CHAPTER VII
WHENhe recovered consciousness it was but to awake to an incomprehensible dream condition. Of his whereabouts he had no notion. An attempt to move caused him such hideous pain in his head as almost to render him again unconscious. His limbs, too, seemed under the control of dream paralysis. He lay for a while co-ordinating his faculties, until he arrived at the definite conviction that he was awake. His eyes rested on ashlars of granite which, as he lay on his left side, continued in a long line; also, cast downwards, they rested on rough grass. Gradually he realized that he was in the open air, that the stones were part of his wall. What he was doing there he could not tell. He felt sick and faint. By an effort of will he moved a leg. The movement revealed unaccustomed stiffness of limb: it also reawakened the torture of his head. Again he stayed motionless. Yes, it was daylight. It was sunlight; some twenty feet further down the wall cast a shadow. Presently over his recovering senses stole an abominable stench. He sniffed, jerking his head to its intolerable agony. Cautiously he lifted his right hand to the seat of pain. His fingers dabbled in something like thick glue. Bringing them down before his eyes, he saw they were covered with coagulated blood. He felt again, and realized, in stupid amazement, that his hair was stuck to a stone. The first thing to be done was to liberate himself. He remembered afterwards that he said: “Let us concentrate on this: nothing else for the moment matters.” He concentrated, and at last, after infinite suffering that made him cry aloud, he freed his hair from its glutinous imprisonment and, spent with the effort, rolled over on the flat of his back and gazed upwards into the blue sky. A faint breeze swept over him. But the breeze was laden with the same abominable stench.
As soon as he could gather sufficient physical energy he rose to a sitting posture, supporting himself on his hands, and gazed spellbound and stupefied on a scene of unimaginable disaster. Where once stretched the familiar long-lying homestead, there was nothing but an inchoate mass of stones, from the midst of which eddied and swirled columns of black smoke. And the wind blew the smoke towards him. Looking down, he found himself begrimed by it. He sat forward, staring, and, secure of balance, withdrew his hands and put them up to his brow, seeking a clue to the mystery. Memory, stage after stage, returned. He had been sitting at night with Quong Ho. They had heard a strange noise. They had gone out to discover what it was. Then——? What had happened then? Just a terror of Hell opening—and nothingness. Yes, he remembered. It was dense mist when they went out. Now it was clear, beautifully clear. The sun was shining; but it was low on the horizon; so it must be early morning.
What could have happened? A thunderstorm? The place struck by lightning? He gripped his temples. He had never heard of a thunderstorm in a dense fog. Besides, thunder never occurred in the long, continuous, rhythmical acceleration of volume of sound. Yet what else but thunder and lightning could account for the blasted homestead that reeked before his eyes?
He looked around. The stone enclosure was strewn with unspeakable wreckage; great blocks of masonry, unrecognizable shafts of timber, bits of twisted iron railing, ashes, charred wood. . . . He rose dizzily to his feet. His head was one agony. He felt something wet on his neck, and realized that the wound evidently caused by the concussion of his head against a stone, had begun to bleed afresh. Before he could tie around his brows the handkerchief which he mechanically drew out, he saw, close by, the dead body of the dog Brutus, and he returned the handkerchief to his pocket. The dog seemed to have been killed outright by a great piece of granite that had been hurled upon him. Then for the first time his mind grew quite clear. The unknown convulsion had dealt not only destruction but death. Where was Quong Ho?
He started forthwith on an agonized search. They had been standing together a few paces away from the front door. Thither he went, but could find no trace of him among the wreckage. From the roofless enclosure of granite and through the windows poured black volumes of smoke. It was useless, even impossible, to look inside. Baltazar called out loudly the Chinaman’s name, as he made a circuit of the devastated house, only to find fresh evidences of complete catastrophe. Here and there lay fragments of iron, unfamiliar to him, which in his anxiety for Quong Ho’s safety he did not speculate on or examine. He nearly tripped over something by the burned-down stable. Looking down, to his sickening horror, he found it to be the head of the old grey mare. He went on. No sign of Quong Ho. In the little enclosed grass patch, now foul with rubbish, the very goats lay dead, mostly dismembered. He stared at them stupidly. A sudden shrill noise caused him to jump aside in terror. A second later he realized that it came from a solitary cockerel, strutting about in the sunshine, the sole survivor of the poultry-run, cynically proclaiming his lust of life.
Wherever he turned was ruin utter and final. But where was Quong Ho? Had he not, after all, remained outside, but re-entered the house? If so—he shuddered. Creeping back, he peered through the windows on the windward side, as long as the smart in his eyes would allow him. There was nothing there but fragments of stone and smouldering, indistinguishable ash that mounted nearly to the sill. Whatever had been the cause, the dry thatch had been set alight—the roof had fallen in, and nothing of the interior remained save a few charred books on the upper shelves of blackened and crazily precarious sections of bookcase. He strode away, came to the front of the house again, and continued his search there, with horror in his soul. The front door had been blown out. On his first inspection he had passed it by. Now he stood wondering at the supernatural explosion that could have burst it from its hinges and thrown its great oaken weight bodily forth; and, looking at it, suddenly became conscious of a foot, shod in a Chinese shoe, protruding from beneath it. He bent down swiftly and touched the foot. Shouted “Quong Ho!” But there was no reply. He rose, remained for a moment with the horror of the old mare’s head, and other things he had seen in the goats’ enclosure, racking his nerves. Then he braced himself, bent and lifted the door, and under it lay the body of Quong Ho. To lever the heavy mass and set it upright without treading on the motionless man, taxed all his strength. At last he got a footing on the further side of Quong Ho, which enabled him to set the door on edge, and a push sent it clattering clear. Then he saw that the corner had rested on a stone by Quong Ho’s head and so had not crushed his face.
