He was the only one of the company who advocated violent measures. The others seemed to regard strikes as phenomena of nature impeding the war like artillery-arresting mud, or as inevitable accidents like explosions in powder factories. Baltazar went away full of undigested knowledge.
On his return from Godalming he dined with Weatherley, a bachelor, and a small gathering of fellow publicists. Here the conversation ran on more intellectual lines. The war was considered from the international standpoint, discussions turned on the subject-races of Austria, the inner history of the Roumanian campaign, the sinister situation in Greece, the failure of Allied diplomacy all through Eastern Europe. Baltazar listened eagerly to the good keen talk, and went back to his hotel braced and exhilarated. Even if they had all been talking through their hats, it would not matter. Premises granted, the logic of it all had been faultless, an intellectual joy. And they had not been talking through their hats. They were men who knew, men who had access to vital information apparently despised by the Foreign Office.
He had fallen into a universe which seemed to be more and more inextricably jumbled as his outlook widened. But how splendidly interesting! Take just the little fraction of it given up to the Czecho-Slovacs and the Jugo-Slavs . . . Serbs, Croats, Slovenes. . . . He had hitherto paid as little attention to them as to Lepidoptera and Coleoptera, and other families of bugs with Latin names, to whose history and habits, not being an entomologist, he was perfectly indifferent. He had never thought of them as possible factors in the future of Europe. Now that he was in touch with his kind again, London ceased to be a city of dreadful night. In his enthusiastic eyes it had almost become a ville lumière.
A week had wrought miraculous changes—that day the most miraculous of all. At the back of his delight, through the evening’s rare entertainment ran a thrill of amazed happiness. A week ago he had floundered here derelict, lost, unwanted, a sick Chinaman his only link with humanity. Now he was safe on sunny seas, bound once more to life by friends, by a new-found son, in itself an adamantine tie, and, wonder of wonders, by the woman for whose sake he had revolutionized his existence and whose fragrant girlish memory had sanctified his after years.
He might have married well in China. Polygamy being recognized, the fact of his having a wife alive in England would not have rendered such a marriage illegal according to Chinese law. He had many opportunities, for he held a position there unique for a European; and a delicately nurtured Chinese lady can be an exquisite thing in womanhood, more than alluring to a lonely, full-blooded man. But ever between him and a not dishonourable temptation had floated the flower-shape of the English girl with her pink and white face and her light brown hair and her hazel eyes, through which shone her English wit and her English understanding and her English love and her English soul. Not that he had eaten out his heart for twenty years for Marcelle. He had wiped her as a disturbing element clean out of his existence. His loyalty had been passive rather than active. He had made no attempt to throw open gates and go in search of her. But at hostile approach the gates had been uncompromisingly shut.
The wonder of wonders had happened. In one respect, the wonder of all possible wonders had happened.
There had been no disillusion.
In the gap of twenty years between girl and woman, what devastating life forces might have been at work, wiping bloom from cheek, dulling gleam from eyes, distorting lips, smiting haggard lines on face, hardening or unshapening sweet and beloved contours; hardening, too, the mind, drying up the heart, arresting the development of the soul? As he had never thought to see her in this world again, he had not speculated on such a natural life-change. It was only now, when he had met her in the gracious fullness of her woman’s beauty, that he shivered at the thought of that which might have been and exulted in the knowledge of that which was. He remembered a woman, a friend of his wife, though much older, a lovely dream of a woman of the fair, frail type, who had disappeared from Cambridge for two or three years and then returned—suddenly old, as though a withering hand had passed over her face. No such hand had touched Marcelle. Then he pulled himself up and thought. How old is she? Thirty-eight—thirty-nine. Twelve years younger than himself. He laughed out loud. A mere child! What could she yet have to do with withering hands? Fifty—thirty-eight! The heyday of life. What is fifty when a man feels as young as at twenty-five? Novelists and dramatists were responsible for the conventional idea of the decrepitude of man after forty. The brilliant and compelling works of fiction are generally the inspirations of young men who think the thirties are an age of incipient decay. “An old dangling bachelor who was single at fifty!” cries the abusive Lady Teazle. An old bachelor of fifty! Sheridan, of six-and-twenty, thought of Sir Peter as the lean and slippered pantaloon; and so has dramatic tradition always represented him.
“Damn it!” cried Baltazar, feeling his muscles as he strode about his bedroom, “I’m as hard as iron.”
Satisfied with his youth, he sat down and wrote impulsive pages to Marcelle, which he posted in the hotel post-box before going to bed.