baltazar awoke a couple of mornings afterwards to find that certain vague happenings which he had regarded as dreams were true. he really lay in a comfortable bed, in a pleasant room; the soft-voiced woman in grey, whose ministrations he had been unable to divine, stood smiling at the foot of his bed, an unmistakable nurse. conscious of discomfort, he raised his hand and felt his head swathed in a close-fitting, scientific bandage. he remembered now that he had lain there for a considerable time. what he had taken for outrageous assaults on his brain for the purpose of extracting the secrets of his mathematical researches, had been the doctor dressing his wounds.
“how are you this morning?” asked the nurse.
“perfectly well, thank you,” said baltazar. “i should feel better if you would tell me where i am.”
“this is mr. pillivant’s house.”
“pillivant—pillivant? oh yes. i’ve got it. it seems as if i had been off my head for a bit.” the nurse nodded. “i’m all right now. let me put things together.” suddenly he sat up. “my god! how is quong ho?”
“he is getting on as well as can be expected,” replied the nurse.
“he’s alive? quite sure?”
“quite sure.”
baltazar fell back on the pillow. “the last thing i remember clearly was their taking him into the cottage hospital, after that infernal jolting across the moor. what happened then?”
“you collapsed, and they brought you here.”
“what day is it?”
“friday.”
“good lord,” said baltazar, “i’ve been here since midday wednesday.”
“would you like a little breakfast?”
“i should like a lot,” declared baltazar.
the nurse laughed. the patient was better. she turned to leave the room, but baltazar checked her.
“before you go just tell me if i’ve got the situation clear. the european war has been going on for two years. in the course of a new-fangled kind of warfare the germans drop bombs from zeppelins over england. a zeppelin dropped bombs on my house on tuesday night—to get rid of them—so mrs. pillivant said. you see, everything’s coming back to me. afterwards it came down in flames, and all the crew were burned. is that right?”
“perfectly,” said the nurse.
“now i know more or less where i am,” said baltazar.
the nurse fetched his breakfast, which he ate with appetite. he had barely finished when dr. rewsby entered.
“this is capital. capital,” said he. “sitting up and taking nourishment. how’s the pulse?”
“never mind about me,” said baltazar, as the doctor took hold of his wrist. “what about quong ho?”
the doctor gave a serious report. fractured skull, severe concussion. broken legs. semi-consciousness, however, had returned—the hopeful sign. but it would be a ticklish and tedious business.
“if you want another opinion, a man from harley street, special nurses, don’t hesitate a second,” said baltazar. “money’s no object.”
“i’ll bear in mind what you say,” replied the doctor; “but if his constitution is as sound as yours, he’ll do all right. by all the rules of the game you ought to be as helpless as he is.”
“what’s wrong with me?”
“you’ve had half your scalp tom away. how you manage to be sitting up now, eating eggs, after your lunatic performances on wednesday, is more than i can understand.”
baltazar smiled grimly. “i can’t afford the time to fool about in a state of unconsciousness, when i have two years’ arrears of european history to make up.”
“never mind european history,” said the doctor. “let us see how this head of yours is getting on.”
the dressing completed, he said to baltazar:
“now you’ll lie quiet and not worry about the war, quong ho, or anything.”
“and grow wings and order a halo and work out the quadrature of the circle and discover the formula for the deity in terms of the ultimate function of energy. . . . man alive!” he cried impetuously, raising himself on his elbow. “don’t you understand? i’ve been dead for years—my own silly, selfish doing—and now i’ve come to life and found the world in an incomprehensible mess. if i don’t go out and try to understand it, i shall go stark, staring mad!”
“i can only order you to stay in bed till i give you permission to get up,” said the doctor. “good-bye. i’ll come in this evening.”
as soon as he had gone baltazar threw off the bedclothes and sprang to his feet.
“doctors be hanged!” said he. “i’ve not given in to illness all my life long, and i’m not going to begin now. besides, i’m as fit as ever i was. i’m going to dress.”
“i’m afraid you can’t,” said the nurse.
“why?”
“you haven’t any clothes.”
he glanced for a second or two at the unfamiliar green and purple striped silk pyjamas in which he was clad, and remembered the undervest and flannel trousers, foul with blood and grime, in which he had arrived at water-end.
