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.