quong ho sitting up, taking plentiful nourishment and definitely pronounced out of danger, baltazar presented his cheque for a thousand pounds to dr. rewsby, and thanked god for the preservation of quong ho’s life and his own fortune. he also listened with much interest to quong ho’s apologetics for leaving him in ignorance of the war. for such exact obedience and perfect fidelity reproaches would have been unjust, even had remorse for his own folly not have precluded them.
“and now, my dear fellow,” said he—he was sitting by the bed in the airy, sun-filled ward of the cottage hospital—“tell me what you would like to do.”
“i don’t care what he would like to do,” said dr. rewsby. “what he has got to do is to stay here quiet and recover from the shock and mend up, and not worry his mind with the war, or mathematics, or the condition of your underclothes.”
“quong ho shall never wash a shirt of mine again,” declared baltazar. “henceforth he is the master of his destiny. i’m talking not of now, but of the future. so far as i can manage it, he can do what he jolly well likes. that’s why i put the question to him. so, quong ho, never mind this excellent medicine man, who can’t see beyond his nose and doesn’t want to, because all he’s concerned with is getting you well—never mind him, but tell me what most in the world you would like to do.”
“sir,” said quong ho, “if you desire to dispense with my personal services, which i have always regarded it as a privilege to render to my benefactor, may i dare to formulate an ambition which has hitherto been but an idle dream?”
dr. rewsby knitted his grizzled brows and dragged baltazar away from the bed.
“does he always talk like that?” he whispered.
“did you think he would express himself with ‘muchee likee topside,’ and that sort of thing?”
“no; but he talks like an archbishop.”
“then perhaps,” grinned baltazar, “you’ll understand why i’ve insisted on his being treated as my closest friend.”
he returned to the bed. “i’m sorry, quong ho. what’s this famous ambition of yours?”
quong ho looked up at him unsmiling, with a dog-like yearning in his slanting eyes.
“if i could obtain the mathematical degree of the university of cambridge——”
“if you went in for the tripos now, you would wipe the floor with everybody.—cambridge! that’s a wonderful idea.” he stuck his hands behind him in the waistband of his trousers and strode about for a moment or two, his eyes illuminated. “a splendid notion! you can begin where i leave off. i’ll work up all the stuff that’s gone, and put it into your hands, and you’ll continue my life’s work. by god! you’ll consummate it. cambridge! the very thing! damn china! any fool can teach young china the binomial theorem and trigonometry. but there’s only one quong ho, the pupil and intellectual heir of john baltazar, in the world. yes. you’ll go to cambridge, and by the lord harry! won’t there be fluttering of dovecotes!”
he stopped suddenly in his enthusiastic outburst and his brow darkened. “wait a bit. perhaps you don’t realize that cambridge is a matter of at least three years?”
“if it were twenty years it would matter little,” said quong ho.
“there’s latin and greek—compulsory. i was forgetting.”
“greek,” replied quong ho, “i presume i could readily acquire. as for latin i think i am acquainted with the grammar and i have already read the interesting commentaries of julius c?sar on the gallic war.”
baltazar sank into a chair.
“latin! you’ve learned latin? when? how?”
quong ho explained apologetically that the simultaneous excitation of mind over the quotation at the head of the papers of the rambler, and the discovery in the lowest rubbish shelf in the library of an old latin grammar and a copy of the de bello gallico, had inaugurated his study of the latin tongue. he had procured, not without difficulty, owing to the limited intelligence of the young lady in charge, a latin dictionary, through the miniature bookshop in water-end.
“well, i’m damned!” said baltazar. “i’m just damned. and now, do you mind telling me why you never mentioned a word of it to me?”
he looked fierce and angry. quong ho replied in his own tongue. how could the inconsiderable worm that was his illustrious lordship’s servant, presume to importune him with his inferior and unauthorized pursuits?
“i could have taught you twice as much in half the time,” said baltazar.
quong ho professed regret. he had also bought, he said, the works of the poets virgil and horace, but had found peculiar difficulty in translating them.
the new conception of quong ho as an independent purchaser of commodities set baltazar’s mind on a different track. he had paid quong ho wages—or rather quong ho had paid himself. he started up from his chair.
“good lord! i’ve only just thought of it. all the money you must have had on the farm is lost. how much was it?”
“a trifling sum—a pound or two. it does not matter,” replied quong ho.
“but you’ve been drawing a salary all the time. what’s become of it? you couldn’t possibly have spent it all.”
