Читать книгу The House of Baltazar (William J. (John) Locke) (Literary Thoughts Edition) - William J. (John) Locke - Страница 5

THE renting of Spendale Farm, derelict for many years, caused some excitement on the moorland. It had achieved notoriety by concentrating in its small acreage every disadvantage that a farm could have. A soil so barren and granitic that scarcely grass would grow on it; a situation of bleakness unique in that bleak and unsheltered region; an inaccessibility almost beyond the powers of transport. The last was the final factor in the bankruptcy and despair of former tenants. Three miles of foot-and-wagon-worn track—and this now indistinguishable—must be traversed before striking a road, and along five miles of the road must one go before reaching the tiny town of Water-End, which contained the nearest railway station, shop, post office and church. Excitement grew in Water-End when motor lorries and materials and workmen from the cathedral town, thirty miles off, all made their daily way to Spendale Farm, and later, when packing-cases marked “Books, with the greatest care” were dumped on the station platform. All bore the name of John Baltazar—an outlandish name, if ever there was one, to eyes and ears of remotely rural England. And when the demented foreigner—for so they conceived him to be—was due to arrive in order to take up his residence, a fact proclaimed by the presence outside the station of Farmer Benstead’s old grey mare and springless cart which Ellis and Dean, the local estate agents, were known to have bought for the new-comer, the population of Water-End turned out to see what manner of being he was. The hefty, quickly moving Englishman, obviously the master, disappointed their anticipations; but the Chinaman, his coiled pigtail unconcealed beneath the brim of a bowler hat too small for him, made their eyes bulge with wonder. They did not even know he was a Chinaman until the vicar’s son, a lad of sixteen, unavowed emissary of a curious vicarage, gave them the information. Master and man drove off alone in the cart with their luggage, in the midst of gaping silence.

A Chinaman. What was a Chinaman doing in those parts? Men speculated in the bar parlour of “The Three Feathers.” Gossips of the more timorous sex discussed the possibility of a yellow peril—children kidnapped, throats cut, horrors perpetrated in lonely places. Mrs. Trevenna had seen murder in his eye; and Mrs. Trevenna, who had buried three husbands, was a woman whose opinion was respected. Mrs. Bates said his yellow hands were like the claws of a turkey-cock. Her daughter, Gwinnie, giggling, remarked that she wouldn’t like to have them round her neck.

“That’s what I’ve heard they do,” said old Mrs. Sopwith. “I remember my grandfather, him that was in the Indian Mutiny, telling me, when I was a little girl, that they thought nothing of strangling you. It was their religion.”

Thus the amiable Quong Ho leapt at once into a pretty repute—of which an addiction to Thuggee was a venial aspect.

But when, a few days afterwards, Quong Ho drove into Water-End on a shopping expedition, and in the presence of palpitating Water-Enders carried on his business and passed remarks on the weather, polite and smiling, in the easy English of the vicar and the motoring gentlefolk, with no perceptible trace of a foreign accent, they gaped once more in amazement. Language is a marvellous solvent of prejudice. No one who talked English like the Vicar could strangle English necks. But Quong Ho, unfortunately, complicated this favourable impression by overdoing the perfect Briton.

At the butcher’s door, freshly coloured as the carcasses hanging at each side, stood Gwinnie Bates, the leader of the staring crowd, blocking the way. Quong Ho, trained theoretically by Baltazar in European ceremonial, swept her a bow with his billycock hat—a bow composite of the court of Charles the Second and Ratcliffe Highway, and addressed her:

“Beauteous Madam, will you allow your devoted servant the privilege of a passage?”

She melted hysterically from the doorway. Her friends, like a grinning Red Sea, divided into an avenue through which passed Quong Ho, with gestures courteously expressive of thanks, followed by the butcher’s assistant carrying to the cart the leg of mutton and the joint of beef which Quong Ho had purchased. Quong Ho drove off amid unceremonial guffaws and gigglings.

“Beauteous Madam! Oh, Hell!” roared the butcher’s assistant.

Gwinnie Bates checked her mirth and advanced with flushed cheeks and defiant eyes.

