THE renting of Spendale Farm, derelict for many years, caused some
excitement on the moorland. It had achieved notoriety by concentrating
in its small acreage every disadvantage that a farm could have. A soil
so barren and granitic that scarcely grass would grow on it; a situation
of bleakness unique in that bleak and unsheltered region; an
inaccessibility almost beyond the powers of transport. The last was the
final factor in the bankruptcy and despair of former tenants. Three
miles of foot-and-wagon-worn track—and this now indistinguishable—must
be traversed before striking a road, and along five miles of the road
must one go before reaching the tiny town of Water-End, which contained
the nearest railway station, shop, post office and church. Excitement
grew in Water-End when motor lorries and materials and workmen from the
cathedral town, thirty miles off, all made their daily way to Spendale
Farm, and later, when packing-cases marked “Books, with the greatest
care” were dumped on the station platform. All bore the name of John
Baltazar—an outlandish name, if ever there was one, to eyes and ears of
remotely rural England. And when the demented foreigner—for so they
conceived him to be—was due to arrive in order to take up his
residence, a fact proclaimed by the presence outside the station of
Farmer Benstead’s old grey mare and springless cart which Ellis and
Dean, the local estate agents, were known to have bought for the
new-comer, the population of Water-End turned out to see what manner of
being he was. The hefty, quickly moving Englishman, obviously the
master, disappointed their anticipations; but the Chinaman, his coiled
pigtail unconcealed beneath the brim of a bowler hat too small for him,
made their eyes bulge with wonder. They did not even know he was a
Chinaman until the vicar’s son, a lad of sixteen, unavowed emissary of a
curious vicarage, gave them the information. Master and man drove off
alone in the cart with their luggage, in the midst of gaping silence.
A Chinaman. What was a Chinaman doing in those parts? Men speculated in
the bar parlour of “The Three Feathers.” Gossips of the more timorous
sex discussed the possibility of a yellow peril—children kidnapped,
throats cut, horrors perpetrated in lonely places. Mrs. Trevenna had
seen murder in his eye; and Mrs. Trevenna, who had buried three
husbands, was a woman whose opinion was respected. Mrs. Bates said his
yellow hands were like the claws of a turkey-cock. Her daughter,
Gwinnie, giggling, remarked that she wouldn’t like to have them round
her neck.
“That’s what I’ve heard they do,” said old Mrs. Sopwith. “I remember my
grandfather, him that was in the Indian Mutiny, telling me, when I was a
little girl, that they thought nothing of strangling you. It was their
religion.”
Thus the amiable Quong Ho leapt at once into a pretty repute—of which
an addiction to Thuggee was a venial aspect.
But when, a few days afterwards, Quong Ho drove into Water-End on a
shopping expedition, and in the presence of palpitating Water-Enders
carried on his business and passed remarks on the weather, polite and
smiling, in the easy English of the vicar and the motoring gentlefolk,
with no perceptible trace of a foreign accent, they gaped once more in
amazement. Language is a marvellous solvent of prejudice. No one who
talked English like the Vicar could strangle English necks. But Quong
Ho, unfortunately, complicated this favourable impression by overdoing
the perfect Briton.
At the butcher’s door, freshly coloured as the carcasses hanging at each
side, stood Gwinnie Bates, the leader of the staring crowd, blocking the
way. Quong Ho, trained theoretically by Baltazar in European ceremonial,
swept her a bow with his billycock hat—a bow composite of the court of
Charles the Second and Ratcliffe Highway, and addressed her:
“Beauteous Madam, will you allow your devoted servant the privilege of a
passage?”
She melted hysterically from the doorway. Her friends, like a grinning
Red Sea, divided into an avenue through which passed Quong Ho, with
gestures courteously expressive of thanks, followed by the butcher’s
assistant carrying to the cart the leg of mutton and the joint of beef
which Quong Ho had purchased. Quong Ho drove off amid unceremonial
guffaws and gigglings.
“Beauteous Madam! Oh, Hell!” roared the butcher’s assistant.
Gwinnie Bates checked her mirth and advanced with flushed cheeks and
defiant eyes.
“What’s wrong about it, Johnnie Evans? If you want to insult me, say it
out. If you can’t be a gentleman, at least be a man.”
