SUCH, as far as a few strokes can picture him, was John Baltazar, at the
time when his unsuspected son lay footless in the convalescent home and
discussed with Marcelle Baring the mystery of his existence. A man of
many failings, many intolerances, of some ruthlessness. A man both
sensitive and hard; both bold and shrinking; with the traditional habits
of the ostrich and the heart of a lion. A man apparently given to
extravagances of caprice; and yet remaining always constant to himself,
preserving also throughout his strange career a perfect unity of
character. Perhaps, regarding him from another point of view, his
detractors may say that he loved to play to himself as audience and,
further, put that audience in the gallery. Why not? It is in the essence
of human consciousness that a man must, in some measure, be an actor to
himself. The degree depends on the human equation. Dumas _fils_ once
said of his immortal semi-mulatto father: “He is quite capable of
getting up behind his own carriage, in order to persuade people that he
keeps a black footman.” A savage epigram. But it would have been a
deeper truth if he had said that the wonder of a man who was his father,
was capable of doing it, in order to persuade himself that he kept a
black footman. The more we limit the audience to the man himself, the
more we love him. The more human does the vivid creature appear to us.
If Baltazar played to that audience of one, he had many illustrious
colleagues. If again his method was melodramatic, it at least had
breadth. It dealt with big issues in a broad and simple way. . . .
“That’s what I love about the three great systems of Chinese ethics,” he
would declare. “There’s no damned subtlety about them. You accept the
various propositions or you, don’t. There are no _homoousian_ and
_homoiousian_ conflicts, and suchlike rubbish, that have torn Western
thought to ribbons for over a thousand years. In China you go straight
to the heart of truth. All the subtlety lies, Quong Ho, in the correct
interpretation of your appalling but fascinating script.”
This was a rough profession of faith, almost an analysis of character.
The intellect of the mathematician delighted in the process of arriving
at exactness of statement, but at the same time that statement’s
philosophic simplicity appealed to a nature fundamentally simple.
He abhorred complications. That was his weakness. He claimed,
unphilosophically, the absolute. Hence the abandonment of his academical
career, involving at the same time the merciless abandonment of his
wife. Hence the clean cut of his career in China, where a little supple
coquetting with political corruption would have brought him great wealth
and power. Hence the impenetrable wall he had now contrived between
himself and the rest of mankind. He had no power of compromise.
Thus an attempt has been made to answer the question which Marcelle
Baring vainly put to herself that sleepless night on her return from
London, when a boy’s artless admiration had opened springs of sentiment
which she had thought deliberately sealed forever; the question asked by
Godfrey Baltazar; the same question which almost simultaneously John
Baltazar put to himself, while leaning over the gate in the glory of the
moorland sunset; which, in a wistful, speculative way, he continued to
put to himself after Quong Ho, with new lights on Elliptic Functions and
the philosophy of Lao-Tze and the Ethics of Love—for the severe lesson
in mathematics was always followed by an hour’s improving conversation
on general matters—had retired for the night, leaving him to his last
pipe and his last spell of work. But the discussion on the Ethics of
Love disturbed his more studious thought and brought back the question
which a few hours before had idly flitted across his brain.
Quong Ho had said, somewhat diffidently, in his own language: “Master,
may this inconsiderable person seek the solution of an intimate problem
from one who is a supreme authority on all things concerning human
conduct?”
“Fire away,” said Baltazar in English.
“Thank you, sir; I will proceed to fire. When I left China I was a young
man of no account, the son of peasants long since defunct, your
body-servant, almost your slave, because you purchased my life.”
“We can stow all that,” said Baltazar.
“With your honourable permission, by no means. I was reckoned in
Chen-Chow only as a hopper of clods——”
“Eh? Oh yes. Go on,” smiled Baltazar.
“I saw the daughter of Fung Yu, the gardener of the palace——”
“I remember the old villain. He had a daughter?”
“There were negotiations in progress,” Quong Ho went on. “The young
woman was eminently desirable. She was virtuous and obedient, and not
devoid of physical attractiveness. When I followed you, sir, from China,
I left the affair between myself and Fung Yu in a state of suspended
animation.”
“You mean Fung Yu’s daughter? In our more brutal idiom it comes to
this—that you’re in love with a little girl in China—and she possibly
with you—and you’ve run away and don’t know what the devil to do.”
