Part 8 (1/2)

How many preferred a really good novel is another and a more invidious matter; but nothing was more refres.h.i.+ng than the way the older masters held their own. d.i.c.kens was in constant demand, especially among the older men; and they really read him, judging by the days the immortal works stayed out. Again, it was worth noting that here in France _A Tale of Two Cities_ had twice as many readers as _Pickwick_, which came next in order of popularity. Thackeray was not fully represented, but we had all his best and they were always out. Of the Brontes we had next to nothing, of Reade and Trollope far too little; but _It is Never too Late to Mend_ enchanted a Sapper, a Machine Gunner, and a Red Cross man in turn, while _Orley Farm_ would have headed our first day's list had it been there in time. George Eliot was never without readers, but Miss Braddon had more, and _The Woman in White_ only one! After d.i.c.kens, however, the most popular Victorian was the first Lord Lytton.

I confess it rejoiced my heart to hand out the protagonists of a belittled age at least as freely as their 'opposite numbers' of the present century. But I had my surprises. Scott (Sir Walter!) was a firm wall-flower for the first fortnight; probably the Jocks knew him off by heart; and, of course, the same thing may apply to their unnatural neglect of the so-called Kaleyard School of other days. There was, at any rate, nothing clannish about their reading. It was a Jock who took _The Unspeakable Scot_ for its only airing; and more than three-fourths of my Stevensonians were Sa.s.senachs. But one could still conjure with the name of Stevenson, as with many another made in his time. Mr.

Kipling's soldiers are adored by legions created in their image. Sir H.

Rider Haggard was never on the Rest House shelf. Messrs. Holmes and Watson were the most flouris.h.i.+ng of old firms, and Gerard the only Brigadier taken seriously at my counter. Ruritania, too, got back some of its own trippers from the Five Towns; for though you would have thought there was adventure enough in the air we breathed, there was more realism, and it was against the realism we all reacted. Mr.

Bennett, to be sure, did not occupy nearly enough s.p.a.ce in our capricious catalogue; neither, for that matter, did Mr. Weyman, Mr.

Galsworthy, Mr. Vach.e.l.l, nor yet Miss Marie Corelli or Sir Thomas Hall Caine. The fault was not mine, I can a.s.sure them.

Mr. H. G. Wells, on the other hand, utilised a better chance by tying with the author of _a.r.s.ene Lupin_, and just beating Mr. Phillips Oppenheim, for a place it would be unprofitable to compute. Even they could not live the pace of Mr. Charles Garvice, who in his turn succ.u.mbed to the lady styled the Baroness Horsy by her fondest slaves; to these two and to Miss Ethel Dell, among others I have or have not presumed to mention, I could wish no greater joy than my job at that counter when their books were coming in, and 'another by the same author, if you've got one,' being urgently demanded in their place. The most enthusiastic letter ever written for an autograph could not touch the eager tone, the live eye, the parted lips of those unconscious tributes. It is not the look you see in Mudie's as you wait your turn; but I have seen it in small boys chasing pirates with 'Ballantyne the Brave,' and in one old lady who fell in love every Sunday of her dear life with the hero of _The Family Herald Supplement_. It was even better worth seeing in a soldier with _Just a Girl_ in his ruthless hand, and _The One Girl in the World_ trembling on a reverential tongue. The man might have been performing prodigies of dreadful valour up the Line, but his soul had been on leave with a lady in marble halls.

There were two young Privates in the A.S.C. who bolted their Garvice at about two days to the book; and two trim Corporals of the Rifle Brigade who made as short work of the other magicians. This type of reader always hunted in couples, sharing the most sympathetic of all the pa.s.sions, if not the books themselves, which would double the rate of consumption. They were the hard drinkers at my bar; but the hardest of all was a lean young Jock, who smiled as hungrily as Ca.s.sius, and arrived punctually at six every evening to change his book. He looked delicate, and was, I think, like other regular attendants, on light duty in the town; in any case he took his bottle of fiction a day without fail, and once, when it was raining, drained it under my nose and wanted another. I refused to serve him. Unlike the other topers, he was a sardonic critic. One night he banged the counter with a book in my own old line, and the invidious comment:

'He can do what _you_ no can!'

I said I was sure, but inquired the special point of superiority.

'He can kill his mon as often as he likes,' said McCa.s.sius, 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 Northamptons.h.i.+re shoemaker by trade; and though you would trust him not to scamp a sole or b.u.mp 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 partners.h.i.+p, 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 a.s.signed any credit to his wife--'good la.s.s!' 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 impa.s.sioned, 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 G.o.d 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.