William J. (John) Locke - The House of Baltazar

THE early story of Baltazar is not the easiest one to tell. It is episodic. It obeys not the Unities of Time, Place and Action. The only unity to be found in it is the oneness of character in that absurd and accomplished man. The fact of his being lustily alive at the present moment does not matter. To get him in perspective, one must regard him as belonging to the past. Now the past is a relative conception. Save to the academic student of History, Charlemagne is as remote as Sesostris. To the world emerging from the stupor of the great war, Mons is as distant as Balaclava. Time is really reckoned by the heart-throbs of individuals or nations. Yester-year is infinitely far away. . . .

To get back to Baltazar and his story. In the first place it may be said that he was a man of fits and starts; a description which does not imply irresponsible mobility of purpose and spasmodic achievement. The phrase must be taken in the literal significance of the two terms. A man of fits—of mental, moral and emotional paroxysms; of starts—of swift courses of action which these paroxysms irresistibly determined. Which same causes of action, in each case, he doggedly and ruthlessly pursued. One, an intimate teacher of Baltazar, one who, possessed of the knowledge of the scholar and the wisdom of the man of the world, might be qualified to judge, called him a Fool of Genius. Now the genius is steadfast; the fool erratic. In this apparent irreconcilability of attributes lies the difficulty of presenting the story of Baltazar.

But for the war, the story would scarcely be worth the telling, however interesting might be his sheer personality and his calculated waywardness. It would have led no whither, save to a stage or two further on his journey to the grave. But there is scarcely a human being alive with whose apparently predestined lot the war has not played the very devil. It knocked Baltazar’s world to bits—as soon as the realization of it burst on his astonished senses; yet it seemed to bring finality or continuity into his hitherto disconnected life.

It was during the war that his name was mentioned and his character discussed for the first time for many years, by two persons not without interest in his fate.

Marcelle Baring, a professional nurse of long standing, arrived late one night at Churton Towers, to take up the duties of sister in charge. The place was the country seat of a great family who, like many others, had given it over to the Government as a convalescent home for officers; a place of stately lawns and terraces and fountains; of picture-hung galleries guarded by grim emptinesses in armour; of noble halls heterogeneously furnished—for generosity seldom goes so far as to leave the edges of a priceless marquetry table at the mercy of a feather-headed subaltern’s forgotten cigarette; of tapestried rooms, once filled with the treasures of centuries, now empty save for the rows of little standard War Office bedsteads and the little deal regulation tables at their heads.

Somewhat confused by the vastness of her new home, and by the contrast of its gracious splendour with the utilitarian ugliness and mathematical uniformity of the General Hospital which she had just left, Marcelle Baring went downstairs the next morning to begin her new duties. Once in the wards she felt at home; for a ward of sick men is the same all the world over. The Matron went round with her, performing introductions; but that first morning she only caught a third of the names. It would take a few days to learn them, to learn also the history of the cases. Besides, they were convalescents, dressings were few, and her work was more administrative than personal. Her first impression was that of a high spirited crowd of almost indistinguishable young men, some to all intents and purposes sound of wind and limb, who in a short time would be sent back to the tempest of shell whence they were driven; others maimed and crippled, armless, legless, 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.