BALTAZAR had asked his friend Burtingshaw, K.C., to suggest some sphere
in which his gifts might be usefully employed by the nation.
Burtingshaw, an unimaginative fellow, a professional exploiter of
formulas, bade him become a special constable and join the National
Volunteers. The man all agog to save his country, scoffed at the advice.
If there was marching to be done and blows to be struck, he had far
better enlist. Just like a Chancery lawyer to try to damp enthusiasm. He
decided to bide his time, to adopt the unusual course of looking before
he leaped. To judge by what he could gather from the press and from
conversation, it had been the crying fault of the Government from the
beginning of the war to use razors to cut butter and wooden blades to
perform delicate operations. There must be waiting in the vast war
machine one particular lever which he of all men was qualified to pull.
To find it would take time. But what was it? Godfrey’s suggestions ran
from vague to gloomy. Possibly he could find a billet in one of the new
ministries springing up like mushrooms every day, or he might de
Y.M.C.A. work, or drive a motor ambulance in France. All of which was as
satisfactory to the perfervid patriot as the idea of joining the Special
Constabulary or the National Volunteer Force. He rebelled at
half-measures.
Meanwhile, his own house had first to be set in order. He began
operations by removing his worldly goods (easily contained in one
suit-case and a large brown-paper package) to a comfortable hotel at
Godalming, so as to be near Godfrey and Marcelle. The quiet, too, of a
private sitting-room in a country inn conduced to the prosecution of
certain studies which Professor Weatherley, admirable guide in the
world-welter, had recommended. He took up his quarters the most
contented and sanguine of men. He had received a letter from Quong Ho,
in faultless, Ciceronian English, conveying the news that he was well
forward on the road to complete recovery, and in a few days would be in
a fit condition to pursue whatever course of action his most venerated
master might choose to prescribe. When he had disposed the books and
pamphlets, contents of the brown-paper package, about his room, he sat
down and wrote to Quong Ho. A room in the Godalming hotel was at Quong
Ho’s disposal as soon as he was fit to travel. It would be an admirable
opportunity for him to meet Godfrey. They were to be brothers, mutually
helpful: Godfrey, a past-master in the science of modern life but a
neophyte in mathematics, seeing that he was struggling with such
childish puzzles as the elements of Rigid Dynamics; Quong Ho, on the
other hand, a neophyte in the science of modern life, but a past-master
in elementary mathematics. It was important, he wrote, that Quong Ho’s
appearance should, as far as possible, be thoroughly European and his
dress impeccable.
“Good Lord!” he cried aloud, throwing down his pen. “I clean forgot. The
poor beggar hasn’t a rag to his back!”
He drafted a telegram to the tailoring firm in the cathedral city,
instructing them to supply Mr. Ho with essential raiment, and then,
continuing his epistle to his pupil, gave him safe counsel and his
blessing, and enclosed a cheque to meet necessary expenses.
After which he lunched in the coffee-room with the appetite of the
healthy man, lounged for a while with a pipe on the tranquil pavement
outside the inn, and then went upstairs again, threw himself contentedly
into an arm-chair with a German war publication lent him by Weatherley,
and waited for Marcelle.
* * * * *
It was her afternoon of freedom. She had looked forward to the interview
with mingled longing and apprehension. He had been the only man in her
life, and it was all such a long time ago. The jealous grip of her
nurse’s work had fastened upon neck and shoulders, and bent the
concentration of her being within a succession of little horizons. Men
she had met and known intimately, men in thousands; but they were all
suffering men, men whose sole appeal to her womanhood was their
helplessness, their dependence. If there crossed her path a man with
strong protective arm and compelling eyes, he was whisked away sound and
whole beyond her horizon’s misty rim. Now and then, but rarely, in
haggard faces shone eyes of desire. Her sex revolted until experience
taught her the nurse’s cynical indifference. Of course there are the
romances of nursing. In her long career she had known of many; of many,
too, in which the resultant marriages had been all that is adumbrated by
the ends of the fairy tales. But no ghost of such a romance had ever
come her way. And no romance had come her way in her restricted social
life. Her holidays had been too rare and fleeting. Here and there,
perhaps, a man had been attracted by her good looks and her
graciousness, but before these had had time to consolidate a first
effect, she was miles away, back again in uniform between the eternal
rows of beds. She had worked hard and seriously, the perfect nurse,
accepting, without question, the hospital ward as the sphere ordained
for her by destiny. Yet to soften the rigid life, she had fostered in
her heart the memory of the brief and throbbing love of long ago.
