IF I don’t smoke, I’m afraid I can’t talk,” said Baltazar. Sheepshanks smiled politely. “You remember my little weakness? But pray smoke. I’ve got used to it of late years. Times change, and we with them.”
Baltazar filled and lit his pipe.
“A couple of weeks ago,” said he, “I had all but complete two epoch-marking mathematical treatises. I had got systems and results you good people here had never dreamed of. I had also stuff in the way of Chinese scholarship that would have been a revelation to the Western world. Then German aircraft dropped bombs on my house, a hermitage in the middle of a moorland, and wiped out the labour of a lifetime. They also nearly killed a young Chinaman whom I regard as an extraordinary mathematical genius and about whom I want to consult you. They also, thereby, revealed to me a fact of which I was entirely unaware, namely, that the war had been going on for a couple of years.”
He leaned back in his chair and drew a few contented puffs. His host passed a hand over perplexed brows and leaned forward.
“I’m very sorry,” said he, in his precise, nasal voice, “to appear stupid. But you have put forward half a dozen such amazing propositions in one breath that I can’t quite follow you.”
A smile gleamed in Baltazar’s eyes. “I thought that would get you,” he remarked placidly. “But it’s an accurate presentment of my present position.”
“No doubt, no doubt,” said Sheepshanks. “But you surely haven’t been living a recluse on a moor for the last twenty years?”
“Oh no,” replied Baltazar. “Eighteen of them I spent in China. I went out straight from here.”
“To China? Dear me,” said Sheepshanks. “What an extraordinary place to go to from Cambridge.”
“Didn’t anybody guess where I had vanished to?”
“Not a soul, I assure you. Your disappearance created a sensation. Quite a sensation. A painful one, because you were a man we could ill afford to lose.”
“It’s good of you to say so. But it’s odd that no one seemed to be interested enough in me to reason out China. You all knew I was keen on Chinese.” He cast a swift glance around the bookshelves that lined the room, and shot out an arm. “I shouldn’t be surprised if that’s my little handbook—Introduction to the Language, on a Scientific Basis.”
Sheepshanks’ myopic vision followed Baltazar’s pointing finger.
“Yes. It’s somewhere there. You haven’t changed much from the creature of flashes that you used to be.”
“It happens to be the only yellow-backed book on the shelf. To say nothing of the purple dragon, which is grossly incorrect and unmeaning. It jumps to the eyes. Just as my going to China ought to have jumped to the eyes of everybody.”
“I’m afraid it didn’t. Perhaps we were too much paralysed with dismay.”
“I often tried to guess what you all thought about it,” said Baltazar. “A human being can’t escape his little vanities. It was like being dead and wondering what the dickens people were saying about one.”
“We didn’t know what to say,” replied Sheepshanks. “We had no precedents on which to base any conclusions. We looked for motives for flight and we could find none. We sought for possible imperative objectives, and one so apparently uncompelling as China never occurred to us. Here to-day, gone to-morrow. You vanished, ‘like a snowflake on a river.’ To see you now, after all these years, looking scarcely a day older, is an experience which I must confess is bewildering.”
“I suppose you thought me mad or a fugitive from justice, or one driven by the Furies.”
“We didn’t know what to think, and that’s the truth of it,” replied Sheepshanks.
“Well, call it the last. I wasn’t very old and hardened. Perhaps I mistook Mrs. Grundy with an upraised umbrella for one of the ladies who played the devil with Orestes and Company. I had quite decent reasons then for clearing out. Whether I was wise or not is another matter. Anyhow I cleared, sank my identity and went out to China. After eighteen years I came back. The rest I’ve told you in a sort of pemmican form.”
“I don’t deny,” said Sheepshanks, “that I am still somewhat confused.”
“All right,” said Baltazar. “You sit there, and I’ll tell you what I can. Anyhow, I’ll try to explain why I’m here. I’ll begin from the day I sailed for China.”
The primness of Edgar Sheepshanks,D.SC., relaxed, to some extent, during Baltazar’s story. Like Dominie Sampson’s “Prodigious!” his “Wonderful! wonderful!” punctuated the intervals. To him who had stuck limpet-like to the same academic walls, Baltazar appeared a veritable modern Ulysses. He sighed, wishing that he too had performed the scholarly travels through that far land of Mystery, the Cathay of ancient times, which was now the little better known interior of modern China; he sighed, as he did when gallant youth returned from high adventure in that land of equal mystery, the Front. Baltazar was half through his tale when there entered a venerable man-servant, Sheepshanks’s gyp for innumerable years. At the sight of the guest he started back with the dropped jaw of one who sees a ghost. “Mr. Baltazar!”
“Lord, it’s Punter!”
It was odd how names came back from the moss-grown recesses of memory. He shook hands with the old man.
“Yes, it’s me. And you’re looking just as young as ever. I recognized you at once. And look here, Punter, if you want to do me a service, just spread the news about Cambridge. If I’ve got to go through an Ancient Mariner or Wandering Jew explanation every time I meet anyone, it’ll eventually get on my nerves.”
