If it had been a magnificent folly, a royal debauch, a voluptuous orgy of roses and wine and laughter and song and the pulsating lustiness of life, the dulce periculum of the follower of the Lenæan one brow-bound with green vine-leaves, he might have held himself in some measure excused. He had made no vow, he had no reason, to spurn the joyousness of existence. He was a man of racing blood, with claim and right to the gladness of physical things. But this sordid, solitary bout with its end of vulgarity and degradation, filled him with a horror almost maddening in its fierceness. His soul shrivelled at the ghastly humiliation. That it should come upon him; him, John Baltazar, with half a century of clean life behind him; him, John Baltazar, the man who had compelled high honour for intellect and character from his childhood days, at a Public School, at the University, as an unknown and prejudice-surrounded foreigner in the strangest of alien lands; that it should come upon him seemed like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
And then it fell that he once more cut the Gordian knot. He would fly from a world in which he had proved himself not fit to live cleanly, with all the less reluctance because he had found it incomprehensible and unattractive. And sitting dishevelled on the bed, he informed Quong Ho of his decision. As soon as he had cleansed himself from the soil of the awful night, he left the Savoy and the dishonoured name of James Burden for ever, and took rooms at another hotel for the night as John Baltazar. The next day he threw himself vehemently into the quest of a hermitage. He remembered a desolate waste of moorland through which on a walking tour he had rambled in his undergraduate days.
“It may be, Quong Ho,” said he, “that it is built over with picture palaces and swarming with tango-dancers. Any conceivable happening to England during the last twenty years is possible. But we’ll go and see.”
“I am unacquainted, sir,” replied Quong Ho, “with the dancers you mention; but I have visited picture palaces during the fortnight we have spent in your wonderful country, and, rightly exercised, the cinematograph strikes me as being the most marvellous vehicle for the propaganda of civilization that the world has seen.”
“Quong Ho,” said Baltazar, “it is not in our contract to care one little tuppenny damn for the propaganda of civilization. You’re not going to waste your time at one of those futile and ill-conceived, although ingenious, entertainments for the next three years. If the particular region I have in view is not satisfactory, we shall find another.”
Presently he added, in a tone of compunction—he was dressing while Quong Ho packed:
“I’m sorry I’ve had to cut short the time I intended you to have in London. I badly wanted you to have some general idea of it.”
“Sir,” replied Quong Ho, “without wishing to boast, I have grasped London. I could find my way blindfolded from here to the Tower, the House of Parliaments, the North End Road, Fulham, and that imperishable objective record of your honourable nation’s history, the museum of Madame Tussaud.”
“All the points you have mentioned, Quong Ho,” said Baltazar, “are of undoubted value—except the North End Road, Fulham. What the devil could you find of interest in that drab region of nowhere?”
Quong Ho’s usually smiling and mobile face became an expressionless mask.