"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."
"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'tcaremuch. 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 hercouldn'thelp thinking that she cared. Most awfully. Ifshedidn't make a fuss, it must be because she was rather brave.
"Brive?Idon'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 verymuch, if you ask me.They all catch it from each other, these wretched Army men's wives. It's no morecreditto 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, whatyoumean 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 youcansay of the minds of Army people is that they haven't got any. And I don't know thatI'mimpressed 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, awfullyagainstsoldiers 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 neverkeephim 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 amanwith.) So, as I say, she'llsuppressher own identity, and grow the kind 'He' happens to like."
The art-student murmured that she supposed it didn't reallymatter, 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 sheispleased. She'll catch the whole detestable Jingow spirit,Iknow. Syme attitude of mind as the Zulu who runs amuck at the sound of a drum. Hysterical, that's whatIcall 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 boysTo lift them through the fight;And comfortress of UnsuccessTo give the dead Good-night."A rule to trick the arithmeticToo base of leaguing odds,The spur of trust, the curb of lust,The hand-maid of the gods."
"The Voice to Kingly boysTo lift them through the fight;And comfortress of UnsuccessTo give the dead Good-night.
"A rule to trick the arithmeticToo 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 Ladyat the Works. She'd go back just as if nothing had happened.
She returned, to find changes at that Aircraft Factory.
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 on the stocks; and out of the body of the most nearly completed one there climbed the slight figure of the Aeroplane Lady. Her blue and youthful eyes lighted up at the sight of the girl standing in the clear, diffused light of the many windows and backed by the spinning shafting.
"Ah! You've arrived, Mrs. Dampier," she said briskly, using the new name without a pause or a smile, for which Gwenna blessed her. "Thank Heaven I shall have a reliable clerk again.... No end of correspondence now, my dear. A sheaf of it waiting in the office.Come on and see to it now, will you? And for goodness' sake remind me that I am 'theirs obediently,' instead of merely 'truly,' to the Admiralty. I always forget. If I were left to myself my letters would sound just like the aviator's who wrote to thePOWERS-THAT-BE: 'Commander So-and-So presents his compliments and begs respectfully to submit that don't you think it would be a jolly good thing if we started a repairing shop?'—somewhere or other. Well! Here we are, you see. Stacks of it!" she went on as they reached that office where an airman's sweetheart had first realised the idea that an aeroplane might mean a ship of war—war in the clouds.
"We shall have as much work as we can get through now," said the Aeroplane Lady. "Look at this order from the War Office. And this—and this!"
For to all intents and purposes the War Office and the Admiralty had "taken over" Mrs. Crewe's Aircraft Factory.
The place rang and echoed, long after the hours of the ordinary working man's working day, with the clinking and whirring and hammering of those labours that went to bring forth these great wings of War.
Some of the French mechanics whom Gwenna had known well by sight had disappeared. They had been served with their mobilisation papers and were now off to serve under the Tricolour.
One or two of the English fitters, who were Reservists, had rejoined. One had enlisted.
But now, the Aeroplane Lady explained, the enlistingof any more of her men had been discouraged.Theywere too useful where they were. They, with many other sturdy Britons who fretted because they were not to take up other, riskier work on the other side of the Channel, were kept busy enough preparing the arms which those other, envied men were to use.
It was for the encouragement of them and their fellow-workers in Armament and Ammunition factories that a bundle of blue-lettered posters came down presently to the Works.
Gwenna, once more arrayed in the grey-blue, dope-stiffened pinafore, had the job of pinning up here and there, in the shops and sheds, these notices. They announced to the Man at the Bench that he was as needful to his country as the Man in the Trench. They gave out:
"YOU CAN HIT THE ENEMY AS HARD WITHHAMMER AND RIVET AS YOU CAN WITHRIFLE AND BULLET.HIT HIM!HURRY UP WITH THE SHIPS AND GUNS!"
And she, too, little Gwenna Dampier, clerk and odd-job-girl, felt herself respond to the appeal. As she typed letters and orders, as she heated dope, as she varnished for the men's handling those huge blue prints with the white, spider's-web-like "working drawings," or as she tested square inches of the fine wing-linen,she felt that she, too, was helping in her way to hurry up with those needed ships and guns.
Was she not lucky in her job?