“i have invested it in british war loan,” said quong ho.
“quong ho,” said baltazar, standing over him, with hands thrust deep into his trouser-pockets, “you are immense.”
he went away, his head full of quong ho.
“doctor,” said he, “i thought that if there ever was a westerner who had got to the soul of the chinaman, that man was i. yet the more i see of quong ho the less do i know what queer mental workings and strange secrecies those soft, faithful eyes conceal. he kept me in absolute ignorance of the war, he learned latin in the next room to me, without my having the faintest idea of it, and he has invested his money in war loan. of course, the philosophy of it all is perfectly lucid to him. in a way, i can get at the logic of it. but one wants to be wise not after but before the event. what surprise is he going to spring on me next?”
“perhaps you’ve been nurturing an oriental caruso in your bosom,” the doctor suggested.
“that—no!” laughed baltazar. “chinese vocal chords aren’t built that way. but, for all i know, he may have a complete critical knowledge of the strategy of the war. the confounded fellow learning latin! that’s what i can’t get over. and calmly investing in war loan!”
“you don’t think he may cut everything and slip away to china?”
“no,” said baltazar seriously. “that at least i’m sure of. the tremendous quality of the chinaman is his loyalty. the scrupulousness of his obedience is a thing beyond your conception. that’s why he allowed no whisper of the war to reach me. quong ho would never be guilty of ingratitude. that you, dr. rewsby, should pick my pocket is far more possible. in fact, quong ho would cheerfully die this moment in order to save my life. that i know. but within those limits of utter devotion, god alone knows the weird workings of his celestial mind.” he pulled out his pipe and filled it. “i thought i knew a lot. now i’m being knocked flat and beginning to realize that i know nothing at all, and that everything i’ve ever learned isn’t worth a tinker’s curse.”
“perhaps,” said the doctor, after a hesitating glance, “you have put your foot on the first rung of the ladder of wisdom.”
baltazar broke into a great laugh.
“i wish,” said he, “i had met more men like you. they would have done me good. you have the most comforting way in the world of telling me that i’m the great ass of the universe.”
his head mended, his fears concerning quong ho at rest, his decision taken to send quong ho to cambridge, nothing more kept him in the backwater of the little moorland town. he was for london, for the full stream of national thought and energy. what he would do there he did not know. he would learn. he would at least set his heart throbbing in unison with the heart of the empire. he packed his newly purchased suit-case with his scanty wardrobe, bade farewell to the detested though embarrassingly hospitable pillivants, and took train to london with the high hopes of a boy.
his first taste of the metropolis was exhilarating. here was a new world. every porter at the railway-station, every news-vendor, every street urchin, was the possessor of accumulated knowledge and experience of which he, john baltazar, was denied a share. he read strange wisdom in the eyes of working girls and slatternly women. he bought all the evening papers, reeking, as they seemed, with the pregnant moment’s actuality. he went to a bookseller’s and bought every book and pamphlet bearing on the war. he would have an orgy of information. he would pluck the heart of the world’s mystery of blood and sacrifice.
but where to begin? if he had but one solitary acquaintance in london, who could put him into the way of understanding, his course would be simple. but he found himself absolutely alone in an infinite mass of units, knit together by complexities of common ties.
what he saw and felt, in his first eager search, reduced to dwindling point the petty tragedy of his own life. for greater issues were at stake than the revolution of mathematical thought by a new theory of groups. in the wholesale destruction of what were thought to be the immortal works of man, the loss of a few chinese manuscripts counted as little as that of paper-bags for buns. for excursions into the geometry of four dimensional space, or scholarly translation of the mild and benign chinese classic, the book of rewards and punishments, the world would have no use for another half-century. in face of the realities with which london confronted him, he felt that he had devoted his life to the pursuit of shadows.
if only he could grasp these realities. if only he could merge himself into them, become part and parcel of them, bring his intellect and his bodily strength into the stupendous machine which he saw at work.
