THE life ordained by John Baltazar for Quong Ho and himself was one of unremitting toil, mental and physical. From the time of his uprising at six in the morning, when Quong Ho awakened him with tea (some chests of which he had brought with him from China), until midnight, there were few moments, save the after dinner hour of literary indulgence, that he wasted in idle relaxation. The work of the house, that of steward, butler, valet, cook, parlourmaid, charwoman and laundress, together with the outdoor functions of groom, dairyman and bailiff, Quong Ho executed with the remarkable ease and despatch of the Chinaman accustomed from childhood to menial tasks. The cultivation of the barren land, the painful wheeling of barrow-loads of superficial soil from the moorland, the digging and the planting and the draining and the watering, were all done by John Baltazar himself. The hard exercise, some three or four hours a day, maintained him in the superb health that enabled him to carry out his studious programme. Of his eighteen waking hours he allotted roughly seven to physical things, eleven to intellectual pursuits. For Quong Ho this apportionment of time was inverted. That was the theoretic schedule. As a matter of fact, Quong Ho found more than seven hours a day for mathematical study and other intellectual development. There was much that Baltazar had set himself to do during his three years. First he must make up in mathematical output the loss of his wander-time in China. Now all the world understands the irresistible force that compels the poet, at last, to give form to long haunting dreams; the need, also, of the astronomer to crystallize the results of his discoveries and formulate his epoch-making theories; but the passion of the mathematician to do the same is not so easily comprehensible. For years Baltazar had dreamed of an exhaustive and monumental treatise on the Theory of Groups which would revolutionize the study of the higher mathematics, a gorgeous vision the mere statement of which must leave the ordinary being cold and the first attempt at explanation petrify him with its icy unintelligibility. The dream was now in process of accomplishment. He had also to put into form fascinating adventures into the analytical geometry of the ghostly and unrealizable space of Four Dimensions. There, he was wont to assert, you entered the true Fairyland of mathematics. To all these labours he brought the enthusiasm of the poet or the astronomer. Another and a totally different sphere of activities absorbed much of his energy. In China he had assimilated a vast store of philosophical learning, with which equipment he prepared to re-edit many European versions of the Chinese classics misconceived through faulty erudition. He had brought from China stacks of rare manuscripts, piles of notes, materials for the life-work of any scholar. And, last, he had thrown himself with impetuous zeal into the intellectual training of Quong Ho.
The mutual attitude of the solitary pair was one of curious delicacy. As master and man they were league-sundered by the gulf of convention. As teacher and pupil they were drawn together into close intellectual intimacy. It was the Chinaman’s exquisite tact that simplified the situation for the direct and masterful Englishman. As a servant he scrupulously observed the decorum of the attendant—there never existed head butler in ducal mansion who could surpass his perfection of manner; but as disciple he subtly raised himself to the plane of social equality, and gauged to a hair’s breadth the shade of familiar address warranted by the position.
“Quong Ho,” said Baltazar one day at dinner, when the Chinaman had gone through the usual solemn farce of offering him Burgundy, “your discretion is beyond the value of rubies. Never once have you remarked on the apparent vanity of this daily proceeding. Yet in your own mind you must have wondered at it.”
“It is not for me to speculate on the reason for your honourable customs,” said Quong Ho.
“Yet why do you think I cause myself to be offered wine every day only to refuse it?”
“I suppose you desire to maintain, in the wilderness, the ceremonial etiquette of the English dinner-table. The wine in the bottle is but an adornment, like the flowers in the bowl.”
“It pleases me that you should have come to such a conclusion,” said Baltazar.
For the ceremony of the wine was linked with the causes that determined his sudden flight into solitude. He had promised Quong Ho to inform him of these causes; but the fulfilment of the promise was hard to make. Sitting dishevelled on the bed in the little room at the top of the Savoy Hotel, he had thought disclosure to his servant to be a fitting part of the punishment he had meted out to himself. Later he repented; especially when he perceived Quong Ho’s blank indifference. Still, a promise was a promise, and Baltazar not the man to shirk his obligations. On this particular occasion he thought it best to get the matter over.
