CHAPTER V
BALTAZARhad lived on the moor in peace and comfort for nearly a year when he received his first unsolicited communication from the outside world, in the shape of a long, cheap envelope, headed “On His Majesty’s Service,” and containing Income Tax assessment forms. For a moment he wondered how the representatives of His Majesty had managed to ferret him out in his retreat.
“It’s a vile country,” said he to Quong Ho, who had handed him the letter on returning from his weekly visit to the town. “It’s a pettifogging, police-ridden land, where a man, if he so chooses, can’t bury himself decently. I’m sure the King is not aware of this unwarranted interference with the liberty of one of the most self-effacing of his subjects.”
“My mind was in half,” replied Quong Ho, “to destroy the missive which I conjectured would cause you annoyance.”
“It’s a good thing you didn’t. The King is an amiable gentleman, but the High Mandarins from whom this proceeds are not to be trifled with.” He glanced through the papers. “It is well,” said he, with a sigh of relief. “The High Mandarins around the Throne are as yet ignorant of my whereabouts; but if I refused to obey this invitation, they would soon learn it. It is a pestilential minor official in the vicinity who for the sake of money—it’s his disgusting mode of livelihood—has violated my solitude.”
“In the New China,” said Quong Ho, “we hope to do away with the bureaucracy, which is a parasite on civilization.”
“You won’t do it,” said Baltazar. “In the New Jerusalem—by which we mean the Kingdom of Heaven—there is a Recording Angel, and you may bet your boots he has got his staff of officials who write minutes and fill up forms all Eternity long.”
“Perfection,” remarked Quong Ho, “is to be found neither in this world nor the next, but only in that harmonious principle of the soul which is termedliin the Confucian philosophy.”
“Quong Ho,” said Baltazar in Chinese, “your wisdom befits rather the honourable white beard of the teacher than the smooth-shaven chin of the pupil of five-and-twenty.”
Quong Ho bowed respectfully at the compliment and withdrew.
“Confound the Income Tax!” said Baltazar, looking through the papers. He had completely forgotten his liability. The sudden reminder vexed him. Of course he must pay; but his income being exclusively derived from investments, all of which were taxed at the source before the dividend warrants were paid automatically into his account at his bankers’, why should he be worried? He resented the intrusion on his privacy.
A week later Quong Ho posted the form in the ironically provided, penny-saving official envelope, and Baltazar dismissed the incident from his mind.
When some time afterwards his assessment paper arrived, it caused him some astonishment. He cast his memory back twenty years. In 1896 the Income Tax, if he remembered rightly, was inconsiderable, some sixpence in the pound. Now it was half a crown. He filled up the form, an easy task, thinking less than ever of the social condition of Modern England; such high direct taxation could only mean the desperate financial straits of a decadent country. Well, as far as he was concerned, the loss of one-eighth of his income did not matter. The initial expenses of his installation at Spendale Farm over, he scarcely spent a third of it.
The next disturbing document that found its way to Spendale Farm contained a searching series of questions, headed “National Registration.”
“I am ceasing to regard England as a fit place to live in,” said he, with some petulance. “This is Mandarinism run riot.”
A few weeks afterwards he received a neat little card folded in two, on the outside of which was printed a vile semblance of the Royal Coat of Arms and “National Registration Act, 1915,” and inside a certificate of the Registration of (a) John Baltazar, (b) Philosophical Investigator—for as such had he irritably described himself—(c) of Spendale Farm, Water-End. There was a space for the signature of Holder, and below it in great capitals “God Save the King.” On the back were directions as to change of address.
“God knows what’s coming over the country,” said he. “It appears that a free-born Englishman has got to carry about his police papers, as people have to do in disgusting countries like Germany and Russia. What about you, Quong Ho? Have you got a pretty little document like this?”
“I am registered as an alien,” replied Quong Ho.
“It seems to me,” said Baltazar, “that when I used to gas to you about our free British institutions I was nothing but an ignorant liar.”
“By no means, sir,” replied Quong Ho politely. “The keynote of the modern world is change. What was true of material things yesterday is a lie to-day.”
“How did you discover that?”
“I assume the little town of Water-End to be but a microcosm of Great Britain.”
“Why,” laughed Baltazar, “what signs of change do you see there?”
Quong Ho remained for a moment silent, and his face assumed its Oriental impassivity. If he reported to his master the astounding events that were taking place, even at Water-End, whose quiet High Street was a-bustle with newly fledged soldiery from the moorland camp three miles on the further side, he would not only risk the dissolution of the establishment, but would be guilty of filial disobedience, which was impiety. And the European War, after all, how could it concern him, Li Quong Ho? Perhaps, too, his master, foreseeing the tempest, particularly desired to take shelter and hear nothing at all about it. He was fortunate enough, however, to find a perfectly true reply to Baltazar’s question. He smiled in some relief; for an intellectual Chinaman, trained in the lofty morality of the Chinese classics, does not willingly lie.
“It is a woman and not a man who now delivers the letters in Water-End.”
