The Boy with Wings 27Part II · The Girl He Left Behind Him
18
Literature · Romance
The Boy with Wings 27
Part II · The Girl He Left Behind Him
RuckEnglish
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.
