CHAPTER XXIII
YOUseem to have managed your little affair rather clumsily,” said Baltazar.
“What’s he doing here?” she asked wildly.
“Probably catching you and Godfrey.”
“He mustn’t see Godfrey here.”
“That’s easily managed,” said Baltazar. “I’ll send him flying out of the telephone box. But what on earth could have put your husband on the track? What indiscretion have you been committing?”
“I left a letter for him telling him I wouldn’t stay any longer in his house. He’s a traitor to his country.”
Baltazar threw up his hands. “Oh, Lord! The usual idiocy. For a clever woman—well! Anyhow, I’ll head off Godfrey. When your husband spots you, use your brains. Don’t say a word to give yourself away.”
“You’ll come back?” she cried, losing her head.
“I’ll see,” said he.
He left her, and fetched a compass round the station, mingling as much as possible with the never-ceasing throng of soldiers and civilians and women and luggage, until he arrived at the row of telephone boxes. There he found Godfrey, waiting his turn and fuming at the delay.
“My boy,” said he, “here are all the elements of a first-class farce. The injured husband, Edgar Donnithorpe, has turned up. You had better make tracks as quick as you can.”
“I suppose you gave him the hint,” snarled the young man, with set teeth.
“You’re insulting your own blood to make such a damfool remark,” said Baltazar. “Go home, and stay there till I come.”
Godfrey met the infernal eyes and, for all his anger and humiliation, knew that he had accused basely.
“I apologize, sir,” said he, in his most haughty and military manner, and marched off.
Baltazar hesitated. Should he or should he not return to Lady Edna? If he had escaped the eye of Edgar Donnithorpe, it were better to leave Lady Edna, injured innocent, to tell her tale of solitary retirement to sylvan depths where she could be remote from the consequences of his political turpitude. On the other hand, if he had been observed, or if Lady Edna had avowed his presence, his abandonment of her might be idiotically interpreted. He decided to return.
He saw them at once through the moving traffic: the husband, his back towards him, gripping a handle of the truck on which the luggage was piled; the wife facing him, an ironical smile on her lips. A devilish handsome woman, thought Baltazar. The boy had taste. There she stood, slim, distinguished in her simple fawn coat and skirt and little hat to match, beneath which waved her dark brown hair, very cool, aristocratic and defiant. Baltazar came up to them.
“Ah, Donnithorpe!”
The thin, grey man wheeled round, and then Baltazar realized that he had made the wrong decision, for he was the last man the other expected to see.
“You? What are you doing here?” he shouted.
“Hush!” said Lady Edna, with a touch on his arm. “You’re not at home or in the House of Commons. You’re in a public place, and you’ll get a crowd round us in no time. Let us pretend we’re a merry party going on a holiday.”
Edgar Donnithorpe threw an anxious glance round to see if they had attracted undesired attention. But people passed them by or stood in knots near them, unheeding, intent on their own affairs.
“I ask you,” he said in a low voice, “what you are doing at this railway station with my wife?”
Baltazar, his felt hat at the back of his head and his hands thrust into his trousers’ pockets beneath the skirts of his buttoned-up, double-breasted jacket, eyed him in exasperating amusement.
“I am seeing Lady Edna off on a railway journey. Was it necessary to ask your permission?”
Lady Edna laughed mockingly. “As far as I can make out, my husband expected to find me eloping with your son Godfrey.”
Donnithorpe shifted his eyes from one to the other, looking at them evilly.
“He was with you for nearly a couple of hours to-day. I had my own very good reasons for suspicion. I went round to your house, Mr. Baltazar, and asked for your son. I saw your Chinese secretary——” He caught Baltazar’s involuntary sudden frown and angry flush. “In justice,” he continued in his thin, sneering manner, “I must absolve him from indiscretion. He knows my position in the Government, and when I informed him that it was imperative I should see your son on important political business, he told me I should find him at Waterloo station.”
“You overreached yourself,” said Baltazar with a bantering grin. “Godfrey knows no more about politics than a tom-cat. Quong Ho naturally thought you meant me. You came. Here I am, seeing your wife off. She telephoned me that she was leaving your house—going to stay with friends—wanted a man of the world’s advice on the serious step she was taking—woman-like, of course, she took the step first, and asked for advice afterwards—and I naturally put myself at her ladyship’s disposal. Don’t you think you had better let Lady Edna get on with her journey? Here’s her porter. Come with me and see her safe into her carriage.”
He was enjoying himself amazingly. Donnithorpe, baffled, tugged at his thin grey moustache. The porter came up, touching his cap.
“Time’s getting on, ma’am. I’ve reserved the two seats——”
“One seat,” said Lady Edna swiftly.
“Beg your pardon, ma’am. I thought you said the gentleman was going with you.”
“One seat. I said I was meeting a gentleman.”
