CHAPTER XVII
WHENhe hobbled into her drawing-room and saw her without her hat, crowned with the glory of her hair, thick, of silky texture and of baffling colour, now almost black, now gleaming with sombre gold, and her slender figure clad in a blue dress which deepened the magical blue in her eyes, Godfrey thought she was more wonderful still. The clasp of her bare hand with its long, capable fingers, thrilled him. Her voice had the added caress of welcome to her house. When, later, she reminded him of their promised heart to heart talk about fathers, it was in his heart to say, “The pedantic old bat calls you a type—you, unique among women!” The criticism had buzzed in his head all the week and on occasions he had laughed out loud at its ineptitude. It buzzed in his head while he was being introduced to Lady Northby, the wife of a distinguished General, and it was with an effort that he cleared his mind enough to say:
“I had the honour of serving under the General in France. Oh, a long, long way under, all the time I was out.”
“Then you’re friends at once,” cried Lady Edna. “You’ll join Lady Northby’s collection.”
“Of what, pray?” asked Baltazar.
“Of Sir Edward’s officers.”
“I don’t know whether Mr. Baltazar would like to be collected,” said Lady Northby. She was a tiny, dark-faced, kind-eyed woman of fifty. Her smile of invitation was very pleasant.
“Can you doubt it?” replied the young man. “It must be a glorious company. I’m only afraid I’m a poor specimen.”
“Won’t you sit down?” She indicated a place on the sofa by her side. And when Godfrey had obeyed her, she said in a low voice: “That and that”—with the faintest motion of her hand she indicated decoration and footless leg—“entitle you to a place of honour.” Then as if she had touched sensitive ground, she added hastily, almost apologetically: “Lady Edna always teases me about my collection, as she calls it; but there’s a little truth in it. My husband is very proud of his Division, and so am I, and the only way I can try to realize it as a living thing, is to get to know some of his officers.”
“By Jove!” cried Godfrey, his eyes suddenly sparkling. “That accounts for it.”
“For what?”
“For the Division being the most splendid Division, bar none, at the Front. For the magical influence the General has over it. I’ve only seen him once or twice and then I shook in my boots as he passed by. But there isn’t an officer or man who doesn’t feel that he’s under the tips of his fingers. I never could account for it. Now I can.”
She smiled again. “I don’t quite follow you, Mr. Baltazar.”
Suddenly he became aware of his audacity. Subalterns in social relations with the wives of their Divisional Generals were supposed to be the meekest things on earth. He was not sure whether their demeanour was not prescribed in paragraph something or the other of Army Orders. His fair face blushed ingenuous scarlet. In the meanwhile in her eyes shone amused and kindly enquiry; and, to render confusion worse confounded, Lady Edna and his father appeared to have suspended their casual talk in order to listen to his reply. There was no help for it. He summoned up his courage, and with an invisible snap of the fingers said:
“It was you behind the Division all the time.”
The modest lady blushed too. The boy’s sincerity was manifest. Lady Edna rose with a laugh, as a servant entered the room.
“The hand that rocks the subaltern rules the Division. Let us see if we can find something to eat.”
There were only the four of them. At first Lady Edna Donnithorpe had thought of inviting a numerous company to meet Baltazar. Her young consciousness of power delighted in the homage of the fine flower of London around her table. Baltazar’s story (heard before she met him) had fascinated her, he himself had impressed her with a sense of his vitality and vast erudition, and after the dinner party she had been haunted by his personality. Here was a great force at a loose end. How could she apply it? People were beginning to talk about him. The new Rip Van Winkle. The Freak of the War. It would be a triumph to manœuvre him into the position of a National Asset. She had already drawn up a list of the all-important people whom it was essential for him to know—her husband did not count—and was ticking off the guests for the proposed luncheon party when suddenly she tore it up, she scarcely knew why. Better perhaps gauge her protégé more accurately before opening her campaign. The son added a complication. A fine pathetic figure of a boy. Perhaps she might be able to do something for him, too, if she knew what he wanted. She liked his eyes and the set of his head. Besides, the stuffy lot who would be useful to the father would bore the young man to death. She regarded the boredom of a guest in her house as an unimaginable calamity. Edgar, her husband, was the only person ever bored in it, and that was his own doing. He had reduced self-boredom in private life to a fine art. She decided that young Baltazar should not run the risk of boredom. Having tom up her list, she ran across Lady Northby, dearest of women, the ideal fourth.
At the beginning of lunch, while Baltazar happened to be engaged in eager argument with Lady Northby, she devoted herself to Godfrey. In her sympathetic contralto she questioned him, and, under the spell of it, he answered. He would have revealed the inmost secrets of his soul, had she demanded them. As it was, he told her an astonishing lot of things about himself.
Presently the talk became general. Lady Northby, in her gentle way, shed light, from the point of view of a divisional commander’s wife, on many obscure phases of the war. Lady Edna held a flaming torch over black and abysmal corners of diplomacy. Godfrey sat awed by her knowledge of facts and her swift deductions from them. He had never met a woman like her, scarcely dreamed that such a woman existed. She had been in personal touch with all the great ones of the earth, from the Kaiser upwards, and she judged them shrewdly and with a neat taste in epigram.
“If the Kaiser and the Crown Prince had been ordinary middle-class folk,” she said, “they would have been in gaol long ago. The father for swindling the public on a grand scale; the son for stealing milk-cans.”
She had met King Constantine, then a thorn in the Allied flesh, whose sufferance for so long on the Greek throne is still a mystery to the plain Briton.
“What a degradation of a name for Constantine the Great,” said Baltazar.
“That’s just it,” she flashed. “His awful wife says ‘In hoc signo vinces,’ and dangles before his eyes the Iron Cross.”
No. Godfrey had never met a woman remotely like her. She was incomparable.
The talk developed quickly from the name of Constantine to names in general. The degradation of names. Uriah, for instance, that of the most tragic victim of dastardly treachery in history, now brought low by its association with Heep.
“I love the old Saxon names,” said Lady Northby, with some irrelevance. “Yours, dear, for instance.”
“It’s a beautiful name,” said Baltazar, “but it’s not Saxon. It’s far older.”
“Surely it’s Saxon,” said Lady Edna.
“Edna was the wife of Raguel and the mother-in-law of Tobias, the son of Tobit, the delightful young gentleman carrying a fish and accompanied by the Angel Raphael, whom you see in the Italian pictures.”
Lady Edna was impressed. “I wonder if there’s anything you don’t know?”
He laughed. “I only remember what I’ve read. My early wrestling with Chinese, I suppose, has trained my memory for detail. I’m also very fond of the Apocrypha. The Book of Esdras, for instance, is a well of wonderful names. I love Hieremoth and Carabasion.”
Presently she said to Godfrey: “Your father always makes me feel so humble and ignorant. Have you ever read the Apocrypha?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Neither have I. If you said you had, I should want to sink under the table. The pair of you would be too much for me.”
