once more baltazar stood within his granite enclosure and surveyed the scene of ruin and horror. he had hired a cart and driven over with three nondescript elderly labouring men, who were now wandering aimlessly about the wreckage. nothing seemed changed since he had last left it in the wake of the stretcher-borne body of quong ho, although the water-end fire brigade, learning that the place was still on fire, and inspired by zeal and curiosity, had meanwhile come down with helmets, hatchets and hoses, and had drenched the interior of the house with water pumped from the well. there had been no attempt at salvage. the administrators of the derelict property had long since given up paying insurance premiums on the building, and baltazar, so long alien to european life, and desirous of coming into as slight contact as possible with the outside world, had not troubled to insure the contents.
a foul, sickly smell tainted the still air. mingled with the sour odour of the charred and sodden mess inside the dwelling, rose the miasma of corruption. baltazar made a grimace of disgust. before any salvage could be done the latter causes of offence must be removed. he summoned the men and gave his directions. they found the old mare’s head and the dog and fragments of the goats, alive with the infinite horror of flies and other abominable life. there was a cesspool handy. throw them all in and clamp down the cast-iron lid. it did not matter. nevermore would spendale farm be a human habitation. the men conveyed with their shovels the nameless things to the unhallowed resting-place. baltazar would have liked to give the faithful brutus, who had obviously rushed out of the house at the heels of quong ho and himself, decent burial. but not only had brutus ceased to be brutus, but baltazar knew from experience the toil of digging in that granite-bound earth.
he left the men to their task, which they performed without compunction—had he not offered them the amazing sum of a pound each for their day’s work?—and plunged through the front door into the black chaos which was once his home. the sun streamed down upon unimaginable filth. he was wearing the clothes he had borrowed from pillivant and at first he stepped warily. but every step landed him deeper in the damp carbonized welter, and at last he slipped and came down sprawling in the midst of it, so that when he rose he found himself fouled and begrimed from head to foot. he picked his way out again and stood on the front steps looking hopelessly in at the piled mass of nothingness.
he had listened to the report of the fire brigade’s captain, and his doubtless correct theory that the desperate marauder had dropped his bombs almost simultaneously, one explosive and the other incendiary. the latter had caught the homestead fair and had caused the instant and terrific conflagration. yet he had hoped. . . . he tried to hope still. the men would soon return from the cesspool and begin to shovel away the debris from the writing-table by the wall.
to get his brain into complete working order had been a matter of time. the shock of the explosion, his wound, his enormous physical and mental effort on the memorable wednesday, his puzzled amazement, the cataclysmic revelation of the war, his anxiety for quong ho, had knocked him out for a couple of days. when he recovered and regained mental grip of things, the only things he could grip at first were the staggering history of the war and the progress of quong ho. the two absorbing interests battened down fears that vaguely began to rise from deep recesses of his mind. but strength regained, quong ho out of immediate peril of death and the war a thing envisaged, practically understood, accepted, the fears burst their hatches and crowded round him, haunting and tormenting. and now he stared through the doorway of his house, with sinking heart, scarcely daring to hope that those fears should prove unrealized.
he glanced round. the men were spending inordinate time in the disposal of the carrion. again he entered and stood in the midst of the rubbish. only one section of bookcase remained, crazily askew. he had noted it on the wednesday. he clambered gingerly towards it. the first slanting, half-charred, half-drenched book, whose title he made out was queechy. by the author of the wide, wide world. next to it was flowering shrubs of great britain, the date of which he knew to be eighteen-fifty-four. his heart sank. only the refuse of his famous deal with the second-hand bookseller remained. just that little bit of section. the rest of his library was there—down there in the molten quagmire.
at last the men came, shovels on shoulder. he pointed out the place where his long table used to stand and bade them dig. he had brought, too, a shovel for himself, and he dug with them, violently, pantingly, distractedly, heaving the shovelfuls over his shoulders, wallowing in the filth regardless of pillivant’s expensive clothes; soon an object of dripping sweat and squalor, distinguishable only from his co-workers by his begrimed and bandaged head. the men began to pant and relax. he overheard as in a dream one of them saying, in a grumbling tone, something about beer. the sun beat fiercely down on the roofless site. he said:
“dig like hell. dig all day. i’ll stand you a couple of gallons apiece when you get home. if you’re thirsty now, there’s heaps of water.”
the results of severe arithmetical calculation gleamed in each man’s eye. the command over sixteen free pints of ale transcended the dreams of desire. they fell to again, working with renewed vigour.