“The conclusion is an honourable one on your part, Quong Ho,” he continued, “but it is incorrect.”
“I own, sir,” replied Quong Ho, “that it is drawn from conjectural premises.”
“It was over-indulgence in wine that made me set to myself this penalty of studious solitude,” said Baltazar in Chinese. “By telling you this I redeem a promise. As to our daily custom, a weak man flies from temptation, a strong man keeps temptation at his elbow in order to defy it.”
“In that way, honourable master, is merit acquired.”
Quong Ho took away his empty plate and retired into the kitchen to fetch the next course. Baltazar leaned back in his chair and, his brow full of perplexity, yet breathed a sigh of relief.
“I’ve got it off my chest at last,” he said half aloud. “But I wonder whether I’ve been a damned fool.”
Quong Ho’s subsequent demeanour could not enlighten him. Never again between them, save once, and that under the stress of a peculiar situation, was made the most veiled allusion to the subject, and day after day Quong Ho imperturbably performed with the Burgundy decanter the ceremonial etiquette of the English dinner-table.
It was only by glimpses like this that the man had ever revealed himself to his fellow-creatures. Glimpses like this one, fine and deliberate, to Quong Ho, and that one of long ago, passionate and self-destroying, to Marcelle Baring. To neither did he accord more than a glimpse. To neither did he show himself on a razor-edged ledge with the abyss on one side and salvation on the other. Another touch of the girl’s lips would have sent them both into what the sensitive and honourable gentleman would have called the abyss. Perhaps, if she had been older, a woman, one tuned to the pulsating responsibilities of life, he might have faced things with her. Who knows? To his direct mind the casuistical point did not occur. Actualities alone concerned him. She was so delicate and fragrant a flower of girlhood. His for the plucking. . . . When he regained his college rooms, that far-off summer afternoon, he was as a man torn by devils. Love her? He would be torn in pieces rather than that her exquisite foot should be bruised against a stone. Love her? With her soft voice, her maddening Madonna face, her kind eyes, her tremulous mouth? Love her? The wonder of wonders possessed of the power to divine his inmost thoughts, to touch with magically healing fingers all the aching wounds in his soul, to envelop him body and mind and spirit in a network of a myriad fairy tendrils? Love her? God knows he did.
But she was a child—and a child can forget—at the worst retain a not ungracious memory. But he was a man, on the verge of hideous villainy. And he stood in his college room, surrounded by all that symbolized the intellectual life that up to then had been the meaning of his existence, and he looked around.
“The whole lot will have to go to blazes,” said he.
And at that moment he cut the Gordian knot.
His wife? She hated him: why, he could not tell; but she missed few opportunities of showing her rancour. He had striven desperately to win her esteem, at the cost of much swallowed pride. Some months had passed since the last pitiable reconciliation. . . . Why had he married her? It had not been for lack of warning. Perhaps the very traducing of her had spurred him on. She was so fair and fragile, so pathetic in her widowhood. A clamour of the senses, a prompting of chivalry, and the thing was done. And she, widow of a phlegmatic don of Trinity, living in Cambridge, was perhaps carried away by the glamour surrounding the coming man in that tiny, academic world.
“I wish you were dead,” were the last words he had heard her utter. He snapped his fingers. She could have her desire.
Baltazar packed his bag with necessaries, told his gyp that business called him to London for some days, and left Cambridge forever. A month afterwards he was on his way, under an assumed name, to China.
The act of a fool perhaps. But has not one who knew called him the Fool of Genius? Anyhow he had the courage and the wit to cut his life off clean. The life of John Baltazar of Cambridge and that of James Burden who, having landed at Shanghai, spent so many adventurous years in the heart of China, might have been lived by two individuals who had never heard of each other. That disappearance from England was the first start, the consequence of the first violent fit. The first that mattered.
