CAMBRIDGE put Baltazar on the track of old acquaintances, so that on his return to London he found himself in contact with people of his own standing who could explain to him the contemporary attitude of mind. There was Burtingshaw, K.C., for instance, a member of the Inventions Committee, and Weatherley, a professor of Modern History, whom the war had developed into an indefatigable publicist, and Jackman, a curious blend of classical scholar and man of business, who had allowed his family mustard-making firm to look after itself while he spent laborious days at the Admiralty in uncomfortable naval uniform. All welcomed the elderly prodigal, though in return for fatted calves—these were happy days before rationing—they demanded an account of his adventures. A man can’t make a sensational disappearance from a small social unit and turn up twenty years afterwards, without encountering natural human curiosity. This, over and over again, he had to satisfy, until he began to regard his absurd history with loathing, especially that of the past two years. He went through it, however, grimly, as part of the penalty he must pay for folly. After his first meeting with them at offices and clubs, he received invitations to dinner at their respective homes. The night before he went to Godalming he dined with the Jackmans. The family consisted of Mrs. Jackman, a homely woman, who spent most of her time at a Y.M.C.A. canteen on the south side of the river, two young girls and a boy home on leave from France. A few guests had been invited to meet John Baltazar; a colonel of artillery on sick leave, a notoriously question-asking Conservative member of Parliament, a judge, the wives of the two last, and a woman just back from eighteen months’ Red Cross work on the Russian front. A typical war gathering.
As soon as chance enabled him to speak to his host after his entrance into this galaxy of civilization, he said:
“Man alive! you shouldn’t have asked all these people. I’ve not been in a European drawing-room for twenty years. My instinct is to wander about, growling, like a bear.”
Jackman, a florid, good-natured, clean-shaven man, laughed.
“It’s for your good. The sooner you get into the ways of the world the better.”
“But what the devil shall I talk about?”
“Let the other people talk. You listen. I thought that was what you wanted.”
Baltazar sat between Mrs. Jackman and the lady from Russia. At first he felt somewhat embarrassed, even dazed. He had not conversed with intelligent women since his flight from England. Even in his brave University days, his scholarly habits had precluded him from mingling much in the general society of Cambridge. Now the broad feminine outlook somewhat mystified him. The vital question which once was referred to in bated breath as the Social Evil, cropped up, he knew not how. His two neighbours talked across him with a calm frankness that rendered him speechless. He looked around the table, apprehensive lest the two young girls might be overhearing the conversation. Their mother did not seem to care in the least. She quoted statistics in a loud, clear voice. The Red Cross lady sketched conditions in Russia. The question was suddenly put to him: What about China? The fifty-year-old child of a forgotten day caught at the opening and talked hurriedly. He had lived in the heart of old China, mainly an agricultural population, a more or less moral, ancestor-fearing and tradition-bound welter of humanity. There was much to be said for old China, in spite of the absence of elementary ideas of sanitation and the ignorance of the new-fangled Western science of eugenics. Even now girl children’s feet were being bound. The ladies followed his desperate red herring and began a less alarming argument on infant welfare. When pressed for his opinion, he said:
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a baby at close quarters. I don’t remember ever having touched one. I have it on hearsay that the proper thing to do is to prod a baby’s cheek with the tip of your finger, which you wipe surreptitiously on your trousers. But I haven’t done it. I know nothing at all about ’em. In fact, your proposition that babies are an important part of the body politic has never occurred to me. In prolific China babies spring up like weeds, unregarded. Some of them die, some of them live. And the living are for the most part weeds too. One gets used there to an almost animal conception of the phenomena of life and death. I’m learning all sorts of things, getting all sorts of new points of view. Just see if I’m right. Modern Europe isn’t China. Even before the war, the birth-rate was a matter of anxiety. Now Europe, de-populated of her male youth, is in a desperate quandary. Every baby is a priceless asset to the race. Lord!” said he, pushing spoon and fork abruptly together on his plate, “I never thought of it. I must appear to you like a fellow on a great Cunarder, proclaiming his discovery of America. But the discovery is there all the same. The idea never entered my head till this minute. Everybody’s got to produce babies as fast as they can, and everybody’s sacred duty is to see that they live and thrive and become potential parents of more healthy babies. That’s the proposition, isn’t it?”
Comfortable Mrs. Jackman smilingly agreed. Without doubt that was the proposition. The flower of the world cut off by the war. . . . Oh! it staggered imagination to speculate on the number of bright young lives sacrificed! There was So-and-So, and Somebody Else’s son. Too tragic! The talk turned at once to the terrible intimacy of the war. Baltazar listened and learned many things.
When the men were left alone, Baltazar learned more things about the war; the blunders, the half-heartednesses, the mysterious influences that petrified action. The soldier spoke of the fierce fight of a devoted little set of enthusiasts for an adequate supply of machine guns; the judge of hidden German ramifications against which he, as a mere administrator of written law, was powerless; the Conservative member of Parliament—his revelations made every particular hair of Baltazar’s brown thatch stand on end. Jackman talked of labour troubles, mentioned a recent case in which thousands of men making essential munitions of war had downed tools because a drunken pacifist, a workman, had been dismissed from a factory. Baltazar, only a month awakened to the fact of war, held the same bewildered view of strikes as had nearly driven him forth at midnight from Pillivant’s house. He burst out:
“Why don’t they take the traitors and blow them from the cannon’s mouth?”
The Member of Parliament laughed aloud:
“There’s nothing like a fresh mind on things.”
“Well, why don’t they?”
“Don’t you think,” said the judge, “that such a course might tend to dishearten the working classes?”
