IF I don’t smoke, I’m afraid I can’t talk,” said Baltazar.
Sheepshanks smiled politely. “You remember my little weakness? But pray
smoke. I’ve got used to it of late years. Times change, and we with
them.”
Baltazar filled and lit his pipe.
“A couple of weeks ago,” said he, “I had all but complete two
epoch-marking mathematical treatises. I had got systems and results you
good people here had never dreamed of. I had also stuff in the way of
Chinese scholarship that would have been a revelation to the Western
world. Then German aircraft dropped bombs on my house, a hermitage in
the middle of a moorland, and wiped out the labour of a lifetime. They
also nearly killed a young Chinaman whom I regard as an extraordinary
mathematical genius and about whom I want to consult you. They also,
thereby, revealed to me a fact of which I was entirely unaware, namely,
that the war had been going on for a couple of years.”
He leaned back in his chair and drew a few contented puffs. His host
passed a hand over perplexed brows and leaned forward.
“I’m very sorry,” said he, in his precise, nasal voice, “to appear
stupid. But you have put forward half a dozen such amazing propositions
in one breath that I can’t quite follow you.”
A smile gleamed in Baltazar’s eyes. “I thought that would get you,” he
remarked placidly. “But it’s an accurate presentment of my present
position.”
“No doubt, no doubt,” said Sheepshanks. “But you surely haven’t been
living a recluse on a moor for the last twenty years?”
“Oh no,” replied Baltazar. “Eighteen of them I spent in China. I went
out straight from here.”
“To China? Dear me,” said Sheepshanks. “What an extraordinary place to
go to from Cambridge.”
“Didn’t anybody guess where I had vanished to?”
“Not a soul, I assure you. Your disappearance created a sensation. Quite
a sensation. A painful one, because you were a man we could ill afford
to lose.”
“It’s good of you to say so. But it’s odd that no one seemed to be
interested enough in me to reason out China. You all knew I was keen on
Chinese.” He cast a swift glance around the bookshelves that lined the
room, and shot out an arm. “I shouldn’t be surprised if that’s my little
handbook—_Introduction to the Language, on a Scientific Basis_.”
Sheepshanks’ myopic vision followed Baltazar’s pointing finger.
“Yes. It’s somewhere there. You haven’t changed much from the creature
of flashes that you used to be.”
“It happens to be the only yellow-backed book on the shelf. To say
nothing of the purple dragon, which is grossly incorrect and unmeaning.
It jumps to the eyes. Just as my going to China ought to have jumped to
the eyes of everybody.”
“I’m afraid it didn’t. Perhaps we were too much paralysed with dismay.”
“I often tried to guess what you all thought about it,” said Baltazar.
“A human being can’t escape his little vanities. It was like being dead
and wondering what the dickens people were saying about one.”
“We didn’t know what to say,” replied Sheepshanks. “We had no precedents
on which to base any conclusions. We looked for motives for flight and
we could find none. We sought for possible imperative objectives, and
one so apparently uncompelling as China never occurred to us. Here
to-day, gone to-morrow. You vanished, ‘like a snowflake on a river.’ To
see you now, after all these years, looking scarcely a day older, is an
experience which I must confess is bewildering.”
“I suppose you thought me mad or a fugitive from justice, or one driven
by the Furies.”
“We didn’t know what to think, and that’s the truth of it,” replied
Sheepshanks.
“Well, call it the last. I wasn’t very old and hardened. Perhaps I
mistook Mrs. Grundy with an upraised umbrella for one of the ladies who
played the devil with Orestes and Company. I had quite decent reasons
then for clearing out. Whether I was wise or not is another matter.
Anyhow I cleared, sank my identity and went out to China. After eighteen
years I came back. The rest I’ve told you in a sort of pemmican form.”
“I don’t deny,” said Sheepshanks, “that I am still somewhat confused.”
“All right,” said Baltazar. “You sit there, and I’ll tell you what I
can. Anyhow, I’ll try to explain why I’m here. I’ll begin from the day I
sailed for China.”
