If only he could grasp these realities. If only he could merge himself into them, become part and parcel of them, bring his intellect and his bodily strength into the stupendous machine which he saw at work.
Then he saw himself, by his own actions, condemned to sit and watch, an inactive spectator of the great drama. His loneliness fell upon him like a doom. He realized the uselessness of his age. He had as much place in modern London as any chance inhabitant of Mars. He who had dared the untrodden recesses of the Far Eastern world, haughtily asserting his sympathetic right of citizenship, felt, after a day or two, a terror of modern London. It was too vast, too unknown, too strange: a city at war, unlike any city he had ever seen. Youth, in civilian attire, had disappeared from its face. The unfamiliar dirty brown uniform filled the streets. He had read of khaki, was vaguely aware of it as the service uniform of the British Army; he had come across the tropical drill material which had clothed the troops in Hong Kong, but his mind preoccupied with interests remote from military affairs had barely registered the impression. His traditional and therefore instinctive conception of the soldier in the London streets was a thing in swaggering scarlet. He missed the scarlet. It took him some time to accommodate his mental vision to the military reality of the dun-coloured hordes of men that thronged the Strand, Whitehall, and Piccadilly. Soldiers, too, slopped about in an extraordinary kit of blue jean and red ties. He did not grasp the fact that these were wounded men wearing hospital uniform, until he passed the Westminster Hospital and saw some of them taking the air on the terrace. After the first day’s wanderings he dined at his crowded hotel, a bewildered man. In London itself he had beheld an army. Scarcely a table in the vast restaurant showed no man in uniform among its occupants. He contrasted the place with his last pre-war impression. Then every man, young or old, had been impeccably attired in the white tie and white waistcoat of high convention. Not a woman then who was not gowned as for some royal festival. Now the outward and visible signs of gilded youth had vanished. Even elderly bucks wore plain dinner-jackets and black ties—his own sloppily fitting, ready made dress suit seemed ultra ceremonious. Here and there were exquisitely dressed women; but here and there, too, were dowdy ladies unblushing under obviously cheap hats. And men with bandaged heads came in, and legless men on crutches; and at the next table a one-armed man depended for the cutting up of his food on the ministrations of a girl. And away over the other side of the room he saw a man, his breast covered with ribbons, carried pick-a-back by a brother officer to his appointed place. No one seemed to take notice of the unusual. Scarcely a casual glance lingered on the pair. At no table visible was there a break in the talk and the laughter. Baltazar leaned back in his chair and gasped at the realization that the incident was a commonplace of modern life.
His heart throbbed with pity for these maimed men, some of them boys fresh from school; then with pride in their English courage and gaiety. He looked round the room curiously and, in his fancy, identified several Pillivants. They generally sat two or three at a table and drank champagne and leaned over, heads together, as they talked. But the impression they made was effaced by that of youth: youth pervaded the place; youth whole and gloriously insolent; youth maimed and defiant; youth predominating, too, among the women, with its eyes alight and cheeks aglow; youth nerved to war, taking it as the daily round, the common task. It was some new planet in which Baltazar found himself, peopled with beings of dimly conjectured interests and habits of thought.
After dinner, the loneliest soul in London, he took his hat and thought to go for a stroll. He emerged from the brightly lit vestibule into Tartarean darkness and forbidding silence. Instead of the once glad stream of life, a few vague forms flitted by on the pavement. Now and then a moving light and a whir denoted the passing of a taxi-cab on the roadway. At first he stood outside the hotel door, baffled, until he remembered that he had heard of the darkened thoroughfares. The sky being overclouded, London was denied that night the kindly help of stars. Baltazar saw it in all its blackness, and shrank involuntarily as from the supernatural. He laughed and started. Soon, when his sight grew accustomed to the blackness, his senses were arrested and fascinated by the wonder of this veiled heart of the Empire, by its infinite tones of gloom, by its looming masses of building melting upwards into black nothingness, by the vista of narrow streets, where at the end a dim lamp gave them a note of sinister mystery. But his walk did not last long. As he was crossing a street, an unseen and unheard taxi-cab just swerved in time to miss him by a hair’s-breadth. He felt the wind of it on the back of his neck and caught the curse of the driver. After that he lost his nerve. The re-crossing of Trafalgar Square became a perilous and breathless adventure. He was glad to find himself again in the light and the safe normality of the hotel.
No. London was not for him. He found himself even more a stranger than during his last disastrous sojourn. There seemed to be no chance for him to be anything else than a stray number in an hotel. He felt like a bit of waste cog-wheel seeking a place in a perfect machine.
“A few days more of this and I’ll go mad,” said he.
He did not go mad, but at last, with the instinct of the homing pigeon, fled to Cambridge. There at least would he be able to pick up some threads of life left straggling twenty years ago. Only when he had gone half-way did he remember that it was the Long Vacation, so long had he lived indifferent to times and seasons. Doubtless, however, the Long Vacation Term was in progress as usual and the official dons in residence. But who would there be, after twenty years, in spite of the proverbial longevity of dons? Who now was master of his college? When he left, Fordyce was getting a bit elderly. Why, of course, by now, if alive, he would be over ninety. Fordyce must have been gathered long ago to his fathers. Who could have succeeded him? Why hadn’t he looked it up in a book of reference? It seemed stupid to return to his own college without knowing the name of the master. Who were the prominent people? Westgrove, the senior tutor; Barrett, senior dean; Withington, junior dean; Raymond, bursar; Smith, Hartwell, Grayson, Mostyn—men more or less of his own standing; Sheepshanks, the famous mathematical coach upon whose shoulders had fallen the mantle of the immortal Routh (maker of senior wranglers), and his own private tutor and friend. There would be somebody there out of all that lot, at any rate. He felt more hopeful.
A grizzled porter threw his suit-case into a hansom cab, a welcome survival of his youth, and in answer to his query whether the “Blue Boar” was still in existence, stared at him as though he had questioned the stability of the great court of Trinity or Matthews, the Grocers.
“The ‘Blue Boar,’ sir? Why, of course, sir.”