But there had been others. To one, his mind went back even as he asked himself whether his confession to Quong Ho had been the proceeding of an idiot. It had to do with the selfsame subject of that confession. The period went back to his last undergraduate term, when he was as certain of being Senior Wrangler as a Cardinal of being the best theologian in a scratch company of parish priests. Carrying on to the beginning of term an end of vacation revel, Baltazar took to evil courses. The slander which, reported to young Godfrey Baltazar, Marcelle Baring had so vehemently denied, had its basis in truth. He had discovered alcohol, and for a time plunged, with his whole-souled fervour, into his discovery. Then, one Spooner, the next in the Tripos running, a man living entirely on his scholarships, a mild and pallid man of no physical value whom the lusty Baltazar, after the way of vivid and immature young men, despised, had the grand audacity to call on him and expostulate with him on his excesses. Baltazar listened breathless. The fellow ought to be going round with a show of freaks. He told him so. Spooner waved aside the proposition and went on with his main argument.
“You have every right to be Senior. There’s not one of us in it with you. But if you go on playing the fool like this, anything may happen.”
“That’s all to your personal advantage, my dear good missionary,” said Baltazar.
“You don’t seem to understand why I’ve come here,” replied Spooner. “I don’t want to be Senior just because a man who’s infinitely better than I is a drunken sot.”
And they talked and bandied words a little, and then Baltazar saw himself face to face with an exquisite soul. He gripped the lean shoulders of the undeveloped, spectacled young man with his big hands.
“I swear to God,” said he, “that I’ll not touch a drop of alcohol for the next five years.”
But he also swore to himself an oath of which Spooner was ignorant. He swore that Spooner should be Senior. And he kept both vows. In the last day’s Problem Paper he deliberately sacrificed himself. As a matter of fact he just overdid it, for, to the mystification of all concerned in the Tripos, he was placed third. But Spooner had the coveted distinction. The Tripos over, everything fell before Baltazar, and he was acknowledged the supreme mathematician of his year, and, in the course of time, the greatest of his generation.
The difficulty, owing to its episodical character, of presenting the early career of Baltazar, thus finds illustration. One might go back to schoolboy days and point to lapses from grace, followed by similar swift and ruthless decisions. To catalogue them all would require the patient tediousness of formal biography. Apart from such a process, his life up to his flight into the moorland wilderness can best be pictured by a series of flashes.
A sudden disgust with China and an overwhelming nostalgia for the sweeter political life of England drove him home after eighteen years. The greater part of the time he had spent in the impenetrable heart of the vast country, speaking many dialects as well as the classical Wen-Li of the learned, an encyclop?dia of erudition, saturated with intimate knowledge of Chinese custom and observance, a Chinaman in all but physical appearance, dressing, living, acting and accepted universally as a Chinaman, prospering as a Chinaman too in financial undertakings. It was old China that he entered, a land stable in its peculiar civilization which, in spite of many traditional oppressions and time-sanctioned cruelties, had its fascination and grace—the gift to a Mandarin of a precious and much-coveted ancient manuscript had purchased the life of a boy, Li Quong Ho, condemned to elaborate death for a venial offence, the transaction being carried out in an atmosphere of high refinement, and scented tea served and drunk with exquisite punctilio. It was old China that he had learned to love, with its sense of beauty, its reverence for learning, its profound ethical philosophy. But it was a new China, convulsed with new ideas, bloodthirsty, treacherous, unstable to maddening point, that he had quitted in his sudden and determined way.
For eighteen years, in the interior of China, he had lived remote from European politics. He had sunk himself in the lore, and identified himself with the interests, of that ancient land. With no correspondence, beyond the reach of newspapers, he all but forgot the existence of Europe. Meeting his fellow-countrymen on the homeward voyage, he shunned them, partly through shyness, partly through distaste for the brusqueness of their manners, the high pitch of their voices, their colossal ignorance of the country with which they boasted such contemptuous familiarity, the narrowness of their outlook, the petty materialism of their conversation. He held himself aloof, longing for the real England at the end of the voyage.
