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.