Baltazar continued to laugh: “They’ll be driving the motor-cars soon.”
“I’ve seen them doing it,” said Quong Ho.
“I’m not surprised,” said his master. “They were tending that way a year ago. These new women are out for the devirilization of man. Perhaps by this time they’re in Parliament, passing firework legislation and playing the devil with all our laws and customs. You haven’t yet heard, by any chance, whether the occupation of monthly nursing is confined exclusively to the male sex?”
“The enactment, if such there be,” replied Quong Ho solemnly, “is not, to my knowledge, in force in this remote locality.”
“Let us thank the gods, Quong Ho,” said Baltazar, “that we’re out of this feminist hurly-burly. The little I saw of the movement was antipathetic to my philosophy of life. A society in which women regard the bearing of children as a physical accident of no account, and deny the responsibilities which such an event entails, must be doomed to decay, or, at the best, to bitter disillusionment. The more I hear of contemporary England the less I like it. It seems to be woman-ridden; curiously enough by two camps in apparent opposition, but in reality waging joint warfare on man. The world has never yet beheld such a sex campaign. One section demands luxury beyond the dreams of Byzantium at its rottenest, and the other claims supreme political power.”
“It is well, sir,” said Quong Ho, “that you repudiated the imbecile suggestion of the House Agent to the effect that you should employ a woman housekeeper of mature age to superintend this establishment.”
“It is lucky for you, Quong Ho, that I did,” grinned Baltazar. “She would have made you sit up.”
Quong Ho, with clasped hands and lowered head, respectfully asserted himself. “If I do not sit up sufficiently for your satisfaction, sir, it is for you to reprimand me.”
“I only spoke in jest, Quong Ho,” said Baltazar. “Our Western humour is rather subtle.”
“I will make a note of it,” replied Quong Ho.
“By such notation and accumulation of detail one gathers knowledge,” said Baltazar. “By co-ordination one acquires wisdom. Continue on this, the only path of philosophy, and your old age will be blessed. In the meantime, please keep your observations of changes at Water-End to yourself.”
“Obedience to your honourable commands, my master,” replied Quong Ho, in Chinese, “is the sacred duty of this entirely inconsiderable person. But may one so inferior as myself humbly remind your illustrious greatness that it was you who originally propounded to me a question which I was bound to answer.”
“The fact that I did so,” replied Baltazar, “you may note as an instance of the human fallibility of the sublimest minds. Fear not but that I will profit by your lesson.”
He waved a dismissing hand. Quong Ho bowed with the perfect ceremonial of pupil taking leave of master and retired. Baltazar threw himself into his arm-chair and laughed aloud.
“You’re a joy, Quong Ho. A perfect joy. A museum specimen of a joy.”
So while Baltazar delighted in the unhumorous literalness of the Chinaman, it never occurred to him that he was the dupe of the unhumorous literalness of the Chinaman’s fidelity; that while he was inveighing against speculative phenomena of an ill-understood movement, the trumpet of war had transformed that movement into an apotheosis of feminine effort of which Quong Ho, keenly intellectual, was perfectly well aware; and that it was only by the pious grace of his pupil and servant that he lived a day in his fool’s paradise.
When Quong Ho, a week afterwards, brought him his meagre mail, he angrily crushed in his fist and threw aside the enclosure of the first envelope which he had opened.
“I’m hanged if this isn’t a begging circular! It’s infernal impudence! It’s an intolerable outrage on one’s personal liberty. Here, Quong Ho!”—he swept the remainder of the mail into the Chinaman’s hand. “Don’t let me be worried with any more letters. I’ve come down here to be quiet and not to be badgered. If there are bills to pay, make out the cheques and I’ll sign them. If there are circulars, throw them away. About anything else use your discretion.”
“I will exactly execute your orders,” replied Quong Ho.
Thus Baltazar finally severed relations between himself and the outside world. Quong Ho acted the perfect Private Secretary. The only letters presented to his master for perusal were rare business communications from booksellers instructed to purchase some out-of-the-way and possibly expensive book. Circular letters, containing appeals for subscriptions, which poured in, as soon as Baltazar’s name eventually found its way on the address-lists of the neighbourhood, Quong Ho conscientiously destroyed. Using his discretion, he withheld letters from the Bank inviting investments in War Loans. Such, in his opinion, were further intrusions on the sacred privacy of his master. And thus the weeks and months passed by; and Quong Ho, in touch with even such an outpost of civilization as the tiny moorland town and bringing to that contact the most highly trained incuriosity, could not avoid gathering the current tidings of the vast world conflict; but, faithful to his commands, he said never a word to Baltazar, gave never a hint of the stupendous convulsion in which the world was involved. And while his master, serene doctrinaire, discoursed on the political science of the nineties, now being blown to smithereens by German guns, he maintained the reverential attitude of the disciple, drinking in as gospel truth the wisdom of his inspired teacher.
