ONCE more Baltazar stood within his granite enclosure and surveyed the
scene of ruin and horror. He had hired a cart and driven over with three
nondescript elderly labouring men, who were now wandering aimlessly
about the wreckage. Nothing seemed changed since he had last left it in
the wake of the stretcher-borne body of Quong Ho, although the Water-End
Fire Brigade, learning that the place was still on fire, and inspired by
zeal and curiosity, had meanwhile come down with helmets, hatchets and
hoses, and had drenched the interior of the house with water pumped from
the well. There had been no attempt at salvage. The administrators of
the derelict property had long since given up paying insurance premiums
on the building, and Baltazar, so long alien to European life, and
desirous of coming into as slight contact as possible with the outside
world, had not troubled to insure the contents.
A foul, sickly smell tainted the still air. Mingled with the sour odour
of the charred and sodden mess inside the dwelling, rose the miasma of
corruption. Baltazar made a grimace of disgust. Before any salvage could
be done the latter causes of offence must be removed. He summoned the
men and gave his directions. They found the old mare’s head and the dog
and fragments of the goats, alive with the infinite horror of flies and
other abominable life. There was a cesspool handy. Throw them all in and
clamp down the cast-iron lid. It did not matter. Nevermore would
Spendale Farm be a human habitation. The men conveyed with their shovels
the nameless things to the unhallowed resting-place. Baltazar would have
liked to give the faithful Brutus, who had obviously rushed out of the
house at the heels of Quong Ho and himself, decent burial. But not only
had Brutus ceased to be Brutus, but Baltazar knew from experience the
toil of digging in that granite-bound earth.
He left the men to their task, which they performed without
compunction—had he not offered them the amazing sum of a pound each for
their day’s work?—and plunged through the front door into the black
chaos which was once his home. The sun streamed down upon unimaginable
filth. He was wearing the clothes he had borrowed from Pillivant and at
first he stepped warily. But every step landed him deeper in the damp
carbonized welter, and at last he slipped and came down sprawling in the
midst of it, so that when he rose he found himself fouled and begrimed
from head to foot. He picked his way out again and stood on the front
steps looking hopelessly in at the piled mass of nothingness.
He had listened to the report of the fire brigade’s captain, and his
doubtless correct theory that the desperate marauder had dropped his
bombs almost simultaneously, one explosive and the other incendiary. The
latter had caught the homestead fair and had caused the instant and
terrific conflagration. Yet he had hoped. . . . He tried to hope still.
The men would soon return from the cesspool and begin to shovel away the
debris from the writing-table by the wall.
To get his brain into complete working order had been a matter of time.
The shock of the explosion, his wound, his enormous physical and mental
effort on the memorable Wednesday, his puzzled amazement, the
cataclysmic revelation of the war, his anxiety for Quong Ho, had knocked
him out for a couple of days. When he recovered and regained mental grip
of things, the only things he could grip at first were the staggering
history of the war and the progress of Quong Ho. The two absorbing
interests battened down fears that vaguely began to rise from deep
recesses of his mind. But strength regained, Quong Ho out of immediate
peril of death and the war a thing envisaged, practically understood,
accepted, the fears burst their hatches and crowded round him, haunting
and tormenting. And now he stared through the doorway of his house, with
sinking heart, scarcely daring to hope that those fears should prove
unrealized.
He glanced round. The men were spending inordinate time in the disposal
of the carrion. Again he entered and stood in the midst of the rubbish.
Only one section of bookcase remained, crazily askew. He had noted it on
the Wednesday. He clambered gingerly towards it. The first slanting,
half-charred, half-drenched book, whose title he made out was _Queechy_.
By the author of _The Wide, Wide World_. Next to it was _Flowering
Shrubs of Great Britain_, the date of which he knew to be
eighteen-fifty-four. His heart sank. Only the refuse of his famous deal
with the second-hand bookseller remained. Just that little bit of
section. The rest of his library was there—down there in the molten
quagmire.