For always she was buoyed up by the notion that whatever she touched might be of service, not only to the country which the Beloved was serving, but to the Beloved himself. Who knew? He himself might have to fly in any one of these very machines! Every least part, every atom of metal about them bore the visible, indestructible stamp of the English War Office. And Gwenna herself bore that unseen but indelible stamp of her love to her absent lad in every inch of her pliant girl's body, in every thought of her malleable girl's mind.
So the late summer weeks passed as she worked, glad in the thought that any or all of it might be for him. She felt sorry for those women who, when their man is away, have nothing but purely feminine work with which to fill the empty days. Sewing, household cares, knitting.... She herself knitted, snatching minutes from the twelve-o'clock dinner-hour in the cottage with Mrs. Crewe to add rows to the khaki woollen cap-comforter that she had started for Paul. It was just a detail in her own busy life. But it struck her that for countless left-behind women this detail remained all that they had to do; to knit all day, thinking, wondering, fretting over the Absent.
"That must be soawful! I don't think I should want tolive," she told the Aeroplane Lady one dinner-hour, "if there wasn't something else really wanted bythe men themselves, that I could have to do with! Every soldier's wife," said Gwenna, drawing herself up above the table with a pretty and very proud little gesture which made Mrs. Crewe smile a little, "I think every soldier's wife ought to have the chance of a job in some factory of this sort. Or in a shop for soldiers' comforts, perhaps. Like that woman has in Bond Street where I bought those extra-nice khaki handkerchiefs for Paul.She'salways thinking out some sort of new 'dodge' for the Front. A new sleeping-rug or trench-boots or something. A woman can feel she's taking some part in the actual campaign then. Don't you think so, Mrs. Crewe? But there aren't many other things she can do," concluded the girl with that soft, up-and-down accent, "unless she's actually a Red Cross nurse looking after the wounded. There's nothing else."
"Oh, isn't there? Surely——" began the Aeroplane Lady. Then she stopped, with a half-humorous, half-sad little smile in her eyes.
She was going to have suggested that the biggest Job that a woman can achieve has, at the root of things, everything to do with the carrying on of a campaign. Those English workmen in the shops were responsible for the perfect and reliable workmanship of the ships and guns. It was only the women of England who could make themselves responsible for the soundness and reliability of the men of the next generation, their little sons now growing up, to be perhaps the soldiers of the next war. All this flashed through the mind of theAeroplane Lady, who was also the mother of a fighting airman.
But, on second thoughts, she decided that she would not say anything about it. Not to this cherub-headed, guileless girl who bore Paul Dampier's name, and who wore his glitteringly new wedding-ring on her finger (that is, when she hadn't forgotten it, where it lay in the soap-dish in the bathroom or hanging up on a peg in the Wing-room beside her sunshine-yellow jersey coat. It was, as the newly-married Mrs. Dampier explained, miles too big for her, and she hated getting it a mass of dope).
So, instead of saying what she was going to say, the Aeroplane Lady drank tea out of a workman-like-looking, saucerless Brittany cup with two handles, and presently asked if there were anything exciting that she might be allowed to hear out of the letter that had arrived that morning from Mr. Dampier.
Those eagerly-looked-for, greedily-devoured letters from the young Airman to his wife were uncertain qualities enough.
Sometimes they came regularly, frequently, even two in a day, for Gwenna to kiss, and to learn by heart, and to slip under her pillow at night.
Then for days and weeks there would be nothing from him; and Gwenna would seem to herself to be going about with her flesh holding its breath in suspense all over her body.
That suspense was not (curiously enough) too agonised for his safety.
She had laughed quite easily the day that one of the older workmen had said to her kindly, if tactlessly:
"Ah, Miss Williams—or ma'am, as I s'pose I ought to say—I do feel sorry for you, I do. You here, same as when you was a single young lady. Your young gentleman God knows where, and you knowing that as likely as not you neverwillsee him again, p'raps."
"If I were not going to see him again," the girl had said tranquilly, "I should know. I should feel it. And I haven't that feeling at all, Mr. Harris. I'm one of those people who believe in presentiments. And I know Ishallsee him, though I don't know when."
That was the only trouble! When?When?When would she have something for her love to live on, besides just messages on lifeless paper?
