CHAPTER V
THE NUPTIAL FLIGHT
Yes; at last it was flight.
She now, too, was perched up on this structure that had tucked those little bicycle wheels and skids underneath it, as a bird tucks its no longer required feet; she, too, was being borne up aloft on those vast cambered pinions that let the sunlight half through, like the roof of a transparent marquee. In this new machine of Paul's, the passenger-seat was set on a slightly projecting platform, with aluminium-like uprights of a peculiar section. At first, all that Gwenna knew of this easy balancing and dipping and banking of the machine, was that there was a bright triangle of sunlight about her feet, and that this triangle grew sometimes small, sometimes large, and sometimes spread so that half of her was sitting in the warm September sunlight; presently to swerve into the shadow again.
Mechanically tightening her grip on one or other of the aluminium stays, instinctively yielding her body to this unexpected angle or that, she watched that triangle of sunlight. She was not giddy or breathless; she felt no fear at all, only a growing triumph and delight as the soaring biplane sped on—on——
Once she gave a little "Oh, look!" lost in the hum of the engine. It was when a tiny flicker of shadow fell upon her patch of sunlight and was gone; the shadow of some bird flying higher than they, a crow, perhaps. It was just after this that she noticed, near that advancing and retiring wedge of sunlight at her feet, something else. This was a little oval hole in the floor of the platform. A hole for observation. It brought home to her how frail a floor supported her weight and his; still she felt no terror; only wonder. She smiled under her mufflings, thinking that hole was like a knot-hole in a wooden bridge over the river at home. As a small child she had always been fascinated by that hole, and had gazed down through it at the rushing bottle-green water and the bubbles and the boulders below. She glanced down this one, but her unaccustomed eyes could hardly see anything. She leaned forward and looked down below the machine, but still could distinguish little. Woods, roads, meadows, or whatever they were crossing, were still only a warm and moving blur. Once they passed, quickly, a big patch of pink and purple, she thought it might be a town, but wasn't sure.
She sat up again in her seat, giving herself up to her own feelings in this new and breathless experience; her feelings, that were as undistinguishable as the landscape over which the biplane swept—a warm blur of delights.
She gripped the stays; she laughed happily to herself behind the mufflings, she even sang aloud, knowing that it was drowned in the noise of the engine. She hummed the sheerest medley of scraps of things, tags of Musical Comedy picked up at Westminster—some verses out of Leslie's love-songs. Once it was the then universal "Tipperary." And presently it resolved itself into a Welsh folk-song that the singing-class at her school had practised over and over again—"The Rising of the Lark," a blithely defiant tune that seemed best to match her mood as the biplane sped.
Yes! All the bird-like, soaring spirit in her had come to its own. Everything else was cast behind her.... 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.