During her drive from Churton Towers in the motor-cab, foolish
trepidations beset her. Although her woman of the world’s sound sense
made mock of timidities, yet old-maidish instincts questioned the
propriety of her proceeding. She was going to meet her former lover in a
private room of an hotel. What about professional decorum? Matron, who
kept a hard and unsympathetic eye on flirtatious tendencies in the
junior staff, would regard her visit, should she come to know of it, as
a horrifying escapade. She had seen her as she ran down the steps,
hatted, gloved, prinked to her best, with a betraying flush (lobster
colour, she thought) on her cheek; and being within earshot of the
Gorgon, she had thrown the mere word “Godalming” at the chauffeur as she
entered the car. When she gathered up courage to look at herself in the
strip of mirror that faced her, her prejudiced eyes saw herself pale and
haggard, smitten with lines which she had not noticed when she put on
her hat. And all the time she knew that these feminine preoccupations
were but iridescences on the surface of deep, black waters filled with
fear, and that she was letting her mind play on them so as not to think
of the depths.
Baltazar was waiting for her outside the hotel. Thus one little fear was
sent packing. As a nurse she would have gone to Hell Gates to enquire
for a man. She had done it many a time in France. As Marcelle Baring she
was restrained by futile hesitancies. As Marcelle Baring, a woman with
her own life to lead, she was unfamiliar to herself. She had shrunk from
entering the inn alone and asking for Mr. Baltazar. But there he was
awaiting her on the pavement, and no sooner had the car stopped than he
had opened the door and helped her to alight. And following him through
the passage and up the narrow staircase, while he talked loud and cheery
and confident, as though he defied gossiping tongues, and every minute
turned to smile upon her, she remembered with a little pang of remorse
for unjust fears, that as now so it had been in the beginning; that
there never had been a tryst hard or venturesome for her to keep, never
one on which he was not there before her, big, responsible, inspiring
confidence. He was singularly unchanged.
Obeying a breezy wave of the hand, she sank into an arm-chair. He shut
the door and crossed the room, his face lit with happiness.
“For the first time in our lives we’re together alone within four walls.
You and I. Isn’t it strange? We have to talk. Not only now, but often.
As often as we can. It would have been monstrous of me to expect you to
run up and down to London. Besides, there would have been no privacy.
The lounges of the great hotels—I loathe them! A man and woman sit
whispering in a corner and at once surround themselves with an
atmosphere of intrigue. Horrible! And I couldn’t come every day to
Churton Towers—even ostensibly to see Godfrey. There would have been
the devil to pay. All sorts of scandal. So I’ve made this my
headquarters, in order to be near you.”
The weather had turned raw and cold, and as she had driven in an open
car, clad in light coat and skirt, with nothing to warm her but a fur
stole, she felt chilly, and welcomed the bright fire in the grate. She
smiled, and said it was very cosy. He searched the room for a hassock,
and finding one set it beneath her feet.
“We’ll have tea soon, which will make it cosier,” he said. He threw
himself into an arm-chair on the other side of the fire. “It’s like a
fairy-tale, isn’t it?”
She admitted the strangeness of the circumstances in which they had met,
and with instinct of self-defence began to speak of Godfrey, of their
suddenly formed friendship, of his manifold excellences. Baltazar let
her run on for a while, content merely to let his eyes rest on her and
to listen to her voice. At last he rose, irrelevantly, and, striding
across to her, held out both his hands. She could not choose but
surrender hers.