Paul's letters were sometimes mere hasty scrawls. An "All's well," a darling or so, and his name on a bit of thin ruled paper torn from a note-book and scented vaguely with tobacco....
To-day it was a longer one.
"It's dated four days ago only, and it's just headed 'France,'" said young Mrs. Dampier, sitting, backed by the cottage window, with the level Berkshire landscape, flowering now into lines of white tents for the New Army in training, behind her curly head. "He says:
"'Last week I had a day, if you like! Engaged with two Taubes in the morning. Machine hit in four places. In the afternoon, as I was up reconnoitring,I saw below me a railway train, immensely long, going along as slow as a slug, with two engines. Sent in my report to Head Quarters, and wasn't believed, if you please. They said there couldn't be a train there. Line was destroyed. However, they did condescend to go and look. Afterwards I was told my report was of the greatest value——'
"'Last week I had a day, if you like! Engaged with two Taubes in the morning. Machine hit in four places. In the afternoon, as I was up reconnoitring,I saw below me a railway train, immensely long, going along as slow as a slug, with two engines. Sent in my report to Head Quarters, and wasn't believed, if you please. They said there couldn't be a train there. Line was destroyed. However, they did condescend to go and look. Afterwards I was told my report was of the greatest value——'
"There! Think of that," broke off Gwenna, with shining eyes.
"'And it's leaked out now that what I saw was a train crammed with ammunition. Afterwards (same day) went and dropped bombs on some works at—I'd better not say where!—and hope I get to know what damage was done. I know one was a clinking shot. A great game, isn't it?'
"'And it's leaked out now that what I saw was a train crammed with ammunition. Afterwards (same day) went and dropped bombs on some works at—I'd better not say where!—and hope I get to know what damage was done. I know one was a clinking shot. A great game, isn't it?'
"Isn'tit!" murmured the girl who had shuddered so at her first realisation of her lover as a possible fighter. But now, after these weeks, she shrank no longer. Gradually she had come to look upon War as a stupendous Adventure from which it would have been cruelty to shut him out. She saw it now as the reward of his years of working, waiting, experimenting. And she said to herself fancifully, "It must be because I've 'drunk of his cup,' and now I've come to 'think his thoughts.' I don't care what those suffragettes say about losing one's individuality.Ido think it's a great game!"
She read on:
"'Got three letters andPunchfrom you in the evening. Thanks awfully. You will write to me all you can, darling, won't you? The little wing is quite safe in my tunic-pocket. Give my love to Mrs. Crewe and to your Uncle and to Leslie Long. Heard from old Hugo that he was actually going to enlist. Do him lots of good.'
"'Got three letters andPunchfrom you in the evening. Thanks awfully. You will write to me all you can, darling, won't you? The little wing is quite safe in my tunic-pocket. Give my love to Mrs. Crewe and to your Uncle and to Leslie Long. Heard from old Hugo that he was actually going to enlist. Do him lots of good.'
"Then he sort of ends up," said Gwenna, dimpling to herself a little over the ending:
("'Your always Boy.'),
("'Your always Boy.'),
"and then there's a postscript:
"'Wouldn't it be top-hole if I could get some leave to come over and fetch the P.D.Q.? Guess the Censor will be puzzled to know whosheis; who's your lady friend? in fact."'P. D.'"
"'Wouldn't it be top-hole if I could get some leave to come over and fetch the P.D.Q.? Guess the Censor will be puzzled to know whosheis; who's your lady friend? in fact.
"'P. D.'"
"Thank you, Mrs. Dampier," said the Aeroplane Lady as she rose briskly to return with her assistant to the Works. "Give him my love, too (if I may), when you write. And I should like to tell you to write and ask Leslie Long down to see us one Saturday afternoon," she added as they came through the gap in the dusty hedge to the entrance road. "But really we're too rushed to think of such relaxations as visitors!"
For since Gwenna had come back to the Worksneither she nor her employer had taken any sort of holiday. That sacred right of the English worker, the "Saturday half-day off," existed no more at those busy Aircraft Works. Just as if it were any ordinary day of the week, the whistle sounded after the midday rest. And just as if it were any other day of the week, Mrs. Crewe's men (all picked workers, of whom not one happened to be a Trades Unionist) stacked up the bicycles on which they'd ridden back from their meal at home in the near-by town, and trooped into the shops. They continued to hurry up with those ships and guns.