The primness of Edgar Sheepshanks,D.SC., relaxed, to some extent, during
Baltazar’s story. Like Dominie Sampson’s “Prodigious!” his “Wonderful!
wonderful!” punctuated the intervals. To him who had stuck limpet-like
to the same academic walls, Baltazar appeared a veritable modern
Ulysses. He sighed, wishing that he too had performed the scholarly
travels through that far land of Mystery, the Cathay of ancient times,
which was now the little better known interior of modern China; he
sighed, as he did when gallant youth returned from high adventure in
that land of equal mystery, the Front. Baltazar was half through his
tale when there entered a venerable man-servant, Sheepshanks’s gyp for
innumerable years. At the sight of the guest he started back with the
dropped jaw of one who sees a ghost. “Mr. Baltazar!”
“Lord, it’s Punter!”
It was odd how names came back from the moss-grown recesses of memory.
He shook hands with the old man.
“Yes, it’s me. And you’re looking just as young as ever. I recognized
you at once. And look here, Punter, if you want to do me a service, just
spread the news about Cambridge. If I’ve got to go through an Ancient
Mariner or Wandering Jew explanation every time I meet anyone, it’ll
eventually get on my nerves.”
“I’m sure every one will rejoice to have you back, sir,” said the gyp.
“Punter’s bringing my lunch. I hope you’ll stay and share it with me,”
said Sheepshanks politely.
“Delighted,” said Baltazar, and the old man having retired, he went on
with his tale.
He continued it over lunch in the next room, a homelier chamber, where
Sheepshanks kept his choice books and his two or three good Italian
pictures and a few ivories and photographs of nephews and nieces. It was
during the meal that he noticed for the first time a lack of
effusiveness on the part of his host. Not that he had expected the prim
Sheepshanks to throw his arms about him and dance with joy; but he had
hoped for more genial signs of welcome. After all, he reflected, he had
let the college down very badly; possibly he was still unforgiven. Well,
if that was so, he would have to earn forgiveness.
In his tale he had reached the first visit to London.
“I was out of my element, as you perceive,” said he, “and then something
happened which made me decide suddenly to go into seclusion for two or
three years. Real seclusion. I don’t do things by halves. In some remote
spot where not a whisper of the outer world could ever reach me.”
“But what kind of thing could have happened to cause you to take such an
extraordinary step?” asked Sheepshanks.
Thought Baltazar: “If I tell him the real reason, he’ll turn into a
pillar of frozen don.” Besides, he had not the faintest intention of
opening his soul to Sheepshanks, even though the latter should have
enacted the part of the father of the Prodigal Son. He waved the
question aside.
“Nothing of any importance. Just one of the idiot trifles that always
seem to arise and deflect my course through life. The main point is that
I found the place I wanted, and went there with Quong Ho.”
Luncheon had been cleared away and he had finished a couple of pipes
before he came to the end of his narrative.
“So now you see my position,” said he.
“I think I do,” replied Sheepshanks.
“My whole life-work has gone—except that part of it which exists in the
cultivated brain of my remarkable young Chinaman. There seems to be no
place for me in London, where everybody’s fitted into the war, where I’m
simply dazed and unwanted. So I’ve come here—if only to find something
left of my old life to attach myself to.”
“I’m afraid there’s not very much to be done in Cambridge,” said
Sheepshanks. “It’s no longer a university, but a military camp.”
“But at any rate,” said Baltazar, “I can find here a few human beings I
know who might put me in the way of actual things—help me on my
course.”
“That’s quite possible,” said Sheepshanks.
“I also have to see what can be done for Quong Ho. I want him to come up
next term. Has the college ever had an undergraduate who has come up
with a knowledge of Elliptic Functions?”
“God bless my soul!” ejaculated Sheepshanks, in interested astonishment.
“He’s a wonder,” laughed Baltazar. “I ought to know, because I’ve taught
him daily for ten years. Well, he’ll be on your list, if you’ll have
him. He’s a dear creature. Manners like a Hidalgo. Mind cultivated in
the best of Chinese and English literature. And speaks English like his
favourite author, Dr. Johnson.”
Sheepshanks smiled, a very pleasant smile, in which every wrinkle of his
dry brown face seemed to have a part.