One evening, when Baltazar had praised the clear solution of certain problems which he had set in Differential Equations, and prophesied a glorious career for the most brilliant mathematician China had ever produced, Quong Ho, after gratefully acknowledging the encomium, said:
“If you will forgive my indiscretion, I should like to ask a question. Why is it, sir, that you, who take such great interest in the future—for example, my inconsiderable and negligible prospects, and the benefits that will accrue to humanity on the publication of the thought-shaking results of your own profound researches,—should be so indifferent to the present condition of the world?”
“For the simple reason, my good fellow,” replied Baltazar, “that, from what I have observed, the present condition of mankind—from China to Peru, as your newly found friend Dr. Johnson says—is putrescent. The best way in which we can serve mankind is to do what we’re doing now—to provide for the intellectual development of the future generation.”
“The proposition is unanswerable,” said Quong Ho. “But suppose, sir, for the sake of argument, that a philosophic observation of the civilized world as it is should result in the conclusion that, in the English idiom, it is proceeding fast to the devils—what is the duty of the man of high morality?”
“To let it go slap-dash,” said Baltazar. “The faster and surer, the better. For then the sooner will the eternal rhythm, the eternal principle of balance, assert itself. When a society is rushing down to Gadarene suicide——”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” interrupted the alert Quong Ho. “Gad—I do not understand the word.”
“Read the Gospel according to St. Mark to-morrow. You’ve heard of St. Mark?”
“You might as well ask me, sir, if I had heard of Confucius or Homer, or the immortal Todhunter of my childhood.”
Baltazar rubbed his brown thatch and turned his luminous grey eyes on his disciple.
“The immensity of your purview, Quong Ho, is only equalled by your lightning perception of landmarks. Anyhow, read St. Mark over again, and tell me your opinion of the swine of Gadara. For the moment, I’d have you know that you’ve interrupted my argument. I was saying that if everything’s going to the devil—that’s the correct idiom—not proceeding to devils——”
“May I make a note of it?” said Quong Ho, scribbling the phrase across his mathematical manuscript.
Baltazar rose from his chair by the long deal table and relit his pipe over the chimney of a lamp.
“You’ve put me out. What the blazes were we talking about?”
“The present world condition,” replied Quong Ho.
“Then I assert,” said Baltazar, “that the present state of the world is rotten. It’s no place for intellectual reformers like you and me. What are the words of Confucius known to every schoolboy? ‘With sincerity and truth unite a desire for self-culture. Lay down your life rather than quit the path of virtue. Enter not a state which is tottering to its fall. When Law obtains in the Empire let yourself be seen: when lawlessness reigns, retire into obscurity.’ ”
“But supposing,” persisted Quong Ho, “the state of the devil-driven world is of vital interest?”
“It can be of vital interest only to those hurtling down to destruction. To us, who have retired into the obscure aloofness recommended by the great philosopher, it can be of no possible concern.”
“It is well,” said Quong Ho.
“I know it is,” remarked Baltazar, with a yawn. “Another night let us have a slightly more intelligent conversation.”
Quong Ho retired, his conscience finally set at rest. After all, was not his master right? What could he do of any use in the world rudely at war? Was he not serving the truest interests of humanity by retiring at this juncture and devoting the harvest of his great learning to a future generation?
“Soldiers,” said Quong Ho the next day, looking into the unspeculative topaz eyes of the goat which he had been milking, “are as numerous as the sands of the desert, and politicians as the mosquitoes in a swamp; they are swept away and the world misses them not; but philosophers are rare, and the loss of one of them is a supreme world calamity.”
“Baa-a-a!” said the goat.
“I perceive that you too have wisdom,” said Quong Ho. “You appreciate the privilege of living under the same roof as the illustrious Baltazar.”
He burst into an unaccustomed laugh. Conversation with a goat appealed to his prim sense of humour. But all the same, he expressed his own deeply-rooted conviction. To the keen-brained young Chinaman, Baltazar appeared as a man of stupendous intellectual force. His knowledge of the abstract sciences of the Western world would have commanded his respect; but his vast Chinese erudition, acknowledged with admiration by Mandarins and scholars and other Great Ones of China, gave Quong Ho cause for a veneration reaching almost to idolatry.
Also Baltazar, for all his patriarchal years, earned his pupil’s respect as a man of marvellous muscle and endurance. During the winter, when the inclemency of the weather forbade agricultural pursuits—and on that moorland waste the weather abandoned itself to every capricious devildom within meteorological possibilities—Baltazar, having ordered a set of gloves from London, gave boxing lessons to his disciple. At first Quong Ho was shocked. How could so contemptible a person as he ever make a pretence of smiting the highly honourable face of his master? Baltazar bade him try. He would give him an hour’s extra private tuition for every hit. And Quong Ho, encouraged by so splendid a prize, tried, at first diffidently, then earnestly, then zealously, then desperately, then bald-headedly, but never a wild blow could pass the easy guard of his smiling master.
“You see, Quong Ho, it’s a science,” said Baltazar. “Now I’m going to hit you.” And he feinted and struck out with his left and sent his disciple swinging across the room. “It is also a game,” he added, holding up his hand, “because what I have just done did not hurt you in the least.”
