Bowden leaned his weight against the wood—one knee crooked and then the other—in dogged stupefaction. He had begun imagining things, but not very much. No grass, no trees, where his son had been killed, no birds, no animals; what could it be like—all murky grey in the moonlight—and Ned’s face all grey! So he would never see Ned’s face any more! That colley Steer—that colley Steer! His dead son would never see and hear and smell his home again. Vicarious home-sickness for this native soil and scent and sound—this nest of his fathers from time beyond measuring—swept over Bowden. He thought of the old time when his wife was alive and Ned was born. His wife—why! she had brought him six, and out of the lot he had only ‘saved’ Ned, and he was a twin. He remembered how he had told the doctorthat he wasn’t to worry about the ‘maiden’ so long as he saved the boy. He had wanted the boy to come after him here; and now he was dead and dust! That colley Steer!
He heard the sound of wheels—a long way off, but coming steadily. Gripping his stick he stood up straight, staring down the road all barred with moonlight and the dusk. Closer came the rumble, the clop-clop of hoofs, till the shape of horse and cart came out of the darkness into a bright patch. Steer’s right enough! Bowden opened his wicket gate and waited. The cart came slowly; Bowden saw that the mare was lame, and Steer was leading her. He lurched a yard out from the gate.
“’Ere,” he said, “I want to speak to yu. Come in ’ere!”
The moonlight fell on Steer’s thin bearded face.
“What’s that?” he answered.
Bowden turned towards the gate.
“Hitch the mare up; I want to settle my account.”
He saw Steer stand quite still as if debating, then pass the reins over the gate. His voice came sharp and firm:
“Have you got the money, then?”
“Ah!” said Bowden, and drew back under thetrees. He saw Steer coming cautiously—the colley—with a stick in his hand. He raised his own.
“That’s for Ned,” he said and struck with all his might.
The blow fell short a little; Steer staggered back, raising his stick.
He struck again, but the sticks clashed, and dropping his own, Bowden lurched at his enemy’s throat. He had twice Steer’s strength and bulk; half his lean quickness and sobriety. They swayed between the beech trunks, now in shadow, now in moonlight which made their faces livid, and showed the expression in their eyes, of men out to kill. They struggled chest against chest, striving to throw each other; with short hard gruntings. They reeled against a trunk, staggered and unclinched, and stood, breathing hard, glaring at each other. All those months of hatred looked out of their eyes, and their hands twitched convulsively. Suddenly Steer went on his knees and gripping Bowden’s legs strained at them, till the heavy unsteady bulk pitched forward and fell over Steer’s back with stunning weight. They rolled on the grass then, all mixed up, till they came apart, and sat facing each other, dazed—Bowden from the drink shaken up within him, Steer from the weight which had pitched upon his spine. They sat as if each knew there was nohurry and they were there to finish this; watching each other, bent a little forward, their legs stuck out in the moonlight, their mouths open, breathing in hard gasps, ridiculous—to each other! And suddenly the church bell began to toll. Its measured sound at first reached only the surface of Bowden’s muddled brain, dully devising the next attack; then slid into the chambers of his consciousness. Tolling? Tolling? For whom? His hands fell by his sides. Impulse and inhibition, action and superstition, revenge and mourning gripped each other and rolled about within him. A long minute passed. The bell tolled on. A whinny came from Steer’s lame mare outside the gate. Suddenly Bowden staggered up, turned his back on his enemy, and, lurching in the moonlight, walked down the field for home. The clover among the wild grasses smelled sweet; he heard the sound of wheels—Steer had started again! Let him go! ’Twasn’t no use—’twouldn’ bring Ned back! He reached the yard door and stood leaning against it. Cold streaming moonlight filled the air, covered the fields; the pollarded aspens shivered above him; on the low rock-wall the striped roses were all strangely coloured; and a moth went by brushing his cheek.
Bowden lowered his head, as if butting at the beauty of the night. The bell had ceased to toll—nosound now but the shiver of the aspens, and the murmur of a stream! ’Twas monstrous peaceful—surely!
And in Bowden something went out. He had not the heart to hate.
1921.
In these days every landmark is like Alice’s flamingo-croquet-mallet—when you refer to it, the creature curls up into an interrogation mark and looks into your face; and every cornerstone resembles her hedgehog-croquet-ball, which, just before you can use it, gets up and walks away. The old flavours of life are out of fashion, the old scents considered stale; ‘gentleman’ is a word to sneer at, and ‘form’ a sign of idiocy.
And yet there are families in the British Isles in which gentility has persisted for hundreds of years, and though you may think me old-fashioned and romantic, I am convinced that such gentlefolk often have a certain quality, a kind of inner pluck bred into them, which is not to be despised at all.
This is why I tell you my recollections of Miles Ruding.
My first sight of him—if a new boy may look at a monitor—was on my rather wretched second day at a Public School. The three other pups who occupied an attic with me had gone out, and I was ruefully considering whether I had a right to any wall-space on which to hang two small oleographsdepicting very scarlet horsemen on very bay horses, jumping very brown hedges, which my mother had bought me, thinking they might be suitable to the manly taste for which Public Schools are celebrated. I had taken them out of my playbox, together with the photographs of my parents and eldest sister, and spread them all on the window-seat. I was gazing at the little show lugubriously when the door was opened by a boy in ‘tails.’
“Hallo!” he said. “You new?”
“Yes,” I answered in a mouselike voice.
“I’m Ruding. Head of the House. You get an allowance of two bob weekly when it’s not stopped. You’ll see the fagging lists on the board. You don’t get any fagging first fortnight. What’s your name?”
“Bartlet.”
“Oh, ah!” He examined a piece of paper in his hand. “You’re one of mine. How are you getting on?”
“Pretty well.”
“That’s all right.” He seemed about to withdraw, so I asked him hastily: “Please, am I allowed to hang these pictures?”
