SUCH, as far as a few strokes can picture him, was John Baltazar, at the time when his unsuspected son lay footless in the convalescent home and discussed with Marcelle Baring the mystery of his existence. A man of many failings, many intolerances, of some ruthlessness. A man both sensitive and hard; both bold and shrinking; with the traditional habits of the ostrich and the heart of a lion. A man apparently given to extravagances of caprice; and yet remaining always constant to himself, preserving also throughout his strange career a perfect unity of character. Perhaps, regarding him from another point of view, his detractors may say that he loved to play to himself as audience and, further, put that audience in the gallery. Why not? It is in the essence of human consciousness that a man must, in some measure, be an actor to himself. The degree depends on the human equation. Dumas fils once said of his immortal semi-mulatto father: “He is quite capable of getting up behind his own carriage, in order to persuade people that he keeps a black footman.” A savage epigram. But it would have been a deeper truth if he had said that the wonder of a man who was his father, was capable of doing it, in order to persuade himself that he kept a black footman. The more we limit the audience to the man himself, the more we love him. The more human does the vivid creature appear to us. If Baltazar played to that audience of one, he had many illustrious colleagues. If again his method was melodramatic, it at least had breadth. It dealt with big issues in a broad and simple way. . . . “That’s what I love about the three great systems of Chinese ethics,” he would declare. “There’s no damned subtlety about them. You accept the various propositions or you, don’t. There are no homoousian and homoiousian conflicts, and suchlike rubbish, that have torn Western thought to ribbons for over a thousand years. In China you go straight to the heart of truth. All the subtlety lies, Quong Ho, in the correct interpretation of your appalling but fascinating script.”
This was a rough profession of faith, almost an analysis of character. The intellect of the mathematician delighted in the process of arriving at exactness of statement, but at the same time that statement’s philosophic simplicity appealed to a nature fundamentally simple.
He abhorred complications. That was his weakness. He claimed, unphilosophically, the absolute. Hence the abandonment of his academical career, involving at the same time the merciless abandonment of his wife. Hence the clean cut of his career in China, where a little supple coquetting with political corruption would have brought him great wealth and power. Hence the impenetrable wall he had now contrived between himself and the rest of mankind. He had no power of compromise.
Thus an attempt has been made to answer the question which Marcelle Baring vainly put to herself that sleepless night on her return from London, when a boy’s artless admiration had opened springs of sentiment which she had thought deliberately sealed forever; the question asked by Godfrey Baltazar; the same question which almost simultaneously John Baltazar put to himself, while leaning over the gate in the glory of the moorland sunset; which, in a wistful, speculative way, he continued to put to himself after Quong Ho, with new lights on Elliptic Functions and the philosophy of Lao-Tze and the Ethics of Love—for the severe lesson in mathematics was always followed by an hour’s improving conversation on general matters—had retired for the night, leaving him to his last pipe and his last spell of work. But the discussion on the Ethics of Love disturbed his more studious thought and brought back the question which a few hours before had idly flitted across his brain.
Quong Ho had said, somewhat diffidently, in his own language: “Master, may this inconsiderable person seek the solution of an intimate problem from one who is a supreme authority on all things concerning human conduct?”
“Fire away,” said Baltazar in English.
“Thank you, sir; I will proceed to fire. When I left China I was a young man of no account, the son of peasants long since defunct, your body-servant, almost your slave, because you purchased my life.”
“We can stow all that,” said Baltazar.
“With your honourable permission, by no means. I was reckoned in Chen-Chow only as a hopper of clods——”
“Eh? Oh yes. Go on,” smiled Baltazar.
“I saw the daughter of Fung Yu, the gardener of the palace——”
“I remember the old villain. He had a daughter?”
“There were negotiations in progress,” Quong Ho went on. “The young woman was eminently desirable. She was virtuous and obedient, and not devoid of physical attractiveness. When I followed you, sir, from China, I left the affair between myself and Fung Yu in a state of suspended animation.”
“You mean Fung Yu’s daughter? In our more brutal idiom it comes to this—that you’re in love with a little girl in China—and she possibly with you—and you’ve run away and don’t know what the devil to do.”
