We got an awful hiding, but I can still hear Ruding’s voice yelling:
“Well played, Bartlet! Well pla-a-ayed!”
I have only one other school recollection of Miles Ruding which lets
any real light in on him. On the day he left for good I happened to
travel up to town in the same carriage. He sat looking through the
window back at the old hill, and I distinctly saw a tear run down his
cheek. He must have been conscious that I had remarked the phenomenon,
for he said suddenly:
“Damn! I’ve got a grit in my eye,” and began to pull the eyelid down in
a manner which did not deceive me in the least.
I then lost sight of him completely for several years. His people were
not well off, and he did not go up to the ’Varsity. He once said to me:
“My family’s beastly old, and beastly poor.”
It was during one of my Odysseys in connection with sport that I saw
him again. He was growing fruit on a ranch in Vancouver Island. Nothing
used to strike a young Englishman travelling in the Colonies more
than the difference between what he saw and what all printed matter
led him to expect. When I ran across Ruding in the club at Victoria
and he invited me to stay with him, I expected rows of fine trees
with large pears and apples hanging on them, a Colonial house with a
broad verandah, and Ruding in ducks, among rifles and fishing rods,
and spirited horses. What I found was a bare new wooden house, not
yet painted, in a clearing of the heavy forest. His fruit trees had
only just been planted, and he would be lucky if he got a crop within
three years. He wore, not white ducks, but blue jeans, and worked
about twelve hours a day, felling timber and clearing fresh ground. He
had one horse to ride and drive, and got off for a day’s shooting or
fishing about once a month. He had three Chinese boys working under
him, and lived nearly as sparingly as they. He had been out of England
eight years, and this was his second venture--the first in Southern
California had failed after three years of drought. He would be all
right for water here, he said; which seemed likely enough in a country
whose rainfall is superior to that of England.
“How the devil do you stand the loneliness?” I said.
“Oh! one gets used to it. Besides, this isn’t lonely. Good Lord, no!
You should see some places!”
Living this sort of life, he yet seemed exactly what he used to be--in
fact, he had kept his form. He didn’t precisely dress for dinner, but
he washed. He had English papers sent out to him, and read Victorian
poetry, and history natural and unnatural, in the evenings over his
pipe. He shaved every day, had his cold tub every morning, and treated
his Chinese boys just as he used to treat us new boys at school; so far
as I could tell, they seemed to have for him much the feelings we used
to have--a respect not amounting to fear, and a liking not quite rising
to affection.
“I couldn’t live here without a woman,” I said one evening.
He sighed. “I don’t want to mess myself up with anything short of a
wife; and I couldn’t ask a girl to marry me till the place is fit for
her. This fruit-growing’s always a gamble at first.”
“You’re an idealist,” I said.
He seemed to shrink, and it occurred to me suddenly that if there were
anything he hated, it would be a generalisation like that. But I was in
a teasing mood.
“You’re keeping up the prestige of the English gentleman.”
His teeth gritted on his pipe-stem. “I’m dashed if I’m keeping up
anything except my end; that’s quite enough.”
“And exactly the same thing,” I murmured.
He turned away. I felt he was much annoyed with me for trying
to introduce him to self-consciousness. And he was right! It’s
destructive; and his life held too many destructive elements--silence,
solitude, distance from home, and this daily mixing with members of an
Eastern race. I used to watch the faces of his Chinese boys--remote as
cats, wonderfully carved, and old, and self-sufficient. I appreciate
now how much of what was carved and old and self-sufficient Ruding
needed in himself to live year in, year out, alone among them, without
losing his form. All that week of my visit I looked with diabolical
curiosity for some sign of deterioration--of the coarsening, or
softening, which one felt ought naturally to come of such a life.
Honestly, I could not find a trace, save that he wouldn’t touch whisky,
as if he were afraid of it, and shied away at any mention of women.
“Aren’t you ever coming home?” I asked when I was taking leave.
“When I’ve made good here,” he said, “I shall come back and marry.”
“And then out again?”
“I expect so. I’ve got no money, you know.”
