CHAPTER VI

THE WINGED VICTORY

Now Gwenna, although she'd been clerk and assistant to the Aeroplane Lady herself, and although she loved the idea of aeroplanes as other girls have loved the idea of jewels, scarcely knew one pattern of monoplane from another.

They were all the same to her as far as overlapping the seams with the doped strips was concerned. Nevertheless, in this machine that seemed suddenly to have appeared out of nowhere, there struck her something that was quite unfamiliar. Never before had she seen that little blade-shaped drag from the tips of the wings. It gave to this machine the look of a flying pigeon.... She had only noticed it for a moment, as the monoplane had lurched, as it were, into view over the edge of their own lower plane. Then it lurched out of sight again.

Again their engine was shut off; and again she heard Paul's voice, excited, curt.

"Can you get him, do you think?"

Get him? Bewilderingly she wondered what Paul could mean. Then came another staccato rush of sound. Then another silence, and Paul's voice through it.

"All right. I'll get above him; and you can shoot through the floor."

The engine brayed again, this time continuously.

"Shoot!" gasped Gwenna.

Shoot at that machine through the hole in the floor of this one? It was a German craft, then? And Paul meant Mr. Ryan to shoot whoever was in that machine. And she, Gwenna, who had never had a gun in her hands before in her life, found herself in the midst of War, told to shoot----

Hardly knowing one end of the thing from the other, she grasped the carbine. She guessed that the flyer in the other machine must have realised what Paul meant to do.

They were rising; he was rising too.

And suddenly she became aware that there was sunlight about them no longer. All was a dun and chilly white. Paul, trying to get above the other, and the other trying to prevent him, had both run up together into a cloud. Once before the Welsh girl had had this experience. On a rocky mountain-path up Cader Idris she had walked into a thick mist that wrapped her from seeing anything in front of her, even though she could hear the voices of tourists just a little ahead.

And now here they saw nothing, but they could hear.

Even through the noise of their propeller Gwenna's ears caught a smaller noise. It seemed to come from just below.

She had got the muzzle of the carbine through the hole at her feet. Desperately, blindly she fumbled at what she thought must be the trigger. Behind her goggles, she shut her eyes tightly. The thing went off before she knew how it had done so.

Then, nothing....

Then the propeller had stopped again. She felt her shoulder touched from behind. Paul's voice called, "Got him, Ryan?"

"I--I don't know," she gasped, turning. "I--_Paul! It's me!_"

It was a wonder that the biplane did not completely overturn.

Paul Dampier had wrenched himself forward out of the straps and had taken one hand from the wheel. His other clutched Gwenna's shoulder, and the clutch dragged away the muffler at her white throat and her goggles slipped aside. Aghast he glared at her. The Little Thing herself? Here?

"Good---- here, keep still. Great----! For Heaven's sake, don't move. I'll run for it. He can't catch me. I was trying to catch him. He can't touch us---- We'll race--hold tight, Gwen--ready." He opened the throttle again; while Gwenna, white-faced, took in the tornado of wind with parted lips and turned sideways to stare with wide-open eyes.

Then a number of things seemed to happen very quickly.

The first of these was a sharp "Ping!" on one of the aluminium stays. Gwenna found herself gazing blankly at the round hole in the wing a yard to the right of her. The next thing was that the fog--mist--or cloud, had disappeared. All was clear sky about them once more. The third thing was that, hardly a stone's toss away, and only missed by a miracle in the cloud, they saw the monoplane and the aviator in her.

He was bareheaded, for that blind, wild shot of the British girl's had stripped away his head-covering, and there was a trickle of scarlet down his cheek. His hair was a gilded stubble, his eyes hard and blue and Teutonic. His flying-gear was buttoned plastron-wise above his chest, just as that white linen jacket of his had been; and Karl Becker, waiter, spy and aviator, gave a little nod, as much as to say that he recognised that they were meeting not for the first time....

One glimpse showed all this. The next instant both German and Englishman had turned to avoid the imminent collision. But the German did more than turn.

