The Boy with Wings

by Berta Ruck

  CHAPTER XI

  A LOVE LETTER--AND A ROSE

  A couple of days after Leslie's visit Gwenna was moving about thebedroom at Mrs. Crewe's cottage.

  It was an old-fashioned, quaintly pretty room. The low ceiling, on whichthe lamplight gleamed, was crossed by two sturdy black oak beams.Straw-matting covered the uneven floor, and the wall-paper was sprinkledwith a pattern of little prim posies in baskets. The chintz of thecasement-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 undressedand got into her soft white ruffled night-gown and her kimono of pinkcotton-crepe, she proceeded to indulge in one of those "bedroompotterings" so dear to girlhood's heart.

  First there was a drawer to be tidied in the dressing-table that stoodin the casement-window. Ribbons to be smoothed out and rolled up; whiteembroidered collars to be put in a separate heap. Next there was thefrilling to be ripped out of the neck and sleeves of her grey linendress, that she had just taken off, and to be rolled up in a littleball, and tossed into the wastepaper basket. Then, two Cash'smarking-tapes with her name, GWENNA DAMPIER, to be sewn on to the coupleof fine, Irish linen handkerchiefs that had been brought down to her asa little offering from Leslie. Then there was her calendar to be broughtup to date; three leaves to tear off until she came to the day'squotation:

  "Don't call the score at half-time."

  Then there was the last button to sew on to a filmy camisole that shehad found leisure, even with her work and her knitting, to make forherself. Gradually, young Mrs. Dampier meant to accumulate quite a lotof "pretties" for the Bottom Drawers, that Ideal which woman neverutterly relinquishes. The house and furniture of married life Gwennacould let go without a sigh. "The nest"--pooh! But the ideal of "theplumage" was another matter. Even if the trousseau did have to comeafter the wedding, never mind! A trousseau she would have by the timePaul came home again.

  Having finished her stitching, she put her little wicker-work basketaside on the chest-of-drawers and took out the handkerchief-sachet inwhich she kept all his letters. She read each one over again.... "I'llfinish mine to him to-night," she decided. "It'll go off before eight inthe morning, then; save a post."

  From under her work-basket she took her blotting-pad. The letter to Paulwas 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 andleaned her pad up against the edge of that table, with her brushes andcomb, her wicker-cased bottle of eau-de-Cologne, her pot of skin-creamand her oval hand-mirror, its silver back embossed by Reynolds' immortalgroup of cherubs whose curly heads and soft, tip-tilted faces were notunlike Gwenna's own as she sat there, reading over what she had alreadyput in that letter to the Front.

  It began in what Gwenna considered an admirably sedate and old-fashionedstyle: "_My dearest Husband._" She thought: "The Censor, whoever he is!that Paul talks about--when he reads that he'll think it's from somebodyquite old and been married for ten years, perhaps; instead of onlyjust--what is it--seven weeks!"

  It went on to acknowledge the last note from Paul and to ask him if sheshould send him some more cigarettes, and to beg that he would, if hecould possibly, possibly manage it, get one of his friends to take asnapshot 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 asilver frame the only portrait that she possessed of her boy-husband:the glazed picture postcard that Gwenna had bought that Saturday in May,when she had gone to see the flying at Hendon with her two friends fromthe 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 tobe written to Paul.

  And the young girl wrote on, in much the same style as she would havetalked, with few full stops and so much underlining that some wordsseemed 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 theFront were always at least six times as long as the answers that shereceived to them, but this was only to be expected. And Paul had said heloved long letters and that she was to tell him absolutely everythingshe 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 glass of hot milk and two biscuits, though what for I don't know.

  "_Is_ there anything more about your coming back from the Front to fetch the P.D.Q.? Oh, it _would_ be so lovely to see you even for a _few days_. I sometimes feel as if I had _never, never_ seen you----"

  She sighed deeply in the quiet, lamp-lit room, where the chintz-casementcurtains stirred faintly above the open window. It had been so long, solong, all this time of being without him. Why, she had scarcely had aweek of knowing him hers, before there had come that rushed War-bridaland the Good-bye! And all she had to live on were her memories and aglazed picture postcard, and a packet of pencil-scrawled letters ofwhich the folds were worn into slits. She couldn't even write to him asshe would have wished. Always there brooded over her that spectre "TheCensor," who possibly read every letter that was addressed to a man atthe Front. Gwenna knew that some people at home wrote anything theywished, heedless that a stranger's eye might see it. Leslie, forinstance, wrote to one of her medical students, now working with theR.A.M.C. in Paris, as "My dear Harry--and the Censor," adding anoccasional parenthesis: "_You won't understand this expression, Mr.Censor, as it is merely a quite silly family joke!_" She, Gwenna, feltutterly unable to write down mo
re than a tithe of the tender things thatshe would have liked to say. To-night she had a longing to pour out herheart to him ... oh, and she would say _something_! Even if she tore upthat sheet and wrote another. She scribbled down hastily: "Darling boy,do you know I miss you more _every day_; nobody has _ever_ missedanybody _so dreadfully_."