The porter wheeled off the luggage. Lady Edna turned to follow, but her husband gripped her viciously by the wrist.
“Not yet.”
“Drop that,” growled Baltazar.
Donnithorpe released her, plunged his hand into his breast pocket and drew out a couple of sheets of paper.
“You did say two seats. You meant to go off with him. There’s some damned trickery about it. But I’ve got the whip hand, my lady. Just look at this before you go.”
Lady Edna turned ghastly white and clutched Baltazar’s arm to steady herself from the sickening shock. In the desperate rush, after Godfrey’s departure, the scheming, the packing, the telephoning, the temporary straightening of affairs, the chase over London for the complaisant friend whose connivance was essential, the eagerness to get free of the house before her husband should return, she had forgotten the scrap of paper in her secret drawer, with its obsolete information. Now the horror flashed on her. Her husband had gone to the drawer before. Hence the article in Fordyce’s paper. Her first instinct had been right. He had gone to the drawer again. Her swaying brain wondered how he had discovered the secret of the spring. But he had found the paper which in her folly she had not destroyed—and what else besides? She heard, as in a dream, her husband saying:
“If he isn’t your lover, what about these? Here’s proof. Here’s a matter of court-martial and gaol.”
She regained her self-control with a great effort, still holding to Baltazar. “You hound!” she whispered.
Baltazar, smitten with the realization that comedy had vanished—the comedy in which he had played so debonair and masterly a part—vanished in the flash of a cinematographic film, and that something very near tragedy was staring him in the face, stretched out his hand for the papers.
“Let me see.”
But Donnithorpe smiled his thin, derisive smile. “No. They’re too precious. I’ll hold them for you to look at. Keep away.”
And there, in the airless glass-roofed railway station, on that hot summer afternoon, in the midst of the reverberating noises of trains letting off steam, of a thousand human voices, of scurrying feet, of grating luggage trunks, in the midst of a small town’s moving and lounging population, surging now, at that hour’s height of the suburban traffic with home-going streams; there, with hundreds of eyes to watch them, hundreds of ears to hear them, hundreds of successive ears of people darting bee-like around the busy bookstall not ten yards away, there three quietly talking human beings stood at grips with destiny.
“This is written on your notepaper. It is a War Office secret. It reveals the whole strategy of the High Command.”
Baltazar’s lips grew grim and his eyes bent on the little man burned like fires. In Donnithorpe’s hands the document was Godfrey’s death warrant.
Then Baltazar remembered the shock he had received in Sheepshanks’s room at Cambridge when first he saw a letter of Godfrey’s, and Godfrey’s after explanation of the identity of their handwriting.
“Don’t you see? It gives the whole thing away,” Donnithorpe continued.
“I’m quite aware of it,” said Baltazar. “I drew it up for your wife.”
“You?” exclaimed Donnithorpe in incredulous amazement, while Lady Edna caught a sharp breath and clung more fiercely to Baltazar’s arm. “Where did you get your information from?”
“I am to be Minister of the new department in a day or two,” said Baltazar, “and I’m in the inner confidence of the War Cabinet.”
“But it’s in your son’s handwriting!”
“It’s my handwriting,” said Baltazar calmly.
He drew from his pocket a sheaf of notes for a speech and handed them to Donnithorpe. “Compare, if you like.”
Donnithorpe returned them with a curious thin snarl and held out the other paper.
“Then you wrote this too?”
Baltazar glanced at it. It was the first sheet of a letter from which the other sheet had been torn. Lady Edna saw it and again swayed, half fainting with sickening humiliation. The only one of Godfrey’s letters—and only part of one—which she had kept: two pages breathing such a passionate love as she had never dreamed that a man in real life could express to woman. She had forgotten that she had left that, too, in the secret drawer. She stared haggardly into Baltazar s face. His lips twisted into a smile.
“Yes. I wrote that too,” said he.
“Then you’re a damned villain!” cried Donnithorpe.
“Very possibly,” said Baltazar.
Donnithorpe turned in his rat-like way to his wife.
“What have you to say about it?”
Suddenly recovered from her fit of terror and shame, she withdrew her grip from Baltazar’s arm and held herself up with the scornful poise of her head.
“Nothing,” she said. “You can flatter yourself now you know everything.”
He did not heed her words, but once more looked from one to the other with a thin, chuckling laugh.
“You’re a pretty pair. You, my lady. And you, Mr. Minister of Publicity. It strikes me you’ll have to postpone your elopement.”
“You’ve got elopement on the brain, my good fellow,” said Baltazar. “A Minister of Publicity doesn’t elope with a lady with nothing but what he stands up in. Where’s my luggage?”
“There,” replied Donnithorpe, pointing to the barriers to the platform. “Didn’t the porter say she had ordered two seats—one for a gentleman?”
“This is getting wearisome,” said Lady Edna. “I’ve already told you how the mistake arose.”
