QUONG HO sitting up, taking plentiful nourishment and definitely pronounced out of danger, Baltazar presented his cheque for a thousand pounds to Dr. Rewsby, and thanked God for the preservation of Quong Ho’s life and his own fortune. He also listened with much interest to Quong Ho’s apologetics for leaving him in ignorance of the war. For such exact obedience and perfect fidelity reproaches would have been unjust, even had remorse for his own folly not have precluded them. “And now, my dear fellow,” said he—he was sitting by the bed in the airy, sun-filled ward of the Cottage Hospital—“tell me what you would like to do.”
“I don’t care what he would like to do,” said Dr. Rewsby. “What he has got to do is to stay here quiet and recover from the shock and mend up, and not worry his mind with the war, or mathematics, or the condition of your underclothes.”
“Quong Ho shall never wash a shirt of mine again,” declared Baltazar. “Henceforth he is the master of his destiny. I’m talking not of now, but of the future. So far as I can manage it, he can do what he jolly well likes. That’s why I put the question to him. So, Quong Ho, never mind this excellent medicine man, who can’t see beyond his nose and doesn’t want to, because all he’s concerned with is getting you well—never mind him, but tell me what most in the world you would like to do.”
“Sir,” said Quong Ho, “if you desire to dispense with my personal services, which I have always regarded it as a privilege to render to my benefactor, may I dare to formulate an ambition which has hitherto been but an idle dream?”
Dr. Rewsby knitted his grizzled brows and dragged Baltazar away from the bed.
“Does he always talk like that?” he whispered.
“Did you think he would express himself with ‘Muchee likee topside,’ and that sort of thing?”
“No; but he talks like an archbishop.”
“Then perhaps,” grinned Baltazar, “you’ll understand why I’ve insisted on his being treated as my closest friend.”
He returned to the bed. “I’m sorry, Quong Ho. What’s this famous ambition of yours?”
Quong Ho looked up at him unsmiling, with a dog-like yearning in his slanting eyes.
“If I could obtain the mathematical degree of the University of Cambridge——”
“If you went in for the Tripos now, you would wipe the floor with everybody.—Cambridge! That’s a wonderful idea.” He stuck his hands behind him in the waistband of his trousers and strode about for a moment or two, his eyes illuminated. “A splendid notion! You can begin where I leave off. I’ll work up all the stuff that’s gone, and put it into your hands, and you’ll continue my life’s work. By God! you’ll consummate it. Cambridge! The very thing! Damn China! Any fool can teach young China the Binomial Theorem and Trigonometry. But there’s only one Quong Ho, the pupil and intellectual heir of John Baltazar, in the world. Yes. You’ll go to Cambridge, and by the Lord Harry! won’t there be fluttering of dovecotes!”
He stopped suddenly in his enthusiastic outburst and his brow darkened. “Wait a bit. Perhaps you don’t realize that Cambridge is a matter of at least three years?”
“If it were twenty years it would matter little,” said Quong Ho.
“There’s Latin and Greek—compulsory. I was forgetting.”
“Greek,” replied Quong Ho, “I presume I could readily acquire. As for Latin I think I am acquainted with the grammar and I have already read the interesting Commentaries of Julius C?sar on the Gallic War.”
Baltazar sank into a chair.
“Latin! You’ve learned Latin? When? How?”
Quong Ho explained apologetically that the simultaneous excitation of mind over the quotation at the head of the papers of The Rambler, and the discovery in the lowest rubbish shelf in the library of an old Latin grammar and a copy of the De Bello Gallico, had inaugurated his study of the Latin tongue. He had procured, not without difficulty, owing to the limited intelligence of the young lady in charge, a Latin dictionary, through the miniature bookshop in Water-End.
“Well, I’m damned!” said Baltazar. “I’m just damned. And now, do you mind telling me why you never mentioned a word of it to me?”
He looked fierce and angry. Quong Ho replied in his own tongue. How could the inconsiderable worm that was his illustrious lordship’s servant, presume to importune him with his inferior and unauthorized pursuits?
“I could have taught you twice as much in half the time,” said Baltazar.
Quong Ho professed regret. He had also bought, he said, the works of the poets Virgil and Horace, but had found peculiar difficulty in translating them.
The new conception of Quong Ho as an independent purchaser of commodities set Baltazar’s mind on a different track. He had paid Quong Ho wages—or rather Quong Ho had paid himself. He started up from his chair.
“Good Lord! I’ve only just thought of it. All the money you must have had on the Farm is lost. How much was it?”
“A trifling sum—a pound or two. It does not matter,” replied Quong Ho.
“But you’ve been drawing a salary all the time. What’s become of it? You couldn’t possibly have spent it all.”
“I have invested it in British War Loan,” said Quong Ho.
“Quong Ho,” said Baltazar, standing over him, with hands thrust deep into his trouser-pockets, “you are immense.”
He went away, his head full of Quong Ho.
“Doctor,” said he, “I thought that if there ever was a Westerner who had got to the soul of the Chinaman, that man was I. Yet the more I see of Quong Ho the less do I know what queer mental workings and strange secrecies those soft, faithful eyes conceal. He kept me in absolute ignorance of the war, he learned Latin in the next room to me, without my having the faintest idea of it, and he has invested his money in War Loan. Of course, the philosophy of it all is perfectly lucid to him. In a way, I can get at the logic of it. But one wants to be wise not after but before the event. What surprise is he going to spring on me next?”
“Perhaps you’ve been nurturing an Oriental Caruso in your bosom,” the doctor suggested.
“That—no!” laughed Baltazar. “Chinese vocal chords aren’t built that way. But, for all I know, he may have a complete critical knowledge of the strategy of the war. The confounded fellow learning Latin! That’s what I can’t get over. And calmly investing in War Loan!”