  Here she was wrong, though she did not know it. It was true that shelonged hungrily for the sight of that dear blonde face, with its blue,intrepid eyes, for the sound of that deep and gentle voice, and for thetouch of those hands, those strongly modelled lips. But all these thingshad been a new joy, scarcely realised before it was gone. She would havetold you that it made it worse for her. Actually it meant that she wasspared much. Her lover's presence had been a gift given and snatchedaway; not the comradeship of years that, missing, would seem even as theloss of a limb to her. The ties of daily habit and custom whichstrengthen that many-stranded cord of Love had not yet been wovenbetween these two lovers.

  "I sometimes think it was really _awfully selfish_ of me to _marry_ you," Gwenna wrote, thinking to herself, "Oh, bother that old Censor, just for once." She went on more hurriedly:

  "You might have married somebody like that Miss Muriel Conyers, with those frightfully lovely clothes and _all_ her people able to help you on in the Army, or somebody very beautiful and _rich_, anybody would have been glad to have you, and I _know_ I am just a little _nobody_, and not a bit clever and even Leslie used to say I had a Welshy accent sometimes when I speak, and I daresay _lots_ of people will think, oh, 'how _could_ he!--why, she isn't even very _pretty_!'"

  She raised her eyes, deeper and brighter in the lamplight, and gave aquestioning glance at her reflection in the oval, swung mirror on thedressing-table at which she wrote. It would have been a captious criticindeed that could have called her anything less than very pretty at thatmoment; with her little face flushed and intent, a mixture of child andwoman in the expression of her eyes and about her soft, parted lips.Above the ruffle of her night-gown her throat rose proudly; thick andcreamy and smooth. She remembered something he'd told her that afternoonat Kew. He'd said that she always reminded him of any kind of whiteflower that was sturdy and sweet; a posy of white clover, a white,night-blooming stock, some kinds of white roses.... She would like tosend him a flower, in this letter, to remind him.

  She glanced towards the open casement, where the curtain waved. Underthe shading foliage of the clematis that grew up to the cottage-roofthere had climbed the spray of a belated rose. "Rose Menie" was itsname. Mrs. Crewe had said that it would not flower that year. But therewas one bud, half-hidden by leaves, swelling on its sappy twig, close toGwenna's window-sill.

  "It'll come out in a day or so," Gwenna thought.

  "I'll send it to him, if it comes out white.... _He_ was pleased with mylooks!"

  So, reassured, she turned to the letter again, and added:

  "The only thing is, that whatever sort of wife you'd married, they _couldn't_ have loved you like I do, or been so proud of being your wife; _really_ sometimes I can _hardly believe_ that I am really and truly married to----"

  She broke off, and again lifted her curly head from bending above thepaper.

  There had been a light tap at the door behind her.

  "Come in," called Gwenna, writing down as she did so, "here is thelittle maid coming to bring me up my hot milk; now, darling, darlingboy, I _do hope_ they give you enough to eat wherever you are----"

  Behind her the white door opened and shut. But the maid did not appearat Gwenna's elbow with the tray that held that glass of hot milk and theplate of biscuits. The person who had entered gazed silently across thequiet girlish room at the little lissom figure clad in that soft crumpleof pink and white, sitting writing by the dressing-table, at thecherub's head, backed by the globe of the lamp that spun a goldenaureole into that wreath of curls.

  There was a pause so long that Gwenna, wondering, raised her head.

  She gave another glance into the oval mirror that stood on thedressing-table just in front of her.... And there she saw, not thehomely, aproned figure of the little maid that she had expected to see,but the last thing that she had expected.

  It was a picture like, and unlike, a scene she had beheld long, longago, framed in the ornate gold-bordered oval mirror in the drawing-roomat the Smiths'. Over her pink-clad shoulder, she saw reflected a broad,khaki-covered chest, a khaki sleeve, a blonde boy's face that movednearer to her own. Even as she sat there, transfixed by surprise, thoseblue and intrepid eyes of Icarus looked, laughing joyously, full intohers, and held her gaze as a hand might have held her own.

  "It's only me," said a deep and gentle voice, almost shyly. "I say----"

  "_You!_" she cried, in a voice that rang with amazement, but not withfright; though he, it seemed, was hurrying out hasty warnings to theLittle Thing not to be frightened.... He'd thought it better thanstartling her with a wire.... Mrs. Crewe had met him at the door ...he'd come straight up: hoped she didn't think he was a ghost---- Not fora second had she thought so!

  Instantly she had known him for her granted and incarnate heart'sdesire, her Flyer, home from the Front, her husband to whom she had thatmoment been writing as she sat there.

  She sprang to her feet.

  She whirled round.

  She could not have told whether she had first flung herself into thosestrong arms of his, or whether he had snatched her up into them.

  All that mattered was that they were round her now, lifting and holdingher as though they would never let her go again.

  When Reveille sounded from the Camp on the plain, the sun was bright onthat clematis-grown wall outside the window of Gwenna's bridal-room.

  It gilded the September foliage about the window-sill It also touched agem of passionate colour, set among the leaves of the Rose Menie.

  That red rose had broken into blossom in the night.

  PART III

  _SEPTEMBER, NINETEEN-FOURTEEN_