At last the men came, shovels on shoulder. He pointed out the place
where his long table used to stand and bade them dig. He had brought,
too, a shovel for himself, and he dug with them, violently, pantingly,
distractedly, heaving the shovelfuls over his shoulders, wallowing in
the filth regardless of Pillivant’s expensive clothes; soon an object of
dripping sweat and squalor, distinguishable only from his co-workers by
his begrimed and bandaged head. The men began to pant and relax. He
overheard as in a dream one of them saying, in a grumbling tone,
something about beer. The sun beat fiercely down on the roofless site.
He said:
“Dig like hell. Dig all day. I’ll stand you a couple of gallons apiece
when you get home. If you’re thirsty now, there’s heaps of water.”
The results of severe arithmetical calculation gleamed in each man’s
eye. The command over sixteen free pints of ale transcended the dreams
of desire. They fell to again, working with renewed vigour.
The incendiary bomb had apparently fallen square on the northern end of
the long north to south building and had scattered the original wall in
which the great chimney-piece had been built and flung the granite
outwards, obliterating the less solidly constructed kitchen and Quong
Ho’s quarters, and tearing down the side of the scullery. The lower
courses of the rest of the main walls stood more or less secure. But the
roof of dried tinder-thatch had fallen in ablaze, and every thing
beneath it had been consumed by fire. Nothing remained to distinguish
Baltazar’s bedroom at the southern end, once separated from the
house-piece by a wooden partition reaching to the rafters, from the
remainder of the awful parallelogram of disaster. The rigid mathematical
lines of the low granite boundaries, with one end a heap of stony ruin,
oppressed him as he dug with a sense of the ghastly futility of human
self-imprisonment between walls. The position of the shapeless ragged
gaps that had once been windows alone guided him in his search. The
precious long deal table ran along the eastern wall. His writing-seat,
surrounded by the most precious possessions of all, was situated in
front of the north-east window—the long room had two windows, east and
west, on each side. And it was just there where he used to sit, the
happiest of men, in the midst of objective proof of dreams coming true,
that chaos seemed to reign supreme.
“Go on, go on. Dig like hell. Every scrap of unburnt paper is a treasure
to me. Look at every shovelful.”
After hours of toil, they found a little heap of clotted fragments, the
useless cores of burnt clumps of writing. Now and then a man would come
with a few filaments, having shaken the charred edges free, and, looking
wonderingly at the unintelligible outer leaf, would ask: “Is this any
good to you, sir?” And Baltazar, his heart cold and heavy as a stone,
would bid him cast away the mocking remnants of an all but unique copy
of a Chinese classic.
* * * * *
It was over. The three men, having loyally earned their twenty shillings
and the promised two gallons of beer, stood spent and drenched, like
Baltazar himself, with grime and sweat.
“Anything more, sir?”
“Nothing,” said Baltazar.
They shouldered their shovels and he his, and they marched away from the
devastated place and drove back across the moor. Baltazar sat next the
man who drove, in the front of the empty and futile cart, and said never
a word. For the first time in his eager existence, defeat overwhelmed
him. The work of a laborious lifetime had been destroyed in a few hours.
With infinite toil, perhaps, he might recapture the main lines of his
thought-revolutionizing treatise on the Theory of Groups: his studies in
the Analytical Geometry of Four Dimensional Space. Perhaps. He had
relied for his data on the innumerable notes and solutions of intricate
problems which had cost the labour of many years. And these had gone.
The world had hitherto wondered at two such scholar tragedies—Newton’s
_Principia_ destroyed by the dog Diamond, the first volume of Carlyle’s
_French Revolution_ burned by Mill’s stupid housemaid. But in both cases
only the finished product had perished. The data remained. The rewriting
was but a painful business of recompilation. But with him, not only the
more or less finished product, but the fundamental material was lost
forever. He shrank with dismay, almost with terror, at the thought of
going through that infinite maze of accurate calculation and reasoning
once more. Still, as far as the mathematics went, the palimpsest of the
brain existed. Reconstitution was humanly possible. But with the Chinese
editions—for most of it the material could only be found in remote
libraries in China; for much of it, the material no longer survived in
the explored world.
