CAMBRIDGE put Baltazar on the track of old acquaintances, so that on his
return to London he found himself in contact with people of his own
standing who could explain to him the contemporary attitude of mind.
There was Burtingshaw, K.C., for instance, a member of the Inventions
Committee, and Weatherley, a professor of Modern History, whom the war
had developed into an indefatigable publicist, and Jackman, a curious
blend of classical scholar and man of business, who had allowed his
family mustard-making firm to look after itself while he spent laborious
days at the Admiralty in uncomfortable naval uniform. All welcomed the
elderly prodigal, though in return for fatted calves—these were happy
days before rationing—they demanded an account of his adventures. A man
can’t make a sensational disappearance from a small social unit and turn
up twenty years afterwards, without encountering natural human
curiosity. This, over and over again, he had to satisfy, until he began
to regard his absurd history with loathing, especially that of the past
two years. He went through it, however, grimly, as part of the penalty
he must pay for folly. After his first meeting with them at offices and
clubs, he received invitations to dinner at their respective homes.
The night before he went to Godalming he dined with the Jackmans. The
family consisted of Mrs. Jackman, a homely woman, who spent most of her
time at a Y.M.C.A. canteen on the south side of the river, two young
girls and a boy home on leave from France. A few guests had been invited
to meet John Baltazar; a colonel of artillery on sick leave, a
notoriously question-asking Conservative member of Parliament, a judge,
the wives of the two last, and a woman just back from eighteen months’
Red Cross work on the Russian front. A typical war gathering.
As soon as chance enabled him to speak to his host after his entrance
into this galaxy of civilization, he said:
“Man alive! you shouldn’t have asked all these people. I’ve not been in
a European drawing-room for twenty years. My instinct is to wander
about, growling, like a bear.”
Jackman, a florid, good-natured, clean-shaven man, laughed.
“It’s for your good. The sooner you get into the ways of the world the
better.”
“But what the devil shall I talk about?”
“Let the other people talk. You listen. I thought that was what you
wanted.”
Baltazar sat between Mrs. Jackman and the lady from Russia. At first he
felt somewhat embarrassed, even dazed. He had not conversed with
intelligent women since his flight from England. Even in his brave
University days, his scholarly habits had precluded him from mingling
much in the general society of Cambridge. Now the broad feminine outlook
somewhat mystified him. The vital question which once was referred to in
bated breath as the Social Evil, cropped up, he knew not how. His two
neighbours talked across him with a calm frankness that rendered him
speechless. He looked around the table, apprehensive lest the two young
girls might be overhearing the conversation. Their mother did not seem
to care in the least. She quoted statistics in a loud, clear voice. The
Red Cross lady sketched conditions in Russia. The question was suddenly
put to him: What about China? The fifty-year-old child of a forgotten
day caught at the opening and talked hurriedly. He had lived in the
heart of old China, mainly an agricultural population, a more or less
moral, ancestor-fearing and tradition-bound welter of humanity. There
was much to be said for old China, in spite of the absence of elementary
ideas of sanitation and the ignorance of the new-fangled Western science
of eugenics. Even now girl children’s feet were being bound. The ladies
followed his desperate red herring and began a less alarming argument on
infant welfare. When pressed for his opinion, he said:
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a baby at close quarters. I don’t remember
ever having touched one. I have it on hearsay that the proper thing to
do is to prod a baby’s cheek with the tip of your finger, which you wipe
surreptitiously on your trousers. But I haven’t done it. I know nothing
at all about ’em. In fact, your proposition that babies are an important
part of the body politic has never occurred to me. In prolific China
babies spring up like weeds, unregarded. Some of them die, some of them
live. And the living are for the most part weeds too. One gets used
there to an almost animal conception of the phenomena of life and death.