Her confession of ignorance delighted him as much as her display of knowledge filled him with wonder. It made her deliciously human.
When lunch was over and they went up to the drawing-room she left the elders together and sat for a while apart with him.
“You’ll go and see Lady Northby, of course,” she said.
“I should just think so,” he replied boyishly. “You see, I’m New Army and have never had a chance of meeting a General’s wife. If they’re all like that, no wonder the Army’s what it is.”
Lady Edna smiled indulgently. “She’s a dear. I thought you would fall in love with her.”
“But you couldn’t have known I was in General Northby’s Division, unless——”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you’re a witch.”
With a quick glance she read the tribute in his young eyes. It almost persuaded her that she possessed uncanny powers. She looked charmingly mysterious.
“Let us leave it at that,” she said. “Anyhow,” she added, “Lady Northby can be very useful indeed to a young officer.”
“Useful?” His cheek flushed. “But I couldn’t go to see any lady—socially—with the idea of getting things out of her. It would be awful.”
“Why?”
He met her eyes. “It’s obvious.”
She broke into pleasant laughter. “I’m so glad you said that. If you hadn’t, I should have been dreadfully disappointed.”
“But how could you have thought me capable of such a thing?”
His real concern touched her. Inured to her world of intrigue which had little in it that was so sensitive on the point of honour, she had taken for granted his appreciation of Lady Northby’s potential influence. She was too crafty a diplomatist, however, to let him guess her surprise; still less suspect her little pang of realization that his standards might be just a little higher than her own; or her lightning glance back to her girlhood when her standards were just the same. She gave him smilingly to understand that it was a playful trap she had set for him, so that resentment at an implied accusation was instantaneously submerged beneath a wave of wonder at the gracious beauty of her soul. This boy of twenty, instinctive soldier, half-conscious thereof when he came to exercise his power, could play on fifty rough and violent men as on an instrument, and make them do his bidding lovingly in the ease of camp and follow him in battle into the jaws of hell, as they had done, but he was outclassed in his unwitting struggle with the girl of five-and-twenty, instinctive schemer after power, her clear brain as yet undisturbed by any clamourings of the heart.
Baltazar, desiring to bring brightness into the boy’s life, had brought it with a vengeance. He had not heard of Dorothy. He had no idea of the state of mind of the Rosaline-rejected young Romeo of a son of his. Unconscious of peril, he cast him into the furnace. “An interesting type. A woman of the moment,” commented placid and philosophic Fifty. “Oh! she doth teach the torches to burn bright!” sang Twenty. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. See the part of Romeopassim. Away with Rosaline! His “love did read by rote and could not spell.” Rosaline-Dorothy was blotted out of his Book of Existence for ever.
“What are your plans?” asked Lady Edna, as soon as the little cloud had melted beneath the very eager sunshine.
“As soon as I get a new foot I’ll spend every day at the War Office until they give me something to do.”
“You oughtn’t to have any difficulty. There are lots of billets going, I know.”
“Yes. But what kind? I’m not going to sit in an office all day filling up forms. I want to get a man’s job. Active service again.”
“How splendid of you!”
Her commendation was something to live for. After the British way, however, he deprecated claims to splendour.
“Not a bit. It’s only that one feels rather rotten doing nothing while other fellows are fighting. They may take me in the Flying Corps. But I’d sooner go where I belong—to the job I know. Perhaps I’m rather an ass to think of it.”
“Not at all. Where there’s a will there’s a way.”
“I’m going to have a try for it, anyhow,” said he.
He thought vindictively of Dorothy’s light patronage, which would have resulted in a soft job. No soft jobs for him. He had had a lucky escape. Dorothy and her inconsequence and flapperish immaturity, and the paralysing work that General Mackworth would doubtless have found for him—recording issues of bully-beef or keeping stock of dead men’s kits! Never in life! In those bright eyes raining influence—no, they were not bright—they were muffled stars—that was the fascination of them—he would make himself something to be considered, respected, admired. He would be the one one-footed man in the British Army to arrive at greatness. The splendid end compelled the means. Until that moment he had never contemplated an heroic continuance of his military career.
Lady Edna, pathetically young, in spite of myriad ageing worldlinesses, including a half-humorous, half-repellant marriage of calculation, was caught by his enthusiasm.
“I should love to see you back again!”
“That alone is enough,” said he, “to make me move heaven and earth to get there.”
She flushed beneath his downright eyes and hid a moment’s embarrassment by a laugh.
“That’s a very pretty speech,” she said lightly. “I’m glad to find the Army is going back to its old tradition of manners.”
“I perfectly agree with you,” exclaimed Baltazar, for her tone had been purposely pitched higher than that of the preceding conversation. “I’ve been greatly struck by it.”
The little intimate talk was over; but enough had been said before father and son took their leave, to make Godfrey treasure every one of her beautiful words and repeat them over and over again. Especially her last words, spoken in a low voice for him alone: “I don’t want to lose track of you. One so often does in London. If ever you’re at a loose end, come and report progress. Ring me up beforehand.” She gave him her number. Victoria 9857. A Golden Number. The figures had a magical significance.
It was not long before he ventured to obey her, and rang up the Golden Number. He spent with her an enchanted hour, the precursor of many hours which Lady Edna stole from her manifold activities in order to devote them to the young man’s further enchantment.
In the meanwhile Quong Ho arrived at Godalming. Quong Ho delighted with himself, in his ready-made suit and soft felt hat, in spite of the loss of his pigtail, which the treatment of his cracked skull had necessitated. Baltazar, too, cast an eye of approbation on his European appearance, regarding him somewhat as a creation of his own. His pride, however, was dashed by Godfrey, who on being asked, eagerly, after the first interview, what he thought of Quong Ho, cried:
“For Heaven’s sake, sir, get the poor devil a new kit!”
“Why—Why?” asked Baltazar, in his impatient way, “what’s the matter with his clothes?”
“They fit like a flag at the end of a pole in a dead calm,” said Godfrey. “Or like sails round a mast. You’d have to get a pack of hounds in order to find his arms and legs. And that red and purple tie! It’s awful. Ask Marcelle.”
Baltazar had walked Quong Ho over to Churton Towers, and after they had said good-bye at the gates, he had rushed back to put his question, leaving Quong Ho in the road.
Marcelle smiled at his disconcerted face. “It would be scarcely well received at Cambridge.”
“Give the chap a chance, sir,” said Godfrey.
“I want to give him every chance,” exclaimed Baltazar. “I want to overwhelm him with chances. If his clothes won’t do, get him some others.”
At his summons the Chinaman came up. Baltazar caught him by his loose sleeve.
“Godfrey doesn’t approve of garments not made to the precise measurements of the individual human figure. He’ll take you to his tailor and hosier and hatter and rig you out properly. He knows what’s right and I don’t. When can you do it? The sooner the better.”