“What’s wrong about it, Johnnie Evans? If you want to insult me, say it out. If you can’t be a gentleman, at least be a man.”

“Pretty fine gentleman,” sneered Johnnie Evans, jerking a thumb towards the receding Chinaman.

“He can teach manners to the likes of you, at any rate,” cried Gwinnie Bates, and went off triumphant with her head in the air.

Thus, through the courteous demeanour of Quong Ho on this and subsequent occasions, Water-End became divided into two camps—Sinophile and Sinophobe. The latter party asserted that such heathen smiled most when their designs were most criminal, and carried out their activities to the accompaniment of unholy mirth. Was he ever seen at church or chapel? His admirers confessed this abstention from the means of grace. Did he ever speak of the doings of his master with the outlandish name, and himself, in the middle of the moor? Quong Ho was admitted to be a museum-piece of discretion. And as time went on, although his ways were marked by the same perfect courtesy, he lost favour amongst his party, through a bland taciturnity and a polite rejection of conversational advantage.

Now for this taciturnity there were excellent reasons: none other than the commands of John Baltazar. When Quong Ho returned the first time to the farm with the jeering laughter ringing in his ears, he bewailed the impoliteness of the inhabitants of Water-End. Said Baltazar in Chinese:

“Dost thou not know the proverb, Quong Ho, ‘A man must insult himself before others will?’ And again, what saith the Master? ‘Rotten wood cannot be carved, and walls made of dirt and mud cannot be plastered.’ By acting against my orders and striving to plaster the muddy walls of these rustics with ceremonial politeness, you have insulted yourself and therefore exposed yourself to rudeness.”

“Master,” said Quong Ho, “it appears that I have erred grievously.”

“Listen again,” said Baltazar, with a twinkle in his eyes unperceived by the downcast Quong Ho, “to what the Master saith: ‘The failure to cultivate virtue, the failure to examine and analyse what I have learnt, the inability to move towards righteousness after being shown the way, the inability to correct my faults—these are the causes of my grief.’ ”

Quong Ho replied that although his deviation from the path of virtue was glaring to the most myopic vision, he nevertheless was in a dilemma, inasmuch as he had followed the precepts of Western courteous observance, the ceremonial, for instance, of the hat-salutation, laid down for him by his illustrious teacher.

Baltazar, always in Chinese, replied kindly: “O youth of indifferent understanding, is it not written in the Shû King in the Charge to Yüeh: ‘In learning there should be a humble mind and the maintenance of a constant earnestness: in such a case improvement will surely come. When a man’s thoughts from first to last are constantly fixed on learning, his virtuous cultivation comes unperceived’?”

“With those truths am I acquainted,” replied Quong Ho.

“Then, my good fellow,” retorted Baltazar in English, “why the devil don’t you apply them? I’ve absolutely forbidden you to have any intercourse whatever with the people round about. You’re not to talk to them about my concerns or your concerns. You’re not to listen to any of their talk or to bring back to me scraps of their rotten gossip. You’re to go to Water-End on necessary business—unfortunately we can’t live on air or warm ourselves in the winter with bottled sunbeams—but that’s the limit. Outside of that you’re a man deaf and dumb. You’re to go one better than the three Sacred Apes of Japan, who, holding hands respectively before eyes, ears and mouth, signify ‘I see no evil; I hear no evil; and I speak no evil.’ In your case, it’s to be: ‘I see nothing; I hear nothing; I speak nothing.’ ”

“In future,” said Quong Ho, “my eyes shall be blinded, my ears sealed and my mouth locked.”

“If there are any more animated discussions of last week’s thunderstorms, or further Beauteous-Madamizing of young females, I’ll regretfully have to send you straight back to China.”

The unblinking stare in Baltazar’s great grey eyes and the obstinate set of his lips—signs of purpose which Quong Ho for eight years had learned to gauge with infallible precision—caused him to quake excessively. Not only was his servitude to Baltazar a matter of oath, but a return before the completion of the special education which would enable him to take immediate rank in New China, would be the death-blow to his ambitions. So Quong Ho took to heart the precepts of the Humble Mind and swore to outdo the Sacred Apes of Japan, even as his master had ordained.

