The Boy with Wings Part 1

The Boy with Wings.

by Berta Ruck.

PART I

_MAY, JUNE, JULY, 1914_

CHAPTER I

AERIAL LIGHT HORSE

Hendon!

An exquisite May afternoon, still and sunny. Above, a canopy of unflecked sapphire-blue. Below, the broad khaki-green expanse of the flying-ground, whence the tall, red-white-and-blue pylons pointed giant fingers to the sky.

Against the iron railings of the ground the border of chairs was thronged with spectators; women and girls in summery frocks, men in light overcoats with field-gla.s.ses slung by a strap about them. The movement of this crowd was that of a breeze in a drift of coloured petals; the talk and laughter rose and fell as people looked about at the great sheds with their huge lettered names, at the big stand, at the parked-up motors behind the seats; at the men in uniform carrying their bra.s.s instruments slowly across to the bandstand on the left.

At intervals everybody said to everybody else: "Isn't this just a perfect afternoon for the flying?"

Presently, there pa.s.sed the turnstile entrance at the back of the parked motor-cars a group of three young girls, chattering together.

One was in pink; one was in cornflower-blue. The girl who walked between them wore all white, with a suns.h.i.+ne-yellow jersey-coat flung over her arm. Crammed well down upon her head she wore a shady white hat, bristling with a flight of white wings; it seemed to overshadow the whole of her small compact, but supple little person, which was finished off by a pair of tiny, white-canvas-shod feet. She was the youngest as well as the smallest of the trio standing at the turnstile. (Observe her, if you please; then leave or follow her, for she is the Girl of this story.)

"This is my show!" she declared. Her softly-modulated voice had a trace of Welsh accent as she added, "I'm paying for this, indeed!"

"No, you aren't, then, Gwenna Williams!" protested the girl in pink (whose accent was Higher c.o.c.kney). "We were all to pay for ourselves!"

"Yes; but wasn't it me that made you come into the half-crown places because I was so keen to see a flying-machine _close_?... I'll pay the difference then, if you _must_ make a fuss. We'll settle up at the office on Monday," said the girl who had been addressed as Gwenna Williams.

With a girlish, self-conscious little gesture she took half a sovereign out of her wash-leather glove and handed it to the tall, be-medalledd commissionaire.

"Come on, now, girls," she said. "This is going to be lovely!" And she led the way forward to that line of seats, where there were just three green chairs vacant together.

Laughing, chattering, gay with the ease of Youth in its own company, the three, squeezed rather close together by the press, sat down; Gwenna, the Welsh girl, in the middle. The broad brim of her hat brushed against the roses of the pink-clad girl's cheaper hat as Gwenna leaned forward.

"Sorry, Butcher," she said. She moved.

This time one of the white wings caught a pin in the hat of the plump blonde in blue, who exclaimed resignedly and in an accent that was neither of Wales nor of England, "Now komm I also into this hat-business of Candlestick-maker. It _is_ a bit of oll right!"

"_So_ sorry, Baker," apologised the girl in white again, putting up her hands to disengage the hat. "I'll take it off, like a matinee. Yes, I will, indeed. We shall all see better." She removed the hat from a small head that was very prettily overgrown with brown, thick, cropped curls.

The bright eyes with which she blinked at first in the strong sunlight were of the colour of the flying-ground before them: earth-brown and turf-green mixed.

"I will hold your hat, since it is for me that you take him off," said the girl whom they called Baker.

Her real name was Becker; Ottilie Becker. She worked at the German correspondence of that London office where the other two girls, Gwenna Williams and Mabel Butcher, were typists. It was one of the many small jokes of the place to allude to themselves as the Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick-maker.

All three were excellent friends....

The other two scarcely realised that Gwenna, the Celt, was different from themselves; more absent-minded, yet more alive. A pa.s.ser-by might have summed her up as "a pretty, commonplace little thing;" a girl like millions of others. But under the ready-made muslin blouse of that season's style there was ripening, all unsuspected, the dormant bud of Pa.s.sion. This is no flower of the commonplace. And her eyes were full of dreams, innocent dreams. Some of them had come true already. For hadn't she broken away from home to follow them? Hadn't she left the valley where nothing ever went on except the eternal Welsh rain that blurred the skylines of the mountains opposite, and that drooped in curtains of silver-grey gauze over the slate roofs of the quarry-village, set in that brook-threaded wedge between wooded hillsides? Hadn't she escaped from that cage of a chapel house sitting-room with its kitchen-range and its many bookshelves and its steel print of John Bunyan and its maddening old grandfather-clock that _always_ said half-pastt two and its everlasting smell of singeing hearthrug, and _never_ a window open?