“I’ll see what my engagements are,” said Godfrey stiffly.
“That’s right,” cried Baltazar. “Telephone me this evening. His time’s yours. Get him all he wants. Brushes, combs, shirts, pyjamas, boots. You know.”
He wrung his hand, waved his hat to Marcelle and marched off with Quong Ho.
Godfrey regarded the retreating figures speechless. Then he turned to Marcelle.
“Of all the cool cheek! Without by your leave or with your leave! I’m to cart this infernal Chinee about Bond Street. My God! My tailor will have a fit.”
“So long as Quong Ho gets one, it doesn’t matter,” laughed Marcelle.
But he was in no humour for pleasantry. He dug his crutch viciously in the ground as he walked.
“He takes it for granted that I’d love to be saddled with this scarecrow of a Chinaman. Don’t you see? It’s preposterous. My God! I’ve a jolly good mind to set him up regardless, like a pre-war nut—with solid silver boot-trees and the rest to correspond. It would serve J. B. right.”
Said Marcelle with a sidelong glance—in her Sister’s uniform she looked very demure—
“Why didn’t you refuse?”
He fumed. “How could I? I couldn’t hurt the poor chap’s feelings. Besides——”
“Besides what?”
“This father of mine—his big gestures, his ugly mouth—and his infernal dancing eyes—and behind them something so pathetic and appealing—I don’t know. Sometimes I think I loathe the sight of him, and, at others, I feel that I’d be a beast if I shut my heart against him. And always I feel just like a rabbit before a boa-constrictor. I’m not a little boy. I’ve seen life naked. I’m on my own. I object to being bossed. In the Army it’s different—it’s part of the game; but outside—no!”
He limped along to the house full of his grievance. It was not so much the clothing of Quong Ho that annoyed him, though he could well have spared himself the irritating embarrassment, as the sense of his gradual subordination to a dominating personality. The disconnected dynamo was hitching itself on to him, and he resented the process.
“How you’ve escaped being married out of hand, I don’t know,” said he.
Marcelle flushed. “The moment he realizes other people’s feelings,” she replied, “he becomes the gentlest creature on earth.”
“I wish to goodness he’d begin to realize mine,” growled the young man.
When they reached the front steps of Churton Towers, Marcelle said:
“I wonder whether I could be of any help to you in your shopping?”
“You? Why——” He beamed suddenly on her.
“I’m free on Friday. I could go up to town with you.”
“You’re an angel!” he declared. “A winged angel from heaven.” The boy in him broke out sunnily. “That’ll make all the difference. What a dear you are. Won’t we have a time! I’ll love to see you choosing the beast’s pyjamas.”
“They shall be stout and sober flannel,” said Marcelle.
“No. Silk. Green, red, yellow and violet. The sort of thing the chameleon committed suicide on.”
“Who’s going to run the show—you or I?”
“Oh you. You all the time.”
He laughed and hobbled up the steps in high good humour.
Marcelle went off to her duties smiling pensively. What a happy woman would be the right woman for Godfrey. Wax in her hands—but wax of the purest. She was astonished at the transformation from cloud to sunshine which she, elderly spinster nearly double his age, had effected, and her nerves tingled with a sense of feminine power. Her thoughts switched off from son to father. They were so much alike—from the feminine point of view, basically children. Were not her fears groundless? Could she not play upon the man as she played upon the boy? Recent experience answered yes.
But then she faced the root difference. To the boy she surrendered nothing. To the man she would have to pay for any measure of domination the price of an indurated habit of existence, the change of which was fraught with intolerable fear. No. She could take, take all that she wanted. But she could not give. There was nothing in her to give. Better this beautiful autumn friendship than a false recrudescence of spring, in which lay disaster and misery and disillusion.
As for the boy, God was good to have brought him into her life.
Meanwhile, Baltazar walked home to Godalming with Quong Ho in gay spirits. It was just like the modern young Englishman to shy at the depths and attack the surface. And, after all, as a more alert glance assured him, the surface of Quong Ho deserved the censure of any reasonable being. One could almost hear his garments flap in the autumn wind.
“I fear,” said Quong Ho apologetically, “that my care in selecting this costume was not sufficiently meticulous.”
“Godfrey’ll soon put that right,” laughed Baltazar. “Anyhow, it’s the man inside the clothes that matters.”
And when he came to think of it, he perceived that the man inside had had little opportunity of revealing himself, he, Baltazar, having done the talking for the two of them. Quong Ho had comported himself very ceremoniously. His manners, though somewhat florid in English eyes, had been unexceptionable, devoid of self-consciousness and awkward attempts at imitation. He had responded politely to the conventional questions of Marcelle and Godfrey, but there his conversation had stopped. Of the rare gem presented to them they had no notion. Never mind. Once let Quong Ho give them a taste of his quality, and they could not choose but take him to their bosoms.
Which, by the end of the Friday shopping excursion, was an accomplished fact.
Now that Marcelle had assumed responsibility, Godfrey, after the way of man, regarded the attiring of Quong Ho as a glorious jest. His bright influence melted Quong Ho’s Oriental reserve. Encouraged to talk, he gave them sidelights on the life at Spendale Farm which neither had suspected. His description, in his formal, unhumorous English, of the boxing lessons, delighted Godfrey.
“The old man must be a good sport,” he remarked to Marcelle.
“Ah!” said Quong Ho, bending forward—they were in the train—“A ‘sport’ is a term of which I have long desired to know the significance. Will you have the gracious kindness to expound it?”
“Lord! That’s rather a teaser,” said Godfrey. “I suppose a sport is a chap that can do everything and says nothing, and doesn’t care a damn for anything.”
Quong Ho nodded sagely. “That is most illuminating. I regret that I have not my notebook with me. But I shall remember. Incidentally, you have summed up exactly the character of your honourable father and my most venerated patron.”
“He’s a joy,” Godfrey whispered to Marcelle as they left the train. “I could listen to him all day long. He talks like the books my grandmother used to read when she was a kid. Mr. Ho,” said he, as they proceeded up the platform to the gates, “you have now a unique opportunity of studying the Western woman. Miss Baring is going shopping. You see in her eye the sign that she is going to have the time of her life.”
“Madam,” said Quong Ho, taking off his hat, to the surprise not only of Godfrey but of the scurrying passengers, “that is also the superlative achievement of the ladies of my country.”
They shopped, they lunched merrily in a select little restaurant off Shaftesbury Avenue, they shopped again. Godfrey stood aloof and gave advice; sketched the programme in broad outlines; Marcelle filled in the details and became responsible for the selection of the various articles; Quong Ho smiled politely and submitted the various parts of his body, to be measured. Only once did he venture to interfere, and that was when Marcelle was matching ties and socks in the Bond Street hosier’s.
“I beg most humbly your pardon,” said he, picking out a tie other than the one selected, “but this shade is the more exact.”
“Surely it’s the same,” exclaimed Marcelle, putting the ties together.