The solicitous porter, already rewarded with five shillings, and belonging to a race as richly endowed with human failings as any other in the world, hurried up.
“I’ve found a corner seat, ma’am. Put everything into the carriage. You’ve not much time left.”
Suddenly she became aware of the awful desolation that awaited her in the remote cottage in the New Forest with one horrible old servant woman for company. Within her feminine unreason clamoured. No, no! She revolted against the grotesque absurdity of such comfortless living burial. She would go mad, cut off from every opportunity of hearing instant developments of this nerve-racking situation. She couldn’t stick it.
“I’ve changed my mind, porter. I’m not going. Get my things out and bring them back.”
“Certainly, ma’am.”
The porter ran off. Baltazar thrust his hands again into his trousers’ pockets. His face was a grim mask.
“Why don’t you get your luggage out too?” sneered Donnithorpe.
“Don’t be a brainless fool,” said Baltazar.
The fingers in his pockets twitched, and Lady Edna caught a malevolent flash in his eyes that made her shiver. He would have liked to wring her neck. Why the devil didn’t she play the game and go to the cottage and the old woman? He read her through and through. And mingled with his contempt ran a thrill of gladness. Godfrey was well rid of her.
Donnithorpe cackled at his abjuration. He turned to Lady Edna.
“You haven’t condescended to tell me where you were going.”
“I was going, if you want to know, to stay with Sybil Manning at her little place in the New Forest.”
“Indeed?” said her husband, in his rasping voice, and a gleam of triumph sparkled in his crafty eyes. “Now it happens that I, not being quite the fool you and Mr. Baltazar have thought me, rang up Lady Manning. It was the first thing I did when I read your letter. I knew you would bolt, straight to her. I’ve often thought of bringing in a Bill in Parliament to deprive her of existence. She answered me herself. She had heard nothing of you, knew nothing of you.”
“Naturally,” she said jeeringly. “But,” she added, carrying the war into enemy’s quarters, “she knows everything about you. Everything, my friend. So will the Prime Minister.”
“I was with the Prime Minister this morning,” said Donnithorpe. “I told him all about my Saturday evening’s effort in the cause of solidarity. We parted the best of friends, and my position is secure.”
“What about Fordyce’s article this morning?”
“This morning I couldn’t conceive how the fellow had got the information. This evening or to-morrow morning”—he tapped his breast pocket—“if I am asked, I can point to a dual source of leakage.”
He folded his arms, the crafty political intriguer, thin and triumphant.
“Of us two,” said Baltazar, “it strikes me that you are the damnder scoundrel.”
“What you think is a matter of perfect indifference to me,” retorted Donnithorpe. “What does interest me is the fact that my wife was going to stay with Lady Manning in the New Forest while Lady Manning is in London, and that when I find her here with you, she decides not to go to the New Forest after all.”
Lady Edna flushed angrily. She was out-manœuvred, outclassed, beaten on all sides by the thin grey man whom she despised. She had acted like a brainless, immoral schoolgirl.
“Where do you propose to go now?” asked Donnithorpe.
She spat her venom at him. “Anywhere to get out of the sight of you. Yes, I was going alone to Sybil Manning’s cottage. I had just left her when you telephoned. I wanted to get as far away from you as I could and from the disgusting impressions of the last few days. Now the whole thing would be spoiled by this abominable insult. I shall stay with my mother to-night and go down to Moulsford to-morrow.”
“I’m glad,” replied Donnithorpe acidly, “you’re not thinking of returning to my house. I’m not going to have any plea of condonation.”
Lady Edna moved away haughtily toward the barriers.
“I see my porter. Mr. Baltazar, will you kindly put me into a taxi?”
“No, he shan’t. You shall go in my car.”
Baltazar, in a cold fury, stood over him threateningly.
“You stay here,” said he, “or by the living God I’ll half kill you!”
He caught up Lady Edna and followed with her in the wake of the porter.
She said: “I owe you a debt of gratitude which I can’t ever repay.”
He felt merciless towards her, murderous. “You let that boy alone, do you hear? You’ve come within a hair’s-breadth of blasting his life. It remains yet to be seen whether that hair’s-breadth will save him——”
“I’d do anything in my power——” she began.
“For God’s sake stop doing things. Hold your tongue. You’ve been criminal in your piling folly on folly. You’ve done enough.”
“But you——?”
“I can take care of myself—and the boy, if you keep quiet. You’ve got to remember the position. I’m your lover. Avowed before your husband by both of us—you implicitly. You’re not to lose sight of that fact. Understand? If you hold any communication with Godfrey, you’ll get him court-martialled. Disgraced, probably imprisoned. And then, by God! I won’t have any pity on you.”
