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 rom............