“I shall follow your gracious counsel,” replied Quong Ho. And the intimate conversation ended.
But it hung around the thoughts of Baltazar for the rest of the night. Quong Ho was young. Quong Ho had looked upon a daughter of men and found her fair. In his Chinese self-repressing way he had had his romance. Now it was over. He pitied Quong Ho. Yet, after a year or so of probation, the young man, lusty in his youth and confident in his future, would return to his native land heart-whole, with all the romance of life still before him—whilst he, Baltazar, would re-enter a world from which all such things were blotted out for ever. For what of romance could lie before a man of fifty—one who had lost all touch with women and women’s ways? For the first time a fear of loneliness sent a shiver through him. It was not natural for a man to have neither wife nor child. It was but half an existence; a deliberate spurning of duties and glories and fulfilled achievement. And his own one romance? Had he been justified in destroying its gossamer web? It was all very long ago; but the beauty of it lingered exquisite in his heart. Had he been a mere fool? Were the results to him and to her worth the sacrifice? And, after all, was he sure that the results to her had been beneficial rather than disastrous? He sighed, consoled himself with the reflections that she must now have around her a family of sons and daughters, and that if ever she gave him a thought, it was to bless Heaven for her narrow escape; and, so fortified, he went on with his work.
When he awoke the next morning, the chastened retrospective mood had passed. After his tea and cold tub, he sat down to the table by the eastern window through which the morning sun was streaming, setting the gorse ablaze and the heather blood-red, and attacked the final chapter of his epoch-making Treatise on the Theory of Groups. The thrill of a great thing accomplished held him as he wrote. Such moments were worth living. He breakfasted with the appetite of a man who had earned a right to the material blessings of life. He went out, groomed the old grey mare and cleaned out the stable and dug up a patch of ground, rejoicing, like a young man, in his strength and in the fresh beauty of the day. On his return to his study he reviewed affectionately the monuments of two years’ labour. The Treatise of the Theory of Groups, all but complete, lay in one neat pile of manuscript. Another represented further serious adventures into the Analytical Geometry of a Four-Dimensional Space than mortal man had ever undertaken. Who could tell whither those adventures could lead? Pure mathematics had demonstrated the existence of the planet Neptune in space of three dimensions. Pure mathematics applied to four dimensions might prove and explain many transcendental phenomena. The next world might be four-dimensional and the spirits of the dead who inhabit it could easily enter confined three-dimensional space. That was Cayley’s ingenious theory of Ghosts. You could carry it further to space of five, six, n dimensions; when you could treat the geometry of space of infinite dimensions as Euclid did the geometry of plane surfaces, you would have solved the riddle of the universe; you would have come direct to the Godhead. He turned lovingly over the leaves of the completed portion of this fascinating essay; also the neighbouring piles of rough notes, the results of laborious years in China. Another section of the long deal table was devoted to his translations and editions of the Chinese classics and to ancient Chinese MSS. and books, his originals and authorities. The final scholarly translation into English of the great book of the Tao-tze—The Book of Rewards and Punishments—so full of deep wisdom, artlessness and charm, rose in three-part completion. It would knock dear old Stanislas Julien’s French version of 1835 into a cocked hat. He had collated libraries undreamed of by Julien or by any subsequent scholar. It would make all the missionaries and consuls and other amateur sinologists wish they had never been born. . . . Then again were the Shih-King—the Psalms of ancient China, resonant with music, bewildering with imagery, vibrating with emotion, hitherto done into English—done in into English—he chuckled as the mild jest occurred to him—by a worthy, prosaic and very learned missionary, much out of sympathy with ancient China because it had never heard of Jesus Christ before He was born—there were the Shih-King in process of reverent and, as far as his power lay, of poetic translation. He took down from his shelves the volume containing the solemnly authoritative English text published by the Oxford University Press, and opened it at random. He read:
“The angry terrors of compassionate Heaven extend through this lower world. (The King’s) counsels and plans are crooked and bad; when will he stop (in his course)? Counsels that are good he will not follow. And those that are not good he employs. When I look at his counsels and plans, I am greatly pained.”
He laughed out loud, shut the book and returned it to the shelf.
“ ‘I am greatly pained’! Oh, my Lord!”
He searched his manuscript for his own version, and read it through with a satisfaction not devoid of smugness. A professional poet might have found, like the Chinese writer, the inevitable word, the sacred flash; but, after all, he had made the thing deadened by the learned Oxford professor live again; he had suggested some of the music and the grace of the original—enough to attract and not to repel the ordinary English reader. And with all that, he would like to see any man, Chinese or European, pick a hole in his scholarship.
He lit his pipe, and before settling down to work again surveyed the great mass of his achievement. Life was truly worth living, when, during its brief span, such great things could be done. With a short interval for luncheon, he worked steadily on through the day, sacrificing his accustomed spell of outdoor exercise, and when Quong Ho, who had changed his nondescript European working kit for the cool, immaculate Chinese dress, announced that dinner would be ready in a quarter of an hour, he had all but written Finis to his Treatise on the Theory of Groups.
“Lord!” said he, “I must wash and get a mouthful of fresh air.” He whistled to the dog, Brutus, who had lain at his feet most of the afternoon, and went off. When he got outside, he discovered, to his surprise, for he had sat in front of a window all the time, that a white mist had gathered on the moorland and that his horizon as he stood on his doorstep was scarcely bounded by his rude granite wall. The fog covered him in like a cupola. He patted the Airedale’s head and smiled, well content in this increased security of his isolation.
“We might, be the last living beings on the face of the globe,” said he to Quong Ho, who came to announce dinner.