Talking thus they reached the outer platform of the station and waited while the porter secured a taxi. She whispered, for they were brushed by the throng of passengers arriving and departing:
“If Edgar brings a divorce action——? He’s vindictive——”
“He’ll bring no action, if you stop playing the fool. I’d advise you not to interfere with my game.”
The porter swung from the step of the taxi bringing a new arrival, and as soon as the latter, a young officer with a suit-case, had alighted and paid his fare, he piled in Lady Edna’s belongings. She entered the cab very white and scared. Godfrey had told her enough about his father for her to realize the unyielding nature of the man. She was terrified, cowed. He blazed before her irresistibly elemental. . . . She carried away with her a blurred impression of his thatch of brown hair coarse and strong like the crown of some relentless beast as he lifted his hat when the taxi drove off. She shuddered, and hated him.
Baltazar let himself into the house in Sussex Gardens, and went straight to Godfrey’s room. He found him writing hard. When the young man sprang up, his quiet eye noted the desk strewn with many sheets of notepaper.
“Writing to her, I suppose.”
“It’s not altogether unnatural,” Godfrey replied in stiff hostility.
“Where are you going to address it?”
Godfrey, looking into the infernal eyes, saw that it was not an idle and impertinent question. Besides, he had spent a very agitated hour, gnawed by bitter disappointment and impotent anger and torturing his brain with conjecture as to what had happened.
“Where is Lady Edna, sir?” he asked.
“She has gone to stay with Lady Ralston.”
“Her mother?”
“The Dowager Countess of Ralston is, I believe, her mother,” said Baltazar.
He threw himself into a chair and mopped his forehead.
“Why the devil don’t you open a window?”
“I didn’t notice,” said Godfrey, and went and threw up the sash.
It was a cosy room at the back of the house, the smoking den of the late dead owner, furnished with green leather arm-chairs drawn up at each end of a green leather-covered fender-seat, with a great green leather-cushioned Chesterfield, with solid comfortable mahogany tables, writing-desk and bookcases. On the walls hung well-framed old engravings of solid worth, and Godfrey had added a little armoury of war trophies, Hun helmets, rifles, flare pistols, gas-masks, bayonets, gleaming shell cases of all sizes, a framed blood-stained letter or two in German script. . . . A cosy room more suitable for a winter’s evening than a close summer afternoon. Baltazar filled his lungs with the fresher air.
“That’s better,” said he.
Godfrey stood by the fireplace, his face set and unyielding.
“Perhaps you might tell me, sir, what has happened. What brought Donnithorpe to the station?”
“The hope of catching you, my son,in flagrante delictoof elopement.”
“Quong Ho was sure that he wanted you.”
“Quong Ho made a mistake. Donnithorpe was exceedingly surprised to find me.”
There was a long pause, during which Baltazar bent his disconcerting and luminous gaze on the young man.
“Godfrey,” he said at last, “what made you such an infatuated fool as to give away War Office secrets in writing to that woman?”
A look of horror dawned in the young man’s eyes and he took a step forward. He gasped:
“What do you mean?”
And then, when Baltazar described the disastrous paper, he cried passionately:
“It can’t be! It can’t possibly be! Only this morning she told me she had destroyed it.”
“She lied, my son,” said Baltazar.
“But she knew it was my honour, my everything——”
“Of course she did. Do you suppose that matters to her?”
Godfrey repeated in a dazed way: “There must be some mistake. She told me she had destroyed it.”
“Well, she didn’t,” said Baltazar. “She kept it—to gratify some vanity or ambition. I don’t know. Our talk was too concentrated to divagate into motives. Anyway, care for your honour didn’t affect her. She left it about, and Edgar Donnithorpe has got it and means to use it.”
The distracted young man sat down, his head in his hands, and groaned. “My God! That’s the end of me.”
Baltazar deliberately filled and lit a pipe, and said nothing. Better let the consequences of the lady’s betrayal soak in. . . . Presently Godfrey rose to his feet and his face was haggard.
“I’ll go to Donnithorpe and get it back. He daren’t show it. It’ll be accusing himself of giving away the information toThe Morning Gazette.”
But Baltazar held him with his inscrutable eyes.
“You’re a brilliant soldier, my son, but you’re no match for a foxy old politician—a past master of dirty craft. He put himself right with the Prime Minister this morning. Besides, there’s the lady to be considered—not that I think she deserves much consideration. Still, it’s a convention of honour.”
Godfrey flashed: “I’m not going to bring her name into it!”
“He will. He’ll get the whole story out of you.”
“What the devil am I to do?” asked Godfrey with a helpless gesture.
Baltazar rose. “My boy,” said he, “in two or three days’ time they’re going to make me, a man suddenly sprung from nowhere, a Minister of the Crown. That shows I’m not altogether a silly fool.”
In spite of the welter of disillusion and catastrophe in which the boy foundered, he detected in his father’s voice the pathetic, apologetic note which he had never been able to resist, the note conveying his father’s yearning desire to make good in his eyes.