“the devil!” said he, and he stood gasping as a new conception of himself flashed across his mind. “except for these borrowed things, i am even more naked than when i came into the world.”
“you’d better go back to bed,” said the nurse.
“i’ve got to go back to the world,” retorted baltazar. “as quick as possible.”
“you can’t do it in pyjamas,” said the nurse.
“i must ask my host to lend me some clothes.”
“i’ll go down and see him about it,” said the nurse.
she went out, leaving baltazar sitting on the edge of the bed. presently entered pillivant, who burst into heartiness of greeting. delighted he was to see him looking so well. at one time he half expected there was going to be a funeral in the house. heard that he wanted some togs. only too happy to rig him out. would pick out all the necessary kit to-morrow.
“but i want clothes now,” said baltazar.
pillivant shook his head. “must obey doctor’s orders. by disobeying in the first place i nearly had a cold corpse on my hands, and if there’s one thing mrs. pillivant dislikes more than another, it’s a corpse. when her old aunt died here, she went half off her chump. no, no, old man,” he continued, in soothing tones which exasperated baltazar, “you be good and lie doggo to-day, as the doctor says, and to-morrow we’ll see about getting up.”
“you’ve got the whip-hand of me,” said baltazar, glowering.
“that’s about it,” grinned pillivant. “and you’re not used to not having your own way.”
“i suppose i’m not,” said baltazar, looking at his host more kindly. “i don’t know but what you’re right. a little discipline might be beneficial for me.” he slipped back into the bed and nodded to the nurse, who settled him comfortably. “a little contact with other people might restore my manners. as i’m beholden to you for everything, mr. pillivant, i may at least be civil. as a matter of fact, i’m infinitely grateful, and i place myself in your hands unreservedly.”
“oh, that’s all right, old man,” said pillivant.
“it isn’t all right,” cried baltazar, realizing, in his self-condemnatory way, the ungracious attitude he had adopted from the first towards his host. “i’ve been merely rude. i’m sorry. i’ve lived in china long enough to know that no personal catastrophe can excuse lack of courtesy. by obeying your medical man i see that i shall give least trouble to your household.”
“you needn’t talk like a book about it,” said pillivant.
“i’ve lived with books so long,” replied baltazar, “that perhaps i have lost the ways of contemporary englishmen.”
pillivant threw him a furtive and suspicious glance.
“most books are all damn rot,” he declared.
“you’re not the first philosopher that has enunciated that opinion,” said baltazar, with a laugh. “didn’t a character in one of the old dramatists—i think—say ‘to mind the inside of a book is to entertain oneself with the forced product of another man’s brain’? no. it’s the practical men who do things, isn’t it?”
“i’m a practical man myself,” said pillivant, “and seeing as how i started as an office-boy at eight shillings a week, i’ve done a blooming lot of things. look”—he swung a chair, and sat down near the bed, and bent confidentially towards baltazar—“in july fourteen i was only a little builder and contractor up at holloway. when kitchener in september called for his million men——”
“wait!” cried baltazar, putting his hand up to his forehead. “in september nineteen fourteen kitchener called for a million men?”
“yes, yes, that’s all ancient history. i was telling you—when the cry went out, i said to myself: a million men will want accommodation. temporary buildings. huts. no end of timber. i hadn’t a penny in the world. but i did a big bluff and sold the government timber which i hadn’t got for twice the price i knew i could buy it at. in six months i was a rich man, and i’ve been growing richer and richer ever since. i’ve got a flat in park lane and this house in the country, and i’m on munitions, and i have my cars and as much petrol to burn as i want, and i’m a useful man to the government, and doing my bit for the war. and none of your blooming books about it. just plain common sense. if i had been worrying my head about books, i should have lost my chance. just what you’ve done. you’ve been burying yourself in books and haven’t even heard of the war, let alone doing anything for your country. books make me tired. to hell with them!”
baltazar looked at the puffy, small-eyed man in his clear way. he disliked him exceedingly. even with the most limited knowledge of war conditions, it was evident he had been exploiting them to his own advantage. but when you haven’t a rag of your own to your back and are dressed in another man’s pyjamas, lying in his bed and eating his food, you must observe the decencies of life.