He had been fired on and hit; now was his shot. Dampier, with no thought now but to get his wife out of danger, crowded the biplane on. As the machines missed one another by hardly ten feet, she heard the four cracks of Paul's revolver.

Little Gwenna thought she had never heard anything so fascinating, horrible, and sweet. He was fighting not for his own life only. And he was not now being fired at, far from her, hoping that she need never know. For she also, she was in danger with him; she who did not want to die before him but who would not wish to live for one moment after him.

Moments? When every moment was a whole life, what could be more perilously, unimaginedly sweet than this?

"I knew I had to come," she gasped to herself. "Never away from him again! Never----"

Her heart was racing like the propeller itself with just such speed, such power. More love than it could bear was crowded into every throb of it. For one more of those moments that were more than years she must look at him and see him look at her....

One look!

As they tore through the air she turned in her straps, pushing the curls back from her brow. Her eyes met his, set and intent over the wheel.

She smiled at him.

Up out of the depths of his intentness she saw the answering smile come into his own eyes. He nodded. He meant that it was all right. His lips moved.

"He can't--touch--us!" he was shouting. His girl threw back her head as far as it would go, offering her face for the kiss that she knew he could not give. He nodded again, laughed outright, and stretched his own head forward. It was all a kiss, despite the constraining straps--or almost all.

More of a kiss than many lovers know, more of a marriage!

For then it was that the German's shot rang out, completing their caress. Never was dearer nor more precious union, never less pain, so lost was it in rapture. As gently as if he had only just said Good-night the boy's head sank on the wheel; as for hers, it never moved. She still lay, leaning back with lips parted, as if to-morrow would see her kissed awake again.... His hands twitched once only. That movement cut off the throttle. Again, for the last time, the propeller stopped.

The Taube was already a vanishing speck in the distance....

The P.D.Q. yawed, hung poised, began to slide tail first, and gathered speed.

Up, up came the silver waves of the English Channel.

POSTSCRIPT

MYRTLE AND LAUREL LEAF

It was the week before Christmas, Nineteen-fourteen.

London wore her dreariest winter livery of mud-brown and fog-yellow, and at three o'clock on such an afternoon there would have been brilliant lights everywhere ... any other, ordinary year.

This year, Londoners had to find their way as best they could through the gloom.

Across a wide Square with a railed and shrubberied garden in the centre of it, there picked her way a very tall girl in furs that clung about her as bushy ivy hangs about some slender tree. She wore a dark velvet coat broadly belted over her strait hips, and upon her impish head there was perched one of the little, back velvet, half-military caps that were still the mode. This girl peered up at the numbers of the great houses at the side of the Square; finally, seeing the gilt-lettered inscription that she sought above one of the doors,

"ANNEXE TO THE CONVALESCENT HOME FOR WOUNDED OFFICERS,"

she rang the bell.

The door was opened to her by a small trim damsel in the garb of the Girl-Guides, who ushered her into a large and ornate hall, and into the presence of a fresh-coloured, fair-haired Personage--she was evidently no less--in nurse's uniform.

This Personage gazed upon the visitor with a suspicious and disapproving look.

"I wonder why? It isn't because I'm not blamelessly tidy for once in my life, and she can't guess that the furs and the brown velvet suit are cast-offs from the opulent," thought the visitor swiftly. Aloud she added in her clear, nonchalant tone: "I have come to see Mr. Scott, please."

"There is the visiting-hour. It is not quite three yet," said the nurse forbiddingly.

"I'll wait, then," said the visitor. For two minutes she waited. Then the nurse approached her with a note-book and a pencil.

"Will you write your name down here?" she said austerely. And upon a page inscribed "_Mr. M. Scott_" the visitor wrote her name, "Miss Leslie Long."

"Will you come up?" the nurse said reluctantly. And Leslie ascended a broad red-carpeted stairway, and was shown into a great room of parquet floors and long windows and painted panels that had been a drawing-room, and that was now turned by a row of small beds on great castors and by several screens into a hospital-ward.