Four years later I happened to see the following in _The Times_:
“Ruding--Fuljambe.--At St. Thomas’s, Market Harborough, Miles Ruding,
of Bear Ranch, Vancouver Island, to Blanche, daughter of Charles
Fuljambe, J.P., Market Harborough.” So it seemed he _had_ made good!
But I wondered what ‘daughter of Fuljambe’ would make of it out there.
Well, I came across Ruding and his wife that very summer at Eastbourne,
where they were spending the butt end of their long honeymoon. She was
pleasant, pretty, vivacious--too vivacious I felt when I thought of
Bear Ranch; and Ruding himself, under the stimulus of his new venture,
was as nearly creative as I ever saw him. We dined and bathed, played
tennis and went riding on the Downs together. Daughter of Fuljambe was
quite ‘a sport’--though, indeed, in 1899 that word had hardly come into
use. I confess to wondering why, exactly, she had married my friend,
till she gave me the history of it one evening. It seems their families
were old neighbours, and when Ruding came back after having been away
in the New World for twelve years, he was something of a curiosity,
if not of a hero. He had been used to take her out hunting when she
was a small child, so that she had an old-time reverence for him. He
seemed, in his absence of small-talk and ‘side,’ superior to the
rattle-pated young men about her--here daughter of Fuljambe gave me a
sidelong glance--and one day he had done a thing which toppled her into
his arms. She was to go to a fancy dress ball one evening as a Chinese
lady. But in the morning a cat upset a bottle of ink over her dress
and reduced it to ruin. What was to be done? All the elaborate mask of
make-up and head-dressing, which she had rehearsed to such perfection,
sacrificed for want of a dress to wear it with! Ruding left that scene
of desolation possessed by his one great creative impulse. It seemed
that he had in London a Chinese lady’s dress which he had brought
home with him from San Francisco. No trains from Market Harborough
could possibly get him up to town and back in time, so he had promptly
commandeered the only neighbouring motor-car, driven it at a rate which
must have been fabulous in those days to a fast-train junction, got the
dress, sent daughter of Fuljambe a wire, returned at the same furious
pace, and appeared before her door with the dress at eight forty-five.
Daughter of Fuljambe received him in her dressing-gown, with hair
combed up and her face beautifully painted. Ruding said quietly: “Here
you are; it’s the genuine thing,” and disappeared before she had time
to thank him. The dress was superior to the one the cat had spoiled.
That night she accepted him. “Miles didn’t properly propose to me,” she
said; “I saw he couldn’t bear to, because of what he’d done, so I just
had to tell him not to keep his form so awfully. And here we are! He
_is_ a dear, isn’t he?”
In his dealings with her he certainly was, for she was a self-centred
little person.
They went off to Vancouver Island in September. The following January
I heard that he had joined a Yeomanry contingent and gone out to fight
the Boers. He left his wife in England with her people on his way. I
met her once or twice before he was invalided home with enteric. She
told me that she had opposed his going, till she had found out that it
was making him miserable. “And yet, you know,” she said, “he’s really
frightfully devoted to me.”
When he recovered they went back to Vancouver Island, where he found
his ranch so let down that he had to begin nearly all over again. I can
imagine what he went through with his dainty and exacting helpmate. She
came home in 1904 to get over it, and again I met her out hunting.
“Miles is too good for me,” she said the second day as we were jogging
home; “he’s got such fearful pluck. If only he’d kick his conscience
out of the window sometimes. Oh, Mr. Bartlet, I don’t want to go back
there, I really don’t! It’s simply deadly. But he says if he gives this
up he’ll be thirty-eight without a thing to show for it, and just have
to cadge round for a job, and he won’t do that; but I don’t believe I
can stand it much longer.”
I wrote to Ruding. His answer was dry and inexpressive: Heaven forbid
that he should drag his wife out to him again, but he would have to
stick it there for another two years; then, perhaps, he could sell and
buy a farm in England. To clear out now would be ruination. He missed
his wife awfully, but one must hoe one’s row, and he would rather she
stayed with her people than force herself to rough it out there with
him.
