And yet England must have still the qualities that made Cressy, Poitiers, Agincourt ring in English ears through the centuries: the qualities of the men who followed Drake and Marlborough and Nelson and Raglan. . . . That very morning he had read of British heroism on the Somme battlefield, and had been thrilled at realizing himself merged into the unconquerable soul of his race.
He threw off his bedclothes—rose—flung the curtains wide apart, and thrust out all the room’s casement windows not already opened, and looked out into the starlit summer night.
No. It was impossible for England to be peopled with Pillivants. They were the fishers in troubled waters, the blood-suckers, the parasites, the excrescences on an abnormal social condition. But why were they allowed to live? What was wrong? Who were the rulers? Their very names were but vaguely familiar to him. And he had read of strikes; of men earning—for the proletariat—fabulous wages, striking for more pay, selfishly, criminally (so it seemed to his unversed and aghast mind), refusing to provide the munitions of war for lack of which their own flesh and blood, earning a shilling a day, might be slaughtered in hecatombs. He threw himself into a chair.
“My God!” said he, “I must get out of this and see what it all means.”
After a few moments he suddenly realized that he had pulled on his socks, as though he were going, there and then, at midnight, to plunge into the midst of the bewildering world at war.
CHAPTER X
QUONG HO sitting up, taking plentiful nourishment and definitely pronounced out of danger, Baltazar presented his cheque for a thousand pounds to Dr. Rewsby, and thanked God for the preservation of Quong Ho’s life and his own fortune. He also listened with much interest to Quong Ho’s apologetics for leaving him in ignorance of the war. For such exact obedience and perfect fidelity reproaches would have been unjust, even had remorse for his own folly not have precluded them.
“And now, my dear fellow,” said he—he was sitting by the bed in the airy, sun-filled ward of the Cottage Hospital—“tell me what you would like to do.”
“I don’t care what he would like to do,” said Dr. Rewsby. “What he has got to do is to stay here quiet and recover from the shock and mend up, and not worry his mind with the war, or mathematics, or the condition of your underclothes.”
“Quong Ho shall never wash a shirt of mine again,” declared Baltazar. “Henceforth he is the master of his destiny. I’m talking not of now, but of the future. So far as I can manage it, he can do what he jolly well likes. That’s why I put the question to him. So, Quong Ho, never mind this excellent medicine man, who can’t see beyond his nose and doesn’t want to, because all he’s concerned with is getting you well—never mind him, but tell me what most in the world you would like to do.”