WHEN he hobbled into her drawing-room and saw her without her hat, crowned with the glory of her hair, thick, of silky texture and of baffling colour, now almost black, now gleaming with sombre gold, and her slender figure clad in a blue dress which deepened the magical blue in her eyes, Godfrey thought she was more wonderful still. The clasp of her bare hand with its long, capable fingers, thrilled him. Her voice had the added caress of welcome to her house. When, later, she reminded him of their promised heart to heart talk about fathers, it was in his heart to say, “The pedantic old bat calls you a type—you, unique among women!” The criticism had buzzed in his head all the week and on occasions he had laughed out loud at its ineptitude. It buzzed in his head while he was being introduced to Lady Northby, the wife of a distinguished General, and it was with an effort that he cleared his mind enough to say: “I had the honour of serving under the General in France. Oh, a long, long way under, all the time I was out.”
“Then you’re friends at once,” cried Lady Edna. “You’ll join Lady Northby’s collection.”
“Of what, pray?” asked Baltazar.
“Of Sir Edward’s officers.”
“I don’t know whether Mr. Baltazar would like to be collected,” said Lady Northby. She was a tiny, dark-faced, kind-eyed woman of fifty. Her smile of invitation was very pleasant.
“Can you doubt it?” replied the young man. “It must be a glorious company. I’m only afraid I’m a poor specimen.”
“Won’t you sit down?” She indicated a place on the sofa by her side. And when Godfrey had obeyed her, she said in a low voice: “That and that”—with the faintest motion of her hand she indicated decoration and footless leg—“entitle you to a place of honour.” Then as if she had touched sensitive ground, she added hastily, almost apologetically: “Lady Edna always teases me about my collection, as she calls it; but there’s a little truth in it. My husband is very proud of his Division, and so am I, and the only way I can try to realize it as a living thing, is to get to know some of his officers.”
“By Jove!” cried Godfrey, his eyes suddenly sparkling. “That accounts for it.”
“For what?”
“For the Division being the most splendid Division, bar none, at the Front. For the magical influence the General has over it. I’ve only seen him once or twice and then I shook in my boots as he passed by. But there isn’t an officer or man who doesn’t feel that he’s under the tips of his fingers. I never could account for it. Now I can.”
She smiled again. “I don’t quite follow you, Mr. Baltazar.”
Suddenly he became aware of his audacity. Subalterns in social relations with the wives of their Divisional Generals were supposed to be the meekest things on earth. He was not sure whether their demeanour was not prescribed in paragraph something or the other of Army Orders. His fair face blushed ingenuous scarlet. In the meanwhile in her eyes shone amused and kindly enquiry; and, to render confusion worse confounded, Lady Edna and his father appeared to have suspended their casual talk in order to listen to his reply. There was no help for it. He summoned up his courage, and with an invisible snap of the fingers said:
“It was you behind the Division all the time.”
The modest lady blushed too. The boy’s sincerity was manifest. Lady Edna rose with a laugh, as a servant entered the room.
“The hand that rocks the subaltern rules the Division. Let us see if we can find something to eat.”
There were only the four of them. At first Lady Edna Donnithorpe had thought of inviting a numerous company to meet Baltazar. Her young consciousness of power delighted in the homage of the fine flower of London around her table. Baltazar’s story (heard before she met him) had fascinated her, he himself had impressed her with a sense of his vitality and vast erudition, and after the dinner party she had been haunted by his personality. Here was a great force at a loose end. How could she apply it? People were beginning to talk about him. The new Rip Van Winkle. The Freak of the War. It would be a triumph to man?uvre him into the position of a National Asset. She had already drawn up a list of the all-important people whom it was essential for him to know—her husband did not count—and was ticking off the guests for the proposed luncheon party when suddenly she tore it up, she scarcely knew why. Better perhaps gauge her protégé more accurately before opening her campaign. The son added a complication. A fine pathetic figure of a boy. Perhaps she might be able to do something for him, too, if she knew what he wanted. She liked his eyes and the set of his head. Besides, the stuffy lot who would be useful to the father would bore the young man to death. She regarded the boredom of a guest in her house as an unimaginable calamity. Edgar, her husband, was the only person ever bored in it, and that was his own doing. He had reduced self-boredom in private life to a fine art. She decided that young Baltazar should not run the risk of boredom. Having tom up her list, she ran across Lady Northby, dearest of women, the ideal fourth.
At the beginning of lunch, while Baltazar happened to be engaged in eager argument with Lady Northby, she devoted herself to Godfrey. In her sympathetic contralto she questioned him, and, under the spell of it, he answered. He would have revealed the inmost secrets of his soul, had she demanded them. As it was, he told her an astonishing lot of things about himself.