He bent down, made a rapid examination; then sank back on his heels, and thanked God that Quong Ho was still alive. There was a wound on his head, somewhat like his own, which until then he had all but forgotten. As far as he could make out the leg was broken in one or two places. Possibly ribs. He did not know. He took off his grey flannel jacket, the back of which was drenched in blood, and, rolling it up, put it beneath Quong Ho’s head. The obvious thing to do next was to fetch water, bandages, stimulant—there was a medicine-chest and brandy in the house. After a few impulsive strides he stopped short. There were no bandages, no brandy. What remained of them lay in the burning filth within the house walls. But water? He prayed God there might be some in the scullery. He found the pump that worked the well broken, but the blessed stream ran from the tap, showing that there was still some reserve in the fortunately undamaged cistern. As best he might he cleaned out and filled a pail; found an unbroken yellow bowl, and took them out to where Quong Ho lay. He went back to search for linen or rag; but in that welter of destruction he could find nothing. His own handkerchief was absurdly inadequate. Luckily, the day before being warm, he had changed before lunch into a thin undervest and a linen shirt. The latter he removed and tore into strips, and so he bathed and bandaged Quong Ho’s head. He also ripped up the man’s trousers and cut shoes and socks from the swollen feet, and with the remainder of the shirt made compresses. And all the time Quong Ho showed no sign of returning consciousness. Evidently he was suffering from severe concussion.
It was only when he had finished his rough dressings that the ghastliness of his isolation smote him. He must leave Quong Ho there alone, uncared for, and go across the moor in search of help. Suppose his own leg had been broken. The sweat stood on his forehead. They would have lain there and starved to death, like stricken animals in a wilderness. Meanwhile the sun was rising higher in the sky and was beating down upon Quong Ho. With a mighty effort he raised him in his arms and staggered with him to the other side of the house, where there would be shade for some hours: where, too, the evil smoke could not eddy over him. Placing the jacket again beneath his head and the bowl filled with fresh water by his side, on the off chance of his recovering consciousness, he left the scene of desolation and horror.
About a mile away he realized that he had not tended his own wounded head, which, without any covering from the sun, was throbbing in exquisite agony. His handkerchief he had left with the remainder of the shirt. He also realized that he was bare-armed, clad only in the summer undervest and flannel trousers and the light gym shoes in which he used to fence. He reeked all over, hands and arms and body, with soot and blood. All this soon passed from his mind. Things whirred in his brain, so that he feared lest he were growing lightheaded. Also, although he had drunk a little water before starting, he began to be tormented with a burning thirst. He lost sense of the vastness of the calamity that had befallen him, lost the power, too, of speculating on its cause. All his mind was concentrated on battling against tortured nerves and reeling brain, in order to achieve one object. He kept on repeating to himself what he should say to the first human being he should meet; fortified himself with the reflection: “Three miles to the road; three-quarters of an hour.” But only having traversed the barely distinguishable track thrice before, once when he made the return journey from Water-End to view the hermitage, and on the other occasion when he drove thither to take up residence, he missed it and strayed diagonally across the moor. At last, after a couple of hours wandering, he reached a ditch beyond which stretched the dazzling white ribbon of road. He fell into the ditch like a drunken man, managed to clamber out and, on the further side, stumbled and lay exhausted, unable to move. After a few minutes he staggered to his feet, and swayed down the road, which was as lonely as the moorland.
Suddenly he became aware of a difference; of trees and laurels and verdure on his left; and in the midst of them stood a couple of tall granite pillars with a gateway between. It was a house. He had won through. Inside was human aid. He made his way to the gate and clutched the top bar to steady himself and looked down a well-ordered drive. As he looked a man appeared from a side path, who, after regarding the haggard apparition grotesquely clad, covered with grime and blood, for a few gasping seconds, rushed up.
“Hello! Hello! What’s the matter? Why—I’m jiggered! It’s Mr. Baltazar!”
Baltazar swept a hand towards the moor, and said hoarsely:
“My Chinese friend is over there, dying. There’s been an accident. Explosion or something. He’s dying. You must send men and doctors at once.”
“Good Lord!” cried the man. “Of course I will. Come inside and tell me all about it. You don’t mean to say those bombs got you? You look in a damn fine old mess too.”
He opened the gate, clasped Baltazar round the waist, and supported him down the drive. Soon an old gardener came up and lent a hand, and between them they carried the half-fainting Baltazar into the house and laid him on a couch in the dining-room. The host poured out a stiff brandy and soda.
“Here, drink this.”
The cool bubbling liquid was a draught of Paradise to Baltazar’s parched throat. The unaccustomed stimulant, after a few moments, had its bracing effect.
“Now, what’s it all about? You remember me, don’t you? Pillivant’s my name. Came to call about eighteen months ago, and you turned me down. Anyhow that’s forgotten. I don’t bear malice, especially when a chap seems down and out. What can I do for you?”
Baltazar said: “There was an explosion last night. It knocked me out. I woke up this morning to find my house burned to the ground. My Chinese friend is there unconscious, with concussion of the brain and broken legs. I had to come for assistance. You must send at once.”
“All right,” said Pillivant. “You stay there. I’ll do some telephoning. Meanwhile I’ll send the wife to look after you. You want a wash and a change, and a doctor and bed.”
“Bed!” cried Baltazar. “I must go back to Quong Ho.”
He rose to his feet, as Pillivant left the room, and tottered after him. But he found himself foolishly lying on the floor. He said to himself: “He has given me brandy. He’s sending his wife. She’ll think I’m drunk.” And with a great effort he re-established himself on the couch.
In a few minutes Mrs. Pillivant entered. She was a faded, fair woman in the late thirties, wearing a cloth skirt and tartan silk low-cut blouse, and a string of pearls around a bony neck.
“So you’ve been Zepped, I hear,” she said. “No, don’t get up. Stay where you are. If you haven’t heard it already, you’ll be glad to know it came down in flames on the moor about twenty miles away, and all the brutes were burned alive.”
Baltazar set his teeth, monstrously striving to get his brain to work.
“Brutes? What brutes? What are you talking about? I don’t understand.”