I’m learning all sorts of things, getting all sorts of new points of
view. Just see if I’m right. Modern Europe isn’t China. Even before the
war, the birth-rate was a matter of anxiety. Now Europe, de-populated of
her male youth, is in a desperate quandary. Every baby is a priceless
asset to the race. Lord!” said he, pushing spoon and fork abruptly
together on his plate, “I never thought of it. I must appear to you like
a fellow on a great Cunarder, proclaiming his discovery of America. But
the discovery is there all the same. The idea never entered my head till
this minute. Everybody’s got to produce babies as fast as they can, and
everybody’s sacred duty is to see that they live and thrive and become
potential parents of more healthy babies. That’s the proposition, isn’t
it?”
Comfortable Mrs. Jackman smilingly agreed. Without doubt that was the
proposition. The flower of the world cut off by the war. . . . Oh! it
staggered imagination to speculate on the number of bright young lives
sacrificed! There was So-and-So, and Somebody Else’s son. Too tragic!
The talk turned at once to the terrible intimacy of the war. Baltazar
listened and learned many things.
When the men were left alone, Baltazar learned more things about the
war; the blunders, the half-heartednesses, the mysterious influences
that petrified action. The soldier spoke of the fierce fight of a
devoted little set of enthusiasts for an adequate supply of machine
guns; the judge of hidden German ramifications against which he, as a
mere administrator of written law, was powerless; the Conservative
member of Parliament—his revelations made every particular hair of
Baltazar’s brown thatch stand on end. Jackman talked of labour troubles,
mentioned a recent case in which thousands of men making essential
munitions of war had downed tools because a drunken pacifist, a workman,
had been dismissed from a factory. Baltazar, only a month awakened to
the fact of war, held the same bewildered view of strikes as had nearly
driven him forth at midnight from Pillivant’s house. He burst out:
“Why don’t they take the traitors and blow them from the cannon’s
mouth?”
The Member of Parliament laughed aloud:
“There’s nothing like a fresh mind on things.”
“Well, why don’t they?”
“Don’t you think,” said the judge, “that such a course might tend to
dishearten the working classes?”
“It wouldn’t dishearten the Army,” declared the literal-minded Colonel.
“The men would be all for it. If any fellows tried to go on strike in
the Army they’d be shot on sight.”
He was the only one of the company who advocated violent measures. The
others seemed to regard strikes as phenomena of nature impeding the war
like artillery-arresting mud, or as inevitable accidents like explosions
in powder factories. Baltazar went away full of undigested knowledge.
On his return from Godalming he dined with Weatherley, a bachelor, and a
small gathering of fellow publicists. Here the conversation ran on more
intellectual lines. The war was considered from the international
standpoint, discussions turned on the subject-races of Austria, the
inner history of the Roumanian campaign, the sinister situation in
Greece, the failure of Allied diplomacy all through Eastern Europe.
Baltazar listened eagerly to the good keen talk, and went back to his
hotel braced and exhilarated. Even if they had all been talking through
their hats, it would not matter. Premises granted, the logic of it all
had been faultless, an intellectual joy. And they had not been talking
through their hats. They were men who knew, men who had access to vital
information apparently despised by the Foreign Office.
He had fallen into a universe which seemed to be more and more
inextricably jumbled as his outlook widened. But how splendidly
interesting! Take just the little fraction of it given up to the
Czecho-Slovacs and the Jugo-Slavs . . . Serbs, Croats, Slovenes. . . .
He had hitherto paid as little attention to them as to Lepidoptera and
Coleoptera, and other families of bugs with Latin names, to whose
history and habits, not being an entomologist, he was perfectly
indifferent. He had never thought of them as possible factors in the
future of Europe. Now that he was in touch with his kind again, London
ceased to be a city of dreadful night. In his enthusiastic eyes it had
almost become a _ville lumière_.
A week had wrought miraculous changes—that day the most miraculous of
all. At the back of his delight, through the evening’s rare
entertainment ran a thrill of amazed happiness. A week ago he had
floundered here derelict, lost, unwanted, a sick Chinaman his only link
with humanity. Now he was safe on sunny seas, bound once more to life by
friends, by a new-found son, in itself an adamantine tie, and, wonder of
wonders, by the woman for whose sake he had revolutionized his existence
and whose fragrant girlish memory had sanctified his after years.
