Said Pillivant, meeting him in the offices ofThe New Universe: “A year ago you didn’t know there was a war on. I took you for the ruddiest freak I had ever come across. Now you’ve blossomed out into a ruddy swell, bossing everything. I can’t open a newspaper without seeing your name. How the hell have you managed to do it?”
“Profiteering,” said Baltazar.
“Profiteering?” asked Pillivant, puckering up his fat face in perplexity. “What’s your line?”
“Brains,” said Baltazar.
He turned away delighted. Well, it came to that. There was no arrogance about it. He was giving everything in his power to the country. Oppressed, at one time, by the sense of physical fitness, and fired by the sudden, urgent demand for man-power, he had, in one of his Gordian-knot cutting moods, marched into a recruiting office and vaunted his brawn and muscle. “I’m fifty,” said he, “but I defy anybody to say I’m not physically equal to any boy of twenty-five.” But they had politely laughed at him and sent him away raging furiously. It was then that he followed the despised counsel of the unimaginative Burtenshaw,K.C., and joined the Special Constabulary and the National Volunteers.
“What’s the next thing you’re going to take on?” asked Marcelle.
“First, my dear,” said he, “the whole running of this war. Then the administration of the Kingdom of God on Earth.”
“What a boy you are!” she laughed.
“A damned fine boy,” said Baltazar.
One fine Sunday in May she came up to town to lunch with him alone, Godfrey being away somewhere or other for the week-end.
“My dear,” he cried, excitedly, as soon as she arrived, “I’ve been dying to see you. It’s going to happen.”
“What?”
She smiled into his eager face. There was nothing so extravagant that it could not happen to Baltazar.
“There’s talk of a new Ministry—a Ministry of Propaganda.”
“Well?”
“Can’t you guess?”
Her eyes glistened suddenly.
“You—Minister?”
He nodded. “It’s all in the clouds at present. At least these whifflers of Cloud-Cuckoo-City think it is. But I don’t. They don’t see the Star of John Baltazar in the ascendant. I do. My dear, there’s not an adverse influence in all the bag of planetary tricks!”
If he could have seen and appreciated what was happening some forty miles off he might have observed in a certain conjunction of planets, to wit, Venus and Mars, something that would have modified his optimistic prognostication.
CHAPTER XIX
THEREthey were in a punt on one of the silent upper reaches of the Thames above Moulsford; Venus in white serge, with a blue veil around hat and throat, reclining gracefully on the cushions, and Mars in white flannels standing, punt-pole in hand. It was one of those days when Spring, in exuberant mood, throws off her shyness and masquerades in the gorgeousness of Summer. The noontide vapours quivered over the sun-baked meadow beyond the tow-path, and the shadows beneath the willows on the opposite bank loomed black and cool. The punt was proceeding up a patch of blazing river, and the drops from the pole sparkled like diamonds. Just ahead there was a bend lapped in the violent shade of overhanging elms.
“This is the nearest thing to Heaven,” said Lady Edna.
“Wait till we tie up under the trees and it’ll be Heaven itself,” said Godfrey.
Even in the boating times of peace this stretch was rarely frequented, being too far both for the London crowd whose general limit was Goring, and for the Oxford town excursionist who seldom pushed below Wallingford. Also thecognoscentideclared it an uninteresting bit of river, dull and flat, devoid of the unspeakable charm of Clevedon and Pangbourne, and therefore unworthy of especial consideration. Still, the River is the River. Talk to an Englishman of the River, and he will not think of the Severn or the Wye, or the historic highway between London Bridge and the sea, but of those few miles of England’s fairy-stream, the beloved haunts of beauty and gentleness and love and laughter, where all the cares of the world are soothed into dreamful ease and the vague passions and aspirations of youth are transformed into magical definition. To the Londoner, at any rate, it is as sacred as Westminster Abbey. So the stretches of loveliness pronounced dull by the superior, were never neglected, and even this remote section, on Sundays especially, had its sparse devotees. But now, in war-time, not a blade or oar or paddle, not a glistening punt-pole disturbed the sweet stillness of the waters. Only once, since they had left the boat-house, had a barge passed them; a barge gay as to its poop with yellow and red, a thin spiral of smoke from its cabin funnel proclaiming the cooking of the Sunday dinner, while the barge-folk lounged on deck, their eyes and attitudes suggestive of those who were already overfed on lotus, and one small, freckled sunwraith of a child flitted along the tow-path beside the mild old horse.
But half an hour had passed since then. The very meadows no longer showed the once familiar pairs of Sunday lovers. Were it not for the pleasant cows, it would have been a scene of lovely desolation.
