He had. There was no denying it. A childish memory emerged from the mist of years. He must have been eight or nine. All about a dog. A puppy had destroyed a new paint-box, priceless possession, and in a fit of passion he had nearly beaten the puppy to death. And when his anger was spent and he grew terribly afraid, and sprawled down by the puppy, the puppy licked his hand. And he swore to God, as a child, that if the puppy lived and did not tell his father, he would never beat a dog again. The puppy lived, and, with splendid loyalty, never breathed a word to a human soul, and loved him with a love passing the love of women. And one day a neighbour’s bad-tempered dog got into the kitchen-garden and attacked him, and though he had a stick by chance in his hand, he remembered his vow, and stood with folded arms and set teeth and let the dog bite his legs, until he was rescued by the gardener and carried indoors. He remembered this, and a train of similar fantastic incidents culminating in his vow of solitude, and reviewed them all, in the light of Dr. Rewsby’s criticism. What good, in the name of sanity, had his wild, Quixotic resolves accomplished? How had they benefited Spooner, for instance, to whom he had surrendered the Senior Wranglership? During his brief stay in London he had had the curiosity to look up Spooner in reference books; found him an Assistant Secretary in a Government office, Sir William Spooner, K.C.B.; an honourable position, but a position which he would have attained—originally through the Civil Service examination—whether he had been second, fourth, tenth Wrangler in the Tripos. His, Baltazar’s, idiot sacrifice had advanced Spooner’s career not one millimetre: just as his self-denying ordinance in the realm of dogs had not benefited one jot the canine race—for the mongrel retriever who had bitten him heroically arm-folded, had been shot the next day by the remorseful neighbour, who had been longing for an opportunity of getting conscientiously rid of an ill-conditioned cur. And then there was his flight from Cambridge and Marcelle. “Damn that doctor!” said he, striding along the road. It was all very well to damn the doctor; but he had entered into a fresh engagement, which in spite of its newly revealed folly, he would break for nothing in the world. Yet what practical good would his little fortune accomplish scattered among the hundreds of hospitals of the United Kingdom? A pittance to each. And he himself, with all his gifts, thrown penniless upon a strange world at war, of what use would he be? His first necessarily animal impulse would be to prey upon society for the means of subsistence. Whereas, a free man, with his assured income, he could throw himself into the national struggle without thought of his own material needs. Quong Ho’s life acquired a new preciousness. He must live, if only to save him from this new absurdity to which he was pledged. CHAPTER IX