THE AEROPLANE LADY
Curiously enough, Gwenna did think of it again.
On the Saturday morning after that walk and talk she took that long dull
train-journey. The only bright spot on it was the passing of Hendon
Flying Ground. Over an hour afterwards she arrived at the little
station, set in a sunburnt waste, for the Aircraft Works.
She asked her way of the ticket-collector at the booking-office. But
before he could speak, she was answered by some one else, who had come
down to the station for a parcel. This was a shortish young man in
greasy blue overalls. He had a smiling, friendly, freckled face under a
thatch of brilliant red hair; and a voice that seemed oddly out of
keeping with his garments. It was an "Oxford" voice.
"The Works? I'm just going on there myself. I'll come with you and show
you, if I may," he said with evident zest.
Gwenna, walking beside him, wished that she had not immediately
remembered Leslie's remarks about young men at aircraft works who might
be glad of the arrival of a new pretty face. This young man, piloting
her down a straggling village street that seemed neither town nor
country, told her at once that he was a pupil at the Works and asked
whether she herself were going to help Mrs. Crewe there.
"I don't know yet," said Gwenna. "I hope so."
"So do I," said the young man gravely, but with a glint of unreserved
admiration in the eyes under the red thatch.
Little Gwenna, walking very erect, wished that she were strong and
self-reliant enough not to feel cheered by that admiration.
(But she was cheered. No denying that!)
The young man took her down a road flanked on either hand by sparse
hedges dividing it from that parched and uninteresting plain. The
mountain-bred girl found all this flat country incredibly ugly. Only, on
her purple Welsh heights and in the green ferny depths threaded by
crystal water, nothing ever happened. It was here, in this half-rural
desert littered by builders' rubbish and empty cans, that Enterprise was
afoot. Strange!
* * * * *
On the right came an opening. She saw a yard with wooden debris and what
looked like the wrecks of a couple of motor-cars. Beyond was a cluster
of buildings with corrugated iron roofs.
The red-haired pupil mentioned the name of the Aeroplane Lady and said,
"I think you'll find her in the new Wing-room, over here----"
"What a wonderful name for it," thought the little enthusiast, catching
her breath, as she was shown through a door. "The Wing-room!"
It was high and clean and spacious, with white distempered walls and a
floor of wood-dura, firm yet comforting to the feet. The atmosphere of
it was, on that July day, somewhat overpowering. Two radiators were
working, and the air was heavy with a smell of what seemed like
rubber-solution and spirits mixed: this, Gwenna presently found, was the
"dope" to varnish the strong linen stretched across the wings of
aeroplanes. Two of those great wings were laid out horizontally on
trestles to dry. Another of the huge sails with cambered sections was
set up on end across a corner; and from behind it there moved, stepping
daintily and majestically across the floor, the tawny shape of a Great
Dane, who came inquiringly up to the stranger.
Then from behind the screening wing there came a slight, woman's figure
in dark blue. She followed the dog. Little Gwenna Williams, standing
timidly in that great room so strange and white, and characteristically
scented, found herself face to face with the mistress of the place; the
Aeroplane Lady.
Her hair was greying and fluffy as a head of windblown Traveller's
Joy; beneath it her eyes were blue and young and bright and--yes! with a
little glad start Gwenna recognised that in these eyes too there was
something of that space-daring gleam of the eyes of Icarus, of her own
Flying Man.
"Ah ... I know," said the lady briskly. "You're the girl Leslie's sent
down to see me."
"Yes," said Gwenna, thinking it nice of her to say "Leslie" and not
"Miss Long." She noticed also that the Aeroplane Lady wore at the collar
of her shirt a rather wonderful brooch in the shape of the _caducaeus_,
the serpent-twisted rod of Mercury. "Oh, I _do_ hope she'll take me!"
thought the young girl, agitated. "I do want more than anything to come
here to work with her. Oh, supposing she thinks I'm too silly and young
to be any use--supposing she won't take me----"
She was tense with nervousness while the Aeroplane Lady, fondling the
Great Dane's tawny ear with a small, capable hand as she spoke, put the
girl through a short catechism; asking questions about her age, her
people, her previous experience, her salary.... And then she was told
that she might come and work on a month's trial at the Factory,
occupying a room in the Aeroplane Lady's own cottage in the village. The
young girl, enraptured, put down her success to the certificates from
that Aberystwith school of hers, where she had passed "with distinction"
the Senior Cambridge and other examinations. She did not guess that the
Aeroplane Lady had taken less than two minutes to make sure that this
little Welsh typist-girl carried out what Leslie Long had said of her.
Namely that "she was so desperately keen on anything to do with flying
and flyers that she'd scrub the floors of the shops for you if you
wished it, besides doing your business letters as carefully as if each
one was about some important Diplomatic secret ... try her!"
So on the following Monday Gwenna began her new life.
