The Boy with Wings 28Part II · This Side of "the Front"
18
Literature · Romance
The Boy with Wings 28
Part II · This Side of "the Front"
RuckEnglish
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 the POWERS-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 enlisting of any more of her men had been discouraged. They were 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 WITH
HAMMER AND RIVET AS YOU CAN WITH
RIFLE 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 so awful! I don't think I should want to live," she told the Aeroplane Lady one dinner-hour, "if there wasn't something else really wanted by the 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's always 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 the Aeroplane 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 never will see 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 I shall see 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----'
"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?'
"Isn't it!" 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. I do think it's a great game!"
She read on:
"'Got three letters and Punch from 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.'),
"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 who she is; 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 Works neither 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." ...
