AFTER this they had the many talks which they had promised themselves,
and she told him the little things about John Baltazar which he had
craved to learn. And the young man told her of his ambitions and his
hopes and his young despairs. The last mainly concerned one Dorothy
Mackworth, a Warwickshire divinity in a silk tennis sweater and
tam-o’-shanter, whose only imperfection, if the word could be applied to
tragic misfortune, was her domination by some diabolic sorcery which
made her look more kindly on the black Leopold, his brother, than on
himself. Her age? Seventeen. “You poor babies,” thought Marcelle. Once
she said:
“Why worry? You can find a thousand little Dorothys in a week if you
look for them—all a-growing and a-blowing, with never a wicked spell on
them at all.”
“You are wrong,” he replied. “One can find thousands of Susans and Janes
and Gertrudes—all very charming girls, I admit; but there’s only one
Dorothy. She’s very remarkable. She has an intellect. She has a
distracting quality, something uncanny, you know, in her perceptions and
intuitions. I’m dead serious, Marcelle, believe me——”
She let him talk his heart out. Her soul, dry and athirst, drank in his
boy’s freshness—how greedily she scarcely realized. In her character of
nurse she had acted as Mother Confessor to many a poor lonely wretch;
but in every case she had felt it was to the nun-descended uniform she
wore, to its subconsciously recognized sanctity, and not to the mere
kindly woman beneath, that she owed the appeal or the revelation. But
now to young Godfrey Baltazar she was intensely, materially woman.
Foolishly woman in her unconfessed craving to learn the details of his
life and character and outlook on the world.
Once he checked an egotistic exposition.
“Look here,” he said, struck by a sudden qualm, “I’m always holding
forth about myself—what about you?”
“There’s nothing about me. I’m just a nurse. A nurse is far too busy and
remote from outside things to be anything else than a nurse.”
“But you started out as a mathematical swell at Newnham. Oh yes, you
did! Men like my father don’t coach rotters—least of all women. What
happened? You went in for the Tripos, of course?”
She shook her head. “No, my dear. The magic had gone out of my life. I
tried Newnham for half the next term—facing the music—but it was too
much for me. I broke down. I had to earn my livelihood. My original idea
was teaching. I gave it up. Took to nursing instead. And now you know
the whole story of my life.”
“I can’t understand anybody really bitten with mathematics giving it
up.”
She smiled. “I don’t think I was really bitten. Not like you.”
Then she led him from herself to his own ambitions, on this as on other
occasions. Gradually she established between them a relationship very
precious. It was the aftermath of her own romance.
One day, business calling her to London, she changed into mufti, and
hurried down the front steps to the car that was to take her to the
station. She found Godfrey waiting by the car door.
“My word! You look topping!” he cried in blatant admiration, and she
blushed with pleasure like a girl.
He begged for a jaunt to the station and back. The air would do him
good. She assented, and they drove off.
“You look younger than ever,” he went on. “It’s a sin to hide your
beautiful hair under that wretched Sister’s concern. Now I see really
the kind of woman you are——”
“What have clothes got to do with it?”
“Lots. The way you select them, the way you put them on, the way you
express yourself in them. No one can express themselves in a beastly
uniform. Now, all kinds of instincts, motives, feelings, went into that
hat. There’s a bit of defiance in it. As who should say: ‘Now that I’m
an ordinary woman again, demureness be damned!’”
She said: “I’m glad I meet with your lordship’s approval,” and she felt
absurdly happy for the rest of the day. In her heart she thanked God
that he regarded her not merely as a kind old thing to whom, as a link
between himself and his father, he was benevolently disposed. Out of
sight, she would then be out of his mind. But she held her own as a
woman; unconsciously had held it all the time. Now the little accident
of the meeting in mufti secured her triumph. When he left the home he
would not drift away from her.
He had said on the platform, waiting for her train:
“As soon as we can fix it up, I’ll get hold of Dorothy, and you and I
and she’ll have a little beano at the Carlton. I do so want her to meet
you.”
The wish, she reflected afterwards, signified much: Dorothy to meet her,
not she to meet Dorothy. The kind old thing, as a matter of boyish
courtesy, would be asked to meet Dorothy. But Dorothy was to meet
somebody in whom he took a certain pride.
She remembered a story told her by a friend who had gone to see her boy
at a famous public school on the occasion of the Great Cricket Match. At
the expansive moment of parting he said: “Mother, I suppose you know
that the men feel it awfully awkward being seen with their people, but
as you were out and away the most beautiful woman in the crowd, I went
about not caring a hang.”