“I’m sure every one will rejoice to have you back, sir,” said the gyp.
“Punter’s bringing my lunch. I hope you’ll stay and share it with me,” said Sheepshanks politely.
“Delighted,” said Baltazar, and the old man having retired, he went on with his tale.
He continued it over lunch in the next room, a homelier chamber, where Sheepshanks kept his choice books and his two or three good Italian pictures and a few ivories and photographs of nephews and nieces. It was during the meal that he noticed for the first time a lack of effusiveness on the part of his host. Not that he had expected the prim Sheepshanks to throw his arms about him and dance with joy; but he had hoped for more genial signs of welcome. After all, he reflected, he had let the college down very badly; possibly he was still unforgiven. Well, if that was so, he would have to earn forgiveness.
In his tale he had reached the first visit to London.
“I was out of my element, as you perceive,” said he, “and then something happened which made me decide suddenly to go into seclusion for two or three years. Real seclusion. I don’t do things by halves. In some remote spot where not a whisper of the outer world could ever reach me.”
“But what kind of thing could have happened to cause you to take such an extraordinary step?” asked Sheepshanks.
Thought Baltazar: “If I tell him the real reason, he’ll turn into a pillar of frozen don.” Besides, he had not the faintest intention of opening his soul to Sheepshanks, even though the latter should have enacted the part of the father of the Prodigal Son. He waved the question aside.
“Nothing of any importance. Just one of the idiot trifles that always seem to arise and deflect my course through life. The main point is that I found the place I wanted, and went there with Quong Ho.”
Luncheon had been cleared away and he had finished a couple of pipes before he came to the end of his narrative.
“So now you see my position,” said he.
“I think I do,” replied Sheepshanks.
“My whole life-work has gone—except that part of it which exists in the cultivated brain of my remarkable young Chinaman. There seems to be no place for me in London, where everybody’s fitted into the war, where I’m simply dazed and unwanted. So I’ve come here—if only to find something left of my old life to attach myself to.”
“I’m afraid there’s not very much to be done in Cambridge,” said Sheepshanks. “It’s no longer a university, but a military camp.”
“But at any rate,” said Baltazar, “I can find here a few human beings I know who might put me in the way of actual things—help me on my course.”
“That’s quite possible,” said Sheepshanks.
“I also have to see what can be done for Quong Ho. I want him to come up next term. Has the college ever had an undergraduate who has come up with a knowledge of Elliptic Functions?”
“God bless my soul!” ejaculated Sheepshanks, in interested astonishment.
“He’s a wonder,” laughed Baltazar. “I ought to know, because I’ve taught him daily for ten years. Well, he’ll be on your list, if you’ll have him. He’s a dear creature. Manners like a Hidalgo. Mind cultivated in the best of Chinese and English literature. And speaks English like his favourite author, Dr. Johnson.”
Sheepshanks smiled, a very pleasant smile, in which every wrinkle of his dry brown face seemed to have a part.
“How you keep your enthusiasms, Baltazar!”
“Quong Ho is worth them. You’ll see. As soon as he’s fit for it, I’ll send him to you. You set him last June’s Tripos Papers—Part II, if you like. I’ll bet you anything he’ll floor them. Of course I’m enthusiastic,” he said, after re-lighting his pipe, which had gone out. “I’ve no kith or kin in the world. I’ve adopted Quong Ho as my intellectual son and heir.”
Sheepshanks rose, walked to the open window deliberately and looked out. Presently he turned.
“It seems strange,” said he, “that you should adopt a Chinaman, when your English son is giving great promise of following in your footsteps.”
Baltazar regarded him in a puzzled way. Then he laughed.
“My stepson. I’m afraid, my dear Sheepshanks, when I left the mother I left her son. One of the defects of my qualities is honesty. I may be brutal, but I can’t take a sentimental interest in the son of old Doon.”
“The man I’m talking about,” said Sheepshanks, in the precise clipped, nasal manner under which Baltazar remembered many a delinquent and uppish pupil to have wilted in the old days, “isn’t called Doon. His name is Baltazar. He came up with a Minor Scholarship over the way”—he waved a hand, indicating the grey wing of the neighbouring college visible through the window—“and he was the most promising freshman of his year.”
Baltazar rose too.
“I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about. I don’t suppose I’m the only Baltazar left in England. He can be no son of mine. It’s idiotic. You ought to know.”
“I do know,” said Sheepshanks.
Baltazar’s eyes flashed in amazement and he made a stride towards him. “What do you know? What are you suggesting?”
“A child was born here in Cambridge, three months after you left us.”
Something almost physical seemed to hit Baltazar between the eyes, partially stunning him. He felt his way to the nearest chair and sat down.
“My God!” said he. “Oh, my God!”
He remained for some time, his head on his hands, overwhelmed by the significance of the revelation. At last he sprang suddenly to his feet.
“No wonder you haven’t forgiven me,” he cried, with ch............