It ceased. Then, on the field before her excited eyes, there was brought out of one of the hangars by a cluster of mechanics in khaki-brown overalls the Winged Romance that came into this tired and blasé world with that most wondrous of all Ages—the Twentieth Century. At first only a long gleaming upper plane, jolting over the uneven ground, could be seen over the heads of the watchers. Then it reached the enclosure. For the first time in her life Gwenna beheld a Maurice Farman biplane.
And for the moment she was a little disappointed, for she had said it was "going to be so lovely!"
She had expected—what? Something that would look more like what it was, the new Bird of man's making. Here the sunlight gleamed on the taut, cambered wings, on the bamboo spars, the varnished blade of the motionless propeller, all shiny as a new toyshop. But the girl saw no grace in it. Its skids rested on the sunburned grass like a couple of ski in the Sketch photographs of winter sports. It had absurd little wheels, too, looking as if, when it had finished skiing, the machine might take to roller-skating. The whole thing seemed gaunt and cumbrous and clogged to the earth. Gwenna did not then know that, unlike Antæus, this half-godlike creature only awoke to life and beauty when it felt the earth no more.
Then, as she watched, a mechanic, the Dædalus who strapped on the wings for the Icarus seized the propeller, which kicked thrice, rebelliously, and then, with another roar, dissolved into a circle of mist. Other brown figures were clinging to the under parts of the structure, holding it back; Gwenna did not see the signal to let go. All that she saw was the clumsy forward run of the thing as, like a swan that tries to clear its feet of the water, the biplane struggled to free itself from the drag of Earth....
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. Swiftly circling, up and up it went, until it seemed to dwindle to something not even larger than the seagull it resembled; then it was a flying-fish, then a dragonfly wheeling in the blue immensity above.
Suddenly, like a fog-signal, there boomed out the voice of the man with the megaphone, the man who made from the judges' stand, behind the committee-enclosure all announcements for the meeting:
"Ladies and gentul MEN," it boomed.
"Mis ter Paul Dampier on a Maurice Farman bi plane!"
The huge convolvulus-trumpet of the megaphone swung round. The announcement was made from the other side of the stand; the sound of that booming voice being subdued as it reached the group of three girls.