“There,” said Godfrey, shipping the pole, and guiding the punt by the aid of the branches to a mooring. “Allow me to introduce you to Heaven.”
She kissed her hand to the greenery and the dark water and laughed lightly. “How d’ye do, Heaven?”
Godfrey turned from the rope which he had made fast and stumbled to the floor of the punt. She started up in alarm.
“Your foot, dear!”
He laughed. “It’s all right this time. Sometimes I forget it’s a fake.”
He sat beside her on the cushions and pointed to a basket in front of them. “Shall we start on the nectar and ambrosia, or is it too early?”
“Let us wait a bit and take in Heaven first. What on earth are you doing?” she asked, a moment afterwards, as he established himself elbows on knees and chin in hands, and stared close into her blue eyes.
“I’m taking in all the Heaven that matters to me,” said Godfrey.
“Do I matter so much?”
“You do.”
“Light me a cigarette,” said Lady Edna.
He obeyed, handed her one alight and she put it between her lips.
“I love doing that,” said he. “I’ve never done it for any other woman in my life.”
She arched her eyebrows. “Does his Sultanship think he’s conferring an unprecedented honour on a poor woman?”
“Oh, Edna!” His boyish face flushed suddenly. “You know what I mean. I never dreamed that a wonderful woman would ever dream of taking anything from my lips to hers. Look.” He lit another cigarette and held it out to her. “Let me have yours.”
“Baby!” she said, making the exchange.
All of which imbecility was very bad and sad and mad, but to the united youth in the punt it was peculiarly agreeable.
“What a difference from last week-end,” she said, contentedly, after a while.
“What happened then?”
“I had all the stuff-boxes in London down, Edgar included.”
“And my venerable sire. I remember. I was at the War Office all Sunday. And it poured with rain. What did you do with them?”
“I stroked them and fed them and put them through their little tricks,” she laughed. Then she added more seriously, “It happened to be a very important day for your father. The Government has gone crazy on finding out new forceful men—and clearing out the incompetent political hacks. Edgar’s just hanging on by the skin of his teeth, you know. Well, they’ve discovered your remarkable father, and last week-end they practically fixed it up with him. A new Ministry of Propaganda. Oh!” she laughed again. “I didn’t have such a bad time after all. But”—she sighed—“this is better. Don’t let us think of wars or politics or Edgars and such horrible things.” She threw her cigarette into the water, and bent down to the basket. “Let us lunch.”
It had been indeed an important day for Baltazar. The house near Moulsford, Lady Edna’s personal possession, a vast square, red-brick, late Georgian building, standing in grounds that reached down to the river, had been filled with anxiously chosen High and Mightinesses, among whom her husband, minister though he was, shone like an inferior satellite. It was the last move in the game on behalf of John Baltazar which she had played for many weeks.
“What are you asking that damned fellow for?” Edgar Donnithorpe had asked, looking at the list of guests.
“Because he amuses me.”
“He doesn’t amuse me,” snapped her husband.
He was a little thin man, with thin grey hair and a thin moustache and a thin voice. Up to a few months ago she had treated him with contemptuous tolerance. Now she had begun to dislike him exceedingly.
“If you don’t want to meet Mr. Baltazar,” she replied, “you can stay in London.”
They sparred in the unedifying manner of ill-assorted husband and wife.
“I’m sick of seeing this overbearing adventurer in my house,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. I’m not going to let you make a fool of yourself.”
“My dear man,” she replied cuttingly, “if I were looking out for a lover, this time I should take a young one.”
She laughed scornfully and swept away. Long smouldering resentment had been suddenly fanned into the flame of open hostility. She raged in her heart against him. Never before had he dared to insinuate such a taint in her political interest in any man. She, Lady Edna Donnithorpe, to carry on an intrigue with John Baltazar—the insult of it!
The next day brought a short but fierce encounter.
“You pretend to be jealous. You’re not. You’re envious. You’re envious of a bigger man than yourself. You’re afraid of him. You little minnows hate Tritons. I quite understand.”
In the wrath of a weak and foolish man he sputtered unforgettable words which no woman ever forgives. She faced him with lips as thin as his own, and her languorous eyes hardened into little dots of jade.
“You had better see to it that I don’t break you,” she said.
“Break me? How? Politically?” He laughed a thin laugh of derision. “In the first place you couldn’t. In the second you wouldn’t. What would become of your position if I were out of the Government?”
“I can very well look after myself,” she replied.
