'He can kill his mon as often as he likes,' said McCassius, grimly, 'and
bring him to life again. Fufty times he has killed yon mon--fufty
times!'
They were very nice to me about my books--but very honest! There was a
certain stretcher-bearer, a homely old fellow with a horse-shoe
moustache and mild brown eyes; not from the high-brow unit, but perhaps
a greater reader than any of them; and one of those who eschewed the
novel. _Scenes of Clerical Life_ (on top of Lenotre's _Incidents of the
French Revolution_, and our two little volumes of _Elia_) had been his
only dissipation until, our friendship ripening, he weighed me with his
tranquil eyes and asked for _Raffles_. I seemed to detect a streak of
filial piety in the departure, and gave him as fair warning as I could;
but only the book itself could put him off. He returned it without a
word to temper his forgiving smile, and took out _The Golden Treasury_
as a restorative. Poetry he loved with all his gentle soul; but when, at
a later stage, he asked if I thought he could 'learn to write poetry,'
the wounds of vanity were at least anointed.
He used to take down Mr. David Somervell's capital _Companion to the
Golden Treasury_ from the Poetry Shelf; and it was delightful to watch
his bent head wagging between text and note, a black-rimmed forefinger
creeping down either page, and his back as round as it could possibly
have been before the war. He told me he was a Northamptonshire shoemaker
by trade; and though you would trust him not to scamp a sole or bump a
stretcher, there was nothing to show that the war meant more to him than
his last, or life more than a chance of reading--the shadow lengthening
in the sunshine that he found in books. Once I said how I envied him all
that he had read; very gently--even for him--he answered that he owed it
all to his mother, who had taught him when he was so high, and would be
eighty-one come Tuesday. The man himself was only forty; but he was one
of those guileless creatures who make one unconsciously look up to them
as elders as well as betters. And at the front, where the old are so
gloriously young, and the young so pathetically old, nothing is easier
than to forget one's own age: often enough mine was brought home to me
with a salutary shock.
'When I was up the Line,' said one of my friends, bubbling over with a
compliment, 'a chap said to me, "You know that old--that--that _elderly_
man who runs the Rest Hut? He's the author of _Raffles_!"'
Disastrous refinement! And the fellow grinned as though he had not
turned what might have been a term of friendship into one of pure
opprobrium. Elderly! One would as lief be labelled Virtuous or Discreet.
Another of my poetry lovers did really write it--but not his own--there
was too much of a twinkle in _his_ brown eyes! They were twinkling
tremendously when I saw them first, fixed upon the Poetry Shelf, and the
tightest upper lip in the hut seemed to be keeping down a cheer. No
sooner had we spoken than he was saying he kept his own anthology in his
field pocket-book--and could I remember the third verse of 'Out of the
night that covers me'? Happily I could; and so made friends with a man
after my heart of hearts.
In the first place, he spoke the adorable accent of my native heath or
thereabouts; and the things he said were as good as the way he said
them. Sense and sensibility, fun and feeling, candour and reserve, all
were there in perfect partnership, and his twinkling eyes lit each in
turn. Before the war he had been a postal telegraphist, and 'there
wasn't a greater pacifist alive'; now he was an R.E. signaller attached
to the Guards, and as for pacifism--the twinkle sharpened to a glitter
and his upper lip disappeared.
Yet another man of forty, he had joined up early, and assigned any
credit to his wife--'good lass!' He was splendid about her and their
cheery life together; there was a happy marriage, if you like! 'Ever a
rover,' as he said romantically (but with the twinkle), he might be in a
post-office, but his heart was not; and it seemed the couple were one
spirit. Every summer they had taken their holiday tramping the moors,
their poets in their pack: 'when we were tired we would sit down and
read aloud.' No wonder the Poetry Shelf made him twinkle! There were two
cheery children, 'shaping' as you would expect; their dad borrowed my
_If_ to copy out for the small boy's birthday, as well as in his field
anthology.
Loyalty to one's own, when so impassioned, is by way of draining the
plain man's stock: perfect home lives are not so common that the
ordinary middle-aged ratepayer makes haste to give up one for the wars.
But the anthologist had not been 'wrapped up' like the rest of us. His
loyalties did not even end at his country. That first afternoon, I
remember, he told me he had been 'a bit of a Theosophist.'
'Aren't you one now?'
'No; but I still have a warm corner in my heart for them.'
I thought that very finely said of a creed outlived. Give me a warm
corner for an old love, be it man, woman, or sect!
Daily he dropped in to read and chat; not to take out a book until his
turn came for the Line. It was just when the German push seemed imminent
to many, was indeed widely expected at a date when my friend would still
be at his dangerous post. He knew well what it might mean at any moment;
and I think he said, 'The wireless man must be the last to budge,' with
the smile he kept for the things he meant; but for once his eyes were
not doing their part. 'Well, thank God I've _had_ it!' he said of his
happy past as we locked hands. 'And nothing can take it away from you,'
I had the nerve to say; for these may be the comforts of one's own
heart, but it seems an insolence to offer them to a younger man with a
harder grip on life. Happily we understood each other. 'And many happy
chats had we,' he had written on the back of the photograph he left me.
He had also written his wife's address. _David Copperfield_ went with
him when we parted. I wondered if I should ever see either of them
again.
Sure enough, on the predicted night, came the roll of drum-fire, as like
thunder as a noise can be; but it was our drum-fire, as it happened, and
down came my friend next day to tell me all about it. No-Man's Land had
been 'boiling like cocoa' under our shells; he was full of the set-back
administered to Jerry, of the fun of underground wireless and the genius
of Charles Dickens. I sent him back with _Joseph Vance_, and we talked
of nothing else at our next meeting. It was our last; but I treasure a
letter (telling of 'the ruined city of our friendship,' among other
things), and a field-card of more recent date; and have every hope that
the writer is still lighting up underground danger-posts with his wise
twinkle, and still adding to his field anthology.
Yet another hard reader was a Coldstream Guardsman, a much younger man,
and one of the handsomest in the hut. He, too, if you will believe me,
had brown eyes--a thing that could not happen to three successive
characters in a novel--but of another order altogether. If they had
never killed a lady in their time, their molten glow belied them. This
young man liked a classic author of full flavour. _Tom Jones_ was
probably his favourite novel, but we had it not. De Maupassant would
have enchanted him--but not the coarse translations on vile paper--or
Rousseau's or Cellini's open secrets. As it was he had to put up with
Anatole France, and oddments of Swift and Wilde; nor do I forget his
justifiable disgust on discovering too late that our _Gulliver_ was a
nursery version. He was a delightful companion across the counter:
subtle, understanding, soft-spoken, in himself a romantic figure, yet
engagingly vulnerable to romance.
'I'm feeling sentimental, Mr. Hornung. I want a love-story,' he sighed
one afternoon. I reminded him that he would also want Good Stuff, and
succeeded in meeting all his needs with _Ships that Pass in the Night_.
Next day we had our Quiet Room Evening with Tom Hood; and that was the
time I strayed upon delicate ground by way of 'The Bridge of Sighs,'
from poem to subject before I knew where I was. The men took it
beautifully, and touched my heart by impulsively applauding the very
things I should have feared to say to them upon reflection. As for our
Coldstreamer, he came straight up to the counter and took out Jeremy
Taylor's _Holy Living and Dying_!