The Boy with Wings Part 12

He shook his s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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 gra.s.s 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 b.u.t.tercups, 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 gra.s.s; 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 gra.s.s, 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.

b.u.t.ter--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 gla.s.s, though," exclaimed young Dampier, sitting up on his knees on the shaded patch of gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 gra.s.s.

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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+rt-sleeved shoulders.