THE MAN WHO KEPT HIS FORM
In these days every landmark is like Alice’s flamingo-croquet-mallet—when you refer to it, the creature curls up into an interrogation mark and looks into your face; and every cornerstone resembles her hedgehog-croquet-ball, which, just before you can use it, gets up and walks away. The old flavours of life are out of fashion, the old scents considered stale; ‘gentleman’ is a word to sneer at, and ‘form’ a sign of idiocy.
And yet there are families in the British Isles in which gentility has persisted for hundreds of years, and though you may think me old-fashioned and romantic, I am convinced that such gentlefolk often have a certain quality, a kind of inner pluck bred into them, which is not to be despised at all.
This is why I tell you my recollections of Miles Ruding.
My first sight of him—if a new boy may look at a monitor—was on my rather wretched second day at a Public School. The three other pups who occupied an attic with me had gone out, and I was ruefully considering whether I had a right to any wall-space on which to hang two small oleographs depicting very scarlet horsemen on very bay horses, jumping very brown hedges, which my mother had bought me, thinking they might be suitable to the manly taste for which Public Schools are celebrated. I had taken them out of my playbox, together with the photographs of my parents and eldest sister, and spread them all on the window-seat. I was gazing at the little show lugubriously when the door was opened by a boy in ‘tails.’
“Hallo!” he said. “You new?”
“Yes,” I answered in a mouselike voice.
“I’m Ruding. Head of the House. You get an allowance of two bob weekly when it’s not stopped. You’ll see the fagging lists on the board. You don’t get any fagging first fortnight. What’s your name?”
“Bartlet.”
“Oh, ah!” He examined a piece of paper in his hand. “You’re one of mine. How are you getting on?”
“Pretty well.”
“That’s all right.” He seemed about to withdraw, so I asked him hastily: “Please, am I allowed to hang these pictures?”
“Rather—any pictures you like. Let’s look at them!” He came forward. When his eyes fell on the array, he said abruptly, “Oh, sorry!” and, taking up the oleos, he turned his back on the photographs. A new boy is something of a psychologist, out of sheer fright, and when he said “Sorry!” because his eyes had fallen on the effigies of my people, I felt somehow that he couldn’t be a beast. “You got these at Tomkins’,” he said. “I had the same my first term. Not bad. I should put ’em up here.”
While he was holding them to the wall I took a ‘squint’ at him. He seemed to me of a fabulous height—about five feet ten, I suppose; thin and bolt upright. He had a stick-up collar—‘barmaids’ had not yet come in—but not a very high one, and his neck was rather long. His hair was peculiar, dark and crisp, with a reddish tinge; and his dark-grey eyes were small and deep in, his cheekbones rather high, his cheeks thin and touched with freckles. His nose, chin, and cheekbones all seemed a little large for his face as yet. If I may put it so, there was a sort of unfinished finish about him. But he looked straight, and had a nice smile.
“Well, young Bartlet,” he said handing me back the pictures, “buck up, and you’ll be all right.”
I put away my photographs, and hung the oleos. Ruding! The name was familiar. Among the marriages in my family pedigree, such as ‘daughter of Fitzherbert,’ ‘daughter of Tastborough,’ occurred the entry, ‘daughter of Ruding,’ some time before the Civil War. Daughter of Ruding! This demigod might be a far-off kinsman. But I felt I should never dare to tell him of the coincidence.
Miles Ruding was not brilliant, but pretty good at everything. He was not well dressed—you did not think of dress in connection with him either one way or the other. He was not exactly popular—being reserved, far from showy, and not rich—but he had no ‘side,’ and never either patronised or abused his juniors. He was not indulgent to himself or others, but he was very just; and, unlike many monitors, seemed to take no pleasure in ‘whopping.’ He never fell off in ‘trials’ at the end of a term, and was always playing as hard at the finish of a match as at the start. One would have said he had an exacting conscience, but he was certainly the last person to mention such a thing. He never showed his feelings, yet he never seemed trying to hide them, as I used always to be. He was greatly respected without seeming to care; an independent, self-dependent bird, who would have cut a greater dash if he hadn’t been so, as it were, uncreative. In all those two years I only had one at all intimate talk with him, which after all was perhaps above the average number, considering the difference in our ages. In my fifth term and Ruding’s last but one, there had been some disciplinary rumpus in the house, which had hurt the dignity of the captain of the football ‘torpid’ eleven—a big Irish boy who played back and was the mainstay of the side. It happened on the eve of our first house match and the sensation may be imagined when this important person refused to play; physically and spiritually sore, he declared for the part of Achilles and withdrew to his tent. The house rocked with pro and con. My sympathies, in common with nearly all below the second fifth, lay with Donelly against the sixth form. His defection had left me captain of the side, so that the question whether we could play at all depended on me. If I declared a sympathetic strike, the rest would follow. That evening, after long hours of ‘fronde’ with other rebellious spirits, I was alone and still in two minds, when Ruding came into my room. He leaned against the door, and said: “Well, Bartlet, you’re not going to rat?”
“I—I don’t think Donelly ought to have been—been whopped,” I stammered.
“That as may be,” he said, “but the house comes first. You know that.”
Torn between the loyalties, I was silent.
“Look here, young Bartlet,” he said suddenly, “it’ll be a disgrace to us all, and it hangs on you.”
“All right,” I said sulkily, “I’ll play.”
“Good chap!”
“But I don’t think Donelly ought to have been whopped,” I repeated inanely; “he’s—he’s too big.”
Ruding approached till he looked right down on me in my old ‘froust,’ as we called arm-chairs. “One of these days,” he said slowly, “you’ll be head of the house yourself. You’ll have to keep up the prestige of the sixth form. If you let great louts like Donelly cheek little weak six-formers with impunity,” (I remember how impressed I was by the word) “you’ll let the whole show down. My old governor runs a district in Bengal, about as big as Wales, entirely on prestige. He’s often talked to me about it. I hate whopping anybody, but I’d much rather whop a lout like Donelly than I would a little new chap. He’s a swine anyway for turning the house down because his back is sore!”
“It isn’t that,” I said, “it—it wasn’t just.”
“If it was unjust,” said Ruding, with what seems to me now extraordinary patience, “then the whole system’s wrong, and that’s a pretty big question, young Bartlet. Anyway, it’s not for me to decide. I’ve got to administer what is. Shake hands, and do your damndest to-morrow, won’t you?”
I put out my hand with a show of reluctance, though secretly won over.
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.