“Can’t you realize what you’ve been to me? ‘All a wonder and a wild
desire!’”
She fluttered a frightened glance at him and withdrew her hands. He
stood looking down on her, one elbow resting on the mantelpiece.
“Do you remember? That Browning line—it was one of the last things I
said to you. Then we lost our heads and broke off a delightful
conversation. Why not continue it, starting from where we left off?”
“How can we go back twenty years?”
“By wiping out two hundred and forty unimportant months from our
memories.”
She glanced up at him and shook her head. It was the grey and barren
waste of those two hundred and forty months that formed the impassable
barrier. In order to pick up the thread of that last talk it would be
necessary to recapture the grace of those brief and exquisite moments.
“If we are to be friends,” she said, “we must start afresh. All
that—that foolishness has been dead and buried long ago.”
“Buried, perhaps—or, rather, hidden away in a Sleeping Beauty sort of
trance. But dead? Not a bit of it. It has been healthily alive all the
time, and now—a magic touch—and it has reawakened strong and beautiful
as ever.”
“It’s very easy to play with words and metaphors and analogies. You can
make them appear to prove anything. As a matter of fact, we’ve both been
subjected to the organic changes of twenty years. I can no more become
the girl of eighteen than I can become the child of eight or the baby
eight months old.”
Baltazar put his hands in his pockets, laughed, turned away, and sat
down again in his chair.
“We seem to have got on to the basis of a nice and interminable
discussion. Let us get off it for the present. We have plenty of time.
If I’m anything at all, I’m a man of illimitable patience.”
She laughed out loud. She could not help it. A typhoon proclaiming its
Zephyrdom! And proclaiming it not jestingly, but with the accent of
deeply rooted conviction.
“You? You patient? Oh, my dear——”
“There,” he cried, jumping up from his chair. “You have called me ‘my
dear’!”
Quickly she retorted: “I didn’t. At least, I didn’t mean to. You caught
me up in your patient way. I was going to call you my dear something—my
dear sir—my dear man——”
“My name happens to be John,” said Baltazar.
“‘My dear John’? No. I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Why?”
“It sounds as if we had been married for twenty years.”
With feminine instinct she had put her foot on his man’s vanity and had
used it, like a rock climber, as a projection to mount to safety. She
saw him uncertain, unhumorous, and felt pleasurably conscious of
advantage gained.
“You said it twenty years ago, at any rate.”
She sat up victoriously in her chair. “I didn’t. Never. I don’t think I
had the courage to call you anything. Certainly not John. I never even
thought of you as John. As a label you were John Baltazar. But not
John—_tout court_—like that. Oh no!”
“I suppose you’re right,” said Baltazar. “It’s a damned name. It’s
everything that’s dull and prosaic in the English genius concentrated
into one uninspiring vocable. Unlike other idiot names, it has no
pleasing diminutive. ‘Johnnie’ is insulting. ‘Jack’ is Adelphi
melodrama. Thank God I’ve been spared both. Now I burst upon you, after
twenty years, as ‘John,’ and you naturally receive the idea with
derision.”
“Oh, it’s not as bad as that,” she cried. “Look at the great men of your
name. John of Gaunt, John Knox, John Bunyan, John Locke, John Stuart
Mill——”
“A merry crew of troubadours, aren’t they?” said Baltazar.
Whereat they both laughed, and the situation, as far as it affected her,
was relieved. They talked freely of the twenty years of their
separation. She of her work, her family; her mother, still alive, looked
after by an elder sister, her brothers, both younger than herself, in
the Navy. He, of China and his lamentable adventure on the moorland. He
found that Godfrey, carrying out his request, had saved him from the
abhorred recital of his story. Quong Ho aroused her curiosity and amused
interest. She longed to see Quong Ho. Tea was set out in old-fashioned
style and she presided at the table. She laughed at the wry face he made
over the first sip of the good, strong Ceylon blend. Not the least
dismal aspect of the tragedy of Spendale Farm, he explained, was the
destruction of the chests of priceless tea which he had brought from
China—stuff that yielded liquid and fragrant gold, lingering on the
palate like exquisite wine.