the incendiary bomb had apparently fallen square on the northern end of the long north to south building and had scattered the original wall in which the great chimney-piece had been built and flung the granite outwards, obliterating the less solidly constructed kitchen and quong ho’s quarters, and tearing down the side of the scullery. the lower courses of the rest of the main walls stood more or less secure. but the roof of dried tinder-thatch had fallen in ablaze, and every thing beneath it had been consumed by fire. nothing remained to distinguish baltazar’s bedroom at the southern end, once separated from the house-piece by a wooden partition reaching to the rafters, from the remainder of the awful parallelogram of disaster. the rigid mathematical lines of the low granite boundaries, with one end a heap of stony ruin, oppressed him as he dug with a sense of the ghastly futility of human self-imprisonment between walls. the position of the shapeless ragged gaps that had once been windows alone guided him in his search. the precious long deal table ran along the eastern wall. his writing-seat, surrounded by the most precious possessions of all, was situated in front of the north-east window—the long room had two windows, east and west, on each side. and it was just there where he used to sit, the happiest of men, in the midst of objective proof of dreams coming true, that chaos seemed to reign supreme.
“go on, go on. dig like hell. every scrap of unburnt paper is a treasure to me. look at every shovelful.”
after hours of toil, they found a little heap of clotted fragments, the useless cores of burnt clumps of writing. now and then a man would come with a few filaments, having shaken the charred edges free, and, looking wonderingly at the unintelligible outer leaf, would ask: “is this any good to you, sir?” and baltazar, his heart cold and heavy as a stone, would bid him cast away the mocking remnants of an all but unique copy of a chinese classic.
it was over. the three men, having loyally earned their twenty shillings and the promised two gallons of beer, stood spent and drenched, like baltazar himself, with grime and sweat.
“anything more, sir?”
“nothing,” said baltazar.
they shouldered their shovels and he his, and they marched away from the devastated place and drove back across the moor. baltazar sat next the man who drove, in the front of the empty and futile cart, and said never a word. for the first time in his eager existence, defeat overwhelmed him. the work of a laborious lifetime had been destroyed in a few hours. with infinite toil, perhaps, he might recapture the main lines of his thought-revolutionizing treatise on the theory of groups: his studies in the analytical geometry of four dimensional space. perhaps. he had relied for his data on the innumerable notes and solutions of intricate problems which had cost the labour of many years. and these had gone. the world had hitherto wondered at two such scholar tragedies—newton’s principia destroyed by the dog diamond, the first volume of carlyle’s french revolution burned by mill’s stupid housemaid. but in both cases only the finished product had perished. the data remained. the rewriting was but a painful business of recompilation. but with him, not only the more or less finished product, but the fundamental material was lost forever. he shrank with dismay, almost with terror, at the thought of going through that infinite maze of accurate calculation and reasoning once more. still, as far as the mathematics went, the palimpsest of the brain existed. reconstitution was humanly possible. but with the chinese editions—for most of it the material could only be found in remote libraries in china; for much of it, the material no longer survived in the explored world.
he had come hoping against hope, arguing that great masses of manuscript on thick paper were practically indestructible by fire. the outsides, the edges might be burnt, but the vast bulk of inside sheets could be preserved. but he had not counted on the disruption and devouring effect of an incendiary bomb falling at the most precious end of the long deal working-table. probably the whole room had been instantaneously carpeted thick with loose sheets, and the great stacks of manuscript had, as it were, been burnt in detail. then, for a while, on his hateful ride, he strove with conjecture. but what was the use of vain imaginings? that which was done was done. the harvest of his life had been annihilated. if he died to-morrow, the world would be no richer by his existence than by that of any dead goat whose body had just been cast into the cesspool. to recover the harvest would cost him many years of uninspired drudgery. it would be a horrible re-living, an impossible attempt to recapture the ardour of the pioneer, the thrills of discovery. for the first time he really felt the meaning of his age, the non-resilience of fifty. for the black present the very meaning of his life had been wiped out.
the men, wearied, befouled and thirsty, sat silent in the cart, each dreaming of the two gallons of beer that awaited him at the end of the journey. they knew they had been searching for papers; but to them valuable papers had only one signification; something perhaps to do with a bank; something which constituted a claim to money: they had discussed it during the half-hour midday interval for food. wills, mortgages, title-deeds, they had heard of. the daughter of one of them, a parlourmaid in the house of a leading solicitor in the neighbouring cathedral city, ranking next to legendary london in majesty in the eyes of the untravelled water-enders, had told him that she had heard her master say, at dinner, that the contents of the tin-boxes ranged around his office represented half a million of money. his announcement vastly impressed his colleagues, one of whom explained that all real wealth nowadays was a matter of bits of paper. he himself had fifteen pounds in the savings bank, but nothing to show for it but his post office book. then the nature of their employer’s frenzied quest became obvious to them all. they had found nothing. their employer sat like a ruined man. they pitied him and, in the delicacy of their english souls, refrained from intruding by speech upon his despair. in the meantime, there was no harm in surrendering their imaginations to the prospect of the incessant flow of delectable liquid down their parched throttles.
