The Boy with Wings 31Part III · A War-Time Honeymoon
18
Literature · Romance
The Boy with Wings 31
Part III · A War-Time Honeymoon
RuckEnglish
The morning after Paul Dampier's arrival from the Front he and his wife started off on the honeymoon trip that had been for so many weeks deferred.
They motored from the Aircraft Works to London, where they stopped to do a little shopping, and where Gwenna was in raptures of pride to see the effect produced by the Beloved in the uniform that suited him so well.
For every passer-by in the street must turn to look, with quickened interest now, at an Army Aviator. Even the young men in their uniforms gave a glance at the soldier whose tunic buttoned at the side and whose cap had the tilt that gave to the shape of his blonde head something bird-like, falcon-like. And every girl in the restaurant where they lunched murmured, "Look," to her companion, "that's some one in the Royal Flying Corps," and was all eyes for that kit which, at a time when all khaki was romantic, had a special, super-glamour of its own.
But the blue eyes of the man who wore it were for no one but the girl with whom he was taking his first meal alone together since they had been man and wife.
Her own glance was still hazy with delight. Oh, to see him there facing her, over the little round table set in a corner!
They ate cold beef and crusty loaf and cheese in memory of their first lunch together in that field, long ago. They drank cider, touching glasses and wishing each other all luck and a happy life.
"And fine weather for the whole of our week's honeymoon," added the bridegroom as he set down his glass. "Lord, I know how it can pour in your Wales."
For it was to Wales that they went on by the afternoon train from Euston; to Gwenna's home, arriving late that evening. The Reverend Hugh Lloyd was away on a round of preaching-visits about Dolgelly. They had his black-henlike housekeeper to chirp and bustle about them with much adoring service; and they would have the Chapel House to themselves.
"But we won't be in the house much," Gwenna decided, "unless it pours."
It did not pour the next morning. It was cloudless and windless and warm. And looking round on the familiar landscape that she had known when she was a little child, it seemed now to Gwenna as if War could not be. As if it were all a dream and a delusion. There was no khaki to be met in that little hillside village of purple slate and grey stone. Only one or two well-known figures were missing from it. A keeper from one of the big houses on the other side of the river, and an English chauffeur had joined the colours, but that nine-days' wonder was over now. Peace had made her retreat in these mountain fastnesses that had once echoed to the war-shouts and the harp-music of a race so martial.
It was the music that had survived....
Paul Dampier had put on again that well-known and well-worn grey tweed jacket of his, so that he also no longer recalled War. He had come right away from all that, as she had known he would; come safely back to her. Here he was, with her, and with a miracle between them, in this valley of crystal brooks and golden bracken and purple slopes. It was meant that they two should be together thus. Nothing could have stopped it. She felt herself exulting and triumphing over all the Fates who might have tried to stop it; and over all the Forces that might have tried to keep him from her. His work on the Machine? Pooh! That had actually helped to bring them together! The Great War? Here he was, home from the War!
"I've always, always wanted to be with you in the real country, and I never have," she told him, as together they ran down the slate steps of Uncle Hugh's porch after breakfast and turned up a path between the sunny larch-grown steeps. That path would be a torrent in the winter time. Now the slate pebbles of it were hot under the sun. "I don't really count that country, that field, that day----"
"Didn't seem to mind it when we were there," he teased her as he walked beside her swinging the luncheon basket that Margaret had put up for them. "I mean of course when I was there."
Gwenna affected to gasp over the conceit of men. "If I've got to be with one," she told him as if wearily, "I'd rather it was in a nice place for me to listen to his nonsense."
"Wasn't any 'nonsense,' as you call it, in that field."
"No," agreed Gwenna, "there wasn't."
He looked sideways and down at her as she climbed that hill-path, hatless, sure-footed and supple. Then a narrow turn in the path made her walk a little ahead of him. She was wearing a very simple little sheath of a grey cotton or muslin or something frock, with a white turn-down collar that he hadn't seen her in before, he thought. Suited her awfully well. (Being a man, he could not be expected to recognise it for the grey linen that she'd had on when he'd come upon her that afternoon, high up on the scaffolding at Westminster.)
