Baltazar brought down his hand with a great thump on the little table.
“I’m damned if I do!” And to the waiter who ran up in some alarm: “Yes, tea. China tea. Gallons of it.”
CHAPTER XV
BALTAZAR had asked his friend Burtingshaw, K.C., to suggest some sphere in which his gifts might be usefully employed by the nation. Burtingshaw, an unimaginative fellow, a professional exploiter of formulas, bade him become a special constable and join the National Volunteers. The man all agog to save his country, scoffed at the advice. If there was marching to be done and blows to be struck, he had far better enlist. Just like a Chancery lawyer to try to damp enthusiasm. He decided to bide his time, to adopt the unusual course of looking before he leaped. To judge by what he could gather from the press and from conversation, it had been the crying fault of the Government from the beginning of the war to use razors to cut butter and wooden blades to perform delicate operations. There must be waiting in the vast war machine one particular lever which he of all men was qualified to pull. To find it would take time. But what was it? Godfrey’s suggestions ran from vague to gloomy. Possibly he could find a billet in one of the new ministries springing up like mushrooms every day, or he might de Y.M.C.A. work, or drive a motor ambulance in France. All of which was as satisfactory to the perfervid patriot as the idea of joining the Special Constabulary or the National Volunteer Force. He rebelled at half-measures.
Meanwhile, his own house had first to be set in order. He began operations by removing his worldly goods (easily contained in one suit-case and a large brown-paper package) to a comfortable hotel at Godalming, so as to be near Godfrey and Marcelle. The quiet, too, of a private sitting-room in a country inn conduced to the prosecution of certain studies which Professor Weatherley, admirable guide in the world-welter, had recommended. He took up his quarters the most contented and sanguine of men. He had received a letter from Quong Ho, in faultless, Ciceronian English, conveying the news that he was well forward on the road to complete recovery, and in a few days would be in a fit condition to pursue whatever course of action his most venerated master might choose to prescribe. When he had disposed the books and pamphlets, contents of the brown-paper package, about his room, he sat down and wrote to Quong Ho. A room in the Godalming hotel was at Quong Ho’s disposal as soon as he was fit to travel. It would be an admirable opportunity for him to meet Godfrey. They were to be brothers, mutually helpful: Godfrey, a past-master in the science of modern life but a neophyte in mathematics, seeing that he was struggling with such childish puzzles as the elements of Rigid Dynamics; Quong Ho, on the other hand, a neophyte in the science of modern life, but a past-master in elementary mathematics. It was important, he wrote, that Quong Ho’s appearance should, as far as possible, be thoroughly European and his dress impeccable.
“Good Lord!” he cried aloud, throwing down his pen. “I clean forgot. The poor beggar hasn’t a rag to his back!”
He drafted a telegram to the tailoring firm in the cathedral city, instructing them to supply Mr. Ho with essential raiment, and then, continuing his epistle to his pupil, gave him safe counsel and his blessing, and enclosed a cheque to meet necessary expenses.
After which he lunched in the coffee-room with the appetite of the healthy man, lounged for a while with a pipe on the tranquil pavement outside the inn, and then went upstairs again, threw himself contentedly into an arm-chair with a German war publication lent him by Weatherley, and waited for Marcelle.
It was her afternoon of freedom. She had looked forward to the interview with mingled longing and apprehension. He had been the only man in her life, and it was all such a long time ago. The jealous grip of her nurse’s work had fastened upon neck and shoulders, and bent the concentration of her being within a succession of little horizons. Men she had met and known intimately, men in thousands; but they were all suffering men, men whose sole appeal to her womanhood was their helplessness, their dependence. If there crossed her path a man with strong protective arm and compelling eyes, he was whisked away sound and whole beyond her horizon’s misty rim. Now and then, but rarely, in haggard faces shone eyes of desire. Her sex revolted until experience taught her the nurse’s cynical indifference. Of course there are the romances of nursing. In her long career she had known of many; of many, too, in which the resultant marriages had been all that is adumbrated by the ends of the fairy tales. But no ghost of such a romance had ever come her way. And no romance had come her way in her restricted social life. Her holidays had been too rare and fleeting. 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.