when they halted at the gate of the cedars, baltazar pulled out a sheaf of treasury notes and gave each man thirty shillings. the extra ten shillings represented to their simple minds, not the promised two gallons of beer, but beer in perpetuity. this generosity on the part of one evidently ruined bewildered them. baltazar strode down the drive leaving men impressed with the idea that he was a gentleman of the old school to whose service they were privileged to be devoted. they retired, singing his praises, being elderly men of a simple and tradition-bred generation.
his golf clubs on the lawn beside him, pillivant, attired in imaginative golfing raiment, was taking the air in front of the house. he lay in an elaborate cane chair and smoked a great cigar. at the sight of baltazar he started up.
“holy moses! you are in a devil of a mess.”
“i’m afraid i’ve ruined your suit,” said baltazar. “if you would only let me know what your tailor charged for it——”
“the sackville street robber bled me eight guineas,” said pillivant, rather greedily.
“here are eight pounds ten,” said baltazar, counting out his notes.
“two shillings change,” laughed pillivant, handling him a florin.
“it’s kind of you to relieve me from this particular embarrassment. the rest of my obligations i don’t quite see how to meet.”
“we won’t charge you for board and lodging, old man, if that’s what you mean. take it and welcome. with regard to rewsby and the nurse, you can do what you like. meanwhile, you’ll be glad to know that the ready-made kit you ordered from brady & co. have turned up this afternoon.”
“i’d better clean myself up and put some of it on,” said baltazar.
“you had indeed,” said pillivant. “you look as if you had fallen into a sewer.”
the previous day, obeying telephone instructions, a representative of a firm of ready-made clothiers in the cathedral city had called to take measurements and orders. this evening baltazar was able to array himself once more in clothes of his own. by getting rid of borrowed garments he felt relieved of an immense burden.
“well, how did you get on?” asked pillivant heartily as they sat down to dinner. “find anything?”
“nothing but an appetite,” replied baltazar with a smile.
he could not tell this man of alien ideals and limited intellectual horizon of his irreparable loss, or hint his intolerable despair. the coarse husband and the common, over-bejewelled wife laughed at his sally, hoped the menu would furnish sufficiency of food. he was but to say the word, and they would kill the goose they were fattening up for michaelmas. the jest lasted off and on through the meal. they pressed him to second and third helpings, joking, though genuinely hospitable. at first he strove to entertain them. spoke picturesquely of his queer life in remotest china, where he lived the chinese life and almost came to think chinese thoughts. mrs. pillivant yawned behind bediamonded fingers. pillivant said: “dam funny,” with complete lack of enthusiasm in the expletive, and as soon as he found a point of departure, set forth on the story of a discreditable grievance against the war office. he couldn’t personally examine every plank of timber supplied. it had all been passed by their own inspector. if they sent down a young idiot of a subaltern who didn’t know the difference between green pine and green cheese, it was their affair, not his. he had got his contract, and there it was. their talk about an enquiry was all nonsense. the war office ought to employ business men on business affairs. he had just gone in, with another firm, on a big contract for a aerodrome in the north of england. some political paul pry had discovered—so he said—that it could be built for half the money. rot. patriotism was one thing, but running your business at a loss was another. the patriotic contractor must earn his living, like anybody else. why should his wife and family starve? in righteous indignation he poured himself a bumper of 1904 bollinger, which he drained before finishing the whole grouse which as a fifth course had been set before him. the entire system was one vast entanglement of red tape, he continued. we were out to beat germany. how could we, when every effort was strangled by the red tape aforesaid? germany had to be beaten. how? by british pluck and british enterprise. pluck, by god! were we not showing it now on the somme? and enterprise? he poured out more bollinger. if the fool government would let business men do business things in a business way, we would get the germans beaten and fawning for peace in a fortnight. there was nothing wrong with england. he was english, through and through.