“The gentleman is right, madam,” said the shopman. “But not one person out of ten thousand could tell the difference. I couldn’t, myself, if I hadn’t been trained at Lyons. I wonder, madam, whether you would allow me to try a little experiment?”
He disappeared into a back room and returned with a pinkish mass of silk threads.
“This is a colour test. There are twenty different shades. Can you sort them?”
Godfrey, amused, took half the mass, and for several minutes he and Marcelle laboriously sorted the threads. Presently the shopman turned to Quong Ho.
“Now you, sir.”
Quong Ho, without hesitation, made havoc of the piles and swiftly arranged the twenty groups in an ascending scale of red.
“There’s not another man in London who could have done that under an hour,” said the shopman admiringly.
“When did you learn it?” asked Godfrey.
“Vain boasting, sir,” replied Quong Ho, “is far from my habits, but to me these differences are as obvious as black from white. It is only a matter of informative astonishment that they are not perceptible both to you and”—he took off his hat again—“to the most accomplished madam.”
“Look here, old chap,” said Godfrey, “what I want to know is this. How could you, with your exquisite colour sense, go about in that awful red and purple tie?”
“To assume the perfection of English pink,” replied Quong Ho, “I would make any sacrifice. At the same time, it gives me infinite satisfaction to discover that the taste of Water End is not that of the metropolis.Non omnes arbusta juvant humilesque myricae.”
“I beg your pardon?” cried Godfrey, with a start, almost, upsetting the high counter chair on which he was sitting.
Quong Ho, perched between Godfrey and Marcelle, turned with a smile.
“It is the Latin poet Virgilius.”
“Yes, I know that.”
“He says that shrubs and other bucolic appurtenances do not please everybody—by which he means the sophisticated inhabitants of capital cities, who prefer such delectable harmonies of colour”—he waved a hand to the pile of shirts, socks, ties and pyjamas on the counter—“to the red and purple atrocities which form the delight of the rural population.”
Godfrey, elbow on counter and head on hand, regarded him wonderingly.
“Mr. Ho,” said he, “you’re immense. Do tell me. I don’t mean to be impertinent. But for a Chinaman to quote Virgil—pat—How do you manage to do it?”
“During my convalescence,” replied Quong Ho, with his engaging smile, “I read through the works of the poet with considerable interest. Dr. Rewsby was kind enough to obtain for me the edition in the series of the Oxford Pocket Classics,P. Virgilii Maronis Opera Omnia. Oxonii. MDCCCCXIII, from which date I concluded that I was reading the most authoritative text known to English scholarship.”
“In the meanwhile,” said Marcelle, “Mr. Ho is in need of winter underclothing.”
Not the least noteworthy of the day’s incidents was the meeting between Quong Ho and Lady Edna, who, proceeding on foot to a War Committee in Grosvenor Street, and wearing the blue serge coat and skirt of serious affairs, ran into them as they waited for a taxi on the Bond Street kerb. She stopped, with outstretched hand.
“Why, Godfrey, I didn’t know you were in town to-day.”
Then, suddenly catching Marcelle’s curious glance, she became conscious of his companions and her cheek flushed. He hastened to explain.
“We’re on outfit duty—indenting for clothing for Mr. Ho, who was badly bombed, if you remember, with my father.”
He performed the introductions.
“I have heard about you, Mr. Ho,” she said graciously. “You’re a great mathematician.”
Godfrey wondered at her royal memory. Quong Ho, bare-headed, said:
“I but follow painfully in the footsteps of my illustrious master.”
She laughed. “You must let Mr. Godfrey bring you round to see me one of these days.”
“Madam,” replied Quong Ho, with a low bow. “As the Italians say, it will be a thousand years until I have the honour to avail myself of so precious a privilege.”
“We must fix something up soon, then—one day next week.”
She shook hands with Marcelle, nodded to the others, and went away wreathed in smiles. Quong Ho followed her with his eyes; then to Godfrey:
“I have never seen a more beauteous and worshipful lady. One might say she was one of the goddesses so vividly described by Publius Virgilius Maro.”
“Your taste seems to be impeccable, sir,” replied Godfrey.
In the train, on the homeward journey, Marcelle, who was sitting by Godfrey’s side—Quong Ho sat opposite reading an evening paper—said to him:
“You seem to be great friends with Lady Edna Donnithorpe.”
“The best,” said he.
“Do you usually let her know when you’re coming up to town?”
Godfrey reflected for the fraction of a second. Lady Edna had certainly committed the unprecedented act of giving herself away. Frankness was therefore the best policy.
“Sometimes I do,” he replied innocently. “On the off chance of her being able to give me a cup of tea. It’s only once in a blue moon that she can, for she’s always all over the place.”
“She’s a very beautiful woman, my dear.”
“Your taste is as perfect as Quong Ho’s.”
Quong Ho, hearing his name, looked with enquiring politeness over the top of his newspaper.
“Miss Baring and I were talking of Lady Edna.”
“Ah!” said Quong Ho, with a very large smile.
Before they parted, on reaching Churton Towers, Marcelle put her hand on Godfrey’s shoulder.
“Perhaps I oughtn’t to have asked you that question in the train—I had no right——”
He interrupted her with his boyish laugh.
“You dear old thing! You have every right to cross-question me on my wicked doings. Haven’t I adopted you as a sort of young mother? Iolanthe. Or the Paphian one which Quong Ho was gassing about. Now, look here. You just come to me in a rosy cloud whenever you like, and I’ll tell you everything.”
“Swear it?”
“I swear it.”
He kissed her finger-tips, and she went away half-reassured. But she was sufficiently in the confidence of the Baltazars, father and son, to know that, for both of them, Lady Edna Donnithorpe was but a recent acquaintance. And to her the boy was “Godfrey,” and his presence in London without her knowledge a matter of surprise.
A few days later came the order for Godfrey to be transferred to an orthopædic hospital, where he should learn the new art of walking with an artificial foot. He parted from her with reiterated vows of undying affection. From his Iolanthe mother the secrets of his heart would never be hidden. If she wanted a real good time, she would chuck the nursing—Heaven knew she had done her bit in the war—and come and be a real mother and keep house for him. She smiled through her tears. “Preposterous child!” she called him.
“You seem to forget,” said he, “that you’re the only female thing associated with my family I’ve ever cared a hang about. I’ve adopted you, and don’t you forget it. When I’ve got my foot, I’ll march in like a regimental sergeant-major and take you by the scruff of your Sister’s cap, and off you come.”
She laughed, trying to attune herself to his gay spirits; but when she lost the last faint sound on the gravel-path of the motor-cab that took him away, she went up to her room and cried foolishly, as she had not cried for years.