He had come hoping against hope, arguing that great masses of manuscript
on thick paper were practically indestructible by fire. The outsides,
the edges might be burnt, but the vast bulk of inside sheets could be
preserved. But he had not counted on the disruption and devouring effect
of an incendiary bomb falling at the most precious end of the long deal
working-table. Probably the whole room had been instantaneously carpeted
thick with loose sheets, and the great stacks of manuscript had, as it
were, been burnt in detail. Then, for a while, on his hateful ride, he
strove with conjecture. But what was the use of vain imaginings? That
which was done was done. The harvest of his life had been annihilated.
If he died to-morrow, the world would be no richer by his existence than
by that of any dead goat whose body had just been cast into the
cesspool. To recover the harvest would cost him many years of uninspired
drudgery. It would be a horrible re-living, an impossible attempt to
recapture the ardour of the pioneer, the thrills of discovery. For the
first time he really felt the meaning of his age, the non-resilience of
fifty. For the black present the very meaning of his life had been wiped
out.
The men, wearied, befouled and thirsty, sat silent in the cart, each
dreaming of the two gallons of beer that awaited him at the end of the
journey. They knew they had been searching for papers; but to them
valuable papers had only one signification; something perhaps to do with
a bank; something which constituted a claim to money: they had discussed
it during the half-hour midday interval for food. Wills, mortgages,
title-deeds, they had heard of. The daughter of one of them, a
parlourmaid in the house of a leading solicitor in the neighbouring
cathedral city, ranking next to legendary London in majesty in the eyes
of the untravelled Water-Enders, had told him that she had heard her
master say, at dinner, that the contents of the tin-boxes ranged around
his office represented half a million of money. His announcement vastly
impressed his colleagues, one of whom explained that all real wealth
nowadays was a matter of bits of paper. He himself had fifteen pounds in
the Savings Bank, but nothing to show for it but his Post Office book.
Then the nature of their employer’s frenzied quest became obvious to
them all. They had found nothing. Their employer sat like a ruined man.
They pitied him and, in the delicacy of their English souls, refrained
from intruding by speech upon his despair. In the meantime, there was no
harm in surrendering their imaginations to the prospect of the incessant
flow of delectable liquid down their parched throttles.
When they halted at the gate of The Cedars, Baltazar pulled out a sheaf
of Treasury notes and gave each man thirty shillings. The extra ten
shillings represented to their simple minds, not the promised two
gallons of beer, but beer in perpetuity. This generosity on the part of
one evidently ruined bewildered them. Baltazar strode down the drive
leaving men impressed with the idea that he was a gentleman of the old
school to whose service they were privileged to be devoted. They
retired, singing his praises, being elderly men of a simple and
tradition-bred generation.
His golf clubs on the lawn beside him, Pillivant, attired in imaginative
golfing raiment, was taking the air in front of the house. He lay in an
elaborate cane chair and smoked a great cigar. At the sight of Baltazar
he started up.
“Holy Moses! You are in a devil of a mess.”
“I’m afraid I’ve ruined your suit,” said Baltazar. “If you would only
let me know what your tailor charged for it——”
“The Sackville Street robber bled me eight guineas,” said Pillivant,
rather greedily.
“Here are eight pounds ten,” said Baltazar, counting out his notes.
“Two shillings change,” laughed Pillivant, handling him a florin.
“It’s kind of you to relieve me from this particular embarrassment. The
rest of my obligations I don’t quite see how to meet.”