After this, in the first days of their Thebaïd, master and man held frequent conversations on the relations with the outside world which the former had prescribed. The three years, said Baltazar, which lay before them in the solitude of the wilderness, were for the maceration of the flesh, the pursuit of virtue and the cultivation of the intellect. He illustrated his argument with countless quotations from the Chinese classics.

“In this fashion, Quong Ho,” said he, “you are drinking of the Five Sources of Happiness. To wit: Long Life: for here, in this unpolluted atmosphere, you are acquiring physical health. Riches: they will be yours in no matter what University of Modern China you go as Professor of Mathematics. Soundness of Body and Serenity of Mind: the Latins put the idea into epigrammatic form—Mens sano in corpore sano; what can be more conducive to serenity of mind than this studious solitude, undisturbed by material cares? The Love of Virtue: we have every hour of all our days to acquire it. Fulfilling to the end the WILL; is it not the WILL that has set us here?”

“Indubitably,” said Quong Ho.

“Hearken again,” said Baltazar, “to the Six Extreme Evils. Misfortune shortening the Life: from that no man is exempt—but from it no men are more than we protected. Sickness: likewise—but I have a box of simple remedies, and if the worst comes, there is a man learned in physic at Water-End. Distress of Mind: if our minds in these ideal surroundings are so unstable as to be distressed, we are unworthy of the name of philosophers. Poverty: I have an ample fortune. Wickedness: we, who are Seekers after Truth, have deliberately set ourselves beyond the reach of Temptation. Weakness: that, O Quong Ho, is the only danger. You must be on your guard against it night and day, especially on the days when necessity exposes you to the manifold temptations of that microcosm of Babylon, Pekin and San Francisco which goes by the name of Water-End.”

So it came to pass that when astounding tidings, the most pregnant in the world’s history, came to Water-End and the little townlet blazed with the wildfire of gossip, Quong Ho, scrupulous obeyer of Law, heard without listening and, forbearing to question, always returned to Spendale Farm with a mind rendered, with Oriental deliberation, so profoundly blank as to preclude the possibility of retailing to his master the idle news of the outer world. And gradually, such is the contempt bred by familiarity, Quong Ho lost prestige in Water-End. His weekly appearance in the town, with old grey mare and cart, grew to be one of the commonplace recurrent phenomena such as the Vicar’s Sunday sermon and the Saturday evening orgy and home-convoying of old Jack Bonnithorne, the champion alcoholist of the moorland.

But around Baltazar of the one brief glimpse arose many a legend. He was mad. He was a magician. He was an unspeakable voluptuary; though whence and how arrived the houris who ministered to his voluptuousness, was an insoluble problem. He was a missionary with one convert. The theory, put forward by the farmers, that he was the champion fool on the Moor, gained the most general acceptance. Then someone whispered that he was a German spy. The valiant of the town planned an expedition at dead of night to surprise him at his nefarious practices; but the sarcasms of Police-Sergeant Doubleday, who asked what information useful to the enemy, save the crop of heather per square acre, could be given by a man inhabiting the most desolate spot in the United Kingdom, checked their enterprise. Their ardour, too, was damped by a spell of torrential rain, which robbed of its pleasantness the prospect of a sixteen-mile walk. When the sun came out, the suspicion had faded from their minds, and shortly afterwards most of them found themselves in the King’s uniform in regions far distant from Water-End.

One morning Police-Sergeant Doubleday lay in wait for Quong Ho outside the Bank, and informed him that he must register himself as an alien, under the Defence of the Realm Act. Quong Ho blandly accompanied the Sergeant to the Police Station and complied with the formalities. Full name: Li Quong Ho. Nationality: Chinese. Occupation: Student.

“Eh?” cried Sergeant Doubleday, a vast, red-faced man with a scrubby black moustache. “That won’t do. Aren’t you Mr. Whats-his-name’s man-servant?”

“That sphere of my activities is purely incidental,” said Quong Ho. “Kindly put down ‘student.’ ”

“What do you study?”

“Specialized branches of Western Philosophy,” replied Quong Ho.

“Well, I’m damned!” said the mystified Doubleday. “Anyhow, it’s none of my business.”

