BALTAZAR awoke a couple of mornings afterwards to find that certain
vague happenings which he had regarded as dreams were true. He really
lay in a comfortable bed, in a pleasant room; the soft-voiced woman in
grey, whose ministrations he had been unable to divine, stood smiling at
the foot of his bed, an unmistakable nurse. Conscious of discomfort, he
raised his hand and felt his head swathed in a close-fitting, scientific
bandage. He remembered now that he had lain there for a considerable
time. What he had taken for outrageous assaults on his brain for the
purpose of extracting the secrets of his mathematical researches, had
been the doctor dressing his wounds.
“How are you this morning?” asked the nurse.
“Perfectly well, thank you,” said Baltazar. “I should feel better if you
would tell me where I am.”
“This is Mr. Pillivant’s house.”
“Pillivant—Pillivant? Oh yes. I’ve got it. It seems as if I had been
off my head for a bit.” The nurse nodded. “I’m all right now. Let me put
things together.” Suddenly he sat up. “My God! How is Quong Ho?”
“He is getting on as well as can be expected,” replied the nurse.
“He’s alive? Quite sure?”
“Quite sure.”
Baltazar fell back on the pillow. “The last thing I remember clearly was
their taking him into the Cottage Hospital, after that infernal jolting
across the moor. What happened then?”
“You collapsed, and they brought you here.”
“What day is it?”
“Friday.”
“Good Lord,” said Baltazar, “I’ve been here since midday Wednesday.”
“Would you like a little breakfast?”
“I should like a lot,” declared Baltazar.
The nurse laughed. The patient was better. She turned to leave the room,
but Baltazar checked her.
“Before you go just tell me if I’ve got the situation clear. The
European war has been going on for two years. In the course of a
new-fangled kind of warfare the Germans drop bombs from Zeppelins over
England. A Zeppelin dropped bombs on my house on Tuesday night—to get
rid of them—so Mrs. Pillivant said. You see, everything’s coming back
to me. Afterwards it came down in flames, and all the crew were burned.
Is that right?”
“Perfectly,” said the nurse.
“Now I know more or less where I am,” said Baltazar.
The nurse fetched his breakfast, which he ate with appetite. He had
barely finished when Dr. Rewsby entered.
“This is capital. Capital,” said he. “Sitting up and taking nourishment.
How’s the pulse?”
“Never mind about me,” said Baltazar, as the doctor took hold of his
wrist. “What about Quong Ho?”
The doctor gave a serious report. Fractured skull, severe concussion.
Broken legs. Semi-consciousness, however, had returned—the hopeful
sign. But it would be a ticklish and tedious business.
“If you want another opinion, a man from Harley Street, special nurses,
don’t hesitate a second,” said Baltazar. “Money’s no object.”
“I’ll bear in mind what you say,” replied the doctor; “but if his
constitution is as sound as yours, he’ll do all right. By all the rules
of the game you ought to be as helpless as he is.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“You’ve had half your scalp tom away. How you manage to be sitting up
now, eating eggs, after your lunatic performances on Wednesday, is more
than I can understand.”
Baltazar smiled grimly. “I can’t afford the time to fool about in a
state of unconsciousness, when I have two years’ arrears of European
history to make up.”
“Never mind European history,” said the doctor. “Let us see how this
head of yours is getting on.”
The dressing completed, he said to Baltazar:
“Now you’ll lie quiet and not worry about the war, Quong Ho, or
anything.”
“And grow wings and order a halo and work out the quadrature of the
circle and discover the formula for the Deity in terms of the Ultimate
Function of Energy. . . . Man alive!” he cried impetuously, raising
himself on his elbow. “Don’t you understand? I’ve been dead for
years—my own silly, selfish doing—and now I’ve come to life and found
the world in an incomprehensible mess. If I don’t go out and try to
understand it, I shall go stark, staring mad!”
“I can only order you to stay in bed till I give you permission to get
up,” said the doctor. “Good-bye. I’ll come in this evening.”
As soon as he had gone Baltazar threw off the bedclothes and sprang to
his feet.
“Doctors be hanged!” said he. “I’ve not given in to illness all my life
long, and I’m not going to begin now. Besides, I’m as fit as ever I was.
I’m going to dress.”
“I’m afraid you can’t,” said the nurse.
“Why?”
“You haven’t any clothes.”
He glanced for a second or two at the unfamiliar green and purple
striped silk pyjamas in which he was clad, and remembered the undervest
and flannel trousers, foul with blood and grime, in which he had arrived
at Water-End.
