BALTAZAR awoke a couple of mornings afterwards to find that certain vague happenings which he had regarded as dreams were true. He really lay in a comfortable bed, in a pleasant room; the soft-voiced woman in grey, whose ministrations he had been unable to divine, stood smiling at the foot of his bed, an unmistakable nurse. Conscious of discomfort, he raised his hand and felt his head swathed in a close-fitting, scientific bandage. He remembered now that he had lain there for a considerable time. What he had taken for outrageous assaults on his brain for the purpose of extracting the secrets of his mathematical researches, had been the doctor dressing his wounds. “How are you this morning?” asked the nurse.
“Perfectly well, thank you,” said Baltazar. “I should feel better if you would tell me where I am.”
“This is Mr. Pillivant’s house.”
“Pillivant—Pillivant? Oh yes. I’ve got it. It seems as if I had been off my head for a bit.” The nurse nodded. “I’m all right now. Let me put things together.” Suddenly he sat up. “My God! How is Quong Ho?”
“He is getting on as well as can be expected,” replied the nurse.
“He’s alive? Quite sure?”
“Quite sure.”
Baltazar fell back on the pillow. “The last thing I remember clearly was their taking him into the Cottage Hospital, after that infernal jolting across the moor. What happened then?”
“You collapsed, and they brought you here.”
“What day is it?”
“Friday.”
“Good Lord,” said Baltazar, “I’ve been here since midday Wednesday.”
“Would you like a little breakfast?”
“I should like a lot,” declared Baltazar.
The nurse laughed. The patient was better. She turned to leave the room, but Baltazar checked her.
“Before you go just tell me if I’ve got the situation clear. The European war has been going on for two years. In the course of a new-fangled kind of warfare the Germans drop bombs from Zeppelins over England. A Zeppelin dropped bombs on my house on Tuesday night—to get rid of them—so Mrs. Pillivant said. You see, everything’s coming back to me. Afterwards it came down in flames, and all the crew were burned. Is that right?”
“Perfectly,” said the nurse.
“Now I know more or less where I am,” said Baltazar.
The nurse fetched his breakfast, which he ate with appetite. He had barely finished when Dr. Rewsby entered.
“This is capital. Capital,” said he. “Sitting up and taking nourishment. How’s the pulse?”
“Never mind about me,” said Baltazar, as the doctor took hold of his wrist. “What about Quong Ho?”
The doctor gave a serious report. Fractured skull, severe concussion. Broken legs. Semi-consciousness, however, had returned—the hopeful sign. But it would be a ticklish and tedious business.
“If you want another opinion, a man from Harley Street, special nurses, don’t hesitate a second,” said Baltazar. “Money’s no object.”
“I’ll bear in mind what you say,” replied the doctor; “but if his constitution is as sound as yours, he’ll do all right. By all the rules of the game you ought to be as helpless as he is.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“You’ve had half your scalp tom away. How you manage to be sitting up now, eating eggs, after your lunatic performances on Wednesday, is more than I can understand.”
Baltazar smiled grimly. “I can’t afford the time to fool about in a state of unconsciousness, when I have two years’ arrears of European history to make up.”
“Never mind European history,” said the doctor. “Let us see how this head of yours is getting on.”
The dressing completed, he said to Baltazar:
“Now you’ll lie quiet and not worry about the war, Quong Ho, or anything.”
“And grow wings and order a halo and work out the quadrature of the circle and discover the formula for the Deity in terms of the Ultimate Function of Energy. . . . Man alive!” he cried impetuously, raising himself on his elbow. “Don’t you understand? I’ve been dead for years—my own silly, selfish doing—and now I’ve come to life and found the world in an incomprehensible mess. If I don’t go out and try to understand it, I shall go stark, staring mad!”
“I can only order you to stay in bed till I give you permission to get up,” said the doctor. “Good-bye. I’ll come in this evening.”
As soon as he had gone Baltazar threw off the bedclothes and sprang to his feet.
“Doctors be hanged!” said he. “I’ve not given in to illness all my life long, and I’m not going to begin now. Besides, I’m as fit as ever I was. I’m going to dress.”
“I’m afraid you can’t,” said the nurse.
“Why?”
“You haven’t any clothes.”
He glanced for a second or two at the unfamiliar green and purple striped silk pyjamas in which he was clad, and remembered the undervest and flannel trousers, foul with blood and grime, in which he had arrived at Water-End.
