HE stood, an hour later, on the pavement of that noiseless and forlorn
thoroughfare, and stared at the latest catastrophe which, like all the
others in his impulsive life, he had of his own deliberate act
contrived. As yet he failed fully to understand his defeat—for defeat
it was, surrender absolute and unconditional. He thrust his hat to the
back of his head and mopped his forehead, and moved slowly up the street
in amazed reaction from the glow of conquest which warmed him as he had
entered the office. He had gone without any plan of campaign, confident
in his intellectual resource to meet emergency. Merciless craft and
cunning vindictiveness met him. Under the fierce sunshine, angry shame
made him hotter, and the sweat poured down his face. He had been able
only to bluster and threaten in vain retaliation. The grey rat of a man
had laughed at him with rasping thinness. The horse-faced lawyer had
smiled professional deprecation of heroics. “I shall do this and that,”
he declared. “Then our action will be so and so,” they countered. Like
the Duke of Wellington, he cried: “Publish and be damned.” They pointed
out with icy logic that not they but he and his would suffer inevitable
condemnation.
“You and yours.” That was the lawyer’s phrase. On the last word two
pairs of eyes were bent on him narrowly and significantly. The
unmistakable hint—the only one during the interview—of Godfrey’s
complicity, he had repudiated with indignation. The consequences
concerned himself alone. They smiled again. “Let it be so, then,” said
they, “for the sake of argument. . . .” As he walked along the burning
street he wondered how much they knew, how much they guessed. Save for
that significant glance, both the grey politician and the longlipped
lawyer had been as inscrutable as Buddhist idols. And he, John Baltazar,
had been hopelessly outmatched.
Yet, after all, at a cost, he had won the game. Godfrey was saved.
Mechanically he put his hand to the breast pocket of his thin summer
jacket and felt the incriminating document crackle beneath his touch.
That and the sheet of clotted passion of which he had confessed himself
the author. . . . He continued his way westwards, down the mean and
noisy Theobald’s Road, half conscious of his surroundings. The drab men
and women who jostled him on the pavement and passed him in the roadway
traffic seemed the happy creatures of a dream—happy in the inalienable
possession of their London heritage. . . . Fragments of the recent
interview passed through his mind. His adversaries had threatened not to
stand alone on the written disclosure of War Office secrets. They could
bring evidence of leakage through Lady Edna, for some time past, of
important military information. He could quite believe it. The written
paper could scarcely be the boy’s sole infatuated indiscretion; and as
for the lady—revealed as she was yesterday, he counted her capable of
any betrayal. Bluff or not, he had yielded to the threat. While the
paper remained in Donnithorpe’s possession, Godfrey was in grave
peril. . . . “You and yours.” The phrase haunted him. If he defied them,
they would strike through him at Godfrey.
Were they aware of farce? If so, why, save for this veiled allusion, did
Godfrey, the real lover, seem to matter so little? During the interview
their attitude puzzled him, until he became aware of Donnithorpe’s
implacable enmity towards him, John Baltazar. And now he wondered
whether the pose of the injured husband were not a blind for revenge
rooted in deeper motives. Only a fortnight or so ago Godfrey had said:
“The little beast hates you like poison.”
He had asked why. Parrot-like, Godfrey had quoted from Lady Edna’s
report of the conversation before his father’s visit to Moulsford.
“A Triton like you gives these political minnows the jumps.”
He had laughed at the affectionate exaggeration. But was the boy right
after all? Certainly he had paid scant courtesy to Donnithorpe, whom he
had lustily despised as one of the brood of little folk still
parasitically feeding on the Empire which they had done their best to
bring to ruin. Was this the abominable little insect’s vengeance?
He halted at the hurrying estuary of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, took off
his hat, and again mopped his forehead and the short thatch of thick
brown hair. The words of Dr. Rewsby of Water-End flashed across his
mind—“Have you generally conducted your life on these extravagant
principles?” . . . and . . . “I should say you were cultivating a very
bad habit, and I should advise you to give it up.” And he remembered his
confession, a year ago, to the sagacious doctor: “You have the most
comforting way in the world of telling me that I’m the Great Ass of the
Universe.”
“That man’s diagnosis,” said Baltazar to himself, putting on his hat,
“was perfectly correct. I am.”