“Her feelings,” replied Quong Ho calmly, “do not concern me. I doubt
whether she has any of sentimental importance. It is with my own
honourable conduct that I am preoccupied. I left China a person to whom
Fung Yu would condescend: I return as a personage of high intellectual
repute. I shall be able to seek a bride of a far higher social position
than the daughter of Fung Yu. That is not all. My study of English
literature has given me new conceptions of the intellectual
companionship of married life. In the New China there are certainly
young girls of high educational standard, among whom I might find one
who could understand what I was talking about when I spoke of such
philosophical topics as interested me. The point that, as a very young
and humble man, I wish to submit to your infallible wisdom, for my
guidance, is this: am I bound, as an honourable fellow, to marry, in Old
China, the flower-like but cabbage-ignorant daughter of Fung Yu, the
gardener, or am I justified in cutting the Rubicon and seeking in the
New China for a real helpmate?”
“Before proceeding,” replied Baltazar, with the bantering light in his
grey eyes that Quong Ho could never interpret, “will you make a note for
a conversation to-morrow on Mixture of Metaphors?” Quong Ho produced his
notebook. “Yes, just that entry. Mixture of Metaphors. Good,” said he,
when the methodical young Chinaman had obeyed. “Side issues, like that,
have their great importance; but they must be followed after the main
course has been traversed. The whole point of the matter is: how far
have you committed yourself with the girl?”
Quong Ho started back in his straight-backed wooden chair—they were
still side by side at the lamplit centre of the long deal table—and
held up his hands.
“Committed myself? Oh no. The only time I ever addressed her was on one
occasion when I relieved her of the burden of a vessel of water from the
well to her house. But I have spoken very seriously to Fung Yu.”
“Fung Yu can go to blazes,” said Baltazar.
Quong Ho smiled. “I alone could give evidence that would condemn him to
a perpetuity of punishment.”
“So could I,” cried Baltazar. “Graft! If Tammany Hall really wanted to
know how to do things, it ought to sit like a little child at the feet
of a high-class Mandarin’s head-gardener. Fung Yu’s the real thing.”
“He is a corrupt personality,” said Quong Ho.
“Therefore,” replied Baltazar, “he is not the kind of person with whom
an honourable man should seek alliance. As to the lady, her young
affections are obviously unblighted, and very possibly by this time she
is married and the mother of twins. My advice is to dismiss Fung Yu and
his flower-like yet cabbage-ignorant daughter forever from your mind.”
“I shall follow your gracious counsel,” replied Quong Ho. And the
intimate conversation ended.
But it hung around the thoughts of Baltazar for the rest of the night.
Quong Ho was young. Quong Ho had looked upon a daughter of men and found
her fair. In his Chinese self-repressing way he had had his romance. Now
it was over. He pitied Quong Ho. Yet, after a year or so of probation,
the young man, lusty in his youth and confident in his future, would
return to his native land heart-whole, with all the romance of life
still before him—whilst he, Baltazar, would re-enter a world from which
all such things were blotted out for ever. For what of romance could lie
before a man of fifty—one who had lost all touch with women and women’s
ways? For the first time a fear of loneliness sent a shiver through him.
It was not natural for a man to have neither wife nor child. It was but
half an existence; a deliberate spurning of duties and glories and
fulfilled achievement. And his own one romance? Had he been justified in
destroying its gossamer web? It was all very long ago; but the beauty of
it lingered exquisite in his heart. Had he been a mere fool? Were the
results to him and to her worth the sacrifice? And, after all, was he
sure that the results to her had been beneficial rather than disastrous?
He sighed, consoled himself with the reflections that she must now have
around her a family of sons and daughters, and that if ever she gave him
a thought, it was to bless Heaven for her narrow escape; and, so
fortified, he went on with his work.
When he awoke the next morning, the chastened retrospective mood had
passed. After his tea and cold tub, he sat down to the table by the
eastern window through which the morning sun was streaming, setting the
gorse ablaze and the heather blood-red, and attacked the final chapter
of his epoch-making Treatise on the Theory of Groups. The thrill of a
great thing accomplished held him as he wrote. Such moments were worth
living. He breakfasted with the appetite of a man who had earned a right
to the material blessings of life. He went out, groomed the old grey
mare and cleaned out the stable and dug up a patch of ground, rejoicing,
like a young man, in his strength and in the fresh beauty of the day. On
his return to his study he reviewed affectionately the monuments of two
years’ labour. The Treatise of the Theory of Groups, all but complete,
lay in one neat pile of manuscript. Another represented further serious
adventures into the Analytical Geometry of a Four-Dimensional Space than
mortal man had ever undertaken. Who could tell whither those adventures
could lead? Pure mathematics had demonstrated the existence of the
planet Neptune in space of three dimensions. Pure mathematics applied to
four dimensions might prove and explain many transcendental phenomena.
