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.