In London, the loneliest soul in the great city, he set himself to pick up the threads of the life around him. He walked the familiar and unwelcoming streets, at first dazed by the motor traction, then bewildered by evidences of the luxury which eighteen years of decadence had engendered. He visited new palaces of entertainment and came away wondering. In fashionable supper-rooms he saw the flower of the land dancing to what, as a scholar, he knew to be West African sexual rhythms. He could not understand. What were they doing, or trying to do? He would sit lonely at a table, a formally ordered drink before him, at one of these great public haunts, and try to get the key to the mystery. The decay of manners offended him. He discounted the fact that he had lived so many intense years in the land of sacred ceremonial; he wiped that out of his mind, and recalled the standard of his own youth. The exiguity of feminine apparel shocked his unaccustomed eyes; in many cases nothing from waist up but a sort of low palisade, scarcely concealing the bust. Was he not mistaken? Was this not rather the scum than the flower of modern England? But at neighbouring tables he had overheard attention being directed to bearers of proud and historic names. Then he asked himself the question: had he frequented such places eighteen years ago? Had they not been outside the sphere of his narrow academic life? He desired to judge justly. When did he leave England? In 1896. And his bachelor days, with their joyous London jaunts, had ended in 1894. There was no such social life then: if there had been, he would have heard of it. In the afternoons, too, these young men and maidens danced their weird dances.
Outside, the land was a-clamour with the doings of a sterner sisterhood. Processions, mass meetings, virago riotings, picture slashings, incendiarism, bombs, formed the features of their astounding crusade. The newspapers, beyond the recounting of facts, with vivid descriptions of sensational scenes, gave him little information as to the philosophy of the movement. Politically the country seemed to be in a state of chaotic turmoil. Persons holding high office were publicly accused of corrupt financial practices. Parliament wrangled fiercely with the Army over an opéra bouffe condition of Irish affairs. Beneath all this Labour uttered volcanic threatenings. Subversive ideas, new to him, such as syndicalism, were in the air. Unintelligible criticisms of picture exhibitions urged his curious steps to the indicated galleries, where he came upon canvases that made his brain reel. A new Rip Van Winkle, he had awakened to a mad world, a world even more perilously unstable than the China which he had left.
The solitary scholar found himself disastrously out of sympathy with it all. He had planned to give himself a month’s holiday in London before settling down, in some quiet and comfortable suburb, to the many years’ work that lay before him on the materials he had brought from China. He had formed no intention whatever of cutting himself off from communion with his fellow-men. Indeed, he meant, as soon as he could rid himself of the complications of his assumed name, to proclaim himself unobtrusively to the world as John Baltazar. Before coming finally to this decision, however, he must learn what had become of his wife, as he had no desire to play the disconcerting part of a tactless Enoch Arden. His first step on arriving at London had been to institute, through a firm of solicitors, discreet enquiries. He learned that his wife had been dead for thirteen years. He was at liberty to become John Baltazar again as soon as he liked. But in London, as James Burden, he stayed at the Savoy Hotel, a bewildered and disillusioned spectator of the modern world.
How did the catastrophe happen? Thinking over it, as he often thought with shivers of disgust, in his moorland retreat, he could scarcely give an answer. Only once, since his interview with the audacious Spooner, had he given way to an overmastering impulse—and that was on his journey out to Shanghai. Anti-climax, in the shape of sudden storm and sea-sickness, cured him, and he vowed total abstinence all the time he should be in China; and he kept his vow. Perhaps, here in London, unaccustomed idleness and his disgust-filled loneliness drove him gradually and insensibly to the consolation of alcohol. The odd drinks during the day increased in number. He viewed a rosier London after a quart of old Burgundy at dinner. To sit in a crowded cosmopolitan café became his evening amusement, and the continuous consumption of brandies and soda aided indulgent observation. He had given himself his month’s holiday, and he meant to have it, no matter how joyless and unsympathetic was the holiday atmosphere. Now and then, in these popular resorts he picked casual acquaintanceship with a neighbour. He had the gift of making his companion’s conversation intelligent and interesting. On these occasions he drank less.