So down went Quong Ho as “student”—the only alien on the register.

“That’s very interesting,” said the Vicar, during his next chat with Doubleday. “The Chinese are a remarkable race. Their progress should be watched.”

“I’m afraid it can’t be done, sir. What with being short-handed and overworked as it is——”

At the Vicar’s explanation the Sergeant mopped his forehead in relief.

“I’ve a man’s job to keep Christians in order, without shadowing the heathen,” said he.

“I’m convinced that his master and himself are a pair of harmless eccentrics,” said the Vicar.

And the Vicar’s word went the round of the district, and eccentrics, or the nearest approach to it that local tongues could manage, the inhabitants of Spendale Farm were finally designated—though what were “eccentrics” remained a matter of pleasant and fruitful conjecture.

When Quong Ho returned to the farmhouse after his encounter with Sergeant Doubleday, he said nothing about his registration as an alien. Nor did it occur to him to show the paper money which he had received in lieu of the usual gold in exchange for the cheque which he had cashed at the bank; for the disposal of petty cash did not concern John Baltazar, who rightly trusted in the Chinaman’s scrupulous honesty. That, in spite of the most definite orders, he should leave Baltazar uninformed of the various signs and tokens of national unrest which he had observed at Water-End, caused Quong Ho occasional twinges of conscience. He remembered the saying: “To shirk your duty when you see it before you, shows want of moral courage.” But what was his duty? On the other hand, there was the dictum: “To sacrifice to a spirit with which you have nothing to do is mere servility.” What had he to do with this purely English war-spirit that he should servilely sacrifice to it his almost filial obligations? Obviously nothing. Quong Ho therefore continued to purvey no idle gossip, and went about his varied avocations with a serene mind.

Now, as John Baltazar, who had been dead to the English-speaking world for nearly twenty years, held correspondence with no one save a few necessary tradesmen, mostly booksellers, as he took in no periodical, daily, weekly, monthly or annual of any kind whatever, and as he conversed with no human being except Quong Ho, whose lips he had sealed, he had created for himself an almost perfect barrage through which the news of contemporary happenings could not penetrate.

“Quong Ho,” he had said, one Spring day, soon after his return from China, when he had come to one of those revolutionary decisions that marked the crises of his life, “I have sworn by the spirits of my ancestors to live the life of a recluse for the space of three years, holding communication with no man or woman and cutting myself off like one that is dead from the interests of the contemporaneous world. My reasons for this determination I will eventually unfold to you, provided you carry out faithfully the contract I am about to propose. If you decline to bind yourself, which as a free man you are at liberty to do, I will pay your passage back to China and give you a sum of money adequate to start you on an honest career. If you accept it, I will honourably perform my part. You have been my servant and my pupil for the last eight years——”

“You saved this miserable orphan from death at the hands of a tyrannic governor,” interposed Quong Ho—they were speaking his native tongue,—“you have taught him the language of England and the philosophies both of East and West, and you are to me as a father to whom I owe filial fidelity and devotion.”

“That is well said, Quong Ho,” replied Baltazar. “This person appreciates your professions of loyalty.” The scene of this memorable conversation, by the way, was a small bedroom at the top of the Savoy Hotel; Baltazar, with bloodshot eyes, a splitting headache and tousled raiment, sitting on the bed, and Quong Ho, impeccably vested in Chinese attire, standing before him. “He has not been honourably blessed with sons, and therefore will receive from you the devotedness that is due to a parent. But for the space of three years only. There may come a time when exaggerated filial zeal may become embarrassing.”

And he set forth the contract. In return for the absolute obedience of Quong Ho and his acceptance of the life of a recluse for three years, he undertook to send him back to China as the most accomplished native mathematician in existence—for he had already gauged the young man’s peculiar genius—with a Master of Arts degree, if possible, from some British University, and thus assure him a distinguished position in that New China whose marvellous future had been the subject of so many of their dreams and discussions. And Quong Ho had taken solemn oaths of fealty and with the Chinaman’s singleness of purpose, accepted, a few weeks later, the deadly and enduring solitude of the moorland as an unquestionable condition of existence.