The next world might be four-dimensional and the spirits of the dead who
inhabit it could easily enter confined three-dimensional space. That was
Cayley’s ingenious theory of Ghosts. You could carry it further to space
of five, six, _n_ dimensions; when you could treat the geometry of space
of infinite dimensions as Euclid did the geometry of plane surfaces, you
would have solved the riddle of the universe; you would have come direct
to the Godhead. He turned lovingly over the leaves of the completed
portion of this fascinating essay; also the neighbouring piles of rough
notes, the results of laborious years in China. Another section of the
long deal table was devoted to his translations and editions of the
Chinese classics and to ancient Chinese MSS. and books, his originals
and authorities. The final scholarly translation into English of the
great book of the Tao-tze—The Book of Rewards and Punishments—so full
of deep wisdom, artlessness and charm, rose in three-part completion. It
would knock dear old Stanislas Julien’s French version of 1835 into a
cocked hat. He had collated libraries undreamed of by Julien or by any
subsequent scholar. It would make all the missionaries and consuls and
other amateur sinologists wish they had never been born. . . . Then
again were the Shih-King—the Psalms of ancient China, resonant with
music, bewildering with imagery, vibrating with emotion, hitherto done
into English—_done in_ into English—he chuckled as the mild jest
occurred to him—by a worthy, prosaic and very learned missionary, much
out of sympathy with ancient China because it had never heard of Jesus
Christ before He was born—there were the Shih-King in process of
reverent and, as far as his power lay, of poetic translation. He took
down from his shelves the volume containing the solemnly authoritative
English text published by the Oxford University Press, and opened it at
random. He read:
“_The angry terrors of compassionate Heaven extend through this lower
world._ (_The King’s_) _counsels and plans are crooked and bad; when
will he stop_ (_in his course_)_? Counsels that are good he will not
follow. And those that are not good he employs. When I look at his
counsels and plans, I am greatly pained._”
He laughed out loud, shut the book and returned it to the shelf.
“‘I am greatly pained’! Oh, my Lord!”
He searched his manuscript for his own version, and read it through with
a satisfaction not devoid of smugness. A professional poet might have
found, like the Chinese writer, the inevitable word, the sacred flash;
but, after all, he had made the thing deadened by the learned Oxford
professor live again; he had suggested some of the music and the grace
of the original—enough to attract and not to repel the ordinary English
reader. And with all that, he would like to see any man, Chinese or
European, pick a hole in his scholarship.
He lit his pipe, and before settling down to work again surveyed the
great mass of his achievement. Life was truly worth living, when, during
its brief span, such great things could be done. With a short interval
for luncheon, he worked steadily on through the day, sacrificing his
accustomed spell of outdoor exercise, and when Quong Ho, who had changed
his nondescript European working kit for the cool, immaculate Chinese
dress, announced that dinner would be ready in a quarter of an hour, he
had all but written Finis to his Treatise on the Theory of Groups.
“Lord!” said he, “I must wash and get a mouthful of fresh air.” He
whistled to the dog, Brutus, who had lain at his feet most of the
afternoon, and went off. When he got outside, he discovered, to his
surprise, for he had sat in front of a window all the time, that a white
mist had gathered on the moorland and that his horizon as he stood on
his doorstep was scarcely bounded by his rude granite wall. The fog
covered him in like a cupola. He patted the Airedale’s head and smiled,
well content in this increased security of his isolation.
“We might, be the last living beings on the face of the globe,” said he
to Quong Ho, who came to announce dinner.
“Yes, sir,” said Quong Ho.
Baltazar shot a humorous glance at him: “The idea doesn’t seem to
provoke you to radiant enthusiasm.”
“I fail to see, sir,” replied Quong Ho, “who, in that hypothetical case,
would benefit by your illuminating editions of the Chinese classics, and
what advantage it would be to me to continue the severe study of
Elliptic Functions.”
“I’m afraid you’re a dismal utilitarian,” said his master, passing by
him into the house. “Yet I suppose you’re right,” he added a few moments
afterwards, as he sat down to table and unfolded his napkin. “If we were
the only two people left in the world, we’d very soon chuck our
intellectual pursuits. I don’t think I care a damn for the things
themselves. As far as I am solely and personally concerned, this
excellent bit of grilled salmon is infinitely more vital than the
discovery of any mathematical truth. The latter has only value as it
relates to the progress of humanity. If there is no humanity, it is
valueless. It won’t help me on worth a cent. But the salmon, a typical
edible, is essential to the physical existence of ME. So I should let
Chinese philosophy and the Higher Mathematics go hang, and confine
myself to the chase of salmon or rabbits or roots or acorns—and so
would you—and in a very few years we should be hairy, long-nailed
savages, flying at each other’s throats for the last succulent bit of
Brutus.”