Yes! she'd given her uncle-guardian no peace until he'd washed his hands over Gwenna's coming up to London. So here she was in London now, making fresh discoveries every day, and enjoying that mixture of drudgery and frivolling that makes up the life of the London bachelor-girl. She was still "fancy-free," as people say of a girl who loves and lives in fancies, and she was still at the age for bosom-friends.h.i.+ps. One sincerely adored girl-chum had her confidence. This was a young woman at the Residential Club, where Gwenna lived; not one of these from the office.

But the office trio could take an occasional Sat.u.r.day jaunt together as enjoyingly as if they never met during the week.

"Postcards, picture postcards!" chanted a shrill treble voice above the buzz of the talking, waiting crowds.

Before the seats a small boy pa.s.sed with a tray of photographs. These showed views of the hangars and of the ground; portraits of the aviators.

"Postcards!" He paused before that cl.u.s.ter of blue and white and pink frocks. "Any picture postcards?"

"Yes! Wait a minute. Let's choose some," said Miss Butcher. And three heads bent together over the display of glazed cards. "Tell you what, Baker; we'll send one off to your soldier-brother in Germany. Shall we?

All sign it, like we did that one to your mother, from the Zoo."

"Ah, yes. A _bier-karte_!" said the German girl, with her good-natured giggle. "Here, I choose this one. View of Hendon. We write '_Es la.s.sen grussen unbekannter Weise_'--'there send greeting to Karl, the Unknown.'"

"Oh, but hadn't we better send him this awfully nice-looking airman, just as a sort of example of what a young man really can do in the way of appearance, what?" suggested Miss Butcher, picking out another card.

"Peach, isn't he? Look! He's standing up in the thingamagig _just_ like an archangel in his car; or do I mean Apollo?--Gwenna'd know.... Which are you going to choose, Gwenna?"

Gwenna had picked out three cards. A view of the ground, a picture of a biplane in mid-air, and a portrait of one of the other airmen.

He had been taken in his machine against the blank background of sky.

The big, boyish hands gripped the wheel, the cap, goggles in front, peak behind, was pushed back from the careless, clean-shaven lad's face, with its cheeks creased with deep dimples of a smile.

"This one," said Gwenna Williams. And there was no whisper of Fate at her heart as she announced lightly, "This is _my_ love." (She did not guess, as you do, that here was the portrait of the Boy of this story.)

The other girls leaned across her to look as she added: "_He's_ the most like Icarus, I think."

"Who's Icarus, when he's at home?" inquired Miss Butcher. And Gwenna, out of one of her skimmed books, gave a hurried explanation of Icarus, the first flying-man, the cla.s.sic youth who "dared the sun" on wings of wax.... Together the girls inspected the postcard of his modern type, the Hendon aviator. They laughed; they read aloud the name "_P.

Dampier_;" they compared his looks with those of other airmen, treating the whole subject precisely as they would have treated the dancing or singing of their favourite actresses in the revues....

For it was still May, Nineteen-fourteen in England. The feeling of warm and drowsy peace in the air was only intensified by the brisk, sharp strains of the military band on the left of the flying-ground, playing the "Light-Cavalry" march....

"Dear me! Are we going on like this for ever?" remonstrated Gwenna presently. "Aren't they _ever_ going up?"

She was answered by a shattering roar from the right.

It ceased. Then, on the field before her excited eyes, there was brought out of one of the hangars by a cl.u.s.ter of mechanics in khaki-brown overalls the Winged Romance that came into this tired and _blase_ world with that most wondrous of all Ages--the Twentieth Century. At first only a long gleaming upper plane, jolting over the uneven ground, could be seen over the heads of the watchers. Then it reached the enclosure.

For the first time in her life Gwenna beheld a Maurice Farman biplane.

And for the moment she was a little disappointed, for she had said it was "going to be so lovely!"