Ruth Seer’s father had been a clergyman of the Church of England, and
had spent a short life in doing, in the eyes of his family—a widowed
mother and an elderly sister—incredibly foolish things.
To begin with he openly professed what were then considered extreme
views, and thereby hopelessly alienated the patron of the comfortable
living on which his mother’s eye had been fixed when she encouraged his
desire to take Holy Orders.
“As if lighted candles, and flowers on the altar, and that sort of
thing, mattered two brass farthings when £800 a year was at stake,”
wailed Mrs. Seer, to a sympathizing friend.
Paul Seer then proceeded to fall in love, and with great promptitude
married the music mistress at the local High School for Girls. She was
adorably pretty, with the temper of an angel, and they succeeded in
being what Mrs. Seer described as “wickedly happy” in a state of
semi-starvation on his curate’s pay of £120 a year.
They had three children with the greatest possible speed.
That two died at birth Mrs. Seer looked upon as a direct sign of a
Merciful Providence.
Poor lady, she had struggled for so many years on a minute income, an
income barely sufficient for one which had to provide for three, to say
nothing of getting the boy educated by charity, that it was small wonder
if a heart and mind, narrow to start with, had become entirely ruled by
the consideration of ways and means.
And, the world being so arranged that ways and means do bulk
iniquitously large in most people’s lives, obliterating, even against
their will, almost everything else by comparison, perhaps it was also a
Merciful Providence which took the boyish curate and his small wife to
Itself within a week of each other, during the first influenza epidemic.
You cannot work very hard, and not get enough food or warmth, and at the
same time hold your own against the Influenza Fiend when he means
business. So, at the age of three, the Benevolent Clergy’s Orphanage,
Parson’s Green, London, S.E., swallowed Ruth Courthope Seer. A very
minute figure all in coal black, in what seemed to her a coal-black
world. For many a long year, in times of depression, that sense of an
all pervading blackness would swallow Ruth up, struggle she never so
fiercely.
Asked, long after she had left it, what the Orphanage was like, she
answered instantly and without thought:
“It was an ugly place.”
That was the adjective which covered to her everything in it, and the
life she led there. It was ugly.
The Matron was the widow of a Low Church parson. A worthy woman who
looked on life as a vale of tears, on human beings as miserable sinners,
and on joy and beauty as a distinct mark of the Beast.
She did her duty by the orphans according to the light she possessed.
They were sufficiently fed, and kept warm and clean. They learnt the
three R’s, sewing and housework. Also to play “a piece” on the piano,
and a smattering of British French. The Orphanage still in these days
considered that only three professions were open to “ladies by birth.”
They must be either a governess, a companion, or a hospital nurse.
The Matron inculcated the virtues of gratitude, obedience and
contentment, and two great precepts, “You must bow to the Will of God”
and “You must behave like a lady.”
“The Will of God” seemed to typify every unpleasant thing that could
possibly happen to you; and Ruth, in the beginnings of dawning thought,
always pictured It as a large purple-black storm-cloud, which descended
on all and sundry at the most unexpected moments, and before which the
dust blew and the trees were bent double, and human beings were
scattered as with a flail. And in Ruth’s mind the storm-cloud was
peculiarly terrible because unaccompanied by rain.
With regard to the second precept, when thought progressed still
farther, and she began to reason things out, she one day electrified the
whole Orphanage when rebuked for unladylike behaviour, by standing up
and saying, firmly but politely, “If you please, Matron, I don’t want to
be a lady. I want to be a little girl.”
But for the most part she was a silent child and gave little trouble.
Twice a year a severe lady, known as “your Grandmother,” and a younger
less severe lady, known as “your Aunt Amelia,” came to see her, and they
always hoped she “was a good girl.”
Then Aunt Amelia ceased to come, for she had gone out to India to be
married, and “your Grandmother” came alone. And then Grandmother died
and went to heaven, and nobody came to see Ruth any more. Only a parcel
came, an event hitherto unknown in Ruth’s drab little existence, and of
stupendous interest. It contained a baby’s first shoe, a curl of gold
hair in a tiny envelope, labelled “Paul, aged 2,” in a pointed writing,
a letter in straggling round hand beginning “My dear Mamma,” another
letter in neat copper plate beginning “My dear Mother,” and a highly
coloured picture of St. George attacking the dragon, signed “Paul
Courthope Seer,” with the date added in the pointed writing.
It was many years later that Ruth first understood the pathos of that
parcel.
When she was seventeen the Committee found a situation for her as
companion to a lady. The Matron recommended her as suitable for the
position, and the Committee informed her, on the solemn occasion when
she appeared before them to receive their parting valediction, delivered
by the Chairman, that she was extremely lucky to secure a situation in a
Christian household where she would not only have every comfort, but
even Every Luxury.
