BALTAZAR had asked his friend Burtingshaw, K.C., to suggest some sphere in which his gifts might be usefully employed by the nation. Burtingshaw, an unimaginative fellow, a professional exploiter of formulas, bade him become a special constable and join the National Volunteers. The man all agog to save his country, scoffed at the advice. If there was marching to be done and blows to be struck, he had far better enlist. Just like a Chancery lawyer to try to damp enthusiasm. He decided to bide his time, to adopt the unusual course of looking before he leaped. To judge by what he could gather from the press and from conversation, it had been the crying fault of the Government from the beginning of the war to use razors to cut butter and wooden blades to perform delicate operations. There must be waiting in the vast war machine one particular lever which he of all men was qualified to pull. To find it would take time. But what was it? Godfrey’s suggestions ran from vague to gloomy. Possibly he could find a billet in one of the new ministries springing up like mushrooms every day, or he might de Y.M.C.A. work, or drive a motor ambulance in France. All of which was as satisfactory to the perfervid patriot as the idea of joining the Special Constabulary or the National Volunteer Force. He rebelled at half-measures. Meanwhile, his own house had first to be set in order. He began operations by removing his worldly goods (easily contained in one suit-case and a large brown-paper package) to a comfortable hotel at Godalming, so as to be near Godfrey and Marcelle. The quiet, too, of a private sitting-room in a country inn conduced to the prosecution of certain studies which Professor Weatherley, admirable guide in the world-welter, had recommended. He took up his quarters the most contented and sanguine of men. He had received a letter from Quong Ho, in faultless, Ciceronian English, conveying the news that he was well forward on the road to complete recovery, and in a few days would be in a fit condition to pursue whatever course of action his most venerated master might choose to prescribe. When he had disposed the books and pamphlets, contents of the brown-paper package, about his room, he sat down and wrote to Quong Ho. A room in the Godalming hotel was at Quong Ho’s disposal as soon as he was fit to travel. It would be an admirable opportunity for him to meet Godfrey. They were to be brothers, mutually helpful: Godfrey, a past-master in the science of modern life but a neophyte in mathematics, seeing that he was struggling with such childish puzzles as the elements of Rigid Dynamics; Quong Ho, on the other hand, a neophyte in the science of modern life, but a past-master in elementary mathematics. It was important, he wrote, that Quong Ho’s appearance should, as far as possible, be thoroughly European and his dress impeccable.
“Good Lord!” he cried aloud, throwing down his pen. “I clean forgot. The poor beggar hasn’t a rag to his back!”
He drafted a telegram to the tailoring firm in the cathedral city, instructing them to supply Mr. Ho with essential raiment, and then, continuing his epistle to his pupil, gave him safe counsel and his blessing, and enclosed a cheque to meet necessary expenses.
After which he lunched in the coffee-room with the appetite of the healthy man, lounged for a while with a pipe on the tranquil pavement outside the inn, and then went upstairs again, threw himself contentedly into an arm-chair with a German war publication lent him by Weatherley, and waited for Marcelle.
It was her afternoon of freedom. She had looked forward to the interview with mingled longing and apprehension. He had been the only man in her life, and it was all such a long time ago. The jealous grip of her nurse’s work had fastened upon neck and shoulders, and bent the concentration of her being within a succession of little horizons. Men she had met and known intimately, men in thousands; but they were all suffering men, men whose sole appeal to her womanhood was their helplessness, their dependence. If there crossed her path a man with strong protective arm and compelling eyes, he was whisked away sound and whole beyond her horizon’s misty rim. Now and then, but rarely, in haggard faces shone eyes of desire. Her sex revolted until experience taught her the nurse’s cynical indifference. Of course there are the romances of nursing. In her long career she had known of many; of many, too, in which the resultant marriages had been all that is adumbrated by the ends of the fairy tales. But no ghost of such a romance had ever come her way. And no romance had come her way in her restricted social life. Her holidays had been too rare and fleeting. Here and there, perhaps, a man had been attracted by her good looks and her graciousness, but before these had had time to consolidate a first effect, she was miles away, back again in uniform between the eternal rows of beds. She had worked hard and seriously, the perfect nurse, accepting, without question, the hospital ward as the sphere ordained for her by destiny. Yet to soften the rigid life, she had fostered in her heart the memory of the brief and throbbing love of long ago.
During her drive from Churton Towers in the motor-cab, foolish trepidations beset her. Although her woman of the world’s sound sense made mock of timidities, yet old-maidish instincts questioned the propriety of her proceeding. She was going to meet her former lover in a private room of an hotel. What about professional decorum? Matron, who kept a hard and unsympathetic eye on flirtatious tendencies in the junior staff, would regard her visit, should she come to know of it, as a horrifying escapade. She had seen her as she ran down the steps, hatted, gloved, prinked to her best, with a betraying flush (lobster colour, she thought) on her cheek; and being within earshot of the Gorgon, she had thrown the mere word “Godalming” at the chauffeur as she entered the car. When she gathered up courage to look at herself in the strip of mirror that faced her, her prejudiced eyes saw herself pale and haggard, smitten with lines which she had not noticed when she put on her hat. And all the time she knew that these feminine preoccupations were but iridescences on the surface of deep, black waters filled with fear, and that she was letting her mind play on them so as not to think of the depths.
Baltazar was waiting for her outside the hotel. Thus one little fear was sent packing. As a nurse she would have gone to Hell Gates to enquire for a man. She had done it many a time in France. As Marcelle Baring she was restrained by futile hesitancies. As Marcelle Baring, a woman with her own life to lead, she was unfamiliar to herself. She had shrunk from entering the inn alone and asking for Mr. Baltazar. But there he was awaiting her on the pavement, and no sooner had the car stopped than he had opened the door and helped her to alight. And following him through the passage and up the narrow staircase, while he talked loud and cheery and confident, as though he defied gossiping tongues, and every minute turned to smile upon her, she remembered with a little pang of remorse for unjust fears, that as now so it had been in the beginning; that there never had been a tryst hard or venturesome for her to keep, never one on which he was not there before her, big, responsible, inspiring confidence. He was singularly unchanged.