"Yes, though, there was 'nonsense,'" he said, now suddenly answering her last speech. "Fact of the matter is, it was dashed nonsense to waste such a lot of time."
"Time, how?" asked Gwenna guilelessly, without turning her head.
"Oh! As if you didn't know!" he retorted. "Wasting time talking about the Machine, to you. Catching hold of your hand, to show you what the camber was--and then letting it go! Instead of owning up at once, 'Yes. All right. You've got me. Pax!' And starting to do this----"
He was close up behind her now on the mountain-path, and because of the steep ground on which they stood, her head was on a higher level than his own. He drew it downwards and backwards, that brown, sun-warmed head, to his tweed-clad shoulder.
"You'll break my neck. I know you will, one day. You are so rough," complained Gwenna; twisting round, however, and taking a step down to him.
"I love you to be," she whispered. She kissed his coat-lapel. All the red of that rose bloomed now on her mouth.... They walked on, with his arm a close, close girdle about her. The luncheon basket was forgotten on the turfy slope on which he'd dropped it. So they lunched, late, in the farm-house four hundred feet above the Quarry village. It was a lonely place enough, a hillside outpost, fenced by stunted damson trees; a short slate-flagged end of path led to the open door where a great red baking crock stood, full of water. Inside, the kitchen was a dark, cool cave, with ancient, smooth-worn oaken furniture that squeaked on the slate-slabbed floor, with a dresser rich with willow-pattern and lustre, and an open fire-place, through which, looking up, they could see through the wood smoke a glimpse of the blue sky.
And in this sort of place people still lived and worked as if it were Seventeen Hundred and Something--and scarcely a day's journey away was the Aircraft Factory where people lived for the work that will remake the modern world; oh, most romantic of all ages, that can set such sharp contrasts side by side!
An old Welshwoman, left there by her sheep-farming sons at home in the chimney corner, set butter-milk before the lovers, and ambrosial home-churned butter, and a farm-house loaf that tasted of nuts and peatsmoke. They ate with astonishing appetites; Gwenna sitting in the window-seat under the sill crowded with flower-pots and a family Bible. Paul, man-like, stood as near as he could to the comfort of the fire even on that warm day. The old woman, who wore clumping clogs on her feet and a black mutch-cap on her head, beamed upon the pair with smiles as toothless and as irresistible as those of an infant.
"You must have a plenty, whatever," she urged them, bringing out another loaf, of bara breeth (or currant bread). "Come on, Sir! Come, Miss Williams, now. Mam, I mean. Yess, yess. You married lady now. Your husband," with a skinny hand on his grey sleeve, "your husband is not a minnyster?"
"He's a soldier, Mrs. Jones," explained Gwenna, proudly, and with a strengthening of her own accent, such as occurs in any of her race when revisiting their wilds. "He's an Airman."
"Ur?" queried Mrs. Jones, beaming.
"He goes flying. You know. On a machine. Up in the sky."
"Well, oh!" ejaculated the old woman. And laughed shrilly. To her this was some eccentric form of English joke. Flying? Like the birds! Dear, dear. "What else does he do, cariad fach?" she asked of Gwenna.
"He's been over in France, fighting the Germans," said the girl, while the old woman on her settle by the fire nodded her mutched head with the intense, delighted expression of some small child listening to a fairy story. It was indeed no more, to her. She said, "Well, indeed. He took a very kind one, too." Then she added, "I not much English. Pitty, pitty!" and said something in Welsh at which Gwenna coloured richly and laughed a little and shook her head.
"What's she say?" demanded Paul, munching; but his girl-wife said it was nothing--and turned her tip-tilted profile, dark against the diamond window panes, to admire one of the geranium plants in the pots.