“i suppose lots of fortunes are being made out of this war.”
“i should think so. those honestly made, well, the chaps with brains deserve them. but, at the same time, there’s a lot of profiteering going on”—pillivant shook an unctuous head—“which is a perfect disgrace.”
“profiteering—that’s a new word.”
“you’ll find lots of new words and lots of all sorts of new things now you’ve waked up.”
“i’m sure i shall,” said baltazar. “and now, if you’ve half an hour to spare, i wonder if you would mind telling me something about the war.”
that day and the next, baltazar listened to pillivant, the nurse and the doctor’s story of the world conflict, and read everything bearing on the subject with which they could supply him. dr. rewsby, who did not share pillivant’s disdain for books, ransacked the little town for war literature. he bought him white books, pamphlets, back numbers of magazines and newspapers, maps. . . . what he heard, what he read, was the common knowledge of every intelligent child, but to this man of vast intellectual achievement it was staggeringly new. for those two days he lost sense of time, desire to move from the bewildering mass of lambent history that grew in piles by his bedside. the lies, the treacheries, the horrors that had accumulated on the consciousness of all other men one by one, burst upon him in one thundering concentration of hell. the martyrdom of belgium, the bombardment of rheims cathedral, the sinking of the lusitania, the use of poison gas, the bombing of open towns, the unmasking of the german beast in all its lust and shamelessness—stunned him, so that at times he would put his hands to his head and cry: “it’s impossible! i can’t believe it.” and whoever was with him would answer: “it is true. what you read is but the outside of the devilry the civilized world is out to fight.” and his scholar’s mind would revolt. what of intellectual germany? the mathematicians, the orientalists, whose names were to him like household words, to say nothing of those eminent in sciences outside the sphere of his own studies? they were worse, the doctor declared, than the brutish peasant or the brutal operative. a monstrous intellectualism developed to the disregard of ethical sanction. the doctor brought him one of the great cartoons of the war, which he had cut out from some paper and kept, by norman lindsay, the great australian black and white artist—the “jekyll and hyde” cartoon, representing a typical benevolent elderly german professor regarding himself in a mirror; and the reflection was a gorilla in prussian spiked helmet and uniform, dripping with blood. and then baltazar’s blood curdled in his veins as he realized the truth of the picture. all the mighty intellectualism of germany was but an instrument of its gorilla animalism. it was an overwhelming revelation: the almost mesmeric dominance of prussia over the other teutonic states of germany and austria, reducing them to prussia’s own atrophied civilization; that atrophied civilization itself, till now unanalysed, but now a byword of history, the development, on abnormal intellectual lines, of the ruthless barbarism of a non-european race. strange that he had not thought of it before. had anything good, any poem, picture, song, music, statue, dream building, sweet philosophy, ever come out of prussia? never. not one. her children were “fire and sword, red ruin and the breaking-up of laws.” and now the rest of the germanic empire had lost its soul. prussia extended from the baltic to the danube. the whole of central europe was one vast cesspool, in which all things good were cast to deliquesce in putrefaction, while over it floated supreme the livid miasma of prussianism.
in some sort of figurative conception as this did his brain realize the psychological meaning of the forces against which the civilized world was struggling. but there was the other side of the world’s embattled hosts, whose tremendous energies baffled his mental grasp. england’s navy—yes. he had been born and bred in the belief of its invincibility. but the british army? a glorious army, of course; a blaze of honour from cressy upwards; a sure shield and buckler in the far-flung posts of empire; but a thing necessarily apart from the vast military systems of the continent of europe. and now he learned, to his stupefaction, that the british empire, calling up all her sons from within those same far-flung posts, had made itself, within two years, one of the three greatest military powers in the world. the casualties alone exceeded the total strength of the original british army serving with the colours. the army now was an organization of millions. where had they come from? his three interpreters of the outer world gave him information according to their respective lights. all the early gathering of the hosts had been voluntary enlistments. the armies springing up at lord kitchener’s call had been labelled numerically by his magic name. only recently had we been driven to conscription. and kitchener himself—the only great soldier of whom he had ever heard? drowned in the hampshire last june. . . .
then again the revolution in national life—the paper currency, the darkened streets of towns, the licensing laws—further excited his throbbing curiosity. he remembered with a spasm almost of remorse the few signs and tokens of war which had reached him and passed unheeded; the national registration, which he had resented as a bureaucratic impertinence; the mad taxation of income which he had regarded as evidence of england’s decay. . . .