“Rather—any pictures you like. Let’s look at them!” He came forward. When his eyes fell on the array, he said abruptly, “Oh, sorry!” and,taking up the oleos, he turned his back on the photographs. A new boy is something of a psychologist, out of sheer fright, and when he said “Sorry!” because his eyes had fallen on the effigies of my people, I felt somehow that he couldn’t be a beast. “You got these at Tomkins’,” he said. “I had the same my first term. Not bad. I should put ’em up here.”
While he was holding them to the wall I took a ‘squint’ at him. He seemed to me of a fabulous height—about five feet ten, I suppose; thin and bolt upright. He had a stick-up collar—‘barmaids’ had not yet come in—but not a very high one, and his neck was rather long. His hair was peculiar, dark and crisp, with a reddish tinge; and his dark-grey eyes were small and deep in, his cheekbones rather high, his cheeks thin and touched with freckles. His nose, chin, and cheekbones all seemed a little large for his face as yet. If I may put it so, there was a sort of unfinished finish about him. But he looked straight, and had a nice smile.
“Well, young Bartlet,” he said handing me back the pictures, “buck up, and you’ll be all right.”
I put away my photographs, and hung the oleos. Ruding! The name was familiar. Among the marriages in my family pedigree, such as‘daughter of Fitzherbert,’ ‘daughter of Tastborough,’ occurred the entry, ‘daughter of Ruding,’ some time before the Civil War. Daughter of Ruding! This demigod might be a far-off kinsman. But I felt I should never dare to tell him of the coincidence.
Miles Ruding was not brilliant, but pretty good at everything. He was not well dressed—you did not think of dress in connection with him either one way or the other. He was not exactly popular—being reserved, far from showy, and not rich—but he had no ‘side,’ and never either patronised or abused his juniors. He was not indulgent to himself or others, but he was very just; and, unlike many monitors, seemed to take no pleasure in ‘whopping.’ He never fell off in ‘trials’ at the end of a term, and was always playing as hard at the finish of a match as at the start. One would have said he had an exacting conscience, but he was certainly the last person to mention such a thing. He never showed his feelings, yet he never seemed trying to hide them, as I used always to be. He was greatly respected without seeming to care; an independent, self-dependent bird, who would have cut a greater dash if he hadn’t been so, as it were, uncreative. In all those two years I only had one at all intimate talk with him, which after all wasperhaps above the average number, considering the difference in our ages. In my fifth term and Ruding’s last but one, there had been some disciplinary rumpus in the house, which had hurt the dignity of the captain of the football ‘torpid’ eleven—a big Irish boy who played back and was the mainstay of the side. It happened on the eve of our first house match and the sensation may be imagined when this important person refused to play; physically and spiritually sore, he declared for the part of Achilles and withdrew to his tent. The house rocked with pro and con. My sympathies, in common with nearly all below the second fifth, lay with Donelly against the sixth form. His defection had left me captain of the side, so that the question whether we could play at all depended on me. If I declared a sympathetic strike, the rest would follow. That evening, after long hours of ‘fronde’ with other rebellious spirits, I was alone and still in two minds, when Ruding came into my room. He leaned against the door, and said: “Well, Bartlet,you’renot going to rat?”
“I—I don’t think Donelly ought to have been—been whopped,” I stammered.
“That as may be,” he said, “but the house comes first. You know that.”
Torn between the loyalties, I was silent.
“Look here, young Bartlet,” he said suddenly, “it’ll be a disgrace to us all, and it hangs on you.”
“All right,” I said sulkily, “I’ll play.”
“Good chap!”
“But I don’t think Donelly ought to have been whopped,” I repeated inanely; “he’s—he’s too big.”
Ruding approached till he looked right down on me in my old ‘froust,’ as we called arm-chairs. “One of these days,” he said slowly, “you’ll be head of the house yourself. You’ll have to keep up the prestige of the sixth form. If you let great louts like Donelly cheek little weak six-formers with impunity,” (I remember how impressed I was by the word) “you’ll let the whole show down. My old governor runs a district in Bengal, about as big as Wales, entirely on prestige. He’s often talked to me about it. I hate whopping anybody, but I’d much rather whop a lout like Donelly than I would a little new chap. He’s a swine anyway for turning the house down because his back is sore!”
“It isn’t that,” I said, “it—it wasn’t just.”
“If it was unjust,” said Ruding, with what seems to me now extraordinary patience, “then the whole system’s wrong, and that’s a pretty big question, young Bartlet. Anyway, it’s not for meto decide. I’ve got to administer what is. Shake hands, and do your damndest to-morrow, won’t you?”
I put out my hand with a show of reluctance, though secretly won over.
We got an awful hiding, but I can still hear Ruding’s voice yelling: “Well played, Bartlet! Well pla-a-ayed!”
I have only one other school recollection of Miles Ruding which lets any real light in on him. On the day he left for good I happened to travel up to town in the same carriage. He sat looking through the window back at the old hill, and I distinctly saw a tear run down his cheek. He must have been conscious that I had remarked the phenomenon, for he said suddenly:
“Damn! I’ve got a grit in my eye,” and began to pull the eyelid down in a manner which did not deceive me in the least.
I then lost sight of him completely for several years. His people were not well off, and he did not go up to the ’Varsity. He once said to me: “My family’s beastly old, and beastly poor.”
It was during one of my Odysseys in connection with sport that I saw him again. He was growing fruit on a ranch in Vancouver Island. Nothing used to strike a young Englishman travelling in theColonies more than the difference between what he saw and what all printed matter led him to expect. When I ran across Ruding in the club at Victoria and he invited me to stay with him, I expected rows of fine trees with large pears and apples hanging on them, a Colonial house with a broad verandah, and Ruding in ducks, among rifles and fishing rods, and spirited horses. What I found was a bare new wooden house, not yet painted, in a clearing of the heavy forest. His fruit trees had only just been planted, and he would be lucky if he got a crop within three years. He wore, not white ducks, but blue jeans, and worked about twelve hours a day, felling timber and clearing fresh ground. He had one horse to ride and drive, and got off for a day’s shooting or fishing about once a month. He had three Chinese boys working under him, and lived nearly as sparingly as they. He had been out of England eight years, and this was his second venture—the first in Southern California had failed after three years of drought. He would be all right for water here, he said; which seemed likely enough in a country whose rainfall is superior to that of England.