“Her feelings,” replied Quong Ho calmly, “do not concern me. I doubt whether she has any of sentimental importance. It is with my own honourable conduct that I am preoccupied. I left China a person to whom Fung Yu would condescend: I return as a personage of high intellectual repute. I shall be able to seek a bride of a far higher social position than the daughter of Fung Yu. That is not all. My study of English literature has given me new conceptions of the intellectual companionship of married life. In the New China there are certainly young girls of high educational standard, among whom I might find one who could understand what I was talking about when I spoke of such philosophical topics as interested me. The point that, as a very young and humble man, I wish to submit to your infallible wisdom, for my guidance, is this: am I bound, as an honourable fellow, to marry, in Old China, the flower-like but cabbage-ignorant daughter of Fung Yu, the gardener, or am I justified in cutting the Rubicon and seeking in the New China for a real helpmate?”
“Before proceeding,” replied Baltazar, with the bantering light in his grey eyes that Quong Ho could never interpret, “will you make a note for a conversation to-morrow on Mixture of Metaphors?” Quong Ho produced his notebook. “Yes, just that entry. Mixture of Metaphors. Good,” said he, when the methodical young Chinaman had obeyed. “Side issues, like that, have their great importance; but they must be followed after the main course has been traversed. The whole point of the matter is: how far have you committed yourself with the girl?”
Quong Ho started back in his straight-backed wooden chair—they were still side by side at the lamplit centre of the long deal table—and held up his hands.
“Committed myself? Oh no. The only time I ever addressed her was on one occasion when I relieved her of the burden of a vessel of water from the well to her house. But I have spoken very seriously to Fung Yu.”
“Fung Yu can go to blazes,” said Baltazar.
Quong Ho smiled. “I alone could give evidence that would condemn him to a perpetuity of punishment.”
“So could I,” cried Baltazar. “Graft! If Tammany Hall really wanted to know how to do things, it ought to sit like a little child at the feet of a high-class Mandarin’s head-gardener. Fung Yu’s the real thing.”
“He is a corrupt personality,” said Quong Ho.
“Therefore,” replied Baltazar, “he is not the kind of person with whom an honourable man should seek alliance. As to the lady, her young affections are obviously unblighted, and very possibly by this time she is married and the mother of twins. My advice is to dismiss Fung Yu and his flower-like yet cabbage-ignorant daughter forever from your mind.”
“I shall follow your gracious counsel,” replied Quong Ho. And the intimate conversation ended.
But it hung around the thoughts of Baltazar for the rest of the night. Quong Ho was young. Quong Ho had looked upon a daughter of men and found her fair. In his Chinese self-repressing way he had had his romance. Now it was over. He pitied Quong Ho. Yet, after a year or so of probation, the young man, lusty in his youth and confident in his future, would return to his native land heart-whole, with all the romance of life still before him—whilst he, Baltazar, would re-enter a world from which all such things were blotted out for ever. For what of romance could lie before a man of fifty—one who had lost all touch with women and women’s ways? For the first time a fear of loneliness sent a shiver through him. It was not natural for a man to have neither wife nor child. It was but half an existence; a deliberate spurning of duties and glories and fulfilled achievement. And his own one romance? Had he been justified in destroying its gossamer web? It was all very long ago; but the beauty of it lingered exquisite in his heart. Had he been a mere fool? Were the results to him and to her worth the sacrifice? And, after all, was he sure that the results to her had been beneficial rather than disastrous? He sighed, consoled himself with the reflections that she must now have around her a family of sons and daughters, and that if ever she gave him a thought, it was to bless Heaven for her narrow escape; and, so fortified, he went on with his work.