then he saw himself, by his own actions, condemned to sit and watch, an inactive spectator of the great drama. his loneliness fell upon him like a doom. he realized the uselessness of his age. he had as much place in modern london as any chance inhabitant of mars. he who had dared the untrodden recesses of the far eastern world, haughtily asserting his sympathetic right of citizenship, felt, after a day or two, a terror of modern london. it was too vast, too unknown, too strange: a city at war, unlike any city he had ever seen. youth, in civilian attire, had disappeared from its face. the unfamiliar dirty brown uniform filled the streets. he had read of khaki, was vaguely aware of it as the service uniform of the british army; he had come across the tropical drill material which had clothed the troops in hong kong, but his mind preoccupied with interests remote from military affairs had barely registered the impression. his traditional and therefore instinctive conception of the soldier in the london streets was a thing in swaggering scarlet. he missed the scarlet. it took him some time to accommodate his mental vision to the military reality of the dun-coloured hordes of men that thronged the strand, whitehall, and piccadilly. soldiers, too, slopped about in an extraordinary kit of blue jean and red ties. he did not grasp the fact that these were wounded men wearing hospital uniform, until he passed the westminster hospital and saw some of them taking the air on the terrace. after the first day’s wanderings he dined at his crowded hotel, a bewildered man. in london itself he had beheld an army. scarcely a table in the vast restaurant showed no man in uniform among its occupants. he contrasted the place with his last pre-war impression. then every man, young or old, had been impeccably attired in the white tie and white waistcoat of high convention. not a woman then who was not gowned as for some royal festival. now the outward and visible signs of gilded youth had vanished. even elderly bucks wore plain dinner-jackets and black ties—his own sloppily fitting, ready made dress suit seemed ultra ceremonious. here and there were exquisitely dressed women; but here and there, too, were dowdy ladies unblushing under obviously cheap hats. and men with bandaged heads came in, and legless men on crutches; and at the next table a one-armed man depended for the cutting up of his food on the ministrations of a girl. and away over the other side of the room he saw a man, his breast covered with ribbons, carried pick-a-back by a brother officer to his appointed place. no one seemed to take notice of the unusual. scarcely a casual glance lingered on the pair. at no table visible was there a break in the talk and the laughter. baltazar leaned back in his chair and gasped at the realization that the incident was a commonplace of modern life.
his heart throbbed with pity for these maimed men, some of them boys fresh from school; then with pride in their english courage and gaiety. he looked round the room curiously and, in his fancy, identified several pillivants. they generally sat two or three at a table and drank champagne and leaned over, heads together, as they talked. but the impression they made was effaced by that of youth: youth pervaded the place; youth whole and gloriously insolent; youth maimed and defiant; youth predominating, too, among the women, with its eyes alight and cheeks aglow; youth nerved to war, taking it as the daily round, the common task. it was some new planet in which baltazar found himself, peopled with beings of dimly conjectured interests and habits of thought.
after dinner, the loneliest soul in london, he took his hat and thought to go for a stroll. he emerged from the brightly lit vestibule into tartarean darkness and forbidding silence. instead of the once glad stream of life, a few vague forms flitted by on the pavement. now and then a moving light and a whir denoted the passing of a taxi-cab on the roadway. at first he stood outside the hotel door, baffled, until he remembered that he had heard of the darkened thoroughfares. the sky being overclouded, london was denied that night the kindly help of stars. baltazar saw it in all its blackness, and shrank involuntarily as from the supernatural. he laughed and started. soon, when his sight grew accustomed to the blackness, his senses were arrested and fascinated by the wonder of this veiled heart of the empire, by its infinite tones of gloom, by its looming masses of building melting upwards into black nothingness, by the vista of narrow streets, where at the end a dim lamp gave them a note of sinister mystery. but his walk did not last long. as he was crossing a street, an unseen and unheard taxi-cab just swerved in time to miss him by a hair’s-breadth. he felt the wind of it on the back of his neck and caught the curse of the driver. after that he lost his nerve. the re-crossing of trafalgar square became a perilous and breathless adventure. he was glad to find himself again in the light and the safe normality of the hotel.
no. london was not for him. he found himself even more a stranger than during his last disastrous sojourn. there seemed to be no chance for him to be anything else than a stray number in an hotel. he felt like a bit of waste cog-wheel seeking a place in a perfect machine.