“How the devil do you stand the loneliness?” I said.
“Oh! one gets used to it. Besides, this isn’tlonely. Good Lord, no! You should see some places!”
Living this sort of life, he yet seemed exactly what he used to be—in fact, he had kept his form. He didn’t precisely dress for dinner, but he washed. He had English papers sent out to him, and read Victorian poetry, and history natural and unnatural, in the evenings over his pipe. He shaved every day, had his cold tub every morning, and treated his Chinese boys just as he used to treat us new boys at school; so far as I could tell, they seemed to have for him much the feelings we used to have—a respect not amounting to fear, and a liking not quite rising to affection.
“I couldn’t live here without a woman,” I said one evening.
He sighed. “I don’t want to mess myself up with anything short of a wife; and I couldn’t ask a girl to marry me till the place is fit for her. This fruit-growing’s always a gamble at first.”
“You’re an idealist,” I said.
He seemed to shrink, and it occurred to me suddenly that if there were anything he hated, it would be a generalisation like that. But I was in a teasing mood.
“You’re keeping up the prestige of the English gentleman.”
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 inThe 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 hehadmade 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 hadtime 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! Heisa dear, isn’t he?”
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 suchfearful 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 wasbound 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, interestedin 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 betterstuff 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 didthere 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.
One day I asked him point-blank whether one’s nerve was not bound to go in time. He looked a little surprised and said rather coldly: “Not if your heart’s in the right place.”
That was it to a T. His heart was so deeply rooted in exactly the right place that nothing external could get at it. Whatever downed Ruding would have to blow him up bodily—there was no detaching his heart from the rest of him. And that’s what I mean by an inbred quality, the inner pluck that you can bet on. I don’t say it’s not to be found in the proletariat and ‘new’ people, but not in quite the same—shall we say?—matter of course way. When those others have it, they’re proud of it or conscious of it, or simply primitively virile and thick-skinned; they don’t—like such as Ruding—regard not having it as ‘impossible,’ a sort of disgrace. If scientists could examine the nerves of men like him, would they discern a faint difference in their colour or texture—the result ofgenerations of nourishment above the average and of a traditional philosophy which for hundreds of years has held fear to bethecardinal offence? I wonder.
He went out again in 1917, and was out for the rest of the war. He did nothing very startling or brilliant; but, as at school, he was always on the ball, finishing as hard as when he started. At the Armistice he was a Lieutenant-Colonel, and a Major when he was gazetted out, at the age of fifty-three, with the various weaknesses which gas and a prolonged strain leave in a man of that age, but no pensionable disability. He went back to Vancouver. Anyone at all familiar with fruit-growing knows it for a pursuit demanding the most even and constant attention. When Ruding joined up he had perforce left his ranch in the first hands which came along; and at that time, with almost every rancher in like case, those hands were very poor substitutes for the hands of an owner. He went back to a property practically valueless. He was not in sufficient health to sit down for another long struggle to pull it round, as after the Boer War, so he sold it for a song and came home again, full of confidence that, with his record, he would get a job. He found that his case was that of thousands. They didn’t want him back in the Army.They were awfully sorry, but they didn’t know what they could do for him. The Governmental education and employment schemes, too, seemed all for younger men. He sat down on the ‘song’ and the savings from his pay to wait for some ship or other out of his fleet of applications to come home. It did not come; his savings went. How did I know all this? I will tell you.
One night last January I had occasion to take a cab from a restaurant in Soho to my club in Pall Mall. It was wet, and I got in hastily. I was sitting there comatose from my good dinner when I had a queer feeling that I knew the back of the driver. It had—what shall I call it?—a refined look. The man’s hair was grey; and I began trying to recollect the profile I had glimpsed when bolting in. Suddenly with a sort of horror the thought flashed through me: Miles Ruding!
It was!
When I got out and we looked each other in the face he smiled and my lips quivered. “Old chap,” I said, “draw your cab up on that stand and get in with me.”
When we were sitting together in his cab we lighted cigarettes and didn’t speak for quite a minute, till I burst out:
“Look here! What does this mean?”
“Bread and butter.”
“Good God! And this is what the country——”
“Bartlet,” he said, through curiously set lips with a little fixed smile about the corners, “cut out all that about the country. I prefer this to any more cadging for a job; that’s all.”
Silent from shame, I broke out at last: “It’s the limit! What about the Government schemes?”
“No go! All for younger men.”
“My dear chap!” was the only thing I could find to say.
“This isn’t a bad life in good weather,” he went on with that queer smile; “I’ve still got gassy lungs.”
“Do you mean to say you contemplate going on with this?”
“Till something turns up; but I’m no good at asking for things, Bartlet; I simply can’t do it.”
“What about your people?”
“Dead or broke.”
“Come and stay with me till your ship comes home.”
He squeezed my arm and shook his head. That’s what’s so queer about gentility! If only I could have established a blood tie! Ruding would have taken help or support from his kinsfolk—would have inherited without a qualm from a secondcousin that he’d never seen; but from the rest of the world it would be charity. Sitting in that cab of his, he told me, without bitterness, the tale which is that of hundreds since the war. Ruding could not be pitied to his face, it would have been impossible. And when he had finished I could only mutter:
“Well, I think it’s damnable, considering what the country owes you.”
He did not answer. Whatever his limitations Miles Ruding was bred to keep his form.
I nearly shook his hand off when I left him, and I could see that he disliked that excessive display of feeling. From my club doorway I saw him resume his driver’s seat, the cigarette still between his lips, and the lamplight shining on his lean profile. Very still he sat—symbol of that lost cause, gentility.
1920.
Rupert K. Vaness remains freshly in my mind because he was so fine and large, and because he summed up in his person and behaviour a philosophy which, budding before the war, hibernated during that distressing epoch, and is now again in bloom.
