“That—no!” laughed Baltazar. “Chinese vocal chords aren’t built that way. But, for all I know, he may have a complete critical knowledge of the strategy of the war. The confounded fellow learning Latin! That’s what I can’t get over. And calmly investing in War Loan!”
“You don’t think he may cut everything and slip away to China?”
“No,” said Baltazar seriously. “That at least I’m sure of. The tremendous quality of the Chinaman is his loyalty. The scrupulousness of his obedience is a thing beyond your conception. That’s why he allowed no whisper of the war to reach me. Quong Ho would never be guilty of ingratitude. That you, Dr. Rewsby, should pick my pocket is far more possible. In fact, Quong Ho would cheerfully die this moment in order to save my life. That I know. But within those limits of utter devotion, God alone knows the weird workings of his celestial mind.” He pulled out his pipe and filled it. “I thought I knew a lot. Now I’m being knocked flat and beginning to realize that I know nothing at all, and that everything I’ve ever learned isn’t worth a tinker’s curse.”
“Perhaps,” said the doctor, after a hesitating glance, “you have put your foot on the first rung of the ladder of wisdom.”
Baltazar broke into a great laugh.
“I wish,” said he, “I had met more men like you. They would have done me good. You have the most comforting way in the world of telling me that I’m the Great Ass of the Universe.”
His head mended, his fears concerning Quong Ho at rest, his decision taken to send Quong Ho to Cambridge, nothing more kept him in the backwater of the little moorland town. He was for London, for the full stream of national thought and energy. What he would do there he did not know. He would learn. He would at least set his heart throbbing in unison with the heart of the Empire. He packed his newly purchased suit-case with his scanty wardrobe, bade farewell to the detested though embarrassingly hospitable Pillivants, and took train to London with the high hopes of a boy.
His first taste of the metropolis was exhilarating. Here was a new world. Every porter at the railway-station, every news-vendor, every street urchin, was the possessor of accumulated knowledge and experience of which he, John Baltazar, was denied a share. He read strange wisdom in the eyes of working girls and slatternly women. He bought all the evening papers, reeking, as they seemed, with the pregnant moment’s actuality. He went to a bookseller’s and bought every book and pamphlet bearing on the war. He would have an orgy of information. He would pluck the heart of the world’s mystery of blood and sacrifice.
But where to begin? If he had but one solitary acquaintance in London, who could put him into the way of understanding, his course would be simple. But he found himself absolutely alone in an infinite mass of units, knit together by complexities of common ties.
What he saw and felt, in his first eager search, reduced to dwindling point the petty tragedy of his own life. For greater issues were at stake than the revolution of mathematical thought by a new Theory of Groups. In the wholesale destruction of what were thought to be the immortal works of man, the loss of a few Chinese manuscripts counted as little as that of paper-bags for buns. For excursions into the geometry of Four Dimensional Space, or scholarly translation of the mild and benign Chinese classic, The Book of Rewards and Punishments, the world would have no use for another half-century. In face of the realities with which London confronted him, he felt that he had devoted his life to the pursuit of shadows.