CHAPTER XVIII
ONGodfrey’s transference from Godalming, Baltazar, with characteristic suddenness, moved into a furnished house in London. The reasons for his sojourn at the inn existed no longer. Besides, books and other belongings were quickly usurping the cubic space at his disposal. Marcelle, urgently invited to a consultation, advised, according to her practical mind, a flat or a small house which he could furnish for himself; and she offered such aid as her duties would allow. He ruled out her suggestion. There must be rooms for Godfrey and Quong Ho whenever they should be in town; rooms for servants; decent living rooms, so that the inhabitants should not have to herd higgledy-piggledy together; also ample accommodation for Marcelle, should she care to change her mind. Nothing but a large house would suit him. As for waiting until painters, decorators, paper-hangers, curtain-makers, carpet-layers, electric-light fitters and suchlike war-attenuated tribes had completed their business, it was out of the question. It would take months. He wanted to establish himself in a ready-made home right now, and get on with the war. Such a home his friend Mrs. Jackman had suggested. The owner, poor fellow, killed in the war; the wife and a boy of thirteen left ill-provided for. As she could not afford to live in the house, and yet shrank from selling it and its precious contents, the boy’s heritage, she would be content to let it furnished for an indefinite period. There it was—Sussex Gardens—near the Park—admirable in every way. He was accustomed to spacious habitations. His house in Chen-Chow covered nearly an acre. In his exile at Spendale Farm he had room to breathe. The Godalming inn was charming in its way, but now and then he had mad impulses to attack the walls of his sitting-room with his nails and tear them down. What was wrong with Sussex Gardens?
“It’s extravagant, trouble-shirking, and generally manlike.”
“Marry me,” said he, “and you shall have a house economical, trouble-inviting and generally woman-like. Any kind of old house you consider ideal.”
“You’ll want four or five servants to run it,” she objected, ignoring his proposition. “Where are you going to get them from in these war times?”
“They’re already there. A cook who’ll act as housekeeper——”
“You’ll be robbed right and left.”
“Come and save me,” said Baltazar.
She laughed. “I’m tempted to do so, just out of pity for you.”
“Pity won’t do, my dear,” said he.
“Then you must go your own way.”
“I’m going it,” said Baltazar. “Perhaps you’ll come to Sussex Gardens now and then to see Godfrey. Possibly Quong Ho?”
“I might even come to see John Baltazar,” said Marcelle.
So Baltazar settled down in the big house and gave himself up to the infinite interests of war-racked London. The weeks and the months passed. Quong Ho at Cambridge, under the benign tutelage of Dr. Sheepshanks, began the study of Greek for his Little Go, and wrote to his patron curious impressions of the University. “I have the option,” said he, “of taking up for this examination either an infant’s primer on Logic compiled by an illustrious thinker of a bygone age, called Jevons, or a humorous work on the Evidence of Christianity, by the divine Paley, who seems to have been one of the patriarchs of the Anglican Church. As the latter seems the more entertaining, seeing that it tends to destroy in the mind of the reasoning believer all faith in the historical truth of the Christian religion, I am studying it with a deep interest based on the analogy between English and Chinese academic conservatism. On the other hand, dear sir and most venerated master, if you could suggest a course in Theology more in consonance with modern philosophical thought, I should derive from it much instruction and recreation.” Baltazar bade him get on with his Greek, so that if he wanted light reading, he could soothe his leisure hours with Aristotle and Thucydides. “I am working at Greek, like stags,” wrote Quong Ho later; “with all the more zeal because I find I have completed already the mathematical course required for my Tripos.” Some time afterwards he wrote again: “If you, most honoured sir, would permit me, I should esteem it a privilege to read for the Science Tripos as well as the Mathematical. I should enjoy the possibility of the application of my sound mathematical equipment to the higher branches of physics.” “Do what you like, my dear fellow,” replied Baltazar. “Suck the old place dry.” Quong Ho delighted him. Sheepshanks wrote enthusiastically of the rare bird. “He will be a monument,” said he, “to your sound and masterly teaching. I wish you would come back to us.” But Baltazar had other things to do. Having set his house in order, established Quong Ho at Cambridge, seen Godfrey accept his filial position and cemented relations, such as they were, with Marcelle, he plunged head foremost into the war. Others floundered about in it, tired after two strenuous years of buffeting. He came to it fresh, with new zeal and unimpaired strength of mind and body. With a new, keen judgment, too, being in the unique position of one with historical perspective. Others had lived through the fateful years and could not clear their brains of the myraid cross-currents that had swirled through them day by day, almost hour by hour, and had systematized themselves into their mental being, so that, with all their passionate patriotism, they could not see the main course. Baltazar brought an untroubled and vigorous intellect to bear on an accurately studied situation.
“We’re all at sixes and sevens,” cried Weatherley one day in despair, when they were discussing the new weekly review of the Far Eastern policy which he had asked Baltazar to control. “Unless we’re careful, the project will drop to pieces. Russell now declines to edit it unless we give him an autocratic hand. But Russell’s mad on Slovenes and Ruthenes and Croats. Clever as he is, he has no sense of proportion. I don’t know what the devil we’re going to do. There’s no one else can give the time. For the review to be any good, a man must throw his whole soul into it.”
Baltazar had one of his flashes. “If you like, I’ll edit the damned thing. You’ve all been fiddling about for a title. I’ve got one. ‘The New Universe.’ I’ll undertake to make a living thing of it, wipe out all the dreary, weary old weekly and monthly respectabilities. We won’t have a second-rater writing for it. We’ll appeal to ‘Longleat’s towers’ and ‘Mendip’s sunless caves.’ We’ll make it the one thing that matters in this quill-driven country. We’ll have it translated into all known languages and circulate it over the civilized earth. It’ll be the only publication that’ll give everybody the truth about everything.”
He went on in his vehement way. When Weatherley asked him where the money for so gigantic a scheme was to come from, he quoted the Tichborne claimant.
“Some has money and no brains and some has brains and no money. If those with no money can’t get money from those with no brains, God help them.”
And it came to pass, a few days afterwards, at a meeting of the committee of the new review, that Baltazar had his way. As he looked with even vision on Ruthenes, Slovenes, Belgians, Hereros, Jugo-Slavs, British miners, Samoans, the staff of the Foreign Office, Indian princes, Mrs. Annie Besant, the denizens of Arkansas, the Southern Chinese, the gilded adorners of Newport, the Women’s Emergency League, the Wilhelmstrasse, Armenians, and the Young Men’s Christian Association, a fact elicited by lengthy discussion of the multitudinous phases of world politics, and as he succeeded in convincing all the several zealots of particular interests, that their impassioned aims were an integral part of his far-reaching scheme, they came unanimously to the conclusion that no one but he had the universality to edit The New Universe, and passed a resolution promising him their loyal co-operation.
“I’m going to make this darned thing hum,” said Baltazar to Weatherley.