Quong Ho rubbed his jaw. “It was like the kiss of a butterfly,” said he.
“Here endeth the First Lesson,” said Baltazar. “The English etiquette now requires that we should shake hands.”
When they had gone through the formality Baltazar continued:
“You of all non-English people oughtn’t to be astonished. Did not the same ceremony exist in your country over two thousand years ago? Is it not referred to in the Analects?”
“Sir,” said the breathless and perspiring Quong Ho, “I have unworthily forgotten.”
“Did not the Master say: ‘The true gentleman is never contentious. If a spirit of rivalry is anywhere unavoidable, it is at a shooting-match. Yet even here he courteously salutes his opponents before taking up his position’—we ought to have shaken hands before starting, but we’ll do it next time—‘and again when, having lost, he retires to drink the forfeit-cup’—your forfeit-cup being the loss of the extra hours of tuition. ‘So that even when competing, he remains a true gentleman.’ ”
“I remember now,” said Quong Ho.
“I’m glad you do,” replied Baltazar. “That is the lofty spirit in which we shall continue this exceedingly health-giving science and pastime.”
And they continued. The young Chinaman, lithe, hard, physically perfect, little more than half the age of his tutor, devoted himself, with his Chinese assiduity, to the mastery of the fascinating art, and succeeded eventually in giving Baltazar most interesting encounters; he realized that fierce blows planted on venerable features were taken, nay applauded, in the spirit of the Confucian gentleman; he also accepted in the same gentlemanly way the hammering that he invariably received. It was after some months of this training, when he was able to discount merely superior science, that he bowed down before Baltazar not only as before an intellect, but as before a marvellous physical man.
There came a truce, however—the following winter—when Baltazar, wise in his elderly generation, foresaw the inevitable supremacy of youth, and ordered new toys from London—foils, masks and fencing jackets. The gloves mouldered in a broken-down potting-shed, and Quong Ho again started, as a tyro, to learn a new athletic accomplishment. Thus in his disciple’s sound body Baltazar contrived to maintain a sound and humble mind. He knew that he was held in deep respect by Quong Ho. But it never occurred to his careless mind that Quong Ho regarded him as a kind of god. He accepted the homage as a matter of course.
In these idyllic conditions John Baltazar accounted himself serenely happy. His scholarly solitude was undisturbed by the windy ways of men or the windy ways of moorland nature. The former spent themselves before reaching him; at the latter he snapped his fingers. What to him was the seasons’ difference? So absorbed was he in his work, so circumscribed in his walled enclosure beyond which he seldom set foot, that he barely even noticed the hourly change on the sensitive face of the moor. And season followed season, and the piles of manuscript, exquisitely corrected for the printer, grew in height, and Quong Ho assimilated Higher Mathematics as though it were rice; and everything was for the best in the best of all possible little intellectual worlds.
CHAPTER VI
SUCH, as far as a few strokes can picture him, was John Baltazar, at the time when his unsuspected son lay footless in the convalescent home and discussed with Marcelle Baring the mystery of his existence. A man of many failings, many intolerances, of some ruthlessness. A man both sensitive and hard; both bold and shrinking; with the traditional habits of the ostrich and the heart of a lion. A man apparently given to extravagances of caprice; and yet remaining always constant to himself, preserving also throughout his strange career a perfect unity of character. Perhaps, regarding him from another point of view, his detractors may say that he loved to play to himself as audience and, further, put that audience in the gallery. Why not? It is in the essence of human consciousness that a man must, in some measure, be an actor to himself. The degree depends on the human equation. Dumasfilsonce said of his immortal semi-mulatto father: “He is quite capable of getting up behind his own carriage, in order to persuade people that he keeps a black footman.” A savage epigram. But it would have been a deeper truth if he had said that the wonder of a man who was his father, was capable of doing it, in order to persuade himself that he kept a black footman. The more we limit the audience to the man himself, the more we love him. The more human does the vivid creature appear to us. If Baltazar played to that audience of one, he had many illustrious colleagues. If again his method was melodramatic, it at least had breadth. It dealt with big issues in a broad and simple way. . . .
“That’s what I love about the three great systems of Chinese ethics,” he would declare. “There’s no damned subtlety about them. You accept the various propositions or you, don’t. There are nohomoousianandhomoiousianconflicts, and suchlike rubbish, that have torn Western thought to ribbons for over a thousand years. In China you go straight to the heart of truth. All the subtlety lies, Quong Ho, in the correct interpretation of your appalling but fascinating script.”
This was a rough profession of faith, almost an analysis of character. The intellect of the mathematician delighted in the process of arriving at exactness of statement, but at the same time that statement’s philosophic simplicity appealed to a nature fundamentally simple.