“Damn the Huns for robbing me of my tea!” he cried, “besides damning
them for a million other devilries. And yet the just man must give even
Huns their due. They’ve done one good thing.”
Marcelle flashed a protest. “They haven’t. They’re incapable of it. I’ve
been in France, in the thick of it, close up to the Front—and I’ve seen
things. I know. They haven’t done one good thing.”
“They have,” said Baltazar. “They’ve brought you and me together.”
“Oh!” said Marcelle rather foolishly. “I thought you were referring to
something serious.”
He fastened on the word. “Serious? Do you suppose that your presence
here at this minute, with that little bitten-into piece of buttered
toast between your finger and thumb, isn’t the most serious fact in my
life since I parted from you on the Newnham Road twenty years ago?”
She dropped the bit of toast into her saucer and regarded him with
dismayed renewal of her earlier fears.
“Why spoil everything? We were beginning to get along so nicely.”
He became aware of her piteous attitude. “What have I said?” he asked
solicitously.
In distress, she replied: “What you mustn’t say again. If you do, it’s
the end. It makes things impossible.”
“I don’t see why it should. If I weren’t honest about it, it would be a
different matter. But I am honest. I can’t tell you that I’ve waited for
you all these years, for the simple reason that I never dreamed I should
see your face again. But I’ve been true to your memory. It has knocked
out the possibility of any other woman. That’s plain fact.”
Womanlike, she said: “I suppose I’ve wrecked your life. God knows I
never meant to.”
Then he rose and flung his arms out. His essential integrity spoke
through his egotism. He tapped his broad chest.
“Wrecked my life? If a man’s a man, do you suppose his life can be
wrecked by anybody but himself? Do I look like a wreck? I’ve lived every
minute of these twenty years to the full power of body and brain. If I
made any appeal, on that score, to your pity or suchlike sentiments, I
should be a contemptible liar. If there’s any question of playing the
devil with lives, I did it with yours.”
“Oh, no, no!” Her voice quivered and she sank back in her chair, with
averted head. “Of course not. That’s absurd.”
“Well then,” he asked, “what’s all the fuss about? We loved each other
when we parted. Pretty passionately and desperately, too. Why we
shouldn’t love each other now, when fate throws us together again, I
can’t understand.”
She answered wearily: “I’ve told you. The years that the locust hath
eaten.”
“What locust?”
“Ah!” she sighed.
He took a pace or two towards the door, halted, turned and looked at her
as she sat by the tea-table, and the pain in her eyes and the piteous
twist of her lips smote him with remorse. A remarkable idea entered his
head. He clinched the entrance by smiting his left palm with his right
fist. Naturally any idea coming into Baltazar’s head could not fail to
be correct. He went behind her chair and laid his finger-tips on her
shoulder.
“My dear,” said he tenderly, “forgive me. I ought to have thought of it
before. A beautiful and accomplished woman——”
She swerved round. “Oh, don’t! You mean that there may have been someone
else—since——? Well, there hasn’t. I’ve been far too busy.” And seeing
him incredulous of the fallibility of his idea, she added with a touch
of petulance: “If there had been anybody, I should have told you so at
once.”
For the moment she wished there had been an intervening lover whose
memory she could use as a rampart, for again she felt defenceless. If
only Godfrey would come! He had promised to call for her on his way back
from London, whither he had been summoned by a Medical Board. She
glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. Godfrey’s train would not
arrive for another hour. With some apprehension she watched Baltazar,
who was moving about the room in a restless, puzzled way.
“Don’t you see you’re spoiling it all?” she said. “And I haven’t even
finished my tea.”