“has ever man been such a fool as i, since the world began?”
the hard-headed doctor to whom this rhetorical question was addressed, replied:
“i can’t recall an instance.”
when driven to contemplation of his own isolation, he reflected that all the time there had been a living link between himself and this upheaved world. every week, rain or fine, through snow or dust, quong ho had visited the little town.
“when did the news of the war become general in water-end?” he asked.
he had to put the question in two or three different forms before his puzzled informants could perceive its drift, for they could not conceive it being the question of an intelligent man. he could not yet realize the electric shock that convulsed the land from end to end on the declaration of war. he could not gauge the immediate disruption of social life throughout the country. the calling up of reservists, the mobilization of the territorial forces alone affected instantly every community, no matter how remote from centres of industry. the queer straits to which every community was reduced, owing to the closing of the banks during that fateful august week, had also brought the reality of the war home to every individual. then the issue of treasury notes. the recruiting. from the very first day of the war, water-end, they told him, was as much agog with it all as london itself. from the beginning the town had been plastered with patriotic posters. the mayor for the first months had exhibited the latest telegrams outside the town hall. there had been a camp of territorials some few miles away and the high street had reeked of war. government war notices met the least observant eye in post office, bank and railway station.
“if what you say is true,” said baltazar, “how could quong ho have come here every week and failed to understand what was going on? not only is he a master of english, but he’s a man of acute intellect.”
“that,” replied the doctor, “you must ask quong ho when his intellect has recovered from its present eclipse.”
“but the fellow must have known all along,” baltazar persisted. “come now,”—he sat up in bed impulsively—“he must, mustn’t he?”
“i should have thought that a negro from central africa, who only spoke central african, would have guessed,” replied the doctor.
“then why the devil didn’t he tell me?”
“i’m afraid i must refer you to my previous answer,” said the doctor.
“it strikes me that i’m a bigger fool than ever,” said baltazar.
a smile flitted over the grey-haired doctor’s shrewd thin face. he did not controvert the proposition.
“it’s also borne in upon me,” continued baltazar, “that i’ll have to scrap everything i’ve ever learned—and i’ve learned a hell of a lot—i’m an original mathematician, and i think i know more about chinese language and literature than any man living. oh! i’m not modest. i know exactly what my attainments are. as i say, i’ve learned a hell of a lot, and i’ll have to scrap it all and just sit down and begin to learn the elementary things of existence, from the very beginning, all over again, like a schoolboy.”
“hear, hear!” said pillivant, blatantly golf-accoutred, who had entered by the open door at the opening of baltazar’s avowal. “now you’re talking sense. i’m glad to see you realize how sinfully you’ve been wasting your time. chinese! what’s the good of chinese? they’ve got to learn our language, not we theirs. i know. i went out to hong kong as a young man for five months on a building job. every man-jack talks pidgin-english. that’s good enough to get along with. do you mean to say you’ve been spending your life learning chinese? of all the rotten things——”
“i’m aware, mr. pillivant,” said baltazar, with a grimace intended, for a smile, which on his haggard face and beneath his bandaged head had a somewhat sinister aspect, “i’m aware that in your eyes i must appear rather a contemptible personage.”
“oh, not at all, old man,” cried pillivant. “everyone to his hobby. after all it’s a free country. have a cigar.”
he produced the portable gold casket. the doctor caught a swift glance from his patient and checked the generous offer.
“not yet, pillivant. a cigarette or two is all i can allow him.”
pillivant selected and lit a cigar. there was a span of silence. he looked out of the window. presently he began to praise the local golf-course, some mile or so distant. a natural course, with natural bunkers. the greens artificial—every sod brought from miles. now the infernal government had taken away their men. not a soul in the place who understood anything about turf. consequently the greens were going to the devil. it was an infernal shame to let golf-greens go to the devil. goff was a national institution, necessary to maintain tired war-workers, like himself, in a state of national efficiency. but what could one expect from the rotten lot who constituted the so-called government? anyhow, you could still get some sort of a game. baltazar must come round with him as soon as he could get about.