“Why, the crew of the Zeppelin. Where it came from or what it was doing about here, we don’t know—we’ll have to wait until news comes from London. It must have been badly damaged, and lost its way in the mist. They must have got rid of their bombs before trying to land, so my husband says—but before they had time to land the Zeppelin came to grief. We heard the bombs, but thought they had dropped on the moor. We’d no idea they had got anybody.”
“Zeppelin! Zeppelin!” murmured Baltazar. “I seem to have heard the name——”
“It’s pretty familiar, I should think,” said Mrs. Pillivant. “Don’t you think the best thing to do is to let us put you to bed, until the doctor comes?”
“The doctor must go to Quong Ho, at once. He’s dying,” said Baltazar.
“Then I’m sure I don’t know what to do,” said Mrs. Pillivant.
Baltazar closed his eyes. “I’ll be all right in a minute. It’s the knock on the head, and the long walk on an empty stomach.”
“Oh, I’ll get you something to, eat. What would you like?”
“Nothing,” said Baltazar. “Nothing. A bit of a rest and I must go back to Quong Ho. He’s the only creature I care about in the world. He was just alive when I left him.”
She said in a helpless sort of way: “I hope you’re not seriously hurt?”
He opened his eyes. “No, no. My head’s pretty thick. But I’m not as young as I was. By the way, you were talking of a Zeppelin. That’s a German airship, isn’t it?”
“Why—of course——”
He raised himself on his elbow, and his eyes flashed beneath his knit brows.
“Why should German airships be dropping bombs on the moor?”
Mrs. Pillivant regarded him uncomprehendingly.
“I’ve told you. They had to get rid of their bombs before they landed.”
“But what were they carrying bombs for?”
“I wouldn’t worry about that now,” she replied rather nervously. “I don’t think you realize how very ill you are.”
“I’m not ill—not out of my mind, at any rate. I want to know. Why should they carry bombs? Wait a bit. I’m all right now. My mind’s clear. You said the airship came down in flames and the brutes were killed. Tell me what it means.”
“Surely you’ve heard of the air raids? Read about them in the papers?”
“I see no newspapers,” said Baltazar. “Air raids? For God’s sake tell me what you mean?”
She glanced round to see that access to the door was clear. His aspect—his shaggy hair clotted with blood and dirt—his eyes gleaming from a haggard, grimed and bloody face—the filth of his half-nakedness—alone would have frightened a timorous woman. And his words were those of a madman. She giggled hysterically.
“I suppose you’ve heard there’s a European war on?”
He sat up. “War! What war?”
Mrs. Pillivant fled from the room. Baltazar rose to his feet.
War? War with Germany? Naturally Germany, because Zeppelins were German airships. A European war, the woman had said. His glance for the first time fell upon a newspaper on the dining-room table, open at the middle page. Forgetful of pain and exhaustion, he strode and seized it—and the headlines held him spellbound by their bewildering revelation.
Great Britain, France, Italy, Russia, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria . . . all Europe at war. The basic facts stood out in great capital letters.
He was staring at the print, absorbed as never had he been in his life before, when a heavy hand on his shoulder aroused him. He turned to meet the fat and smiling face of Pillivant.
“I’ve fixed it all up—doctor, police, ambulance. I’ll take some in the Rolls-Royce, the doctor the others in his car. We’ll have the Chink back in no time.”
“The what?” asked Baltazar, with a swift glance.
“The Chink—the Chinaman——”
“Oh, yes. My friend, Mr. Quong Ho. If you don’t mind, I’ll come with you.”
“My dear fellow, that’s impossible. You must go to bed. It’s no trouble. There are fifteen bedrooms in the house. You can take your choice. Hasn’t Mrs. Pillivant been in to see you?”
“She did me that honour.”
“Then why the dickens didn’t she have you attended to? I’ll see about it.”
He was already at the door when Baltazar checked him.
“Stop. Don’t worry about me. Tell me one thing.” He smote the open newspaper with the palm of his hand. “How long has this been going on?”
“How long has what been going on?” asked Pillivant, returning.
“This war.”
“I don’t quite see what you’re driving at,” said Pillivant, puzzled.
“I want to know how long this war I’m reading about in the newspaper has been going on.”
Pillivant regarded him askance out of his little furtive eyes. He entertained the same suspicion as his wife.
“Look here, old man,” he said, taking him by the arm, “that knock on the head’s more serious than you think.” At the noise of a halting car he glanced out of window. “Ah! there’s Dr. Rewsby.”
“Never mind the doctor or my head,” cried Baltazar desperately. “Answer my question. How long have we been at war with Germany?”
“Why, since August, 1914.”
“For the last two years?”
“Do you mean to say you’ve been living eight or ten miles off and never heard of the war?” Pillivant stood bewildered.
“I never heard of it,” Baltazar answered mechanically, staring past Pillivant at terrifying things.
“Well, I’m damned!” said Pillivant, recovering his breath. “I’m just damned. Here, Doctor”—as a spare, grey-headed man was shown into the room—“here is a chap who has never heard of the war.”
Baltazar stepped forward. “That’s beside the question, Doctor. All that matters for the moment is my Chinese friend. I had to leave him at the farm unconscious, with, I should think, concussion. And his legs are fractured. We must go at once.”
“Excuse me,” said the doctor, “but that wound in your own head wants seeing to. Just a matter of cleaning and strapping. Only five minutes. Please let me have a look at it.”
“You can do that afterwards,” said Baltazar. “For God’s sake let us go.”
“You’re not fit to go. I won’t allow you to,” replied Dr. Rewsby with suave firmness.
Said Baltazar, with the hard gleam in his eyes, “I’m going. It’s my responsibility, not yours. I don’t care what happens to me. But I swear to God I neither wash nor eat nor drink until my friend Quong Ho is brought back, alive or dead. And it’s much better I should go with you than remain here and frighten your excellent wife, Mr. Pillivant, out of her wits.”