The dog, hearing his name, rested his long chin against his master’s
knee and regarded him with wistful eyes.
“No, old son,” laughed Baltazar, giving him a morsel of salmon, “we’re
not at that point yet. Make your mind easy. You and I and Quong Ho will
take our work out into the hurrying markets of the earth and find
justification for all these lonely days. Although we’re temporary
recluses, we’re valuable citizens of the world. We deserve more salmon.”
Quong Ho presented the dish, and Baltazar and Brutus got their deserts.
Presently Quong Ho brought in lamb cutlets with fresh peas from the
garden, which Baltazar attacked with relish.
“Quong Ho,” said Baltazar, “you’re a wonder. Is there anything you can’t
do?”
The young man smiled bland recognition of the compliment, but said
nothing. As Baltazar’s body-servant he refrained from familiar
conversation. But Baltazar was in an expansive mood. He went on:
“You cook for me enchantingly. You serve me perfectly. Your attitude,
Quong Ho, is one of the most exquisite tact. But if we were the last two
persons on the earth, you would see me damned before you would devote
yourself to my personal comfort in this unrestricted manner.”
“I think not,” replied Quong Ho. “The truths of religion would not be
affected by the annihilation of the human race. To you, who are to me
_in loco parenti_——”
“_Parentis_, my dear fellow. It’s Latin. Make a note of it.”
“I do so, mentally,” said Quong Ho. “To you, sir, who are to me in the
place of a parent, I owe filial obligation, and therefore I should not
see you damned before I administered to your wants.”
“Rubbish!” said Baltazar, with a wave of his hand.
“I speak the truth,” said Quong Ho gravely.
Baltazar did not reply, but devoted himself to the cutlets and peas.
Quong Ho performed the sacred rite of the offering of wine. The meal was
concluded in its nice formality of conventional life, and after coffee
Baltazar lit his pipe and sat down to his usual hour’s mental
relaxation. But his mind wandered from _The Caxtons_, which he had taken
down from the shelves, to Quong Ho’s quiet profession of loyalty. For
all his intimate knowledge of the Chinese character, this perhaps was
the first time that he realized the depth of the young man’s real
affection. And suddenly it occurred to him that he also was greatly
attached to Quong Ho; not only through habit, or implicit trust, or
gratitude for essential co-operation in carrying out his eccentric
scheme of life; but by ties very simple and homely. Bacon, speaking of
man, says: “If he have not a friend, he may quit the stage.” Baltazar
glowed with the thought that he could still act his part as a human
being. He had his friend. Indeed, he had had one for all these months,
and even years, without knowing it. The loneliness of soul which he had
accepted as his portion from the time of his flight from Cambridge, and
for the last day or two he had begun to dread, was filled by the
incongruous sympathy of the young Chinaman. Hitherto he had accepted his
fidelity as a matter of course; he had rewarded it by scrupulous
observance of his obligations. But it had been his good pleasure to
regard his disciple as a human and intellectual toy, all the more
delectable for his lack of the humorous sense. To pull well-known
strings and elicit platitudes expressed in the solemnity of his
classically learned English had been his mischievous delight. But—“I
speak the truth,” Quong Ho had said; and the accent in which he had said
it was one of grave conviction, even of rebuke.
He took up his book again and almost immediately let it drop.
“If I lost Quong Ho, what the devil would become of me?” He threw the
book on to the floor and leaned back in his arm-chair, pipe in mouth,
his hands clasped behind his head. In the whole wide world of hundreds
of millions of people, he had not a single friend, save Quong Ho. He had
been very dense not to realize before the elementary truth that
individual life is not supportable by itself. Newton’s Third Law of
Motion—_to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction_—was
a law of life. The incessant reaction on the individual would be death.
One other nature at least was needed for the distribution and
application of vital forces, and in their mutual action and reaction
could alone be found the compensation that was safety, sanity, normal
human existence. And the more attuned were the part of the reciprocal
human machine, the greater the compensation; this human adjustment had
its degrees: understanding, friendship, affection, culminating in
love—the perfect state.
When Quong Ho appeared, books and papers as usual under his arm,
Baltazar waved an inviting arm.
“Take a chair, Quong Ho, and let us talk. Elliptic Functions are too
inhuman for me to-night.”
Quong Ho put his burden down on the table and brought up a
straight-backed, rush-bottomed chair, and sat down stiffly, facing his
master, who took up his parable.