Then, of course, came that which a man like Ruding, with his loyalty
and his sense of form, is the last to imagine possible. Daughter of
Fuljambe met a young man in the Buffs or Greens or Blues, and after a
struggle, no doubt--for she was not a bad little sort--went off with
him. That happened early in 1906, just as he was beginning to see the
end of his troubles with Bear Ranch. I felt very sorry for him, yet
inclined to say: “My dear man, where was your imagination; couldn’t you
see this was bound to happen with ‘daughter of Fuljambe’ once she got
away from you?” And yet, poor devil, what could he have done?
He came home six thousand miles to give her a divorce. A ghoulish
curiosity took me into court. I never had more whole-hearted admiration
for Ruding than I had that day, watching him, in that pretentiously
crooked court among us tight-lipped, surly-minded lawyers, giving
his unemotional evidence. Straight, thin, lined and brown, with
grey already in his peculiar-coloured hair, his voice low, his eyes
unwavering, in all his lonely figure a sad, quiet protest--it was not
I only who was moved by the little speech he made to the Judge: “My
Lord, I would like to say that I have no bitter feelings; I think it
was my fault for asking a woman to share a rough, lonely life, so far
away.” It gave me a queer pleasure to see the little bow the Judge made
him, as if saying: ‘Sir, as one gentleman to another.’ I had meant to
get hold of him after the case, but when it came to the point I felt
it was the last thing he would want of anyone. He went straight back
the six thousand miles and sold his ranch. Cunningham, who used to be
in our house, and had a Government post in Esquimault, told me that
Ruding made himself quite unpopular over that sale. Some enterprising
gentleman, interested in real estate, had reported the discovery of
coal seams, which greatly enhanced the value of Bear Ranch and several
neighbouring properties. Ruding was offered a big sum. He took it, and
had already left the neighbourhood when the report about coal was duly
disproved. Ruding at once offered to cancel the price, and take the
agricultural value of the property. His offer was naturally accepted,
and the disgust of other owners who had sold on the original report may
be imagined. More wedded to the rights of property, they upheld the
principle ‘Caveat emptor,’ and justified themselves by calling Ruding
names. With his diminished proceeds he bought another ranch on the
mainland.
How he spent the next eight years I only vaguely know. I don’t think
he came home at all. Cunningham spoke of him as ‘Still the same
steady-going chap, awfully respected; but no one knows him very well.
He looks much as he did, except that he’s gone grey.’
Then, like a bolt from hell, came the Great War. I can imagine Ruding
almost glad. His imagination would not give him the big horror of the
thing; he would see it as the inevitable struggle, the long-expected
chance to show what he and his country were made of. And I must confess
that on the evidence he seems to have been made of even better stuff
than his country. He began by dyeing his hair. By dint of this and by
slurring the eight of his age so that it sounded like forty odd, he was
accepted, and, owing to his Transvaal experience, given a commission in
Kitchener’s Army. But he did not get out to France till early in 1916.
He was considered by his Colonel the best officer in the regiment for
training recruits, and his hair, of course, had soon gone grey again.
They said he chafed terribly at being kept at home. In the spring of
1916 he was mentioned in despatches, and that summer was badly gassed
on the Somme. I went to see him in hospital. He had grown a little grey
moustache, but otherwise seemed quite unchanged. I grasped at once that
he was one of those whose nerve--no matter what happened to him--would
see it through. One had the feeling that this would be so as a matter
of course, that he himself had not envisaged any other possibility.
He was so completely lost in the winning of the war, that his own
sensations seemed to pass him by. He had become as much of a soldier
as the best of those professionally unimaginative stoical creatures,
and, quite naturally, as if it were in his blood. He dwelt quietly,
without visible emotion, in that universal atmosphere of death. All was
in the day’s work, so long as the country emerged victorious; nor did
there seem the least doubt in his mind but that it would so emerge. A
part of me went with him all the way, but a part of me stared at him
in curiosity, surprise, admiration, and a sort of contempt, as at a
creature too single-hearted and uncomplicated.
I saw him several times in that hospital at Teignmouth, where he
recovered slowly.
One day I asked him point-blank whether one’s nerve was not bound to go
in time. He looked a little surprised and said rather coldly: “Not if
your heart’s in the right place.”