There was a moment’s silence. The grey-haired doctor glanced at Baltazar out of the corner of a shrewd eye and diagnosed an adamantine obstinacy.
“If you refuse to take me with you,” Baltazar added, “I’ll follow you on foot.”
The doctor shrugged his shoulders.
“As you will. But if anything happens—tetanus, blood-poisoning, collapse—I wash my hands of responsibility. Mr. Pillivant will bear me out. Let us go.”
In the hall Pillivant took down from the pegs of an alcove a cap and light overcoat.
“You don’t mind sticking on these, do you?” he said to Baltazar. “You’ll need them motoring, and besides, I don’t mind telling you, you’re not looking exactly like a candidate for a beauty show.”
“I thank you,” said Baltazar, accepting the proffered raiment.
They started. The doctor, Sergeant Doubleday and a constable, with a stretcher, in one car; Pillivant, Baltazar, and a chauffeur at the wheel, in the great Rolls-Royce.
“To carry through this,” said Pillivant, hauling out a thick gold watch, “in twenty minutes, shows what we English can do when we set our minds to it.”
“Twenty minutes?” said Baltazar. “It has seemed like three hours.”
“Twenty minutes since I went to the telephone,” Pillivant asserted triumphantly.
The cars raced on. For some moments Baltazar, huddled together in the comfort of the back seat, maintained a brooding silence, which Pillivant, glaring at him from time to time, did not care to disturb. There was something uncanny about this man who had to be bombed nearly to death in order to hear of the war.
They turned off the road on to the rough track across the moor along which Quong Ho had so often bumped his way in the old cart. The weather had been dry and the track was at its best. But the cars jolted alarmingly and at every quivering descent from a larger hummock than usual, Pillivant cried out in fear for the springs of his Rolls-Royce.
“If it busts up, there’s no earthly chance of getting another.”
“Why?” asked Baltazar.
“Because there’s a war on, old man. You don’t seem to understand.”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” said Baltazar. “You must grant me your kind indulgence. I can’t immediately realize what is happening.”
They climbed the rise that brought them into view of the Farm. Pillivant pointed to the smoking ruins.
“That’ll help you to realize it. That’s what Belgium and the northern part of France look like.”
“When I have found my friend Quong Ho alive,” said Baltazar, “I may be able to think of things.”
They worked their way, Dr. Rewsby’s lighter car following, almost to the low enclosing wall, and drew to a halt. Viewed on the approach, the havoc loomed before Baltazar’s eyes even more appalling than when he had stood dazed and sick in the midst of it. The battered granite shell of the house stood absurdly low, and the rough gaping apertures of door and windows stared like maimed features hideously human. The wall of the scullery had been thrown down by the explosion, and the pump and cistern and a shelf or two of broken crockery were grimly exposed. He wondered why he had not noticed this when he went to fetch water for Quong Ho. The byre by the wrecked stable no longer existed. The white Wyandotte cockerel, the sole living thing visible, pecked about the ground in jaunty unconcern.
As soon as they dismounted the party followed Baltazar, who strode ahead with the air of a man about to denounce a ghost. At the turn of the ruined house they came in sight of Quong Ho, lying as Baltazar had left him, the bowl of water untouched. The sun had gradually encroached upon him, and now the shadow of the wall cut his body in a long vertical line. His yellow face looked pinched and ghastly beneath the pink and white cotton of his bandaged head.
Baltazar’s face was almost as ghastly, and horrible fear dwelt in his eyes. He pointed.
“There!” he said, and drew the doctor forward and motioned to the others to remain.
Together they bent down over Quong Ho. “If he’s dead,” Baltazar whispered in a hoarse voice, “it’s I who have murdered him.”
“He’s not dead yet,” replied the doctor.
“Thank God!” said Baltazar.
Sergeant Doubleday, surveying the scene of ruin with the eye of the policeman and the Briton, turned to Mr. Pillivant.
“This sort of thing oughtn’t to be allowed,” said he.
CHAPTER VIII
BALTAZARawoke a couple of mornings afterwards to find that certain vague happenings which he had regarded as dreams were true. He really lay in a comfortable bed, in a pleasant room; the soft-voiced woman in grey, whose ministrations he had been unable to divine, stood smiling at the foot of his bed, an unmistakable nurse. Conscious of discomfort, he raised his hand and felt his head swathed in a close-fitting, scientific bandage. He remembered now that he had lain there for a considerable time. What he had taken for outrageous assaults on his brain for the purpose of extracting the secrets of his mathematical researches, had been the doctor dressing his wounds.
“How are you this morning?” asked the nurse.
“Perfectly well, thank you,” said Baltazar. “I should feel better if you would tell me where I am.”
“This is Mr. Pillivant’s house.”
“Pillivant—Pillivant? Oh yes. I’ve got it. It seems as if I had been off my head for a bit.” The nurse nodded. “I’m all right now. Let me put things together.” Suddenly he sat up. “My God! How is Quong Ho?”
“He is getting on as well as can be expected,” replied the nurse.
“He’s alive? Quite sure?”
“Quite sure.”
Baltazar fell back on the pillow. “The last thing I remember clearly was their taking him into the Cottage Hospital, after that infernal jolting across the moor. What happened then?”
“You collapsed, and they brought you here.”
“What day is it?”
“Friday.”
“Good Lord,” said Baltazar, “I’ve been here since midday Wednesday.”
“Would you like a little breakfast?”
“I should like a lot,” declared Baltazar.
The nurse laughed. The patient was better. She turned to leave the room, but Baltazar checked her.
“Before you go just tell me if I’ve got the situation clear. The European war has been going on for two years. In the course of a new-fangled kind of warfare the Germans drop bombs from Zeppelins over England. A Zeppelin dropped bombs on my house on Tuesday night—to get rid of them—so Mrs. Pillivant said. You see, everything’s coming back to me. Afterwards it came down in flames, and all the crew were burned. Is that right?”
“Perfectly,” said the nurse.
“Now I know more or less where I am,” said Baltazar.