“You know I’m proud of you, sir,” he said. “Which is a lot more,” he added with a break in his voice, “than you can say of me.”
Baltazar put his arm round his son’s shoulders very tenderly.
“My boy,” said he, “I’d give my life for you.” And the young man hung his head. “The only thing is, will you trust me?”
Ten minutes afterwards Baltazar, cheery and confident, stood at the door preparing to depart from a chastened though more hopeful Godfrey. Love had conquered. What had passed between his father and the Donnithorpes the boy did not know. Of his father’s assumption of the part of indiscreet lover he had no suspicion. But his father had fascinated him, dominated his will, evoked in him a blind, unquestioning confidence, compelled from him a promise of implicit obedience. Of course there were conditions. He was to petition the War Office to be allowed to sacrifice his leave and start for France, at the earliest opportunity, the next day if possible. He was not to communicate with Lady Edna until his return to England, whenever that might be. He gave the latter undertaking readily, her lie rankling in his heart, her callous disregard of his honour monstrous in its incomprehensibility. Whatever might be his revulsion of feeling afterwards—and his clear young brain grappled with the possibility—whatever might be his unregenerate torment of longing, he accepted the condition as his punishment. She, so his father said, was bound by the same condition. . . . Baltazar stood by the door.
“It’s all damned hard, old man, I know. But you’ll worry through. It’s the English way.”
He walked out, humming “Tipperary” out of tune, the only modern air he knew, and ascended the stairs and thrust his head into the drawing-room. There, as he expected, he found a desolate Marcelle, who, throwing down the book which she was trying to read, jumped up and ran to the door. What had happened? Quong Ho had told her of Edgar Donnithorpe’s call. Godfrey was in black anger against her.
“Go down,” said he, “and make your peace with him. You’ll stay and dine. I must go now and finish my work before dinner.”
He left her and, still humming “Tipperary,” entered his library, where Quong Ho was patiently and efficiently working at the proofs.
“Miss Baring and Captain Godfrey have upbraided me for indiscretion in that I informed Mr. Donnithorpe of your whereabouts,” said Quong Ho.
“The best day’s work you ever did in your life,” said Baltazar, seating himself at the table and taking up his pen.
The dinner was not quite the success for which Baltazar had hoped, in spite of his efforts to set a tone of light-hearted gaiety. His best champagne flowed to little purpose. Godfrey acknowledged the toast to his promotion and appointment with irreproachable politeness and lamentable lack of fervour. Marcelle confessed afterwards that she had never sat through so unjoyous a meal. To make her peace with Godfrey had been no easy matter. It was but an armistice that she had patched up. Twice that day had he been betrayed by women, and he felt sore against an untrustworthy sex. He had admitted her not an inch further into his confidence. Of the incriminating scrap of paper he told her nothing. She sat at the table puzzled and unhappy. Quong Ho ate philosophically when he was not drinking in the words of wisdom that came from the master’s lips.
They broke up early. Godfrey retired to his room. Quong Ho departed to the printers to correct the proof of the editorial. Baltazar walked home with Marcelle: a somewhat silent and miserable little journey. In vain he assured her that she had been Godfrey’s salvation. She only realized that the boy’s faith in her had gone. Of the extent of the salvation he, like Godfrey, said nothing. The position for the moment was too delicate and grotesque to be told to another person—even to Marcelle, and his forthrightness scorned half confidences. He walked back disappointed, ever so little depressed. Hadn’t he told everybody to put their trust in him and worry their heads no more about the matter? And they were worrying considerably.
At the end of the passage beyond the hall he saw a streak of light signifying that Godfrey’s door was ajar. He went down, opened the door and looked in. There was Godfrey, huddled up on the Chesterfield, his head in his hands, his fingers clutching his crisp fair hair. As he seemed unaware of intrusion, Baltazar closed the door quietly and tiptoed away. No one knew better than he that every man must go through his little Gethsemane alone. But the pity of it! He crept upstairs with an aching heart. Papers by the last post in connection with the new ministry lay on his desk. He sat down and tried to deal with them; but at last abandoned them and sucked a gloomy pipe. Had he saved the boy after all? Would the woman hold her tongue? Was Donnithorpe such a fool as to believe his story? Meanwhile he was the avowed lover of the detested woman and the betrayer of official secrets. And the vindictive little rat held the proofs. What use was he going to make of them?
Yet the situation had a grimly humorous aspect. If he had not seen the boy huddled up in grief and shame downstairs he would have envisaged it with one of his great laughs. . . .
The next day passed quietly. Godfrey was absent till the evening. He had been to the War Office and arranged to leave for France on the morrow by the staff train. An agreeable evening was marred by no reference to Lady Edna or the scrap of paper. They spoke of books and mathematics and the war and the probable scope of Godfrey’s duties.
