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 gla.s.ses, 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 sn.o.bbery. 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 cla.s.s 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 ident.i.ty, 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 "ident.i.ty" 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 att.i.tude 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 c.o.c.kney 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 l.u.s.t, The hand-maid of the G.o.ds."
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.
CHAPTER IX
THIS SIDE OF "THE FRONT"
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.