The nurse fetched his breakfast, which he ate with appetite. He had barely finished when Dr. Rewsby entered.
“This is capital. Capital,” said he. “Sitting up and taking nourishment. How’s the pulse?”
“Never mind about me,” said Baltazar, as the doctor took hold of his wrist. “What about Quong Ho?”
The doctor gave a serious report. Fractured skull, severe concussion. Broken legs. Semi-consciousness, however, had returned—the hopeful sign. But it would be a ticklish and tedious business.
“If you want another opinion, a man from Harley Street, special nurses, don’t hesitate a second,” said Baltazar. “Money’s no object.”
“I’ll bear in mind what you say,” replied the doctor; “but if his constitution is as sound as yours, he’ll do all right. By all the rules of the game you ought to be as helpless as he is.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“You’ve had half your scalp tom away. How you manage to be sitting up now, eating eggs, after your lunatic performances on Wednesday, is more than I can understand.”
Baltazar smiled grimly. “I can’t afford the time to fool about in a state of unconsciousness, when I have two years’ arrears of European history to make up.”
“Never mind European history,” said the doctor. “Let us see how this head of yours is getting on.”
The dressing completed, he said to Baltazar:
“Now you’ll lie quiet and not worry about the war, Quong Ho, or anything.”
“And grow wings and order a halo and work out the quadrature of the circle and discover the formula for the Deity in terms of the Ultimate Function of Energy. . . . Man alive!” he cried impetuously, raising himself on his elbow. “Don’t you understand? I’ve been dead for years—my own silly, selfish doing—and now I’ve come to life and found the world in an incomprehensible mess. If I don’t go out and try to understand it, I shall go stark, staring mad!”
“I can only order you to stay in bed till I give you permission to get up,” said the doctor. “Good-bye. I’ll come in this evening.”
As soon as he had gone Baltazar threw off the bedclothes and sprang to his feet.
“Doctors be hanged!” said he. “I’ve not given in to illness all my life long, and I’m not going to begin now. Besides, I’m as fit as ever I was. I’m going to dress.”
“I’m afraid you can’t,” said the nurse.
“Why?”
“You haven’t any clothes.”
He glanced for a second or two at the unfamiliar green and purple striped silk pyjamas in which he was clad, and remembered the undervest and flannel trousers, foul with blood and grime, in which he had arrived at Water-End.
“The devil!” said he, and he stood gasping as a new conception of himself flashed across his mind. “Except for these borrowed things, I am even more naked than when I came into the world.”
“You’d better go back to bed,” said the nurse.
“I’ve got to go back to the world,” retorted Baltazar. “As quick as possible.”
“You can’t do it in pyjamas,” said the nurse.
“I must ask my host to lend me some clothes.”
“I’ll go down and see him about it,” said the nurse.
She went out, leaving Baltazar sitting on the edge of the bed. Presently entered Pillivant, who burst into heartiness of greeting. Delighted he was to see him looking so well. At one time he half expected there was going to be a funeral in the house. Heard that he wanted some togs. Only too happy to rig him out. Would pick out all the necessary kit to-morrow.
“But I want clothes now,” said Baltazar.
Pillivant shook his head. “Must obey doctor’s orders. By disobeying in the first place I nearly had a cold corpse on my hands, and if there’s one thing Mrs. Pillivant dislikes more than another, it’s a corpse. When her old aunt died here, she went half off her chump. No, no, old man,” he continued, in soothing tones which exasperated Baltazar, “you be good and lie doggo to-day, as the doctor says, and to-morrow we’ll see about getting up.”
“You’ve got the whip-hand of me,” said Baltazar, glowering.
“That’s about it,” grinned Pillivant. “And you’re not used to not having your own way.”
“I suppose I’m not,” said Baltazar, looking at his host more kindly. “I don’t know but what you’re right. A little discipline might be beneficial for me.” He slipped back into the bed and nodded to the nurse, who settled him comfortably. “A little contact with other people might restore my manners. As I’m beholden to you for everything, Mr. Pillivant, I may at least be civil. As a matter of fact, I’m infinitely grateful, and I place myself in your hands unreservedly.”
“Oh, that’s all right, old man,” said Pillivant.
“It isn’t all right,” cried Baltazar, realizing, in his self-condemnatory way, the ungracious attitude he had adopted from the first towards his host. “I’ve been merely rude. I’m sorry. I’ve lived in China long enough to know that no personal catastrophe can excuse lack of courtesy. By obeying your medical man I see that I shall give least trouble to your household.”
“You needn’t talk like a book about it,” said Pillivant.
“I’ve lived with books so long,” replied Baltazar, “that perhaps I have lost the ways of contemporary Englishmen.”
Pillivant threw him a furtive and suspicious glance.
“Most books are all damn rot,” he declared.
“You’re not the first philosopher that has enunciated that opinion,” said Baltazar, with a laugh. “Didn’t a character in one of the old dramatists—I think—say ‘To mind the inside of a book is to entertain oneself with the forced product of another man’s brain’? No. It’s the practical men who do things, isn’t it?”
“I’m a practical man myself,” said Pillivant, “and seeing as how I started as an office-boy at eight shillings a week, I’ve done a blooming lot of things. Look”—he swung a chair, and sat down near the bed, and bent confidentially towards Baltazar—“in July fourteen I was only a little builder and contractor up at Holloway. When Kitchener in September called for his million men——”
“Wait!” cried Baltazar, putting his hand up to his forehead. “In September nineteen fourteen Kitchener called for amillion men?”
“Yes, yes, that’s all ancient history. I was telling you—when the cry went out, I said to myself: a million men will want accommodation. Temporary buildings. Huts. No end of timber. I hadn’t a penny in the world. But I did a big bluff and sold the Government timber which I hadn’t got for twice the price I knew I could buy it at. In six months I was a rich man, and I’ve been growing richer and richer ever since. I’ve got a flat in Park Lane and this house in the country, and I’m on Munitions, and I have my cars and as much petrol to burn as I want, and I’m a useful man to the Government, and doing my bit for the war. And none of your blooming books about it. Just plain common sense. If I had been worrying my head about books, I should have lost my chance. Just what you’ve done. You’ve been burying yourself in books and haven’t even heard of the war, let alone doing anything for your country. Books make me tired. To hell with them!”