When he awoke the next morning, the chastened retrospective mood had passed. After his tea and cold tub, he sat down to the table by the eastern window through which the morning sun was streaming, setting the gorse ablaze and the heather blood-red, and attacked the final chapter of his epoch-making Treatise on the Theory of Groups. The thrill of a great thing accomplished held him as he wrote. Such moments were worth living. He breakfasted with the appetite of a man who had earned a right to the material blessings of life. He went out, groomed the old grey mare and cleaned out the stable and dug up a patch of ground, rejoicing, like a young man, in his strength and in the fresh beauty of the day. On his return to his study he reviewed affectionately the monuments of two years’ labour. The Treatise of the Theory of Groups, all but complete, lay in one neat pile of manuscript. Another represented further serious adventures into the Analytical Geometry of a Four-Dimensional Space than mortal man had ever undertaken. Who could tell whither those adventures could lead? Pure mathematics had demonstrated the existence of the planet Neptune in space of three dimensions. Pure mathematics applied to four dimensions might prove and explain many transcendental phenomena. The next world might be four-dimensional and the spirits of the dead who inhabit it could easily enter confined three-dimensional space. That was Cayley’s ingenious theory of Ghosts. You could carry it further to space of five, six, n dimensions; when you could treat the geometry of space of infinite dimensions as Euclid did the geometry of plane surfaces, you would have solved the riddle of the universe; you would have come direct to the Godhead. He turned lovingly over the leaves of the completed portion of this fascinating essay; also the neighbouring piles of rough notes, the results of laborious years in China. Another section of the long deal table was devoted to his translations and editions of the Chinese classics and to ancient Chinese MSS. and books, his originals and authorities. The final scholarly translation into English of the great book of the Tao-tze—The Book of Rewards and Punishments—so full of deep wisdom, artlessness and charm, rose in three-part completion. It would knock dear old Stanislas Julien’s French version of 1835 into a cocked hat. He had collated libraries undreamed of by Julien or by any subsequent scholar. It would make all the missionaries and consuls and other amateur sinologists wish they had never been born. . . . Then again were the Shih-King—the Psalms of ancient China, resonant with music, bewildering with imagery, vibrating with emotion, hitherto done into English—done in into English—he chuckled as the mild jest occurred to him—by a worthy, prosaic and very learned missionary, much out of sympathy with ancient China because it had never heard of Jesus Christ before He was born—there were the Shih-King in process of reverent and, as far as his power lay, of poetic translation. He took down from his shelves the volume containing the solemnly authoritative English text published by the Oxford University Press, and opened it at random. He read:
“The angry terrors of compassionate Heaven extend through this lower world. (The King’s) counsels and plans are crooked and bad; when will he stop (in his course)? Counsels that are good he will not follow. And those that are not good he employs. When I look at his counsels and plans, I am greatly pained.”
He laughed out loud, shut the book and returned it to the shelf.
“?‘I am greatly pained’! Oh, my Lord!”
He searched his manuscript for his own version, and read it through with a satisfaction not devoid of smugness. A professional poet might have found, like the Chinese writer, the inevitable word, the sacred flash; but, after all, he had made the thing deadened by the learned Oxford professor live again; he had suggested some of the music and the grace of the original—enough to attract and not to repel the ordinary English reader. And with all that, he would like to see any man, Chinese or European, pick a hole in his scholarship.
He lit his pipe, and before settling down to work again surveyed the great mass of his achievement. Life was truly worth living, when, during its brief span, such great things could be done. With a short interval for luncheon, he worked steadily on through the day, sacrificing his accustomed spell of outdoor exercise, and when Quong Ho, who had changed his nondescript European working kit for the cool, immaculate Chinese dress, announced that dinner would be ready in a quarter of an hour, he had all but written Finis to his Treatise on the Theory of Groups.
“Lord!” said he, “I must wash and get a mouthful of fresh air.” He whistled to the dog, Brutus, who had lain at his feet most of the afternoon, and went off. When he got outside, he discovered, to his surprise, for he had sat in front of a window all the time, that a white mist had gathered on the moorland and that his horizon as he stood on his doorstep was scarcely bounded by his rude granite wall. The fog covered him in like a cupola. He patted the Airedale’s head and smiled, well content in this increased security of his isolation.
“We might, be the last living beings on the face of the globe,” said he to Quong Ho, who came to announce dinner.
“Yes, sir,” said Quong Ho.
Baltazar shot a humorous glance at him: “The idea doesn’t seem to provoke you to radiant enthusiasm.”
“I fail to see, sir,” replied Quong Ho, “who, in that hypothetical case, would benefit by your illuminating editions of the Chinese classics, and what advantage it would be to me to continue the severe study of Elliptic Functions.”
“I’m afraid you’re a dismal utilitarian,” said his master, passing by him into the house. “Yet I suppose you’re right,” he added a few moments afterwards, as he sat down to table and unfolded his napkin. “If we were the only two people left in the world, we’d very soon chuck our intellectual pursuits. I don’t think I care a damn for the things themselves. As far as I am solely and personally concerned, this excellent bit of grilled salmon is infinitely more vital than the discovery of any mathematical truth. The latter has only value as it relates to the progress of humanity. If there is no humanity, it is valueless. It won’t help me on worth a cent. But the salmon, a typical edible, is essential to the physical existence of ME. So I should let Chinese philosophy and the Higher Mathematics go hang, and confine myself to the chase of salmon or rabbits or roots or acorns—and so would you—and in a very few years we should be hairy, long-nailed savages, flying at each other’s throats for the last succulent bit of Brutus.”
