The Boy with Wings
girding her pretty frock. She looked very childish for "a wife"! But for
that bright wedding-ring on her finger (half a size too large for it)
she might have passed for one of the veiled and white-clad First
Communicants of an Easter Sunday in Paris. Then she turned up the little
face, from which the veil had been thrown back, to be kissed by the
others who had followed them into the vestry. Vaguely she heard
Leslie's voice, arranging in murmurs with Hugo Swayne. "No. Perhaps I'll
come on afterwards.... After I've helped her to change.... No; you take
Mr. Lloyd and feed him somewhere. No! I'm sure those two won't want to
come on to any lunch. Lunch? My dear man!... Send them in your car to
Victoria and Johnson can bring it back.... They'll be getting away at
once."
At once! Gwenna looked up into her young husband's blue eyes.
He caught her hand.
"Got you now," he said softly. "Can't run away this time."
By rights she should have walked down the church on his arm. But he did
not loose her hand. So it was hand-in-hand, like children, that they
hurried out again, ahead of the others, into the sunshine of the porch.
The merry breeze took the bride's veil and spread it, a curtain of mist,
across the pair of them. Gwenna Dampier caught it aside, laughing
gleefully as they stepped out of the porch. The gravity of the service
had sparkled into gaiety in their eyes. He crushed her fingers in his.
Her heart sang. They would be off----! It was almost too lovely to be
true, but----
Yes. It _was_ too lovely to be true.
A shadow fell across the path; across the bride's white shoe.
Johnson, Hugo's man, who had been waiting with the car, stepped quickly
up to the bridegroom.
"Excuse me, sir, but this message.... Came just as you'd gone into
church. I waited. The woman brought it on from your rooms, sir."
Paul Dampier took the wire and read it.
The white-frocked girl he had just married stood at the church entrance
watching him, while the breeze lifted her veil and stirred her curls and
tossed a couple of creamy petals, from her wreath, on to the breast of
his coat. She herself stood motionless, stony.
She knew that this was no wire of congratulation such as any bridal
couple may expect to receive as they come out of church from their
wedding. She knew, even before she heard his deep voice saying--blankly
and hurriedly:
"I say. It's from the War Office. I shall have to go. I've got to leave
you. Now. I'm ordered to join at once!"
CHAPTER VIII
THE GIRL HE LEFT BEHIND HIM
Gwenna Dampier was always to be truly thankful that at that thunderbolt
moment of parting at the church door from the lover who had only been
her husband for the last quarter of an hour she had been too dazed to
show any emotion.
As at the Aviation Dinner she had been numbed by excess of joy, so, now,
the shock had left her stony. She knew that she had turned quite a calm
little face to the concerned and startled faces of the others as they
hurried up to ask what was happening that Paul should be getting into
that car alone. It was as quiet and calm to receive Paul's last kiss as
he held her strained for a moment almost painfully close to him,
muttering, "Take care of yourself, Little Thing."
At the moment it struck her as rather funny, that.
_She_ was to take care of herself! She, who was just to stay quietly at
home, doing nothing. And this was what he told her; he, who was going
off on service, _where_, he himself didn't know. Off, to serve as an
Army Aviator, a flyer who swooped above enemy country, to shoot and to
be shot at; every instant in peril of his life.
She even smiled a little as the motor rattled down the hill with him,
leaving her to Leslie, and to Uncle Hugh, and to Mr. Hugo Swayne.
She found herself thinking, sedately, that it was a good thing Paul had
got most of his field service equipment yesterday; shopping while she
had shopped, while she had bought the white shoes and the silk
stockings, the Princesse slip and the handful of other dainty girlish
things that had been all the _trousseau_ she could collect in such a
hurry. Yes, Paul was all ready, she told her friends. She wouldn't see
him again before he left London, she expected.
She did not see him again.
That night at the Club, when she was still dazedly quiet--it was Leslie
Long who had to swallow lumps in her own throat, and to blink back
starting tears from her eyes--that night there arrived the first note of
his that had ever been addressed to:
"_Mrs. Paul Dampier._"
It was scrawled and hurried and in pencil. It began:
"My darling Wife." It told her to address to the War Office until
she heard from him, and that she would hear from him whenever he
could manage it. It ended up, "_I was so jolly proud of you because
you took it like that, you can't think. I always thought you were a
sweet Little Thing. I knew you'd be a plucky Little Thing too.
Bless you. It's going to be all right._
"_Your affectionate husband_,
"P. D."
It was Leslie who cried herself to sleep that night; not Gwenna Dampier.
Only gradually the girl came out of the stupor that had helped her, to
the realisation of what had really happened. He'd gone! She'd been
left--without him! But as one source of help disappeared, another came
to hand.
It was that queer mixture of feelings that the more enlightened young
women at the Club would have called "The conventional point of view."
Miss Armitage at the Club tea-table said to her friends, "Nayowh, I
don't consider them at all 'splendid,' as you call it, these girls who
go about quite smiling and happily after their husbands have embarked
for the War. Saying good-bye without shedding a tear, indeed; and all
that kind of thing. Shows they can't _care_ much. Heartless!
Unsensitive! Callous, I call them."