So Ruth departed to a large and heavily furnished house, where the
windows were only opened for a half an hour each day while the servants
did the rooms, and which consequently smelt of the bodies of the people
who lived in it. Every day, except Sunday, she went for a drive with an
old lady in a brougham with both windows closed. On fine warm days she
walked out with an old lady leaning on her arm. Every morning she read
the newspaper aloud. At other times she picked up dropped stitches in
knitting, played Halma, or read a novel aloud, by such authors as Rhoda
Broughton or Mrs. Hungerford.
Any book less calculated to have salutary effect on a young girl who
never spoke to any man under fifty, and that but rarely, can hardly be
imagined.
If there had been an animal in the house, or a garden round it, Ruth
might have struggled longer. As it was, at the end of three months she
proved to be one of the Orphanage’s few failures and, without even
consulting the Committee, gave notice, and took a place as shop
assistant to a second-hand bookseller in a small back street off the
Tottenham Court Road. And here Ruth stayed and worked for the space of
seventeen years—to be exact, until the year of the Great War, 1914.
The Committee ceased to take an interest in her, and her Aunt Amelia,
still in India, ceased to write at Christmas, and Ruth’s last frail
links with the world of her father were broken.
It was a strange life for a girl in the little bookshop, but at any rate
she had achieved some measure of freedom, she had got rid of the burden
of her ladyhood, and in some notable directions her starved intelligence
was fed.
Her master, Raphael Goltz, came of the most despised of all race
combinations; he was a German Jew, and he possessed the combined
brain-power of both races.
He had the head of one of Michael Angelo’s apostles, on the curious
beetle-shaped body of the typical Jew. He was incredibly mean, and
rather incredibly dirty, and he had three passions—books, music, and
food.
When he discovered in his new assistant a fellow lover of the two first,
and an intelligence considerably above the average, he taught her how
and what to read, and to play and sing great music not unworthily. With
regard to the third, he taught her, in his own interest, to be a cook of
supreme excellence.
And on the whole Ruth was not unhappy. Sometimes she looked her
loneliness in the face, and the long years struck at her like stones.
Sometimes her dying, slowly dying, youth called to her in the night
watches, and she counted the hours of the grey past years, hours and
hours with nothing of youth’s meed of joy and love in them. But for the
most part she strangled these thoughts with firm hands. There was
nothing to be gained by them, for there was nothing to be done. An
untrained woman, without money or people, must take what she can get and
be thankful.
She read a great many both of the wisest and of the most beautiful books
in the world, she listened to music played by the master hand, and her
skilled cooking interested her. As the years went on, old Goltz left the
business more and more to her, spending his time in his little back
parlour surrounded by his beloved first editions, which he knew better
by now than to offer for sale, drawing the music of the spheres from his
wonderful Bluthner piano, and steadily smoking. He gave Ruth a
sitting-room of her own upstairs, and allowed her to take in the two
little dogs Sarah and Selina. On Saturday afternoons and Sundays she
would take train into the country, and tramp along miles with them in
the world she loved.
And then, when it seemed as if life were going on like that for ever and
ever, came the breathless days before August 4, 1914, those days when
the whole world stood as it were on tiptoe, waiting for the trumpet
signal.
Ah well! there was something of the wonder and glory of war, of which we
had read, about it then—before we knew—yes, before we knew! The bugle
call—the tramp of armed men—the glamour of victory and great deeds—and
of sacrifice too,—of sacrifice too. The love of one’s country suddenly
made concrete as it were. Just for that while, at any rate, no one
thinking of himself, or personal profit. Personal glory, perhaps, which
is a better matter. Every one standing ready. “Send me.”
The world felt cleaner, purer.
It was a wonderful time. Too wonderful to last perhaps. But the marks
last. At any rate we have known. We have seen white presences upon the
hills. We have heard the voices of the Eternal Gods.
The greatest crime in history. Yes. But we were touched to finer issues
in those first days.
And then Raphael Goltz woke up too. He talked to Ruth in the hot August
evenings instead of sleeping. Even she was astonished at what the old
man knew. He had studied foreign politics for years. He knew that the
cause of the war lay farther back, much farther back than men realized.
He saw things from a wide standpoint. He was a German Jew by blood and
in intellect, Jew by nature, but England had always been his home. That
he loved her well Ruth never had any doubt after those evenings.
He never thought, though, that it would come to war. It seemed to him
impossible. “It would be infamy,” he said.