She would have to get herself up very smart for Dorothy. In the train
coming back she fell a-dreaming. If John Baltazar and she had stuck it
out in all honour for a few years, Death, which was in God’s hands and
not theirs, would have solved all difficulties. They would have been
married. The five-year-old child would have called her “mother.” She
would be “mother” still to this gallant lad whose youth and charm had
suddenly swept through the barren chambers of her heart. And in the
night she asked again the question which in the agonized moments of past
years she had cried to the darkness: “Why?”
Why had he left her? If he had been strong enough to keep love within
the bounds of perfect friendship, she, the unawakened girl, living in
passionate commune with intellectual and spiritual ideals, would have
found for some years, at least, all her cravings satisfied in such a
tender and innocent intercourse. And if he had claimed her body and her
soul, God knows they were his for the taking.
So why? Why the breaking of so many lives? His own, so vivid, most of
all.
* * * * *
In the quivering splendour of her one girlish month of love, a
distracted Semele, she had scarcely seen her Jovian lover, as he was in
human form. She pictured him, Heaven knows how romantically. But always,
in her picturing, she took for granted the canon of chiaroscuro, of
light and shade. In judging him afterwards, she had no conception of a
being to whom compromise was damnation. A phrase—an instinctive cutter
of Gordian knots—might have brought illumination; but there was none to
utter it.
She was amazed, dumbfounded, conscience-stricken, all but
soul-destroyed, when the astounding fact of John Baltazar’s
disappearance became known. The familiar houses and trees and hedges on
the Newnham Road pointed to her as accusing witnesses. Yet she kept her
own counsel, and, keeping it, suffered to breaking-point. Many months
passed before she could look life again squarely in the face—and then
it was the new life that had lasted for so many years. And still, with
all her experience of human weakness and human fortitude, she lay awake
asking herself the insoluble question.
* * * * *
So little occasion had been given for scandal, that her name was
associated in no man or woman’s mind with the extraordinary event. Clue
to John Baltazar’s disappearance, save the notorious shrewishness of his
wife, there was none. Common Rooms, heavy with the secular atmosphere of
casuistic argument, speculated in vain. A man of genius, destined to
bring the University once more into world-wide fame—watched, therefore,
by the University with sedulous care and affection; a man with the
prizes of the earth (from the academic point of view) dangling within
his grasp, does not, they contended, forsake all and go out into the
darkness because his wife happens to be a scold. Another woman? To
Common Rooms the idea was preposterous. Besides, if there had been one,
the married members would have picked up in their homes the gossip of
one of the most nervous gossip centres in the United Kingdom. Mad,
perhaps? But Mrs. Baltazar proclaimed loudly the sagacious method by
which he realized his private fortune, before setting out for the
Unknown. And Common Rooms, like Marcelle, asked the same perplexing
question: Why?
* * * * *
The next day, in the grounds of Churton Towers, the young man, returning
to his father’s fascinating mystery, propounded the dilemma that had
kept her from sleep the night before, and he, in his turn, asked: “Why?”
“The only solution of it is,” said he, “that he burned the house down in
order to roast the pig.”
She flashed a glance at him. “You seem to know him better than I.”
* * * * *
At that moment, John Baltazar, about whom there was all this coil,
leaning over the gate of a derelict and remote moorland farmstead,
perhaps asked himself the same question; for in moments of intellectual
and physical relaxation he was wont, like most solitaries, to look down
the vista of his years.
A low granite wall, in which was set the wooden gate, encircled the few
acres of his domain. Behind him, a one-storied, granite-built, thatched
dwelling and the adjoining stable and byre and pigsties and dismantled
dairy. Surrounding the buildings, with little selection as to
appropriateness of site, were flower garden, mostly of herbaceous
plants, vegetable garden, wire-enclosed poultry runs variegated with
White Wyandottes and Rhode Island Reds, and half an acre of rough grass
on which some goats were tethered.
John Baltazar leaned over the gate and, smoking his cherry-wood pipe,
gazed with the outer eye on the familiar scene of desolate beauty.
Within his horizon he was the only visible human being, his the only
human habitation. All around him spread the rolling landscape of granite
and heather and wind-torn shrub. The granite hills, some surmounted by
gigantic and shapeless masses of rock left freakishly behind in glacial
movements of unknown times, glowed amethyst and pale coral; the heather
slopes in the sunlight blazed in the riot of royal purple, and the
shadowed plains lay in a sullen majesty of gloom. Heather and granite,
granite and heather, moorland and mountain, beauty and barrenness. God
and granite and heather. No place for man. No more a place for man than
the Sahara. For man, to his infinite despair, had tried it; had built
the rude farmstead, had, Heaven knows why—perhaps through pathetic
pride of ownership—with infinite sweating, piled up the three-foot ring
of stones, had sought to cultivate the illusory covering of earth, had
dug till his sinews cracked and turned up the eternal granite instead of
clods, and had sickened and starved and died; and had abandoned the
stricken place to the unhelpful sun and the piercing winds and the
snows—and to John Baltazar, who now, smoking his pipe, formed part of
this tableland of desolation.