Secure in the unswerving fidelity of Quong Ho, and in the impregnable seclusion of this God-disclosed hermitage, John Baltazar lived a life according to his ideals. No outer ripple of the maëlstrom in which the world was engulfed lapped, however faintly, against the low granite wall encircling the low-built granite farmhouse. His retirement was absolute, his retreat off the track of the most casual wanderer.

Six months passed before his eyes rested on a human being other than Quong Ho. It is true that the rate-collector, savagely cursing his luck and the bicycle-destroying track that led from the road to the farmhouse, had appeared one day with a paper showing certain indebtedness; but Quong Ho had received it and, gravely promising a cheque in payment, had dismissed the intruder. No other official came near the place. Quong Ho called weekly at the Post office and railway station, to the great relief of postman and van-driver.

“Thought and money acutely applied,” remarked Baltazar, “together with freedom from the entanglement of family relationships, are the determining factors of human happiness. A man with these factors at his disposal is a fool if he cannot, fashion for himself whatever kind of existence he pleases.”

But one day, a cloudless winter morning, when the sunshine kissing the frost-bound earth transmuted the myriad frondage of the heather into a valley of diamonds, Baltazar, on his way from the stable to the front door, came across a stranger leaning over the gate. He was a heavy man with a fat, clean-shaven face, loose lips and little furtive eyes. He wore a new golfing suit exaggerated in cut and aggressive in colour.

He said with easy familiarity: “Good morning, Mr. Baltazar.”

“Since you know my name,” replied Baltazar, with an air of courtesy, “it has doubtless struck you that this is my gate.”

“Of course——”

“You are leaning on it,” said Baltazar.

The visitor, perplexed, straightened himself.

“I’m a sort of neighbour of yours, you know. I live about seven miles off—the big property this side of Water-End: Cedar Chase—and I’ve often thought I’d run over in the Rolls-Royce as far as I could, and walk the rest, and see how you were getting along.”

“That is most amiable of you,” said Baltazar, advancing to the gate and resting his arm on it with an easy suggestion of proprietorship. “You have run over, you have walked—and now you see.”

Before Baltazar’s ironical gaze the stranger’s eyelids fluttered in disconcertment.

“I fancied you might be lonely and might like to look in and have a game of bridge one of these days. My name’s Pillivant.”

“Pillivant,” said Baltazar. “I don’t much like it, but there are doubtless worse.”

“You may have heard it. Pillivant and Co., Timber Merchants. We’ve rather come to the front lately.”

“Your personal initiative, I should imagine,” said Baltazar.

“I don’t say as it isn’t,” replied Mr. Pillivant. “When whacking Government contracts are going, why not get ’em?”

“Why not? Why waste time in doing anything else, all day long, but getting ’em?”

Mr. Pillivant drew from his inner breast pocket a vast gold casket of a cigar-case, opened it and held it out towards his inhospitable host.

“Have a cigar? You needn’t be afraid. They stand me in two hundred and fifty shillings a hundred and I get ’em wholesale. No?” Baltazar declined politely. “You’re missing a good thing.” He bit off the end of the one he had chosen, lit it with a fat wax vesta extracted from a minor gold casket and drew a few puffs. “Funny sort of life you seem to be leading here, Mr. Baltazar. Dam’ funny!”

“I perceive you have a keen sense of humour,” said Baltazar.

Again the mocking stare of his cold, grey eyes abashed the unwelcome visitor, who filled in the ensuing silence by re-biting and re-lighting his half-crown cigar. The operation over:

“Lovely day, isn’t it?” said he.

“So lovely, Mr. Pillivant,” replied Baltazar, “that it would be selfish of me to do otherwise than leave you to the undisturbed enjoyment of it.”

And, with a polite bow, he left Mr. Pillivant and walked, in a dignified way, into the house. Mr. Pillivant, conscious at last of the rejection of his friendly overtures, stared for a while, and then, sticking his cigar at a truculent angle in his mouth, swaggered away across the moor.

“Quong Ho,” said Baltazar, “when next you go to Water-End, it will be your duty to find a powerful and exceedingly nasty-tempered dog.”

A fortnight afterwards Brutus was added to the establishment.