“The devil!” said he, and he stood gasping as a new conception of
himself flashed across his mind. “Except for these borrowed things, I am
even more naked than when I came into the world.”
“You’d better go back to bed,” said the nurse.
“I’ve got to go back to the world,” retorted Baltazar. “As quick as
possible.”
“You can’t do it in pyjamas,” said the nurse.
“I must ask my host to lend me some clothes.”
“I’ll go down and see him about it,” said the nurse.
She went out, leaving Baltazar sitting on the edge of the bed. Presently
entered Pillivant, who burst into heartiness of greeting. Delighted he
was to see him looking so well. At one time he half expected there was
going to be a funeral in the house. Heard that he wanted some togs. Only
too happy to rig him out. Would pick out all the necessary kit
to-morrow.
“But I want clothes now,” said Baltazar.
Pillivant shook his head. “Must obey doctor’s orders. By disobeying in
the first place I nearly had a cold corpse on my hands, and if there’s
one thing Mrs. Pillivant dislikes more than another, it’s a corpse. When
her old aunt died here, she went half off her chump. No, no, old man,”
he continued, in soothing tones which exasperated Baltazar, “you be good
and lie doggo to-day, as the doctor says, and to-morrow we’ll see about
getting up.”
“You’ve got the whip-hand of me,” said Baltazar, glowering.
“That’s about it,” grinned Pillivant. “And you’re not used to not having
your own way.”
“I suppose I’m not,” said Baltazar, looking at his host more kindly. “I
don’t know but what you’re right. A little discipline might be
beneficial for me.” He slipped back into the bed and nodded to the
nurse, who settled him comfortably. “A little contact with other people
might restore my manners. As I’m beholden to you for everything, Mr.
Pillivant, I may at least be civil. As a matter of fact, I’m infinitely
grateful, and I place myself in your hands unreservedly.”
“Oh, that’s all right, old man,” said Pillivant.
“It isn’t all right,” cried Baltazar, realizing, in his
self-condemnatory way, the ungracious attitude he had adopted from the
first towards his host. “I’ve been merely rude. I’m sorry. I’ve lived in
China long enough to know that no personal catastrophe can excuse lack
of courtesy. By obeying your medical man I see that I shall give least
trouble to your household.”
“You needn’t talk like a book about it,” said Pillivant.
“I’ve lived with books so long,” replied Baltazar, “that perhaps I have
lost the ways of contemporary Englishmen.”
Pillivant threw him a furtive and suspicious glance.
“Most books are all damn rot,” he declared.
“You’re not the first philosopher that has enunciated that opinion,”
said Baltazar, with a laugh. “Didn’t a character in one of the old
dramatists—I think—say ‘To mind the inside of a book is to entertain
oneself with the forced product of another man’s brain’? No. It’s the
practical men who do things, isn’t it?”
“I’m a practical man myself,” said Pillivant, “and seeing as how I
started as an office-boy at eight shillings a week, I’ve done a blooming
lot of things. Look”—he swung a chair, and sat down near the bed, and
bent confidentially towards Baltazar—“in July fourteen I was only a
little builder and contractor up at Holloway. When Kitchener in
September called for his million men——”
“Wait!” cried Baltazar, putting his hand up to his forehead. “In
September nineteen fourteen Kitchener called for a _million men_?”
“Yes, yes, that’s all ancient history. I was telling you—when the cry
went out, I said to myself: a million men will want accommodation.
Temporary buildings. Huts. No end of timber. I hadn’t a penny in the
world. But I did a big bluff and sold the Government timber which I
hadn’t got for twice the price I knew I could buy it at. In six months I
was a rich man, and I’ve been growing richer and richer ever since. I’ve
got a flat in Park Lane and this house in the country, and I’m on
Munitions, and I have my cars and as much petrol to burn as I want, and
I’m a useful man to the Government, and doing my bit for the war. And
none of your blooming books about it. Just plain common sense. If I had
been worrying my head about books, I should have lost my chance. Just
what you’ve done. You’ve been burying yourself in books and haven’t even
heard of the war, let alone doing anything for your country. Books make
me tired. To hell with them!”
Baltazar looked at the puffy, small-eyed man in his clear way. He
disliked him exceedingly. Even with the most limited knowledge of war
conditions, it was evident he had been exploiting them to his own
advantage. But when you haven’t a rag of your own to your back and are
dressed in another man’s pyjamas, lying in his bed and eating his food,
you must observe the decencies of life.