Again the whirring and the chinking and the other forge-like noises would fill the place. Again the quick, achieving movements of clever hands, black and soaked in oil, would be carried on, sometimes until, from the training-camps on the surrounding ugly, useful plains, the bugles had sounded "Lights Out." ...
Now, as it happened, Miss Leslie Long did not choose to wait for her invitation to the Aircraft Works. Unasked and unexpected, she turned up there the very next Saturday afternoon.
She was given a chair in that spacious, white, characteristically-scented room where Mrs. Crewe and Gwenna were again busy with the wings. She was told not to expect either of them to stop work to look at her, but to go on talking and to tell them if there were anything new going on in London.
"Anything? Why, everything's new," Leslie told them gaily.
She wore the mauve linen frock and the shady hat that had been her bridesmaid's attire for Gwenna's wedding. And she was looking well, Gwenna noticed, as she stole a glance at her chum; well, and happier than she had seen Leslie look since the beginning of this eventful summer.
Leslie then gossiped to them of the many changes in London. These are now very ancient history to a whole nation. But at that time (in September, Nineteen-fourteen) they sounded still strange enough to those who lived out of town.
She spoke of the darkened streets. The bright, purposely-misleading lights in the Park. Of the recruitingposters; the recruiting results. Of the first of the refugees. Leslie's old lady had given hospitality to two ladies, a mother and a daughter from Brussels, and it was Leslie's new duty to translate English to them. Also of the departure of regiments she talked....
"Of course there are only two classes into which youcandivide the young men who aren't getting ready to go out," decreed Leslie, the whole-hearted. "Either they're Objects of Pity, or else they're Objects of Contempt."
"Come, come!" put in the Aeroplane Lady, laughing a little, but without raising her eyes from the stretched canvas on the trestles before her. "What about my men outside there?"
"I bet they envy the rawest recruit in K.'s Army!" declared Leslie. "The most anæmic little plucky shop-assistant who's only just scraped through on his chest-measurement and who's never spent so many consecutive hours in the open air in his whole life before!" She patted the stately head of the Great Dane as he stepped up to her from his big wooden kennel in the corner, and went on to say how she loved the New Armies.
"We see plenty of their doings up at Hampstead now, Taffy," she said. "'The Heath has Armies plenty, and semi-warlike bands!' Queen's Westminsters coming up in sweaters and shorts to do Physical Ekkers on the cricket-pitch. Swagger young men, some of them, too. Driving up in cars. Wearingtheir Jermyn Street winter-sports kit of last year under common privates' overcoats."
"Mars in motley!" said the Aeroplane Lady.
Leslie said, "It is amixture! New Army Type Number One, Section A: the boy who was born to be a soldier and bred to be a clerk. The fighter who wouldn't have got a chance toliveif it hadn't been for this war. The Dear Duck who's being taken to the water for the first time after twenty years!... Then, of course, there's the New Army Type Number Forty-three: the Honest Striver in Khaki, putting his back into learning a job that wasn't ever meant to be his. Not one bit thrilled by the idea of a scrap. No fun to him. Civilian down to his bones. But—'It is his duty, and he does.'"
"All the more credit," the Aeroplane Lady reminded her quietly, "to the born civilian."
"Yes, I know, Mrs. Crewe. One thoroughly respects him for it," agreed the soldier's daughter warmly.
Adding meditatively, "But it's rather an effort tolikehim as much as the other kind!"
"Talking of duty, Mr. Grant has gone," said Gwenna as she worked. "You know, Leslie: the engineer at our Westminster place who was always talking to Mabel Butcher and then saying, 'Well! Duty calls. I must away.' I'msurehe said that before he went off to enlist. He's in the R.E. And the office-boy that had such anawfulaccent went with him.He'sin the Halberdiers now; billeted in the country in some garage with six other men."
"How funny! D'you know who one of the men is? My friend, Monty Scott, the Dean's son," said Leslie, laughing again. "You remember him, Taffy, at that dance? He wore that Black Panther get-up.... He came up to see me, in uniform, last Sunday. I told him he'd only joined the Halberdiers because he thought the touch of black suited him. Then he told me of his weird billet in the country with these five other men. Two of them had lately come out of prison, he said; and they were really awfully interesting, comparing the grub they'd had there with what was served out to them here. I asked him (Monty) how he was getting on. He summed up the lot of the New Ranker rather well, I thought. He said, 'I'veneverbeen so uncomfortable or laughed so much in my life'!"
