ONCE more Baltazar stood within his granite enclosure and surveyed the scene of ruin and horror. He had hired a cart and driven over with three nondescript elderly labouring men, who were now wandering aimlessly about the wreckage. Nothing seemed changed since he had last left it in the wake of the stretcher-borne body of Quong Ho, although the Water-End Fire Brigade, learning that the place was still on fire, and inspired by zeal and curiosity, had meanwhile come down with helmets, hatchets and hoses, and had drenched the interior of the house with water pumped from the well. There had been no attempt at salvage. The administrators of the derelict property had long since given up paying insurance premiums on the building, and Baltazar, so long alien to European life, and desirous of coming into as slight contact as possible with the outside world, had not troubled to insure the contents. A foul, sickly smell tainted the still air. Mingled with the sour odour of the charred and sodden mess inside the dwelling, rose the miasma of corruption. Baltazar made a grimace of disgust. Before any salvage could be done the latter causes of offence must be removed. He summoned the men and gave his directions. They found the old mare’s head and the dog and fragments of the goats, alive with the infinite horror of flies and other abominable life. There was a cesspool handy. Throw them all in and clamp down the cast-iron lid. It did not matter. Nevermore would Spendale Farm be a human habitation. The men conveyed with their shovels the nameless things to the unhallowed resting-place. Baltazar would have liked to give the faithful Brutus, who had obviously rushed out of the house at the heels of Quong Ho and himself, decent burial. But not only had Brutus ceased to be Brutus, but Baltazar knew from experience the toil of digging in that granite-bound earth.
He left the men to their task, which they performed without compunction—had he not offered them the amazing sum of a pound each for their day’s work?—and plunged through the front door into the black chaos which was once his home. The sun streamed down upon unimaginable filth. He was wearing the clothes he had borrowed from Pillivant and at first he stepped warily. But every step landed him deeper in the damp carbonized welter, and at last he slipped and came down sprawling in the midst of it, so that when he rose he found himself fouled and begrimed from head to foot. He picked his way out again and stood on the front steps looking hopelessly in at the piled mass of nothingness.
He had listened to the report of the fire brigade’s captain, and his doubtless correct theory that the desperate marauder had dropped his bombs almost simultaneously, one explosive and the other incendiary. The latter had caught the homestead fair and had caused the instant and terrific conflagration. Yet he had hoped. . . . He tried to hope still. The men would soon return from the cesspool and begin to shovel away the debris from the writing-table by the wall.
To get his brain into complete working order had been a matter of time. The shock of the explosion, his wound, his enormous physical and mental effort on the memorable Wednesday, his puzzled amazement, the cataclysmic revelation of the war, his anxiety for Quong Ho, had knocked him out for a couple of days. When he recovered and regained mental grip of things, the only things he could grip at first were the staggering history of the war and the progress of Quong Ho. The two absorbing interests battened down fears that vaguely began to rise from deep recesses of his mind. But strength regained, Quong Ho out of immediate peril of death and the war a thing envisaged, practically understood, accepted, the fears burst their hatches and crowded round him, haunting and tormenting. And now he stared through the doorway of his house, with sinking heart, scarcely daring to hope that those fears should prove unrealized.
He glanced round. The men were spending inordinate time in the disposal of the carrion. Again he entered and stood in the midst of the rubbish. Only one section of bookcase remained, crazily askew. He had noted it on the Wednesday. He clambered gingerly towards it. The first slanting, half-charred, half-drenched book, whose title he made out was Queechy. By the author of The Wide, Wide World. Next to it was Flowering Shrubs of Great Britain, the date of which he knew to be eighteen-fifty-four. His heart sank. Only the refuse of his famous deal with the second-hand bookseller remained. Just that little bit of section. The rest of his library was there—down there in the molten quagmire.
At last the men came, shovels on shoulder. He pointed out the place where his long table used to stand and bade them dig. He had brought, too, a shovel for himself, and he dug with them, violently, pantingly, distractedly, heaving the shovelfuls over his shoulders, wallowing in the filth regardless of Pillivant’s expensive clothes; soon an object of dripping sweat and squalor, distinguishable only from his co-workers by his begrimed and bandaged head. The men began to pant and relax. He overheard as in a dream one of them saying, in a grumbling tone, something about beer. The sun beat fiercely down on the roofless site. He said:
“Dig like hell. Dig all day. I’ll stand you a couple of gallons apiece when you get home. If you’re thirsty now, there’s heaps of water.”
The results of severe arithmetical calculation gleamed in each man’s eye. The command over sixteen free pints of ale transcended the dreams of desire. They fell to again, working with renewed vigour.