“a few days more of this and i’ll go mad,” said he.
he did not go mad, but at last, with the instinct of the homing pigeon, fled to cambridge. there at least would he be able to pick up some threads of life left straggling twenty years ago. only when he had gone half-way did he remember that it was the long vacation, so long had he lived indifferent to times and seasons. doubtless, however, the long vacation term was in progress as usual and the official dons in residence. but who would there be, after twenty years, in spite of the proverbial longevity of dons? who now was master of his college? when he left, fordyce was getting a bit elderly. why, of course, by now, if alive, he would be over ninety. fordyce must have been gathered long ago to his fathers. who could have succeeded him? why hadn’t he looked it up in a book of reference? it seemed stupid to return to his own college without knowing the name of the master. who were the prominent people? westgrove, the senior tutor; barrett, senior dean; withington, junior dean; raymond, bursar; smith, hartwell, grayson, mostyn—men more or less of his own standing; sheepshanks, the famous mathematical coach upon whose shoulders had fallen the mantle of the immortal routh (maker of senior wranglers), and his own private tutor and friend. there would be somebody there out of all that lot, at any rate. he felt more hopeful.
a grizzled porter threw his suit-case into a hansom cab, a welcome survival of his youth, and in answer to his query whether the “blue boar” was still in existence, stared at him as though he had questioned the stability of the great court of trinity or matthews, the grocers.
“the ‘blue boar,’ sir? why, of course, sir.”
so to that ancient hostelry baltazar drove down trumpington street. it seemed all new and perky until he came to the great landmark, the fitzwilliam museum. then in a flash he recaptured his cambridge: peterhouse on his left; pembroke on his right; the three-sided, low, bricked court of st. catherine’s facing the dignified stone front and gateway of corpus; then the amazing grandeur of king’s college chapel—he craned his head out and drank in its calm loveliness; then the senate house; on the right the shops of the king’s parade, just as they used to be; then caius, and the cab drew up at the “blue boar.”
he secured a room and went out again to fill his lungs with the atmosphere of the beloved place, his soul with its beauty and its meaning. he wandered, at first like a man distraught, his eyes far above the pavement, wrapt in the familiar glories of stone and brick; the majesty of trinity, the twin-towered, blazoned gateway of st. john’s, the venerable round church of the holy sepulchre. . . . he walked on past sidney, christ’s, emmanuel; turned up downing street. at the sight of the vast piles of modern science buildings, he came down to earthly things. thenceforward he became aware of something new and strange and alien to the academic spirit that once spread its brooding wings over the town. the quiet streets were filled with soldiery. khaki, khaki, on roads and pavements; khaki, khaki, in college courts. there seemed to be regiments of rank and file. officers, gaitered and spurred, clanked along as in a garrison city. much youth, whose status he could not determine, wearing a white band round its cap, laughed and jested, undergraduate-like, on its way. he wandered through the river-nest of colleges, queen’s, clare, trinity hall, through courts and gateways, and it was the same story of military occupation. a bevy of nurses flitted about the courts of king’s. a group of men in hospital blue lounged over the balustrade of clare bridge.
it was a wondrous metamorphosis. almost the only young men in civilian attire were a few indian students. he came across them carrying notebooks under their arms, on their return from morning lecture. lectures, then, were still going on. college authorities were still in residence; he had, in fact, passed many unmistakable dons. but dons and indians seemed but the relics of a past civilization. in a spasm of amazement he realized that the university, as he had conceived it, a seat of learning, no longer existed. the three thousand young men, the average undergraduate population, who afforded the university its reason of being, were fighting for their country or being trained in the arts of war. yet the colleges through which he passed seemed to be alive. no sign anywhere of desolation or decay. pembroke and emmanuel had the appearance of barracks. he strode hither and thither, in his impetuous way, his mind exercised with the wonder of it all; saw midsummer common filled with troops at drill, found himself on the river. the tow-path was overgrown with grass. war everywhere. the very boat-houses were incorporated into the military system. on the familiar front of his own college boat-house was nailed an inscription. such and such a regiment. officers’ mess.
the university was at war. not for the first time in its glorious history. troops had garrisoned his college in the civil wars. it had melted down its plate for charles the first. if it had possessed a boat-house it would have given it loyally to the king. yet that was between two and three hundred years ago. baltazar had the modern and not the arch?ological instinct. conditions were different in those days. but now, in the second decade of the twentieth century, to be confronted with his remote, innocent college boat-house thus drawn, a vital though tiny unit, into the war, spurred his imagination to a newer comprehension of the world-convulsion to which he had been but recently awakened. if the war could reach and grip a pretty balconied shed on the river cam, in what other infinite ramifications through the whole of the national life did its tentacles not extend? as he retraced his steps to the town, the bombing of spendale farm and the commandeering of his college boat-house appealed to him as the two most significant facts of the war.
he stood in the gateway under the groined roof by the porter’s lodge of his own college. the porter on duty, a young, consumptive-looking man, appeared at the door. baltazar said:
“i am an old member of the college, and i’ve been abroad for many years. i wonder if there’s anybody in residence whom i used to know.”
“it depends upon who you want to see, sir.”
baltazar searched the young man’s face. “first”—he snapped finger and thumb—“yes, first, where’s westmacott?”
“my father, sir? he’s feeling his age, and having a bit of a holiday. did you know him, sir?”
“of course i did. he was senior porter when i was an undergraduate. he must be about a hundred and ten.”
“no, sir, only seventy-five,” smiled the young man.
“who’s master now?”
“dr. barrett, sir.”
“is he up?”
“not for the moment, sir.”
“what about mr. westgrove?”
“westgrove? oh yes, sir. he died a long time ago. when i was a boy, sir.”
“well, who is there in residence?”
the younger westmacott rattled off a string of unfamiliar names.
“i’m talking of twenty years ago,” said baltazar. “what about mr. raymond?”
“he’s professor of economics at—at one of those new sort of universities, sir.”
the cambridge-trained servitor’s tone expressed both regret at mr. raymond’s decline and scorn of the new sort of universities.
“mr. sheepshanks——?”
“dr. sheepshanks now, sir. honoris causa. just before the war.”
“well, dr. sheepshanks then,” said baltazar, rather impatiently.
“oh, he’s always here, sir. he’s senior tutor.”
“is he in?”
“i haven’t seen him go out to-day. i’m pretty sure he’s in, sir. letter e, new court.”
“thanks,” said baltazar, and went in search of sheepshanks, through the familiar courts.
when he stood at the doorway of letter e and read the name, white-lettered on black, “dr. sheepshanks,” he remembered that here sheepshanks had lived thirty years ago. probably the same rooms. on the second floor. he mounted the winding wooden stairs. yes: above the unsported oak (the infallible porter was right) the name of dr. sheepshanks was inscribed. he paused for an instant before knocking at the inner door, because all his youth came surging back on him. he saw himself a freshman, tapping with nervous knuckles at the almost sacred portal of the famous coach, the fount of all mathematical science, the legendary being who had the power to make senior wranglers at will. he saw himself the third year man, rapping confidently, secure in the knowledge that sheepshanks had staked his reputation on his triumph. he saw himself smiting the door defiantly, after the lists had been published . . . “spooner, jenkins, baltazar . . .” spooner had read with roberts of trinity; but jenkins had been a sheepshanks man. . . . he saw himself, many and many a time afterwards, when he had stepped into his universally acknowledged own, thumping it with friendly familiarity. that heavy, black oak door, invitingly open, held the secrets of his vivid youth.
at last he knocked, but the knock—so it seemed—was devoid of character. a voice—the same sharp, nasal voice—it sent him back again to freshman’s days—cried:
“come in.”
he opened the door, stood on the threshold. the back of sheepshanks, working at his desk by the great window looking over the master’s garden, met his eyes, across the large library table that occupied the centre of the room. it was the same old table—the table at which he had sat with the superior first batch of pupils, during his undergraduate days. how often then and in after days he had entered on that cracked “come in,” and seen that lean back and bowed head, and waited the few seconds, as he was doing now, for the owner to finish his sentence and swing round in his chair—the same old swivel-chair. after the same second or two, sheepshanks turned round and, as in one movement, rose to his feet. he was a small, brown, wrinkled, clean-shaven man in the early sixties, with eyes masked by thick myopic lenses, spectacles set in gold rims. his hair short, but curly, gleamed a dazzling white. it was a shock of memory to baltazar to realize that when he had last seen it, it was raven black.
“yes?” said sheepshanks, enquiringly.
baltazar strode past the library table with outstretched hand.
“don’t pretend you’ve never seen me before, sheepshanks.”
sheepshanks made a step forward, peered through his glasses, then recoiled and gasped:
“baltazar!”
“you’ve hit it, my dear old friend. i’m not a ghost. i’m live flesh and blood. i’m john baltazar right enough.”
“god bless my soul!” said sheepshanks. “we thought you must be dead. do sit down.”
baltazar laughed as he turned to deposit hat and stick on a side-table; then he came and clapped both his hands on the elderly don’s lean shoulders.
“you apostle of primness! aren’t you glad to see me?”
“of course i’m glad, my dear fellow. exceedingly glad. but your sudden resurrection rather takes one’s breath away.” he smiled. “let us both sit down, and you can tell me all about it.”