The Aeroplane Lady, working, said she thought he must be a dear.
"He is, rather," agreed the girl who had thrice refused to marry this young man.
"Why d'you sigh?" asked Gwenna quickly. A sigh meant, to her, only one thing. Impatience over the absence of the Beloved!
"I—perhaps I was thinking of Monty Scott's eyes," said Leslie lightly, bending over to smooth the dog's neck. "Theyareso absurdly handsome.Sucha pity one can't have them to wear as brooches!" Then, quickly, she turned from the subject of Monty Scott. She drew something out of her black silk bag. A picture postcard.
"From one of our Allies," said Leslie, showing it.
It gave a view of a French Regiment, still wearing the picturesque uniform of Eighteen-seventy, marching down a sunny, chestnut-bordered boulevard. The soldier in the immediate foreground showed under the jauntyképia dark, intelligent, mobile face that Gwenna recognised.
She sighed and smiled over the card. It brought back to her that tea at Hugo Swayne's rooms with Leslie, and the tall, blonde Englishman who was to be her husband, and that dark young French engineer who had said, "But the Machine is also of the sex of Mademoiselle!" He had written on this card in sprawling French writing and blue French ink, "À Mademoiselle Langue. Salutation amicale. Remember, please, the private soldier Gaston, who carries always in his knapsack the memory of the Curate's Egg!"
"Fancy, two of the men who were at Mr. Swayne's that afternoon are off at the Front to-day," said Gwenna Dampier. "That is, all three, perhaps. Paul said something about his cousin enlisting."
"Poor Hugo Swayne," said Leslie, with a laugh, that she stopped as if she were sorry she had begun it. "It's too bad, really."
"What is?Isn'the enlisting?"
"Yes. Oh, yes, Taffy, he has. But merely enlisting isn't the whole job," said Leslie. "He—to begin with, he could hardly get them to pass him——"
"Why? Too fat?" asked Gwenna mercilessly.
"Fat—Oh, no. They said three weeks' Swedish exerciseanddrill would take that off. He was quitefit, they said, physically. It was hismentalcapacity they seemed to doubt," explained Leslie. "Of course that was rather a shock to Hugo to hear, after the years he's been looking up to himself as a rather advanced and enlightened and thinking person. However, he took it very well. He saw what they meant."
"Who were 'they'?" asked Mrs. Crewe.
"The soldier-men he went to first of all, old brother-officers of his father's, who'd been with his father in Egypt, and whom he asked to find him a job of some sort. They told him, quite gently, of course, that they were afraid he was not 'up' to any soldiering job. They said they were afraid there were heaps of young Englishmen like him, awfully anxious to 'do their bits,' but simplynot clever enough! (Rather nice, isn't it, the revenge, at last, of the Brainless Army Type on the Cultured Civilian?) And he said to the old Colonel or General or whatever it was, 'I know, sir. I see, sir. Yes, I suppose I have addled myself up by too much reading and too much talk. I know I'm a Stage-Society-and-Café-Royal rotter, and no earthly good at this crisis.' And then he turned round and said quite angrily, 'Why wasn't I brought up to be some use when the time came?' And the old soldier-man said quite quietly, 'My dear Swayne, none of you "enlightened" people believed us that there was any "time" coming. You see now that we were right.' And Hugo said, 'You ought to have hammered it into me. Isn't there anything that I can do, sir?' And at last they got him something."
"What?" demanded Gwenna.
"Well, of course it soundsratherludicrous when you come to say what it is," admitted Leslie, her mouth curling into a smile that she could not suppress. "But it just shows the Philistines that thereissome use (if not beauty) in Futurist painting, after all. One always knew 'there must be something, if one could but find it out.'"
"But your friend Mr. Swayne can't do Futurist paintings," objected the Aeroplane Lady, "at the Front!"