He might have married well in China. Polygamy being recognized, the fact
of his having a wife alive in England would not have rendered such a
marriage illegal according to Chinese law. He had many opportunities,
for he held a position there unique for a European; and a delicately
nurtured Chinese lady can be an exquisite thing in womanhood, more than
alluring to a lonely, full-blooded man. But ever between him and a not
dishonourable temptation had floated the flower-shape of the English
girl with her pink and white face and her light brown hair and her hazel
eyes, through which shone her English wit and her English understanding
and her English love and her English soul. Not that he had eaten out his
heart for twenty years for Marcelle. He had wiped her as a disturbing
element clean out of his existence. His loyalty had been passive rather
than active. He had made no attempt to throw open gates and go in search
of her. But at hostile approach the gates had been uncompromisingly
shut.
The wonder of wonders had happened. In one respect, the wonder of all
possible wonders had happened.
There had been no disillusion.
In the gap of twenty years between girl and woman, what devastating life
forces might have been at work, wiping bloom from cheek, dulling gleam
from eyes, distorting lips, smiting haggard lines on face, hardening or
unshapening sweet and beloved contours; hardening, too, the mind, drying
up the heart, arresting the development of the soul? As he had never
thought to see her in this world again, he had not speculated on such a
natural life-change. It was only now, when he had met her in the
gracious fullness of her woman’s beauty, that he shivered at the thought
of that which might have been and exulted in the knowledge of that which
was. He remembered a woman, a friend of his wife, though much older, a
lovely dream of a woman of the fair, frail type, who had disappeared
from Cambridge for two or three years and then returned—suddenly old,
as though a withering hand had passed over her face. No such hand had
touched Marcelle. Then he pulled himself up and thought. How old is she?
Thirty-eight—thirty-nine. Twelve years younger than himself. He laughed
out loud. A mere child! What could she yet have to do with withering
hands? Fifty—thirty-eight! The heyday of life. What is fifty when a man
feels as young as at twenty-five? Novelists and dramatists were
responsible for the conventional idea of the decrepitude of man after
forty. The brilliant and compelling works of fiction are generally the
inspirations of young men who think the thirties are an age of incipient
decay. “An old dangling bachelor who was single at fifty!” cries the
abusive Lady Teazle. An old bachelor of fifty! Sheridan, of
six-and-twenty, thought of Sir Peter as the lean and slippered
pantaloon; and so has dramatic tradition always represented him.
“Damn it!” cried Baltazar, feeling his muscles as he strode about his
bedroom, “I’m as hard as iron.”
Satisfied with his youth, he sat down and wrote impulsive pages to
Marcelle, which he posted in the hotel post-box before going to bed.
He ordered lunch the next day in the great room of the Savoy.
“I’m having my son,” he said to the _maître-d’hotel_, with a thrill at
the new and unfamiliar word. “He has been wounded. I want the very best
you can do for us.” The _maître-d’hotel_, pencil and pad in hand, made
profuse suggestions. But Baltazar had forgotten the terms and indeed the
items of European gastronomy. “I leave it in your hands. The best the
Savoy can do. It’s the first meal I’ve had with my son—since—— And
wine. Champagne. What do you recommend?”
The _maître-d’hotel_ pointed to a 1904 vintage on the list. There was
nothing better, said he. Baltazar agreed, suddenly aware that he knew no
more of vintage wines than of artillery drill. His ignorance irritated
him.
“Do you mind if I look at that for a little?”
The _maître-d’hotel_ handed him the wine list, and for half an hour he
sat by a table in the great empty restaurant studying the names of the
various wines and their vintages. Then, having mastered the information,
he began long before the appointed hour to pace up and down the
vestibule with an eye on every taxi-cab that swung round the
rubber-paved courtyard and deposited its fares at the door, as impatient
as any young subaltern waiting for his inamorata.