Laughter like quick sunshine lit his face. “A thousand pardons,
Marcelle. I of all people to outrage the etiquette of tea-drinking!” He
sat down. “Another cup, please. I shall get used to it soon. The Ceylon
tea, I mean—not being with you.”
She breathed again, rather wondering at the power of a light word. Of
course she had learned the way of tactful dealing with querulous or
obstinate patients. Had she instinctively applied the method to
Baltazar? A flush crept into her cheek. Perhaps those were right who
proclaimed that man sick or man sound was the same overgrown child.
Hitherto she had regarded man sick with maternal indulgence. Was she to
regard man sound, in the person of John Baltazar, from the same maternal
point of view? It would be a change from the old one. For twenty years
she had looked on the John Baltazar of thirty with the eyes of the girl
of eighteen; and she had beheld him as a god. Now she looked upon the
man of fifty with the eyes of the woman of thirty-eight. It was not that
either of them had grown wondrously old. On the contrary, he appeared to
have changed absurdly little, for his face had ever been eager and
marked with the lines of thought which time had but accentuated; his
figure had retained its athletic suggestion of strength and activity;
and his manner had the fire and vehemence of youth. And she herself had
received assurance from an anxiously consulted mirror, of beauty that
endured, and physically she rejoiced in the consciousness of splendid
health, enabling her to work untiringly at tasks that had all but
prostrated her fifteen years ago; in which respect she was younger than
ever. No, it was not that he was an old man and she an old woman between
whom the revival of romance would have been pathetically ludicrous. It
wasn’t that at all. . . . After she had handed him the cup of tea, she
took up the long abandoned bit of toast which she had dropped into the
saucer. Laughing, he leaned forward and whipped from her fingers the
cold and forlorn morsel, which he threw into the fire, and sprang to
hand her the covered china dish from the warming hob.
“Not that unsacramental bit of bread,” he cried.
It was not done rudely or bearishly; it was done in the most charming
way in the world; done with a cavalier, conquering lightness, what the
French call “_panache_,” characteristic of the bright creature who had
overpowered and overmastered her in her impressionable girlhood. She
helped herself from the hot pile of toast, and her smile of thanks was
not without a curl of ironic indulgence. The masterfulness of the
proceeding in no way offended her, its manner being so perfect, but it
did not strike the old romantic chord. Its symbolism flashed
illuminatingly upon her. The god of the girl of eighteen to the woman of
thirty-eight appeared merely as a self-willed, erratic and vehement man.
The glamour that had invested him faded like the colours of dawn, and
the sunshine beat on him in a hard, mistless air. He stood before her in
the full light. While she listened to his pleasant talk, her feminine
subconsciousness observed him in clear definition. It admitted his many
virile and admirable qualities; he was a man out of the common mould; he
was ruthless in the prosecution of the lines of conduct which he laid
down for himself—and these same lines had been inspired by high moral
or spiritual ideals; in his egotism he might unthinkingly trample over
your body in order to reach his ends, but at your cry of pain he would
be back in a flash, tearing himself to bits with remorse, overwhelming
you with tenderness; a man, too, of great intellect—in his own sphere,
of genius; a contradictory being, a hectoring giant, a wayward child, a
helpless sentimentalist; possibly, with all that, the overgrown baby of
the nurses’ tradition; a man, possessing all the defects of his
masculine qualities. Not a god. Nothing like a god. Just a man. Just an
interesting, forceful, even fascinating man whom she was meeting for the
first time. A brilliant stranger. She gasped at a swift realization,
even while she smiled at his description of what passed for a hospital
at Chen Chow, the scene of Quong Ho’s prim and passionless amours. A
stranger. Yet memory had made familiar every gesture, every intonation.
He had not changed. It was she who had changed. The fault lay in
herself, baffling attempts at explanation. She began to accuse herself
of callousness, deadness of soul, and at last conscience impelled her to
make some sort of amends.
There remained but a quarter of an hour before Godfrey was due. She lit
a cigarette from the match which Baltazar held out.