A blonde youth in a pink pyjama jacket, and with his arm in a black silken sling, was sitting up in bed and chatting to a white-moustached gentleman beside him; another of the wounded was sitting by one of the great fire-places, reading; a couple were playing picquet in a corner, under a smiling Academy portrait of the mistress of the mansion.

"Mr. Scott is sitting up to-day, in the ante-room," vouchsafed the nurse. And Leslie Long entered, through a connecting door, a small room to the right.

One wall of it was hung with a drapery of ancient brown tapestry, showing giant figures amidst giant foliage; beneath it was a low couch. Upon this, covered with a black, panther-skin rug, there lay, half sitting up, supported on his elbow, the young wounded officer whom Leslie had come to see.

"Frightfully good of you, this," he said cheerfully, as she appeared.

She looked down at him.

For the moment she could not speak. She set down on his couch the sheaf of golden chrysanthemums that she had brought, and the copy of the _Natal Newsletter_ that she had thought might cheer him. She found herself about to say a very foolish thing: "So they left you your handsome eyes, Monty."

The face in which those eyes shone now was thin and drawn; and it seemed as if all the blood had been drained from it. His crutches stood in the corner at the foot of the couch. He was Monty Scott, the Dean's son, once a medical student and would-be sculptor. Yes; he had been a dilettante artist once, but he looked a thorough soldier now. The small moustache and the close-cropped hair suited him well. He had enlisted in the Halberdiers at the beginning of the War. He had got his commission and had lost his leg at Ypres.

Not again would he wear that Black Panther get-up to any fancy-dress dance.... Never again.

This was the thought, trivial and irrelevant enough, that flashed through Leslie's mind, bringing with it a rush of tears that she had to bite her lips to check. She had to clench her nails into her palms, to open her black eyes widely and smilingly, and to speak in the clearest and most flippant tone that she could summon.

"Hullo, Monty! Nice to see you again; now that I _can_ see you. You wounded warriors _are_ guarded by a dragon!--thanks, I'll sit down here." She turned the low chair by the couch with its back to the light. "Yes, I could hardly get your Ministering-Angel-Thou to let me through. Glared at me as if she thought I was after the spoons. (I suppose that's exactly what some of them _are_ after," suggested Miss Long, laughing quite naturally.) "She evidently took me for just another predatory feline come to send the patient's temperature soaring upwards. It's not often I'm crushed, but----"

"Oh, Nurse Elsa is all right," said the patient, laughing too. "You know, I think she feels bound to be careful about new people. She seems to have a mania for imagining that everybody fresh may be a German spy!"

"A _German_? Why should she think that?"

"Oh, possibly because--well----" Young Scott lowered his voice and glanced towards that connecting door. But it had been shut. "Because she happens to be 'naturalised' herself, you know!"

They talked; Leslie ever more lightly as she was more deeply touched by the sight of the young man on his couch. So helpless, he who had been so full of movement and fitness and supple youth! So pluckily, resolutely gay, he who had been so early put out of the fun!

Lightly he told Leslie the bare details of his wound. It had been in a field of beet that he had been pipped; when he had been seeing to some barbed wire with a sergeant and a couple of his men, at nightfall. One of those snipers had got him.

"And I was downed in a second," he said ruefully. "_I_ couldn't get the beggar!"

Leslie thought of the young, mortally-wounded Mercutio and his impatient cry of "_What! Is he gone, and hath nothing?_" It was the only complaint at his lot that was ever to pass the lips of this other fighter.

She looked at him, and her heart swelled with pride for him. It sank with shame for herself. She had always held him--well, not as lightly as she said she had. There had been always the sneaking tenderness for the tall, infatuated boy whom she'd laughed at. But why "sneaking"? Why had she laughed? She had thought him so much less than herself. She said she knew so much more. What vanity and crass, superficial folly! A new thrill took her suddenly. Could it be that War, that had cut everybody's life in two, had worked another wonder?

Presently he remarked, "I say, your friends, the poor Dampiers! I suppose nothing's ever been heard of them, after that day that they found out at the Works that his wife had started with him, when he set off for France, and disappeared?"