On Saturday morning he made some apology for loss of temper which she coldly accepted on condition of his courteous treatment of John Baltazar. And so it fell that, when the subject of all this to-do arrived at Moulsford, he found himself almost effusively welcomed by the negative Edgar, and thrust into the inner circle of the High and Mightinesses assembled. As the latter took Baltazar very seriously as a coming power in the country, and as Lady Edna’s attitude towards him was marked by no especial characteristic, Edgar Donnithorpe came to the unhappy conclusion that he had made a fool of himself, and during the informal discussion on the creation of the new Ministry, for which purpose the week-end party had gathered together, he had dared do little more than “just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike” when Baltazar’s name was mentioned. Which pusillanimity coming to his wife’s ears, deepened her resentment against him; and only Baltazar’s triumphal exit on the Monday morning restrained her from giving it practical expression. Sufficient for the day was the success thereof.
In the lazy punt, that gracious Spring morning, she strove to drive the last week-end from her thoughts. She revelled in the unusual and the audacious. Edgar had gone to Paris on an international conference. Only an ancient and faded Aunt, Lady Lætitia Vardon, a sort of permanent aristocratic caretaker, was in the house; Godfrey the sole guest. And Aunt Lætitia had caught a God-sent cold and was staying in bed. They two had the whole bright day before them, and the scented evening, with never a soul to obtrude on their idyllic communion. She had always snapped her fingers at convention. But, Lady Edna Donnithorpe, chartered libertine, had always observed the terms of her charter, her heart never having tempted her to break them. This delicious breach was a different matter altogether. She had even dared to put off two or three previously invited friends. . . .
She told him this while he helped her to chicken and ham. He proclaimed her the most wonderful thing in the world.
“Don’t you think I deserve one little day’s holiday in the year? Just a holiday from the talk, talk, talk, the smiling, the wheedling, the scheming, with my brain ever on the alert and seeming to grow bigger and bigger as the night goes on, until it almost bursts my head when I lie down to sleep?”
“Why do you do it?” he asked.
She shrugged her graceful shoulders. “I don’t know. I used to love it. Now I’m beginning to hate it. I was at a wedding a day or two ago—Charlie Haughton and Minnie Lavering—you know whom I mean, don’t you? They haven’t a sixpence between them—and they looked so happy—oh! so damned happy”—her voice broke adorably—“that I nearly wept.”
He neglected his own plateful of chicken and ham and bent forward over the basket between them.
“I’d do anything in the wide world to make you happy, Edna.”
“I know you would,” she smiled. “You’re doing your best now. It’s an excellent best. But it might be better if you fished out the salt.”
While she helped herself daintily from the paper packet which he held out, he laughed, adoring her ever ready trick of switching off the sentimental current.
“Now you are really just a little bit happy, aren’t you?”
She nodded intimately, which emboldened him to say:
“For the life of me I can’t see what induced you to take up with a rotten sort of cripple like me.”
“Neither can I,” she replied composedly. “Except perhaps that the rotten cripple is a very brave and distinguished soldier.”
“Rubbish!” said Godfrey. “There are hundreds of thousands like me all over the place, as indistinguishable from one another as peas in a peck.”
“Won’t you allow a poor woman just a nice sense of discrimination?”
“I’ll allow the one woman in the universe,” said Godfrey, “to have everything she pleases.”
“Then that’s that,” said Lady Edna.
They finished their meal happily, drank hot coffee from a thermos flask and smoked and talked. As on the first day he had sat beside her, so now, under the spell of her keen sympathy, he told her of all his doings. For the past two or three months they had been of absorbing interest. He had besieged the War Office, as he had gloriously threatened, until one day he received an appointment on the staff of the Director-General of Military Operations. That it was due to any other influence than his own furious and persistent attacks, he had not the remotest suspicion. He had dashed away from the amazing interview in a taxi to Lady Edna, whom by good chance he found at home, and vaunted his generalship. His father’s blood sang in his veins. The lady to whom, in close conspiracy with Lady Northby, he owed the billet coveted by thousands of men, wounded and whole, welcomed his news with the smiling surprise of a mother who listens to her offspring’s tale of the wondrous gifts of Santa Claus.
It was one of the characteristics of Lady Edna Donnithorpe to love the secret meed of secret services, a far more subtle joy than the facile gratitude poured on a Lady Bountiful. Besides, such a reputation would in itself destroy her power. Many women of her acquaintance who had enjoyed it for a brief season during the war, had seen the sacred shoulders of Authority turned frozenly upon them. She was not one of those women acting from thoughtless impulse or vanity. The game of intrigue fascinated her; she knew her winnings and hoarded them; but they were the concern of no one in the wide world. Perhaps the time might come when she could say to Godfrey: “All that you are you owe to me. I have made you, and I have made your father. I can show you proofs. What are you going to do?” Blackmail of a kind, certainly. A woman driven up against a wall is justified in using any weapons of defence. But all this lay hidden in the self-protective instinct. No thought of it marred her triumph.