Very proudly he conducted Godfrey to the reserved table in the middle of
the room. He would have liked to proclaim to each group of lunchers as
he passed: “This is my son, you know. Wounded and decorated for valour.”
To those who regarded them with any attention, they were obviously
father and son. But this Baltazar did not realize.
“My boy,” said he, when the waiter had filled the two glasses, “I hope
you like champagne. For myself I am a confirmed teetotaller. But I come
from a land of strict ceremonial—and ceremonial ideas have got into my
bones. Our first meal together—we must drink in wine to what the future
has in store for us.”
He smiled and held out his glass across the table. They touched rims.
Baltazar took a sip, then put his champagne aside and filled a tumbler
with mineral water. Godfrey was struck by the courtesy and suavity of
manner with which his father conducted the little ceremony; also, as the
lunch progressed, by his perfect hostship and by his charming
conversation. The disconnected dynamo could be, when he chose, a very
pleasant gentleman. By his tone and attitude he conveyed a man of the
world’s suggestion that this might be the beginning of an agreeable
acquaintance. Godfrey began to revise his first impression of his
father. Confidence increasing, he yielded to subtle pressure and spoke
in his English objective way about himself; about his schooldays, his
ambitions, his entrance scholarship, his brief University career. He
explained how his intimacy with Sister Baring sprang from the unfruitful
pages of _Routh’s Rigid Dynamics_.
“Oh! that’s how she spotted you——?”
“That’s how, sir. And then she told me she had read with you—and
eventually all the rest came.”
“Life is very simple,” said Baltazar, “if we would only let it take its
own course. It’s when we begin to mess about with it ourselves that the
tangles come.”
When the meal was ended and coffee and cigars were brought round, the
young man threw off further garments of reserve.
“I wonder whether I may ask you a question, sir?”
“A million,” replied Baltazar, “and I’ll do my best to answer every
one.”
“It’s only this. You were such a great mathematician when you left
Cambridge. I’ve been wondering all the time since yesterday what has
happened—whether you’ve chucked mathematics or what——”
“My boy,” said Baltazar, “you’ve touched on tragedy.”
“I’m sorry,” said Godfrey.
“Oh, you haven’t been indiscreet. By no means. You’re bound to hear it
sooner or later. So why not now? But it will take a little time. What
are your engagements?”
“My afternoon is at your disposal, sir.”
“Very good,” said Baltazar. “I shall now proceed to tell you the amazing
story of Spendale Farm, Quong Ho, and the Zeppelin.”
Godfrey laughed. Youth that has drunk most of a bottle of perfect
champagne can afford to be indulgent.
“That has quite an Oriental flavour,” said he.
“A blend,” smiled Baltazar.
The waiter, previously summoned, brought the bill. Godfrey, shrewd
observer, noted with gratification that his father merely glanced at the
total, and waved away the waiter with payment and tip all in the
fraction of a second. But a little while ago he had lunched, grudgingly
dutiful, with his uncle, Sir Richard Woodcott, who, when the bill was
presented, had ticked off the items with a gold pencil, comparing the
prices with the bill of fare, and had sent for the manager to protest a
charge for two portions of potatoes when only one was consumed, he being
forbidden potatoes by his medical man. He had raised his voice and made
a clatter, and neighbouring parties had smiled derisively and Godfrey
had reddened and glowered and wished either that the earth would swallow
him up or that hell-fire would engulf his millionaire uncle and trustee.
“I see now, sir,” said he, “why I’m always broke to the world.”
Baltazar flashed on him. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t look at my bills either,” said he.
Baltazar bent his keen gaze on his son. The remark had some
significance. At first he was puzzled. Then the solution flashed on him.
“You’re thinking of that damned Woodcott crowd.”
Godfrey gasped. “How on earth do you know that?”