"Well, but that's just what heisdoing! He's in France; at Quisait. Painting motor-buses to be used for transport wagons," explained Leslie. "You know the most disguising colour for those things at a distance is said to be not khaki, or feld-grau, or dull green, or any othersinglecolour. You have to have a sort of heather-mixture of all the most brilliant colours that can be got! This simply makes the thing invisible a certain way off. It's the idea of the game-feather tweed on the moors, you know. So Hugo's using his talents by painting emerald-green and magenta and scarlet and black triangles and cubes and splodges all over those big Vanguards——"
"Why,Icould do that," murmured the girl who was so busy varnishing the aeroplane wings. "Sure I could."
"Oh, but, Taffy, you haven't been educated up to it," protested Leslie gravely. "Youcouldn'tget it sufficiently dynamic and simultaneous and marinetic!"
A message from the Central Shop to the Aeroplane Lady left the two girls alone presently in the Wing-room. Then Leslie, putting her hand on the rounded arm below the loose sleeve of Gwenna's working-pinafore, said softly and quickly, "Look here, I came down because I had something to tell you, Taffy."
The Welsh girl glanced quickly up into her chum's black eyes.
"Something to tell me?" Gwenna's heart sank.
She didn't want to hear of Leslie having definitely made up her mind at last to marry a—well, a man who was good-natured and well bred and generous enough about wedding-presents, but who confessed himself to be of "no earthly good" when "it came to the real things of life." "Oh, Leslie, is it——"
"It is that you can congratulate me."
"Oh, dear. I wasafraid—You mean youareengaged to him, Leslie. To Mr. Swayne."
"No," said Leslie, holding her black head high. "No, not to Mr. Swayne. Why must 'congratulations' always mean 'Mister' Anybody? They don't, 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'msothankful," she cried childishly. "It wouldn't have done, Leslie!"
"No," said Miss Long.
"He wasn't a quarter good enough."
"Pooh. What'sthatgot 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 Ialwaysbeen 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'vealways known how much Love means. What'smoney?"
"Nothing to run down, I assure you. Money's gorgeous. Money meansPower," 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 thatbefore," said little Gwenna, feeling for once in her lifesomuch older and much wiser than her chum. "What makes you know it now, Leslie?"
"The War, perhaps. Everything's put down to theWar 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'smoreof 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 thisworld, 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?
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-crêpe, 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 beenbrought 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-casedbottle 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, whatdoyou think? She has beentaken awayfrom 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 shenearlywas just on trialas 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 wasawful, a great place like six National Galleries rolled into one, andmilesof immense long corridors, andsimply crowdsof all kinds of Germans and Austrians, just like a queue at the theatre, waiting to be registered, and all looking scared todeath, 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 ofherbeing a prisoner. Of course I know one ought to feel that all Germans ought to be wiped out now," wrote Gwenna, "but it makesyou feel sort of different when it's a girl you'veknownand had lots of little jokes with, and I was with her the very first time I heard ofyou, 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 declaredshedidn't know she wasn't supposed to, and that she hadn't anideaof our going to War with her country or anything, and I'msureshe didn'tmeanany harm at all. She said she'd seen her brother Karl in England the week before War was declared, and thathehadn't said a word to her then. And so perhaps hewasthat waiter all the time. You know, the one we saw, in the cab that last Sunday of peace-time. I expectheis fighting us now, isn't itextraordinary?"
"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, whatdoyou think? She has beentaken awayfrom 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 shenearlywas just on trialas 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 wasawful, a great place like six National Galleries rolled into one, andmilesof immense long corridors, andsimply crowdsof all kinds of Germans and Austrians, just like a queue at the theatre, waiting to be registered, and all looking scared todeath, 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 ofherbeing a prisoner. Of course I know one ought to feel that all Germans ought to be wiped out now," wrote Gwenna, "but it makesyou feel sort of different when it's a girl you'veknownand had lots of little jokes with, and I was with her the very first time I heard ofyou, 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 declaredshedidn't know she wasn't supposed to, and that she hadn't anideaof our going to War with her country or anything, and I'msureshe didn'tmeanany harm at all. She said she'd seen her brother Karl in England the week before War was declared, and thathehadn't said a word to her then. And so perhaps hewasthat waiter all the time. You know, the one we saw, in the cab that last Sunday of peace-time. I expectheis fighting us now, isn't itextraordinary?"
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: