it was not till long afterwards that baltazar learned the cause of his son’s discomfiture. marcelle learned it at once. the boy exploded with pent-up indignation. dorothy had turned him down, callously turned him down. could marcelle imagine such heartlessness? he had gone to her after his board. seeing that she had undertaken to keep him in the army, it was only civil to report progress. besides, the house had been open to him since childhood. well, there she was alone in the drawing-room. looked bewitching. jolly as possible. everything right as rain. then, he didn’t know how it happened—perhaps because she hadn’t discouraged him at the carlton—anyhow there it was; he lost his head; told her he loved her, worshipped her and all the rest of it, and asked her to marry him. she broke into peals of laughter and recommended him not to be an idiot. she had the infernal impudence to laugh at him! if she had been a man he would have wrung her neck.
“and that isn’t all,” he cried. “what do you think she had the colossal nerve to tell me? that she was engaged to my brother leopold. leopold! ‘why,’ i said, ‘only the other day you informed me you were fed up with leopold.’ ‘oh! that,’ she said airily, ‘was before the engagement.’ apparently the brute’s just home on leave and has stolen a march on me. easy enough with two feet,” he added bitterly.
marcelle tried to console. after all, he was very young, not yet one-and-twenty. it would be years before he could marry. he flared up at the suggestion. that was what dorothy, a month older than he, had the cool cheek to say. what did age matter? he was as old as hell. he had all his life behind him. in the trenches alone he had spent twenty years. as for marrying, he was perfectly able to support a wife, not being, through god’s grace, one of those unhappy devils of new army officers who were wondering what the deuce they would do to earn their living when the war was over. . . . she had treated him damnably. a decent girl would have been kind and sorry and let him down easily. but she!
“she treated me as though i were a lout of a schoolboy, and she a woman of thirty. only the woman of thirty would at least have had manners. well, she’s going to marry leopold. i wish her joy of him. she’ll have a hell of a time.”
decidedly it had not been a lucky day for the house of baltazar. marcelle was oppressed by a sense of guilt for her share in the family disaster, and felt tragically unable to administer comfort. yesterday she would have poured healing sympathy over the hurts of the evilly entreated youth, and her wrath would have flamed out upon the heartless minx who had spurned the love of a gallant gentleman. but to-day how could she? had not some horrible freak of chance put her in the same dock as dorothy, worthless criminals both?
“i suppose you were very angry with her,” she said timidly.
he flung out a hand. oh, that inherited gesture! angry? who wouldn’t have been angry? he would never see her, speak to her, think of her again. he had told her so. as for receiving favours from general mackworth, she was not to dare insult him by dreaming of it. marcelle pictured a very pretty rumpus. godfrey was not john baltazar’s son for nothing.
and she, in the modern idiom, had turned down john baltazar; with less ostensible reason, for, after all, she had not engaged herself to another man. was he, too, like his son, hurling anathema at the head of a faithless woman? outwardly he had been very courteous, astonishingly gentle; but he was older and had learned self-restraint. how was he taking it now? she was very glad when they reached churton towers and when she stripped from herself the unfamiliar trappings of marcelle baring and put on the comforting impersonal uniform of the nurse.
baltazar, however, carried out none of marcelle’s forebodings. he neither upbraided her nor smashed furniture, nor made one of his volcanic decisions. he merely lit a pipe and sat down and tried to think out his unqualified rejection. it was a second zeppelin bomb, annihilating the castle in the air which that morning had appeared utterly solid and assured, as effectively as the first had wiped out spendale farm and all that it signified. he couldn’t make head or tail of it. he sat a mystified man. for him the glamour of the old days had not faded. in her ripe woman’s beauty she was more desirable than ever. flashes had shown the continuance of her old wit and gaiety. thank god she wasn’t eighteen still. what would he do with a child of eighteen? the association was unthinkable. but the woman into which she had developed was the ideal mate and companion. as for her being dead, that was rubbish. never was woman more splendidly alive. . . . now let him try to get her point of view. he clenched his teeth on his pipe. at eighteen she loved him. she made some sort of hero of him. she kept up her idealization until she met him an elderly, unromantic savage of fifty. then her romance fell tumbling about her ears, and she said to herself, “oh, my god! i can’t marry this!”
it was the “that” which he had thought himself that the second bomb had sent into eternity. it took a lot of confused and blinking wonder for him to realize marcelle’s “this.” having realized, he accepted it grimly.
he had a little passage of arms with her some days afterwards. she had invited it, anxious to know how deeply she had wounded.
“i’m wretched because i feel i’ve again brought you unhappiness,” she confessed.
“that you should be leading the life you wish to lead is my happiness,” he replied, not insincerely.
“i feel so selfish,” she said.
“which means that if i pestered and blustered and raved and stormed and made your days a nightmare of remorse, you would end by marrying me out of desperation?”
she shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “i suppose i should.”