Presently the talk became general. Lady Northby, in her gentle way, shed light, from the point of view of a divisional commander’s wife, on many obscure phases of the war. Lady Edna held a flaming torch over black and abysmal corners of diplomacy. Godfrey sat awed by her knowledge of facts and her swift deductions from them. He had never met a woman like her, scarcely dreamed that such a woman existed. She had been in personal touch with all the great ones of the earth, from the Kaiser upwards, and she judged them shrewdly and with a neat taste in epigram.
“If the Kaiser and the Crown Prince had been ordinary middle-class folk,” she said, “they would have been in gaol long ago. The father for swindling the public on a grand scale; the son for stealing milk-cans.”
She had met King Constantine, then a thorn in the Allied flesh, whose sufferance for so long on the Greek throne is still a mystery to the plain Briton.
“What a degradation of a name for Constantine the Great,” said Baltazar.
“That’s just it,” she flashed. “His awful wife says ‘In hoc signo vinces,’ and dangles before his eyes the Iron Cross.”
No. Godfrey had never met a woman remotely like her. She was incomparable.
The talk developed quickly from the name of Constantine to names in general. The degradation of names. Uriah, for instance, that of the most tragic victim of dastardly treachery in history, now brought low by its association with Heep.
“I love the old Saxon names,” said Lady Northby, with some irrelevance. “Yours, dear, for instance.”
“It’s a beautiful name,” said Baltazar, “but it’s not Saxon. It’s far older.”
“Surely it’s Saxon,” said Lady Edna.
“Edna was the wife of Raguel and the mother-in-law of Tobias, the son of Tobit, the delightful young gentleman carrying a fish and accompanied by the Angel Raphael, whom you see in the Italian pictures.”
Lady Edna was impressed. “I wonder if there’s anything you don’t know?”
He laughed. “I only remember what I’ve read. My early wrestling with Chinese, I suppose, has trained my memory for detail. I’m also very fond of the Apocrypha. The Book of Esdras, for instance, is a well of wonderful names. I love Hieremoth and Carabasion.”
Presently she said to Godfrey: “Your father always makes me feel so humble and ignorant. Have you ever read the Apocrypha?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Neither have I. If you said you had, I should want to sink under the table. The pair of you would be too much for me.”
Her confession of ignorance delighted him as much as her display of knowledge filled him with wonder. It made her deliciously human.
When lunch was over and they went up to the drawing-room she left the elders together and sat for a while apart with him.
“You’ll go and see Lady Northby, of course,” she said.
“I should just think so,” he replied boyishly. “You see, I’m New Army and have never had a chance of meeting a General’s wife. If they’re all like that, no wonder the Army’s what it is.”
Lady Edna smiled indulgently. “She’s a dear. I thought you would fall in love with her.”
“But you couldn’t have known I was in General Northby’s Division, unless——”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you’re a witch.”
With a quick glance she read the tribute in his young eyes. It almost persuaded her that she possessed uncanny powers. She looked charmingly mysterious.
“Let us leave it at that,” she said. “Anyhow,” she added, “Lady Northby can be very useful indeed to a young officer.”
“Useful?” His cheek flushed. “But I couldn’t go to see any lady—socially—with the idea of getting things out of her. It would be awful.”
“Why?”
He met her eyes. “It’s obvious.”
She broke into pleasant laughter. “I’m so glad you said that. If you hadn’t, I should have been dreadfully disappointed.”
“But how could you have thought me capable of such a thing?”
His real concern touched her. Inured to her world of intrigue which had little in it that was so sensitive on the point of honour, she had taken for granted his appreciation of Lady Northby’s potential influence. She was too crafty a diplomatist, however, to let him guess her surprise; still less suspect her little pang of realization that his standards might be just a little higher than her own; or her lightning glance back to her girlhood when her standards were just the same. She gave him smilingly to understand that it was a playful trap she had set for him, so that resentment at an implied accusation was instantaneously submerged beneath a wave of wonder at the gracious beauty of her soul. This boy of twenty, instinctive soldier, half-conscious thereof when he came to exercise his power, could play on fifty rough and violent men as on an instrument, and make them do his bidding lovingly in the ease of camp and follow him in battle into the jaws of hell, as they had done, but he was outclassed in his unwitting struggle with the girl of five-and-twenty, instinctive schemer after power, her clear brain as yet undisturbed by any clamourings of the heart.