“I suppose lots of fortunes are being made out of this war.”
“I should think so. Those honestly made, well, the chaps with brains
deserve them. But, at the same time, there’s a lot of profiteering going
on”—Pillivant shook an unctuous head—“which is a perfect disgrace.”
“Profiteering—that’s a new word.”
“You’ll find lots of new words and lots of all sorts of new things now
you’ve waked up.”
“I’m sure I shall,” said Baltazar. “And now, if you’ve half an hour to
spare, I wonder if you would mind telling me something about the war.”
* * * * *
That day and the next, Baltazar listened to Pillivant, the nurse and the
doctor’s story of the world conflict, and read everything bearing on the
subject with which they could supply him. Dr. Rewsby, who did not share
Pillivant’s disdain for books, ransacked the little town for war
literature. He bought him white books, pamphlets, back numbers of
magazines and newspapers, maps. . . . What he heard, what he read, was
the common knowledge of every intelligent child, but to this man of vast
intellectual achievement it was staggeringly new. For those two days he
lost sense of time, desire to move from the bewildering mass of lambent
history that grew in piles by his bedside. The lies, the treacheries,
the horrors that had accumulated on the consciousness of all other men
one by one, burst upon him in one thundering concentration of hell. The
martyrdom of Belgium, the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral, the sinking
of the _Lusitania_, the use of poison gas, the bombing of open towns,
the unmasking of the German Beast in all its lust and
shamelessness—stunned him, so that at times he would put his hands to
his head and cry: “It’s impossible! I can’t believe it.” And whoever was
with him would answer: “It is true. What you read is but the outside of
the devilry the civilized world is out to fight.” And his scholar’s mind
would revolt. What of intellectual Germany? The mathematicians, the
Orientalists, whose names were to him like household words, to say
nothing of those eminent in sciences outside the sphere of his own
studies? They were worse, the doctor declared, than the brutish peasant
or the brutal operative. A monstrous intellectualism developed to the
disregard of ethical sanction. The doctor brought him one of the great
cartoons of the war, which he had cut out from some paper and kept, by
Norman Lindsay, the great Australian black and white artist—the “Jekyll
and Hyde” cartoon, representing a typical benevolent elderly German
professor regarding himself in a mirror; and the reflection was a
gorilla in Prussian spiked helmet and uniform, dripping with blood. And
then Baltazar’s blood curdled in his veins as he realized the truth of
the picture. All the mighty intellectualism of Germany was but an
instrument of its gorilla animalism. It was an overwhelming revelation:
the almost mesmeric dominance of Prussia over the other Teutonic States
of Germany and Austria, reducing them to Prussia’s own atrophied
civilization; that atrophied civilization itself, till now unanalysed,
but now a byword of history, the development, on abnormal intellectual
lines, of the ruthless barbarism of a non-European race. Strange that he
had not thought of it before. Had anything good, any poem, picture,
song, music, statue, dream building, sweet philosophy, ever come out of
Prussia? Never. Not one. Her children were “fire and sword, red ruin and
the breaking-up of laws.” And now the rest of the Germanic Empire had
lost its soul. Prussia extended from the Baltic to the Danube. The whole
of Central Europe was one vast cesspool, in which all things good were
cast to deliquesce in putrefaction, while over it floated supreme the
livid miasma of Prussianism.
In some sort of figurative conception as this did his brain realize the
psychological meaning of the forces against which the civilized world
was struggling. But there was the other side of the world’s embattled
hosts, whose tremendous energies baffled his mental grasp. England’s
Navy—yes. He had been born and bred in the belief of its invincibility.
But the British Army? A glorious army, of course; a blaze of honour from
Cressy upwards; a sure shield and buckler in the far-flung posts of
Empire; but a thing necessarily apart from the vast military systems of
the Continent of Europe. And now he learned, to his stupefaction, that
the British Empire, calling up all her sons from within those same
far-flung posts, had made itself, within two years, one of the three
greatest military powers in the world. The casualties alone exceeded the
total strength of the original British Army serving with the colours.
The Army now was an organization of millions. Where had they come from?
His three interpreters of the outer world gave him information according
to their respective lights. All the early gathering of the hosts had
been voluntary enlistments. The armies springing up at Lord Kitchener’s
call had been labelled numerically by his magic name. Only recently had
we been driven to conscription. And Kitchener himself—the only great
soldier of whom he had ever heard? Drowned in the _Hampshire_ last
June. . . .