“Pretty fine gentleman,” sneered Johnnie Evans, jerking a thumb towards
the receding Chinaman.
“He can teach manners to the likes of you, at any rate,” cried Gwinnie
Bates, and went off triumphant with her head in the air.
Thus, through the courteous demeanour of Quong Ho on this and subsequent
occasions, Water-End became divided into two camps—Sinophile and
Sinophobe. The latter party asserted that such heathen smiled most when
their designs were most criminal, and carried out their activities to
the accompaniment of unholy mirth. Was he ever seen at church or chapel?
His admirers confessed this abstention from the means of grace. Did he
ever speak of the doings of his master with the outlandish name, and
himself, in the middle of the moor? Quong Ho was admitted to be a
museum-piece of discretion. And as time went on, although his ways were
marked by the same perfect courtesy, he lost favour amongst his party,
through a bland taciturnity and a polite rejection of conversational
advantage.
Now for this taciturnity there were excellent reasons: none other than
the commands of John Baltazar. When Quong Ho returned the first time to
the farm with the jeering laughter ringing in his ears, he bewailed the
impoliteness of the inhabitants of Water-End. Said Baltazar in Chinese:
“Dost thou not know the proverb, Quong Ho, ‘_A man must insult himself
before others will?_’ And again, what saith the Master? ‘_Rotten wood
cannot be carved, and walls made of dirt and mud cannot be plastered._’
By acting against my orders and striving to plaster the muddy walls of
these rustics with ceremonial politeness, you have insulted yourself and
therefore exposed yourself to rudeness.”
“Master,” said Quong Ho, “it appears that I have erred grievously.”
“Listen again,” said Baltazar, with a twinkle in his eyes unperceived by
the downcast Quong Ho, “to what the Master saith: ‘_The failure to
cultivate virtue, the failure to examine and analyse what I have learnt,
the inability to move towards righteousness after being shown the way,
the inability to correct my faults—these are the causes of my grief._’”
Quong Ho replied that although his deviation from the path of virtue was
glaring to the most myopic vision, he nevertheless was in a dilemma,
inasmuch as he had followed the precepts of Western courteous
observance, the ceremonial, for instance, of the hat-salutation, laid
down for him by his illustrious teacher.
Baltazar, always in Chinese, replied kindly: “O youth of indifferent
understanding, is it not written in the Shû King in the Charge to Yüeh:
‘_In learning there should be a humble mind and the maintenance of a
constant earnestness: in such a case improvement will surely come. When
a man’s thoughts from first to last are constantly fixed on learning,
his virtuous cultivation comes unperceived_’?”
“With those truths am I acquainted,” replied Quong Ho.
“Then, my good fellow,” retorted Baltazar in English, “why the devil
don’t you apply them? I’ve absolutely forbidden you to have any
intercourse whatever with the people round about. You’re not to talk to
them about my concerns or your concerns. You’re not to listen to any of
their talk or to bring back to me scraps of their rotten gossip. You’re
to go to Water-End on necessary business—unfortunately we can’t live on
air or warm ourselves in the winter with bottled sunbeams—but that’s
the limit. Outside of that you’re a man deaf and dumb. You’re to go one
better than the three Sacred Apes of Japan, who, holding hands
respectively before eyes, ears and mouth, signify ‘I see no evil; I hear
no evil; and I speak no evil.’ In your case, it’s to be: ‘I see nothing;
I hear nothing; I speak nothing.’”
“In future,” said Quong Ho, “my eyes shall be blinded, my ears sealed
and my mouth locked.”
“If there are any more animated discussions of last week’s
thunderstorms, or further Beauteous-Madamizing of young females, I’ll
regretfully have to send you straight back to China.”
The unblinking stare in Baltazar’s great grey eyes and the obstinate set
of his lips—signs of purpose which Quong Ho for eight years had learned
to gauge with infallible precision—caused him to quake excessively. Not
only was his servitude to Baltazar a matter of oath, but a return before
the completion of the special education which would enable him to take
immediate rank in New China, would be the death-blow to his ambitions.
So Quong Ho took to heart the precepts of the Humble Mind and swore to
outdo the Sacred Apes of Japan, even as his master had ordained.