“How you keep your enthusiasms, Baltazar!”
“Quong Ho is worth them. You’ll see. As soon as he’s fit for it, I’ll
send him to you. You set him last June’s Tripos Papers—Part II, if you
like. I’ll bet you anything he’ll floor them. Of course I’m
enthusiastic,” he said, after re-lighting his pipe, which had gone out.
“I’ve no kith or kin in the world. I’ve adopted Quong Ho as my
intellectual son and heir.”
Sheepshanks rose, walked to the open window deliberately and looked out.
Presently he turned.
“It seems strange,” said he, “that you should adopt a Chinaman, when
your English son is giving great promise of following in your
footsteps.”
Baltazar regarded him in a puzzled way. Then he laughed.
“My stepson. I’m afraid, my dear Sheepshanks, when I left the mother I
left her son. One of the defects of my qualities is honesty. I may be
brutal, but I can’t take a sentimental interest in the son of old Doon.”
“The man I’m talking about,” said Sheepshanks, in the precise clipped,
nasal manner under which Baltazar remembered many a delinquent and
uppish pupil to have wilted in the old days, “isn’t called Doon. His
name is Baltazar. He came up with a Minor Scholarship over the way”—he
waved a hand, indicating the grey wing of the neighbouring college
visible through the window—“and he was the most promising freshman of
his year.”
Baltazar rose too.
“I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about. I don’t suppose I’m
the only Baltazar left in England. He can be no son of mine. It’s
idiotic. You ought to know.”
“I do know,” said Sheepshanks.
Baltazar’s eyes flashed in amazement and he made a stride towards him.
“What do you know? What are you suggesting?”
“A child was born here in Cambridge, three months after you left us.”
Something almost physical seemed to hit Baltazar between the eyes,
partially stunning him. He felt his way to the nearest chair and sat
down.
“My God!” said he. “Oh, my God!”
He remained for some time, his head on his hands, overwhelmed by the
significance of the revelation. At last he sprang suddenly to his feet.
“No wonder you haven’t forgiven me,” he cried, with characteristic
directness. “To run away from a woman in such circumstances would be the
unforgivable sin. But I swear to God I never knew. She gave no hint, and
I saw her only a few days before I left. Such a possibility never
entered my mind. Has never entered it. I may be any kind of a sinner,
but not such a scoundrel as that. I left her because we were miserable
together.—I did my best—now and then a brief reconciliation.—I
suppose she tried too, in her way.—After the last, things were worse
than ever. And then there was the life of someone else I couldn’t
sacrifice—a flower of a thing. I felt my wife would be glad to see the
last of me. So I fled like Christian from the Burning City. If I had
known that—well, that I was leaving this responsibility behind me, I
should have faced things out. My God! man, you must believe me,” he
ended passionately.
Sheepshanks through his thick gold spectacles met Baltazar’s fierce gaze
for a few moments. Then he held out his hand: “I believe you, J. B., and
doing so takes a great load off my mind.”
“I’ve noticed your avoidance of the old name,” said Baltazar. “It must
have been in pretty evil odour for the past twenty years or so.”
“You’re such an incalculable fellow,” said Sheepshanks, with a kind
smile. “The romance you so delicately suggest never occurred to any of
us.”
“Well, well,” said Baltazar, “all that is done and over long ago.
Anyhow, I wasn’t the heartless wretch Cambridge must have taken me for.
I leave my rehabilitation in your hands. To me now the main, staring,
extraordinary fact is that I have a son. A son. I, who thought I was
wandering lonely as What’s-his-name’s cloud. I’ve got a son. A
mathematician. The same lunatic quirk of brain. If he were the village
idiot—it would be different.—You remember the ghastly story of Guy de
Maupassant? But not only my own flesh and blood, but my own flesh, blood
and intellect.” He paced about the room. “What kind of a fellow is he?
Is he like me? Have you seen him?”
“Yes; once. Crosby—you remember Crosby?” He waved a hand towards the
college visible through the window.
“Yes, yes,” said Baltazar, impatiently.
“Crosby asked me to breakfast, one day, to meet him. The son of John
Baltazar, senior mathematical scholar of his year, was a curiosity. We
didn’t tell the young man so. Indeed, I suppose he wondered why such an
old fossil like myself was there.”