He abhorred complications. That was his weakness. He claimed, unphilosophically, the absolute. Hence the abandonment of his academical career, involving at the same time the merciless abandonment of his wife. Hence the clean cut of his career in China, where a little supple coquetting with political corruption would have brought him great wealth and power. Hence the impenetrable wall he had now contrived between himself and the rest of mankind. He had no power of compromise.
Thus an attempt has been made to answer the question which Marcelle Baring vainly put to herself that sleepless night on her return from London, when a boy’s artless admiration had opened springs of sentiment which she had thought deliberately sealed forever; the question asked by Godfrey Baltazar; the same question which almost simultaneously John Baltazar put to himself, while leaning over the gate in the glory of the moorland sunset; which, in a wistful, speculative way, he continued to put to himself after Quong Ho, with new lights on Elliptic Functions and the philosophy of Lao-Tze and the Ethics of Love—for the severe lesson in mathematics was always followed by an hour’s improving conversation on general matters—had retired for the night, leaving him to his last pipe and his last spell of work. But the discussion on the Ethics of Love disturbed his more studious thought and brought back the question which a few hours before had idly flitted across his brain.
Quong Ho had said, somewhat diffidently, in his own language: “Master, may this inconsiderable person seek the solution of an intimate problem from one who is a supreme authority on all things concerning human conduct?”
“Fire away,” said Baltazar in English.
“Thank you, sir; I will proceed to fire. When I left China I was a young man of no account, the son of peasants long since defunct, your body-servant, almost your slave, because you purchased my life.”
“We can stow all that,” said Baltazar.
“With your honourable permission, by no means. I was reckoned in Chen-Chow only as a hopper of clods——”
“Eh? Oh yes. Go on,” smiled Baltazar.
“I saw the daughter of Fung Yu, the gardener of the palace——”
“I remember the old villain. He had a daughter?”
“There were negotiations in progress,” Quong Ho went on. “The young woman was eminently desirable. She was virtuous and obedient, and not devoid of physical attractiveness. When I followed you, sir, from China, I left the affair between myself and Fung Yu in a state of suspended animation.”
“You mean Fung Yu’s daughter? In our more brutal idiom it comes to this—that you’re in love with a little girl in China—and she possibly with you—and you’ve run away and don’t know what the devil to do.”
“Her feelings,” replied Quong Ho calmly, “do not concern me. I doubt whether she has any of sentimental importance. It is with my own honourable conduct that I am preoccupied. I left China a person to whom Fung Yu would condescend: I return as a personage of high intellectual repute. I shall be able to seek a bride of a far higher social position than the daughter of Fung Yu. That is not all. My study of English literature has given me new conceptions of the intellectual companionship of married life. In the New China there are certainly young girls of high educational standard, among whom I might find one who could understand what I was talking about when I spoke of such philosophical topics as interested me. The point that, as a very young and humble man, I wish to submit to your infallible wisdom, for my guidance, is this: am I bound, as an honourable fellow, to marry, in Old China, the flower-like but cabbage-ignorant daughter of Fung Yu, the gardener, or am I justified in cutting the Rubicon and seeking in the New China for a real helpmate?”
“Before proceeding,” replied Baltazar, with the bantering light in his grey eyes that Quong Ho could never interpret, “will you make a note for a conversation to-morrow on Mixture of Metaphors?” Quong Ho produced his notebook. “Yes, just that entry. Mixture of Metaphors. Good,” said he, when the methodical young Chinaman had obeyed. “Side issues, like that, have their great importance; but they must be followed after the main course has been traversed. The whole point of the matter is: how far have you committed yourself with the girl?”
Quong Ho started back in his straight-backed wooden chair—they were still side by side at the lamplit centre of the long deal table—and held up his hands.
“Committed myself? Oh no. The only time I ever addressed her was on one occasion when I relieved her of the burden of a vessel of water from the well to her house. But I have spoken very seriously to Fung Yu.”
“Fung Yu can go to blazes,” said Baltazar.
Quong Ho smiled. “I alone could give evidence that would condemn him to a perpetuity of punishment.”
“So could I,” cried Baltazar. “Graft! If Tammany Hall really wanted to know how to do things, it ought to sit like a little child at the feet of a high-class Mandarin’s head-gardener. Fung Yu’s the real thing.”
“He is a corrupt personality,” said Quong Ho.
“Therefore,” replied Baltazar, “he is not the kind of person with whom an honourable man should seek alliance. As to the lady, her young affections are obviously unblighted, and very possibly by this time she is married and the mother of twins. My advice is to dismiss Fung Yu and his flower-like yet cabbage-ignorant daughter forever from your mind.”
“I shall follow your gracious counsel,” replied Quong Ho. And the intimate conversation ended.
