Ho took away his empty plate and retired into the kitchen to fetch the next course. Baltazar leaned back in his chair and, his brow full of perplexity, yet breathed a sigh of relief.
“I’ve got it off my chest at last,” he said half aloud. “But I wonder whether I’ve been a damned fool.”
Quong Ho’s subsequent demeanour could not enlighten him. Never again between them, save once, and that under the stress of a peculiar situation, was made the most veiled allusion to the subject, and day after day Quong Ho imperturbably performed with the Burgundy decanter the ceremonial etiquette of the English dinner-table.
It was only by glimpses like this that the man had ever revealed himself to his fellow-creatures. Glimpses like this one, fine and deliberate, to Quong Ho, and that one of long ago, passionate and self-destroying, to Marcelle Baring. To neither did he accord more than a glimpse. To neither did he show himself on a razor-edged ledge with the abyss on one side and salvation on the other. Another touch of the girl’s lips would have sent them both into what the sensitive and honourable gentleman would have called the abyss. Perhaps, if she had been older, a woman, one tuned to the pulsating responsibilities of life, he might have faced things with her. Who knows? To his direct mind the casuistical point did not occur. Actualities alone concerned him. She was so delicate and fragrant a flower of girlhood. His for the plucking. … When he regained his college rooms, that far-off summer afternoon, he was as a man torn by devils. Love her? He would be torn in pieces rather than that her exquisite foot should be bruised against a stone. Love her? With her soft voice, her maddening Madonna face, her kind eyes, her tremulous mouth? Love her? The wonder of wonders possessed of the power to divine his inmost thoughts, to touch with magically healing fingers all the aching wounds in his soul, to envelop him body and mind and spirit in a network of a myriad fairy tendrils? Love her? God knows he did.
But she was a child—and a child can forget—at the worst retain a not ungracious memory. But he was a man, on the verge of hideous villainy. And he stood in his college room, surrounded by all that symbolized the intellectual life that up to then had been the meaning of his existence, and he looked around.
“The whole lot will have to go to blazes,” said he.
And at that moment he cut the Gordian knot.
His wife? She hated him: why, he could not tell; but she missed few opportunities of showing her rancour. He had striven desperately to win her esteem, at the cost of much swallowed pride. Some months had passed since the last pitiable reconciliation. … Why had he married her? It had not been for lack of warning. Perhaps the very traducing of her had spurred him on. She was so fair and fragile, so pathetic in her widowhood. A clamour of the senses, a prompting of chivalry, and the thing was done. And she, widow of a phlegmatic don of Trinity, living in Cambridge, was perhaps carried away by the glamour surrounding the coming man in that tiny, academic world.
“I wish you were dead,” were the last words he had heard her utter. He snapped his fingers. She could have her desire.
Baltazar packed his bag with necessaries, told his gyp that business called him to London for some days, and left Cambridge forever. A month afterwards he was on his way, under an assumed name, to China.
The act of a fool perhaps. But has not one who knew called him the Fool of Genius? Anyhow he had the courage and the wit to cut his life off clean. The life of John Baltazar of Cambridge and that of James Burden who, having landed at Shanghai, spent so many adventurous years in the heart of China, might have been lived by two individuals who had never heard of each other. That disappearance from England was the first start, the consequence of the first violent fit. The first that mattered.
But there had been others. To one, his mind went back even as he asked himself whether his confession to Quong Ho had been the proceeding of an idiot. It had to do with the selfsame subject of that confession. The period went back to his last undergraduate term, when he was as certain of being Senior Wrangler as a Cardinal of being the best theologian in a scratch company of parish priests. Carrying on to the beginning of term an end of vacation revel, Baltazar took to evil courses. The slander which, reported to young Godfrey Baltazar, Marcelle Baring had so vehemently denied, had its basis in truth. He had discovered alcohol, and for a time plunged, with his whole-souled fervour, into his discovery. Then, one Spooner, the next in the Tripos running, a man living entirely on his scholarships, a mild and pallid man of no physical value whom the lusty Baltazar, after the way of vivid and immature young men, despised, had the grand audacity to call on him and expostulate with him on his excesses. Baltazar listened breathless. The fellow ought to be going round with a show of freaks. He told him so. Spooner waved aside the proposition and went on with his main argument.
“You have every right to be Senior. There’s not one of us in it with you. But if you go on playing the fool like this, anything may happen.”
“That’s all to your personal advantage, my dear good missionary,” said Baltazar.
“You don’t seem to understand why I’ve come here,” replied Spooner. “I don’t want to be Senior just because a man who’s infinitely better than I is a drunken sot.”
And they talked and bandied words a little, and then Baltazar saw himself face to face with an exquisite soul. He gripped the lean shoulders of the undeveloped, spectacled young man with his big hands.
“I swear to God,” said he, “that I’ll not touch a drop of alcohol for the next five years.”
But he also swore to himself an oath of which Spooner was ignorant. He swore that Spooner should be Senior. And he kept both vows. In the last day’s Problem Paper he deliberately sacrificed himself. As a matter of fact he just overdid it, for, to the mystification of all concerned in the Tripos, he was placed third. But Spooner had the coveted distinction. The Tripos over, everything fell before Baltazar, and he was acknowledged the supreme mathematician of his year, and, in the course of time, the greatest of his generation.
The difficulty, owing to its episodical character, of presenting the early career of Baltazar, thus finds illustration. One might go back to schoolboy days and point to lapses from grace, followed by similar swift and ruthless decisions. To catalogue them all would require the patient tediousness of formal biography. Apart from such a process, his life up to his flight into the moorland wilderness can best be pictured by a series of flashes.
A sudden disgust with China and an overwhelming nostalgia for the sweeter political life of England drove him home after eighteen years. The greater part of the time he had spent in the impenetrable heart of the vast country, speaking many dialects as well as the classical Wen-Li of the learned, an encyclopædia of erudition, saturated with intimate knowledge of Chinese custom and observance, a Chinaman in all but physical appearance, dressing, living, acting and accepted universally as a Chinaman, prospering as a Chinaman too in financial undertakings. It was old China that he entered, a land stable in its peculiar civilization which, in spite of many traditional oppressions and time-sanctioned cruelties, had its fascination and grace—the gift to a Mandarin of a precious and much-coveted ancient manuscript had purchased the life of a boy, Li Quong Ho, condemned to elaborate death for a venial offence, the transaction being carried out in an atmosphere of high refinement, and scented tea served and drunk with exquisite punctilio. It was old China that he had learned to love, with its sense of beauty, its reverence for learning, its profound ethical philosophy. But it was a new China, convulsed with new ideas, bloodthirsty, treacherous, unstable to maddening point, that he had quitted in his sudden and determined way.
For eighteen years, in the interior of China, he had lived remote from European politics. He had sunk himself in the lore, and identified himself with the interests, of that ancient land. With no correspondence, beyond the reach of newspapers, he all but forgot the existence of Europe.