“i’ve never played golf in my life,” said baltazar.
“never played——? why, you seem to be out of everything.”
presently he swaggered out at the end of his monstrous cigar. baltazar turned a weary head.
“doctor,” said he, “would they hang me very high if i slew my benefactor?”
as soon as sticking-plaster replaced the head bandage, the most impatient of men insisted on rising and going out into the world, clad in a borrowed suit of the detested pillivant. his first care was to visit the cottage hospital, where quong ho, semi-conscious, still hung between life and death. yielding to baltazar’s insistence, dr. rewsby had summoned in consultation the leading surgeon of the nearest town, the great cathedral city. from the point of view of the faculty nothing could be simpler than quong ho’s injuries. to bring a specialist from london would be a wicked waste of invaluable lime. all that science could do was being done. the rest must be left to nature. baltazar was disappointed. having an exile’s faith in the wonders of modern surgery, he had thought that a few hundreds of pounds would have brought down a magician of a fellow from harley street with gleaming steel instruments, who could have mended quong ho’s head in a few miraculous seconds. the ironical smile on the lips of rewsby, for whom he had conceived respect and liking, convinced him of extravagant imaginings. he professed satisfaction, although sorely troubled by his queerly working conscience. outside the ward, he grabbed dr. rewsby by the arm.
“look here, doctor,” said he. “i want you to understand my position. i must pay some penalty for my egotistical folly in bringing quong ho to this infernal place. oh, i know,” he added quickly, checking with a gesture the doctor’s obvious remonstrance; “i know it might have happened anywhere. but nowhere else than in that desert island of a farm would i have had to leave him alone for hours on the bare ground, without medical assistance. it’s my fault. i must pay for it.”
“you’ve paid for it, my good friend,” said dr. rewsby, “by your anxiety, by your—apparently—by your remorse. you’ve done everything that a human being could do in the circumstances.”
“but don’t you see, i brought the poor fellow to this through my selfish folly. you must let me pay for it in some way.”
said the doctor, a practical man, with the interests of his little struggling hospital at heart: “it’s open to you to give a donation to the cottage hospital.”
“all right,” said baltazar, flinging out an arm. “if he gets through there’s a thousand pounds for the hospital.”
“good. and if he doesn’t?”
baltazar drew a short breath, glanced down and askance beneath his shaggy brown eyebrows, and set a heavy, obstinate jaw. then suddenly he flashed upon the doctor:
“if he dies you won’t get a penny from me. but i’ll give every cent i have in the world to the general fund of the hospitals of the united kingdom.”
“do you really mean that, mr. baltazar?”
“mean it? of course i mean it. i’ve done all kinds of rotten things in my life, but i’ve never broken my word. by george! i haven’t. if quong ho dies, the world will be the poorer, not only by a loyal soul, but by one of the most powerful mathematical intellects it has ever seen. and it’s i”—he thumped his chest—“i, who have robbed the world of him. and it’s i who must pay the penalty.”
“pardon my impertinence,” said dr. rewsby, drawing on his motoring gloves, as a sign of ending the interview; “but have you generally conducted your life on these extravagant principles?”
“i don’t quite understand——” replied baltazar, stiffening.
“if mr. quong ho dies—and i’m glad to say the probability is against his doing so—but if he does, you vow, as an act of penance, that you’ll reduce yourself to a state of poverty and walk out into the world without one penny. is that right?”
“perfectly,” said baltazar.
“well, as a medical man, with a hobby, a special interest in—let us say—psychology, i’ve been indiscreet enough to wonder whether this is the first time you’ve made such a quixotic vow. in fact, now i come to think of it, you made a similar one within two minutes of my first meeting you.”
baltazar met his eyes. “in fact, you want to know whether i’m not a bit mad.”
“not at all,” laughed the doctor. “but i have a shrewd suspicion that the folly you bewail—the eccentric hermit life on the moor—was the result of some such rashly taken obligation.”
“suppose it was,” said baltazar; “what then?”
