CHAPTER XX
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.