Money was the first object. Brains he could command in plenty. He envisaged London as his El Dorado. The history of his exploitation of the capitalist and landowner would, if it were published, become a text-book on the science and remain forever a classic. He forced wealth-guarding doors of whose existence he had been ignorant six months before; by a stroke of the genius which had brought him his position in China, he secured the support, financial and moral, without the control of an important group of newspapers; he enlisted the aid of every possible unit in his rapidly increasing circle of acquaintance. The scope of the Weekly had extended far beyond the modest bounds of its conception. Originally it was to be an appeal to the thinkers of all nations. “Damn thinkers,” said Baltazar. “They’re as scarce as angels and about as useful. We want to put thoughts into the heads of those that don’t think. It’s the Doers we want to get hold of. A thing academic is a thing dead. This is going to live.” Some of the superior smiled at his enthusiasm; but Baltazar damned them and went his way. This was going to be the Great Teaching Crusade of the War, the most far-sweeping instrument of propaganda known to journalism. He pulled all strings, brought in all parties. A high dignitary of the Labour World and a Tory Duke of unimpeachable integrity found themselves appointed as Trustees of The New Universe Publication Fund. Money flowed in.
One day he ran across Pillivant, in St. James’s Street, Pillivant mainly individualized by a sable fur coat and a lustrous silk hat and a monstrous cigar cutting his red face like a fifteen-inch gun cutting the deck of a battleship. Baltazar greeted him as a long-lost brother and haled him off to lunch at his club. Mellowed by the club’s famous Chambertin and 1870 port, he took a rosy view of all kinds of worlds including The New Universe, as presented by his host. It was a great scheme, he agreed. He was sick of all newspapers, no matter of what shades of opinion. They were all the same. Honesty was not in them. Nor was there honesty in any Government. Men with not a quarter of what he had done for the country to their credit, were being rewarded with peerages and baronetcies. In the New Year’s Honours List he had not been mentioned. Not even offered a beastly knighthood. But it didn’t matter. He was a patriot. And it was very fine old brandy, and he didn’t mind if he did have another glass. Still, if a man put down a thousand pounds for a thing, it was only business prudence to know where he stood.
“You’ll stand here,” cried Baltazar, spreading before his eyes a printed list of the General Committee, a galaxy of dazzling names. “You’ll take rank in the forefront of the biggest patriotic crusade that ever was. Your light will no longer be under a bushel. It will shine before men. What’s the good of your name being lost in a close-printed subscription list? This is a totally different thing. Your appearance here will give you position. Look at the people. Have you ever stood in with a crowd like this before?”
Baltazar held the mellowed profiteer with his compelling eyes.
“I can’t say that I have,” replied Pillivant. “But all the same——”
“But all the same,” Baltazar interrupted, “you’ve been at loggerheads with the War Office. There was that question asked in the House over the Aerodrome contract. You told me about it yourself. Now listen to me carefully”—Baltazar played a gambler’s card—“your coming in with us will be a guarantee of integrity. It’s obvious that no one on this list could do otherwise than run straight. The worry it would save you!” He looked at his watch and jumped up. “By George! I’ve got an appointment with our Treasurer, Lord Beldon. Would you like to come along and hear more about the scheme? Waiter! Ask them to get me a taxi. We’ll find our hats and coats round here.”
He drove a gratified Pillivant to Chesterfield Gardens and introduced him to Lord Beldon (with whom he had no appointment whatever) as an enthusiastic believer in The New Universe, ready to finance it to the extent of two or three thousand pounds. “Three thousand, wasn’t it?”
“I said between two and three thousand,” replied Pillivant, flattered at his reception by the powerful old peer, and not daring to fall back on the original one thousand that had been vaguely suggested. A bluff, of course, for which he admired Baltazar, although he cursed him in his heart; but was it worth while calling it? He could buy up this old blighter of a lord twice over. He would show him that he had the money. “I was thinking of two thousand five hundred,” he continued. “But what’s a miserable five hundred? Yes. You can put me down for three thousand. In fact”—with a flourish he drew a cheque-book from his pocket—“I’ll write you the cheque now, payable, I presume, to the Right Honourable the Earl of Beldon.”
“OrThe New Universe. As you please.”
“Better be personal,” said Pillivant, enjoying the inscription of the rolling title and the prospect of the elevated eyebrows of the bank clerk who should debit the sum to his account.
“That’s exceedingly generous of you, Mr. Pillivant,” said Lord Beldon, putting the cheque into a drawer of his writing-table.
“Just patriotic, your lordship,” replied Pillivant, with a profiteering wave of the hand.
“I think,” said Baltazar, “that the contributor of such an important sum ought to be offered some practical interest in the scheme. Mr. Pillivant’s name will appear on the General Committee. But that’s more or less honorary. The sub-committees will do the real business. We’re going to deal with every phase of the war, Pillivant, and the various sub-committees—their names will be published large as life and twice as natural—will supply the editorial department with indisputable facts. Now,” he turned to Lord Beldon, “if Mr. Pillivant will serve on the Purity of Contracts Sub-Committee, he’ll be bringing us a tremendous and invaluable business experience.”
“That’s a most happy suggestion,” smiled Lord Beldon.
“I think so, too. I’ll get a run for my money,” said Pillivant.
When he had gone, Lord Beldon turned a puzzled brow on Baltazar.
“Isn’t that the chap about whom some nasty things were said a few months ago?”
Baltazar grinned. “It is,” said he. “We’ve made him disgorge some of his ill-gotten gains, and, by putting him on the sub-committee we’ll make him pretty careful about getting them ill in the future.”
Thus, with ruthless pertinacity he gathered in a great sum of money, and finally in a splendour of publicity the first number ofThe New Universeappeared, and from the first day of its appearance Baltazar felt himself to be a power in the land.
Another reputation in certain circles had meanwhile been made by his trenchant article on Chinese affairs in theImperial Review. It led to an interview with the Chinese Ambassador, who professed agreeable astonishment at finding the famous but somewhat mysterious Anglo-Chinaman of Chen-Chow and the writer of the article one and the same person. After which he spent many pleasant hours at the Embassy, discussing Chinese art and philosophy and the prospects of the career of his prodigious pupil, Quong Ho. In course of time, the Foreign Office discreetly beckoned to him. It had heard from authoritative sources—it smiled—that Mr. Baltazar’s knowledge of China was unique, for though many other men were intimately acquainted with the country from the point of view of the official, the missionary, the merchant and the traveller, it had never heard of a man of his attainments who had divorced himself from all European influence and had attained a high position in the social and political life of non-cosmopolitan China. If Mr. Baltazar would from time to time put his esoteric knowledge at the service of the Foreign Office, the Foreign Office would be grateful. At last, after various interviews with various high personages, for all this was not conveyed to him in a quarter of an hour, it not being the way of the Foreign Office to fall on a stranger’s neck and open its heart to him, he received a proposal practically identical with Weatherley’s suggestion which he had so furiously flouted. The Secret Service—the Intelligence Department—had been crying out for years for a man like him, who should go among the Chinese as a Chinaman, thoroughly in their confidence. “A spy?” asked Baltazar bluntly. The Foreign Office smiled a bland smile and held out deprecating fingers. Of course not. An agent, acting for the Allies, counteracting German influence, working in his own way, responsible to no one but the Powers at Whitehall, but yet, with necessary secrecy, towards China’s longed-for Declaration of War against Germany.