She listened to his fairy-tales of the Allies’ war organization with a twofold pride. First, in this vicarious entrance into the jealously guarded Ark of the Covenant, whereby she gained exact knowledge of mighty happenings to come, denied even to the self-important Edgar. Secondly, in her unerring judgment of men. For Baltazar had told her a week before of his meeting with one of Godfrey’s chiefs, who had given the boy unreserved praise. Whereupon she herself had made it her week’s business to track the social doings of the great man until she ran him down a day or two ago at a friend’s house, and, in reply to her tactful questionings, he had replied:
“Baltazar? Lots of brains. A brilliant fellow, with wonderful power of detail. Son of that astonishing chap John Baltazar, who has just come to life again, and everybody’s talking about. Oh, you needn’t be afraid. We have spotted him right enough.”
She was sufficiently versed in affairs to know that a major-general does not speak of a third-grade staff officer, and at the very tail of the grade at that, in eulogistic terms, even to Lady Edna Donnithorpe, without good reason. She hugged the word “brilliant” to her heart.
And while Godfrey talked that May afternoon, she felt that she was justified in all that she had done, was doing, and was going to do. Yet, though what she had done gave her perfect satisfaction, and what she was doing was blatantly obvious, what she was going to do lay dimly hidden behind a rosy veil. For the moment this handsome, clean run boy to whom she had given her heart, much to her own amazement, was contented with platonic adoration in a punt. How long, she wondered, would his contentment last? How long, indeed, would her own? Well, well,Vogue la galère. Pole the spring-tide punt. Let her drain to its full the unprecedented glory of the day.
The cares of her crowded, youth-consuming life fell from her, and she became young again, younger than she had been before her loveless marriage. As she responded laughing to his eager, boyish foolishness, she felt that she had never known till then what it was to be young. She felt an infinite craving for all she had missed. . . . And Godfrey, standing there in careless grace, punt-pole in hand, alert, confident, radiant in promise, was the incarnation of it all: of all the youth and laughter and love that she had passed by, scornfully unheeding. She feasted her hungry eyes on him. Not only was he good to look at, in his physical perfection. He was good to think upon. He had faced death a thousand times, no doubt as debonairly as he faced the current of the mild river. He, that boy whom a whisper could compel to her bidding, had led men through mazes of unimagined blood and slaughter. If he had one worm gnawing at his heart, it was the desire to get back again to this defiant comradeship with death. She had looked up the record of the achievement that had won for him the Military Cross. What a man he was! And as she watched him, there floated across her vision the figure of a thin, dry, self-seeking politician, and she shivered in the sunshine. And, as there chanced to be a pause in the boyish talk, she let her thoughts wander on. No one had ever called her thin, dry husband a brilliant man, not even the most sycophantic place hunter who had intrigued for a seat at her table. But in such terms had the first Authority to whom she had spoken characterized Godfrey. Not only was he the ordinary heroic young officer; he was a brilliant man, who would make his mark as part of the brain that controlled the destinies of the British Army. And all the sex in her humbled itself deliciously in the knowledge that this paragon of all Bayards, or this Bayard of all paragons, loved her with all his youth and manhood.
Presently she noticed a change in his happy face. A spasm of pain seemed to pass across it. He drew out the pole, stood with it poised. He drove it in again, his jaws set in an ugly way. She waited till the end of the stroke; then she rose to her feet.
“Stop, dear, stop. You’re overdoing it.”
“Overdoing what?”
“Your foot.”
“Nonsense! Do sit down.”
He gathered up the dripping pole preparatory for the thrust; but she caught his arm.
“I’m sure your foot’s hurting you.”
“It isn’t,” he declared, bending his weight on it. “Not a little bit.”
But even as he spoke he made an unconscious grimace.
“Do you love me?”
He drew a sharp breath at the categorical question. In a thousand indirect ways he had told her of his devotion; but he had never spoken the explicit words. He said quietly and half wonderingly:
“You know I love you.”
“Then don’t hurt me by hurting yourself.”
“Do you really care what happens to me?” he asked.
“I love you better than anything in the world,” she said.
They paddled home somewhat sobered by the mutual declaration, about which they said nothing more. He admitted overstrain of the still sensitive tissues of the base of the stump, and railed at his misfortune. It was so humiliating to confess defeat. She smiled. There might, she said, be compensation. When they landed, she insisted on his leaning on her for support, during the walk up to the house, and, although he suffered damnable torture whenever he set the artificial foot on the ground, for his pressure on her adorable shoulder was of the slightest, his progress was one of deliciously compensating joy.