Only when they shook hands for the night did Godfrey say:
“I think, sir, you’re the best father that ever a man had.”
And Baltazar, with gladness leaping into his eyes and a grin on his face, replied:
“God knows I try to be.”
On the following morning the post brought him a letter from Donnithorpe’s solicitors. Would Mr. Baltazar make an appointment to meet Mr. Donnithorpe and themselves, at his earliest convenience, on a matter of very serious importance? He bade Quong Ho ring up and fix the appointment for three o’clock that afternoon.
“Will you not,” hazarded Quong Ho, “be also accompanied by your solicitor?”
“No,” said Baltazar in his grand self-confidence. “Damn lawyers.”
When the long train moved out of Charing Cross station amid the waving of handkerchiefs and hats, he drew a breath of unutterable relief. As far as God would allow, the boy was safe. Safe, at any rate, from the woman with whom he had pledged his honour not to communicate while he was in France. And the boy would keep his word. He had been disentangled from the imbroglio. It was all that mattered. He made his powerful, almost ruthless way through the sobered crowd of lately cheerful friends seeing off those dear to them, almost heedless of the streaming eyes of women who but a moment ago had been so brave and smiling. He was unique among them. His son was not seeking, but escaping death.
Jubilant he walked across the station yard, up Cockspur Street and Pall Mall. He felt strong—nay, more—all-powerful. A force before which all the rats of Donnithorpes and lawyers in the world must crumble. He had no plan; no idea how he should counter Donnithorpe’s machinations. He had been accustomed all his life long to wait for the perilous moment and then get in his grip. He had glorious faith in his destiny. His and Godfrey’s. The destiny of the House of Baltazar. The war over, Godfrey would find some sweet English girl and marry her; and there would be a son to carry on the torch and hand it, in his turn, to the next generation. Striding up St. James’s Street, he saw the babe; made calculations of dates. He would last at least till seventy-five. The grandson then would be on the verge of manhood. . . . He laughed. Odd that he should have lived for fifty years before dreaming of the continuance of his race. Those infernal years in China! He cursed them. Never mind. If he had gone on in the humdrum certainty of the perpetuation of his name he would have missed the present glory of the conception. It was a wonderful world.
He lunched at his club with Weatherley and Burtenshaw, optimistic to gasconade, prophesying the speedy end of the war; then the millennium; the world ruled by Anglo-Saxon fibre of brain and body inspired by Latin nervous force—the combination towards which civilization had been groping for centuries. At ten minutes to three he waved them farewell and drove in a taxi to his appointment in Bedford Row.
He was shown into a room where Edgar Donnithorpe and an impassive elderly man with a face like a horse awaited him. He felt that he entered like an irresistible force.
CHAPTER XXIV
HEstood, an hour later, on the pavement of that noiseless and forlorn thoroughfare, and stared at the latest catastrophe which, like all the others in his impulsive life, he had of his own deliberate act contrived. As yet he failed fully to understand his defeat—for defeat it was, surrender absolute and unconditional. He thrust his hat to the back of his head and mopped his forehead, and moved slowly up the street in amazed reaction from the glow of conquest which warmed him as he had entered the office. He had gone without any plan of campaign, confident in his intellectual resource to meet emergency. Merciless craft and cunning vindictiveness met him. Under the fierce sunshine, angry shame made him hotter, and the sweat poured down his face. He had been able only to bluster and threaten in vain retaliation. The grey rat of a man had laughed at him with rasping thinness. The horse-faced lawyer had smiled professional deprecation of heroics. “I shall do this and that,” he declared. “Then our action will be so and so,” they countered. Like the Duke of Wellington, he cried: “Publish and be damned.” They pointed out with icy logic that not they but he and his would suffer inevitable condemnation.
“You and yours.” That was the lawyer’s phrase. On the last word two pairs of eyes were bent on him narrowly and significantly. The unmistakable hint—the only one during the interview—of Godfrey’s complicity, he had repudiated with indignation. The consequences concerned himself alone. They smiled again. “Let it be so, then,” said they, “for the sake of argument. . . .” As he walked along the burning street he wondered how much they knew, how much they guessed. Save for that significant glance, both the grey politician and the longlipped lawyer had been as inscrutable as Buddhist idols. And he, John Baltazar, had been hopelessly outmatched.
