“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 manœuvre 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.