Baltazar looked at the puffy, small-eyed man in his clear way. He disliked him exceedingly. Even with the most limited knowledge of war conditions, it was evident he had been exploiting them to his own advantage. But when you haven’t a rag of your own to your back and are dressed in another man’s pyjamas, lying in his bed and eating his food, you must observe the decencies of life.
“I suppose lots of fortunes are being made out of this war.”
“I should think so. Those honestly made, well, the chaps with brains deserve them. But, at the same time, there’s a lot of profiteering going on”—Pillivant shook an unctuous head—“which is a perfect disgrace.”
“Profiteering—that’s a new word.”
“You’ll find lots of new words and lots of all sorts of new things now you’ve waked up.”
“I’m sure I shall,” said Baltazar. “And now, if you’ve half an hour to spare, I wonder if you would mind telling me something about the war.”
That day and the next, Baltazar listened to Pillivant, the nurse and the doctor’s story of the world conflict, and read everything bearing on the subject with which they could supply him. Dr. Rewsby, who did not share Pillivant’s disdain for books, ransacked the little town for war literature. He bought him white books, pamphlets, back numbers of magazines and newspapers, maps. . . . What he heard, what he read, was the common knowledge of every intelligent child, but to this man of vast intellectual achievement it was staggeringly new. For those two days he lost sense of time, desire to move from the bewildering mass of lambent history that grew in piles by his bedside. The lies, the treacheries, the horrors that had accumulated on the consciousness of all other men one by one, burst upon him in one thundering concentration of hell. The martyrdom of Belgium, the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral, the sinking of theLusitania, the use of poison gas, the bombing of open towns, the unmasking of the German Beast in all its lust and shamelessness—stunned him, so that at times he would put his hands to his head and cry: “It’s impossible! I can’t believe it.” And whoever was with him would answer: “It is true. What you read is but the outside of the devilry the civilized world is out to fight.” And his scholar’s mind would revolt. What of intellectual Germany? The mathematicians, the Orientalists, whose names were to him like household words, to say nothing of those eminent in sciences outside the sphere of his own studies? They were worse, the doctor declared, than the brutish peasant or the brutal operative. A monstrous intellectualism developed to the disregard of ethical sanction. The doctor brought him one of the great cartoons of the war, which he had cut out from some paper and kept, by Norman Lindsay, the great Australian black and white artist—the “Jekyll and Hyde” cartoon, representing a typical benevolent elderly German professor regarding himself in a mirror; and the reflection was a gorilla in Prussian spiked helmet and uniform, dripping with blood. And then Baltazar’s blood curdled in his veins as he realized the truth of the picture. All the mighty intellectualism of Germany was but an instrument of its gorilla animalism. It was an overwhelming revelation: the almost mesmeric dominance of Prussia over the other Teutonic States of Germany and Austria, reducing them to Prussia’s own atrophied civilization; that atrophied civilization itself, till now unanalysed, but now a byword of history, the development, on abnormal intellectual lines, of the ruthless barbarism of a non-European race. Strange that he had not thought of it before. Had anything good, any poem, picture, song, music, statue, dream building, sweet philosophy, ever come out of Prussia? Never. Not one. Her children were “fire and sword, red ruin and the breaking-up of laws.” And now the rest of the Germanic Empire had lost its soul. Prussia extended from the Baltic to the Danube. The whole of Central Europe was one vast cesspool, in which all things good were cast to deliquesce in putrefaction, while over it floated supreme the livid miasma of Prussianism.
In some sort of figurative conception as this did his brain realize the psychological meaning of the forces against which the civilized world was struggling. But there was the other side of the world’s embattled hosts, whose tremendous energies baffled his mental grasp. England’s Navy—yes. He had been born and bred in the belief of its invincibility. But the British Army? A glorious army, of course; a blaze of honour from Cressy upwards; a sure shield and buckler in the far-flung posts of Empire; but a thing necessarily apart from the vast military systems of the Continent of Europe. And now he learned, to his stupefaction, that the British Empire, calling up all her sons from within those same far-flung posts, had made itself, within two years, one of the three greatest military powers in the world. The casualties alone exceeded the total strength of the original British Army serving with the colours. The Army now was an organization of millions. Where had they come from? His three interpreters of the outer world gave him information according to their respective lights. All the early gathering of the hosts had been voluntary enlistments. The armies springing up at Lord Kitchener’s call had been labelled numerically by his magic name. Only recently had we been driven to conscription. And Kitchener himself—the only great soldier of whom he had ever heard? Drowned in theHampshirelast June. . . .
Then again the revolution in national life—the paper currency, the darkened streets of towns, the licensing laws—further excited his throbbing curiosity. He remembered with a spasm almost of remorse the few signs and tokens of war which had reached him and passed unheeded; the National Registration, which he had resented as a bureaucratic impertinence; the mad taxation of income which he had regarded as evidence of England’s decay. . . .
“Has ever man been such a fool as I, since the world began?”
The hard-headed doctor to whom this rhetorical question was addressed, replied:
“I can’t recall an instance.”
When driven to contemplation of his own isolation, he reflected that all the time there had been a living link between himself and this upheaved world. Every week, rain or fine, through snow or dust, Quong Ho had visited the little town.
“When did the news of the war become general in Water-End?” he asked.