He marched in his unconsciously hectoring way down Holborn and Oxford
Street, deep in his thoughts. Yes, once again his episodical life
history had repeated itself. The same old extravagant principles had
once again prevailed. They were part and parcel of his being, resistless
as destiny. Once again, without thought of the future, he had cast the
glowing present to the winds. Once again he had proved himself the Great
Ass of the Universe. But what did it matter? Godfrey was saved. Again he
made the papers crackle in his pocket. He had told him he would give his
life for him. He strode along fiercely. By God! Stupendous Ass that he
might be, he had never in his life broken a vow or a promise. . . .
Apart from the passionate love he had conceived for the boy, there was
no reparation adequate for his twenty years’ unconscious neglect. He
swung his stick to the peril of the King’s lieges on the pavement. It
was a young man’s world—this new world that was to follow the war. Old
men like himself were of brief account. Godfrey should have his chance,
unstained, unfettered in the new world which his generation, throwing
mildewed tradition on a universal bonfire, would have to mould.
He drew nearer to the brighter life of West End London, Oxford Circus,
with its proud sweep of great shops and its plentiful harbours from the
streams of the four great thoroughfares. Reluctant to confine himself
yet awhile within the four walls of his library, he abandoned the
straight course home and went down Regent Street, and at last stood
uncertain at Piccadilly Circus, the centre of London, more than any
other one spot perhaps, the true heart of the Empire. Though it was the
broad day of a summer afternoon, his memory sped swiftly back over
twenty years to the night when he saw it alive with light and flashing
movement and the great city’s joy of life, for the last time before he
sailed for China; when, in spite of decorous and scholarly living, his
heart had sunk within him at the realization that he was giving up all
that, and all that it symbolized—the familiar and pulsating life of
England. And now he stood in the same glamour-haunted precincts, and
again his heart sank like a stone. He turned, crept for a few steps down
Piccadilly and, catching a taxi putting down a fare at the Piccadilly
Hotel, engaged it and drove home to Sussex Gardens.
The house appeared bleak and desolate. Quong Ho had gone some whither.
Godfrey—he thanked God—was on his way to France. Foolishly he had
hoped that Marcelle might be awaiting him, to hear the latest tidings of
the boy; but she was not there. For all its carpeting and pleasant
luxury of furniture the house seemed to be full of echoes, as though it
were an empty shell. For the first time in his life he shrank almost
afraid, from the intolerable loneliness of the lot to which he had
condemned himself. For the last year he had given way to his
long-pent-up craving for human affection. He had cast his soul into the
orgy of love that he had compelled from the only three dear to him in
the world. It had been more than his daily bread. It had been a kind of
daily debauch. It had lifted him above himself. Marcelle loved him,
Godfrey loved him, Quong Ho loved him, each in their separate ways. They
were always there, ready at hand, to appease the hunger of the moment.
And now, in a flash, he had cut himself adrift from the beloved three.
The love would remain. That he knew. But from the precious food of its
daily manifestations he would be many thousands of leagues sundered by
oceans and continents. At thirty he could forsake love and face solitude
with the brave fool’s confidence. At fifty he gazed terrified at the
prospect. He had embraced loneliness as a bride, three years ago, in
order to save himself from perdition. But then his heart had been stone
cold, unwarmed by any human touch. He had felt himself to be an unwanted
wanderer in an alien planet. Spendale Farm had been a haven of comfort,
an Eden of refuge. But the German bomb had revolutionized his world. It
had magically brought him into indissoluble bondage to human things of
unutterable dearness. And now once more—_finis_ to the episode which he
had thought to be the story ending only in death.
He sat mechanically at the writing-table in his library and began to
open the letters that had come during his absence. A leathern Government
despatch case containing the day’s papers from the office which he had
only hurriedly visited that morning, awaited his attention. The deathly
sensation that they no longer concerned him held him in a cold grip.
There was a flaming article from a Croatian statesman which had reached
_The New Universe_ through devious channels, fraught with pregnant
information. He glanced through it in impotent detachment, like that of
a dead man brought back to the conduct of his affairs. He was no longer
the dynamo of _The New Universe_. Other forces, who and what he knew
not, would in a day or two take his place. _The New Universe_ would have
to get on, as best it could, without him. He was dead. He had no more to
do with _The New Universe_ than with the internal affairs of Mars.
