“I remember now,” said Quong Ho.
“I’m glad you do,” replied Baltazar. “That is the lofty spirit in which we shall continue this exceedingly health-giving science and pastime.”
And they continued. The young Chinaman, lithe, hard, physically perfect, little more than half the age of his tutor, devoted himself, with his Chinese assiduity, to the mastery of the fascinating art, and succeeded eventually in giving Baltazar most interesting encounters; he realized that fierce blows planted on venerable features were taken, nay applauded, in the spirit of the Confucian gentleman; he also accepted in the same gentlemanly way the hammering that he invariably received. It was after some months of this training, when he was able to discount merely superior science, that he bowed down before Baltazar not only as before an intellect, but as before a marvellous physical man.
There came a truce, however—the following winter—when Baltazar, wise in his elderly generation, foresaw the inevitable supremacy of youth, and ordered new toys from London—foils, masks and fencing jackets. The gloves mouldered in a broken-down potting-shed, and Quong Ho again started, as a tyro, to learn a new athletic accomplishment. Thus in his disciple’s sound body Baltazar contrived to maintain a sound and humble mind. He knew that he was held in deep respect by Quong Ho. But it never occurred to his careless mind that Quong Ho regarded him as a kind of god. He accepted the homage as a matter of course.
In these idyllic conditions John Baltazar accounted himself serenely happy. His scholarly solitude was undisturbed by the windy ways of men or the windy ways of moorland nature. The former spent themselves before reaching him; at the latter he snapped his fingers. What to him was the seasons’ difference? So absorbed was he in his work, so circumscribed in his walled enclosure beyond which he seldom set foot, that he barely even noticed the hourly change on the sensitive face of the moor. And season followed season, and the piles of manuscript, exquisitely corrected for the printer, grew in height, and Quong Ho assimilated Higher Mathematics as though it were rice; and everything was for the best in the best of all possible little intellectual worlds.
CHAPTER VI
SUCH, as far as a few strokes can picture him, was John Baltazar, at the time when his unsuspected son lay footless in the convalescent home and discussed with Marcelle Baring the mystery of his existence. A man of many failings, many intolerances, of some ruthlessness. A man both sensitive and hard; both bold and shrinking; with the traditional habits of the ostrich and the heart of a lion. A man apparently given to extravagances of caprice; and yet remaining always constant to himself, preserving also throughout his strange career a perfect unity of character. Perhaps, regarding him from another point of view, his detractors may say that he loved to play to himself as audience and, further, put that audience in the gallery. Why not? It is in the essence of human consciousness that a man must, in some measure, be an actor to himself. The degree depends on the human equation. Dumas fils once said of his immortal semi-mulatto father: “He is quite capable of getting up behind his own carriage, in order to persuade people that he keeps a black footman.” A savage epigram. But it would have been a deeper truth if he had said that the wonder of a man who was his father, was capable of doing it, in order to persuade himself that he kept a black footman. The more we limit the audience to the man himself, the more we love him. The more human does the vivid creature appear to us. If Baltazar played to that audience of one, he had many illustrious colleagues. If again his method was melodramatic, it at least had breadth. It dealt with big issues in a broad and simple way. . . .
“That’s what I love about the three great systems of Chinese ethics,” he would declare. “There’s no damned subtlety about them. You accept the various propositions or you, don’t. There are no homoousian and homoiousian conflicts, and suchlike rubbish, that have torn Western thought to ribbons for over a thousand years. In China you go straight to the heart of truth. All the subtlety lies, Quong Ho, in the correct interpretation of your appalling but fascinating script.”
This was a rough profession of faith, almost an analysis of character. The intellect of the mathematician delighted in the process of arriving at exactness of statement, but at the same time that statement’s philosophic simplicity appealed to a nature fundamentally simple.
He abhorred complications. That was his weakness. He claimed, unphilosophically, the absolute. Hence the abandonment of his academical career, involving at the same time the merciless abandonment of his wife. Hence the clean cut of his career in China, where a little supple coquetting with political corruption would have brought him great wealth and power. Hence the impenetrable wall he had now contrived between himself and the rest of mankind. He had no power of compromise.