Fifty, he looked ten years younger. A short, uncombed thatch of coarse
brown hair showed no streak of grey; nor did a closely clipped moustache
of a lighter shade. His broad forehead was singularly serene, save for
an accusing deep vertical line between the brows. And a faint
criss-cross network, too, appeared beneath the strong grey eyes when
they were dimmed by relaxation of effort, but vanished almost magically
when they were illuminated by thought. A grey sweater, somewhat tightly
fitting, revealed a powerful frame. Knicker-bockers and woollen
stockings and heavy shoes completed his attire. His hands, glazed and
coarsened, at first sight betrayed the labourer rather than the scholar.
But the fingers were sensitively long, and the deep filbert nails showed
signs of personal fastidiousness, as did his closely shaven cheek.
A wiry-coated Airedale came to him and sought his notice. He turned and
caressed the dog’s rough head.
“Well, old son, finished the day’s work? You’re a rotten old fraud, you
know, pretending to be bossing around, and never doing a hand’s turn for
anybody.”
The dog, as though to justify his existence, barked, darted a yard away,
ran up, barked again and once more started.
“Dinner time already?”
The sound of the word signified to the dog the achievement of his
mission. He barked and leaped joyously as his master slowly strolled
towards the house. On the threshold appeared a young Chinaman, of
smiling but dignified demeanour, wearing Chinese dress.
“Dinner is served, sir,” he said, making way respectfully for Baltazar
to pass.
“So Brutus has just informed me, Quong Ho.”
“I sent him to tell you, sir. He is possessed of almost human
understanding.”
“It is always good,” said Baltazar, “to associate with intelligent
beings.”
He entered the house-piece, the one large living room of the building,
and took his place at a small table by a western window, simply but
elegantly set with clean cloth and napkin, shining silver and glass, and
a little bowl of roses placed on a strip of blue-and-gold Chinese
embroidery. It was a room, at the first glance, of characterless muddle;
at the second, of studied order. A long, narrow room, built north and
south, with two windows on the west side and two on the east. An
old-fashioned cooking range stretched beneath the great chimney-piece
that took up most of the northern end, for the room was rudely planned
as kitchen and dining-room and parlour and boudoir, all combined, and
hams in the brief days of its prosperity had hung from its rafters. The
spaces on the distempered walls not occupied by unpainted deal
bookshelves were filled with long silken rolls of Chinese paintings.
Turkey carpets covered the stone floor. Nearly the whole length of the
eastern wall ran a long deal table, piled with manuscripts and
pamphlets, but with a clear writing space by the north-east window, at
which stood a comfortably cushioned writing chair. A settee and an
arm-chair by the chimney corner, an old oak chest of drawers that seemed
to wonder what it did in that galley, a bamboo occasional table and the
little dining table by the south-western window completed the furniture.
But the room was spotlessly clean. Everything that could shine shone.
Every pile of papers on the long deal table was squared with
mathematical precision.
The young Chinaman served the dinner which he had prepared—curried
eggs, roast chicken, goat’s milk cheese—with the deftness of long
training. He paused, expectant, with an unstoppered decanter.
“Burgundy, sir?”
“No, thank you.”
Quong Ho filled a tumbler with water.
“How long has that half-bottle of wine been opened?”
“If I remember accurately, sir, this is the fifteenth day.”
“It’s not fit to drink, Quong Ho. To-morrow you will throw it away and
open another half-bottle.”
“It shall be done as you wish, sir,” said Quong Ho. “Except, sir, that I
do not propose to waste the wine, for though it is too stale for
drinking purposes, it is an invaluable adjunctive in cookery for soups
and sauces.”
Baltazar drank a draught of water and, wiping his lips, looked over his
shoulder at the Chinaman.
“Adjunctive? That’s a new word. Where did you get hold of it?”
“Possibly from you, sir, who have been my master in the English language
for the last ten years.”
“You didn’t get it from me. It’s a beast of a word.”
“Then possibly, sir, I have met it in my independent reading. Perhaps in
The Rambler of your celebrated philosopher, Johnson, which I have been
perusing lately with great interest.”
Baltazar leaned back in his chair.
“Quong Ho,” said he, “you’re a gem. A gem of purest ray serene——”
“The words I recognize as those of Poet Gray,” said Quong Ho.
“That is true,” said Baltazar. “But destiny, as far as I have the
handling of things, won’t condemn you to a vast unfathomed cave of
ocean. What I tried to imply was, that you’re a wonderful fellow—what
the Americans in their fruity idiom which I haven’t yet taught you, call
a peach.”