“then i’m damned if i do it. you’d be merely a scared sort of slave of duty, suffering all the time from acute inflammation of the conscience. i being a product of human civilization, and not a german or a gorilla, or even a hottentot, should be soon aware of the fact, and our lives would be the most exquisite misery the mind could conceive.”
“i can’t see why you don’t hate me,” she said.
“i think i’ve arrived at an understanding of the phenomenon,” he replied with a wry smile. “you might just as well try to recreate a vanished rainbow as a lost illusion.” he smiled. “go in peace,” said he.
to himself he said: “i wonder what will be the next knock-down blow.”
not being able to take charge of marcelle and godfrey, who both seemed bent on going their respective independent ways, and quong ho still lingering at water end, baltazar applied himself seriously to england. first he must learn, learn more fully the endless ramifications of national and international life that formed the nervous ganglion of that manifestation of activity known as the war. in pursuit of knowledge he not only read books, but eagerly availed himself of every opportunity of social intercourse. his circle of acquaintances grew rapidly. his three friends, loyal sponsors, had started him with the reputation of an authority on far eastern problems. he became a little lion and delighted in it like a child.
a great monthly review published an article on china written by a well-known diplomatist. it was so deplorably wrong in its failure to reach any possible chinese point of view, that baltazar shut himself up for a couple of days in his inn sitting-room and wrote a scathing refutation of the eminent sciolist’s propositions. this, the ink on the last sheets scarcely dry, he put into an envelope and sent off to the editor. a week later the article was returned with the stereotyped form of rejection. in a fury baltazar sought weatherley and consulted him as to the quickest means of wading in that editor’s blood. here was this monstrous ass, he shouted, who, on the strength of having passed a few months at the embassy in pekin, with his owl’s eyes full of the dust politely thrown in them by bland chinese officials, not knowing a word of any chinese language written or spoken, without the vaguest idea of the thoughts or aspirations of the educated man in the interior of the kingdom, was granted the authority of a great review to spread abroad in this country the miasma of his pestilential ignorance. that stupendous and pernicious asses of his kidney should be allowed to mould british public opinion was a scandal of scandals. and when he, who knew, wrote to expose the solemn red-tape and sealing-wax dummy’s imbecility, an equally colossal ass of an editor sent back his article as if it were an essay on longfellow written by a schoolgirl.
“when you’ve finished foaming at the mouth, my dear j. b.,” said weatherley, “let me look at the manuscript. ah!” he remarked, turning over the pages, “untyped, difficult to read, owing to saeva indignatio playing the devil with a neat though not very legible handwriting, and signed by a name calamitously unknown to the young and essentially oxford pennyfeather.”
“your serene equanimity does me a lot of good,” growled baltazar.
“you must advance with the times, my dear j. b.,” laughed weatherley. “why on earth didn’t you ring the man up, telling him who you were, and then have the thing typed?”
“telephones and typewriters!” cried baltazar. “this new world’s too complicated for me.”
“never mind,” said weatherley. “leave things in my hands. i’ll fix up pennyfeather. if he persists in his obscurantism, owing to a desire to save his face, i’ll send the article to jesson of the imperial review, who’ll jump at it.”
“i accept your help gratefully,” replied baltazar. “but all you’ve said confirms me in my opinion that your friend pennyfeather is a lazy, incompetent hound. he and his jejune magazine can starve to death.”
he laughed after a while at his own vehemence. they talked of the points at issue. presently weatherley said:
“after all, you’re two years behindhand in chinese affairs. chinese adherence to the allied cause is of vast importance. why don’t you go out again on behalf of the government and pick up the threads?”
baltazar burst out:
“i go back to china? that god-forgotten country of dead formulas, in which i’ve wasted the prime of my life? no, my dear friend, never again. i’m here at last, among my own people, in the most enthralling moments in the history of the civilized world. for years i looked upon myself as a damned chinaman, and now i’ve woke up to find myself english. and english i’m going to remain.”
“but,” objected weatherley, “by undertaking a government mission in china, you can remain as english as you please.”
baltazar refused to consider the suggestion. england, his rediscovered country, was his appointed sphere of action. no more china for him as long as he lived. he went away almost angry with weatherley for putting such an idea into his head. no doubt he might be useful out there: much more useful than a diplomatist like the arid ass who had written the article; but to bury himself there again and leave godfrey and marcelle and the throbbing wonders of his resurrection, was preposterous. as he descended weatherley’s staircase a shiver of dismay ran down his spine. a walk through the streets restored his equanimity. those crowds which once had seemed so alien, were now his brothers, all fired by the same noble aspirations. he would have liked to shake hands with the soldiers from far oversea, canadians, australians, new zealanders, south africans, and thank them for their inspiring presence. the day was fine, the exhilaration of the somme victories was in the air. the new mystery of the tanks exercised all london, which still showed the afterglow of the laughter caused by continued humoristic descriptions in the morning papers. a tank waddled up to a house filled with germans, leaned against it in a comfortable way, and there was no more house and no more huns. he heard scraps of conversation about them as he walked. yes, tennyson was right—a bit of a seer after all that incarnation of victorianism—when he remarked that fifty years in europe were preferable to a cycle in cathay. he went in gayer mood to lunch with jackman at a club in the west end, for membership of which his host had proposed him. the club, like many london clubs, being hard hit by the war, had taken the unprecedented step of holding an autumn election for all candidates duly proposed and seconded. baltazar found invited to meet him a little party of influential members. he went back to godalming forgetful of weatherley’s idiocy.