They dined decorously under the inscrutable eyes of butler and parlourmaid, and after dinner they called for coat and wrap and went out to sit on the moonlit terrace. As he put the fur-lined cloak round her, his hand touched her cheek. She put up a hand caressingly and held his there while she looked up at him in the dimness. He bent down, greatly daring, and touched her lips. Then suddenly she clasped his head and held his kiss long and passionately.
CHAPTER XX
THEYarranged it all between them in the comfortingly short-sighted way of thousands of reprehensible couples before them. They spoke vaguely of a divorce as though the wretched Edgar were the conjugal offender, and pictured a time in the future, after the war, when they should marry and live the bright and perfect life. In the meanwhile they proposed to find much happiness and consolation together. He gave her, she declared, what she had vainly been hungering for since early childhood—love and sympathy and understanding. Into his sensitive ears she poured the story of her disastrous marriage; of the far separated lives of her husband and herself; of his envies and trivial basenesses. Godfrey had thought her courted and flattered, a woman passing rich in love and friendship. Really she had moved the loneliest thing on earth. Didn’t he see now what he meant to her? She had been starving and he gave her food. If he withdrew it now, she would die.
This self-abasement from high estate established her martyrdom in the eyes of chivalrous youth. He swore eternal devotion, his soul registering the vow. They wrote frequently to each other, and met as often as they could. Three mornings a week, at an astonishingly early hour, she left her house soberly clad, for the purpose of working at a mythical canteen. On those mornings Godfrey waited for her at a discreet distance round the corner of the square, in a two-seater car for which, as a crippled staff officer, he had contrived to obtain a petrol permit. An hour’s run—Richmond Park, Barnes Common: it mattered little where—and Lady Edna went demurely home to breakfast and Godfrey to his day’s work at the War Office.
Of the canteen Edgar Donnithorpe knew nothing, for she had merely tossed the invention to her maid, until one morning, coming down earlier than usual, he met her ascending the stairs.
“Good lord!” said he. “What have you been doing at this unearthly hour?”
Irritated at having to lie to him, she replied: “I’ve been doing an hour’s shift at a canteen. Have you any objection?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Why should I? If it pleases you and doesn’t hurt the Tommies—poor devils.”
His sneer jarred on her guilty sensitiveness. Her eyes hardened. “Why poor devils?”
“Like the rest of the country,” he replied, “at the mercy of the amateur.”
He turned with his thin laugh and left her speechless with futile anger. She wondered how she had ever regarded him otherwise than with unmitigated hatred.
She told the incident to Godfrey, having reached the point of confiding to him such domestic bickerings. He set his teeth and damned the fellow. How could this incomparable angel dwell in the same house with him? She sighed. If it were not for the war. . . . But during the war the house was the centre of her manifold activities on behalf of the country. As for the social side of it, she would throw that up to-morrow only too gladly. Heavens, how weary she was of it all!
“I wish to God I could take you away with me!” said the young man fiercely.
“I wish you could, dear,” she said in her caressing tone. “But in the meantime we have these happy little hours. We mustn’t ask too much of fate.”
“I only ask what fate gives to any man—that bus driver and that policeman—the woman he loves.”
“I’m afraid,” she laughed, “if you heard the history of theirvie amoureuse, you would be dreadfully disillusioned. It seems to me that everybody marries the wrong person in this muddle-pairing world. We must make the best of it.”
At this period, infatuated though she was, she had no idea of breaking away from convention, even to the extent of setting up a household separate from her husband’s. Social life was dear to her, for all her asseverations to the contrary, and dearer still the influence that she could command. Yet, as the days went on she noticed signs of restiveness in Godfrey. An hour thrice a week in an open car, when half his attention had to be devoted to the preservation of their own and other people’s lives, scarcely satisfied his young ardour. The times when he could lounge free in her boudoir from four to six were over. As an officer on the staff of the Director-General of Operations, he knew no hours. The intricate arrangements for the mobility of the British Army did not depend on the convenience of young gentlemen at the War Office. Such had to scorn delight and live laborious days, which on the occasions of especial military activity were apt to run into the nights. Now and then, of course, Godfrey could assure himself an hour or so for lunch, but never could he foretell it on the day before. Only once, by hasty telephoning, did they manage to meet for lunch at the Carlton. In the evenings they were a little more successful. Now and again a theatre together. But Godfrey, suddenly become sensitive on the point of honour, refused opportunities of dining at Belgrave Square.
“If I love a man’s wife, I can’t sit at his table and drink his wine and smile at him,” he proclaimed bluntly.
“It seems,” she said, at last, “there’s nothing left but for me to run away with you.”
