The Boy with Wings Part 44

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 was _afraid_--You mean you _are_ engaged 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'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 a.s.sure 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-fas.h.i.+oned, quaintly pretty room. The low ceiling, on which the lamplight gleamed, was crossed by two st.u.r.dy 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 cas.e.m.e.nt-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 cas.e.m.e.nt-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 b.u.t.ton 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 acc.u.mulate 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 st.i.tching, 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 gla.s.s of hot milk and two biscuits, though what for I don't know.