“I’ve lived in a country where unless you guess what the other fellow is
thinking of, you may be led astray by what he says. It’s a sort of
game.” He let the long ash of his cigar fall into his coffee-cup, and,
remembering Quong Ho, added, with his queer honesty: “I don’t pretend to
be an adept, as you will gather from the tale which I propose to relate.
Perhaps arm-chairs in a corner of the lounge might be more comfortable.”
They rose. The heavily tipped waiter sprang to aid Godfrey with his
crutches. The boy paused. Baltazar waved him courteously on.
“Go ahead.”
On their way out they passed by a round table at which a large party
were assembled. Suddenly a young officer sprang up and laid a hand on
Godfrey’s shoulder.
“Hallo! Hallo, dear old chap! It’s years since I’ve seen you.”
“Not since we’ve been in uniform.”
“By Jove, that’s true!” He pointed to the M.C. ribbon. “Splendid, old
chap, glorious!”
“Glory all right,” laughed Godfrey, “but,” pointing downwards, “_sic
transit_——”
“Oh, hell!” said the other.
“Kinnaird,” said Godfrey, “let me introduce you to my father.”
Baltazar beamed. His quick eyes gathered curious glances from the
luncheon party. It was a proud moment, inaugurating a definite parental
position. He wrung the young man’s hand cordially. Godfrey explained:
“Kinnaird and I were at Winchester and Cambridge together. He’s a
classical swell. When the war came it swallowed us up with different
mouths.” He turned to his friend. “Where have you been all the time?”
“Gallipoli. Then a soft turn in Egypt. And you?”
“Flanders and France.”
“I’m off to France next week.”
“Let us meet before you go. Where are you to be found?”
They exchanged addresses. On leave-taking:
“I’m proud to have met you, sir,” said Kinnaird. He turned and sat down
at his table. Father and son continued their way to the lounge.
“Was that last remark of your friend,” asked Baltazar, “unusual
politeness, or did it mean anything?”
“Most of my University friends, sir,” replied Godfrey, “know who my
father was.”
“Oh!” said Baltazar, with knit brows. “Oh, indeed! Anyhow it was very
polite. Look here, my boy,” he went on, as they halted by a secluded and
inviting little table, “I’ve been struck lately by an outward and
visible sign of what seems to me to be an inward, invisible grace. When
I was your age, having left school and masters behind me, I would have
seen anybody damned first before I called them ‘sir’—except royalty, of
course. Now I come back into the world as an elderly codger, and both of
you young chaps ‘sir’ me punctiliously.”
“I suppose the Army is teaching us manners,” said Godfrey.
“Then the war is of some good, after all,” commented Baltazar. “And this
reversion to an ancient code provides you with a mode of address which
saves you, my young friend, from considerable embarrassment.”
Godfrey, quick and sensitive, glanced for an instant at the firm lips
drawn down in a humorous smile and at the kindly indulgence in the keen
eyes, and then broke into a laugh.
“Let us be grateful, sir, to the _Chinoiserie_ of the eighteenth
century.”
Baltazar folded his arms and contemplated his son admiringly.
“Do you know, I couldn’t have got out of it like that if I had thought
for a thousand years. Let us sit down.” And when they had settled
themselves by the wall on the fringe of the crowded lounge, he went on:
“You young men are not the least problem which a Cyrano dropped from the
peaceful moon like myself has to solve.”
“I’m afraid we don’t quite know what we’re playing at ourselves,” said
Godfrey.
Again Baltazar felt pleased with the boy’s reply. An understanding
fellow; one who could get to the thought behind a few words.
“I wish to God I had known you all your life,” said he.
At the appeal to sentiment, Godfrey shied like a horse.
“It wouldn’t have affected what the war has made of me. I should have
joined up just the same, and, just the same, I should have had a hell of
a time in a perpetual blue funk which I had to hide, and should have
come out minus a foot; and just the same too I should have wondered how
on earth I’m going to stick the University—if I do go back—with its
childish little rules and restrictions—to say nothing of its limited
outlook.”