The dog, hearing his name, rested his long chin against his master’s knee and regarded him with wistful eyes.
“No, old son,” laughed Baltazar, giving him a morsel of salmon, “we’re not at that point yet. Make your mind easy. You and I and Quong Ho will take our work out into the hurrying markets of the earth and find justification for all these lonely days. Although we’re temporary recluses, we’re valuable citizens of the world. We deserve more salmon.”
Quong Ho presented the dish, and Baltazar and Brutus got their deserts.
Presently Quong Ho brought in lamb cutlets with fresh peas from the garden, which Baltazar attacked with relish.
“Quong Ho,” said Baltazar, “you’re a wonder. Is there anything you can’t do?”
The young man smiled bland recognition of the compliment, but said nothing. As Baltazar’s body-servant he refrained from familiar conversation. But Baltazar was in an expansive mood. He went on:
“You cook for me enchantingly. You serve me perfectly. Your attitude, Quong Ho, is one of the most exquisite tact. But if we were the last two persons on the earth, you would see me damned before you would devote yourself to my personal comfort in this unrestricted manner.”
“I think not,” replied Quong Ho. “The truths of religion would not be affected by the annihilation of the human race. To you, who are to me in loco parenti——”
“Parentis, my dear fellow. It’s Latin. Make a note of it.”
“I do so, mentally,” said Quong Ho. “To you, sir, who are to me in the place of a parent, I owe filial obligation, and therefore I should not see you damned before I administered to your wants.”
“Rubbish!” said Baltazar, with a wave of his hand.
“I speak the truth,” said Quong Ho gravely.
Baltazar did not reply, but devoted himself to the cutlets and peas.
Quong Ho performed the sacred rite of the offering of wine. The meal was concluded in its nice formality of conventional life, and after coffee Baltazar lit his pipe and sat down to his usual hour’s mental relaxation. But his mind wandered from The Caxtons, which he had taken down from the shelves, to Quong Ho’s quiet profession of loyalty. For all his intimate knowledge of the Chinese character, this perhaps was the first time that he realized the depth of the young man’s real affection. And suddenly it occurred to him that he also was greatly attached to Quong Ho; not only through habit, or implicit trust, or gratitude for essential co-operation in carrying out his eccentric scheme of life; but by ties very simple and homely. Bacon, speaking of man, says: “If he have not a friend, he may quit the stage.” Baltazar glowed with the thought that he could still act his part as a human being. He had his friend. Indeed, he had had one for all these months, and even years, without knowing it. The loneliness of soul which he had accepted as his portion from the time of his flight from Cambridge, and for the last day or two he had begun to dread, was filled by the incongruous sympathy of the young Chinaman. Hitherto he had accepted his fidelity as a matter of course; he had rewarded it by scrupulous observance of his obligations. But it had been his good pleasure to regard his disciple as a human and intellectual toy, all the more delectable for his lack of the humorous sense. To pull well-known strings and elicit platitudes expressed in the solemnity of his classically learned English had been his mischievous delight. But—“I speak the truth,” Quong Ho had said; and the accent in which he had said it was one of grave conviction, even of rebuke.
He took up his book again and almost immediately let it drop.
“If I lost Quong Ho, what the devil would become of me?” He threw the book on to the floor and leaned back in his arm-chair, pipe in mouth, his hands clasped behind his head. In the whole wide world of hundreds of millions of people, he had not a single friend, save Quong Ho. He had been very dense not to realize before the elementary truth that individual life is not supportable by itself. Newton’s Third Law of Motion—to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction—was a law of life. The incessant reaction on the individual would be death. One other nature at least was needed for the distribution and application of vital forces, and in their mutual action and reaction could alone be found the compensation that was safety, sanity, normal human existence. And the more attuned were the part of the reciprocal human machine, the greater the compensation; this human adjustment had its degrees: understanding, friendship, affection, culminating in love—the perfect state.
When Quong Ho appeared, books and papers as usual under his arm, Baltazar waved an inviting arm.
“Take a chair, Quong Ho, and let us talk. Elliptic Functions are too inhuman for me to-night.”
Quong Ho put his burden down on the table and brought up a straight-backed, rush-bottomed chair, and sat down stiffly, facing his master, who took up his parable.
