Berta Ruck

“ She went on talking while Gwenna, putting a gloss on her short curls with a brush in each hand, listened and laughed, and watched her from the bed with greeny-brown eyes full of an unreserved admiration. So far, Leslie Long's was the society in which Gwenna Williams most delighted. The younger, less sophisticated girl poured out upon her chum that affection which is not to be bribed or begged. It is not even to be found in any but a heart which is yet untouched, save in its dreams, by Love. ”

“ Then, as the wonder happened, the untried and imaginative little Welsh country-girl, watching, gave a gasp. "Ah——!"
The machine was fettered no longer.
Suddenly those absurd skids and wheels had become no more than the tiny feet that a seagull tucks away under itself, and like a gull the biplane rose. It soared, its engine shouting triumph as it sped. Gwenna's heart beat as tensely as that engine. Her eyes sparkled. What they saw was not now a machine, but the beauty of those curves it cut in the conquered air. It soared, it banked, it swayed gently as if on a keel. ”

“ I should want to bring you all the good luck in the world," cried the younger girl, earnestly, over her shoulder as they went out. "If I were given three wishes now for a wedding-present, one of them would be that you would some day be as happy as me!"
"My dear lamb!" said Leslie lightly, running downstairs after her, "How do you know I'm not quite as happy in another—in my own way?"
Gwenna shook the curly head under the orange-blossom wreath and the misty veil. It seemed to her that there was only The One Way in which a woman could be happy. ”

“ Made that baggage in the yellow dress and the Mrs. in the Pink look like a couple of half-artificial florists' blooms by the side of a lily-of-the-valley freshly-plucked from some country garden, sappy and sturdy, and sweet. And her skin was like the bit of mother-of-pearl she was wearing as a heart-shaped locket.
Quite suddenly he said to her: "Look here! Should you care to go up?"
Gwenna gasped.
The whole room, the bright table and the chattering guests seemed now to whirl about her in a circle of shiny mist—as that aeroplane propeller had whirled.... Care to go up? "Care!" Would she? ”

“ He was a droning bee, buzzing and hovering unheeded over a tuft of dusty white clover growing by the rails that were so closely thronged by human beings come to watch and wonder over man's still new miracle of flight.
"Oh, flying! Mustn't it be too glorious!" sighed the Welsh girl, watching the aeroplane that was now scarcely larger than a winged bullet in the blue. "Oh, wouldn't I love to go up! Wouldn't it be Heaven!"
"It's been Heaven for several poor fellows lately," suggested the shrewd, Cockney-voiced little Miss Butcher, grimly, from her right. ”

“ For every passer-by in the street must turn to look, with quickened interest now, at an Army Aviator. Even the young men in their uniforms gave a glance at the soldier whose tunic buttoned at the side and whose cap had the tilt that gave to the shape of his blonde head something bird-like, falcon-like. And every girl in the restaurant where they lunched murmured, "Look," to her companion, "that's some one in the Royal Flying Corps," and was all eyes for that kit which, at a time when all khaki was romantic, had a special, super-glamour of its own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Steady as if running on rails, the aeroplane came on overhead; her sound as she came now loud, now soft, but always angry, harsh—harshness like that of a woman who lives to herself and her strivings, with no comradeship of Earth on which to lean. Against the sky that was her playground she showed as a slate-coloured dragonfly—a purple Empress of the Air soaring on and on into the growing dazzle of the day.
"Oh, it is beautiful, though," cried the girl on the path, looking up, and losing for that moment the angry sense that had fallen upon her of pleasure past, of the end of the song. ”

“ Gwenna, standing shyly, as if on the brink of the party, heard the hostess saying: "We hardly hoped you'd come ... we know you people always are besieged by invitations——"
"Dear me! All these people seem dreat-fully grand," thought the Welsh girl hastily to herself. "I wonder if it wouldn't have been better, now, if Leslie had left that cerise velvet trimming as it was on my dress?"
Instinctively she glanced about for the nearest mirror. There was a big oval gilt-framed one over the yellow brocaded Empire couch near which Gwenna stood. ”

“ It was Gwenna who asked the first question.
With a stormy and troubled sigh, she broke out, à propos of nothing: "How is one to make him? I mean how is one ever to get a young man to like one if he hardly ever sees one?"
Leslie looked down at her over the second mauve stocking that she was drawing over a yellow wooden darning mushroom.
"Tut," said Leslie, with her usual mock unction. "What is all this about 'getting' a young man to like one? What an expression, my love. And, worse; what a sentiment! Surely you know that men (nice men) think very lightly of a girl who does not have to be wooed. ”

“ She'd always felt, dimly and uncomfortably, that a great part of herself, Gwenna, was just an uninteresting, commonplace little girl.... That part had gone! It had been left behind her, just as her bodily form had been left sleeping on her bed, that midsummer night, while her soul flew through dreams.
"Dreams!" she thought incoherently. "It's not true what people say about the dream-come-true, and how one's always disappointed in it. I'm not—ah, I'm not! This flying! ”

“ Money's gorgeous. Money means Power," affirmed Leslie. "Apart from the silk-stockinged aspect of it, it lets you live a much fuller life mentally and spiritually. It can make you almost everything you want to be, to yourself and to other people, Taff. It's worth almost anything to get it. But there's one thing it's not worth," said Leslie Long, really gravely: "It's not worth marrying the wrong person for."
"I don't know why you didn't know that before," said little Gwenna, feeling for once in her life so much older and much wiser than her chum. "What makes you know it now, Leslie?" ”

“ Two things greater than all things are,
The first is Love and the second is War."
"I can't imagine such a thing as war, now," mused Gwenna on the bed. "Can you?"
"Oh, vaguely; yes," said Leslie Long. "You know my people, poor darlings, were all in the Army. But the poisonously rich man my sister married says there'll never be any war again, except perhaps among a few dying-out savage races. He does so grudge every ha'penny to the Navy Estimates; and he's quite violent about these useless standing armies! You know he's no sahib. ”