Then again the revolution in national life—the paper currency, the
darkened streets of towns, the licensing laws—further excited his
throbbing curiosity. He remembered with a spasm almost of remorse the
few signs and tokens of war which had reached him and passed unheeded;
the National Registration, which he had resented as a bureaucratic
impertinence; the mad taxation of income which he had regarded as
evidence of England’s decay. . . .
“Has ever man been such a fool as I, since the world began?”
The hard-headed doctor to whom this rhetorical question was addressed,
replied:
“I can’t recall an instance.”
When driven to contemplation of his own isolation, he reflected that all
the time there had been a living link between himself and this upheaved
world. Every week, rain or fine, through snow or dust, Quong Ho had
visited the little town.
“When did the news of the war become general in Water-End?” he asked.
He had to put the question in two or three different forms before his
puzzled informants could perceive its drift, for they could not conceive
it being the question of an intelligent man. He could not yet realize
the electric shock that convulsed the land from end to end on the
declaration of war. He could not gauge the immediate disruption of
social life throughout the country. The calling up of reservists, the
mobilization of the Territorial forces alone affected instantly every
community, no matter how remote from centres of industry. The queer
straits to which every community was reduced, owing to the closing of
the banks during that fateful August week, had also brought the reality
of the war home to every individual. Then the issue of Treasury notes.
The recruiting. From the very first day of the war, Water-End, they told
him, was as much agog with it all as London itself. From the beginning
the town had been plastered with patriotic posters. The mayor for the
first months had exhibited the latest telegrams outside the town hall.
There had been a camp of Territorials some few miles away and the High
Street had reeked of war. Government war notices met the least observant
eye in post office, bank and railway station.
“If what you say is true,” said Baltazar, “how could Quong Ho have come
here every week and failed to understand what was going on? Not only is
he a master of English, but he’s a man of acute intellect.”
“That,” replied the doctor, “you must ask Quong Ho when his intellect
has recovered from its present eclipse.”
“But the fellow must have known all along,” Baltazar persisted. “Come
now,”—he sat up in bed impulsively—“he must, mustn’t he?”
“I should have thought that a negro from Central Africa, who only spoke
Central African, would have guessed,” replied the doctor.
“Then why the devil didn’t he tell me?”
“I’m afraid I must refer you to my previous answer,” said the doctor.
“It strikes me that I’m a bigger fool than ever,” said Baltazar.
A smile flitted over the grey-haired doctor’s shrewd thin face. He did
not controvert the proposition.
“It’s also borne in upon me,” continued Baltazar, “that I’ll have to
scrap everything I’ve ever learned—and I’ve learned a hell of a
lot—I’m an original mathematician, and I think I know more about
Chinese language and literature than any man living. Oh! I’m not modest.
I know exactly what my attainments are. As I say, I’ve learned a hell of
a lot, and I’ll have to scrap it all and just sit down and begin to
learn the elementary things of existence, from the very beginning, all
over again, like a schoolboy.”
“Hear, hear!” said Pillivant, blatantly golf-accoutred, who had entered
by the open door at the opening of Baltazar’s avowal. “Now you’re
talking sense. I’m glad to see you realize how sinfully you’ve been
wasting your time. Chinese! What’s the good of Chinese? They’ve got to
learn our language, not we theirs. I know. I went out to Hong Kong as a
young man for five months on a building job. Every man-Jack talks
pidgin-English. That’s good enough to get along with. Do you mean to say
you’ve been spending your life learning Chinese? Of all the rotten
things——”
“I’m aware, Mr. Pillivant,” said Baltazar, with a grimace intended, for
a smile, which on his haggard face and beneath his bandaged head had a
somewhat sinister aspect, “I’m aware that in your eyes I must appear
rather a contemptible personage.”
“Oh, not at all, old man,” cried Pillivant. “Everyone to his hobby.
After all it’s a free country. Have a cigar.”
He produced the portable gold casket. The doctor caught a swift glance
from his patient and checked the generous offer.
“Not yet, Pillivant. A cigarette or two is all I can allow him.”
Pillivant selected and lit a cigar. There was a span of silence. He
looked out of the window. Presently he began to praise the local
golf-course, some mile or so distant. A natural course, with natural
bunkers. The greens artificial—every sod brought from miles. Now the
infernal Government had taken away their men. Not a soul in the place
who understood anything about turf. Consequently the greens were going
to the devil. It was an infernal shame to let golf-greens go to the
devil. Goff was a national institution, necessary to maintain tired
war-workers, like himself, in a state of national efficiency. But what
could one expect from the rotten lot who constituted the so-called
Government? Anyhow, you could still get some sort of a game. Baltazar
must come round with him as soon as he could get about.