He was a New Yorker addicted to Italy. One often puzzled over the composition of his blood. From his appearance it was rich; and his name fortified the conclusion. What the K. stood for, however, I never learned; the three possibilities were equally intriguing. Had he a strain of Highlander with Kenneth or Keith; a drop of German or Scandinavian with Kurt or Knut; a blend of Syrian or Armenian with Khalil or Kassim? The blue in his fine eyes seemed to preclude the last, but there was an encouraging curve in his nostrils and a raven gleam in his auburn hair, which, by the way, was beginning to grizzle and recede when I knew him. The flesh of his face, too, had sometimes a tired and pouchy appearance, and his tall body looked a trifle rebellious within his extremelywell-cut clothes—but, after all, he was fifty-five. You felt that Vaness was a philosopher, yet he never bored you with his views, and was content to let you grasp his moving principle gradually through watching what he ate, drank, smoked, wore, and how he encircled himself with the beautiful things and people of this life. Presumably he was rich, for one was never conscious of money in his presence. Life moved round him with a certain noiseless ease or stood still at a perfect temperature like the air in a conservatory round a choice blossom which a draught might shrivel.
This image of a flower in relation to Rupert K. Vaness pleases me because of that little incident in Magnolia Gardens, near Charleston, South Carolina.
Vaness was the sort of man of whom one could never say with safety whether he was revolving round a beautiful young woman or whether the beautiful young woman was revolving round him. His looks, his wealth, his taste, his reputation, invested him with a certain sun-like quality; but his age, the recession of his locks, and the advancement of his waist were beginning to dim his lustre; so that whether he was moth or candle was becoming a moot point. It was moot to me watching him and Miss Sabine Monroy at Charleston throughoutthe month of March. The casual observer would have said that she was ‘playing him up’ as a young poet of my acquaintance puts it; but I was not casual. For me Vaness had the attraction of a theorem, and I was looking rather deeply into him and Miss Monroy. That girl had charm. She came, I think, from Baltimore, with a strain in her, they said, of old Southern Creole blood. Tall and what is known as willowy, with dark chestnut hair, very broad dark eyebrows, very soft quick eyes, and a pretty mouth—when she did not accentuate it too much with lip-salve—she had more sheer quiet vitality than any girl I ever saw. It was delightful to watch her dance, ride, play tennis. She laughed with her eyes; she talked with a savouring vivacity. She never seemed tired or bored. She was—in one hackneyed word—‘attractive.’ And Vaness, the connoisseur, was quite obviously attracted. With professional admirers of beauty who can tell whether they definitely design to add a pretty woman to their collection, or whether their dalliance is just matter of habit? But he stood and sat about her, he drove and rode, listened to music, and played cards with her; he did all but dance with her, and even at times trembled on the brink of that. And his eyes—those fine lustrous eyes of his—followed her about.
How she had remained unmarried at the age of twenty-six was a mystery till one reflected that with her power of enjoying life she could not yet have had the time. Her perfect physique was at full stretch for eighteen hours out of the twenty-four each day. Her sleep must have been like that of a baby. One figured her sinking into dreamless rest the moment her head touched pillow, and never stirring till she sprang up into her bath.
As I say, for me, Vaness, or rather his philosophy,erat demonstrandum. I was myself in some philosophic distress just then. The microbe of fatalism, already present in the brains of artists before the war, had been considerably enlarged by that depressing occurrence. Could a civilisation basing itself on the production of material advantages do anything but ensure the desire for more and more material advantages. Could it promote progress even of a material character except in countries whose resources were still much in excess of their populations? The war had seemed to me to show that mankind was too combative an animal ever to recognise that the good of all was the good of one. The coarse-fibred, pugnacious, and self-seeking would, I had become sure, always carry too many guns for the refined and kindly. In short, there was not enough altruism to go round—nothalf, not a hundredth part enough. The simple heroism of mankind, disclosed or rather accentuated by the war, seemed to afford no hope—it was so exploitable by the rhinoceri and tigers of high life. The march of science appeared on the whole to be carrying us backward, and I deeply suspected that there had been ages when the populations of this earth, though less numerous and comfortable, had been proportionately more healthy than they were at present. As for religion, I had never had the least faith in Providence rewarding the pitiable by giving them a future life of bliss; the theory seemed to me illogical, for even more pitiable in this life appeared to me the thick-skinned and successful, and these, as we know in the saying about the camel and the needle’s eye, are consigned wholesale to hell. Success, power, wealth—those aims of profiteers and premiers, pedagogues and pandemoniacs, of all, in fact, who could not see God in a dewdrop, hear Him in distant goat-bells, and scent Him in a pepper-tree—had always appeared to me akin to dry-rot. And yet every day one saw more distinctly that the holders of the ‘power’ philosophy were the hub of a universe which, with the approbation of the majority they represented, they were fast making uninhabitable. It did not even seem of any use to help one’sneighbours; all efforts at relief just gilded the pill and encouraged our stubbornly contentious leaders to plunge us all into fresh miseries. So I was searching right and left for something to believe in, willing to accept even Rupert K. Vaness and his basking philosophy. But, then, could a man bask his life right out? Could just looking at fine pictures, tasting rare fruits and wines, the mere listening to good music, the scent of azaleas and the best tobacco, above all the society of pretty women, keep salt in my bread, an ideal in my brain? Could they? That’s what I wanted to know.