“China will come in on our side before the year’s out,” said Baltazar.
How did he know it? Why, it was obvious to any student of the science of political forces. It was as supererogatory for a man to go out to China to persuade her to join the Allies as to stir up a bomb whose fuse was alight, in order to make it explode. The Foreign Office protested against argument by analogy. The forthcoming entry of China into the war was naturally not hidden from its omniscience. But that did not lessen the vital need of secret and skilful propaganda before, during and after the period that China might be at war. There were the eternal German ramifications to be watched; the possible Japanese influences—it spoke under the seal of the most absolute confidence—which, without any thought of disloyalty on the part of Japan, might, not accord with Western interests; there were also the bewildering cross-currents of internal Chinese politics. There were thousands of phases of invaluable information which could not be viewed by the Embassy; thousands of strings to be pulled which could not be pulled from Pekin. “We could not, like Germany and Austria in America, outrage those international principles upon which the ambassadorial system had been based for centuries. At the same time——”
“You’re not above using a spy,” said Baltazar.
Again the Foreign Office deprecated the suggestion. It wouldn’t dream of asking Mr. Baltazar to take such a position.
“Then,” said Baltazar, “what are you driving at?”
The Foreign Office looked at him rather puzzled. As a matter of fact, it did not quite know. Having Baltazar’sdossierpretty completely before it, it had gradually been compelled to the recognition of Baltazar as a man of supreme importance in Chinese affairs. He must be used somehow, but on the way to use him it was characteristically vague and hesitating. It knew a lot about the Ming Dynasty being a connoisseur in porcelain—but the Ming Dynasty, and all that it connoted, had come to an end a devil of a long time ago; which was a pity, for it only knew the little about Modern China which it gleaned from the epigrammatic and uninspiredprécisof official reports. To attach Baltazar in any way to the Embassy was out of the question. The idea would have sent a shiver down its spine to the very last vertebra of the most ancient messenger whose father had run on devious errands for Lord Palmerston. On the other hand, Baltazar was not of the type which could be sent out on a secret errand. That fact he had made almost brutally obvious. So, after looking at him for a puzzled second or two, it smiled invitingly. Really, it waited for him to make a proposition.
This he did.
“Offer me a square and above-board mission as the duly accredited agent of the British Government—to perform whatever duties you prescribe for me, and I’ll consider it. At any rate, I’ll regard the offer as an honour. But to go back to my friends as Chi Wu Ting——”
“Ah!” interrupted the Foreign Office, turning over a page or two of type-script. “That’s interesting. We wanted to ask you. How did you get that name in China? You started there, after your abandonment of your brilliant Cambridge career—you see we know all about you, Mr. Baltazar—as James Burden.”
“Phonetic,” said Baltazar, impatiently. “It’s as impossible for an ordinary Chinaman to say James Burden, as for you to pronounce a word with the Zulu click in it. It’s the nearest they could get. It’s good Chinese. So I adopted it. I’m known by it all through Southern China. Let me get on with what I was saying. To go back to my friends as Chi Wu Ting and pretend I was acting in their interests, while all the time I was acting in the interests of the British Government—well, I’m damned if I would entertain the idea for a second.”
The Foreign Office winced at the oath, although it damned lustily in private.
“But if Chi Wu Ting goes back, as you say, accredited——?”
“That’s a different matter altogether.”
“There’s still the question of—of remuneration,” said the Foreign Office.
“I’m by way of being a rich man,” said Baltazar. “I didn’t spend the eighteen golden years of my life in the interior of China for my health.”
The Foreign Office beamed. “That simplifies things enormously.”
“It generally does,” replied Baltazar.
A month later the Foreign Office made him the offer which his sense of personal dignity demanded from them; and, honour being satisfied, he declined it. He could do better work for his country in London, said he, than in again burying himself alive for an indefinite number of years in China. The Foreign Office regretted his decision; but it gave him to understand that the offer would always remain open. They parted on terms of the most cordial politeness; but if the Foreign Office had heard the things Baltazar said of it, its upstanding hair would have raised its own roof off.
“Three months,” he cried to Marcelle, “playing the fool, wasting their time and mine, when the whole thing could have been done in five minutes.”
“But I can’t quite see,” she objected, “why you went on when you had made up your mind from the start not to go back to China.”
“Can’t you?” said he. “I’ll explain. I’ve sworn that there’ll be no more idiocy on the part of John Baltazar to prevent him coming into his own. He is coming into it. That the F.O. should recognize his position was an essential factor of his own. When a man can dictate terms, he has established himself. See? I suppose,” said he, halting in his abrupt way, and thrusting his hands deep in his trousers pockets, “you think this is just childish vanity. Come, say it.”
She met his bright eyes and smiled up at him. “If I do, you won’t bite my head off?”
“No. I’ll convince you that it isn’t. Vanity, as its name implies, is emptiness. Negative. This isn’t vanity, it’s Pride. Something positive. My pet Deadly Sin. If you’ve got that strong, you can tell the six others to go back to hell. If I hadn’t got it, the others would have torn me to bits long ago. If I were a mongrel and thought myself a prize bull-pup—that would be vanity. But I know, hang it all, that I’m a prize bull-pup, and when I take leave to remind myself, and people like the F.O. of the fact, that’s Pride. And when I say I’ve sworn to fulfil the Destiny of the prize pup, John Baltazar, and be one of the intellectual forces that’ll carry the Empire along to Victory—that’s not vanity. Where’s the emptiness? It’s Pride—reckoned first of the Seven Deadly Sins. If I glory in it—well—according to the Theologians, it’s my damnation: according to me, it’s the other way about. Look. There’s another way of putting it——”
Suddenly she was smitten with the memory of Godfrey’s words five or six months ago, when he fumed at the bear-leading of Quong Ho—“Those infernal dancing eyes of his—and behind them something so pathetic and appealing.” The boy was right. She met just that pathetic appeal. He was so anxious to put himself right with her. He went on:
“If I were in the habit of vowing to perform impossible extravagances, that would be the sign of a vain man. But—apart from the Acts of God—and I suppose technically we must classify the wiping out of my life’s work under that heading—I have carried out every wild-cat scheme I’ve deliberately set my mind to. So when I say I’m coming into John Baltazar’s own, I know what I’m talking about, and that’s the sign of a proud man. And, my dear,” said he after a pause, occupied in filling and lighting his pipe, “I think this jolly old sin of mine keeps me from making an ass of myself in all sorts of other ways.”
