The House of Baltazar. William John Locke

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СКАЧАТЬ with drooping wrists, with unserving ankles. In the daytime nearly all were out of the wards; most in the open air playing tennis or lounging about the terraces, or playing billiards in the open-sided pavilion that looked over the Japanese garden. It was no easy matter to keep track of them all.

      It was only on the second day that the name of a young officer who had lost his foot caught her eye: “Mr. G. Baltazar.” He was very young, fair, blue-eyed, with a little blond moustache. His tunic, laid ready with the rest of his clothes, bore the white and purple ribbon of the Military Cross. The stump had practically healed, but it still needed attention.

      “It’s rotten luck, isn’t it, Sister?” he said while she was tending him. “I thought I had got through all right—the show at Ypres early in June. I all but saw it out, but a bit of high explosive got me and here I am. Anyhow, they say they’re going to wangle me an artificial foot, so that I’ll never know the difference. One of those pukka things, you know, that’ll pick up pins with the toes. I hope it’ll come soon, for I’m fed up with crutches. I always feel as if I ought to hold out my hat for pennies.”

      “Poor chap!” said Marcelle, absently.

      “That’s kind of you, but it’s just what I’m hating. I don’t want to go through life as a ‘poor chap.’ ” He paused, then ran on: “I wonder how you dear people can look at the beastly thing. Whenever I cock my leg down and try to have a sight of it, it nearly makes me sick. I like to be neat and tidy and not repulsive to my fellow-creatures, but that crimpled-crumpled end of me is just slovenly and disgusting.”

      Marcelle Baring scarcely heeded his debonair talk. His name had awakened far-off memories. She worked in silence, pinned the bandage and, smiling, with a “You’ll do all right, Mr. Baltazar,” left him.

      The shock came the next afternoon. As she passed through the great entrance hall, fitted up as a lounge with the heterogeneous furniture, she came across him, the solitary occupant, sitting at a table, busy with pencil and writing pad and a thick volume propped up in front of him. Her eye caught arresting symbols on the paper, then the page-heading of the book: “Rigid Dynamics.”

      She paused. He looked up with a laugh.

      “Hello, Sister!”

      She said, with a catch in her breath, “You’re a mathematician?”

      He laughed. “More or less. If they kick me out of the Army, I must go back to Cambridge and begin again where I left off.”

      “You must have left off rather high, if you’re reading Rigid.”

      He started, for no one in this wide world but a mathematical student could have used the phrase.

      “What the—what do you know about Rigid?”

      “I was at Newnham, in my young days,” she replied, “and I read mathematics. And, oddly enough, my private tutor was”—she hesitated for a second—“someone of your name.”

      He pushed his chair away from the table.

      “That must have been my father.”

      “John Baltazar.”

      “Yes, John Baltazar. One of the greatest mathematical geniuses Cambridge has produced. Good Lord! did you know my father?”

      “He and I were great friends.”

      She looked him through and through with curiously burning eyes; of which the boy was unconscious, for he said:

      “Fancy your reading with my father! It’s a funny old world.” Then suddenly he reflected and glanced at her critically. “But how could you? He disappeared nearly twenty years ago.”

      “I’m thirty-eight,” she said.

      “Lord! you don’t look it—nothing like it,” he cried boyishly.

      Nor did she. She carried a graceful air of youth, from the wave of brown hair that escaped from beneath her Sister’s cap to the supple and delicately curved figure. And her face, if you peered not too closely, was young, very pure in feature, still with a bloom on the complexion in spite of confinement in hospital wards. Her voice, too, was soft and youthful. Perhaps her eyes were a little weary—they had seen many terrible things.

      At the young man’s tribute she flushed slightly and smiled. But the smile died away when he added:

      “What was he like? I’ve often wondered, and there has been no one to tell me—no one I could have listened to. The dons of his generation are too shy to refer to him and I’m too shy to ask ’em. Do you know, I’ve never seen a picture of him even.”

      “He was not unlike you,” she replied, looking not at him, but wistfully down the years. “Of heavier build. He was a man of tremendous vitality—and swift brain. The most marvellous teacher I have ever met. He seemed to hold your intellect in his hands like a physical thing, sweep it clear of cobwebs and compel it to assimilate whatever he chose. A born teacher and a wonderful man.”

      “But was he human? I know his work, though I haven’t read enough to tackle it yet—most of it’s away and beyond Part II of the Tripos even. I went up with an Open Mathematical Scholarship just before the war, and only did my first year’s reading. I’m beginning this”—he tapped his Treatise on Rigid Dynamics—“on my own. What I mean is,” he went on, after a pause, “my father has been always an abstraction to me. I shouldn’t have worried about him if he had just been a nonentity—it wasn’t playing the game to vanish as he did into space and leave my mother to fend for herself.”

      “But I heard,” said the Sister, “that your mother had her own private fortune.”

      “I wasn’t alluding to that side of it,” he admitted. “But he did vanish, didn’t he? Well, as I say, if he had been just a nobody, I shouldn’t have been particularly interested; but he wasn’t. He was the most brilliant man of his generation at Cambridge. For instance, he took up Chinese as a sort of relaxation. They say his is the only really scientific handbook on the study of the language. You see, Sister”—he swerved impatiently on his chair and brought his hand down on the table, whereat she drew a swift inward breath, for the gesture of the son was that of the father—“I’ve always wanted to know whether I’m the son of an inhuman intellect or of a man of flesh and blood. Was he human? That’s what I want to know.”

      “He was human all right,” she replied quietly. “Too human. Of course he was essentially the scholar—or savant—whatever you like to call it. His work was always to him an intellectual orgy. But he loved the world too. He was a fascinating companion. He seemed to want to get everything possible out of life.”

      “Why didn’t he get it?”

      “He was a man,” she said, “of sensitive honour.”

      Captain Baltazar threw away the flaming match wherewith he was about to light a cigarette.

      “That licks me,” said he.

      “How?”

      “His bolting. Did you know my father very well?”

      “I’ve told you we were great friends.”

      “Did СКАЧАТЬ