But it hung around the thoughts of Baltazar for the rest of the night. Quong Ho was young. Quong Ho had looked upon a daughter of men and found her fair. In his Chinese self-repressing way he had had his romance. Now it was over. He pitied Quong Ho. Yet, after a year or so of probation, the young man, lusty in his youth and confident in his future, would return to his native land heart-whole, with all the romance of life still before him—whilst he, Baltazar, would re-enter a world from which all such things were blotted out for ever. For what of romance could lie before a man of fifty—one who had lost all touch with women and women’s ways? For the first time a fear of loneliness sent a shiver through him. It was not natural for a man to have neither wife nor child. It was but half an existence; a deliberate spurning of duties and glories and fulfilled achievement. And his own one romance? Had he been justified in destroying its gossamer web? It was all very long ago; but the beauty of it lingered exquisite in his heart. Had he been a mere fool? Were the results to him and to her worth the sacrifice? And, after all, was he sure that the results to her had been beneficial rather than disastrous? He sighed, consoled himself with the reflections that she must now have around her a family of sons and daughters, and that if ever she gave him a thought, it was to bless Heaven for her narrow escape; and, so fortified, he went on with his work.
When he awoke the next morning, the chastened retrospective mood had passed. After his tea and cold tub, he sat down to the table by the eastern window through which the morning sun was streaming, setting the gorse ablaze and the heather blood-red, and attacked the final chapter of his epoch-making Treatise on the Theory of Groups. The thrill of a great thing accomplished held him as he wrote. Such moments were worth living. He breakfasted with the appetite of a man who had earned a right to the material blessings of life. He went out, groomed the old grey mare and cleaned out the stable and dug up a patch of ground, rejoicing, like a young man, in his strength and in the fresh beauty of the day. On his return to his study he reviewed affectionately the monuments of two years’ labour. The Treatise of the Theory of Groups, all but complete, lay in one neat pile of manuscript. Another represented further serious adventures into the Analytical Geometry of a Four-Dimensional Space than mortal man had ever undertaken. Who could tell whither those adventures could lead? Pure mathematics had demonstrated the existence of the planet Neptune in space of three dimensions. Pure mathematics applied to four dimensions might prove and explain many transcendental phenomena. The next world might be four-dimensional and the spirits of the dead who inhabit it could easily enter confined three-dimensional space. That was Cayley’s ingenious theory of Ghosts. You could carry it further to space of five, six,ndimensions; when you could treat the geometry of space of infinite dimensions as Euclid did the geometry of plane surfaces, you would have solved the riddle of the universe; you would have come direct to the Godhead. He turned lovingly over the leaves of the completed portion of this fascinating essay; also the neighbouring piles of rough notes, the results of laborious years in China. Another section of the long deal table was devoted to his translations and editions of the Chinese classics and to ancient Chinese MSS. and books, his originals and authorities. The final scholarly translation into English of the great book of the Tao-tze—The Book of Rewards and Punishments—so full of deep wisdom, artlessness and charm, rose in three-part completion. It would knock dear old Stanislas Julien’s French version of 1835 into a cocked hat. He had collated libraries undreamed of by Julien or by any subsequent scholar. It would make all the missionaries and consuls and other amateur sinologists wish they had never been born. . . . Then again were the Shih-King—the Psalms of ancient China, resonant with music, bewildering with imagery, vibrating with emotion, hitherto done into English—done ininto English—he chuckled as the mild jest occurred to him—by a worthy, prosaic and very learned missionary, much out of sympathy with ancient China because it had never heard of Jesus Christ before He was born—there were the Shih-King in process of reverent and, as far as his power lay, of poetic translation. He took down from his shelves the volume containing the solemnly authoritative English text published by the Oxford University Press, and opened it at random. He read:
“The angry terrors of compassionate Heaven extend through this lower world.(The King’s)counsels and plans are crooked and bad; when will he stop(in his course)? Counsels that are good he will not follow. And those that are not good he employs. When I look at his counsels and plans, I am greatly pained.”
He laughed out loud, shut the book and returned it to the shelf.
“ ‘I am greatly pained’! Oh, my Lord!”
He searched his manuscript for his own version, and read it through with a satisfaction not devoid of smugness. A professional poet might have found, like the Chinese writer, the inevitable word, the sacred flash; but, after all, he had made the thing deadened by the learned Oxford professor live again; he had suggested some of the music and the grace of the original—enough to attract and not to repel the ordinary English reader. And with all that, he would like to see any man, Chinese or European, pick a hole in his scholarship.
He lit his pipe, and before settling down to work again surveyed the great mass of his achievement. Life was truly worth living, when, during its brief span, such great things could be done. With a short interval for luncheon, he worked steadily on through the day, sacrificing his accustomed spell of outdoor exercise, and when Quong Ho, who had changed his nondescript European working kit for the cool, immaculate Chinese dress, announced that dinner would be ready in a quarter of an hour, he had all but written Finis to his Treatise on the Theory of Groups.
“Lord!” said he, “I must wash and get a mouthful of fresh air.” He whistled to the dog, Brutus, who had lain at his feet most of the afternoon, and went off. When he got outside, he discovered, to his surprise, for he had sat in front of a window all the time, that a white mist had gathered on the moorland and that his horizon as he stood on his doorstep was scarcely bounded by his rude granite wall. The fog covered him in like a cupola. He patted the Airedale’s head and smiled, well content in this increased security of his isolation.