“Never mind what he thought of old fossils, my dear Sheepshanks. What
was he like?”
“Like you. Quite recognizable. But fairer, and though sensible and
manly, less—if you will allow me to say so—less of a firebrand.”
“Anyhow, a good straight chap. Not merely low mathematical cunning
enveloped in any kind of smug exterior?”
“He’s a son any father would be proud of,” said Sheepshanks.
“And where is he now?”
Sheepshanks made a vague gesture. “Where is all the gallant youth of
England? Over there, fighting.”
“Are you sure?”
“It would be small compliment to you, J. B., if I wasn’t sure,” replied
Sheepshanks with a smile. “The only undergraduates left in the
University are a few unhappy youngsters rejected from the army for
physical reasons. The maimed, halt and blind; also medical students
hurrying through their course, and the usual contingent of Indian
students who, not belonging to the fighting races of India, can find no
place in the armies of Great Britain.”
“I don’t care about paralytics or doctors or Indians,” said Baltazar. “I
want to know about this son of mine.”
“Crosby would tell you. He’s up. I saw him yesterday. Of course, you
know he’s master now.”
“Crosby?” cried Baltazar, incredulously. “Crosby—that pragmatical owl,
master of——?”
“Even as you are master of intolerance,” Sheepshanks interrupted.
“Crosby has developed into a very great man, and there’s not a head of
house in the University who is more beloved by his college. You’ll find
him in intimate touch with half a dozen generations of undergraduates.”
“I’m learning things every minute,” said Baltazar. “So much for Crosby.
I’ll go along and see him. But the boy—I suppose he has got a Christian
name. What is it?”
“I forget—but I can easily find out.” Sheepshanks took _The Cambridge
University Calendar_ from a shelf. “But perhaps you’d like to look
through it yourself.”
Baltazar turned rapidly over the pages, found the college he sought and
the name of Godfrey Baltazar in its list of scholars.
“Godfrey!” he exclaimed. “That was my father’s name.” Then after a
pause, as though speaking to himself: “It was good of her. Damned good
of her.”
He walked to the casement window which Sheepshanks had vacated and
leaned his elbows on the sill, looking out for a long time into a blur
of things. Sheepshanks glanced at his broad shoulders which seemed bowed
beneath an intolerable burden, and after a moment or two of hesitation
slipped noiselessly from the room. Presently Baltazar turned, started to
find himself alone, frowned, then recognizing a delicate instinct on the
part of his host, went back to the window and his whirl of thoughts and
emotions.
What a mess he had made of his life! What folly had been each one of
those flaming decisions that had marked his career! Was he a coward? The
word stung. There was a difference between flying from temptation and
resisting it. He remembered the comparison he had just made between
himself and Christian flying from the Burning City, and suddenly saw the
meanness and selfishness of Bunyan’s Hero—egotism as colossal as that
of St. Simeon Stylites on whom he had once airily lectured to Quong Ho.
What mattered anything human, wife, children born and the child within
the womb, so long as he saved his own wretchedly unimportant soul? For
aught Christian cared, all his family and his friends could go literally
to Hell, so long as he himself escaped. A sorry figure. And just such a
sorry figure had cut John Baltazar. And, life being real and implacable,
he had not even succeeded in saving his paltry soul. He had lost it at
every step. His fine phrases to Quong Ho; his boast of altruistic
service to mankind? Sheer juggling with sacred things. Sheer egotism.
Sheer vanity.
What a mess he had made of his life! What folly had been his cowardly
flight! If he had known, he would have remained. Yes. A salve to
conscience. But the consciences of brave men need no salve.
He had fooled away his life in a country that had no need of him, from
which he had derived no measure of spiritual profit. Strip the glamour
of sheer scholarship from his interest in Chinese philosophy, and what
remained? Scarcely anything that the heir of Western thought had not
picked up in his child’s copybook. And whilst he was wasting his brain
and his moral energies and his physical strength in pursuit of the
shadows, the son of his loins, a human thing for whose moulding and
development he was, by the laws of nature and civilization, responsible,
had grown up, haphazard, fatherless, motherless, under alien guidance.