After this, in the first days of their Thebaïd, master and man held
frequent conversations on the relations with the outside world which the
former had prescribed. The three years, said Baltazar, which lay before
them in the solitude of the wilderness, were for the maceration of the
flesh, the pursuit of virtue and the cultivation of the intellect. He
illustrated his argument with countless quotations from the Chinese
classics.
“In this fashion, Quong Ho,” said he, “you are drinking of the _Five
Sources of Happiness_. To wit: _Long Life_: for here, in this unpolluted
atmosphere, you are acquiring physical health. _Riches_: they will be
yours in no matter what University of Modern China you go as Professor
of Mathematics. _Soundness of Body and Serenity of Mind_: the Latins put
the idea into epigrammatic form—Mens sano in corpore sano; what can be
more conducive to serenity of mind than this studious solitude,
undisturbed by material cares? _The Love of Virtue_: we have every hour
of all our days to acquire it. _Fulfilling to the end the_ WILL; is it
not the WILL that has set us here?”
“Indubitably,” said Quong Ho.
“Hearken again,” said Baltazar, “to the _Six Extreme Evils. Misfortune
shortening the Life_: from that no man is exempt—but from it no men are
more than we protected. _Sickness_: likewise—but I have a box of simple
remedies, and if the worst comes, there is a man learned in physic at
Water-End. _Distress of Mind_: if our minds in these ideal surroundings
are so unstable as to be distressed, we are unworthy of the name of
philosophers. _Poverty_: I have an ample fortune. _Wickedness_: we, who
are Seekers after Truth, have deliberately set ourselves beyond the
reach of Temptation. _Weakness_: that, O Quong Ho, is the only danger.
You must be on your guard against it night and day, especially on the
days when necessity exposes you to the manifold temptations of that
microcosm of Babylon, Pekin and San Francisco which goes by the name of
Water-End.”
So it came to pass that when astounding tidings, the most pregnant in
the world’s history, came to Water-End and the little townlet blazed
with the wildfire of gossip, Quong Ho, scrupulous obeyer of Law, heard
without listening and, forbearing to question, always returned to
Spendale Farm with a mind rendered, with Oriental deliberation, so
profoundly blank as to preclude the possibility of retailing to his
master the idle news of the outer world. And gradually, such is the
contempt bred by familiarity, Quong Ho lost prestige in Water-End. His
weekly appearance in the town, with old grey mare and cart, grew to be
one of the commonplace recurrent phenomena such as the Vicar’s Sunday
sermon and the Saturday evening orgy and home-convoying of old Jack
Bonnithorne, the champion alcoholist of the moorland.
But around Baltazar of the one brief glimpse arose many a legend. He was
mad. He was a magician. He was an unspeakable voluptuary; though whence
and how arrived the houris who ministered to his voluptuousness, was an
insoluble problem. He was a missionary with one convert. The theory, put
forward by the farmers, that he was the champion fool on the Moor,
gained the most general acceptance. Then someone whispered that he was a
German spy. The valiant of the town planned an expedition at dead of
night to surprise him at his nefarious practices; but the sarcasms of
Police-Sergeant Doubleday, who asked what information useful to the
enemy, save the crop of heather per square acre, could be given by a man
inhabiting the most desolate spot in the United Kingdom, checked their
enterprise. Their ardour, too, was damped by a spell of torrential rain,
which robbed of its pleasantness the prospect of a sixteen-mile walk.
When the sun came out, the suspicion had faded from their minds, and
shortly afterwards most of them found themselves in the King’s uniform
in regions far distant from Water-End.
One morning Police-Sergeant Doubleday lay in wait for Quong Ho outside
the Bank, and informed him that he must register himself as an alien,
under the Defence of the Realm Act. Quong Ho blandly accompanied the
Sergeant to the Police Station and complied with the formalities. Full
name: Li Quong Ho. Nationality: Chinese. Occupation: Student.
“Eh?” cried Sergeant Doubleday, a vast, red-faced man with a scrubby
black moustache. “That won’t do. Aren’t you Mr. Whats-his-name’s
man-servant?”
“That sphere of my activities is purely incidental,” said Quong Ho.
“Kindly put down ‘student.’”
“What do you study?”
“Specialized branches of Western Philosophy,” replied Quong Ho.
“Well, I’m damned!” said the mystified Doubleday. “Anyhow, it’s none of
my business.”
