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?”