THEY arranged 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 their _vie
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 Review_ sped 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 original _tu 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 really _know_, 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.