So down went Quong Ho as “student”—the only alien on the register.
“That’s very interesting,” said the Vicar, during his next chat with
Doubleday. “The Chinese are a remarkable race. Their progress should be
watched.”
“I’m afraid it can’t be done, sir. What with being short-handed and
overworked as it is——”
At the Vicar’s explanation the Sergeant mopped his forehead in relief.
“I’ve a man’s job to keep Christians in order, without shadowing the
heathen,” said he.
“I’m convinced that his master and himself are a pair of harmless
eccentrics,” said the Vicar.
And the Vicar’s word went the round of the district, and eccentrics, or
the nearest approach to it that local tongues could manage, the
inhabitants of Spendale Farm were finally designated—though what were
“eccentrics” remained a matter of pleasant and fruitful conjecture.
When Quong Ho returned to the farmhouse after his encounter with
Sergeant Doubleday, he said nothing about his registration as an alien.
Nor did it occur to him to show the paper money which he had received in
lieu of the usual gold in exchange for the cheque which he had cashed at
the bank; for the disposal of petty cash did not concern John Baltazar,
who rightly trusted in the Chinaman’s scrupulous honesty. That, in spite
of the most definite orders, he should leave Baltazar uninformed of the
various signs and tokens of national unrest which he had observed at
Water-End, caused Quong Ho occasional twinges of conscience. He
remembered the saying: “_To shirk your duty when you see it before you,
shows want of moral courage._” But what was his duty? On the other hand,
there was the dictum: “_To sacrifice to a spirit with which you have
nothing to do is mere servility._” What had he to do with this purely
English war-spirit that he should servilely sacrifice to it his almost
filial obligations? Obviously nothing. Quong Ho therefore continued to
purvey no idle gossip, and went about his varied avocations with a
serene mind.
Now, as John Baltazar, who had been dead to the English-speaking world
for nearly twenty years, held correspondence with no one save a few
necessary tradesmen, mostly booksellers, as he took in no periodical,
daily, weekly, monthly or annual of any kind whatever, and as he
conversed with no human being except Quong Ho, whose lips he had sealed,
he had created for himself an almost perfect barrage through which the
news of contemporary happenings could not penetrate.
“Quong Ho,” he had said, one Spring day, soon after his return from
China, when he had come to one of those revolutionary decisions that
marked the crises of his life, “I have sworn by the spirits of my
ancestors to live the life of a recluse for the space of three years,
holding communication with no man or woman and cutting myself off like
one that is dead from the interests of the contemporaneous world. My
reasons for this determination I will eventually unfold to you, provided
you carry out faithfully the contract I am about to propose. If you
decline to bind yourself, which as a free man you are at liberty to do,
I will pay your passage back to China and give you a sum of money
adequate to start you on an honest career. If you accept it, I will
honourably perform my part. You have been my servant and my pupil for
the last eight years——”
“You saved this miserable orphan from death at the hands of a tyrannic
governor,” interposed Quong Ho—they were speaking his native
tongue,—“you have taught him the language of England and the
philosophies both of East and West, and you are to me as a father to
whom I owe filial fidelity and devotion.”
“That is well said, Quong Ho,” replied Baltazar. “This person
appreciates your professions of loyalty.” The scene of this memorable
conversation, by the way, was a small bedroom at the top of the Savoy
Hotel; Baltazar, with bloodshot eyes, a splitting headache and tousled
raiment, sitting on the bed, and Quong Ho, impeccably vested in Chinese
attire, standing before him. “He has not been honourably blessed with
sons, and therefore will receive from you the devotedness that is due to
a parent. But for the space of three years only. There may come a time
when exaggerated filial zeal may become embarrassing.”
And he set forth the contract. In return for the absolute obedience of
Quong Ho and his acceptance of the life of a recluse for three years, he
undertook to send him back to China as the most accomplished native
mathematician in existence—for he had already gauged the young man’s
peculiar genius—with a Master of Arts degree, if possible, from some
British University, and thus assure him a distinguished position in that
New China whose marvellous future had been the subject of so many of
their dreams and discussions. And Quong Ho had taken solemn oaths of
fealty and with the Chinaman’s singleness of purpose, accepted, a few
weeks later, the deadly and enduring solitude of the moorland as an
unquestionable condition of existence.
