The Boy with Wings
here. I mean you can congratulate me on coming to see reason. I know,
now, that I mustn't think of marrying him."
Gwenna drew a big breath of relief.
She laid her dope-thickened brush carefully down in the tin, and clapped
her little sticky hands.
"I'm _so_ thankful," she cried childishly. "It wouldn't have done,
Leslie!"
"No," said Miss Long.
"He wasn't a quarter good enough."
"Pooh. What's _that_ got to do with caring? Nothing," declared Leslie,
tilting her loose-limbed, mauve-clad figure back on the chair that Paul
Dampier had sat in, the day before the Aviation Dinner. "It's caring
that counts."
"Haven't I _always_ been saying so?" said Gwenna earnestly as she took
up her brush again. "Not just because I'm a happily-married woman
myself, my dear."
Here she drew herself up with the same little gesture of matronly
dignity that had made Mrs. Crewe smile. It forced Leslie to bite her
lips into gravity. And Paul Dampier's girl concluded innocently, "_I've_
always known how much Love means. What's _money_?"
"Nothing to run down, I assure you. Money's gorgeous. Money means
_Power_," affirmed Leslie. "Apart from the silk-stockinged aspect of it,
it lets you live a much fuller life mentally and spiritually. It can
make you almost everything you want to be, to yourself and to other
people, Taff. It's worth almost anything to get it. But there's one
thing it's not worth," said Leslie Long, really gravely: "_It's not
worth marrying the wrong person for._"
"I don't know why you didn't know that _before_," said little Gwenna,
feeling for once in her life _so_ much older and much wiser than her
chum. "What makes you know it now, Leslie?"
"The War, perhaps. Everything's put down to the War nowadays.... But it
has simplified things. One knows better what's what. What one must keep,
what one can throw overboard," said Leslie Long. "Everything is
changed."
Gwenna thought for a moment of telling her that one thing did not
change. Love!
Then she thought that that was not quite true, either.
In its own way Love, too, was changed by this War.
"There's _more_ of it!" thought Gwenna simply.
For had not her own love to her absent lover burned with more steady a
flame within her ever since the morning when she had seen him depart to
take his own share in the struggle? And so she guessed it must be with
many a girl, less ardently in love than she had been, but now doubly
proud of her man--and her soldier. She thought of the other hurried
War-bridals and betrothals all over the country. She thought of the
gentler voice and manner that she had noticed between the husbands and
wives among the cottagers down here. They realised, perhaps, how many
couples were being swept apart by War. Yes, this thought seemed to give
Man and Woman an added value in the eyes of each other, Gwenna thought.
She thought of the gradual disappearance of the suffragette type with
her indictments against Man. She thought of the new courtesy with which
every woman and girl seemed to be treated in the streets and tubes and
omnibuses by every man who wore the livery of War.
Of the two things greater than all things in this world, one fulfilled
the other. And, because War was in the world again, it was bringing home
undeniably to man and maid alike that "_the first is Love_."
Then Gwenna sighed from her heart.
How long? How much longer would it be before she could see her own lover
again?
CHAPTER XI
A LOVE LETTER--AND A ROSE
A couple of days after Leslie's visit Gwenna was moving about the
bedroom at Mrs. Crewe's cottage.
It was an old-fashioned, quaintly pretty room. The low ceiling, on which
the lamplight gleamed, was crossed by two sturdy black oak beams.
Straw-matting covered the uneven floor, and the wall-paper was sprinkled
with a pattern of little prim posies in baskets. The chintz of the
casement-curtains showed flowering sprays on which parrots perched;
there was a patchwork quilt on the oaken bed.
Gwenna had come up early; it was only nine o'clock. So, having undressed
and got into her soft white ruffled night-gown and her kimono of pink
cotton-crepe, she proceeded to indulge in one of those "bedroom
potterings" so dear to girlhood's heart.
First there was a drawer to be tidied in the dressing-table that stood
in the casement-window. Ribbons to be smoothed out and rolled up; white
embroidered collars to be put in a separate heap. Next there was the
frilling to be ripped out of the neck and sleeves of her grey linen
dress, that she had just taken off, and to be rolled up in a little
ball, and tossed into the wastepaper basket. Then, two Cash's
marking-tapes with her name, GWENNA DAMPIER, to be sewn on to the couple
of fine, Irish linen handkerchiefs that had been brought down to her as
a little offering from Leslie. Then there was her calendar to be brought
up to date; three leaves to tear off until she came to the day's
quotation:
"Don't call the score at half-time."
Then there was the last button to sew on to a filmy camisole that she
had found leisure, even with her work and her knitting, to make for
herself. Gradually, young Mrs. Dampier meant to accumulate quite a lot
of "pretties" for the Bottom Drawers, that Ideal which woman never
utterly relinquishes. The house and furniture of married life Gwenna
could let go without a sigh. "The nest"--pooh! But the ideal of "the
plumage" was another matter. Even if the trousseau did have to come
after the wedding, never mind! A trousseau she would have by the time
Paul came home again.