Baltazar, desiring to bring brightness into the boy’s life, had brought it with a vengeance. He had not heard of Dorothy. He had no idea of the state of mind of the Rosaline-rejected young Romeo of a son of his. Unconscious of peril, he cast him into the furnace. “An interesting type. A woman of the moment,” commented placid and philosophic Fifty. “Oh! she doth teach the torches to burn bright!” sang Twenty. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. See the part of Romeo passim. Away with Rosaline! His “love did read by rote and could not spell.” Rosaline-Dorothy was blotted out of his Book of Existence for ever.
“What are your plans?” asked Lady Edna, as soon as the little cloud had melted beneath the very eager sunshine.
“As soon as I get a new foot I’ll spend every day at the War Office until they give me something to do.”
“You oughtn’t to have any difficulty. There are lots of billets going, I know.”
“Yes. But what kind? I’m not going to sit in an office all day filling up forms. I want to get a man’s job. Active service again.”
“How splendid of you!”
Her commendation was something to live for. After the British way, however, he deprecated claims to splendour.
“Not a bit. It’s only that one feels rather rotten doing nothing while other fellows are fighting. They may take me in the Flying Corps. But I’d sooner go where I belong—to the job I know. Perhaps I’m rather an ass to think of it.”
“Not at all. Where there’s a will there’s a way.”
“I’m going to have a try for it, anyhow,” said he.
He thought vindictively of Dorothy’s light patronage, which would have resulted in a soft job. No soft jobs for him. He had had a lucky escape. Dorothy and her inconsequence and flapperish immaturity, and the paralysing work that General Mackworth would doubtless have found for him—recording issues of bully-beef or keeping stock of dead men’s kits! Never in life! In those bright eyes raining influence—no, they were not bright—they were muffled stars—that was the fascination of them—he would make himself something to be considered, respected, admired. He would be the one one-footed man in the British Army to arrive at greatness. The splendid end compelled the means. Until that moment he had never contemplated an heroic continuance of his military career.
Lady Edna, pathetically young, in spite of myriad ageing worldlinesses, including a half-humorous, half-repellant marriage of calculation, was caught by his enthusiasm.
“I should love to see you back again!”
“That alone is enough,” said he, “to make me move heaven and earth to get there.”
She flushed beneath his downright eyes and hid a moment’s embarrassment by a laugh.
“That’s a very pretty speech,” she said lightly. “I’m glad to find the Army is going back to its old tradition of manners.”
“I perfectly agree with you,” exclaimed Baltazar, for her tone had been purposely pitched higher than that of the preceding conversation. “I’ve been greatly struck by it.”
The little intimate talk was over; but enough had been said before father and son took their leave, to make Godfrey treasure every one of her beautiful words and repeat them over and over again. Especially her last words, spoken in a low voice for him alone: “I don’t want to lose track of you. One so often does in London. If ever you’re at a loose end, come and report progress. Ring me up beforehand.” She gave him her number. Victoria 9857. A Golden Number. The figures had a magical significance.
It was not long before he ventured to obey her, and rang up the Golden Number. He spent with her an enchanted hour, the precursor of many hours which Lady Edna stole from her manifold activities in order to devote them to the young man’s further enchantment.
In the meanwhile Quong Ho arrived at Godalming. Quong Ho delighted with himself, in his ready-made suit and soft felt hat, in spite of the loss of his pigtail, which the treatment of his cracked skull had necessitated. Baltazar, too, cast an eye of approbation on his European appearance, regarding him somewhat as a creation of his own. His pride, however, was dashed by Godfrey, who on being asked, eagerly, after the first interview, what he thought of Quong Ho, cried:
“For Heaven’s sake, sir, get the poor devil a new kit!”
“Why—Why?” asked Baltazar, in his impatient way, “what’s the matter with his clothes?”
“They fit like a flag at the end of a pole in a dead calm,” said Godfrey. “Or like sails round a mast. You’d have to get a pack of hounds in order to find his arms and legs. And that red and purple tie! It’s awful. Ask Marcelle.”
Baltazar had walked Quong Ho over to Churton Towers, and after they had said good-bye at the gates, he had rushed back to put his question, leaving Quong Ho in the road.
Marcelle smiled at his disconcerted face. “It would be scarcely well received at Cambridge.”
“Give the chap a chance, sir,” said Godfrey.
“I want to give him every chance,” exclaimed Baltazar. “I want to overwhelm him with chances. If his clothes won’t do, get him some others.”
At his summons the Chinaman came up. Baltazar caught him by his loose sleeve.
“Godfrey doesn’t approve of garments not............