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.