The Boy with Wings

by Berta Ruck

Those hands themselves, Gwenna noticed, were masked and thick, half way up his forearms, with soft soap. This he seemed to have been smearing on certain boards, making a sliding way for that precious package that stood on the low lorry. The boards were packed up in banks and stages, an irregular stairway. This another assistant was carefully trying with a long straight edge with a spirit level in the middle of it; and a third man stood on the lorry, resting on a crowbar and considering the package that held the heart of Paul Dampier's machine.

"You see if she doesn't come down as light as a bubble and stop exactly there," said Mr. Ryan complacently, digging his heel into a pillowy heap of debris. "Lay those other planks to take her inside, André." He wiped his brow on a moderately clear patch of forearm, and moved away to check the observations of the man in the shirt-sleeves.

Gwenna, watching, could not help admiring both this self-satisfied young mudlark and his job. This was how women liked to see men busy: with strenuous work that covered them with dirt and sweat, taxing their brains and their muscles at the same time. Those girls who were so keen on the Enfranchisement of Women and "Equal Opportunities" and those things, those suffragettes at her Hampstead Club who "couldn't see where the superiority of the male sex was supposed to come in"—Well! The reason why they "couldn't" was (the more primitive Gwenna thought) simply because they didn't see enough men at this sort of thing. The men these enlightened young women knew best sat indoors all day, writing—that sort of thing. Or talking about fans, like Mr. Swayne, and about "the right tone of purple in the curtains" for a room. The women, of course, could do that themselves. They could also go to colleges and pass men's exams. Lots did. But (thought Gwenna) not many of them could get through the day's work of Mr. Ryan, who had also been at Oxford, and who not only had forearms that made her own look like ivory toys, but who could plan out his work so that if he said that that squat, ponderous case would "stop exactly there"—stop there it would. She watched; the breeze rollicking in her curls, spreading the folds of her grey-blue pinafore out behind her like a sail, moulding her skirt to her rounded shape as she stood.

Then she turned with a very friendly and pretty smile to young Ryan.

It was thus that Paul Dampier, entering the yard from behind them, came upon the girl whom he had decided not to see again.

He knew already that "his little friend," as old Hugo insisted upon calling her, had taken a job at the Aircraft Works. He'd heard that from his cousin, who'd been told all about it by Miss Long.

And considering that he'd made up his mind that it would be better all round if he were to drop having anything more to say to the girl, young Dampier was glad, of course, that she'd left town. That would make things easier. He wouldn't seem to be avoiding her, yet he needn't set eyes upon her again.

Of course he'd been glad. He hadn't wanted to see her.

Then, at the end of his negotiations with Colonel Conyers, he'd understood that he would have to go over and pay a visit to the Aeroplane Lady. And even in the middle of the new excitement he had remembered that this was where Gwenna Williams was working. And for a moment he'd hesitated. That would mean seeing the Little Thing again after all.

Then he'd thought, Well? Fellow can't look as if he were trying to keep out of a girl's way? Besides, chances were he wouldn't see her when he did go, he'd thought.