“You don’t think he may cut everything and slip away to China?”
“No,” said Baltazar seriously. “That at least I’m sure of. The tremendous quality of the Chinaman is his loyalty. The scrupulousness of his obedience is a thing beyond your conception. That’s why he allowed no whisper of the war to reach me. Quong Ho would never be guilty of ingratitude. That you, Dr. Rewsby, should pick my pocket is far more possible. In fact, Quong Ho would cheerfully die this moment in order to save my life. That I know. But within those limits of utter devotion, God alone knows the weird workings of his celestial mind.” He pulled out his pipe and filled it. “I thought I knew a lot. Now I’m being knocked flat and beginning to realize that I know nothing at all, and that everything I’ve ever learned isn’t worth a tinker’s curse.”
“Perhaps,” said the doctor, after a hesitating glance, “you have put your foot on the first rung of the ladder of wisdom.”
Baltazar broke into a great laugh.
“I wish,” said he, “I had met more men like you. They would have done me good. You have the most comforting way in the world of telling me that I’m the Great Ass of the Universe.”
His head mended, his fears concerning Quong Ho at rest, his decision taken to send Quong Ho to Cambridge, nothing more kept him in the backwater of the little moorland town. He was for London, for the full stream of national thought and energy. What he would do there he did not know. He would learn. He would at least set his heart throbbing in unison with the heart of the Empire. He packed his newly purchased suit-case with his scanty wardrobe, bade farewell to the detested though embarrassingly hospitable Pillivants, and took train to London with the high hopes of a boy.
His first taste of the metropolis was exhilarating. Here was a new world. Every porter at the railway-station, every news-vendor, every street urchin, was the possessor of accumulated knowledge and experience of which he, John Baltazar, was denied a share. He read strange wisdom in the eyes of working girls and slatternly women. He bought all the evening papers, reeking, as they seemed, with the pregnant moment’s actuality. He went to a bookseller’s and bought every book and pamphlet bearing on the war. He would have an orgy of information. He would pluck the heart of the world’s mystery of blood and sacrifice.
But where to begin? If he had but one solitary acquaintance in London, who could put him into the way of understanding, his course would be simple. But he found himself absolutely alone in an infinite mass of units, knit together by complexities of common ties.
What he saw and felt, in his first eager search, reduced to dwindling point the petty tragedy of his own life. For greater issues were at stake than the revolution of mathematical thought by a new Theory of Groups. In the wholesale destruction of what were thought to be the immortal works of man, the loss of a few Chinese manuscripts counted as little as that of paper-bags for buns. For excursions into the geometry of Four Dimensional Space, or scholarly translation of the mild and benign Chinese classic, The Book of Rewards and Punishments, the world would have no use for another half-century. In face of the realities with which London confronted him, he felt that he had devoted his life to the pursuit of shadows.
If only he could grasp these realities. If only he could merge himself into them, become part and parcel of them, bring his intellect and his bodily strength into the stupendous machine which he saw at work.
Then he saw himself, by his own actions, condemned to sit and watch, an inactive spectator of the great drama. His loneliness fell upon him like a doom. He realized the uselessness of his age. He had as much place in modern London as any chance inhabitant of Mars. He who had dared the untrodden recesses of the Far Eastern world, haughtily asserting his sympathetic right of citizenship, felt, after a day or two, a terror of modern London. It was too vast, too unknown, too strange: a city at war, unlike any city he had ever seen. Youth, in civilian attire, had disappeared from its face. The unfamiliar dirty brown uniform filled the streets. He had read of khaki, was vaguely aware of it as the service uniform of the British Army; he had come across the tropical drill material which had clothed the troops in Hong Kong, but his mind preoccupied with interests remote from military affairs had barely registered the impression. His traditional and therefore instinctive conception of the soldier in the London streets was a thing in swaggering scarlet. He missed the scarlet. It took him some time to accommodate his mental vision to the military reality of the dun-coloured hordes of men that thronged the Strand, Whitehall, and Piccadilly. Soldiers, too, slopped about in an extraordinary kit of blue jean and red ties. He did not grasp the fact that these were wounded men wearing hospital uniform, until he passed the Westminster Hospital and saw some of them taking the air on the terrace. After the first day’s wanderings he dined at his crowded hotel, a bewildered man. In London itself he had beheld an army. Scarcely a table in the vast restaurant showed no man in uniform among its occupants. He contrasted the place with his last pre-war impression. Then every man, young or old, had been impeccably attired in the white tie and white waistcoat of high convention. Not a woman then who was not gowned as for some royal festival. Now the outward and visible signs of gilded youth had vanished. Even elderly bucks wore plain dinner-jackets and black ties—his own sloppily fitting, ready made dress suit seemed ultra ceremonious. Here and there were exquisitely dressed women; but here and there, too, were dowdy ladies unblushing under obviously cheap hats. And men with bandaged heads came in, and legless men on crutches; and at the next table a one-armed man depended for the cutting up of his food on the ministrations of a girl. And away over the other side of the room he saw a man, his breast covered with ribbons, carried pick-a-back by a brother officer to his appointed place. No one seemed to take notice of the unusual. Scarcely a casual glance lingered on the pair. At no table visible was there a break in the talk and the laughter. Baltazar leaned back in his chair and gasped at the realization that the incident was a commonplace of modern life.
His heart throbbed with pity for these maimed men, some of them boys fresh from school; then with pride in their English courage and gaiety. He looked round the room curiously and, in his fancy, identified several Pillivants. They generally sat two or three at a table and drank champagne and leaned over, heads together, as they talked. But the impression t............