Having finished her stitching, she put her little wicker-work basket
aside on the chest-of-drawers and took out the handkerchief-sachet in
which she kept all his letters. She read each one over again.... "I'll
finish mine to him to-night," she decided. "It'll go off before eight in
the morning, then; save a post."
From under her work-basket she took her blotting-pad. The letter to Paul
was between the leaves, with her fountain-pen that she'd used at school.
She sat down in the wicker-seated chair before the dressing-table and
leaned her pad up against the edge of that table, with her brushes and
comb, her wicker-cased bottle of eau-de-Cologne, her pot of skin-cream
and her oval hand-mirror, its silver back embossed by Reynolds' immortal
group of cherubs whose curly heads and soft, tip-tilted faces were not
unlike Gwenna's own as she sat there, reading over what she had already
put in that letter to the Front.
It began in what Gwenna considered an admirably sedate and old-fashioned
style: "_My dearest Husband._" She thought: "The Censor, whoever he is!
that Paul talks about--when he reads that he'll think it's from somebody
quite old and been married for ten years, perhaps; instead of only
just--what is it--seven weeks!"
It went on to acknowledge the last note from Paul and to ask him if she
should send him some more cigarettes, and to beg that he would, if he
could possibly, possibly manage it, get one of his friends to take a
snapshot of him--Paul--in uniform, as Gwenna had never yet seen him.
Beside the swung oval mirror on the dressing-table there was set up in a
silver frame the only portrait that she possessed of her boy-husband:
the glazed picture postcard that Gwenna had bought that Saturday in May,
when she had gone to see the flying at Hendon with her two friends from
the Westminster Office, Mabel Butcher and Ottilie Becker.
Gwenna's eyes fell on that photograph as she raised them from her pad.
Her thoughts, going back to that afternoon, suggested the next item to
be written to Paul.
And the young girl wrote on, in much the same style as she would have
talked, with few full stops and so much underlining that some words
seemed to have a bar of music below them.
"You remember my telling you about Miss Becker, the German girl
that I used to be at Westminster with, when we used to call
ourselves the Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick-maker? Well,
what _do_ you think? She has been _taken away_ from her
boarding-house where she was in Bloomsbury, and interned in some
camp as an alien enemy, although she is a girl, and they say she
_nearly_ was just on trial _as a spy_!
"Mabel Butcher wrote and told me about it. She (Miss Butcher) went
with Ottilie Baker when she had to register herself as an alien at
Somerset House, just after the War broke out, and she said it was
_awful_, a great place like six National Galleries rolled into one,
and _miles_ of immense long corridors, and _simply crowds_ of all
kinds of Germans and Austrians, just like a queue at the theatre,
waiting to be registered, and all looking scared to _death_, quite
a lot of pretty girls among them, too.
"Poor Ottilie Becker cried like anything at having to go, and to be
an enemy alien, you know she'd got such heaps of friends in England
and liked lots of English ways. She used to have a bath every
morning, even. I hate to think of _her_ being a prisoner. Of course
I know one ought to feel that all Germans ought to be wiped out
now," wrote Gwenna, "but it makes you feel sort of different when
it's a girl you've _known_ and had lots of little jokes with, and I
was with her the very first time I heard of _you_, so I shan't be
able to help always feeling a little kinder about her.
"The reason she was arrested was because they found in her room at
the boarding-house a lot of notes about the engineering-works, our
works, which she had been going to send off to that soldier-brother
of hers, Karl. She declared _she_ didn't know she wasn't supposed
to, and that she hadn't an _idea_ of our going to War with her
country or anything, and I'm _sure_ she didn't _mean_ any harm at
all. She said she'd seen her brother Karl in England the week
before War was declared, and that _he_ hadn't said a word to her
then. And so perhaps he _was_ that waiter all the time. You know,
the one we saw, in the cab that last Sunday of peace-time. I expect
_he_ is fighting us now, isn't it _extraordinary_?"
This was the end of the sheet. Gwenna took another. Her letters to the
Front were always at least six times as long as the answers that she
received to them, but this was only to be expected. And Paul had said he
loved long letters and that she was to tell him absolutely everything
she could. All about herself.
She went on:
"You tell me to take care of myself and not to work too hard; well,
I am not. And I am quite well and Mrs. Crewe is most _awfully_
kind to me, and the little maid here _spoils_ me. Every night when
I am in bed she _insists_ on bringing me up a glass of hot milk and
two biscuits, though what for I don't know.
"_Is_ there anything more about your coming back from the Front to
fetch the P.D.Q.? Oh, it _would_ be so lovely to see you even for a
_few days_. I sometimes feel as if I had _never, never_ seen
you----"
She sighed deeply in the quiet, lamp-lit room, where the chintz-casement
curtains stirred faintly above the open window. It had been so long, so
long, all this time of being without him. Why, she had scarcely had a
week of knowing him hers, before there had come that rushed War-bridal
and the Good-bye! And all she had to live on were her memories and a
glazed picture postcard, and a packet of pencil-scrawled letters of
which the folds were worn into slits. She couldn't even write to him as
she would have wished. Always there brooded over her that spectre "The
Censor," who possibly read every letter that was addressed to a man at
the Front. Gwenna knew that some people at home wrote anything they