and shoved out of things for ever, just

because I'm poor. If being poor means being 'out of it,' having no Power

of any kind, I'm dashed if I _stay_ poor. I'll show that I can make

good----"

And, gradually, step by step, the young mechanic, pilot, aero-racer and

inventor had been "making good."

He'd made friends, too. People had been decent. He'd been made to feel

that _they_ felt he was going to be a useful sort of chap. He'd quailed

a bit under the eyes of butlers in these houses where he'd stayed, but

he'd been asked again. That Mrs. What's-her-name (the woman in the pink

frock at the Smiths) had been awfully kind. Introducing him to her

brothers with capital; asking him down to the New Forest to meet some

other influential person; and knowing that he couldn't entertain in

return. (He'd just sent her some flowers and some tickets for

Brooklands.) Then there was Colonel Conyers. He'd asked whether he

(Dampier) were engaged. And, at his answer, had replied, "Good. Much

easier for a bachelor, these days."

And now! Supposing he got married?

On his screw? Paul Dampier laughed bitterly.

Well, but supposing he got engaged; got some wretched girl to wait

for----

Years of it! Thanks!

Then, quite apart from the money-question, what about all his work?

Everything he wanted to do! Everything he was really in earnest about.

His scheme--his invention--his Machine!

"End of it all, if he went complicating matters by starting a _girl_!"

Take up all his time. Interrupt--putting him off his job--yes, he knew!

Putting him off, like this afternoon in the yard, and that other night

at the Dance. Only more so. Incessant. "Mustn't have it; quite simply,

he must _not_."

Messing up his whole chance of a career, if----

But he was pulling himself up in time from that danger.

Up to now he hadn't realised that there might be something in all that

rot of old Hugo's about the struggle in a man's mind between an

Aeroplane and a Girl. Now--well, he'd realised. All the better. Now he

was forewarned. Good thing he could take a side for himself now.

By the time he'd reached the door of the National Portrait Gallery and

stood waiting for his motor omnibus, he had definitely taken that

resolution of which Gwenna Williams did not know.

Namely, that he must drop seeing the Girl. Have nothing more to say to

her. It was better so; wiser. Whatever he'd promised about taking her up

would have to be "off."

A pity--! Dashed shame a man couldn't have _everything_! She was ... so

awfully sweet....

Still, got to decide one way or the other.

This would fix it before it was too late, before he'd perhaps managed to

put ideas into the head of the Little Thing. She shouldn't ever come

flying, with him!

That _ended_ it! he thought. He'd made up _his_ mind. He would not allow

himself to wonder what _she_ might think.

After all, what _would_ a girl think? Probably nothing.

Nothing at all, probably.