Swiftly she applied these last words to the relations between them and confessed their truth. A vain man would have pestered the life out of her, confident in attaining his ends—ends as beautiful and spiritual as you please—until through sheer weariness she yielded. Such a one would enunciate and firmly believe in the proposition—she had not spent twenty years among men in angelic ignorance of their idiosyncrasies—that just hammer, hammer hard enough, and a woman will be bound to love you in the end. But there were others, with a deadly, sinful pride like Baltazar, who, scorning the vain, maintained the dignified attitude of the late lamented King Canute. He would not claim the impossible.
But this was a far cry from the Imperial Government Mission to the Far East. She asked, by way of escape from personal argument:
“After all, this Chinese proposition is a first-rate thing. Is it so very repugnant to you to go back?”
He stood over her with his clenched fists in the air.
“My dear,” said he, “you talked last year some silly rot about a locust. I know the beast better than you do. It ate all those precious years I spent in that infernal country. The best years of my life. I’m starting now at fifty-one where I ought to have started at thirty. That damned Chinese locust has robbed me of everything. You, Godfrey, the vital life of England, and a brilliant career with Heaven knows what kind of power for good. I hold the country in the most deadly detestation. Nothing in this wide world would induce me to go back—not even if they wanted to make me an Emperor. I’ve finished with it for ever and ever. I swear it.”
“You needn’t look as if I were urging you to it,” she laughed. “I’m sure I don’t want to lose you.”
“All right then,” said Baltazar. “Let us talk of something else.”
In these early months of struggle to enter his kingdom, Baltazar came nearer happiness than he had ever done before. A man younger, or more habitually dependent on women, would have counted the one thing wanting as the one prime essential and would have regarded everything else as naught. But Baltazar, although wistfully recognizing the one missing element, was far too full of the lust of others to sit down and make moan. Marcelle gave him all she could, a devoted friendship, a tender intimacy, a sympathetic understanding. He wanted infinitely more, his man’s nature clamoured for the whole of her. But what she gave was of enormous comfort. It was a question of taking it or leaving it. Perhaps had his love been less, he would have left it. Love me all in all or not at all, and be hanged to you! That might have been his attitude. Besides, he knew that by the high-handed proceeding of the primitive man he could at any moment carry her off to the cave in Sussex Gardens. In a way, it was his own choice to live celibate. Sooner accept the graciousness she could give freely than take by force what she would yield grudgingly. Let him be happy with what he had.
For he had much.
Godfrey, learning to walk on his artificial foot, a miracle of running contrivance, and allowed, as it seemed, almost indefinite leave until he should reach perfection of movement, took up his quarters in his house, at first almost angrily, compelled against his will by the infernal dancing eyes and the pathetic appeal behind them, and after a short while very contentedly, appreciating his strange father’s almost womanly solicitude for his comfort, his facilities for leading his own young man’s life. Far more attractive the well-appointed house, with a snuggery of his own made over for him to have and to hold in perpetuity, with a table always spread for any friends he cared to ask to lunch or dine, with an alert intellect for companion ever ready to give of its best, with opportunities of meeting the odd, fascinating personalities whom the editor ofThe New Universehad gathered round him, with an atmosphere of home all the more pleasant because of its unfamiliarity, than the bleak room at an over-crowded hotel, or the cramped Half Moon Street lodgings which in his boyish experience were the inevitable condition of a lonely young man’s existence in London. Once he said:
“I know it’s a delicate point, sir, but I should be awfully glad if you’d let me contribute—pay my way, you know. It’s really embarrassing for me to accept all this—I can’t explain—it’s horrid. But I do wish you would let me, sir.”
This was just after breakfast one morning. Baltazar paused in the act of filling his pipe.
“If you like, my boy,” said he, “we can discuss the matter with our housekeeper, Mrs. Simmons, and agree upon a weekly sum for your board and lodging. I know that you have independent means and can pay anything in reason. Rather than not have you here, I should agree to such an arrangement.”
“It would make me feel easier in my mind, sir,” said Godfrey. “Shall we have her in now and get the thing over?”
“Not yet,” said Baltazar. “There’s another side of the question. By accepting your father’s house as your natural home, you are giving a very human, though faulty being, the very greatest happiness he has ever known in his life. By refusing, you would destroy something that there is no power in the wide world to replace. I don’t deserve any gratitude for being your father; but, after all, you’re my son—and I’m very proud of it. And all I have, not only in my house but in my heart, is yours.” He lit a match. “Just yours,” said he, and the breath of the words blew the match out.
When Godfrey next met Marcelle, he told her of this.
“What the devil could a fellow do,” said he, “but feel a worm and grovel?”
Another thing that added greatly to Baltazar’s happiness was Godfrey’s attitude towards Quong Ho during the vacations, when the young Chinaman was also a member of the household.
“I like the beggar,” said Godfrey. “He’s so tactful; always on tap when one wants him, and never in the way when one doesn’t. And his learning would sink a ship.”
Quong Ho, for his part, sat at the feet of the young English officer and with pathetic earnestness studied him as a model of English vernacular and deportment, and at the same time sucked in from him the whole theory of the art of modern warfare. He had a genius for assimilating knowledge. With the amused aid of Lady Edna Donnithorpe and Burke, he acquired prodigious familiarity with the inter-relationships of the great English families. At Baltazar’s dinner-table he absorbed modern political thought like a sponge. It was during the Easter vacation that he more especially determined to assume the perfect Englishman. Dr. Sheepshanks, towards the end of term, had made him an astonishing proposition. A mathematician of his calibre, said he, would be wasted in China. Why should Mr. Ho not contemplate, as Fellow and Professor, identification of himself with Cambridge? The war had swept away all possible contemporary rivals. It was in his power to attain in a few years not only a brilliant position in the University, but in the European world of pure science. Sheepshanks had also written in the same strain to Baltazar. And when Quong Ho modestly sought his master’s advice, Baltazar vehemently supported Sheepshanks.
“Of course you’ll stay. Weren’t those my very words at the hospital at Water End? Another time perhaps you’ll believe me.”
“For many years have I been convinced of the infallibility of your judgment,” said Quong Ho. “I shall also never forget,” he added, “that I am merely the clay which you have moulded.”
“I’m beginning to think,” cried Baltazar, “that I’m not your friend Dr. Rewsby’s colossal ass after all.”
Baltazar was happy. He went about shouldering his way through the amazing war-world, secure in his grip on all that mattered to him in life. His was a name that, once heard, stuck in men’s memory. Gradually it became vaguely familiar to the general public, well known to an expanding circle. His romantic story, at first to his furious indignation, was paragraphed far and wide. The Athenæum, under special rule, reinstated him in his membership. The intransigent policy ofThe New Universebrought him into personal contact with the High and Mighty at the heads of Ministries. Invitations to speak by all manners of organizations poured in. As a speaker his dominating personality found its supreme expression. He exalted in his newly found strength. The essential man of action had been trammelled for half a century by the robe of the scholar. The Zeppelin bomb had set him naked.