“The devil!” said he, and he stood gasping as a new conception of himself flashed across his mind. “Except for these borrowed things, I am even more naked than when I came into the world.”
“You’d better go back to bed,” said the nurse.
“I’ve got to go back to the world,” retorted Baltazar. “As quick as possible.”
“You can’t do it in pyjamas,” said the nurse.
“I must ask my host to lend me some clothes.”
“I’ll go down and see him about it,” said the nurse.
She went out, leaving Baltazar sitting on the edge of the bed. Presently entered Pillivant, who burst into heartiness of greeting. Delighted he was to see him looking so well. At one time he half expected there was going to be a funeral in the house. Heard that he wanted some togs. Only too happy to rig him out. Would pick out all the necessary kit to-morrow.
“But I want clothes now,” said Baltazar.
Pillivant shook his head. “Must obey doctor’s orders. By disobeying in the first place I nearly had a cold corpse on my hands, and if there’s one thing Mrs. Pillivant dislikes more than another, it’s a corpse. When her old aunt died here, she went half off her chump. No, no, old man,” he continued, in soothing tones which exasperated Baltazar, “you be good and lie doggo to-day, as the doctor says, and to-morrow we’ll see about getting up.”
“You’ve got the whip-hand of me,” said Baltazar, glowering.
“That’s about it,” grinned Pillivant. “And you’re not used to not having your own way.”
“I suppose I’m not,” said Baltazar, looking at his host more kindly. “I don’t know but what you’re right. A little discipline might be beneficial for me.” He slipped back into the bed and nodded to the nurse, who settled him comfortably. “A little contact with other people might restore my manners. As I’m beholden to you for everything, Mr. Pillivant, I may at least be civil. As a matter of fact, I’m infinitely grateful, and I place myself in your hands unreservedly.”
“Oh, that’s all right, old man,” said Pillivant.
“It isn’t all right,” cried Baltazar, realizing, in his self-condemnatory way, the ungracious attitude he had adopted from the first towards his host. “I’ve been merely rude. I’m sorry. I’ve lived in China long enough to know that no personal catastrophe can excuse lack of courtesy. By obeying your medical man I see that I shall give least trouble to your household.”
“You needn’t talk like a book about it,” said Pillivant.
“I’ve lived with books so long,” replied Baltazar, “that perhaps I have lost the ways of contemporary Englishmen.”
Pillivant threw him a furtive and suspicious glance.
“Most books are all damn rot,” he declared.
“You’re not the first philosopher that has enunciated that opinion,” said Baltazar, with a laugh. “Didn’t a character in one of the old dramatists—I think—say ‘To mind the inside of a book is to entertain oneself with the forced product of another man’s brain’? No. It’s the practical men who do things, isn’t it?”
“I’m a practical man myself,” said Pillivant, “and seeing as how I started as an office-boy at eight shillings a week, I’ve done a blooming lot of things. Look”—he swung a chair, and sat down near the bed, and bent confidentially towards Baltazar—“in July fourteen I was only a little builder and contractor up at Holloway. When Kitchener in September called for his million men——”
“Wait!” cried Baltazar, putting his hand up to his forehead. “In September nineteen fourteen Kitchener called for a million men?”
“Yes, yes, that’s all ancient history. I was telling you—when the cry went out, I said to myself: a million men will want accommodation. Temporary buildings. Huts. No end of timber. I hadn’t a penny in the world. But I did a big bluff and sold the Government timber which I hadn’t got for twice the price I knew I could buy it at. In six months I was a rich man, and I’ve been growing richer and richer ever since. I’ve got a flat in Park Lane and this house in the country, and I’m on Munitions, and I have my cars and as much petrol to burn as I want, and I’m a useful man to the Government, and doing my bit for the war. And none of your blooming books about it. Just plain common sense. If I had been worrying my head about books, I should have lost my chance. Just what you’ve done. You’ve been burying yourself in books and haven’t even heard of the war, let alone doing anything for your country. Books make me tired. To hell with them!”
Baltazar looked at the puffy, small-eyed man in his clear way. He disliked him exceedingly. Even with the most limited knowledge of war conditions, it was evident he had been exploiting them to his own advantage. But when you haven’t a rag of your own to your back and are dressed in another man’s pyjamas, lying in his bed and eating his food, you must observe the decencies of life.