“although i won’t deny,” said he, with an incipient hiccough, “that my mother spoke yiddish. no, no my dear”—he turned with a protesting wave to his wife—“i want to make things perfectly clear and above board to our old friend baltazar. i’ve got a coat-of-arms—look up pillivant in any book on heraldry and you’ll see it—that goes back to edward the something—not the seventh. i’m english, i tell you. but i’m not responsible for my mother, who came from posen. now, what do you do to prevent typhoid? you inoculate. i’m inoculated. that’s my fortunate position. i’m inoculated against prussianism and all it stands for. could i be a pacifist or a conscientious objector? no. i’m immune from the disease of pro-germanism. as i’ve been telling you, i’m english through and through, and i’m spending my life and my fortune in seeing that old england comes out on top.”
to prove the expenditure of fortune he seized a fresh bottle of bollinger which the butler had just opened and filled baltazar’s glass and his own.
“if you don’t drink, you’re a pro-german. to hell with the kaiser.”
baltazar drank the toast politely and patriotically; the merest sip of champagne; for beyond the first brandy and soda which had been poured down his parched and exhausted throat, he had kept his vow of abstinence, in spite of his host’s continued pressure. he felt sure of himself now; wondered how he could ever have brought himself to the present pillivant condition. he liked pillivant less than ever; yet he began to be fascinated by the truth concerning pillivant which rose unashamed to the surface of the wine-cup.
when the cigars were put on the table, mrs. pillivant rose. baltazar opened the door for her to pass out. on the first occasion of his doing so, the first time he had come down to dinner, she had been puzzled, and asked him whether he was not going to smoke with her husband. she still did not seem to understand the conventional courtesy. when the door was closed behind her, pillivant drew a great breath of relief.
“pity you won’t drink,” said he, refilling his glass. “we might have made a night of it. and this is such good stuff, too. about the most expensive i could buy.”
after that, impelled by the craving for self-revelation, he took up his parable again, and entertained his guest with many details of opinions, habits and actions, that had not been fit for wifely ears. when the stream of confidence at last grew maudlin, baltazar, pleading an invalid’s fatigue after a heavy day, bade him good night.
“i’ve been so long out of touch with english life,” said he, “that it is most interesting to me to meet a typical englishman.”
pillivant clapped him heavily on the shoulder.
“you’re right, my boy,” he asserted thickly. “a downright, patriotic john bull englishman. the sort of stuff that’s winning the war for you, and don’t you make no mistake about it.”
baltazar went to bed pondering over his host. the annihilation of his own life’s work did not bear thinking about. that way lay madness. pillivant brought a new interest. for all his adventurous journeyings he had not met the pillivant type—or if he had fortuitously encountered it, he had passed it by in academic scorn. had his ironical remark any basis of truth? was pillivant after all typical of the forces behind the war in this unknown modern england? vulgarity, bluster, self-seeking, corruption, hypocrisy? the old aristocratic order changing into something loathsomely new? pillivant posed as the successful man, engaged in vast affairs, working night and day for his country—he was only snatching, he had explained, a three weeks’ rest at this little country shanty which he had not seen for nearly a year. the luxury of the “shanty” proved his success; proved the magnitude of his dealings with the government. so far there was no brag. but how came it that the government put itself into the hands of such a man, openly boastful of his exploitation of official ineptitude? he could not be unique. there must be hundreds, thousands like him. was he, in sober earnest, a typical modern englishman? if so, thought baltazar, god help england.
and yet england must have still the qualities that made cressy, poitiers, agincourt ring in english ears through the centuries: the qualities of the men who followed drake and marlborough and nelson and raglan. . . . that very morning he had read of british heroism on the somme battlefield, and had been thrilled at realizing himself merged into the unconquerable soul of his race.
he threw off his bedclothes—rose—flung the curtains wide apart, and thrust out all the room’s casement windows not already opened, and looked out into the starlit summer night.
no. it was impossible for england to be peopled with pillivants. they were the fishers in troubled waters, the blood-suckers, the parasites, the excrescences on an abnormal social condition. but why were they allowed to live? what was wrong? who were the rulers? their very names were but vaguely familiar to him. and he had read of strikes; of men earning—for the proletariat—fabulous wages, striking for more pay, selfishly, criminally (so it seemed to his unversed and aghast mind), refusing to provide the munitions of war for lack of which their own flesh and blood, earning a shilling a day, might be slaughtered in hecatombs. he threw himself into a chair.
“my god!” said he, “i must get out of this and see what it all means.”
after a few moments he suddenly realized that he had pulled on his socks, as though he were going, there and then, at midnight, to plunge into the midst of the bewildering world at war.