"Nothing," said Leslie quietly, "Whether it was an accident with his new engine, or whether they were killed by a shot from a German aeroplane they met, we shan't ever know now. It must have been over the sea.... Nothing has ever been found. Much the best way, I think. I said so to poor young Mr. Ryan, the man who let her take his place. He was beside himself when he turned up at the Aircraft place again and found that nothing had been heard. He said he'd killed her. I told him she would think he'd done more for her than anybody she knew. The best time to go out! No growing old and growing dull and perhaps growing ill and being kept half alive by bothering doctors, for years.... No growing out of love with each other, ever! They, at least, have had something that nothing can spoil."

Monty Scott, turning his small, close-cropped head of a soldier and his white face towards the tapestry, blurted out: "Well! At all events they've _had_ it. But even having it 'spoilt' is better than never having had any----"

He checked himself abruptly.

He was not going to whine now over his own ill-luck in love to her, to Leslie, who had turned him down three times. Not much.

In the suddenly tense atmosphere of the little room overlooking the wide, dim Square, the girl felt the young man's resolution--a resolution that he would keep. He would never ask her for another favour.

He cleared his throat and spoke in an altered tone, casual, matter-of-fact.

"Awfully pretty, the little girl that Dampier married, wasn't she? Usen't she to live at that Club of yours? I think I saw her once, somewhere or other----"

"Yes. You did," said Leslie quickly, and a little breathlessly as though she, too, had just taken a resolution. "At that dance. That river dance. She was the Cherub-girl. And I wore my mauve Nijinski things. You remember that time, Monty?"

"Oh, yes," said the wounded man shortly, "I remember."

There was a slight, uneasy movement under the panther-skin rug.

He hadn't thought that Leslie would have reminded him of those times. Not of that dance, when, with his hands on her hips and her hands clasped at the back of his neck, he had swung round with her in the maddest of waltzes.... He wouldn't have expected her to _remind_ him!

Nor was he expecting the next thing that Leslie did. She slipped from that low chair on to her knees by the couch. Her furs touched his hand, delicate and whiter now than a woman's, and he took it quickly away. He could not look at the vivid, impish face with the black, mocking eyes and the red, mocking mouth that had always bewitched him. Had he looked, he would have seen that the mockery was gone from both. It was gone, too, from Leslie's voice when she next spoke, close to him.

"Monty! At that dance---- Have you forgotten? We were walking by the river--and you said--you asked----"

"Yes, yes; all right. Please don't mind," muttered the man who had been the Black Panther hastily. It was pretty awful, having girls _sorry_ for one!

She went on kneeling by him. "I told you that I wasn't in the mood!"

"Yes; but--I say, it doesn't matter one scrap, thanks," declared Monty Scott, very hoarsely.

This was the hardest thing he'd ever yet had to bear; harder than lying out wounded in that wet beetroot-field for nine hours before he could be picked up; harder than the pain, the agonising, jolting journeys; harder even than the sleepless nights when he had tossed and turned on his bed, next to the bed where a delirious man who had won the D.S.O. cried out in his nightmare unceasingly: "Stick it, boys! Stick it, boys! Stick it, boys!" He (Monty) didn't think he could stick this. There could never be any one in the world but Leslie for him, that laughing, devil-may-care Leslie at whom "nice" girls looked askance. Leslie who didn't care. Leslie who _pitied_ him! Ghastly! Desperately he wished she'd get up and go--_go_----

Suddenly her voice sounded in his ear. Far from being pitying it was so petulant as to convince even him. It cried: "Monty! I said then that you were an infant-in-arms! If you weren't an infant you could _see_!"

He turned his head quickly on the couch-cushion. But even then he didn't really see. Even then he scarcely took in, for the moment, what he heard.