a few days afterwards he met weatherley by appointment at his chambers in the temple. a group of publicists outside professional journalism, of which baltazar guessed his friend to be one of the initiative forces, were about to bring out a new weekly review, devoted to the international phases of the war; to all racial questions from greenland to new guinea. its international outlook would be unlimited, but, of course, it would pursue a relentless anti-german policy. would baltazar care to join the band? if so, would he attend a meeting of the founders of the review that afternoon?
“my dear fellow,” cried baltazar, holding out both his hands, “it’s meat and drink to me.”
“you’ll take up the far eastern end of the thing,” said weatherley.
“i’ll write about china till i’m dead, if you like,” said baltazar, “so long as i don’t have to go back to the infernal country.”
again, after the meeting, baltazar returned to godalming in a glow. thanks to weatherley, he had at last got a footing in the great struggle.
in a telephone talk with marcelle he told her all about it. he heard a ripple of laughter.
“where does the fun come in?” he asked.
her voice said: “you’re so young and enthusiastic. you ought to be the son and godfrey the father.”
“by the way,” said he, “what’s the matter with godfrey? he’s about as cheerful as a police-court in a fog.”
marcelle, who could not betray godfrey’s confidence, attributed his depression to the tediousness of his recovery and the uncertainty of the future.
“of course, of course!” replied baltazar penitently. “i’m a selfish beast, never entering into other people’s feelings. i must brighten things up for him.”
the opportunity came very much sooner than baltazar had any reason to anticipate, in their meeting with lady edna donnithorpe in the lounge of the carlton.
young, beautiful, royally assured, she advanced laughing to baltazar.
“what about your promise, mr. baltazar? pie-crust?”
he had sat next her at dinner a week before and she had invited him to come to tea one afternoon; to have a quiet, interesting talk, she said, away from crowds of disturbing people. she was the wife of the parliamentary secretary of one of the new ministries, the daughter of the earl of dunstable, and in other ways a woman of considerable importance. her radiant photographs recurred week after week in the illustrated papers. gossip whispered that she had turned the prime minister round her little finger and that when he had recovered from dizziness, he found he had given her elderly and uninspiring husband a place in the government. certainly no one was more surprised than edgar donnithorpe himself. that he owed his advancement to his wife was common knowledge; but alone of mortals he was unaware of the fact. when asked by a friend why she had gone to so much pains, she replied: “to get edgar out of the way and give him something to play with.” she was twenty-five, pulling a hundred strings of fascinating intrigue, a flashing member of scores of war committees, and contrived for herself illimitable freedom.
baltazar made his apologies. he meant to keep his promise, but it required courage on the part of such a back number as himself.
“back number?” she cried. “why, on your own showing you’ve only been in existence a few weeks. you are the newest thing in numbers in london.”
“it is gracious of you to say so,” replied baltazar. then, as she gave no sign of withdrawal: “lady edna, may i introduce my son—lady edna donnithorpe.”
“i thought it must be. how do you do?” there were dovenotes in her voice which, to the young man’s fancy, invested the commonplace formula with caressive significance; her liquid dark blue eyes regarded him understandingly and pityingly; her hand lingered in a firm clasp for just an appreciable fraction of a second.
“don’t you agree with me about your father? you and i are old, wise, battered people compared with him?”
youth spoke to youth, making gentle mock of middle age—and youth instantly responded.
“my father,” replied godfrey, drinking in her laughing beauty and her sympathetic charm, “has brought back from china all sorts of quaint notions of filial piety—so, until i know whether my opinions of him are pious or not, i rather shy at expressing them.”
she beamed appreciation. “i have a father, too, and although he has never been to china, i sympathize with you. one of these days we’ll have a little heart to heart talk about fathers.”
“i should love to,” replied godfrey.
“would you really? are you sure faithlessness is not hereditary in your family?”
“lady edna,” said baltazar, holding out the signet ring on his little finger. “if you saw this motto of our ancient huguenot family in a looking-glass, you would read ‘jusqu’à la mort.’ the word fidèle, of course, being understood.”
“death is a long way off, let us hope,” she laughed. “but if the family faithfulness will last out—jusqu’à jeudi—no—i can’t manage thursday—i’ll give it one day more—say friday—may i expect you both to lunch with me? you have my address—160 belgrave square.”
receiving their acceptance of the invitation, she shook hands and went across the lounge to her waiting friends.
“a most interesting type,” said baltazar. “a woman of the moment.”
“she’s wonderful!” said godfrey. and as her head was turned away, he looked long and lingeringly at her. “wonderful!”