He opened an envelope addressed in a well-known handwriting and franked
with distinguished initials. It had been delivered by messenger. Like a
dead man he read the achievement of his ambition: He was a Minister of
the Crown. The public announcement awaited only his formal acceptance.
He stared dully at the idle words. And then suddenly mad rage against
the derisive irony of his destiny shook him and he sprang from his
chair, and, in the unsympathetic privacy of the room which he had not
furnished, he stormed in foolish fury and vain agony of soul. . . .
It was the end of John Baltazar—the John Baltazar in whom he had always
believed, at the moment of proof positive of the justification of his
faith. To Godfrey he had not boasted unduly. A year ago he had awakened,
a new Rip Van Winkle, to a world for two years at war. In a few months,
God knows how, save through his resistless energy, his new-born and
flaming patriotism and his keen brain, he had established himself in
England as a driving force compelling recognition and application to the
country’s needs. He had won his position by sheer strength of
personality. Transcendental mathematics and Chinese scholarship he had
thrown into the dust-heap of broken toys. He had emerged from
philosophic childhood into the active life of a man, with his strong
hands fingering the strings of the world’s war. Now the strings were in
his grasp. . . . He had looked far ahead. This Ministry, though of vast
importance, was yet subordinate to the Greater Powers of the State. He
was young. What was fifty-one? The infancy stage of statesmanship. Why
should not he, John Baltazar, rise to higher power and guide the
civilized world to victory and to triumphant peace?
The man had dreamed many dreams. What great man does not? Never yet has
the human being whose day’s vision is blackened by the curtain of the
night reached the shadow of achievement. Then again: was it of England
or of John Baltazar that he dreamed? Who can tell? Can any man of noble
ambitions, of deep conviction of his own powers, strip himself naked
before his God and tell?
And now the dreams were but dreams. Blankness confronted him. Raving
against fate brought no consolation or relief. In utter dejection he
threw himself into an arm-chair and once more gazed hopelessly at
catastrophe.
There was no longer a John Baltazar. As far as England was concerned he
had ceased to exist. In that lawyer’s office he had signed his
abdication. There was the letter written and addressed, formally
declining the almost hourly expected offer of the ministerial
appointment. The offer had now come. He had pledged his honour to give
immediate signal for the posting of the answer. That was part of the
price demanded for the surrender of the disastrous documents. He went to
the telephone and curtly carried out those terms of his contract.
There remained the other condition to be fulfilled, for which they had
no other guarantee than his word. There at least—and a gleam of pride
irradiated his gloom—he had triumphed. He had compelled them to trust
his word without a scrap of written obligation. He would sail for China
within a month.
He sat there alone in the silent house, wondering again whether he had
not set the final seal on himself as the Great Ass of the Universe. He
had been driven, it is true, into a corner by the malignity and craft of
his opponents; but it was he himself who had dictated the terms of
surrender. Acting on one of the wild impulses that had deflected from
childhood the currents of his life, he had made the amazing proposal.
It was the end of John Baltazar. He rose, went over to his table and
filled his pipe. Anyhow, the House of Baltazar stood firm in honour. He
would yet dandle the grandson on his knee. _La course du flambeau_ was
the beginning and end of human endeavour. The torch was in Godfrey’s
hands now. . . . Feeling for his match-box, his wrist met the hidden
papers in his jacket pocket which he had almost forgotten. He drew them
out, folded the one fraught with court-martial and disgrace to Godfrey
into a long strip and set fire to it, a torch not to be handed on. He
lit his pipe with it instead and watched it burn till the flame touched
his finger-tips. Then he went over to the grate and burned the
love-letter.
He sat down and wrote to Godfrey.
“My dear Boy:
I think you ought to know that I have been as good as my word.
Three hours after parting from you, I recovered possession of
the document, and this time you may be certain that it no longer
exists, for I have myself destroyed it. Your sheet now is clean
in this respect, and also in others, if the barrage of silence
is maintained.
I cannot possibly tell you how I shall miss you.
Your ever affectionate father,
John Baltazar.”
That was all. Time enough to tell him about China when he had made
definite arrangements for the voyage. He prayed anxiously that he might
make the announcement in such a way that Godfrey should never
self-reproachfully suspect the cause of his exile.
Quong Ho, returning a short while afterwards, found him deeply engaged
with the contents of the despatch-case.