Everyone who goes to Charleston in the spring, soon or late, visits Magnolia Gardens. A painter of flowers and trees myself, I specialise in gardens, and freely assert that none in the world is so beautiful as this. Even before the magnolias come out it consigns the Boboli at Florence, the Cinnamon Gardens of Colombo, Concepcion at Malaga, Versailles, Hampton Court, the Generaliffe at Granada, and La Mortola to the category of ‘also ran.’ Nothing so free, gracious, so lovely and wistful, nothing so richly coloured, yet so ghostlike, exists planted by the sons of men. It is a kind of paradise which has wandered down, a miraculously enchanted wilderness. Brilliant with azaleas, ormagnolia-pale, it centres round a pool of water overhung by tall trunks festooned with the grey Florida moss. Beyond anything I have ever seen it is other-worldly. And I went there day after day, drawn as one is drawn in youth by visions of the Ionian Sea, of the East, or the Pacific Isles. I used to sit paralysed by the absurdity of putting brush to canvas in front of that dream-pool. I wanted to paint of it a picture like that of the fountain, by Helleu, which hangs in the Luxembourg. But I knew I never should.
I was sitting there one sunny afternoon with my back to a clump of azaleas watching an old coloured gardener—so old that he had started life as an ‘owned’ negro they said, and certainly still retained the familiar suavity of the oldtime darkie—I was watching him prune the shrubs when I heard the voice of Rupert K. Vaness say, quite close: “There’s nothing for me but beauty, Miss Monroy.”
The two were evidently just behind my azalea clump, perhaps four yards away, yet as invisible as if in China.
“Beauty is a wide, wide word. Define it, Mr. Vaness.”
“An ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory—it stands before me.”
“Come now, that’s just a get-out. Is beauty of the flesh or of the spirit?”
“What is the spirit as you call it? I’m a Pagan.”
“Oh! So am I. But the Greeks were Pagans.”
“Well, spirit is only the refined side of sensual appreciations.”
“I wonder!”
“I have spent my life in finding that out.”
“Then, the feeling this garden rouses in me is purely sensuous?”
“Of course. If you were standing there blind and deaf, without the powers of scent and touch, where would your feeling be?”
“You are very discouraging, Mr. Vaness.”
“No, madam—I face facts. When I was a youngster I had plenty of fluffy aspiration towards I didn’t know what—I even used to write poetry.”
“Oh! Mr. Vaness, was it good?”
“It was not, and I very soon learned that a genuine sensation was worth all the uplift in the world.”
“What is going to happen when your senses strike work?”
“I shall sit in the sun and fade out.”
“I certainly do like your frankness.”
“You think me a cynic, of course; I am nothingso futile, Miss Sabine. A cynic is just a posing ass proud of his attitude. I see nothing to be proud of in my attitude, just as I see nothing to be proud of in the truths of existence.”
“Suppose you had been poor?”
“My senses would be lasting better than they are; and when they at last failed I should die quicker from want of food and warmth—that’s all.”
“Have you ever been in love, Mr. Vaness?”
“I am in love now.”
“And your love has no element of devotion, no finer side?”
“None. It wants.”
“I have never been in love. But, if I were, I think I should want to lose myself rather than to gain the other.”
“Would you? Sabine,I am in love with you.”
“Oh! Shall we walk on?”
I heard their footsteps and was alone again, with the old gardener lopping at his shrubs.
But what a perfect declaration of hedonism; how simple and how solid was this Vaness theory of existence! Almost Assyrian—worthy of Louis Quinze!
And just then the old negro came up.
“It’s pleasant settin’,” he said in his polite and hoarse half whisper; “dar ain’t no flies yet.”
“It’s perfect, Richard. This is the most beautiful spot in the world.”
“Sure,” he answered, softly drawling. “In de war time de Yanks nearly burn d’house heah. Sherman’s Yanks. Sure dey did, po’ful angry wi’ ole Massa dey was, ’cos he hid up d’ silver plate afore he went away. My ole father was de factotalum den. De Yanks took’m, suh; dey took’m; and de major he tell my fader to show’m whar de plate was. My ole fader he look at’m an’ say: ‘Wot yuh take me foh? Yuh take me for a sneakin’ nigger? No, suh, yuh do wot yuh like wid dis chile he ain’t goin’ to act no Judas. No, suh!’ And de Yankee major he put’m up against dat tall live-oak dar, an’ he say: ‘Yu darn ungrateful nigger. I’se come all dis way to set yuh free. Now, whar’s dat silver plate or I shoot yuh up, sure!’ ‘No, suh,’ says my fader, ‘shoot away. I’se never goin’ t’tell.’ So dey begin to shoot, and shot all roun’m to skeer’m up. I was a lil’ boy den, an’ I see my ole fader wid my own eyes, suh, standin’ thar’s bold’s Peter. No, suh, dey didn’t never get no word from him; he loved de folk heah; sure he did.”
The old man smiled; and in that beatific smile I saw not only his perennial pleasure in the well-known story, but the fact that he too would havestood there with the bullets raining round him sooner than betray the folk he loved.
“Fine story, Richard. But—very silly obstinate old man, your father, wasn’t he?”
He looked at me with a sort of startled anger, which slowly broadened into a grin; then broke into soft hoarse laughter.
“Oh! yes, suh, sure! Berry silly obstinacious ole man. Yes, suh, indeed!” And he went off cackling to himself.
He had only just gone when I heard footsteps again behind my azalea clump and Miss Monroy’s voice:
“Your philosophy is that of faun and nymph. But can you play the part?”
“Only let me try.” Those words had such a fevered ring that in imagination I could see Vaness all flushed, his fine eyes shining, his well-kept hands trembling, his lips a little protruded.
There came a laugh, high, gay, sweet.
“Very well then; catch me!” I heard a swish of skirt against the shrubs, the sounds of flight; an astonished gasp from Vaness, and the heavy thud thud of his feet following on the path through the azalea maze. I hoped fervently that they would not suddenly come running past and see me sitting there. My straining ears caught another laugh faroff, a panting sound, a muttered oath, a far-away coo-ee! And then, staggering, winded, pale with heat and with vexation, Vaness appeared, caught sight of me and stood a moment—baff! Sweat was running down his face, his hand was clutching at his side, his stomach heaved—a hunter beaten and undignified. He muttered, turned abruptly on his heel, and left me staring at where his fastidious dandyism and all that it stood for had so abruptly come undone.
