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!