Afterwards, when the couple were outside again in the fresh sunlight on the mountain lands, young Dampier persisted with his questioning about what that old woman had said. He betted that he could guess what it was all about. And he guessed.
Gwenna admitted that he had guessed right.
"She said," she told him shyly, "that it ought to be 'a very pretty one, whatever.'"
"I've got a very pretty present for it," Paul whispered presently.
"What?"
"Don't you remember a locket I once took? A little mother-of-pearl heart," he said. "That's what I shall keep it for----"
And there fell a little silence between them as they walked on, swinging hands above the turf, gravely contented.
They had had to spend the day together thus. It seemed to Gwenna that all her life before had been just a waiting for this day.
Below the upland on which they swung along, grey figures on the green, there lay other wide hill-spaces, spread as with turf-green carpets, on which the squares of mellowing, golden-brown autumn woods seemed rugs and skins cast down; below these again stretched the further valley with the marsh, with the silver loops and windings of the river, and the little white moving caterpillar of smoke from the distant train. There was also a blue haze above the slate roofs of a town.
But here, in this sun-washed loneliness far above, here was their world; hers and his.
They walked, sometimes climbing a crest where stag's-horn moss branched and spread through the springy turf beneath their feet, sometimes dipping into a hollow, for two miles and more. They could have walked there for half a day and seen no face except that of a tiny mountain sheep, cropping among the gorse; heard no voice but those of the calling plovers, beating their wings in the free air. Then, passing a gap in two hills, they came quite suddenly upon the cottage and the lake.
The sheet of water, silent, deserted, reflected the warm blue of the afternoon sky and the deep green of the overhanging boughs of great hassock-shaped bushes that covered two islands set upon its breast.
"Rhododendron bushes. When they're in blossom they're all simply covered with flowers, pink and rose-colour, and reflected in the water! It is so lovely," Gwenna told the lover beside her. "Oh, Paul! You must come here again and see that with me in the spring!"
On the further bank was another jungle of rhododendron and lauristinus, half-hiding the grey stone walls and the latticed windows of the square cottage, a fishing box of a place that had evidently been built for some one who loved solitude.
Paul Dampier peered in through one of the cobwebby lattices. Just inside on the sill there stood, left there long since, a man's shaving-tackle. Blue mildew coated the piece of soap that lay in the dish. Further in he caught a glimpse of dusty furniture, of rugs thrown down on a wooden floor, of a man's old coat on a peg. A wall was decorated with sets of horns, with a couple of framed photographs, with old fishing-rods.
"Make a jolly decent billet, for some one, this," said Paul.
Gwenna said, "It belongs to some people.... They're away, I think. It's all locked up now. So's the boat for the lake, I expect. They used to keep a boat up here for fishing."
The long flat boat they found moored to one of the stout-trunked rhododendron bushes that dipped its pointed leaves in the peat-brown water fringed with rushes.
Paul stepped in, examining her, picking up the oars. "Nice afternoon for a row, Ma'am?" he said, smiling up at the girl clad in dove-grey on the rushy bank, with the spongy dark-green moss about her shoes.
"Jump in, Gwenna. I'll row you across the lake."
"You can't row that old tub, boy."
"Can't I?"
"I'll race you round, then!"
"Right you are!"
The girl skipped round the clump of rhodos that hid the last flicker of her skirt; and the boy bent to the short, home-made sculls.
The boat was a crank, unhandy little craft; and lacked thole-pins on one side. Therefore Gwenna, swift-footed Little Thing that she was, had as good a chance of winning as he.
"Like trying to row a bucket!" he laughed, as the boat spun. "Hi, Gwen! I ought to have some start, you know!"
He rowed. Presently he rested on his oars and called, "Hullo, have you started?"
"Started--" came back only the echo from the cottage roof. There was no sign of any grey-frocked running figure on the bank. He scanned it on both sides of him, gave a look towards each of those shrub-covered islands on the smooth expanse.
"Gwenna--Why, where are you? What's become of the girl," he muttered. "Gwen-na!"