Yet, after all, at a cost, he had won the game. Godfrey was saved. Mechanically he put his hand to the breast pocket of his thin summer jacket and felt the incriminating document crackle beneath his touch. That and the sheet of clotted passion of which he had confessed himself the author. . . . He continued his way westwards, down the mean and noisy Theobald’s Road, half conscious of his surroundings. The drab men and women who jostled him on the pavement and passed him in the roadway traffic seemed the happy creatures of a dream—happy in the inalienable possession of their London heritage. . . . Fragments of the recent interview passed through his mind. His adversaries had threatened not to stand alone on the written disclosure of War Office secrets. They could bring evidence of leakage through Lady Edna, for some time past, of important military information. He could quite believe it. The written paper could scarcely be the boy’s sole infatuated indiscretion; and as for the lady—revealed as she was yesterday, he counted her capable of any betrayal. Bluff or not, he had yielded to the threat. While the paper remained in Donnithorpe’s possession, Godfrey was in grave peril. . . . “You and yours.” The phrase haunted him. If he defied them, they would strike through him at Godfrey.
Were they aware of farce? If so, why, save for this veiled allusion, did Godfrey, the real lover, seem to matter so little? During the interview their attitude puzzled him, until he became aware of Donnithorpe’s implacable enmity towards him, John Baltazar. And now he wondered whether the pose of the injured husband were not a blind for revenge rooted in deeper motives. Only a fortnight or so ago Godfrey had said:
“The little beast hates you like poison.”
He had asked why. Parrot-like, Godfrey had quoted from Lady Edna’s report of the conversation before his father’s visit to Moulsford.
“A Triton like you gives these political minnows the jumps.”
He had laughed at the affectionate exaggeration. But was the boy right after all? Certainly he had paid scant courtesy to Donnithorpe, whom he had lustily despised as one of the brood of little folk still parasitically feeding on the Empire which they had done their best to bring to ruin. Was this the abominable little insect’s vengeance?
He halted at the hurrying estuary of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, took off his hat, and again mopped his forehead and the short thatch of thick brown hair. The words of Dr. Rewsby of Water-End flashed across his mind—“Have you generally conducted your life on these extravagant principles?” . . . and . . . “I should say you were cultivating a very bad habit, and I should advise you to give it up.” And he remembered his confession, a year ago, to the sagacious doctor: “You have the most comforting way in the world of telling me that I’m the Great Ass of the Universe.”
“That man’s diagnosis,” said Baltazar to himself, putting on his hat, “was perfectly correct. I am.”
He marched in his unconsciously hectoring way down Holborn and Oxford Street, deep in his thoughts. Yes, once again his episodical life history had repeated itself. The same old extravagant principles had once again prevailed. They were part and parcel of his being, resistless as destiny. Once again, without thought of the future, he had cast the glowing present to the winds. Once again he had proved himself the Great Ass of the Universe. But what did it matter? Godfrey was saved. Again he made the papers crackle in his pocket. He had told him he would give his life for him. He strode along fiercely. By God! Stupendous Ass that he might be, he had never in his life broken a vow or a promise. . . . Apart from the passionate love he had conceived for the boy, there was no reparation adequate for his twenty years’ unconscious neglect. He swung his stick to the peril of the King’s lieges on the pavement. It was a young man’s world—this new world that was to follow the war. Old men like himself were of brief account. Godfrey should have his chance, unstained, unfettered in the new world which his generation, throwing mildewed tradition on a universal bonfire, would have to mould.
He drew nearer to the brighter life of West End London, Oxford Circus, with its proud sweep of great shops and its plentiful harbours from the streams of the four great thoroughfares. Reluctant to confine himself yet awhile within the four walls of his library, he abandoned the straight course home and went down Regent Street, and at last stood uncertain at Piccadilly Circus, the centre of London, more than any other one spot perhaps, the true heart of the Empire. Though it was the broad day of a summer afternoon, his memory sped swiftly back over twenty years to the night when he saw it alive with light and flashing movement and the great city’s joy of life, for the last time before he sailed for China; when, in spite of decorous and scholarly living, his heart had sunk within him at the realization that he was giving up all that, and all that it symbolized—the familiar and pulsating life of England. And now he stood in the same glamour-haunted precincts, and again his heart sank like a stone. He turned, crept for a few steps down Piccadilly and, catching a taxi putting down a fare at the Piccadilly Hotel, engaged it and drove home to Sussex Gardens.
The house appeared bleak and desolate. Quong Ho had gone some whither. Godfrey—he thanked God—was on his way to France. Foolishly he had hoped that Marcelle might be awaiting him, to hear the latest tidings of the boy; but she was not there. For all its carpeting and pleasant luxury of furniture the house seemed to be full of echoes, as though it were an empty shell. For the first time in his life he shrank almost afraid, from the intolerable loneliness of the lot to which he had condemned himself. For the last year he had given way to his long-pent-up craving for human affection. He had cast his soul into the orgy of love that he had compelled from the only three dear to him in the world. It had been more than his daily bread. It had been a kind of daily debauch. It had lifted him above himself. Marcelle loved him, Godfrey loved him, Quong Ho loved him, each in their separate ways. They were always there, ready at hand, to appease the hunger of the moment. And now, in a flash, he had cut himself adrift from the beloved three. The love would remain. That he knew. But from the precious food of its daily manifestations he would be many thousands of leagues sundered by oceans and continents. At thirty he could forsake love and face solitude with the brave fool’s confidence. At fifty he gazed terrified at the prospect. He had embraced loneliness as a bride, three years ago, in order to save himself from perdition. But then his heart had been stone cold, unwarmed by any human touch. He had felt himself to be an unwanted wanderer in an alien planet. Spendale Farm had been a haven of comfort, an Eden of refuge. But the German bomb had revolutionized his world. It had magically brought him into indissoluble bondage to human things of unutterable dearness. And now once more—finisto the episode which he had thought to be the story ending only in death.
