Quong Ho professed regret. He had also bought, he said, the works of the poets Virgil and Horace, but had found peculiar difficulty in translating them.
The new conception of Quong Ho as an independent purchaser of commodities set Baltazar’s mind on a different track. He had paid Quong Ho wages—or rather Quong Ho had paid himself. He started up from his chair.
“Good Lord! I’ve only just thought of it. All the money you must have had on the Farm is lost. How much was it?”
“A trifling sum—a pound or two. It does not matter,” replied Quong Ho.
“But you’ve been drawing a salary all the time. What’s become of it? You couldn’t possibly have spent it all.”
“I have invested it in British War Loan,” said Quong Ho.
“Quong Ho,” said Baltazar, standing over him, with hands thrust deep into his trouser-pockets, “you are immense.”
He went away, his head full of Quong Ho.
“Doctor,” said he, “I thought that if there ever was a Westerner who had got to the soul of the Chinaman, that man was I. Yet the more I see of Quong Ho the less do I know what queer mental workings and strange secrecies those soft, faithful eyes conceal. He kept me in absolute ignorance of the war, he learned Latin in the next room to me, without my having the faintest idea of it, and he has invested his money in War Loan. Of course, the philosophy of it all is perfectly lucid to him. In a way, I can get at the logic of it. But one wants to be wise not after but before the event. What surprise is he going to spring on me next?”
“Perhaps you’ve been nurturing an Oriental Caruso in your bosom,” the doctor suggested.