I know not how he and Miss Monroy got home to Charleston; not in the same car, I guess. As for me, I travelled deep in thought, conscious of having witnessed something rather tragic, not looking forward to my next encounter with Vaness.
He was not at dinner, but the girl was—radiant as ever; and though I was glad she had not been caught I was almost angry at the signal triumph of her youth. She wore a black dress with a red flower in her hair and another at her breast, and had never looked so vital and so pretty. Instead of dallying with my cigar beside cool waters in the lounge of the hotel I strolled out afterwards on the Battery and sat down beside the statue of a tutelary personage. A lovely evening: from some tree or shrub close by emerged an adorable faint fragrance, and in the white electric light the acaciafoliage was patterned out against a thrilling blue sky. If there were no fireflies abroad there should have been. A night for hedonists, indeed!
And suddenly there came before me two freaks of vision—Vaness’s well-dressed person, panting, pale, perplexed; and beside him the old darkie’s father, bound to the live-oak, with the bullets whistling past and his face transfigured. There they stood alongside—the creed of pleasure, which depended for fulfilment on its waist measurement; and the creed of love devoted unto death!
‘Aha!’ I thought, ‘which of the two laughslast?’
And just then I saw Vaness himself beneath a lamp; cigar in mouth and cape flung back so that its silk lining shone. Pale and heavy, in the cruel white light, his face had a bitter look. And I was sorry—very sorry, at that moment, for Rupert K. Vaness.
1920.
Sir Arthur Hirries, Baronet, of Hirriehugh, in a northern county, came to the decision to sell his timber, in that state of mind—common during the war—which may be called patrio-profiteering. Like newspaper proprietors, writers on strategy, shipbuilders, owners of factories, makers of arms and the rest of the working classes at large, his mood was: ‘Let me serve my country, and if thereby my profits are increased, let me put up with it, and invest in National Bonds.’
With an encumbered estate and some of the best coverts in that northern county, it had not become practical politics to sell his timber till the Government wanted it at all costs. To let his shooting had been more profitable, until now, when a patriotic action and a stroke of business had become synonymous. A man of sixty-five, but not yet grey, with a reddish tinge in his moustache, cheeks, lips and eyelids, slightly knock-kneed, and with large, rather spreading feet, he moved in the best circles in a somewhat embarrassed manner. At the enhanced price, the timber at Hirriehughwould enfranchise him for the remainder of his days. He sold it therefore one day of April when the war news was bad, to a Government official on the spot. He sold it at half-past five in the afternoon, practically for cash down, and drank a stiff whisky and soda to wash away the taste of the transaction; for, though no sentimentalist, his great-great-grandfather had planted most of it, and his grandfather the rest. Royalty, too, had shot there in its time and he himself (never much of a sportsman) had missed more birds in the rides and hollows of his fine coverts than he cared to remember. But the country was in need, and the price considerable. Bidding the Government official good-bye, he lighted a cigar, and went across the park to take a farewell stroll among his timber.
He entered the home covert by a path leading through a group of pear-trees just coming into bloom. Smoking cigars and drinking whisky in the afternoon in preference to tea, Sir Arthur Hirries had not much sense of natural beauty. But those pear-trees impressed him, greenish white against blue sky and fleecy thick clouds which looked as if they had snow in them. They were deuced pretty, and promised a good year for fruit, if they escaped the late frosts, though it certainly looked like freezing to-night! He paused a momentat the wicket gate to glance back at those scantily clothed white maidens posing on the outskirts of his timber. Such was not the vision of Sir Arthur Hirries, who was considering how he should invest the balance of the cash down after paying off his mortgages. National Bonds—the country was in need!
Passing through the gate he entered the ride of the home covert. Variety lay like colour on his woods. They stretched for miles, and his ancestors had planted almost every kind of tree—beech, oak, birch, sycamore, ash, elm, hazel, holly, pine; a lime-tree and a hornbeam here and there, and further in among the winding coverts, spinneys and belts of larch. The evening air was sharp, and sleet showers came whirling from those bright clouds; he walked briskly, drawing at his richly fragrant cigar, the whisky still warm within him. He walked thinking, with a gentle melancholy slowly turning a little sulky, that he would never again be pointing out with his shooting stick to such or such a guest where he was to stand to get the best birds over him. The pheasants had been let down during the war, but he put up two or three old cocks, who went clattering and whirring out to left and right; and rabbits crossed the rides quietly to and fro, within easy shot. He came to whereRoyalty had stood fifteen years ago during the last drive. He remembered Royalty saying: “Very pretty shooting at that last stand, Hirries; birds just about as high as I like them.” The ground indeed rose rather steeply there, and the timber was oak and ash, with a few dark pines sprinkled into the bare greyish twiggery of the oaks, always costive in spring, and the just greening feather of the ashes.
“They’ll be cutting those pines first,” he thought—strapping trees, straight as the lines of Euclid, and free of branches, save at their tops. In the brisk wind those tops swayed a little and gave forth soft complaint. ‘Three times my age,’ he thought; ‘prime timber.’ The ride wound sharply and entered a belt of larch, whose steep rise entirely barred off the rather sinister sunset—a dark and wistful wood, delicate dun and grey, whose green shoots and crimson tips would have perfumed the evening coolness, but for the cigar smoke in his nostrils. ‘They’ll have this spinney for pit props,’ he thought; and, taking a cross ride through it, he emerged in a heathery glen of birch-trees. No forester, he wondered if they would make anything of those whitened, glistening shapes. His cigar had gone out now, and he leaned against one of the satin-smooth stems, under the lacery of twigand bud, sheltering the flame of a relighting match. A hare lopped away among the bilberry shoots; a jay, painted like a fan, squawked and flustered past him up the glen. Interested in birds, and wanting just one more jay to complete a fine stuffed group of them, Sir Arthur, though devoid of a gun, followed, to see where ‘the beggar’s’ nest was. The glen dipped rapidly, and the character of the timber changed, assuming greater girth and solidity. There was a lot of beech here—a bit he did not know, for though taken-in by the beaters, no guns could be stationed there because of the lack of undergrowth. The jay had vanished, and light had begun to fail. ‘Must get back,’ he thought, ‘or I shall be late for dinner.’ For a moment he debated whether to retrace his steps, or cut across the beeches and regain the home covert by a loop. The jay, reappearing to the left, decided him to cross the beech grove. He did so, and took a narrow ride up through a dark bit of mixed timber with heavy undergrowth. The ride, after favouring the left for a little, bent away to the right; Sir Arthur followed it hurriedly, conscious that twilight was gathering fast. It must bend again to the left in a minute! It did, and then to the right, and, the undergrowth remaining thick, he could only follow on, or else retrace his steps.He followed on, beginning to get hot in spite of a sleet shower falling through the dusk. He was not framed by Nature for swift travelling—his knees turning in and his toes turning out—but he went at a good bat, uncomfortably aware that the ride was still taking him away from home, and expecting it at any minute to turn left again. It did not, and hot, out of breath, a little bewildered, he stood still in three-quarter darkness, to listen. Not a sound, save that of wind in the tops of the trees, and a faint creaking of timber, where two stems had grown athwart and were touching.