“I’ve been thinking of what you said at dinner. You touched on a
spiritual aspect of the hypothetical emotion we were discussing which
did not occur to me. What made you do it?”
“Sir,” replied Quong Ho, “if you will permit me to speak my thoughts, I
cannot separate life into two watertight departments——”
“_Com_partments,” murmured Baltazar, through force of habit.
Quong Ho bowed. “I recollect. To resume. I cannot separate life into two
watertight compartments—the material and the spiritual. It appears to
me to be the subtle interfusion, the solemnization of holy matrimony,
between the two.”
“One of the charms, my son, of your conversation,” laughed Baltazar, “is
its unexpected allusiveness.”
Quong Ho rose and made a deep bow. “You have called me, sir, by a term
which overwhelms me with filial gratitude.”
Baltazar, who had used the word deliberately, held out his hand.
“I believe,” said he in Chinese, “in your profession of a son’s
affection, and therefore I admit you to the position. After a year or so
our lives will materially be separated, but spiritually they will run
the same course.”
“This is the happiest and most fortunate day of my life,” said Quong Ho.
“Without going into superlatives,” replied Baltazar in English, “I may
reciprocate the sentiment.”
They talked on, developing the idea of wedding of the material and the
spiritual, branching off into fascinating side-tracks, as men of alert
intelligence delight to do in conversation, and coming back now and then
with the flash of unexpectedness to the main issue. They touched on the
hermits of Thebaïd.
“Their outlook,” said Baltazar, “was exclusively spiritual,
fundamentally selfish. They were out to save their own silly,
unimportant souls from hell-fire, and nothing else mattered. Egotism
raised to infinity. Our retirement has nothing at all in common with
theirs.”
“Sir,” said Quong Ho, “since we are speaking very seriously, may I,
without indiscretion, ask you whether you too are not out to save your
soul?”
Baltazar rose from his chair and strode up and down the long room,
casting at Quong Ho a swift glance from beneath frowning brows every
time he passed him. At last he halted and said:
“That’s so. The history of my inner life has been an attempt to save my
soul. But there’s a hell of a lot of difference between me and St.
Simeon Stylites. That was a kind of ass who sat for years on the top of
a pillar and never did a hand’s turn for anybody. All he thought of was
his escape from hell. Now I, as far as my soul is concerned, don’t care
a damn whether it’s going to hell or heaven. My object in saving it is
to be of use to my fellow-creatures.”
Quong Ho, who had risen when his master rose, said:
“All that is clear to me. I too am here for the same purpose.”
“You?” cried Baltazar. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I want to eradicate from my mind the soul-destroying associations of
the daughter of the gardener Fung Yu.”
Then Baltazar laughed aloud and clapped the young Chinaman on the
shoulder, an unprecedented act of hearty familiarity.
“My son,” said he, “this is a discipline that will bring us both, me
old, you young, to the greater wisdom. In the meanwhile, it’s a happy
discipline, isn’t it? We’ve got all that mortal man—under discipline,
mark you—all that mortal man can want. Spiritually, we have the sacred
relations of father and son. Intellectually, we are equals and”—he
threw an arm around the room—“we have the learning of the world at our
command. Materially—what more can we desire?”
He looked fondly around the long, low-ceilinged room, brilliantly
illuminated by four petroleum lamps and half a dozen candles, and dwelt
upon its homely, scholarly comfort; the Turkey carpets; the easeful
chairs and sofa; the exquisite and priceless rolls of Chinese paintings
between the bookcases; the bookcases filled, some with the old-world
books of Europe, others with the literature of China, printed volumes,
manuscripts beyond money value; the long table piled with the
inestimable results of human intellect; the warm bronze curtains, before
each of the four windows; the dear and familiar form of the very dog,
Brutus, stretched out asleep in front of the great chimney-piece. And
the silence was that of the most exclusive and the most untroubled
corner of Paradise.
“What a Heaven-sent thing is Peace,” said Baltazar.
At that moment the silence was disturbed by a strange and unknown sound.
Baltazar and Quong Ho started and looked questioningly at each other. It
seemed like the distant beating of almighty wings. They held their
breath. No, it was like the sweeping thunder of an express train. But
what should express trains be doing on the moorland? With common impulse
they rose and went out of doors into the thick mist. Then the
thundering, clattering rush broke vibrant on their ears. It was in the
air around, above them. John Baltazar put his hand to a bewildered head.
What unheard-of convulsion of nature was this? Then suddenly he had a
second’s consciousness of bursting flame and overwhelming crash, and the
blackness of death submerged his senses.