“I’ve never played golf in my life,” said Baltazar.
“Never played——? Why, you seem to be out of everything.”
Presently he swaggered out at the end of his monstrous cigar. Baltazar
turned a weary head.
“Doctor,” said he, “would they hang me very high if I slew my
benefactor?”
* * * * *
As soon as sticking-plaster replaced the head bandage, the most
impatient of men insisted on rising and going out into the world, clad
in a borrowed suit of the detested Pillivant. His first care was to
visit the Cottage Hospital, where Quong Ho, semi-conscious, still hung
between life and death. Yielding to Baltazar’s insistence, Dr. Rewsby
had summoned in consultation the leading surgeon of the nearest town,
the great cathedral city. From the point of view of the Faculty nothing
could be simpler than Quong Ho’s injuries. To bring a specialist from
London would be a wicked waste of invaluable lime. All that science
could do was being done. The rest must be left to Nature. Baltazar was
disappointed. Having an exile’s faith in the wonders of modern surgery,
he had thought that a few hundreds of pounds would have brought down a
magician of a fellow from Harley Street with gleaming steel instruments,
who could have mended Quong Ho’s head in a few miraculous seconds. The
ironical smile on the lips of Rewsby, for whom he had conceived respect
and liking, convinced him of extravagant imaginings. He professed
satisfaction, although sorely troubled by his queerly working
conscience. Outside the ward, he grabbed Dr. Rewsby by the arm.
“Look here, Doctor,” said he. “I want you to understand my position. I
must pay some penalty for my egotistical folly in bringing Quong Ho to
this infernal place. Oh, I know,” he added quickly, checking with a
gesture the doctor’s obvious remonstrance; “I know it might have
happened anywhere. But nowhere else than in that desert island of a farm
would I have had to leave him alone for hours on the bare ground,
without medical assistance. It’s my fault. I must pay for it.”
“You’ve paid for it, my good friend,” said Dr. Rewsby, “by your anxiety,
by your—apparently—by your remorse. You’ve done everything that a
human being could do in the circumstances.”
“But don’t you see, I brought the poor fellow to this through my selfish
folly. You must let me pay for it in some way.”
Said the doctor, a practical man, with the interests of his little
struggling hospital at heart: “It’s open to you to give a donation to
the Cottage Hospital.”
“All right,” said Baltazar, flinging out an arm. “If he gets through
there’s a thousand pounds for the hospital.”
“Good. And if he doesn’t?”
Baltazar drew a short breath, glanced down and askance beneath his
shaggy brown eyebrows, and set a heavy, obstinate jaw. Then suddenly he
flashed upon the doctor:
“If he dies you won’t get a penny from me. But I’ll give every cent I
have in the world to the General Fund of the hospitals of the United
Kingdom.”
“Do you really mean that, Mr. Baltazar?”
“Mean it? Of course I mean it. I’ve done all kinds of rotten things in
my life, but I’ve never broken my word. By George! I haven’t. If Quong
Ho dies, the world will be the poorer, not only by a loyal soul, but by
one of the most powerful mathematical intellects it has ever seen. And
it’s I”—he thumped his chest—“I, who have robbed the world of him. And
it’s I who must pay the penalty.”
“Pardon my impertinence,” said Dr. Rewsby, drawing on his motoring
gloves, as a sign of ending the interview; “but have you generally
conducted your life on these extravagant principles?”
“I don’t quite understand——” replied Baltazar, stiffening.
“If Mr. Quong Ho dies—and I’m glad to say the probability is against
his doing so—but if he does, you vow, as an act of penance, that you’ll
reduce yourself to a state of poverty and walk out into the world
without one penny. Is that right?”
“Perfectly,” said Baltazar.
“Well, as a medical man, with a hobby, a special interest in—let us
say—psychology, I’ve been indiscreet enough to wonder whether this is
the first time you’ve made such a Quixotic vow. In fact, now I come to
think of it, you made a similar one within two minutes of my first
meeting you.”
Baltazar met his eyes. “In fact, you want to know whether I’m not a bit
mad.”
“Not at all,” laughed the doctor. “But I have a shrewd suspicion that
the folly you bewail—the eccentric hermit life on the moor—was the
result of some such rashly taken obligation.”
“Suppose it was,” said Baltazar; “what then?”