“We might, be the last living beings on the face of the globe,” said he to Quong Ho, who came to announce dinner.
“Yes, sir,” said Quong Ho.
Baltazar shot a humorous glance at him: “The idea doesn’t seem to provoke you to radiant enthusiasm.”
“I fail to see, sir,” replied Quong Ho, “who, in that hypothetical case, would benefit by your illuminating editions of the Chinese classics, and what advantage it would be to me to continue the severe study of Elliptic Functions.”
“I’m afraid you’re a dismal utilitarian,” said his master, passing by him into the house. “Yet I suppose you’re right,” he added a few moments afterwards, as he sat down to table and unfolded his napkin. “If we were the only two people left in the world, we’d very soon chuck our intellectual pursuits. I don’t think I care a damn for the things themselves. As far as I am solely and personally concerned, this excellent bit of grilled salmon is infinitely more vital than the discovery of any mathematical truth. The latter has only value as it relates to the progress of humanity. If there is no humanity, it is valueless. It won’t help me on worth a cent. But the salmon, a typical edible, is essential to the physical existence of ME. So I should let Chinese philosophy and the Higher Mathematics go hang, and confine myself to the chase of salmon or rabbits or roots or acorns—and so would you—and in a very few years we should be hairy, long-nailed savages, flying at each other’s throats for the last succulent bit of Brutus.”
The dog, hearing his name, rested his long chin against his master’s knee and regarded him with wistful eyes.
“No, old son,” laughed Baltazar, giving him a morsel of salmon, “we’re not at that point yet. Make your mind easy. You and I and Quong Ho will take our work out into the hurrying markets of the earth and find justification for all these lonely days. Although we’re temporary recluses, we’re valuable citizens of the world. We deserve more salmon.”
Quong Ho presented the dish, and Baltazar and Brutus got their deserts.
Presently Quong Ho brought in lamb cutlets with fresh peas from the garden, which Baltazar attacked with relish.
“Quong Ho,” said Baltazar, “you’re a wonder. Is there anything you can’t do?”
The young man smiled bland recognition of the compliment, but said nothing. As Baltazar’s body-servant he refrained from familiar conversation. But Baltazar was in an expansive mood. He went on:
“You cook for me enchantingly. You serve me perfectly. Your attitude, Quong Ho, is one of the most exquisite tact. But if we were the last two persons on the earth, you would see me damned before you would devote yourself to my personal comfort in this unrestricted manner.”
“I think not,” replied Quong Ho. “The truths of religion would not be affected by the annihilation of the human race. To you, who are to mein loco parenti——”
“Parentis, my dear fellow. It’s Latin. Make a note of it.”
“I do so, mentally,” said Quong Ho. “To you, sir, who are to me in the place of a parent, I owe filial obligation, and therefore I should not see you damned before I administered to your wants.”
“Rubbish!” said Baltazar, with a wave of his hand.
“I speak the truth,” said Quong Ho gravely.
Baltazar did not reply, but devoted himself to the cutlets and peas.
Quong Ho performed the sacred rite of the offering of wine. The meal was concluded in its nice formality of conventional life, and after coffee Baltazar lit his pipe and sat down to his usual hour’s mental relaxation. But his mind wandered fromThe Caxtons, which he had taken down from the shelves, to Quong Ho’s quiet profession of loyalty. For all his intimate knowledge of the Chinese character, this perhaps was the first time that he realized the depth of the young man’s real affection. And suddenly it occurred to him that he also was greatly attached to Quong Ho; not only through habit, or implicit trust, or gratitude for essential co-operation in carrying out his eccentric scheme of life; but by ties very simple and homely. Bacon, speaking of man, says: “If he have not a friend, he may quit the stage.” Baltazar glowed with the thought that he could still act his part as a human being. He had his friend. Indeed, he had had one for all these months, and even years, without knowing it. The loneliness of soul which he had accepted as his portion from the time of his flight from Cambridge, and for the last day or two he had begun to dread, was filled by the incongruous sympathy of the young Chinaman. Hitherto he had accepted his fidelity as a matter of course; he had rewarded it by scrupulous observance of his obligations. But it had been his good pleasure to regard his disciple as a human and intellectual toy, all the more delectable for his lack of the humorous sense. To pull well-known strings and elicit platitudes expressed in the solemnity of his classically learned English had been his mischievous delight. But—“I speak the truth,” Quong Ho had said; and the accent in which he had said it was one of grave conviction, even of rebuke.
He took up his book again and almost immediately let it drop.
“If I lost Quong Ho, what the devil would become of me?” He threw the book on to the floor and leaned back in his arm-chair, pipe in mouth, his hands clasped behind his head. In the whole wide world of hundreds of millions of people, he had not a single friend, save Quong Ho. He had been very dense not to realize before the elementary truth that individual life is not supportable by itself. Newton’s Third Law of Motion—to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction—was a law of life. The incessant reaction on the individual would be death. One other nature at least was needed for the distribution and application of vital forces, and in their mutual action and reaction could alone be found the compensation that was safety, sanity, normal human existence. And the more attuned were the part of the reciprocal human machine, the greater the compensation; this human adjustment had its degrees: understanding, friendship, affection, culminating in love—the perfect state.