For the kneeling, radiant girl had to go on, laughing shakily: "I always liked you.... After everything I said! After everything I've thought, it comes round to this. _It's better to have loved and settled down than never to have loved at all.... Oh!_ I've got my head into as bright a rainbow as any of them!..." scolded Leslie, laughing again as flutteringly as Paul Ethampier's sweetheart might have done. "Oh, I thought that just because one liked a man in the kind of way I liked you, it was no reason to accept him ... _fool_ that I was----"

"Leslie!" he cried very sharply, scarcely believing his ears. "Could you have?--_could_ you? And you tell me _now_! When it's too late----"

"Too _late_? _Won't_ you have me? Can't you see that I think you so much more of a man when you're getting about as well as you can on one leg than I did when you were just dancing and fooling about on two? As for me----"

She turned her bright face away.

"It's the same old miracle that never stops happening. I shan't even be a woman, ever," faltered Leslie Long, "unless you help to make me one!"

"You can't mean it? You can't----"

"Can't I? I am 'in the mood' _now_, Monty!" she said, very softly. "Believe me!"

And her long arm was flung, gently and carefully, about her soldier's neck; her lips were close to his.

* * * * *

When at last she left her lover, Leslie Long walked down the darkened streets near Victoria, quietly and meditatively. And her thoughts were only partly with the man whom she had left so happy. Partly they were claimed by the girl-friend whose marriage morning wish had been for her, Leslie, to be happy in the same way.

It seemed to Leslie that she was very near her now.

Even as she walked along the tall girl was conscious, in a way not to be described, of a Presence that seemed to follow her and to beset her and to surround her with a sense of loving, laughing, girlish pleasure and fellowship. She saw, _without seeing_, the small, eager, tip-tilted face with bright eyes of river-green and brown, crowned by the wreath of short, thick curls. _Without hearing_, she caught the tone of the soft, un-English, delighted voice that cried, "Oh, _Les_--lie----!"

"Little Taffy! She'd be so full of it, of course.... Of _course_ she'd be glad! Of _course_ she'd know; I can't think she doesn't. Not she, who was so much in love herself," mused Leslie, putting up her hand with her characteristic gesture to tuck in the stray tress of black hair that had come loose under her trim velvet cap.

"And the people we've loved can't forget at once, as soon as they've left us. I don't believe that. _She knows._ If _I_ could only say something--send some sort of message! Even if it were only like waving a hand! If _I_ could make some sign that I shall always care----"

As she thought of it she was passing a row of shops. The subdued light from one of them fell upon swinging garlands of greenery festooned outside; decorations ready for Christmas.

On an impulse Leslie Long turned into this florist's shop. "I want one of those wreaths you have, please," she said.

"Yes, Madam; a holly-wreath?"

"No. One of those. Laurel."

And while the man fetched down the wreath of broad, dark, pointed leaves, Leslie Long took out one of her cards and a pencil, and scribbled the message that she presently fastened to the wreath. She would not have it wrapped up in paper, but carried it as it was. Then she turned down a side-street to the Embankment, near Vauxhall Bridge. She leaned over the parapet and saw the black, full tide, here and there only jewelled with lights, flowing on, on, past the spanning bridges and the town, away to the sea that had been at last the great, silver, restless resting-place for such young and ardent hearts....

There was a soft splash as she flung the laurel wreath into the flowing water.

Leslie glanced over and watched it carried swiftly past. In a patch of light she saw the tiny white gleam of the card that was tied to the leaves of victory.

This was what she had written upon it:

"For Gwenna and Paul.

'_Envy, ah, even to tears! The fortune of their years, Which, though so few, yet so divinely ended._'"

THE END

* * * * *

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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

1. Passages in italics are surrounded by _underscores_ and the ones in bold are indicated by =bold=.

2. Obvious punctuation errors have been silently closed, while those requiring interpretation have been left as such.

3. The word manoeuvres uses an oe ligature in the original.

4. The following misprints have been corrected: "kimona" corrected to "kimono" (page 21) "beseiged" corrected to "besieged" (page 62) "Esctasy" corrected to "Ecstasy" (page 242) "ass" corrected to "as" (page 277) "husabnd" corrected to "husband" (page 353)

5. Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been retained.