And then it came. Came with a shock, and yet with a strange sense of
exhilaration about it. Men who had stood behind counters, and sat on
office stools since boyhood, stretched themselves, as the blood of
fighting forefathers stirred in their veins. They were still the sons of
men who had gone voyaging with Drake and Frobisher, of men who had
sailed the seven seas, and fought great fights, and found strange lands,
and died brave deaths, in the days when a Great Adventure was possible
for all. For them too had, almost inconceivably, come the chance to get
away from greyly monotonous days which seemed like “yesterday come
back”; for them too was the Great Adventure possible. The lad who, under
Ruth’s supervision, took down shutters, cleaned boots, knives and
windows, swept the floors and ran errands, was among the first to go,
falsifying his age by two years, and it was old Raphael Goltz, German
Jew, who even in those first days knew the war as the crime of all the
ages.
Ruth was the next, and he helped her too; while the authorities turned
skilled workers down, and threw cold water in buckets on the men and
women standing shoulder to shoulder ready for any sacrifice in those
first days, old Raphael Goltz, knowing the value of Ruth’s cooking and
physical soundness, found her the money to offer her services free—old
Raphael Goltz, who through so many years had been so incredibly mean. He
disliked dogs cordially, yet he undertook the care of Sarah and Selina
in her absence. To Ruth’s further amazement, he also gave her
introductions of value to leading authorities in Paris who welcomed her
gladly and sent her forthwith into an estaminet behind the lines in
Northern France.
Something of her childhood in the Orphanage, and of the long years with
Raphael Goltz, Ruth told North, as they sat together in the warmth and
stillness of the May evening, but of the years in France she spoke
little. She had seen unspeakable things there. The memory of them was
almost unbearable. They were things she held away from thought.
Beautiful and wonderful things there were too, belonging to those years.
But they were still more impossible to speak of. She carried the mark of
them both, the terrible and the beautiful, in her steady eyes. Besides,
some one else, who was interested too, who was surely—the consciousness
was not to be ignored—interested too, knew all about that. And suddenly
she realized how that common knowledge of life and death at their height
was also a bond, as well as love of Thorpe, and she paused in her tale,
and sat very still.
“And then?” said North, after a while.
“I was out there for two years, without coming home, the first time.
There seemed nothing for me to come home for, and I didn’t want to
leave. There was always so much to be done, and one felt of use. It was
selfish of me really, but I never realized somehow that Raphael Goltz
cared. Then I had bad news from him. You remember the time when the mobs
wrecked the shops with German names? Well, his was one of them. So I got
leave and came back to him. It was very sad. The old shop was broken to
pieces, his books had been thrown into the street and many burnt, and
the piano, his beautiful piano, smashed past all repair. I found him up
in the back attic, with Sarah and Selina. He had saved them for me
somehow. He cried when I came. He was very old, you see, and he had felt
the war as much as any of us.”
Her eyes were full of tears, and she stopped for a moment to steady her
voice. “He bore no malice, and three days after I got back he died,
babbling the old cry, ‘We ought to have been friends.’
“It was always that, ‘We ought to have been friends,’ and once he said,
‘Together we could have regenerated the world.’ He left everything he
had to me, over £60,000. It is to him I owe Thorpe.” Her eyes shone
through the tears in them.
“Come! and let me show you,” she said, and so almost seemed to help him
out of his chair, and then, still holding his hand, led him through the
door behind them, along the passage into the front hall. Here he
stopped, and undoubtedly but for the compelling hand would have gone no
farther. But the soft firm grip held, and something with it, some force
outside both of them, drew him after her into the room that once was his
friend’s. A spacious friendly room, with wide windows looking south and
west, and filled just now with the light of a cloudless sunset.
And the dreaded moment held nothing to fear. Nothing was changed.
Nothing was spoilt. He had expected something, which to him,
unreasonably perhaps, but uncontrollably, would have seemed like
sacrilege; instead he found it was sanctuary. Sanctuary for that, to
him, annihilated personality which had been the companion of the best
years of his life.
Dick might have come back at any moment and found his room waiting for
him, as it had waited on many a spring evening just like this. His
capacious armchair was still by the window. The big untidy
writing-table, with its many drawers and pigeon-holes, in its place. The
piano where he used to sit and strum odd bits of music by ear.
“But it is all just the same,” he said, standing like a man in a dream
when Ruth dropped his hand inside the threshold.
“I was offered the furniture with the house,” she said, “and when I saw
this room I felt I wanted it just as it is. Before that I had all sorts
of ideas in my head as to how I would furnish! But this appealed to me.
There is an air of space and comfort and peace about the room that I
could not bear to disturb. And now I am very glad, because I feel he is
pleased. Of course, his more personal things have gone, and I have added
a few things of my own. Look, this is what I brought you to see.”
She pointed towards the west window, where stood an exquisitely carved
and gilded table of foreign workmanship which was new to him, and on it
burnt a burnished bronze lamp, its flame clear and bright even in the
fierce glow of the setting sun. Beside the lamp stood a glass vase, very
beautiful in shape and clarity, filled with white pinks.
North crossed the room and examined the lamp with interest.
“What does it mean?” he asked.