“i should say you were cultivating a very bad habit, and i should advise you to give it up.”
he smiled, waved a friendly hand, and ran down the steps to his car. baltazar watched him crank-up, slip to the wheel, and depart, without saying a word in self-defence. so far from offending him, the doctor had risen higher in his estimation. a man with brains, and the faculty of using them; a fellow of remarkable penetration; also of courage. he differentiated his outspokenness from pillivant’s blatancy. the former was one man of intellect speaking frankly to another; the latter. . . . he remembered the lecture, illustrated by quotations from the chinese classics, which he had read to quong ho when his disciple, on his first visit to water-end, had complained of the lack of manners of the local inhabitants. why should he worry about pillivant? as he had said to quong ho: “rotten wood cannot be carved, and walls made of dirt and mud cannot be plastered.” never mind pillivant. it was rewsby, and rewsby’s quick summing-up of his psychological tendencies that mattered. not a human being had ever before presented him to himself in any just and intelligible way. of course he had heard truths, pseudo-truths, dictated by violent prejudice, in his brief and disastrous married life. but they had all been superficial; never gone to bed-rock. since then he had been free as a god from criticism. and now came this shrewd, sagacious country doctor, who in the lightest, friendliest way in the world, put an unerring finger on the real unsound spot in his character.
“. . . a very bad habit, and i should advise you to give it up.”
behind those commonplace words he knew lay a wise man’s condemnation of his habitual dealing with life. he walked through the tiny town on his way to “the cedars,” unconscious of the curious interest of the inhabitants, to whom the sight of the mystery-enveloped and now bombed and head-bandaged tenant of spendale farm was a matter of eager, instantaneous mental photography, so that the picture could be produced as a subject for many weeks’ future gossip, and he pondered deeply over dr. rewsby’s criticism.
“have you generally conducted your life on these extravagant principles?”
he had. there was no denying it. a childish memory emerged from the mist of years. he must have been eight or nine. all about a dog. a puppy had destroyed a new paint-box, priceless possession, and in a fit of passion he had nearly beaten the puppy to death. and when his anger was spent and he grew terribly afraid, and sprawled down by the puppy, the puppy licked his hand. and he swore to god, as a child, that if the puppy lived and did not tell his father, he would never beat a dog again. the puppy lived, and, with splendid loyalty, never breathed a word to a human soul, and loved him with a love passing the love of women. and one day a neighbour’s bad-tempered dog got into the kitchen-garden and attacked him, and though he had a stick by chance in his hand, he remembered his vow, and stood with folded arms and set teeth and let the dog bite his legs, until he was rescued by the gardener and carried indoors.
he remembered this, and a train of similar fantastic incidents culminating in his vow of solitude, and reviewed them all, in the light of dr. rewsby’s criticism. what good, in the name of sanity, had his wild, quixotic resolves accomplished? how had they benefited spooner, for instance, to whom he had surrendered the senior wranglership? during his brief stay in london he had had the curiosity to look up spooner in reference books; found him an assistant secretary in a government office, sir william spooner, k.c.b.; an honourable position, but a position which he would have attained—originally through the civil service examination—whether he had been second, fourth, tenth wrangler in the tripos. his, baltazar’s, idiot sacrifice had advanced spooner’s career not one millimetre: just as his self-denying ordinance in the realm of dogs had not benefited one jot the canine race—for the mongrel retriever who had bitten him heroically arm-folded, had been shot the next day by the remorseful neighbour, who had been longing for an opportunity of getting conscientiously rid of an ill-conditioned cur.
and then there was his flight from cambridge and marcelle.
“damn that doctor!” said he, striding along the road.
it was all very well to damn the doctor; but he had entered into a fresh engagement, which in spite of its newly revealed folly, he would break for nothing in the world. yet what practical good would his little fortune accomplish scattered among the hundreds of hospitals of the united kingdom? a pittance to each. and he himself, with all his gifts, thrown penniless upon a strange world at war, of what use would he be? his first necessarily animal impulse would be to prey upon society for the means of subsistence. whereas, a free man, with his assured income, he could throw himself into the national struggle without thought of his own material needs.
quong ho’s life acquired a new preciousness. he must live, if only to save him from this new absurdity to which he was pledged.