“Two or three years ago,” said Baltazar, following his son’s lead, “if I
heard a fellow of twenty talk about the limited outlook of the
University of Cambridge, I should have said that his proper sphere was
the deepest inferno of insufferable young prigs provided by another
ancient seat of learning situated also on the banks of a river. As your
tutor, I should have had even nastier and more sarcastic things than
that to say to you. But now, in this new and incomprehensible world, I’m
perfectly ready to agree with you. What is there of the conduct or
meaning of life that our dear old pragmatical drake of a Crosby and his
train of ducks can teach men like your friend Kinnaird and yourself?
It’s like a bunch of hares sitting down before an old tortoise and being
taught how to run. Isn’t that the way of it?”
“I suppose it is,” replied Godfrey, laughing. “I don’t want to crab men
like the master. Nothing can take away their scholarship, which, after
all, is vital to human progress—and, of course, as far as that goes,
I’m perfectly willing to sit at their feet—but—well—I know you see
what I mean, sir. It’s very jolly of you, as one of the elder crowd, and
very unusual, to be so sympathetic.”
“I’ll go further than that,” said Baltazar. “As one of the elder crowd,
I should like to have the benefit of your concentrated experience of
modern life, and that is why I propose to tell you my story of Spendale
Farm, Quong Ho, and the Zeppelin. It’s my Ancient Mariner’s tale, and
you cannot choose but hear. But for the Lord’s sake tell what you can
remember of it to Sister Baring, for I’m sick to death of it.”
* * * * *
It was nearly five o’clock when he had finished. Finding Godfrey a
sensitive listener, he had expounded with many picturesque and intimate
details the story which he had roughly told so often. The reason for his
sudden self-condemnation to exile he had glossed over, as he had done
when first he had accounted for himself to Sheepshanks. Oddly enough, no
one, not even this son of his, with the quick insight forced to maturity
by the hot-house of war, boggled at the reason. All accepted his
maniacal proceeding as in keeping with the impulsive eccentricity of his
career. Besides, the mere fact of a man being able so to eliminate from
his surroundings every whisper of the outside world as to live in
England and remain in absolute ignorance of the war for a couple of
years, staggered credulity and eclipsed minor considerations.
“Well,” said Baltazar, with a big gesture of both arms, “that’s how it
is. To sum up. Eighteen years’ blank ignorance of, and indifference to,
European history—political, social, moral, artistic, scientific. A
week’s dismay and disgust. Two years’ seclusion devoted to the
consolidation of my life’s work. The whole thing wiped out in a night.
Awakening to find the world had been at war for two years. Myself adrift
in a sort of typhoon, with not a human straw to cling to but my adopted
son, this extraordinary mathematical genius of a Quong Ho. I fly to
Cambridge to try to get some sort of sane attachment to life. I discover
your existence. No sooner do I meet you than I’m thrown against the very
woman for whose sake, as a young man, I chucked the whole of my career.
And here am I, as strong as a horse. Feel that”—he tendered his arm and
braced his muscle, and Godfrey gripping it proclaimed, with wonder, that
it was like an iron bar—“and with a first-class working brain, and the
country is crying out both for brains and muscle, and I’ll go mad if I
don’t give the country my best. But at the same time, I’m just a
month-old child. I’m dazed by everything. And I’ve got you and Marcelle
and Quong Ho to look after. You’re all inextricably woven into the
tapestry of my life. Mathematics and Chinese scholarship can go to the
devil. Only the four of you matter——”
“Four?” Godfrey queried.
“Yes. Four. You, Marcelle, Quong Ho, and England.”
“That’s a tall order, sir,” smiled Godfrey. “But as for me, I’m all
right. I can fend for myself. You can cut me out.”
Baltazar brought down his hand with a great thump on the little table.
“I’m damned if I do!” And to the waiter who ran up in some alarm: “Yes,
tea. China tea. Gallons of it.”