“It wouldn’t dishearten the Army,” declared the literal-minded Colonel. “The men would be all for it. If any fellows tried to go on strike in the Army they’d be shot on sight.”
He was the only one of the company who advocated violent measures. The others seemed to regard strikes as phenomena of nature impeding the war like artillery-arresting mud, or as inevitable accidents like explosions in powder factories. Baltazar went away full of undigested knowledge.
On his return from Godalming he dined with Weatherley, a bachelor, and a small gathering of fellow publicists. Here the conversation ran on more intellectual lines. The war was considered from the international standpoint, discussions turned on the subject-races of Austria, the inner history of the Roumanian campaign, the sinister situation in Greece, the failure of Allied diplomacy all through Eastern Europe. Baltazar listened eagerly to the good keen talk, and went back to his hotel braced and exhilarated. Even if they had all been talking through their hats, it would not matter. Premises granted, the logic of it all had been faultless, an intellectual joy. And they had not been talking through their hats. They were men who knew, men who had access to vital information apparently despised by the Foreign Office.
He had fallen into a universe which seemed to be more and more inextricably jumbled as his outlook widened. But how splendidly interesting! Take just the little fraction of it given up to the Czecho-Slovacs and the Jugo-Slavs . . . Serbs, Croats, Slovenes. . . . He had hitherto paid as little attention to them as to Lepidoptera and Coleoptera, and other families of bugs with Latin names, to whose history and habits, not being an entomologist, he was perfectly indifferent. He had never thought of them as possible factors in the future of Europe. Now that he was in touch with his kind again, London ceased to be a city of dreadful night. In his enthusiastic eyes it had almost become a ville lumière.
A week had wrought miraculous changes—that day the most miraculous of all. At the back of his delight, through the evening’s rare entertainment ran a thrill of amazed happiness. A week ago he had floundered here derelict, lost, unwanted, a sick Chinaman his only link with humanity. Now he was safe on sunny seas, bound once more to life by friends, by a new-found son, in itself an adamantine tie, and, wonder of wonders, by the woman for whose sake he had revolutionized his existence and whose fragrant girlish memory had sanctified his after years.
He might have married well in China. Polygamy being recognized, the fact of his having a wife alive in England would not have rendered such a marriage illegal according to Chinese law. He had many opportunities, for he held a position there unique for a European; and a delicately nurtured Chinese lady can be an exquisite thing in womanhood, more than alluring to a lonely, full-blooded man. But ever between him and a not dishonourable temptation had floated the flower-shape of the English girl with her pink and white face and her light brown hair and her hazel eyes, through which shone her English wit and her English understanding and her English love and her English soul. Not that he had eaten out his heart for twenty years for Marcelle. He had wiped her as a disturbing element clean out of his existence. His loyalty had been passive rather than active. He had made no attempt to throw open gates and go in search of her. But at hostile approach the gates had been uncompromisingly shut.
The wonder of wonders had happened. In one respect, the wonder of all possible wonders had happened.
There had been no disillusion.
In the gap of twenty years between girl and woman, what devastating life forces might have been at work, wiping bloom from cheek, dulling gleam from eyes, distorting lips, smiting haggard lines on face, hardening or unshapening sweet and beloved contours; hardening, too, the mind, drying up the heart, arresting the development of the soul? As he had never thought to see her in this world again, he had not speculated on such a natural life-change. It was only now, when he had met her in the gracious fullness of her woman’s beauty, that he shivered at the thought of that which might have been and exulted in the knowledge of that which was. He remembered a woman, a friend of his wife, though much older, a lovely dream of a woman of the fair, frail type, who had disappeared from Cambridge for two or three years and then returned—suddenly old, as though a withering hand had passed over her face. No such hand had touched Marcelle. Then he pulled himself up and thought. How old is she? Thirty-eight—thirty-nine. Twelve years younger than himself. He laughed out loud. A mere child! What could she yet have to do with withering hands? Fifty—thirty-eight! The heyday of life. What is fifty when a man feels as young as at twenty-five? Novelists and dramatists were responsible for the conventional idea of the decrepitude of man after forty. The brilliant and compelling works of fiction are generally the inspirations of young men who think the thirties are an age of incipient decay. “An old dangling bachelor who was single at fifty!” cries the abusive Lady Teazle. An old bachelor of fifty! Sheridan, of six-and-twenty, thought of Sir Peter as the lean and slippered pantaloon; and so has dramatic tradition always represented him.
“Damn it!” cried Baltazar, feeling his muscles as he strode about his bedroom, “I’m as hard as iron.”
Satisfied with his youth, he sat down and wrote impulsive pages to Marcelle, which he posted in the hotel post-box before going to bed.
He ordered lunch the next day in the great room of the Savoy.
“I’m having my son,” he said to the ma?tre-d’hotel, with a thrill at the new and unfamiliar word. “He has been wounded. I want the very best you can do for us.” The ma?tre-d’hotel, pencil and pad in hand, made profuse suggestions. But Baltazar had forgotten the terms and indeed the items of European gastronomy. “I leave it in your hands. The best the Savoy can do. It’s the first meal I’ve had with my son—since—— And wine. Champagne. What do you recommend?”
The ma?tre-d’hotel pointed to a 1904 vintage on the list. There was nothing better, said he. Baltazar agreed, suddenly aware that he knew no more of vintage wines than of artillery drill. His ignorance irritated him.
“Do you mind if I look at that for a little?”
The ma?tre-d’hotel handed him the wine list, and for half an hour he sat by a table in the great empty restaurant studying the names of the various wines and their vintages. Then, having mastered the information, he began long before the appointed hour to pace up and down the vestibule with an eye on every taxi-cab that swung round the rubber-paved courtyard and deposited its fares at the door, as impatient as a............