“I’ve been thinking of what you said at dinner. You touched on a spiritual aspect of the hypothetical emotion we were discussing which did not occur to me. What made you do it?”
“Sir,” replied Quong Ho, “if you will permit me to speak my thoughts, I cannot separate life into two watertight departments——”
“Compartments,” murmured Baltazar, through force of habit.
Quong Ho bowed. “I recollect. To resume. I cannot separate life into two watertight compartments—the material and the spiritual. It appears to me to be the subtle interfusion, the solemnization of holy matrimony, between the two.”
“One of the charms, my son, of your conversation,” laughed Baltazar, “is its unexpected allusiveness.”
Quong Ho rose and made a deep bow. “You have called me, sir, by a term which overwhelms me with filial gratitude.”
Baltazar, who had used the word deliberately, held out his hand.
“I believe,” said he in Chinese, “in your profession of a son’s affection, and therefore I admit you to the position. After a year or so our lives will materially be separated, but spiritually they will run the same course.”
“This is the happiest and most fortunate day of my life,” said Quong Ho.
“Without going into superlatives,” replied Baltazar in English, “I may reciprocate the sentiment.”
They talked on, developing the idea of wedding of the material and the spiritual, branching off into fascinating side-tracks, as men of alert intelligence delight to do in conversation, and coming back now and then with the flash of unexpectedness to the main issue. They touched on the hermits of Theba?d.
“Their outlook,” said Baltazar, “was exclusively spiritual, fundamentally selfish. They were out to save their own silly, unimportant souls from hell-fire, and nothing else mattered. Egotism raised to infinity. Our retirement has nothing at all in common with theirs.”
“Sir,” said Quong Ho, “since we are speaking very seriously, may I, without indiscretion, ask you whether you too are not out to save your soul?”
Baltazar rose from his chair and strode up and down the long room, casting at Quong Ho a swift glance from beneath frowning brows every time he passed him. At last he halted and said:
“That’s so. The history of my inner life has been an attempt to save my soul. But there’s a hell of a lot of difference between me and St. Simeon Stylites. That was a kind of ass who sat for years on the top of a pillar and never did a hand’s turn for anybody. All he thought of was his escape from hell. Now I, as far as my soul is concerned, don’t care a damn whether it’s going to hell or heaven. My object in saving it is to be of use to my fellow-creatures.”
Quong Ho, who had risen when his master rose, said:
“All that is clear to me. I too am here for the same purpose.”
“You?” cried Baltazar. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I want to eradicate from my mind the soul-destroying associations of the daughter of the gardener Fung Yu.”
Then Baltazar laughed aloud and clapped the young Chinaman on the shoulder, an unprecedented act of hearty familiarity.
“My son,” said he, “this is a discipline that will bring us both, me old, you young, to the greater wisdom. In the meanwhile, it’s a happy discipline, isn’t it? We’ve got all that mortal man—under discipline, mark you—all that mortal man can want. Spiritually, we have the sacred relations of father and son. Intellectually, we are equals and”—he threw an arm around the room—“we have the learning of the world at our command. Materially—what more can we desire?”
He looked fondly around the long, low-ceilinged room, brilliantly illuminated by four petroleum lamps and half a dozen candles, and dwelt upon its homely, scholarly comfort; the Turkey carpets; the easeful chairs and sofa; the exquisite and priceless rolls of Chinese paintings between the bookcases; the bookcases filled, some with the old-world books of Europe, others with the literature of China, printed volumes, manuscripts beyond money value; the long table piled with the inestimable results of human intellect; the warm bronze curtains, before each of the four windows; the dear and familiar form of the very dog, Brutus, stretched out asleep in front of the great chimney-piece. And the silence was that of the most exclusive and the most untroubled corner of Paradise.
“What a Heaven-sent thing is Peace,” said Baltazar.
At that moment the silence was disturbed by a strange and unknown sound. Baltazar and Quong Ho started and looked questioningly at each other. It seemed like the distant beating of almighty wings. They held their breath. No, it was like the sweeping thunder of an express train. But what should express trains be doing on the moorland? With common impulse they rose and went out of doors into the thick mist. Then the thundering, clattering rush broke vibrant on their ears. It was in the air around, above them. John Baltazar put his hand to a bewildered head. What unheard-of convulsion of nature was this? Then suddenly he had a second’s consciousness of bursting flame and overwhelming crash, and the blackness of death submerged his senses.