When Quong Ho appeared, books and papers as usual under his arm, Baltazar waved an inviting arm.
“Take a chair, Quong Ho, and let us talk. Elliptic Functions are too inhuman for me to-night.”
Quong Ho put his burden down on the table and brought up a straight-backed, rush-bottomed chair, and sat down stiffly, facing his master, who took up his parable.
“I’ve been thinking of what you said at dinner. You touched on a spiritual aspect of the hypothetical emotion we were discussing which did not occur to me. What made you do it?”
“Sir,” replied Quong Ho, “if you will permit me to speak my thoughts, I cannot separate life into two watertight departments——”
“Compartments,” murmured Baltazar, through force of habit.
Quong Ho bowed. “I recollect. To resume. I cannot separate life into two watertight compartments—the material and the spiritual. It appears to me to be the subtle interfusion, the solemnization of holy matrimony, between the two.”
“One of the charms, my son, of your conversation,” laughed Baltazar, “is its unexpected allusiveness.”
Quong Ho rose and made a deep bow. “You have called me, sir, by a term which overwhelms me with filial gratitude.”
Baltazar, who had used the word deliberately, held out his hand.
“I believe,” said he in Chinese, “in your profession of a son’s affection, and therefore I admit you to the position. After a year or so our lives will materially be separated, but spiritually they will run the same course.”
“This is the happiest and most fortunate day of my life,” said Quong Ho.
“Without going into superlatives,” replied Baltazar in English, “I may reciprocate the sentiment.”
They talked on, developing the idea of wedding of the material and the spiritual, branching off into fascinating side-tracks, as men of alert intelligence delight to do in conversation, and coming back now and then with the flash of unexpectedness to the main issue. They touched on the hermits of Thebaïd.
“Their outlook,” said Baltazar, “was exclusively spiritual, fundamentally selfish. They were out to save their own silly, unimportant souls from hell-fire, and nothing else mattered. Egotism raised to infinity. Our retirement has nothing at all in common with theirs.”
“Sir,” said Quong Ho, “since we are speaking very seriously, may I, without indiscretion, ask you whether you too are not out to save your soul?”
Baltazar rose from his chair and strode up and down the long room, casting at Quong Ho a swift glance from beneath frowning brows every time he passed him. At last he halted and said:
“That’s so. The history of my inner life has been an attempt to save my soul. But there’s a hell of a lot of difference between me and St. Simeon Stylites. That was a kind of ass who sat for years on the top of a pillar and never did a hand’s turn for anybody. All he thought of was his escape from hell. Now I, as far as my soul is concerned, don’t care a damn whether it’s going to hell or heaven. My object in saving it is to be of use to my fellow-creatures.”
Quong Ho, who had risen when his master rose, said:
“All that is clear to me. I too am here for the same purpose.”
“You?” cried Baltazar. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I want to eradicate from my mind the soul-destroying associations of the daughter of the gardener Fung Yu.”
Then Baltazar laughed aloud and clapped the young Chinaman on the shoulder, an unprecedented act of hearty familiarity.
“My son,” said he, “this is a discipline that will bring us both, me old, you young, to the greater wisdom. In the meanwhile, it’s a happy discipline, isn’t it? We’ve got all that mortal man—under discipline, mark you—all that mortal man can want. Spiritually, we have the sacred relations of father and son. Intellectually, we are equals and”—he threw an arm around the room—“we have the learning of the world at our command. Materially—what more can we desire?”
He looked fondly around the long, low-ceilinged room, brilliantly illuminated by four petroleum lamps and half a dozen candles, and dwelt upon its homely, scholarly comfort; the Turkey carpets; the easeful chairs and sofa; the exquisite and priceless rolls of Chinese paintings between the bookcases; the bookcases filled, some with the old-world books of Europe, others with the literature of China, printed volumes, manuscripts beyond money value; the long table piled with the inestimable results of human intellect; the warm bronze curtains, before each of the four windows; the dear and familiar form of the very dog, Brutus, stretched out asleep in front of the great chimney-piece. And the silence was that of the most exclusive and the most untroubled corner of Paradise.
“What a Heaven-sent thing is Peace,” said Baltazar.
At that moment the silence was disturbed by a strange and unknown sound. Baltazar and Quong Ho started and looked questioningly at each other. It seemed like the distant beating of almighty wings. They held their breath. No, it was like the sweeping thunder of an express train. But what should express trains be doing on the moorland? With common impulse they rose and went out of doors into the thick mist. Then the thundering, clattering rush broke vibrant on their ears. It was in the air around, above them. John Baltazar put his hand to a bewildered head. What unheard-of convulsion of nature was this? Then suddenly he had a second’s consciousness of bursting flame and overwhelming crash, and the blackness of death submerged his senses.