He had to put the question in two or three different forms before his puzzled informants could perceive its drift, for they could not conceive it being the question of an intelligent man. He could not yet realize the electric shock that convulsed the land from end to end on the declaration of war. He could not gauge the immediate disruption of social life throughout the country. The calling up of reservists, the mobilization of the Territorial forces alone affected instantly every community, no matter how remote from centres of industry. The queer straits to which every community was reduced, owing to the closing of the banks during that fateful August week, had also brought the reality of the war home to every individual. Then the issue of Treasury notes. The recruiting. From the very first day of the war, Water-End, they told him, was as much agog with it all as London itself. From the beginning the town had been plastered with patriotic posters. The mayor for the first months had exhibited the latest telegrams outside the town hall. There had been a camp of Territorials some few miles away and the High Street had reeked of war. Government war notices met the least observant eye in post office, bank and railway station.
“If what you say is true,” said Baltazar, “how could Quong Ho have come here every week and failed to understand what was going on? Not only is he a master of English, but he’s a man of acute intellect.”
“That,” replied the doctor, “you must ask Quong Ho when his intellect has recovered from its present eclipse.”
“But the fellow must have known all along,” Baltazar persisted. “Come now,”—he sat up in bed impulsively—“he must, mustn’t he?”
“I should have thought that a negro from Central Africa, who only spoke Central African, would have guessed,” replied the doctor.
“Then why the devil didn’t he tell me?”
“I’m afraid I must refer you to my previous answer,” said the doctor.
“It strikes me that I’m a bigger fool than ever,” said Baltazar.
A smile flitted over the grey-haired doctor’s shrewd thin face. He did not controvert the proposition.
“It’s also borne in upon me,” continued Baltazar, “that I’ll have to scrap everything I’ve ever learned—and I’ve learned a hell of a lot—I’m an original mathematician, and I think I know more about Chinese language and literature than any man living. Oh! I’m not modest. I know exactly what my attainments are. As I say, I’ve learned a hell of a lot, and I’ll have to scrap it all and just sit down and begin to learn the elementary things of existence, from the very beginning, all over again, like a schoolboy.”
“Hear, hear!” said Pillivant, blatantly golf-accoutred, who had entered by the open door at the opening of Baltazar’s avowal. “Now you’re talking sense. I’m glad to see you realize how sinfully you’ve been wasting your time. Chinese! What’s the good of Chinese? They’ve got to learn our language, not we theirs. I know. I went out to Hong Kong as a young man for five months on a building job. Every man-Jack talks pidgin-English. That’s good enough to get along with. Do you mean to say you’ve been spending your life learning Chinese? Of all the rotten things——”
“I’m aware, Mr. Pillivant,” said Baltazar, with a grimace intended, for a smile, which on his haggard face and beneath his bandaged head had a somewhat sinister aspect, “I’m aware that in your eyes I must appear rather a contemptible personage.”
“Oh, not at all, old man,” cried Pillivant. “Everyone to his hobby. After all it’s a free country. Have a cigar.”
He produced the portable gold casket. The doctor caught a swift glance from his patient and checked the generous offer.
“Not yet, Pillivant. A cigarette or two is all I can allow him.”
Pillivant selected and lit a cigar. There was a span of silence. He looked out of the window. Presently he began to praise the local golf-course, some mile or so distant. A natural course, with natural bunkers. The greens artificial—every sod brought from miles. Now the infernal Government had taken away their men. Not a soul in the place who understood anything about turf. Consequently the greens were going to the devil. It was an infernal shame to let golf-greens go to the devil. Goff was a national institution, necessary to maintain tired war-workers, like himself, in a state of national efficiency. But what could one expect from the rotten lot who constituted the so-called Government? Anyhow, you could still get some sort of a game. Baltazar must come round with him as soon as he could get about.
“I’ve never played golf in my life,” said Baltazar.
“Never played——? Why, you seem to be out of everything.”
Presently he swaggered out at the end of his monstrous cigar. Baltazar turned a weary head.
“Doctor,” said he, “would they hang me very high if I slew my benefactor?”
As soon as sticking-plaster replaced the head bandage, the most impatient of men insisted on rising and going out into the world, clad in a borrowed suit of the detested Pillivant. His first care was to visit the Cottage Hospital, where Quong Ho, semi-conscious, still hung between life and death. Yielding to Baltazar’s insistence, Dr. Rewsby had summoned in consultation the leading surgeon of the nearest town, the great cathedral city. From the point of view of the Faculty nothing could be simpler than Quong Ho’s injuries. To bring a specialist from London would be a wicked waste of invaluable lime. All that science could do was being done. The rest must be left to Nature. Baltazar was disappointed. Having an exile’s faith in the wonders of modern surgery, he had thought that a few hundreds of pounds would have brought down a magician of a fellow from Harley Street with gleaming steel instruments, who could have mended Quong Ho’s head in a few miraculous seconds. The ironical smile on the lips of Rewsby, for whom he had conceived respect and liking, convinced him of extravagant imaginings. He professed satisfaction, although sorely troubled by his queerly working conscience. Outside the ward, he grabbed Dr. Rewsby by the arm.
“Look here, Doctor,” said he. “I want you to understand my position. I must pay some penalty for my egotistical folly in bringing Quong Ho to this infernal place. Oh, I know,” he added quickly, checking with a gesture the doctor’s obvious remonstrance; “I know it might have happened anywhere. But nowhere else than in that desert island of a farm would I have had to leave him alone for hours on the bare ground, without medical assistance. It’s my fault. I must pay for it.”
“You’ve paid for it, my good friend,” said Dr. Rewsby, “by your anxiety, by your—apparently—by your remorse. You’ve done everything that a human being could do in the circumstances.”
“But don’t you see, I brought the poor fellow to this through my selfish folly. You must let me pay for it in some way.”
Said the doctor, a practical man, with the interests of his little struggling hospital at heart: “It’s open to you to give a donation to the Cottage Hospital.”
“All right,” said Baltazar, flinging out an arm. “If he gets through there’s a thousand pounds for the hospital.”
“Good. And if he doesn’t?”
Baltazar drew a short breath, glanced down and askance beneath his shaggy brown eyebrows, and set a heavy, obstinate jaw. Then suddenly he flashed upon the doctor:
“If he dies you won’t get a penny from me. But I’ll give every cent I have in the world to the General Fund of the hospitals of the United Kingdom.”
