She shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “I suppose I should.”
“Then I’m damned if I do it. You’d be merely a scared sort of slave of duty, suffering all the time from acute inflammation of the conscience. I being a product of human civilization, and not a German or a gorilla, or even a Hottentot, should be soon aware of the fact, and our lives would be the most exquisite misery the mind could conceive.”
“I can’t see why you don’t hate me,” she said.
“I think I’ve arrived at an understanding of the phenomenon,” he replied with a wry smile. “You might just as well try to recreate a vanished rainbow as a lost illusion.” He smiled. “Go in peace,” said he.
To himself he said: “I wonder what will be the next knock-down blow.”
Not being able to take charge of Marcelle and Godfrey, who both seemed bent on going their respective independent ways, and Quong Ho still lingering at Water End, Baltazar applied himself seriously to England. First he must learn, learn more fully the endless ramifications of national and international life that formed the nervous ganglion of that manifestation of activity known as the war. In pursuit of knowledge he not only read books, but eagerly availed himself of every opportunity of social intercourse. His circle of acquaintances grew rapidly. His three friends, loyal sponsors, had started him with the reputation of an authority on Far Eastern problems. He became a little lion and delighted in it like a child.
A great monthly review published an article on China written by a well-known diplomatist. It was so deplorably wrong in its failure to reach any possible Chinese point of view, that Baltazar shut himself up for a couple of days in his inn sitting-room and wrote a scathing refutation of the eminent sciolist’s propositions. This, the ink on the last sheets scarcely dry, he put into an envelope and sent off to the editor. A week later the article was returned with the stereotyped form of rejection. In a fury Baltazar sought Weatherley and consulted him as to the quickest means of wading in that editor’s blood. Here was this monstrous ass, he shouted, who, on the strength of having passed a few months at the Embassy in Pekin, with his owl’s eyes full of the dust politely thrown in them by bland Chinese officials, not knowing a word of any Chinese language written or spoken, without the vaguest idea of the thoughts or aspirations of the educated man in the interior of the kingdom, was granted the authority of a great review to spread abroad in this country the miasma of his pestilential ignorance. That stupendous and pernicious asses of his kidney should be allowed to mould British public opinion was a scandal of scandals. And when he, who knew, wrote to expose the solemn red-tape and sealing-wax dummy’s imbecility, an equally colossal ass of an editor sent back his article as if it were an essay on Longfellow written by a schoolgirl.
“When you’ve finished foaming at the mouth, my dear J. B.,” said Weatherley, “let me look at the manuscript. Ah!” he remarked, turning over the pages, “untyped, difficult to read, owing to saeva indignatio playing the devil with a neat though not very legible handwriting, and signed by a name calamitously unknown to the young and essentially Oxford Pennyfeather.”
“Your serene equanimity does me a lot of good,” growled Baltazar.
“You must advance with the times, my dear J. B.,” laughed Weatherley. “Why on earth didn’t you ring the man up, telling him who you were, and then have the thing typed?”