“We won’t charge you for board and lodging, old man, if that’s what you
mean. Take it and welcome. With regard to Rewsby and the nurse, you can
do what you like. Meanwhile, you’ll be glad to know that the ready-made
kit you ordered from Brady & Co. have turned up this afternoon.”
“I’d better clean myself up and put some of it on,” said Baltazar.
“You had indeed,” said Pillivant. “You look as if you had fallen into a
sewer.”
The previous day, obeying telephone instructions, a representative of a
firm of ready-made clothiers in the cathedral city had called to take
measurements and orders. This evening Baltazar was able to array himself
once more in clothes of his own. By getting rid of borrowed garments he
felt relieved of an immense burden.
“Well, how did you get on?” asked Pillivant heartily as they sat down to
dinner. “Find anything?”
“Nothing but an appetite,” replied Baltazar with a smile.
He could not tell this man of alien ideals and limited intellectual
horizon of his irreparable loss, or hint his intolerable despair. The
coarse husband and the common, over-bejewelled wife laughed at his
sally, hoped the menu would furnish sufficiency of food. He was but to
say the word, and they would kill the goose they were fattening up for
Michaelmas. The jest lasted off and on through the meal. They pressed
him to second and third helpings, joking, though genuinely hospitable.
At first he strove to entertain them. Spoke picturesquely of his queer
life in remotest China, where he lived the Chinese life and almost came
to think Chinese thoughts. Mrs. Pillivant yawned behind bediamonded
fingers. Pillivant said: “Dam funny,” with complete lack of enthusiasm
in the expletive, and as soon as he found a point of departure, set
forth on the story of a discreditable grievance against the War Office.
He couldn’t personally examine every plank of timber supplied. It had
all been passed by their own inspector. If they sent down a young idiot
of a subaltern who didn’t know the difference between green pine and
green cheese, it was their affair, not his. He had got his contract, and
there it was. Their talk about an enquiry was all nonsense. The War
Office ought to employ business men on business affairs. He had just
gone in, with another firm, on a big contract for a aerodrome in the
North of England. Some political Paul Pry had discovered—so he
said—that it could be built for half the money. Rot. Patriotism was one
thing, but running your business at a loss was another. The patriotic
contractor must earn his living, like anybody else. Why should his wife
and family starve? In righteous indignation he poured himself a bumper
of 1904 Bollinger, which he drained before finishing the whole grouse
which as a fifth course had been set before him. The entire system was
one vast entanglement of red tape, he continued. We were out to beat
Germany. How could we, when every effort was strangled by the red tape
aforesaid? Germany had to be beaten. How? By British pluck and British
enterprise. Pluck, by God! were we not showing it now on the Somme? And
enterprise? He poured out more Bollinger. If the fool Government would
let business men do business things in a business way, we would get the
Germans beaten and fawning for peace in a fortnight. There was nothing
wrong with England. He was English, through and through.
“Although I won’t deny,” said he, with an incipient hiccough, “that my
mother spoke Yiddish. No, no my dear”—he turned with a protesting wave
to his wife—“I want to make things perfectly clear and above board to
our old friend Baltazar. I’ve got a coat-of-arms—look up Pillivant in
any book on Heraldry and you’ll see it—that goes back to Edward the
Something—not the Seventh. I’m English, I tell you. But I’m not
responsible for my mother, who came from Posen. Now, what do you do to
prevent typhoid? You inoculate. I’m inoculated. That’s my fortunate
position. I’m inoculated against Prussianism and all it stands for.
Could I be a pacifist or a conscientious objector? No. I’m immune from
the disease of pro-Germanism. As I’ve been telling you, I’m English
through and through, and I’m spending my life and my fortune in seeing
that Old England comes out on top.”
To prove the expenditure of fortune he seized a fresh bottle of
Bollinger which the butler had just opened and filled Baltazar’s glass
and his own.
“If you don’t drink, you’re a pro-German. To hell with the Kaiser.”