“Do you really mean that, Mr. Baltazar?”
“Mean it? Of course I mean it. I’ve done all kinds of rotten things in my life, but I’ve never broken my word. By George! I haven’t. If Quong Ho dies, the world will be the poorer, not only by a loyal soul, but by one of the most powerful mathematical intellects it has ever seen. And it’s I”—he thumped his chest—“I, who have robbed the world of him. And it’s I who must pay the penalty.”
“Pardon my impertinence,” said Dr. Rewsby, drawing on his motoring gloves, as a sign of ending the interview; “but have you generally conducted your life on these extravagant principles?”
“I don’t quite understand——” replied Baltazar, stiffening.
“If Mr. Quong Ho dies—and I’m glad to say the probability is against his doing so—but if he does, you vow, as an act of penance, that you’ll reduce yourself to a state of poverty and walk out into the world without one penny. Is that right?”
“Perfectly,” said Baltazar.
“Well, as a medical man, with a hobby, a special interest in—let us say—psychology, I’ve been indiscreet enough to wonder whether this is the first time you’ve made such a Quixotic vow. In fact, now I come to think of it, you made a similar one within two minutes of my first meeting you.”
Baltazar met his eyes. “In fact, you want to know whether I’m not a bit mad.”
“Not at all,” laughed the doctor. “But I have a shrewd suspicion that the folly you bewail—the eccentric hermit life on the moor—was the result of some such rashly taken obligation.”
“Suppose it was,” said Baltazar; “what then?”
“I should say you were cultivating a very bad habit, and I should advise you to give it up.”
He smiled, waved a friendly hand, and ran down the steps to his car. Baltazar watched him crank-up, slip to the wheel, and depart, without saying a word in self-defence. So far from offending him, the doctor had risen higher in his estimation. A man with brains, and the faculty of using them; a fellow of remarkable penetration; also of courage. He differentiated his outspokenness from Pillivant’s blatancy. The former was one man of intellect speaking frankly to another; the latter. . . . He remembered the lecture, illustrated by quotations from the Chinese classics, which he had read to Quong Ho when his disciple, on his first visit to Water-End, had complained of the lack of manners of the local inhabitants. Why should he worry about Pillivant? As he had said to Quong Ho: “Rotten wood cannot be carved, and walls made of dirt and mud cannot be plastered.” Never mind Pillivant. It was Rewsby, and Rewsby’s quick summing-up of his psychological tendencies that mattered. Not a human being had ever before presented him to himself in any just and intelligible way. Of course he had heard truths, pseudo-truths, dictated by violent prejudice, in his brief and disastrous married life. But they had all been superficial; never gone to bed-rock. Since then he had been free as a god from criticism. And now came this shrewd, sagacious country doctor, who in the lightest, friendliest way in the world, put an unerring finger on the real unsound spot in his character.
“. . . A very bad habit, and I should advise you to give it up.”
Behind those commonplace words he knew lay a wise man’s condemnation of his habitual dealing with life. He walked through the tiny town on his way to “The Cedars,” unconscious of the curious interest of the inhabitants, to whom the sight of the mystery-enveloped and now bombed and head-bandaged tenant of Spendale Farm was a matter of eager, instantaneous mental photography, so that the picture could be produced as a subject for many weeks’ future gossip, and he pondered deeply over Dr. Rewsby’s criticism.
“Have you generally conducted your life on these extravagant principles?”
He had. There was no denying it. A childish memory emerged from the mist of years. He must have been eight or nine. All about a dog. A puppy had destroyed a new paint-box, priceless possession, and in a fit of passion he had nearly beaten the puppy to death. And when his anger was spent and he grew terribly afraid, and sprawled down by the puppy, the puppy licked his hand. And he swore to God, as a child, that if the puppy lived and did not tell his father, he would never beat a dog again. The puppy lived, and, with splendid loyalty, never breathed a word to a human soul, and loved him with a love passing the love of women. And one day a neighbour’s bad-tempered dog got into the kitchen-garden and attacked him, and though he had a stick by chance in his hand, he remembered his vow, and stood with folded arms and set teeth and let the dog bite his legs, until he was rescued by the gardener and carried indoors.
He remembered this, and a train of similar fantastic incidents culminating in his vow of solitude, and reviewed them all, in the light of Dr. Rewsby’s criticism. What good, in the name of sanity, had his wild, Quixotic resolves accomplished? How had they benefited Spooner, for instance, to whom he had surrendered the Senior Wranglership? During his brief stay in London he had had the curiosity to look up Spooner in reference books; found him an Assistant Secretary in a Government office, Sir William Spooner,K.C.B.; an honourable position, but a position which he would have attained—originally through the Civil Service examination—whether he had been second, fourth, tenth Wrangler in the Tripos. His, Baltazar’s, idiot sacrifice had advanced Spooner’s career not one millimetre: just as his self-denying ordinance in the realm of dogs had not benefited one jot the canine race—for the mongrel retriever who had bitten him heroically arm-folded, had been shot the next day by the remorseful neighbour, who had been longing for an opportunity of getting conscientiously rid of an ill-conditioned cur.
And then there was his flight from Cambridge and Marcelle.
“Damn that doctor!” said he, striding along the road.
It was all very well to damn the doctor; but he had entered into a fresh engagement, which in spite of its newly revealed folly, he would break for nothing in the world. Yet what practical good would his little fortune accomplish scattered among the hundreds of hospitals of the United Kingdom? A pittance to each. And he himself, with all his gifts, thrown penniless upon a strange world at war, of what use would he be? His first necessarily animal impulse would be to prey upon society for the means of subsistence. Whereas, a free man, with his assured income, he could throw himself into the national struggle without thought of his own material needs.
Quong Ho’s life acquired a new preciousness. He must live, if only to save him from this new absurdity to which he was pledged.