“Why not?” he asked, laughing, for her tone was light.
“What about the British Army?”
He reflected. If she had said what about morality, or Christianity, or his immortal soul, he would have damned any item of them off-hand. But he couldn’t damn the British Army. He temporized.
“I don’t quite see.”
“If you ran away with me, you’d have to run an awful long way, and leave the Army in the lurch.”
“That would never do,” said Godfrey.
“So we’ll have to sacrifice ourselves for our country till the war’s over,” said Lady Edna.
Then, in spite of philosophic and patriotic resolve, the relations between them grew to be uncertain and dangerous. Aware of this, she sought to play rather the part of Egeria than that of the unhappy wife claiming consolation from her lover.
Now about this time arose rumours of political dissatisfaction in certain quarters; of differences of opinion between the civil and the military high authorities. Wild gossip animated political circles, and the wilder it became, the more it was fostered, here malignantly, then honestly, by political factions opposed to the Government or to the conjectured strategical conduct of the war. Lady Edna Donnithorpe, in the thick of everything that darkened counsel, found the situation obscure. What were the real facts from the military point of view? She discussed matters with Godfrey, who, regarding her as his second self, the purest well of discretion, told her artlessly what he knew. As a matter of fact, she loyally kept her inner information to herself; but her eyes were opened to vast schemes of which the little political folk about her were ignorant. And one of the most ignorant and most blatantly cocksure about everything was Edgar Donnithorpe, her husband, whose attitude, in view of her knowledge, began to fill her with vague disquietude.
To all this political unrest, Baltazar was loftily indifferent.
“The scum of the world’s hell-broth,” said he. “Skim it off and chuck it away, and let us get on with the cooking.”
He was cooking with all his might, preparing the ingredients of the contemplated new Ministry. Everything must be organized before the final step was token. No fiasco like the jerry-built Ministry of National Service should be possible. Brains, policy, a far-spread scheme complete in detail first; then the building and the simple machinery of clerks and typists. He worked from morning to night, as indeed he had done all his life long.The Universal Reviewsped full-sail on a course of fantastic prosperity. The man had the touch of genius that makes success. He spared himself neither mentally nor physically. He found time for enthusiastic work with the National Volunteers and the Special Constabulary, which formerly he had scorned. As a Special Constable he quickly gained promotion, of which he was inordinately proud. Said Marcelle:
“I believe that running about in an air raid is the greatest joy of your life.”
To which, in his honest egotistical way, he replied:
“I’m not quite so sure that it isn’t.”
And Godfrey to Marcelle, discussing him:
“The dear old dynamo has hitched himself on to the war with a vengeance!”
He had. It absorbed him from the moment of waking to the moment of falling asleep. Since Godfrey’s appointment at the War Office, father and son, living in the same house, met so seldom that they grew each to set an exaggerated value on the other. The boy, conscious not only himself of the force of the man, but of the tribute paid to it by the gods and demi-gods of the land, withdrew his original suspicious antagonism and surrendered loyally.
“I’m proud of him. My God, I am!” he said to Marcelle. “My childish faith is justified. I take back all I’ve said this last year. He’s a marvel, and I’m glad I’m his son.”
He saw perhaps, at this stage, more of Marcelle than of Edna. For Marcelle, shortly after her lunch with Baltazar on the day of Godfrey’s river idyll, had broken down in health and left Churton Towers. The strain of three years’ incessant work had ended in collapse. She was ordered three months’ rest. After a weary fortnight alone in the Cornish country, she had come to London, in spite of medical advice, and shared the Bayswater flat of a friend, a working woman, engaged at the Admiralty. Chance, perhaps a little bit of design, for the motives that determine a woman’s decision are often sadly confused; had thus brought her within easy walking distance of Sussex Gardens and of what the strange man to whose fortunes destiny seemed to link her, and whom uncontrollable fears and forces restrained her from marrying, loved to call the House of Baltazar. Of course, in his headstrong way, he had vehemently put the house at her disposal. He would fix up a suite of apartments for her where she could live, her own mistress, just as she chose. Godfrey, Quong Ho and servants could go to the devil. They could pig it anywhere about the house they liked. They would all agree on the paramount question of her comfort and happiness.
“In God’s name, why not?” he cried with a large gesture. “What are you afraid of? Me? Mrs. Grundy? What?”
But Marcelle shook her head, smiling and stubborn, and would have none of it. As a concession she agreed to run round whenever she heard through the telephone that she was wanted. Baltazar grinned and foretold a life of peripatetic discomfort.
“I’ll risk that,” she said.
