The House of Baltazar

ON Godfrey’s transference from Godalming, Baltazar, with characteristic suddenness, moved into a furnished house in London. The reasons for his sojourn at the inn existed no lon...

WHEN he hobbled into her drawing-room and saw her without her hat, crowned with the glory of her hair, thick, of silky texture and of baffling colour, now almost black, now glea...

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 o...

“That’s easily managed,” said Baltazar. “I’ll send him flying out of the telephone box. But what on earth could have put your husband on the track? What indiscretion have you be...

BALTAZAR awoke a couple of mornings afterwards to find that certain vague happenings which he had regarded as dreams were true. He really lay in a comfortable bed, in a pleasant...

BALTAZAR had asked his friend Burtingshaw, K.C., to suggest some sphere in which his gifts might be usefully employed by the nation. Burtingshaw, an unimaginative fellow, a prof...

SHE would read the paper to-morrow, she had said. But on the morrow she awoke with a violent headache and stayed abed, and had only time to scramble into her clothes and attend...

CAMBRIDGE put Baltazar on the track of old acquaintances, so that on his return to London he found himself in contact with people of his own standing who could explain to him th...

QUONG HO sitting up, taking plentiful nourishment and definitely pronounced out of danger, Baltazar presented his cheque for a thousand pounds to Dr. Rewsby, and thanked God for...

SUCH, as far as a few strokes can picture him, was John Baltazar, at the time when his unsuspected son lay footless in the convalescent home and discussed with Marcelle Baring t...

WHEN he recovered consciousness it was but to awake to an incomprehensible dream condition. Of his whereabouts he had no notion. An attempt to move caused him such hideous pain...

THE life ordained by John Baltazar for Quong Ho and himself was one of unremitting toil, mental and physical. From the time of his uprising at six in the morning, when Quong Ho...

BALTAZAR and Quong Ho were finishing lunch when Godfrey, flushed and excited, burst in with his news. An enthusiastically sympathetic parent failed to detect an unusual note, al...

“A couple of weeks ago,” said he, “I had all but complete two epoch-marking mathematical treatises. I had got systems and results you good people here had never dreamed of. I ha...

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...

ONCE more Baltazar stood within his granite enclosure and surveyed the scene of ruin and horror. He had hired a cart and driven over with three nondescript elderly labouring men...

A DAY or two afterwards Godfrey Baltazar, still tied by his maimed leg to Churton Towers, received a letter which caused him to frown and rub his head. It was type-written save...

THEY arranged it all between them in the comfortingly short-sighted way of thousands of reprehensible couples before them. They spoke vaguely of a divorce as though the wretched...

AFTER this they had the many talks which they had promised themselves, and she told him the little things about John Baltazar which he had craved to learn. And the young man tol...

BALTAZAR had lived on the moor in peace and comfort for nearly a year when he received his first unsolicited communication from the outside world, in the shape of a long, cheap...

THERE they were in a punt on one of the silent upper reaches of the Thames above Moulsford; Venus in white serge, with a blue veil around hat and throat, reclining gracefully on...

AS he had expected, the Foreign Office beamed on him. It was immensely gratified that a man of his statesmanlike qualities should have differentiated so acutely between the valu...

IT was not till long afterwards that Baltazar learned the cause of his son’s discomfiture. Marcelle learned it at once. The boy exploded with pent-up indignation. Dorothy had tu...

But neither heeded him. Baltazar made a stride forward and with one hand gripped Marcelle by the arm and with the other motioned in his imperious way to the open door. Still loo...

HE stood, an hour later, on the pavement of that noiseless and forlorn thoroughfare, and stared at the latest catastrophe which, like all the others in his impulsive life, he ha...