“Nothing,” said Baltazar.
They shouldered their shovels and he his, and they marched away from the devastated place and drove back across the moor. Baltazar sat next the man who drove, in the front of the empty and futile cart, and said never a word. For the first time in his eager existence, defeat overwhelmed him. The work of a laborious lifetime had been destroyed in a few hours. With infinite toil, perhaps, he might recapture the main lines of his thought-revolutionizing treatise on the Theory of Groups: his studies in the Analytical Geometry of Four Dimensional Space. Perhaps. He had relied for his data on the innumerable notes and solutions of intricate problems which had cost the labour of many years. And these had gone. The world had hitherto wondered at two such scholar tragedies—Newton’s Principia destroyed by the dog Diamond, the first volume of Carlyle’s French Revolution burned by Mill’s stupid housemaid. But in both cases only the finished product had perished. The data remained. The rewriting was but a painful business of recompilation. But with him, not only the more or less finished product, but the fundamental material was lost forever. He shrank with dismay, almost with terror, at the thought of going through that infinite maze of accurate calculation and reasoning once more. Still, as far as the mathematics went, the palimpsest of the brain existed. Reconstitution was humanly possible. But with the Chinese editions—for most of it the material could only be found in remote libraries in China; for much of it, the material no longer survived in the explored world.
He had come hoping against hope, arguing that great masses of manuscript on thick paper were practically indestructible by fire. The outsides, the edges might be burnt, but the vast bulk of inside sheets could be preserved. But he had not counted on the disruption and devouring effect of an incendiary bomb falling at the most precious end of the long deal working-table. Probably the whole room had been instantaneously carpeted thick with loose sheets, and the great stacks of manuscript had, as it were, been burnt in detail. Then, for a while, on his hateful ride, he strove with conjecture. But what was the use of vain imaginings? That which was done was done. The harvest of his life had been annihilated. If he died to-morrow, the world would be no richer by his existence than by that of any dead goat whose body had just been cast into the cesspool. To recover the harvest would cost him many years of uninspired drudgery. It would be a horrible re-living, an impossible attempt to recapture the ardour of the pioneer, the thrills of discovery. For the first time he really felt the meaning of his age, the non-resilience of fifty. For the black present the very meaning of his life had been wiped out.
The men, wearied, befouled and thirsty, sat silent in the cart, each dreaming of the two gallons of beer that awaited him at the end of the journey. They knew they had been searching for papers; but to them valuable papers had only one signification; something perhaps to do with a bank; something which constituted a claim to money: they had discussed it during the half-hour midday interval for food. Wills, mortgages, title-deeds, they had heard of. The daughter of one of them, a parlourmaid in the house of a leading solicitor in the neighbouring cathedral city, ranking next to legendary London in majesty in the eyes of the untravelled Water-Enders, had told him that she had heard her master say, at dinner, that the contents of the tin-boxes ranged around his office represented half a million of money. His announcement vastly impressed his colleagues, one of whom explained that all real wealth nowadays was a matter of bits of paper. He himself had fifteen pounds in the Savings Bank, but nothing to show for it but his Post Office book. Then the nature of their employer’s frenzied quest became obvious to them all. They had found nothing. Their employer sat like a ruined man. They pitied him and, in the delicacy of their English souls, refrained from intruding by speech upon his despair. In the meantime, there was no harm in surrendering their imaginations to the prospect of the incessant flow of delectable liquid down their parched throttles.
When they halted at the gate of The Cedars, Baltazar pulled out a sheaf of Treasury notes and gave each man thirty shillings. The extra ten shillings represented to their simple minds, not the promised two gallons of beer, but beer in perpetuity. This generosity on the part of one evidently ruined bewildered them. Baltazar strode down the drive leaving men impressed with the idea that he was a gentleman of the old school to whose service they were privileged to be devoted. They retired, singing his praises, being elderly men of a simple and tradition-bred generation.
His golf clubs on the lawn beside him, Pillivant, attired in imaginative golfing raiment, was taking the air in front of the house. He lay in an elaborate cane chair and smoked a great cigar. At the sight of Baltazar he started up.
“Holy Moses! You are in a devil of a mess.”
“I’m afraid I’ve ruined your suit,” said Baltazar. “If you would only let me know what your tailor charged for it——”
“The Sackville Street robber bled me eight guineas,” said Pillivant, rather greedily.
“Here are eight pounds ten,” said Baltazar, counting out his notes.