Baltazar drank the toast politely and patriotically; the merest sip of
champagne; for beyond the first brandy and soda which had been poured
down his parched and exhausted throat, he had kept his vow of
abstinence, in spite of his host’s continued pressure. He felt sure of
himself now; wondered how he could ever have brought himself to the
present Pillivant condition. He liked Pillivant less than ever; yet he
began to be fascinated by the truth concerning Pillivant which rose
unashamed to the surface of the wine-cup.
When the cigars were put on the table, Mrs. Pillivant rose. Baltazar
opened the door for her to pass out. On the first occasion of his doing
so, the first time he had come down to dinner, she had been puzzled, and
asked him whether he was not going to smoke with her husband. She still
did not seem to understand the conventional courtesy. When the door was
closed behind her, Pillivant drew a great breath of relief.
“Pity you won’t drink,” said he, refilling his glass. “We might have
made a night of it. And this is such good stuff, too. About the most
expensive I could buy.”
After that, impelled by the craving for self-revelation, he took up his
parable again, and entertained his guest with many details of opinions,
habits and actions, that had not been fit for wifely ears. When the
stream of confidence at last grew maudlin, Baltazar, pleading an
invalid’s fatigue after a heavy day, bade him good night.
“I’ve been so long out of touch with English life,” said he, “that it is
most interesting to me to meet a typical Englishman.”
Pillivant clapped him heavily on the shoulder.
“You’re right, my boy,” he asserted thickly. “A downright, patriotic
John Bull Englishman. The sort of stuff that’s winning the war for you,
and don’t you make no mistake about it.”
Baltazar went to bed pondering over his host. The annihilation of his
own life’s work did not bear thinking about. That way lay madness.
Pillivant brought a new interest. For all his adventurous journeyings he
had not met the Pillivant type—or if he had fortuitously encountered
it, he had passed it by in academic scorn. Had his ironical remark any
basis of truth? Was Pillivant after all typical of the forces behind the
war in this unknown modern England? Vulgarity, bluster, self-seeking,
corruption, hypocrisy? The old aristocratic order changing into
something loathsomely new? Pillivant posed as the successful man,
engaged in vast affairs, working night and day for his country—he was
only snatching, he had explained, a three weeks’ rest at this little
country shanty which he had not seen for nearly a year. The luxury of
the “shanty” proved his success; proved the magnitude of his dealings
with the Government. So far there was no brag. But how came it that the
Government put itself into the hands of such a man, openly boastful of
his exploitation of official ineptitude? He could not be unique. There
must be hundreds, thousands like him. Was he, in sober earnest, a
typical modern Englishman? If so, thought Baltazar, God help England.
And yet England must have still the qualities that made Cressy,
Poitiers, Agincourt ring in English ears through the centuries: the
qualities of the men who followed Drake and Marlborough and Nelson and
Raglan. . . . That very morning he had read of British heroism on the
Somme battlefield, and had been thrilled at realizing himself merged
into the unconquerable soul of his race.
He threw off his bedclothes—rose—flung the curtains wide apart, and
thrust out all the room’s casement windows not already opened, and
looked out into the starlit summer night.
No. It was impossible for England to be peopled with Pillivants. They
were the fishers in troubled waters, the blood-suckers, the parasites,
the excrescences on an abnormal social condition. But why were they
allowed to live? What was wrong? Who were the rulers? Their very names
were but vaguely familiar to him. And he had read of strikes; of men
earning—for the proletariat—fabulous wages, striking for more pay,
selfishly, criminally (so it seemed to his unversed and aghast mind),
refusing to provide the munitions of war for lack of which their own
flesh and blood, earning a shilling a day, might be slaughtered in
hecatombs. He threw himself into a chair.
“My God!” said he, “I must get out of this and see what it all means.”
After a few moments he suddenly realized that he had pulled on his
socks, as though he were going, there and then, at midnight, to plunge
into the midst of the bewildering world at war.