At first this new work of Gwenna's consisted very largely of what Leslie
had mentioned; the writing-out of business letters at the table set
under the window in the small private office adjoining the great
Wing-room.
(Curious that the Wings for Airships, the giant butterfly aeroplanes
themselves, should grow out of a chrysalis of ordinary business, with
letters that began, "_Sir, we beg to thank you for your favour of the
2nd instant, and to assure you that same shall receive our immediate
attention_," exactly the sort of letters that Gwenna had typed during
all those weeks at Westminster!)
Then there were orders to send off for more bales of the linen that was
stretched over the membranes of those wings; or for the great reels of
wire which strung the machines, and which cost fifteen pounds apiece;
orders for the metal which was to be worked in the shops across the
parched yard, where men of three nationalities toiled at the
lathe; turning-screws, strainers, washers, and all the tiny,
complicated-looking parts that were to be the bones and the sinews
and the muscles of the finished Flying Machine.
Gwenna, the typist, had at first only a glimpse or so of these other
sides of the Works.
Once, on a message from some visitor to the Aeroplane Lady she passed
through the great central room, larger than her Uncle's chapel at home,
with its concrete floor and the clear diffused light coming through the
many windows, and the never-ceasing throb of the gas-driven engine
pulsing through the lighter sounds of chinking and hammering. Mechanics
were busy all down the sides of this hall; in the aisle of it, three
machines in the making were set up on the stands. One was ready all but
the wings; its body seemed now more than it would ever seem that of a
giant fish; it was covered with the doped linen that was laced at the
seams with braid, eyelets and cord, like an old-fashioned woman's
corset. The second was half-covered. The third was all as yet uncovered,
and looked like the skeleton of a vast seagull cast up on some
prehistoric shore.
Wondering, the girl passed on, to find her employer. She found her in
the fitter's shop. In a corner, the red-haired pupil, with goggles over
his eyes, was sitting at a stand working an acetylene blow-pipe; holding
in his hand the intense jet that shot out showers of squib-like sparks,
and wielding a socket, the Lady directing him. She took the girl's
message, then walked back with her to the office, her tawny dog
following at her heels.
"Letters finished?... then I'd like you to help me on with the wings of
that machine that's all but done," she said. "That is"--she smiled--"if
you don't mind getting your hands all over this beastly stuff----"
Mind? Gwenna would have plastered her whole little white body with that
warmed and strongly-smelling dope if she'd thought that by so doing she
was actually taking a hand in the launching of a Ship for the Clouds.
The rest of the afternoon she spent in the hot and reeking Wing-room,
working side by side with the Aeroplane Lady. Industriously she pasted
the linen strips, patting them down with her little fingers on to the
seams of those wide sails that would presently be spread--for whom?
In her mind it was always one large and springy figure that she saw
ascending into the small plaited wicker seat of the Machine. It was
always the same careless, blonde, lad's face that she saw tilted
slightly against the background of plane and wires....
"I would love to work, even a little, on a machine that he was going to
fly in," thought Gwenna.
She stood, enveloped in a grey-blue overall, at the trestle-table,
cutting out fresh strips of linen with scissors that were sticky and
clogged with dope. She peeled the stuff from her hands in flakes like
the bark of a silver-birch as she added to her thought, "But I shouldn't
want to do anything for that aeroplane; his _Fiancee_, for the P.D.Q.
Hateful creature, with her claws that she doesn't think are going to let
him go!"
Here she set the pannikin of dope to reheat, and there was a smile of
defiance on the girl's lips as she moved about from the trestles to the
radiator or the sewing-table.
For ever since she had been at the Works a change had come over Gwenna.
Curiously enough, she was happier now than she had been in her life. She
was more contented with what the present brought her; more steadily
hopeful about the future. It didn't seem to matter to her now that, the
last time she had seen him, her Aviator had turned almost sullenly away.
She laughed to herself over that, for she believed at last in Leslie's
theory: "Afraid he's going to like me." She did not fret because she
hadn't had even one of his brief notes since she had left London; nor
sigh over the fact that she, living down here in this Bedfordshire
village, was so much further away from those rooms of his at Camden Town
than she had been when she had stayed at the Hampstead Club.
For somehow she felt nearer to him now.
Absence can, in some subtle, unexplained way, spin fine threads of
communication over the gulf between a boy and a girl....
She found a conviction growing stronger and stronger in her girl's mind,
that gay, tangled chaos where faults and faculties, blindness and
intuitions flourish entwined and inseparable. _She was meant to be his._
She'd no "reason" for thinking so, of course. There was very little
reason about Gwenna's whole make-up.
For instance, Leslie had tried "reasoning" with her, the night before
she'd left the Hampstead Club. Leslie had taken it into her impish black
head to be philosophical, and to attempt to talk her chum into the same
mood.
Leslie, the nonchalant, had given a full hour to her comments on
Marriage. We will allow her a full chapter--but a short one.