“I will make a mental note of it, sir,” said Quong Ho.
Baltazar grinned over his plate and went on with his dinner, the dog
Brutus by his side watching the process with well-bred yearning and
accepting an occasional mouthful with a gluttony politely concealed.
Towards the close of the meal Quong Ho brought in lamps and
candles—Baltazar loved vivid illumination—and drew the curtains. In
the house Quong Ho wore Chinese slippers and walked like a ghost. He
began to clear away as soon as Baltazar rose from the table. The latter
filled and lit his pipe and consulted his watch.
“You can come for your lesson in an hour’s time.”
“In an hour precisely,” said Quong Ho.
“Have you prepared the work I set you?”
“With thorough perfection, sir.”
“You’ll be President of the Chinese Republic yet,” said Baltazar.
“It is no mean ambition,” said Quong Ho.
Baltazar took a book from his shelves devoted to general reading—an
amazing medley of dingy volumes such as one sees only in an ill-arranged
second-hand bookseller’s stock. It was a second-hand bookseller’s stock
in literal truth, for Baltazar had bought a catalogue _en bloc_. It
saved infinite trouble. The collection provided him with years of
miscellaneous feeding. It contained little that was modern, nothing that
was of contemporary moment; on the other hand, it gave him many works
which he had ear-marked for perusal, hitherto in vain, from his boyhood.
There were the works of Robertson—the Histories of Scotland, Charles V
and America; Davila’s Wars in France; the Aldine Edition of the British
Poets in many volumes; an incomplete Dodsley’s Old Plays; the works of
one Surtees—he who wrote of the immortal Jorrocks and Soapey Sponge and
Facey Romford; Elzevir editions of Saint Augustine and Tertullian; The
Architectural Beauties of England and Wales; Livingstone’s Travels; and
Queechy, by the author of The Wide, Wide World. A haggis of a library.
No one but John Baltazar could have bought it at one impulsive swoop.
He took down the volume, almost haphazard, for it was his luxurious
custom to devote after dinner a digestive hour to haphazard reading; a
bound volume of pamphlets, which had once entertained him with the
_Times_ reprint of the Obituary of The Duke of Wellington. He sat down
in his arm-chair, turned over some dreary pages, tried to interest
himself in “What is it all About? or an Enquiry into the Statements of
the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon that the Church of England Teaches Salvation by
Baptism, instead of Salvation by the Blood of our Blessed Master Jesus
Christ, and that Many of the Clergy are guilty of Dishonesty and
Perjury, by the Rev. Joseph Bardsley, M.A.,” sadly shook his head, and,
turning over more gloomy pages, came upon an oasis in the desert: “The
Fight at Dame Europa’s School, showing how the German Boy thrashed the
French Boy, and how the English Boy looked on.” He read the mordant
sarcasm of eighteen hundred and seventy-one with great enjoyment, and
had just finished it when Quong Ho, notebook under arm, entered the
room.
“Quong Ho,” said he, “I’ve just been reading a famous satirical pamphlet
on the part which England played in the Franco-Prussian War. When you
have time you might read it. The English is impeccable. You won’t find
any ‘adjunctives’ in it. It lashes England for not having gone to the
help of France in 1870.”
“Why should one nation undertake another’s quarrel?” asked Quong Ho,
with a curious flash in his eyes. “Why should China shed her blood for
the sake, by way of illustration, of Denmark?”
“There is an answer, Quong Ho,” replied Baltazar, “to your astute
question. In ancient times China and Denmark were as far apart as
Neptune and Mercury. But wireless telegraphy has brought them to each
other’s frontiers. Nowadays nations act and react on one another in a
very subtle way. You must read a little more of modern European History,
for Europe is the nerve centre of a system of nervous telepathy which
forms a network round the earth. Nothing can happen in Europe nowadays
without its sensitive reaction in China. You must remember that, at
every instant of your life, if you wish to model a new China. For the
old China has gone. I loved it, as you know, Quong Ho. But it’s as dead
as Assyria. Another struggle between France and Germany would implicate
the civilized world. Great Britain would not look on as in 1870, but
would be on the side of France, and Japan would be on the side of Great
Britain, and China——”
“Would throw her lot into the same scale as Japan,” said Quong Ho,
demurely.
“Let us hope it never will happen,” said Baltazar. “In the meantime
there’s something of greater importance.” He rose, went to his writing
chair by the long deal table. “Let us see. What is it to-night? Elliptic
Functions, isn’t it?”
And while John Baltazar, serene in his reading of political philosophy,
was guiding Quong Ho through mazes of mathematical abstraction, German
aircraft were dropping bombs about England.