He threw his memory back to his wife’s family, the Woodcotts,
narrow-minded, bigoted, vulgar—Lord! how he had detested them. Had he
abandoned his son to their untender mercies? No matter who had trained
the boy, he himself had failed in the most elementary duty of mankind.
Suddenly he raised both clenched fists and cried aloud:
“By God! I swear——”
Then suddenly he saw the ironical face of the village doctor of
Water-End and heard his sarcastic words: “A bad habit. I should give it
up”—and his arms dropped helpless by his sides. No. What was this oath
but one more irretrievable plunge into the morass in which he
floundered?
He began again to wonder concerning this newly discovered son, strove to
visualize him. A broad, upstanding fellow, like himself. Fairer—he got
that from his mother. A fine, soldierly figure in khaki. But only a
boy—just twenty. And he had thrown everything to the winds on the
outbreak of war and had been fighting in France—that child—for two
years. He drew a sharp breath, as a sudden thought smote him. The boy
might have been killed. Apparently he was still alive. Otherwise
Sheepshanks would surely have heard. But supposing—supposing. . . . He
shivered at the thought of it.
Half an hour, an hour—he was unconscious of time—passed. Then the door
opened and Sheepshanks appeared, followed by a short-bearded man in
clerical tweeds.
“A bit of luck. I found Crosby in. I’ve told him everything, and he has
been kind enough to come along.”
Said Dr. Crosby a while later: “I have brought with me the boy’s last
letter—only a week old. Perhaps you would like to see it.”
Baltazar stretched out an impatient hand. This thing so essentially
personal, the first objective token of his son’s existence, affected him
deeply. The words swam before his eyes. He turned to the end to see the
signature. His thumb against it, he held out the paper to Sheepshanks,
and said in a shaking voice:
“That’s my handwriting. He has the same trick of the ‘B’ and the ‘z.’”
The letter informed the master that he was still at Churton Towers, near
Godalming; that the stump obstinately refused to heal completely, owing
perhaps to the original gangrene; that he hoped they would not chuck him
out of the Army, because, with a brand new foot, he could be useful in
hundreds of ways; but that, if they did, he would come up and continue
to read for his degree.
“May I keep this, Crosby?” asked Baltazar; and, permission given, he
folded it up and put it in his pocket. Then he turned to Sheepshanks.
“Why didn’t you tell me at first what had happened?”
“My dear fellow,” said Sheepshanks, “I only heard he had been wounded. I
was unaware of details. That’s why I went at once to Crosby. In these
days one must be discreet.”
“Yes, no doubt,” said Baltazar, absently. He paced the room for a few
moments. Then halting: “I must see this son of mine. But I must see him
in my own way. Will you do me a favour not to let him know of my
reappearance until I send you word?”
“Certainly,” said Dr. Crosby.
“Thanks,” said he.
He walked to and fro, his head full of the tragedy of this maimed young
life. He looked from one unemotional face to the other. Their attitude
was incomprehensible. Crosby, before showing him the letter, had spoken
of wound and amputation in the most matter-of-fact, unfeeling way.
Suddenly he burst out indignantly:
“I wonder if you two people have any idea of what I’m feeling. To-day I
learnt the wonderful news that I’ve got a son—a splendid fellow, a man
and a scholar. An hour afterwards you tell me that he’s a one-legged
cripple. Neither of you seem to care a hang. I haven’t heard a word of
sympathy, of pity——”
The white-headed, gold-spectacled senior tutor rushed towards him, in
some agitation, with outspread hands.
“My dear J. B., we must observe a sense of proportion. You really ought
to go on your knees and thank God that your son is preserved to you.
He’s out of that hell for ever.”
“My boy—my only son—was killed last December,” said Dr. Crosby.
Baltazar stared for a moment at the short, bearded man and sought for
words, even the most conventional words; but they would not come. Then,
memory flashing on him, he stretched out his open hand about three feet
from the ground, and said, in a voice which sounded queer in his own
ears:
“That little chap?”
“Yes. That little chap,” said Dr. Crosby.