But one solitary night intoxication for the first time overcame him. He realized it with a feeling of anger. The lights were just being lowered. He ordered a double liqueur brandy, in the crazy assurance that it would pull him together. Of what happened afterwards he had little memory. In the crowded street someone laid hold of him and, resentful of attack, he turned and smote his supporter. To complete the outrage, a policeman handled him roughly, a proceeding which he also violently resented. Then a whirl of lights and darkness and lights again, and strange faces and once more darkness absolute and final, until he awoke and found himself sober and shivering in a police cell. A few hours afterwards, James Burden, of no occupation, living at the Savoy Hotel, was fined forty shillings or a month for being drunk and disorderly in Leicester Square.
If it had been a magnificent folly, a royal debauch, a voluptuous orgy of roses and wine and laughter and song and the pulsating lustiness of life, the dulce periculum of the follower of the Len?an one brow-bound with green vine-leaves, he might have held himself in some measure excused. He had made no vow, he had no reason, to spurn the joyousness of existence. He was a man of racing blood, with claim and right to the gladness of physical things. But this sordid, solitary bout with its end of vulgarity and degradation, filled him with a horror almost maddening in its fierceness. His soul shrivelled at the ghastly humiliation. That it should come upon him; him, John Baltazar, with half a century of clean life behind him; him, John Baltazar, the man who had compelled high honour for intellect and character from his childhood days, at a Public School, at the University, as an unknown and prejudice-surrounded foreigner in the strangest of alien lands; that it should come upon him seemed like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
And then it fell that he once more cut the Gordian knot. He would fly from a world in which he had proved himself not fit to live cleanly, with all the less reluctance because he had found it incomprehensible and unattractive. And sitting dishevelled on the bed, he informed Quong Ho of his decision. As soon as he had cleansed himself from the soil of the awful night, he left the Savoy and the dishonoured name of James Burden for ever, and took rooms at another hotel for the night as John Baltazar. The next day he threw himself vehemently into the quest of a hermitage. He remembered a desolate waste of moorland through which on a walking tour he had rambled in his undergraduate days.
“It may be, Quong Ho,” said he, “that it is built over with picture palaces and swarming with tango-dancers. Any conceivable happening to England during the last twenty years is possible. But we’ll go and see.”
“I am unacquainted, sir,” replied Quong Ho, “with the dancers you mention; but I have visited picture palaces during the fortnight we have spent in your wonderful country, and, rightly exercised, the cinematograph strikes me as being the most marvellous vehicle for the propaganda of civilization that the world has seen.”
“Quong Ho,” said Baltazar, “it is not in our contract to care one little tuppenny damn for the propaganda of civilization. You’re not going to waste your time at one of those futile and ill-conceived, although ingenious, entertainments for the next three years. If the particular region I have in view is not satisfactory, we shall find another.”
Presently he added, in a tone of compunction—he was dressing while Quong Ho packed:
“I’m sorry I’ve had to cut short the time I intended you to have in London. I badly wanted you to have some general idea of it.”
“Sir,” replied Quong Ho, “without wishing to boast, I have grasped London. I could find my way blindfolded from here to the Tower, the House of Parliaments, the North End Road, Fulham, and that imperishable objective record of your honourable nation’s history, the museum of Madame Tussaud.”
“All the points you have mentioned, Quong Ho,” said Baltazar, “are of undoubted value—except the North End Road, Fulham. What the devil could you find of interest in that drab region of nowhere?”
Quong Ho’s usually smiling and mobile face became an expressionless mask.
“It marked the end of my peregrination in that direction,” he replied.
“It strikes me,” said Baltazar, “that it’s time you peregrinated to a more God-swept and intellectual atmosphere.”
Three weeks afterwards they took up their residence at Spendale Farm.