Obeying a breezy wave of the hand, she sank into an arm-chair. He shut the door and crossed the room, his face lit with happiness.
“For the first time in our lives we’re together alone within four walls. You and I. Isn’t it strange? We have to talk. Not only now, but often. As often as we can. It would have been monstrous of me to expect you to run up and down to London. Besides, there would have been no privacy. The lounges of the great hotels—I loathe them! A man and woman sit whispering in a corner and at once surround themselves with an atmosphere of intrigue. Horrible! And I couldn’t come every day to Churton Towers—even ostensibly to see Godfrey. There would have been the devil to pay. All sorts of scandal. So I’ve made this my headquarters, in order to be near you.”
The weather had turned raw and cold, and as she had driven in an open car, clad in light coat and skirt, with nothing to warm her but a fur stole, she felt chilly, and welcomed the bright fire in the grate. She smiled, and said it was very cosy. He searched the room for a hassock, and finding one set it beneath her feet.
“We’ll have tea soon, which will make it cosier,” he said. He threw himself into an arm-chair on the other side of the fire. “It’s like a fairy-tale, isn’t it?”
She admitted the strangeness of the circumstances in which they had met, and with instinct of self-defence began to speak of Godfrey, of their suddenly formed friendship, of his manifold excellences. Baltazar let her run on for a while, content merely to let his eyes rest on her and to listen to her voice. At last he rose, irrelevantly, and, striding across to her, held out both his hands. She could not choose but surrender hers.
“Can’t you realize what you’ve been to me? ‘All a wonder and a wild desire!’?”
She fluttered a frightened glance at him and withdrew her hands. He stood looking down on her, one elbow resting on the mantelpiece.
“Do you remember? That Browning line—it was one of the last things I said to you. Then we lost our heads and broke off a delightful conversation. Why not continue it, starting from where we left off?”
“How can we go back twenty years?”
“By wiping out two hundred and forty unimportant months from our memories.”
She glanced up at him and shook her head. It was the grey and barren waste of those two hundred and forty months that formed the impassable barrier. In order to pick up the thread of that last talk it would be necessary to recapture the grace of those brief and exquisite moments.
“If we are to be friends,” she said, “we must start afresh. All that—that foolishness has been dead and buried long ago.”
“Buried, perhaps—or, rather, hidden away in a Sleeping Beauty sort of trance. But dead? Not a bit of it. It has been healthily alive all the time, and now—a magic touch—and it has reawakened strong and beautiful as ever.”
“It’s very easy to play with words and metaphors and analogies. You can make them appear to prove anything. As a matter of fact, we’ve both been subjected to the organic changes of twenty years. I can no more become the girl of eighteen than I can become the child of eight or the baby eight months old.”
Baltazar put his hands in his pockets, laughed, turned away, and sat down again in his chair.
“We seem to have got on to the basis of a nice and interminable discussion. Let us get off it for the present. We have plenty of time. If I’m anything at all, I’m a man of illimitable patience.”
She laughed out loud. She could not help it. A typhoon proclaiming its Zephyrdom! And proclaiming it not jestingly, but with the accent of deeply rooted conviction.
“You? You patient? Oh, my dear——”
“There,” he cried, jumping up from his chair. “You have called me ‘my dear’!”
Quickly she retorted: “I didn’t. At least, I didn’t mean to. You caught me up in your patient way. I was going to call you my dear something—my dear sir—my dear man——”
“My name happens to be John,” said Baltazar.
“?‘My dear John’? No. I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Why?”
“It sounds as if we had been married for twenty years.”
With feminine instinct she had put her foot on his man’s vanity and had used it, like a rock climber, as a projection to mount to safety. She saw him uncertain, unhumorous, and felt pleasurably conscious of advantage gained.
“You said it twenty years ago, at any rate.”
She sat up victoriously in her chair. “I didn’t. Never. I don’t think I had the courage to call you anything. Certainly not John. I never even thought of you as John. As a label you were John Baltazar. But not John—tout court—like that. Oh no!”
“I suppose you’re right,” said Baltazar. “It’s a damned name. It’s everything that’s dull and prosaic in the English genius concentrated into one uninspiring vocable. Unlike other idiot names, it has no pleasing diminutive. ‘Johnnie’ is insulting. ‘Jack’ is Adelphi melodrama. Thank God I’ve been spared both. Now I burst upon you, after twenty years, as ‘John,’ and you naturally receive the idea with derision.”
“Oh, it’s not as bad as that,” she cried. “Look at the great men of your name. John of Gaunt, John Knox, John Bunyan, John Locke, John Stuart Mill——”
“A merry crew of troubadours, aren’t they?” said Baltazar.
Whereat they both laughed, and the situation, as far as it affected her, was relieved. They talked freely of the twenty years of their separation. She of her work, her family; her mother, still alive, looked after by an elder sister, her brothers, both younger than herself, in the Navy. He, of China and his lamentable adventure on the moorland. He found that Godfrey, carrying out his request, had saved him from the abhorred recital of his story. Quong Ho aroused her curiosity and amused interest. She longed to see Quong Ho. Tea was set out in old-fashioned style and she presided at the table. She laughed at the wry face he made over the first sip of the good, strong Ceylon blend. Not the least dismal aspect of the tragedy of Spendale Farm, he explained, was the destruction of the chests of priceless tea which he had brought from China—stuff that yielded liqui............