THERE they 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 the _cognoscenti_ declared 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.