That was it to a T. His heart was so deeply rooted in exactly the right
place that nothing external could get at it. Whatever downed Ruding
would have to blow him up bodily--there was no detaching his heart
from the rest of him. And that’s what I mean by an inbred quality, the
inner pluck that you can bet on. I don’t say it’s not to be found in
the proletariat and ‘new’ people, but not in quite the same--shall we
say?--matter of course way. When those others have it, they’re proud of
it or conscious of it, or simply primitively virile and thick-skinned;
they don’t--like such as Ruding--regard not having it as ‘impossible,’
a sort of disgrace. If scientists could examine the nerves of men
like him, would they discern a faint difference in their colour or
texture--the result of generations of nourishment above the average
and of a traditional philosophy which for hundreds of years has held
fear to be _the_ cardinal offence? I wonder.
He went out again in 1917, and was out for the rest of the war.
He did nothing very startling or brilliant; but, as at school, he
was always on the ball, finishing as hard as when he started. At
the Armistice he was a Lieutenant-Colonel, and a Major when he was
gazetted out, at the age of fifty-three, with the various weaknesses
which gas and a prolonged strain leave in a man of that age, but no
pensionable disability. He went back to Vancouver. Anyone at all
familiar with fruit-growing knows it for a pursuit demanding the most
even and constant attention. When Ruding joined up he had perforce
left his ranch in the first hands which came along; and at that time,
with almost every rancher in like case, those hands were very poor
substitutes for the hands of an owner. He went back to a property
practically valueless. He was not in sufficient health to sit down
for another long struggle to pull it round, as after the Boer War,
so he sold it for a song and came home again, full of confidence
that, with his record, he would get a job. He found that his case was
that of thousands. They didn’t want him back in the Army. They were
awfully sorry, but they didn’t know what they could do for him. The
Governmental education and employment schemes, too, seemed all for
younger men. He sat down on the ‘song’ and the savings from his pay to
wait for some ship or other out of his fleet of applications to come
home. It did not come; his savings went. How did I know all this? I
will tell you.
One night last January I had occasion to take a cab from a restaurant
in Soho to my club in Pall Mall. It was wet, and I got in hastily.
I was sitting there comatose from my good dinner when I had a queer
feeling that I knew the back of the driver. It had--what shall I call
it?--a refined look. The man’s hair was grey; and I began trying to
recollect the profile I had glimpsed when bolting in. Suddenly with a
sort of horror the thought flashed through me: Miles Ruding!
It was!
When I got out and we looked each other in the face he smiled and my
lips quivered. “Old chap,” I said, “draw your cab up on that stand and
get in with me.”
When we were sitting together in his cab we lighted cigarettes and
didn’t speak for quite a minute, till I burst out:
“Look here! What does this mean?”
“Bread and butter.”
“Good God! And this is what the country----”
“Bartlet,” he said, through curiously set lips with a little fixed
smile about the corners, “cut out all that about the country. I prefer
this to any more cadging for a job; that’s all.”
Silent from shame, I broke out at last: “It’s the limit! What about the
Government schemes?”
“No go! All for younger men.”
“My dear chap!” was the only thing I could find to say.
“This isn’t a bad life in good weather,” he went on with that queer
smile; “I’ve still got gassy lungs.”
“Do you mean to say you contemplate going on with this?”
“Till something turns up; but I’m no good at asking for things,
Bartlet; I simply can’t do it.”
“What about your people?”
“Dead or broke.”
“Come and stay with me till your ship comes home.”
He squeezed my arm and shook his head. That’s what’s so queer about
gentility! If only I could have established a blood tie! Ruding would
have taken help or support from his kinsfolk--would have inherited
without a qualm from a second cousin that he’d never seen; but from
the rest of the world it would be charity. Sitting in that cab of his,
he told me, without bitterness, the tale which is that of hundreds
since the war. Ruding could not be pitied to his face, it would have
been impossible. And when he had finished I could only mutter:
“Well, I think it’s damnable, considering what the country owes you.”
He did not answer. Whatever his limitations Miles Ruding was bred to
keep his form.
I nearly shook his hand off when I left him, and I could see that he
disliked that excessive display of feeling. From my club doorway I saw
him resume his driver’s seat, the cigarette still between his lips, and
the lamplight shining on his lean profile. Very still he sat--symbol of
that lost cause, gentility.
1920.