Thus it happened that Marcelle was in and out of the house at all seasons, Godfrey clamouring for her as much as his father. Under vow of secrecy he confided to her his love affair. At first she professed deep disapprobation. He should remember her first suspicions and grave warnings. A married woman! No good could come of such an entanglement, no matter how guiltless and romantic. As delicately as he could he reminded her that she herself had cherished a romantic attachment to a married man. She had, further, avowed her readiness to run off with him. Edna and he were no whit worse than the impeccable Marcelle and his revered father. Whereupon, doting rather foolishly on the young man, she yielded, listened to the varied developments of his adventure, and gave sympathy or moral advice, according to the exigencies of the occasion.
Her position of confidante, however, caused her many qualms of conscience. Her common sense told her that he was treading the path to an all too commonplace bonfire. The woman was some years older than he. Marcelle admitted her beauty and superficial charm; but her feminine instinct pounced on insincerities, affectations and hardnesses undreamed of by the guileless worshipper. She divined, to her great dismay, a sudden sex upheaval in this young and self-thwarted woman rather than a pure passion of love. What ought she to do? The question kept her awake of nights. She could not, without breaking the most solemn specific promise, ask counsel of Baltazar. Nor could she refuse to listen further to the boy. He would go his own way and leave her in the misery of incertitude. To go pleading to Lady Edna, like the heavy mother in a French play, was unimaginable. What then remained for her but to continue to receive his confidences? And even then, if she met them with copybook maxims, he would turn on her with his originaltu quoque, and, if she persisted, it would be equivalent to the withdrawal of her sympathetic attention. The only course, therefore, that remained open was to let things go on as they were, and, as far as it lay in her power, to keep his feet from pitfalls. His strange mixture, precipitated by the war, of child and man, appealed to all the woman within her. In his dealings with men—she saw him with pride at his father’s table—he had the air and the experience of five-and-thirty. In dealing with women, even with her own motherly self, he was the romantic, unsophisticated boy of eighteen. His real age now was twenty-one. And at the back of her clean mind lay the conviction that Lady Edna, however indiscreet she might be, could not make the complete and criminal fool of herself.
This conviction deepened when she had an opportunity of seeing them again together, at a little dinner party of six to which Baltazar had invited Lady Edna and the Jackmans. Between them it was “Godfrey” and “Edna” frank and undisguised. Their friendship was obvious; obvious, too, her charming assumption of proprietorship. But she carried it off with the air of a beautiful woman accustomed to such domination over the men she admitted to her intimacy. Beyond this, Marcelle could espy nothing; not a soft word, not a covert glance that betrayed a deeper sentiment. It is all play to her, she concluded, and grew happier in her mind.
Toward the end of the evening after the Jackmans had gone, Lady Edna said lightly to Baltazar:
“This boy has told me all sorts of wonderful things about his den here, and I’ve never seen it.”
Baltazar waved one hand and put the other on Godfrey’s shoulder.
“He shall do the honours.”
“Would you really like to see it?” Godfrey asked innocently.
“Of course I should. Your souvenirs——”
Baltazar beamed on them till they left the drawing-room.
“It’s the best day’s work I ever did for Godfrey,” said he.
“What?”
“Getting him in with Lady Edna. A young fellow wants a clever woman to shepherd him. Does him no end of good. Broadens his mind.”
“Mayn’t it be a bit dangerous?” Marcelle hazarded.
“Dangerous? Suppose he does think himself in love with her? All the better. Keeps him out of mischief.”
“But she might possibly fall in love with him too.”
Wise in the hermit’s theoretic wisdom, he dismissed such an absurdity with a scornful laugh.
“That type of woman can’t fall in love. She’s of the earth earthly, of the world worldly. Otherwise she couldn’t have married that rat of a Donnithorpe.”
“I suppose it’s all right,” said Marcelle.
“You belovedest mid-Victorian survival!” he laughed. “I do believe the young woman’s proposal shocked you!”
They both would have been, if not shocked, at least brought to a sense of actual things, had they seen the transports to which the lovers surrendered themselves as soon as the door of the den closed behind them. Many hundreds of millions of youthful pairs have done exactly the same after long separation. She threw herself into his arms, in which he enfolded her. They kissed and sighed. They had thought they would never be alone again. He had been thirsting for her lips all the tantalizing evening. That wonderful brain of hers—to suggest this visit to his room. Even if the idea had occurred to his dull masculine mind, he wouldn’t have had the daring to tender the invitation. Her ever new adorableness! And more kisses and raptures, until, side by side in the corner of the couch, they began to talk of rational matters.
“There are great things brewing,” she said, after a while. “Just a whisper has reached me—enough to make it dangerous.”