“I wonder,” she said, with a little air of deliberation, “whether you
would let me say something—and remain quite quiet?”
He replied happily: “I swear I’ll sit in this chair until you give me
leave to get up. But why say it? You’ve never let me finish what I want
to tell you. It has to be told now, or a month or six months or a year
hence. It’s silly to waste time, so why not now? I’ve awakened from a
long sleep to find myself in a world of marvels, in a new, throbbing
England, and for the first time in my life every pulse in me throbs with
my country. I must play my part in the big drama. I’ve also awakened to
find even deeper and more passionate things gripping at my heart: My
son, whom I never knew of. And you. You, Marcelle. No, no!” he laughed,
“I’m not going to get up. I’ll put the point in the most phlegmatic way
possible. I love you now as much as ever I did. I want to marry you at
once. I’ve been pursuing shadows for half a century. I want to get into
the substance of life at last. A man can’t do it by himself. He needs a
woman, just as—to advance an abstract proposition—a woman needs a man.
You’re the only woman in the world for me. Together, you and I, we can
go forth strong into this wonderful conflict. You can help me, I can
help you. If you’re tired and want rest, by God, you shall have it. You
shan’t do a hand’s turn. But a smile and a whisper from you will fill me
with strength for both of us. That’s the proposition.”
She looked for a long time into the fire, her head aslant, her lips and
fingers accompanying her thoughts in nervous movements. Presently she
said, in a low voice:
“A man like you would want the Sun, Moon and Stars.”
“And would see that he got them,” said Baltazar. “They’re there right
enough.”
She shook her head despairingly.
“That’s where you make the mistake. You would want what I couldn’t
give—what isn’t in me to give. Don’t you see it’s no good? The whole
thing is dead. I thought it was alive, but it isn’t. It’s dead. I’m
dead. I suppose a nurse’s work eventually unsexes a woman. That’s frank
enough, isn’t it?”
“It’s a frank statement of a conclusion arrived at through fallacious
reasoning,” replied Baltazar.
She shivered. “These things have nothing to do with reason. In all these
years haven’t you learned that?”
“No,” said he. “Schopenhauer and his lot were idiots. Love is the
apotheosis of reason. My dear,” he added, rising, “this is profitless
argument. I’m getting up without your permission, but I’ll be as
unobstreperous as thistledown. If you feel you can’t marry me, well, you
can’t. The reasons you will find are perfectly logical—but throw away
the rotten fallacy in your premise of sexlessness. You are woman all
through, my dear, from your lips to your heart. Perhaps I’ve been rather
like a bull at a gate—the gate of heaven. I suppose I was built like
that. But if you’ll let us be friends, dear friends, I won’t worry you
any more. I promise.”
She broke down. Tears came.
“I’m so sorry—so sorry. But you do understand, don’t you?”
“I don’t say I understand, my dear,” he replied very tenderly. “But I
accept the phenomenon.”
He turned and looked out of the window at the quiet road. Presently a
taxi-cab drew up outside.
“Here’s Godfrey,” he said.
She rose. “I’ll go down and meet him. It’s no use his climbing all these
difficult stairs.”
“You’ll come again, won’t you?” And seeing a flicker of hesitation pass
over her face, he added: “If only to let me show you Quong Ho.”
“Yes, I’ll come again,” she replied, “if only to show you——”
“What?”
“That I’m sorry.”
She moved quickly to the door, which he opened, and he followed her
downstairs. In the vestibule they met Godfrey. Gloom overspread the
young man’s candid face and dejection marked his behaviour, neither of
which could be accounted for by the fact of the Medical Board having
given him, as he announced, a further two months. Baltazar’s proposal to
run over soon to Churton Towers for a talk, he welcomed with polite lack
of enthusiasm. He took leave with the solemnity of a medical man
departing from a house with a corpse in it.
“It doesn’t seem to be one of the House of Baltazar’s lucky days,” said
Baltazar to himself, as he went up to his room.