He sat mechanically at the writing-table in his library and began to open the letters that had come during his absence. A leathern Government despatch case containing the day’s papers from the office which he had only hurriedly visited that morning, awaited his attention. The deathly sensation that they no longer concerned him held him in a cold grip. There was a flaming article from a Croatian statesman which had reachedThe New Universethrough devious channels, fraught with pregnant information. He glanced through it in impotent detachment, like that of a dead man brought back to the conduct of his affairs. He was no longer the dynamo ofThe New Universe. Other forces, who and what he knew not, would in a day or two take his place.The New Universewould have to get on, as best it could, without him. He was dead. He had no more to do withThe New Universethan with the internal affairs of Mars.
He opened an envelope addressed in a well-known handwriting and franked with distinguished initials. It had been delivered by messenger. Like a dead man he read the achievement of his ambition: He was a Minister of the Crown. The public announcement awaited only his formal acceptance. He stared dully at the idle words. And then suddenly mad rage against the derisive irony of his destiny shook him and he sprang from his chair, and, in the unsympathetic privacy of the room which he had not furnished, he stormed in foolish fury and vain agony of soul. . . .
It was the end of John Baltazar—the John Baltazar in whom he had always believed, at the moment of proof positive of the justification of his faith. To Godfrey he had not boasted unduly. A year ago he had awakened, a new Rip Van Winkle, to a world for two years at war. In a few months, God knows how, save through his resistless energy, his new-born and flaming patriotism and his keen brain, he had established himself in England as a driving force compelling recognition and application to the country’s needs. He had won his position by sheer strength of personality. Transcendental mathematics and Chinese scholarship he had thrown into the dust-heap of broken toys. He had emerged from philosophic childhood into the active life of a man, with his strong hands fingering the strings of the world’s war. Now the strings were in his grasp. . . . He had looked far ahead. This Ministry, though of vast importance, was yet subordinate to the Greater Powers of the State. He was young. What was fifty-one? The infancy stage of statesmanship. Why should not he, John Baltazar, rise to higher power and guide the civilized world to victory and to triumphant peace?
The man had dreamed many dreams. What great man does not? Never yet has the human being whose day’s vision is blackened by the curtain of the night reached the shadow of achievement. Then again: was it of England or of John Baltazar that he dreamed? Who can tell? Can any man of noble ambitions, of deep conviction of his own powers, strip himself naked before his God and tell?
And now the dreams were but dreams. Blankness confronted him. Raving against fate brought no consolation or relief. In utter dejection he threw himself into an arm-chair and once more gazed hopelessly at catastrophe.
There was no longer a John Baltazar. As far as England was concerned he had ceased to exist. In that lawyer’s office he had signed his abdication. There was the letter written and addressed, formally declining the almost hourly expected offer of the ministerial appointment. The offer had now come. He had pledged his honour to give immediate signal for the posting of the answer. That was part of the price demanded for the surrender of the disastrous documents. He went to the telephone and curtly carried out those terms of his contract.
There remained the other condition to be fulfilled, for which they had no other guarantee than his word. There at least—and a gleam of pride irradiated his gloom—he had triumphed. He had compelled them to trust his word without a scrap of written obligation. He would sail for China within a month.
He sat there alone in the silent house, wondering again whether he had not set the final seal on himself as the Great Ass of the Universe. He had been driven, it is true, into a corner by the malignity and craft of his opponents; but it was he himself who had dictated the terms of surrender. Acting on one of the wild impulses that had deflected from childhood the currents of his life, he had made the amazing proposal.
It was the end of John Baltazar. He rose, went over to his table and filled his pipe. Anyhow, the House of Baltazar stood firm in honour. He would yet dandle the grandson on his knee.La course du flambeauwas the beginning and end of human endeavour. The torch was in Godfrey’s hands now. . . . Feeling for his match-box, his wrist met the hidden papers in his jacket pocket which he had almost forgotten. He drew them out, folded the one fraught with court-martial and disgrace to Godfrey into a long strip and set fire to it, a torch not to be handed on. He lit his pipe with it instead and watched it burn till the flame touched his finger-tips. Then he went over to the grate and burned the love-letter.
He sat down and wrote to Godfrey.