William John Locke

“ For man, to his infinite despair, had tried it; had built the rude farmstead, had, Heaven knows why—perhaps through pathetic pride of ownership—with infinite sweating, piled up the three-foot ring of stones, had sought to cultivate the illusory covering of earth, had dug till his sinews cracked and turned up the eternal granite instead of clods, and had sickened and starved and died; and had abandoned the stricken place to the unhelpful sun and the piercing winds and the snows—and to John Baltazar, who now, smoking his pipe, formed part of this tableland of desolation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The cares of her crowded, youth-consuming life fell from her, and she became young again, younger than she had been before her loveless marriage. As she responded laughing to his eager, boyish foolishness, she felt that she had never known till then what it was to be young. She felt an infinite craving for all she had missed. . . . And Godfrey, standing there in careless grace, punt-pole in hand, alert, confident, radiant in promise, was the incarnation of it all: of all the youth and laughter and love that she had passed by, scornfully unheeding. ”

“ She looked at the young man, so eager, so proven, so like his father in gesture and glance, yet in speech and outlook—she was yet to get to that—but she knew the revolutionary influences of the war, the real war, on those who have faced its terrors and become saturated with its abiding philosophies—so different from the fervid creature, John Baltazar, of the late nineties, who had never dreamed of the possibility of this world convulsion. ”

“ Why should not he, John Baltazar, rise to higher power and guide the civilized world to victory and to triumphant peace?
The man had dreamed many dreams. What great man does not? Never yet has the human being whose day’s vision is blackened by the curtain of the night reached the shadow of achievement. Then again: was it of England or of John Baltazar that he dreamed? Who can tell? Can any man of noble ambitions, of deep conviction of his own powers, strip himself naked before his God and tell? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Talk to an Englishman of the River, and he will not think of the Severn or the Wye, or the historic highway between London Bridge and the sea, but of those few miles of England’s fairy-stream, the beloved haunts of beauty and gentleness and love and laughter, where all the cares of the world are soothed into dreamful ease and the vague passions and aspirations of youth are transformed into magical definition. ”

“ Baltazar’s heart yearned over the boy. He said in a softened tone: “It is ruin to your career and a mess up of your whole life. And your future means so much to me that I’d sacrifice anything—honour, decency, even your affection which I thought I had gained—to see you off at any rate to France with a clean sheet.”
But Godfrey in cold wrath did not heed the pleading note. He had been betrayed and tricked. Only his soldier’s training kept him outwardly calm. To the casual glances of the preoccupied crowd passing by them nothing in the demeanour of either man gave occasion for special interest. ”

“ Baltazar was waiting for her outside the hotel. Thus one little fear was sent packing. As a nurse she would have gone to Hell Gates to enquire for a man. She had done it many a time in France. As Marcelle Baring she was restrained by futile hesitancies. As Marcelle Baring, a woman with her own life to lead, she was unfamiliar to herself. She had shrunk from entering the inn alone and asking for Mr. Baltazar. But there he was awaiting her on the pavement, and no sooner had the car stopped than he had opened the door and helped her to alight. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Though it was the broad day of a summer afternoon, his memory sped swiftly back over twenty years to the night when he saw it alive with light and flashing movement and the great city’s joy of life, for the last time before he sailed for China; when, in spite of decorous and scholarly living, his heart had sunk within him at the realization that he was giving up all that, and all that it symbolized—the familiar and pulsating life of England. And now he stood in the same glamour-haunted precincts, and again his heart sank like a stone. ”

“ Here and there, perhaps, a man had been attracted by her good looks and her graciousness, but before these had had time to consolidate a first effect, she was miles away, back again in uniform between the eternal rows of beds. She had worked hard and seriously, the perfect nurse, accepting, without question, the hospital ward as the sphere ordained for her by destiny. Yet to soften the rigid life, she had fostered in her heart the memory of the brief and throbbing love of long ago.
During her drive from Churton Towers in the motor-cab, foolish trepidations beset her. ”

“ This conviction deepened when she had an opportunity of seeing them again together, at a little dinner party of six to which Baltazar had invited Lady Edna and the Jackmans. Between them it was “Godfrey” and “Edna” frank and undisguised. Their friendship was obvious; obvious, too, her charming assumption of proprietorship. But she carried it off with the air of a beautiful woman accustomed to such domination over the men she admitted to her intimacy. Beyond this, Marcelle could espy nothing; not a soft word, not a covert glance that betrayed a deeper sentiment. ”

“ L’amitié, c’est le tombeau de l’amour. She sat on the edge of the bed and mourned hopelessly the death of his love.
And the brass Yale latchkey lay mockingly within her range of vision.
Baltazar walked home, her last words echoing in his ears. His absence in China would naturally make a difference to her. She had become part of his household. Godfrey, to whom she had given a mother’s heart, was indefinitely in France and alienated from her by his resentment of her breach of confidence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If you’ve got that strong, you can tell the six others to go back to hell. If I hadn’t got it, the others would have torn me to bits long ago. If I were a mongrel and thought myself a prize bull-pup—that would be vanity. But I know, hang it all, that I’m a prize bull-pup, and when I take leave to remind myself, and people like the F.O. of the fact, that’s Pride. And when I say I’ve sworn to fulfil the Destiny of the prize pup, John Baltazar, and be one of the intellectual forces that’ll carry the Empire along to Victory—that’s not vanity. ”

“ I can sweep away twenty years and begin where I left off.”
“You’re more fortunate than I am,” said Marcelle.
“Rubbish!” said Baltazar.
She glanced at him wistfully and then out over the trees.
“Nursing isn’t the road to perpetual youth,” she said. Then lest he should catch up her words, she continued swiftly: “But you must tell me where you have been, how you’ve come back to life. You disappeared utterly. You never wrote. If we all thought you dead, was it our fault? When Godfrey showed me your letter, I never dreamed who James Burden might be.”
“Godfrey?” Baltazar pounced on the name. ”

“ I’ve done my duty by Quong Ho. He’s on the road to fame at Cambridge. Godfrey’s settled in France till the end of the war. And you—well, my dear,” he smiled, “we won’t lose touch with each other for another twenty years.”
“No, of course not,” she said in a queer voice. “We’ll—we’ll write to each other.” She raised her eyes to his timidly. “Won’t you be rather lonely out there, without us?”
He turned swiftly aside so that she should not see his face. “Naturally I’ll miss you. Miss the three of you. I’m human. But, on the other hand, I’m used to being alone. I’m a solitary by temperament.” ”

“ Baltazar rose from his chair by the long deal table and relit his pipe over the chimney of a lamp.
“You’ve put me out. What the blazes were we talking about?”
“The present world condition,” replied Quong Ho.
“Then I assert,” said Baltazar, “that the present state of the world is rotten. It’s no place for intellectual reformers like you and me. What are the words of Confucius known to every schoolboy? ‘With sincerity and truth unite a desire for self-culture. Lay down your life rather than quit the path of virtue. Enter not a state which is tottering to its fall. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If there was one idiot fallacy that the modern world was exploding, it was the fallacy of the debt due by children for the privilege they owed their parents for bringing them into this damned fool of a world. The only decent attitude of parents towards their children was one of profound apology. It was up to the children to accept it according to the measure of its fulfilment. But, after all, an uncared-for human atom, with intelligence and emotions, could not go through life without stretching out tentacles for some sort of sympathy and understanding. ”

“ 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. ”