“ For Gwenna, envious, thought, "Leslie can make a man think of nothing but her, even when she's 'not in the mood!' I can't. Yet I believe I could, but for one thing. Even now I don't know that he isn't thinking about That Other——"
"That Other" was her rival, that machine of his that Gwenna had not mentioned all the evening....
It had come, she knew, that duel between the Girl and the Aeroplane for the first place in the heart of a Flying Man. A duel as old as the world, between the thing a man greatly loves, and that which he loves more greatly still. ”

“ With her crop-curled head close against his shoulder as they danced, she stole at her boyish partner the shy, defiantly possessive glance that a child gives sometimes to the favourite toy, the toy that focusses all his dreams. This was "the one particular person out of all the world" whose company answered every conscious and unconscious demand of the young girl's nature even as his waltz-step suited her own.
Yet she guessed that this special quiet rapture could not last. Even before the end of the dance the end of this must surely come. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Miss Butcher, munching, was deep in a library-book lent to her by the young electrician. Miss Baker counted stitches in a new pattern for a crochet-work Kante, or length of fine thread insertion. It was not unlike the pattern of the iron trellis above the scaffolding, that tapered black against the sky; man's fancy-work.
What hideously tame things women had to fill their lives with, Gwenna thought as she sat in the upper window of her tea-shop at the corner of the Embankment. She watched the luncheon-time crowd walking over Westminster Bridge. ”

“ Gwenna regarded her with envy. Leslie spoke of what should be the eighth wonder of the world, the making or rejecting of a man's life, as if it were an everyday affair. [Pg 172]
"Don't look so unflatteringly surprised, Taffy. Strictly pretty I may not be. But a scrupulously neat and lady-like appearance," mocked Leslie, putting out a long arm in a faded-silk sleeve that was torn at the cuff, "has often (they tell one) done more to win husbands than actual good looks!"
Little Gwenna said, startled, "You aren't—aren't going to let Mr. Swayne be your husband, are you?" ”

“ 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!" ”

“ It's a mascot," said Gwenna, as she hung the little mother-o'-pearl pendant obstinately about her neck. "There!"
"Very well. Spoil the look of that lovely little dimply hollow you've got just at the base there if you must. A man," said Gwenna's chum with a quick, critical glance, "a man would find that very easy to kiss."
"Easy!" said Gwenna, with a quicker blush of anger. "He wouldn't then, indeed!"
"Oh, my dear, I didn't mean that," explained Leslie as she caught up her gloves and wrap and prepared to lead the way out of the room and downstairs to the hall. ”

“ Me, I am not artiste. I am ingénieur only."
"'Only'!" thought Gwenna over her teacup.
Surely any one should be proud of being an engineer, considering that Mr. Dampier had thus begun his career; he who was now in what the romantic girl considered the First of All Professions? Perhaps her attitude towards the Airman as such was noted by the Airman's cousin. Hugo, who had dropped a little heavily into the softest chair near Miss Long, turned his Chopinesque profile against a purple cushion to shoot a rather satirical glance at the cleaner-built youth in the worn grey suit. ”

“ You're as much in love with that aviator's job as you are with anything else about him. You're as much amused by 'ordinary things' as any other girl is amused by getting a young man. As for what you feel about the young man himself, well!—I suppose that's a tune played half a yard to the right of the keyboard of an ordinary girl's capacity. You're keen for Life; you've got what men call 'a thirst you couldn't buy.' Wish I were like that!"
"Well, but it's so easy to be," argued Gwenna, "when you do meet some one so wonderful——"
"It's not so easy to see 'wonder,' let me tell you. ”

“ Gwenna began to feel a little nervous and intimidated, even in the car that took herself and the Aeroplane Lady and the Airman to the Aviation dinner.
A hundred yards before they reached the portals of the Club in Pall Mall that car stopped. Then it began to advance again a yard or two at a time. A long row of other cars and taxis was ahead, and from them alighted guests in dull black opera hats, with mufflers; once or twice there was the light and jewelled gleam of a woman's wrap, but they were mostly men who were driving up. ”

“ Above the ruffle of her night-gown her throat rose proudly; thick and creamy and smooth. She remembered something he'd told her that afternoon at Kew. He'd said that she always reminded him of any kind of white flower that was sturdy and sweet; a posy of white clover, a white, night-blooming stock, some kinds of white roses.... She would like to send him a flower, in this letter, to remind him.
She glanced towards the open casement, where the curtain waved. Under the shading foliage of the clematis that grew up to the cottage-roof there had climbed the spray of a belated rose. ”

“ Now if there is a feature that a man admires in a girl it's her tiny, trimly-corseted waist. My old lady went to a fancy-dress dance once, in a black-and-yellow plush bodice as 'A Wasp,' and everybody said how splendid. She never allowed herself to spread into anything more than Eighteens until she was thirty! But now the girls are allowed to slop about in these loud, fast-looking, golf-jackets or whatever they call them, made just like a man's—and the young men simply aren't marrying any more. No wonder!"
"Oh, Leslie! do you think it's true?" put in Gwenna, a trifle nervously. ”

“ She announced, "Maudie, here's the stop-gap. Taffy Williams, your hostess."
Her hostess was a version of Leslie grown incredibly matronly. Her auricula-coloured velvet tea-gown looked as if it had been clutched about her at the last moment. (Which in point of fact it had. Mrs. Smith was quite an old-fashioned mother.) Yet from her eyes smiled the indestructible Girl that is embedded in so many a respectable matron, and she looked down very kindly at Gwenna, the cherub-headed, in her white frock. ”