The art-student with the Trilby hair, who was never quite certain
whether she agreed with all Miss Armitage's views or whether she didn't,
remarked that really--really anybody who'd seen Miss Williams' face when
that young man called for her _couldn't_ help thinking that she cared.
Most awfully. If _she_ didn't make a fuss, it must be because she was
rather brave.
"Brive? _I_ don't call it that," declared Miss Armitage. "It's just 'the
thing to do' among those people. They've made a regular idol of this
stupid, deadening Convention of theirs. They all want to be alike.
'Plucky.' 'Not showing anything.' Pah! I call it crushing out their own
individuality for the sake of an ideal that isn't anything very _much_,
if you ask me. They all catch it from each other, these wretched Army
men's wives. It's no more _credit_ to them than it is to some kinds of
dogs not to howl when you hold them up by their tiles."
The Trilby art-student put in shyly, "Doesn't that show that they're
well bred?"
Miss Armitage, the Socialist, fixing her through her glasses, demanded,
"When you sy 'Well bred' d'you mean the dogs are--or the women that
don't cry?"
"Well--both, perhaps," ventured the art-student, blushing as she helped
herself to jam. Miss Armitage, with her little superior smile, gave out,
"There's no such thing as well bred, what _you_ mean by it. What you
mean's just pewer snobbery. The reel meaning of well bred is somebody
who is specially gifted in mind and body. Well, all you _can_ say of the
minds of Army people is that they haven't got any. And I don't know that
_I'm_ impressed by their bodies."
Here a student of music from the other side of the table said she saw
what Miss Armitage meant, exactly. Only, as for Army people, Gwenna
Williams couldn't have been called that. Her people were just sort of
Welsh Dissenters, awfully _against_ soldiers and that kind of thing.
"Doesn't matter. She's the sort of girl who's just like a chameleon:
takes all her colour from the man she's supposed to be in love with,"
said Miss Armitage loftily. "She'll know that she'll never _keep_ him
unless she's just like the class of women he thinks most of. (As it is,
I don't see what that empty-headed girl's got to keep a man _with_.)
So, as I say, she'll _suppress_ her own identity, and grow the kind 'He'
happens to like."
The art-student murmured that she supposed it didn't really _matter_, a
girl doing that. Provided that the new "identity" which was "grown to
please the man" were a better one than the old.
Miss Armitage the Feminist, sniffed; silent with contempt for this idea.
Then she turned again to the student of music, to conclude the
summing-up of the new bride's character.
"She'll be positively stimulated and buoyed-up, all the time, by the
thought that 'He' considered it plucky of her to go on as if she was
quite pleased that he was fighting!" declared the lecturer. "You see! By
and by she'll believe she _is_ pleased. She'll catch the whole
detestable Jingow spirit, _I_ know. Syme attitude of mind as the Zulu
who runs amuck at the sound of a drum. Hysterical, that's what _I_ call
what's at the root of it all!"
* * * * *
But whatever Miss Armitage, the Cockney suffragette, chose to call it,
it was there, that Spirit.
In those few weeks after the declaration of war it spread and throve
over all England. It made Life still worth living, and well worth
living, for thousands of anxious sweethearts, and of mothers giving only
sons for their country, and of wives who missed closest comrades, and of
young widows who had but lately been made brides.
It inspired, through the girl he left behind him, the man who went to
war; and thus its influence became part of that subtle but crucial thing
which is known as the Moral of an Army, and of an Empire and of a
Civilisation.
It was, as Leslie Long, the lover of quotations, often quoted to herself
in those days:
"The Voice to Kingly boys
To lift them through the fight;
And comfortress of Unsuccess
To give the dead Good-night.
"A rule to trick the arithmetic
Too base of leaguing odds,
The spur of trust, the curb of lust,
The hand-maid of the gods."
* * * * *
Little Gwenna, the wife who had been left at the church door, took all
the help that Spirit gave her.
Two days after her wedding her Uncle Hugh went back to the slate-roofed
village that was wedged between those steep, larch-grown Welch hills.
But, though his niece found that this "dreat-ful" old man could be all
that was gentle and kind for her, she refused to go home, as he begged
her, with him.
She said she must live somewhere where she could "see a little bit of
what was going on." She must have some work, real work, to fill her
time. She thanked him; she would let him know directly she felt she
could come down to Wales. But just now, please, she wanted nothing but
to get back to Mrs. Crewe, her Aeroplane Lady at the Works. She'd go
back just as if nothing had happened.
She returned, to find changes at that Aircraft Factory.
CHAPTER IX
THIS SIDE OF "THE FRONT"
The first of these changes at the Aircraft Works was the sight of the
khaki-clad sentry at the entrance.
He was pacing up and down the bit of dusty road outside the shops; and
he stopped Gwenna peremptorily, not knowing that she was one of the
staff.
She told him, and went on. She found the big central shop in a ferment
of activity. Mr. Ryan, striding out on some hurried errand, nearly
knocked her over. He called an "Awfully sorry, Miss Gwenna--Mrs.
Dampier, I mean," over his shoulder. She saw that his day of dalliance
was past, even had she been still "Miss Gwenna." He had less time for
Girl, nowadays. The frames of no fewer than four aeroplanes were set up