The path was a regular will o’ the wisp. He must make a bee line of it through the undergrowth into another ride! He had never before been amongst his timber in the dusk, and he found the shapes of the confounded trees more weird, and as if menacing, that he had ever dreamed of. He stumbled quickly on in and out of them among the undergrowth, without coming to a ride.
‘Here I am stuck in this damned wood!’ he thought. To call these formidably encircling shapes ‘a wood’ gave him relief. After all, it washiswood, and nothing very untoward could happen to a man in his own wood, however dark it might get; he could not be more than a mile and a half at the outside from his dining-room! He lookedat his watch, whose hands he could just see—nearly half-past seven! The sleet had become snow, but it hardly fell on him, so thick was the timber just here. But he had no overcoat, and suddenly he felt that first sickening little drop in his chest which presages alarm. Nobody knew he was in this damned wood! And in a quarter of an hour it would be black as your hat! Hemustget on and out! The trees amongst which he was stumbling produced quite a sick feeling now in one who hitherto had never taken trees seriously. What monstrous growths they were! The thought that seeds, tiny seeds or saplings, planted by his ancestors, could attain such huge impending and imprisoning bulk—the ghostly great growths, mounting up to heaven and shutting off this world, exasperated and unnerved him. He began to run, caught his foot in a root, and fell flat on his face. The cursed trees seemed to have a down on him! Rubbing elbows and forehead with his snow-wetted hands, he leaned against a trunk to get his breath, and summon the sense of direction to his brain. Once as a young man he had been ‘bushed’ at night in Vancouver Island; quite a scary business! But he had come out all right, though his camp had been the only civilised spot within a radius of twenty miles. And here he was, on his own estate,within a mile or two of home, getting into a funk. It was childish! And he laughed. The wind answered, sighing and threshing in the tree tops. There must be a regular blizzard blowing now, and, to judge by the cold, from the north—but whether north-east or north-west was the question. Besides, how keep definite direction without a compass in the dark? The timber, too, with its thick trunks, diverted the wind into keen, directionless draughts. He looked up, but could make nothing of the two or three stars that he could see. It was a mess! And he lighted a second cigar with some difficulty, for he had begun to shiver. The wind in this blasted wood cut through his Norfolk jacket and crawled about his body, which had become hot from his exertions, and now felt clammy and half-frozen. This would mean pneumonia, if he didn’t look out! And, half feeling his way from trunk to trunk, he started on again, but for all he could tell he might be going round in a circle, might even be crossing rides without realising, and again that sickening drop occurred in his chest. He stood still and shouted. He had the feeling of shouting into walls of timber, dark and heavy, which threw the sound back at him.
‘Curse you!’ he thought. ‘Wish I’d sold you six months ago!’ The wind fleered and mowed inthe tree tops; and he started off again at a run in that dark wilderness; till, hitting his head against a low branch, he fell, stunned. He lay several minutes unconscious, came to himself deadly cold, and struggled up on to his feet.
‘By Jove!’ he thought, with a sort of stammer in his brain; ‘this is a bad business! I may be out here all night!’ For an unimaginative man, it was extraordinary what vivid images he had just then. He saw the face of the Government official who had bought his timber, and the slight grimace with which he had agreed to the price. He saw his butler, after the gong had gone, standing like a stuck pig by the sideboard, waiting for him to come down. What would they do when he didn’t come? Would they have thenousto imagine that he might have lost his way in the coverts, and take lanterns and search for him? Far more likely they would think he had walked over to Greenlands or Berrymoor, and stayed there to dinner. And, suddenly, he saw himself slowly freezing out here, in the snowy night, among this cursed timber. With a vigorous shake, he butted again into the darkness among the tree trunks. He was angry now—with himself, with the night, with the trees; so angry that he actually let out with his fist at a trunk against which he hadstumbled, and scored his knuckles. It was humiliating; and Sir Arthur Hirries was not accustomed to humiliation. In anybody else’s wood—yes; but to be lost like this in one’s own coverts! Well, if he had to walk all night, he would get out! And he plunged on doggedly in the darkness.