“I suppose lots of fortunes are being made out of this war.”
“I should think so. Those honestly made, well, the chaps with brains deserve them. But, at the same time, there’s a lot of profiteering going on”—Pillivant shook an unctuous head—“which is a perfect disgrace.”
“Profiteering—that’s a new word.”
“You’ll find lots of new words and lots of all sorts of new things now you’ve waked up.”
“I’m sure I shall,” said Baltazar. “And now, if you’ve half an hour to spare, I wonder if you would mind telling me something about the war.”
That day and the next, Baltazar listened to Pillivant, the nurse and the doctor’s story of the world conflict, and read everything bearing on the subject with which they could supply him. Dr. Rewsby, who did not share Pillivant’s disdain for books, ransacked the little town for war literature. He bought him white books, pamphlets, back numbers of magazines and newspapers, maps. . . . What he heard, what he read, was the common knowledge of every intelligent child, but to this man of vast intellectual achievement it was staggeringly new. For those two days he lost sense of time, desire to move from the bewildering mass of lambent history that grew in piles by his bedside. The lies, the treacheries, the horrors that had accumulated on the consciousness of all other men one by one, burst upon him in one thundering concentration of hell. The martyrdom of Belgium, the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral, the sinking of the Lusitania, the use of poison gas, the bombing of open towns, the unmasking of the German Beast in all its lust and shamelessness—stunned him, so that at times he would put his hands to his head and cry: “It’s impossible! I can’t believe it.” And whoever was with him would answer: “It is true. What you read is but the outside of the devilry the civilized world is out to fight.” And his scholar’s mind would revolt. What of intellectual Germany? The mathematicians, the Orientalists, whose names were to him like household words, to say nothing of those eminent in sciences outside the sphere of his own studies? They were worse, the doctor declared, than the brutish peasant or the brutal operative. A monstrous intellectualism developed to the disregard of ethical sanction. The doctor brought him one of the great cartoons of the war, which he had cut out from some paper and kept, by Norman Lindsay, the great Australian black and white artist—the “Jekyll and Hyde” cartoon, representing a typical benevolent elderly German professor regarding himself in a mirror; and the reflection was a gorilla in Prussian spiked helmet and uniform, dripping with blood. And then Baltazar’s blood curdled in his veins as he realized the truth of the picture. All the mighty intellectualism of Germany was but an instrument of its gorilla animalism. It was an overwhelming revelation: the almost mesmeric dominance of Prussia over the other Teutonic States of Germany and Austria, reducing them to Prussia’s own atrophied civilization; that atrophied civilization itself, till now unanalysed, but now a byword of history, the development, on abnormal intellectual lines, of the ruthless barbarism of a non-European race. Strange that he had not thought of it before. Had anything good, any poem, picture, song, music, statue, dream building, sweet philosophy, ever come out of Prussia? Never. Not one. Her children were “fire and sword, red ruin and the breaking-up of laws.” And now the rest of the Germanic Empire had lost its soul. Prussia extended from the Baltic to the Danube. The whole of Central Europe was one vast cesspool, in which all things good were cast to deliquesce in putrefaction, while over it floated supreme the livid miasma of Prussianism.
In some sort of figurative conception as this did his brain realize the psychological meaning of the forces against which the civilized world was struggling. But there was the other side of the world’s embattled hosts, whose tremendous energies baffled his mental grasp. England’s Navy—yes. He had been born and bred in the belief of its invincibility. But the British Army? A glorious army, of course; a blaze of honour from Cressy upwards; a sure shield and buckler in the far-flung posts of Empire; but a thing necessarily apart from the vast military systems of the Continent of Europe. And now he learned, to his stupefaction, that the British Empire, calling up all her sons from within those same far-flung posts, had made itself, within two years, one of the three greatest military powers in the world. The casualties alone exceeded the total strength of the original British Army serving with the colours. The Army now was an organization of millions. Where had they come from? His three interpreters of the outer world gave him information according to their respective lights. All the early gathering of the hosts had been voluntary enlistments. The armies springing up at Lord Kitchener’s call had been labelled numerically by his magic name. Only recently had we been driven to conscription. And Kitchener himself—the only great soldier of whom he had ever heard? Drowned i............