Secure in the unswerving fidelity of Quong Ho, and in the impregnable
seclusion of this God-disclosed hermitage, John Baltazar lived a life
according to his ideals. No outer ripple of the maëlstrom in which the
world was engulfed lapped, however faintly, against the low granite wall
encircling the low-built granite farmhouse. His retirement was absolute,
his retreat off the track of the most casual wanderer.
Six months passed before his eyes rested on a human being other than
Quong Ho. It is true that the rate-collector, savagely cursing his luck
and the bicycle-destroying track that led from the road to the
farmhouse, had appeared one day with a paper showing certain
indebtedness; but Quong Ho had received it and, gravely promising a
cheque in payment, had dismissed the intruder. No other official came
near the place. Quong Ho called weekly at the Post office and railway
station, to the great relief of postman and van-driver.
“Thought and money acutely applied,” remarked Baltazar, “together with
freedom from the entanglement of family relationships, are the
determining factors of human happiness. A man with these factors at his
disposal is a fool if he cannot, fashion for himself whatever kind of
existence he pleases.”
But one day, a cloudless winter morning, when the sunshine kissing the
frost-bound earth transmuted the myriad frondage of the heather into a
valley of diamonds, Baltazar, on his way from the stable to the front
door, came across a stranger leaning over the gate. He was a heavy man
with a fat, clean-shaven face, loose lips and little furtive eyes. He
wore a new golfing suit exaggerated in cut and aggressive in colour.
He said with easy familiarity: “Good morning, Mr. Baltazar.”
“Since you know my name,” replied Baltazar, with an air of courtesy, “it
has doubtless struck you that this is my gate.”
“Of course——”
“You are leaning on it,” said Baltazar.
The visitor, perplexed, straightened himself.
“I’m a sort of neighbour of yours, you know. I live about seven miles
off—the big property this side of Water-End: Cedar Chase—and I’ve
often thought I’d run over in the Rolls-Royce as far as I could, and
walk the rest, and see how you were getting along.”
“That is most amiable of you,” said Baltazar, advancing to the gate and
resting his arm on it with an easy suggestion of proprietorship. “You
have run over, you have walked—and now you see.”
Before Baltazar’s ironical gaze the stranger’s eyelids fluttered in
disconcertment.
“I fancied you might be lonely and might like to look in and have a game
of bridge one of these days. My name’s Pillivant.”
“Pillivant,” said Baltazar. “I don’t much like it, but there are
doubtless worse.”
“You may have heard it. Pillivant and Co., Timber Merchants. We’ve
rather come to the front lately.”
“Your personal initiative, I should imagine,” said Baltazar.
“I don’t say as it isn’t,” replied Mr. Pillivant. “When whacking
Government contracts are going, why not get ’em?”
“Why not? Why waste time in doing anything else, all day long, but
getting ’em?”
Mr. Pillivant drew from his inner breast pocket a vast gold casket of a
cigar-case, opened it and held it out towards his inhospitable host.
“Have a cigar? You needn’t be afraid. They stand me in two hundred and
fifty shillings a hundred and I get ’em wholesale. No?” Baltazar
declined politely. “You’re missing a good thing.” He bit off the end of
the one he had chosen, lit it with a fat wax vesta extracted from a
minor gold casket and drew a few puffs. “Funny sort of life you seem to
be leading here, Mr. Baltazar. Dam’ funny!”
“I perceive you have a keen sense of humour,” said Baltazar.
Again the mocking stare of his cold, grey eyes abashed the unwelcome
visitor, who filled in the ensuing silence by re-biting and re-lighting
his half-crown cigar. The operation over:
“Lovely day, isn’t it?” said he.
“So lovely, Mr. Pillivant,” replied Baltazar, “that it would be selfish
of me to do otherwise than leave you to the undisturbed enjoyment of
it.”
And, with a polite bow, he left Mr. Pillivant and walked, in a dignified
way, into the house. Mr. Pillivant, conscious at last of the rejection
of his friendly overtures, stared for a while, and then, sticking his
cigar at a truculent angle in his mouth, swaggered away across the moor.
“Quong Ho,” said Baltazar, “when next you go to Water-End, it will be
your duty to find a powerful and exceedingly nasty-tempered dog.”
A fortnight afterwards Brutus was added to the establishment.