The House of Baltazar. William John Locke

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СКАЧАТЬ he shunned them, partly through shyness, partly through distaste for the brusqueness of their manners, the high pitch of their voices, their colossal ignorance of the country with which they boasted such contemptuous familiarity, the narrowness of their outlook, the petty materialism of their conversation. He held himself aloof, longing for the real England at the end of the voyage.

      In London, the loneliest soul in the great city, he set himself to pick up the threads of the life around him. He walked the familiar and unwelcoming streets, at first dazed by the motor traction, then bewildered by evidences of the luxury which eighteen years of decadence had engendered. He visited new palaces of entertainment and came away wondering. In fashionable supper-rooms he saw the flower of the land dancing to what, as a scholar, he knew to be West African sexual rhythms. He could not understand. What were they doing, or trying to do? He would sit lonely at a table, a formally ordered drink before him, at one of these great public haunts, and try to get the key to the mystery. The decay of manners offended him. He discounted the fact that he had lived so many intense years in the land of sacred ceremonial; he wiped that out of his mind, and recalled the standard of his own youth. The exiguity of feminine apparel shocked his unaccustomed eyes; in many cases nothing from waist up but a sort of low palisade, scarcely concealing the bust. Was he not mistaken? Was this not rather the scum than the flower of modern England? But at neighbouring tables he had overheard attention being directed to bearers of proud and historic names. Then he asked himself the question: had he frequented such places eighteen years ago? Had they not been outside the sphere of his narrow academic life? He desired to judge justly. When did he leave England? In 1896. And his bachelor days, with their joyous London jaunts, had ended in 1894. There was no such social life then: if there had been, he would have heard of it. In the afternoons, too, these young men and maidens danced their weird dances.

      Outside, the land was a-clamour with the doings of a sterner sisterhood. Processions, mass meetings, virago riotings, picture slashings, incendiarism, bombs, formed the features of their astounding crusade. The newspapers, beyond the recounting of facts, with vivid descriptions of sensational scenes, gave him little information as to the philosophy of the movement. Politically the country seemed to be in a state of chaotic turmoil. Persons holding high office were publicly accused of corrupt financial practices. Parliament wrangled fiercely with the Army over an opéra bouffe condition of Irish affairs. Beneath all this Labour uttered volcanic threatenings. Subversive ideas, new to him, such as syndicalism, were in the air. Unintelligible criticisms of picture exhibitions urged his curious steps to the indicated galleries, where he came upon canvases that made his brain reel. A new Rip Van Winkle, he had awakened to a mad world, a world even more perilously unstable than the China which he had left.

      The solitary scholar found himself disastrously out of sympathy with it all. He had planned to give himself a month’s holiday in London before settling down, in some quiet and comfortable suburb, to the many years’ work that lay before him on the materials he had brought from China. He had formed no intention whatever of cutting himself off from communion with his fellow-men. Indeed, he meant, as soon as he could rid himself of the complications of his assumed name, to proclaim himself unobtrusively to the world as John Baltazar. Before coming finally to this decision, however, he must learn what had become of his wife, as he had no desire to play the disconcerting part of a tactless Enoch Arden. His first step on arriving at London had been to institute, through a firm of solicitors, discreet enquiries. He learned that his wife had been dead for thirteen years. He was at liberty to become John Baltazar again as soon as he liked. But in London, as James Burden, he stayed at the Savoy Hotel, a bewildered and disillusioned spectator of the modern world.

      How did the catastrophe happen? Thinking over it, as he often thought with shivers of disgust, in his moorland retreat, he could scarcely give an answer. Only once, since his interview with the audacious Spooner, had he given way to an overmastering impulse—and that was on his journey out to Shanghai. Anti-climax, in the shape of sudden storm and sea-sickness, cured him, and he vowed total abstinence all the time he should be in China; and he kept his vow. Perhaps, here in London, unaccustomed idleness and his disgust-filled loneliness drove him gradually and insensibly to the consolation of alcohol. The odd drinks during the day increased in number. He viewed a rosier London after a quart of old Burgundy at dinner. To sit in a crowded cosmopolitan café became his evening amusement, and the continuous consumption of brandies and soda aided indulgent observation. He had given himself his month’s holiday, and he meant to have it, no matter how joyless and unsympathetic was the holiday atmosphere. Now and then, in these popular resorts he picked casual acquaintanceship with a neighbour. He had the gift of making his companion’s conversation intelligent and interesting. On these occasions he drank less.

      But one solitary night intoxication for the first time overcame him. He realized it with a feeling of anger. The lights were just being lowered. He ordered a double liqueur brandy, in the crazy assurance that it would pull him together. Of what happened afterwards he had little memory. In the crowded street someone laid hold of him and, resentful of attack, he turned and smote his supporter. To complete the outrage, a policeman handled him roughly, a proceeding which he also violently resented. Then a whirl of lights and darkness and lights again, and strange faces and once more darkness absolute and final, until he awoke and found himself sober and shivering in a police cell. A few hours afterwards, James Burden, of no occupation, living at the Savoy Hotel, was fined forty shillings or a month for being drunk and disorderly in Leicester Square.

      If it had been a magnificent folly, a royal debauch, a voluptuous orgy of roses and wine and laughter and song and the pulsating lustiness of life, the dulce periculum of the follower of the Lenæan one brow-bound with green vine-leaves, he might have held himself in some measure excused. He had made no vow, he had no reason, to spurn the joyousness of existence. He was a man of racing blood, with claim and right to the gladness of physical things. But this sordid, solitary bout with its end of vulgarity and degradation, filled him with a horror almost maddening in its fierceness. His soul shrivelled at the ghastly humiliation. That it should come upon him; him, John Baltazar, with half a century of clean life behind him; him, John Baltazar, the man who had compelled high honour for intellect and character from his childhood days, at a Public School, at the University, as an unknown and prejudice-surrounded foreigner in the strangest of alien lands; that it should come upon him seemed like a phantasma or a hideous dream.

      And then it fell that he once more cut the Gordian knot. He would fly from a world in which he had proved himself not fit to live cleanly, with all the less reluctance because he had found it incomprehensible and unattractive. And sitting dishevelled on the bed, he informed Quong Ho of his decision. As soon as he had cleansed himself from the soil of the awful night, he left the Savoy and the dishonoured name of James Burden for ever, and took rooms at another hotel for the night as John Baltazar. The next day he threw himself vehemently into the quest of a hermitage. He remembered a desolate waste of moorland through which on a walking tour he had rambled in his undergraduate days.

      “It may be, Quong Ho,” said he, “that it is built over with picture palaces and swarming with tango-dancers. Any conceivable happening to England during the last twenty years is possible. But we’ll go and see.”

      “I am unacquainted, sir,” replied Quong Ho, “with the dancers you mention; but I have visited picture palaces during the fortnight we have spent in your wonderful country, and, rightly exercised, the cinematograph strikes me as being the most marvellous vehicle for the propaganda of civilization that the world has seen.”

      “Quong Ho,” said Baltazar, “it is not in our contract to care one little tuppenny damn for the propaganda of civilization. You’re not going to waste your time at one of those futile and ill-conceived, although ingenious, entertainments for the next three years. If the particular region I have in view is not satisfactory, we shall find another.”

      Presently he added, in a tone of compunction—he was dressing while Quong Ho packed:

      “I’m sorry I’ve had to cut short the time I intended you to have in London. СКАЧАТЬ