“I should say you were cultivating a very bad habit, and I should advise
you to give it up.”
He smiled, waved a friendly hand, and ran down the steps to his car.
Baltazar watched him crank-up, slip to the wheel, and depart, without
saying a word in self-defence. So far from offending him, the doctor had
risen higher in his estimation. A man with brains, and the faculty of
using them; a fellow of remarkable penetration; also of courage. He
differentiated his outspokenness from Pillivant’s blatancy. The former
was one man of intellect speaking frankly to another; the latter. . . .
He remembered the lecture, illustrated by quotations from the Chinese
classics, which he had read to Quong Ho when his disciple, on his first
visit to Water-End, had complained of the lack of manners of the local
inhabitants. Why should he worry about Pillivant? As he had said to
Quong Ho: “_Rotten wood cannot be carved, and walls made of dirt and mud
cannot be plastered._” Never mind Pillivant. It was Rewsby, and Rewsby’s
quick summing-up of his psychological tendencies that mattered. Not a
human being had ever before presented him to himself in any just and
intelligible way. Of course he had heard truths, pseudo-truths, dictated
by violent prejudice, in his brief and disastrous married life. But they
had all been superficial; never gone to bed-rock. Since then he had been
free as a god from criticism. And now came this shrewd, sagacious
country doctor, who in the lightest, friendliest way in the world, put
an unerring finger on the real unsound spot in his character.
“. . . A very bad habit, and I should advise you to give it up.”
Behind those commonplace words he knew lay a wise man’s condemnation of
his habitual dealing with life. He walked through the tiny town on his
way to “The Cedars,” unconscious of the curious interest of the
inhabitants, to whom the sight of the mystery-enveloped and now bombed
and head-bandaged tenant of Spendale Farm was a matter of eager,
instantaneous mental photography, so that the picture could be produced
as a subject for many weeks’ future gossip, and he pondered deeply over
Dr. Rewsby’s criticism.
“Have you generally conducted your life on these extravagant
principles?”
He had. There was no denying it. A childish memory emerged from the mist
of years. He must have been eight or nine. All about a dog. A puppy had
destroyed a new paint-box, priceless possession, and in a fit of passion
he had nearly beaten the puppy to death. And when his anger was spent
and he grew terribly afraid, and sprawled down by the puppy, the puppy
licked his hand. And he swore to God, as a child, that if the puppy
lived and did not tell his father, he would never beat a dog again. The
puppy lived, and, with splendid loyalty, never breathed a word to a
human soul, and loved him with a love passing the love of women. And one
day a neighbour’s bad-tempered dog got into the kitchen-garden and
attacked him, and though he had a stick by chance in his hand, he
remembered his vow, and stood with folded arms and set teeth and let the
dog bite his legs, until he was rescued by the gardener and carried
indoors.
He remembered this, and a train of similar fantastic incidents
culminating in his vow of solitude, and reviewed them all, in the light
of Dr. Rewsby’s criticism. What good, in the name of sanity, had his
wild, Quixotic resolves accomplished? How had they benefited Spooner,
for instance, to whom he had surrendered the Senior Wranglership? During
his brief stay in London he had had the curiosity to look up Spooner in
reference books; found him an Assistant Secretary in a Government
office, Sir William Spooner, K.C.B.; an honourable position, but a
position which he would have attained—originally through the Civil
Service examination—whether he had been second, fourth, tenth Wrangler
in the Tripos. His, Baltazar’s, idiot sacrifice had advanced Spooner’s
career not one millimetre: just as his self-denying ordinance in the
realm of dogs had not benefited one jot the canine race—for the mongrel
retriever who had bitten him heroically arm-folded, had been shot the
next day by the remorseful neighbour, who had been longing for an
opportunity of getting conscientiously rid of an ill-conditioned cur.
And then there was his flight from Cambridge and Marcelle.
“Damn that doctor!” said he, striding along the road.
It was all very well to damn the doctor; but he had entered into a fresh
engagement, which in spite of its newly revealed folly, he would break
for nothing in the world. Yet what practical good would his little
fortune accomplish scattered among the hundreds of hospitals of the
United Kingdom? A pittance to each. And he himself, with all his gifts,
thrown penniless upon a strange world at war, of what use would he be?
His first necessarily animal impulse would be to prey upon society for
the means of subsistence. Whereas, a free man, with his assured income,
he could throw himself into the national struggle without thought of his
own material needs.
Quong Ho’s life acquired a new preciousness. He must live, if only to
save him from this new absurdity to which he was pledged.