He was fighting with his timber now, as if the thing were alive and each tree an enemy. In the interminable stumbling exertion of that groping progress his angry mood gave place to half-comatose philosophy. Trees! His great-great-grandfather had planted them! His own was the fifth man’s life, but the trees were almost as young as ever; they made nothing of a man’s life! He sniggered: and a man made nothing of theirs! Did they know they were going to be cut down? All the better if they did, and were sweating in their shoes. He pinched himself—his thoughts were becoming so queer! He remembered that once, when his liver was out of order, trees had seemed to him like solid, tall diseases—bulbous, scarred, cavernous, witch-armed, fungoid emanations of the earth. Well, so they were! And he was among them, on a snowy pitch-black night, engaged in this death-struggle! The occurrence of the word death in his thoughts brought him up all standing. Why couldn’t he concentrate his mind on gettingout; why was he mooning about the life and nature of trees instead of trying to remember the conformation of his coverts, so as to rekindle in himself some sense of general direction? He struck a number of matches, to get a sight of his watch again. Great heaven! He had been walking nearly two hours since he last looked at it; and in what direction? They said a man in a fog went round and round because of some kink in his brain! He began now to feel the trees, searching for a hollow trunk. A hollow would be some protection from the cold—his first conscious confession of exhaustion. He was not in training, and he was sixty-five. The thought: ‘Can’t keep this up much longer,’ caused a second explosion of sullen anger. Damnation! Here he was—for all he could tell—standing where he had sat perhaps a dozen times on his spread shooting stick; watching sunlight on bare twigs, or the nose of his spaniel twitching beside him, listening to the tap of the beaters’ sticks, and the shrill, drawn-out: “Marrk! Cock over!” Would they let the dogs out, to pick up his tracks? No! ten to one they would assume he was staying the night at the Summertons, or at Lady Mary’s, as he had done before now, after dining there. And suddenly his strained heart leaped. He had struck a ride again! His mindslipped back into place like an elastic let-go, relaxed, quivering gratefully. He had only to follow this ride, and somewhere, somehow, he would come out. And be hanged if he would let them know what a fool he had made of himself! Right or left—which way? He turned so that the flying snow came on his back, hurrying forward between the denser darkness on either hand, where the timber stood in walls, moving his arms across and across his body, as if dragging a concertina to full stretch, to make sure that he was keeping in the path. He went what seemed an interminable way like this, till he was brought up all standing by trees, and could find no outlet, no continuation. Turning in his tracks, with the snow in his face now, he retraced his steps till once more he was brought-up short by trees. He stood panting. It was ghastly—ghastly! And in a panic he dived this way and that to find the bend, the turning, the way on. The sleet stung his eyes, the wind fleered and whistled, the boughs sloughed and moaned. He struck matches, trying to shade them with his cold, wet hands, but one by one they went out, and still he found no turning. The ride must be blind-alley at either end, the turning be down the side somewhere! Hope revived in him. Never say die! He began a second retracing of his steps,feeling the trunks along one side, to find a gap. His breath came with difficulty. What would old Brodley say if he could see him, soaked, sweating, frozen, tired to death, stumbling along in the darkness among this cursed timber—old Brodley who had told him his heart was in poor case!... A gap? Ah! No trunks—a ride at last! He turned, felt a sharp pain in his knee and pitched forward. He could not rise—the knee dislocated six years ago was out again. Sir Arthur Hirries clenched his teeth. Nothing more could happen to him! But after a minute—blank and bitter—he began to crawl along the new ride. Oddly he felt less discouraged and alarmed on hands and knee—for he could use but one. It was a relief to have his eyes fixed on the ground, not peering at the tree trunks; or perhaps there was less strain for the moment on his heart. He crawled, stopping every minute or so, to renew his strength. He crawled mechanically, waiting for his heart, his knee, his lungs to stop him. The earth was snowed over, and he could feel its cold wetness as he scraped along. Good tracks to follow, if anybody struck them! But in this dark forest——! In one of his halts, drying his hands as best he could, he struck a match, and sheltering it desperately, fumbled out his watch. Past ten o’clock. He wound the watch,and put it back against his heart. If only he could wind his heart! And squatting there he counted his matches—four! He thought grimly: ‘I won’t light them to show me my blasted trees. I’ve got a cigar left; I’ll keep them for that!’ And he crawled on again. He must keep going while he could!
He crawled till his heart and lungs and knee struck work; and, leaning his back against a tree, sat huddled together, so exhausted that he felt nothing save a sort of bitter heartache. He even dropped asleep, waking with a shudder, dragged from a dream arm-chair at the Club into this cold, wet darkness and the blizzard moaning in the trees. He tried to crawl again, but could not, and for some minutes stayed motionless, hugging his body with his arms. ‘Well,’ he thought vaguely, ‘Ihavedone it!’ His mind was in such lethargy that he could not even pity himself. His matches: could he make a fire? But he was no woodsman, and, though he groped around, could find no fuel that was not soaking wet. He scraped a hole and with what papers he had in his pockets tried to kindle the wet wood. No good! He had only two matches left now, and he remembered his cigar. He took it out, bit the end off, and began with infinite precautions to prepare for lighting it. Thefirst burned, and the cigar drew. He had one match left, in case he dozed and let the thing go out. Looking up through the blackness he could see a star. He fixed his eyes on it, and leaning against the trunk drew the smoke down into his lungs. With his arms crossed tightly on his breast he smoked very slowly. When it was finished—what? Cold, and the wind in the trees until the morning! Halfway through the cigar, he dozed off, slept a long time, and woke up so cold that he could barely summon vitality enough to strike his last match. By some miracle it burned, and he got his cigar to draw again. This time he smoked it nearly to its end, without mentality, almost without feeling, except the physical sense of bitter cold. Once with a sudden clearing of the brain, he thought faintly: ‘Thank God, I sold the—trees, and they’ll all come down!’ The thought drifted away in frozen incoherence, drifted out like his cigar smoke into the sleet; and with a faint grin on his lips he dozed off again....
An under-keeper found him at ten o’clock next morning, blue from cold, under a tall elm-tree, within a mile of his bed, one leg stretched out, the other hunched up toward his chest, with its foot dug into the undergrowth for warmth, his head huddled into the collar of his coat, his arms crossedon his breast. They said he must have been dead at least five hours. Along one side snow had drifted against him; but the trunk had saved his back and other side. Above him, the spindly top boughs of that tall tree were covered with green-gold clusters of tiny crinkled elm flowers, against a deep blue sky—gay as a song of perfect praise. The wind had dropped, and after the cold of the night the birds were singing their clearest in the sunshine.
They did not cut down the elm-tree under which they found his body, with the rest of the sold timber, but put a little iron fence round it, and a little tablet on its trunk.
1920.