“What things do you refer to?” he asked, with a quick knitting of the brow.
She told him of a wild distortion of the plans of the High Command current in political dining-rooms.
“It’s damnable!” he cried angrily. “One tiny grain of fact to a mountain of imagination. For God’s sake, make it your business to go about crabbing the lie for all you’re worth!”
“I will. When you reallyknow, you can speak with such moral authority that you’re believed, although you don’t give away a bit of your knowledge. At least, anyone with a little experience can do it.”
“And you’re an adept,” he said admiringly.
She drew him nearer, for he had started away on his proclamation of the damnability of rumours.
“What is the grain of fact?”
“Why, the great scale offensive.”
“And where’s the rest of the rumour incorrect?”
“I don’t think I ought to tell you.”
“But don’t you see how important it is that a woman in my position, and a woman of my character, should know exactly? Half the calamities of the war are due to women giving away half secrets of which they’re not allowed to realize the consequences. Give a woman full confidence, and she’ll be on the side of the angels.”
He kissed her and laughed. Was she not one of the angelic band herself?
She pleaded subtly, her head on his shoulder, her deep-blue eyes looking up into his, her breath on his cheek. Surely he and she were one. One heart, one mind, one soul. Individually each was the other’s complement. He could work out vast schemes—the most junior of Third Grade Staff Officers glowed at the flattery—and she could see, not that they were put into execution, but that wicked and irresponsible gossip should not bring them to naught. In her woman’s wheedling she had no ulterior purpose in view. She was not the political adventuress unscrupulously seducing enamoured youth to the betrayal of his country. It was all insatiable curiosity and lust for secret power. And, as far as lay in her nature, she loved the boy; she loved him with a sense of possession; she craved him wholly, his devotion, his mind, his knowledge. His physical self was hers, at a moment’s call. She played with that certainty in delicious trepidation. It invested their relationship in a glamour unknown, mysterious, in spite of her married estate. But the long-atrophied romantic in her sprang to sudden life and prevailed.
So subtly did she plead that he was unaware of her overmastering desire. Secure in her love and her loyalty, and confident in the twin hearts and souls, he told her what he knew; but the numerical and topographical details, proving too confusing for her, he laughed and went over to his desk and, with her sitting over him on the arm of his writing-chair, sketched a map annotated with facts and figures on a sheet of notepaper. When he had done, she returned to the sofa and read the notes.
“Now I understand everything. It’s tremendously exciting, isn’t it?”
“If it comes off.”
She folded up the paper and put it in her bosom.
“Of course it’ll come off.”
“I say, sweetheart,” he cried, watching the disappearing paper. “For Heaven’s sake don’t go leaving that about! Better stick it in the fire.”
“I’ll do it as soon as I get home.”
She took his hand in delightful intimacy and glanced at his wrist watch. Then she started up. They must get back at once, lest the others should subject their absence to undesirable conjecture.
“Oh, the elderly birds”—he laughed gracelessly—“they love to have a little billing and cooing now and then. They’ll be grateful to us.”
But she would not be detained. They went up to the drawing-room.
“He has got a perfect Hun museum downstairs,” she said. “Each piece with a breathless history.”
“What interested you most?” asked Marcelle.
“Me in a gas mask,” said Godfrey, lying readily, for never a glance had Lady Edna given to the trophies and spoils which she had set forth to see.
Later, after putting her into her taxi, he said through the window:
“You’ll destroy that scrap of paper, won’t you?”
“If you doubt me, I’ll give it you back now,” she replied rather sharply, thrusting her hand beneath her cloak.
What could ardent lover do but repudiate the charge of want of faith? She laughed, and answered in her most caressing tones:
“I’m glad, for where it is now it would be awfully awkward to get at.”
The taxi drove off. Godfrey re-entered the house, his young head full of the thought of the paper on which he had written lying warm, deep down, in her bare and sacred bosom.
Lady Edna drove home to her solitary house, and, without asking whether her husband was in or out, went straight to her bedroom. As soon as she could she dismissed her maid and sat in her dressing-gown for a long, long time, thinking as a woman thinks, when for the first time in her life she is not sure of herself, when she is all but at the parting of the ways and when each way seems to lead to catastrophe. As a cold, ambitious girl she had sent the Natural packing; now it had come galloping back. At last she rose and went to her dressing-table. On it lay the crumpled scrap of paper. She glanced at it. The figures and lines conveyed no meaning to her tired brain. What was the warfare in the world to the warfare in her soul? She couldn’t concern herself with the higher strategy to-night. To-morrow, when she was fresh, she would tackle the intricate scheme. She put the paper into a little secret drawer of her writing-table of which even her maid did not know the spring.