The incendiary bomb had apparently fallen square on the northern end of the long north to south building and had scattered the original wall in which the great chimney-piece had been built and flung the granite outwards, obliterating the less solidly constructed kitchen and Quong Ho’s quarters, and tearing down the side of the scullery. The lower courses of the rest of the main walls stood more or less secure. But the roof of dried tinder-thatch had fallen in ablaze, and every thing beneath it had been consumed by fire. Nothing remained to distinguish Baltazar’s bedroom at the southern end, once separated from the house-piece by a wooden partition reaching to the rafters, from the remainder of the awful parallelogram of disaster. The rigid mathematical lines of the low granite boundaries, with one end a heap of stony ruin, oppressed him as he dug with a sense of the ghastly futility of human self-imprisonment between walls. The position of the shapeless ragged gaps that had once been windows alone guided him in his search. The precious long deal table ran along the eastern wall. His writing-seat, surrounded by the most precious possessions of all, was situated in front of the north-east window—the long room had two windows, east and west, on each side. And it was just there where he used to sit, the happiest of men, in the midst of objective proof of dreams coming true, that chaos seemed to reign supreme.
“Go on, go on. Dig like hell. Every scrap of unburnt paper is a treasure to me. Look at every shovelful.”
After hours of toil, they found a little heap of clotted fragments, the useless cores of burnt clumps of writing. Now and then a man would come with a few filaments, having shaken the charred edges free, and, looking wonderingly at the unintelligible outer leaf, would ask: “Is this any good to you, sir?” And Baltazar, his heart cold and heavy as a stone, would bid him cast away the mocking remnants of an all but unique copy of a Chinese classic.
It was over. The three men, having loyally earned their twenty shillings and the promised two gallons of beer, stood spent and drenched, like Baltazar himself, with grime and sweat.
“Anything more, sir?”
“Nothing,” said Baltazar.
They shouldered their shovels and he his, and they marched away from the devastated place and drove back across the moor. Baltazar sat next the man who drove, in the front of the empty and futile cart, and said never a word. For the first time in his eager existence, defeat overwhelmed him. The work of a laborious lifetime had been destroyed in a few hours. With infinite toil, perhaps, he might recapture the main lines of his thought-revolutionizing treatise on the Theory of Groups: his studies in the Analytical Geometry of Four Dimensional Space. Perhaps. He had relied for his data on the innumerable notes and solutions of intricate problems which had cost the labour of many years. And these had gone. The world had hitherto wondered at two such scholar tragedies—Newton’s Principia destroyed by the dog Diamond, the first volume of Carlyle’s French Revolution burned by Mill’s stupid housemaid. But in both cases only the finished product had perished. The data remained. The rewriting was but a painful business of recompilation. But with him, not only the more or less finished product, but the fundamental material was lost forever. He shrank with dismay, almost with terror, at the thought of going through that infinite maze of accurate calculation and reasoning once more. Still, as far as the mathematics went, the palimpsest of the brain existed. Reconstitution was humanly possible. But with the Chinese editions—for most of it the material could only be found in remote libraries in China; for much of it, the material no longer survived in the explored world.
He had come hoping against hope, arguing that great masses of manuscript on thick paper were practically indestructible by fire. The outsides, the edges might be burnt, but the vast bulk of inside sheets could be preserved. But he had not counted on the disruption and devouring effect of an incendiary bomb falling at the most precious end of the long deal working-table. Probably the whole room had been instantaneously carpeted thick with loose sheets, and the great stacks of manuscript had, as it were, been burnt in detail. Then, for a while, on his hateful ride, he strove with conjecture. But what was the use of vain imaginings? That which was done was done. The harvest of his life had been annihilated. If he died to-morrow, the world would be no richer by his existence than by that of any dead goat whose body had just been cast into the cesspool. To recover the harvest would cost him many years of uninspired drudgery. It would be a horrible re-living, an impossible attempt to recapture the ardour of the pioneer, the thrills of discovery. For the first time he really felt the meaning of his age, the non-resilience of fifty. For the black present the very meaning of his life had been wiped out.
The men, wearied, befouled and thirsty, sat silent in the cart, each dreaming of the two gallons of beer that awaited him at the end of the journey. They knew they had been searching for papers; but to them valuable papers had only one signification; something perhaps to do with a bank; something which constituted a claim to money: they had discussed it during the half-hour midday interval for food. Wills, mortgages, title-deeds, they had heard of. The daughter of one of them, a parlourmaid in the house of a leading solicitor in the neighbouring cathedral city, ranking next to legendary London in majesty in the eyes of the untravelled Water-Enders, had told him that she had heard her master say, at dinner, that the contents of the tin-boxes ranged around his office represented half a million of money. His announcemen............