“It is a custom of the orthodox Jews. When anyone belonging to them
dies, they keep a lamp burning for a year. The flame is never allowed to
go out. It is a symbol. A symbol of the Life Eternal. All the years of
the war Raphael Goltz kept this lamp burning for the men who went West.
You see it is in the west window. And now I keep it burning for him. You
don’t think _he_ would mind, although my poor old master _was_ a German
Jew, racially?”
She looked up at North anxiously, as they stood side by side before the
lamp.
“Not Dick—certainly not Dick!” said North. Ruth heaved a sigh of relief.
“You see, I don’t really know anything about him except what I feel
about the farm, and I did want the lamp here.”
“No, Dick wouldn’t mind. But you are mad, you know, quite mad!”
For all that his eyes were very kindly as he looked down at her.
“I expect it is being so much alone,” she said tranquilly, stooping to
smell the pinks.
“Was Goltz an orthodox Jew then?” asked North.
“Oh no, very far from it. He wasn’t anything in the least orthodox. If
you could have known him!” Ruth laughed a little. “But he had some queer
religion of his own. He believed in Beauty, and that it was a revelation
of something very great and wonderful, beyond the wildest dreams of a
crassly ignorant and blind humanity. That glass vase was his. Have you
noticed the wonderful shape of it? And look now with the light shining
through. Do you think it is a shame to put flowers in it? But their
scent is the incense on the altar.”
“Oh, that’s the idea, is it?” said North. He spoke very gently, as one
would to a child showing you its treasures.
“This place is full of altars,” said Ruth, her eyes looking west. “Do
you know the drive in the little spinney? All one broad blue path of
hyacinths, and white may trees on either side.”
“Oh, that’s the idea, is it?” said North. He in his voice—“you mean
Dick’s ‘Pathway to Heaven’!”
“Did he call it that?”
“He said it was so blue it must be.”
“Yes, and it seems to vanish into space between the trees.”
“As I must,” said North. “I have paid you an unwarrantable visitation,
and I shall only just get home now before lighting-up time.”
“You will come again?” said Ruth as they went down the garden. “I want
to show you the site for my cottages. I _think_ it is the right one.”
“Cottages?”
“Yes, I am going to build three. My lawyer tells me it is economically
an unsound investment. My conscience tells me it has got to be done, if
I am to enjoy Thorpe properly. Two couples are waiting to be married
until the cottages are ready, and one man is working here and his wife
living in London because there is no possible place for them. I am
giving him a room here at present.”
North raised his eyebrows.
“Do you take in anybody promiscuously who comes along?” he asked.
“Well, this man went through four years of the war. Was a sergeant, and
holds the Mons Medal and the D.C.M. He is a painter by trade, and worked
for Baxter, who is putting up a billiard-room and a garage at Mentmore
Court.”
“Mentmore Court?” North looked across at the big white house on the
hill. “Why, there is a billiard-room and a garage there already.”
“I believe they are turning the existing billiard-room into a winter
garden, or something of that sort. And they have six cars, so the
present garage is not big enough.”
“Your cottages will probably be of more use to the country,” said North.
“I hear he made his money in leather, and his name is Pithey. Do you
know him?”
“Well, he took a ‘fancy’ to my Shorthorns, and walked in last week to
ask if I’d sell. Price was no object. He fancied them. Then he took a
fancy to some of the furniture and offered to buy that, and finally he
said if I was open to take ‘a profit on my deal’ over the farm, he was
prepared to go to a fancy price for it.”
North stopped and looked at her.
“Are you making it up?” he asked.
Ruth bubbled over into an irrepressible laugh.
“When he went away he told me not to worry. Mrs. Pithey _was_ coming to
call, but she had been so busy, and now those lazy dogs of workmen
couldn’t be out of the place for another month at least.”
“And my wife is worrying me to call on him,” groaned North. “Halloo,
where is Larry?”
“He was there a moment ago; I saw him just before you stopped, but I
never saw him jump out.”
North called in vain until he gave a peculiar whistle, which brought a
plainly reluctant Larry to view.
“He doesn’t want to come with me,” said North. “Get in, Larry.” And
Larry obeyed the peremptory command, while Ruth checked an impulse to
suggest that she should keep him.
As the car started slowly up the hill he turned, laying his black and
tan velvet muzzle on the back of the hood. Long after they had vanished,
Ruth was haunted by the wistful amber eyes looking at her from a cloud
of dust.
Slowly she went up home through the scented evening. It had been a
wonderful day. And she had made a friend. It was not such an event as it
would have been before she went to France, but it was sufficiently
uplifting even now. She sang to herself as she went. And then quite
suddenly she thought of the man in the brown suit. “I wonder who he was,
and where he disappeared to,” she said to herself, as she answered Miss
McCox’s injured summons to supper.