Opening Day

It really was rather like a first night; but there was this intimidating difference, that whereas the worst play in the world draws at least one good house, we were by no means certain of that measure of success. Our venture had been announced, most kindly, in Divisional Orders, as well as verbally at the Y.M. Cinema; but still we knew it was not everybody who believed in us, and that 'a wash-out' had been predicted with some confidence. Even those in authority, who had most handsomely given me my head, were some of them inclined to shake theirs over the result. It was therefore an exciting moment when we opened at two o'clock on the appointed afternoon. There was more occasion for excitement when I had to lock the door for the last time some weeks later; and the two disappointments are not to be compared; but my private cup has seldom filled more suddenly than when I unlocked it with my own hand—and beheld not one solitary man in sight! 'A wash-out' was not the word. It was my Niagara.

At least it looked like it; but after one bad quarter of an hour it turned into a steady trickle of repentant warriors. If the two of us had been holding a redoubt against the enemy, I am not sure that we should have been more delighted to see them than we were. In half an hour the big reading table was surrounded by solemn faces; each of the two stoves had its full circle in the easy chairs; the New Book Table had been discovered, was being thronged, and the best piano in the area yielding real music to the touch of a real pianist. The Rest Hut had started on its short but happy voyage.

Those there were who came demanding candles and boot-polish, and who fled before our softest answers; and there were seekers after billiards who had to be directed elsewhere for their game. I had tipped too many cues at the last hut, and stopped too many games for the further performance of that worse than thankless task, to have the essential quality of the Rest Hut subverted by a billiard-table. The readers, writers, musicians, and above all the weary men, of an Army Corps were the fish for my rod; and we had not been open an hour before I was enjoying good sport, tempered by early misgiving about my flies.

The first book that I connect with a specific inquiry was one that I had certainly failed to order. It was 'anything of Walter de la Mare's'; and I felt a Philistine for having nothing, but a fool for supposing for a moment that I had pitched my hut within the boundaries of Philistia. There might have been a conspiracy to undeceive me on the point without delay. The Poetry Shelf (despite deficiencies so promptly proven) received attention from the start. I forget if it was Mr. de la Mare's admirer who presently took out The Golden Treasury, of which we mercifully had several copies; it was certainly a Jock. I showed him the Shelf, and could have wrung his hand for the tone in which he murmured 'Keats!' It was reverential, awe-stricken and just right. Clearly his Dominie had not abused the taws.

In the meantime I had taken a deposit on three prose volumes. These were they, these the first three authors to cross my counter:

1. George Meredith: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.

2. Robert Louis Stevenson: Across the Plains.

3. Hilaire Belloc: Mr. Clutterbuck's Election.

As I say, it seemed like a conspiracy—but I swear I was not one of the conspirators! They were—my benefactor already—the pianist, and his friends; three young privates in the R.A.M.C., all afterwards great friends of mine. Of course, this form was too good to be true of the mass; and the particular Field Ambulance to which they belonged was an unusually brainy unit, as I came to know it through many other representatives; but I shall always be grateful to that musical young Meredithian for the start he gave me, and may this mite of acknowledgment meet his spectacles.

On the same opening page of my first day-book, to be sure, a less rarefied level is reached by some comparatively pedestrian stuff, including a work of Mr. Charles Garvice and no fewer than two wastrels 'of my own composure' (as the village organist had it); but my place (though gratifying) was obviously due to an ulterior curiosity; and among the twenty-three books in all that went out that afternoon, there was a further burst of four that went far to restore the higher standard: they were Lorna Doone, My Novel, Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist. The two first fell to Jocks; the Blackmore masterpiece was read forthwith from cover to cover in the trenches, and that Jock came down by special permission for something else as good!

A happy afternoon, and of still happier omen! But I was going to need more 'good stuff'; that was the first hard fact to be faced. I had not reckoned with those eager intellectuals, the young stretcher-bearers who had borne a lantern for the nonce. They were going to bring their friends, and did; and were I to tabulate the books these youths took out between them, in the busy month to come, it would be pronounced, I think, as good a little library as a modern young man, with a sociological bias and a considered outlook, could wish to form. And then there were all the books we hadn't got for them! But these missing friends did more, perhaps, to make friends for the Rest Hut than such as were there to close the subject; for one might be able to suggest something else instead; and the man might have read that already, but his face might lighten at the recollection, and across the counter on our four elbows the pair of us forge that absent book into the first link of friendship.

But any one can gossip about the books he loves, and with a soldier at the front any fool could talk on any topic. So I had it both ways, as one seldom does, according to the saying. It may be that the men who found their pleasure in the Rest Hut were by nature responsive and enthusiastic, and not merely sensitised and refined by the generous fires of constant camaraderie and unselfish suffering. I am speaking of them now only as I found them across that narrow counter, while I deliberately pasted my label of rules inside the cover, and deliberately dabbed my rubber-stamp down on the fly-leaf opposite. I have seen clean into a noble heart between these delaying rites and a meticulous entry in my day-book. It was pain to me when three or four were waiting their turn, and a certain despatch became imperative; it always meant a corresponding period without any work or any friend-making across the counter.

At the short end, beyond the flap (never lowered in the Rest Hut), my friend and mate dispensed the cigarettes and biscuits, and tea made with devoted care by a wrinkled Frenchwoman worth all the Y.M.C.A. orderlies I ever saw, not excepting the two stalwarts at the Ark. The Rest Hut orderly was a smart soldier of the old type, a clever carpenter, and a good cook with large ideas about breakfast. He lived out, did not give us his whole time, and early struck me as a man of mystery; but he was a quick and willing worker who did his part by us. The jewel of the hut's company was my mate. I can only describe him as an Australian Jock, and of the first water on both sides. Twice or thrice rejected in Australia, he had come home to try again and yet again with no better luck; so here he was, with his fine heart and his dry cough, as near the firing-line as he could get 'for the duration.' I may lose a friend for having said so much, yet I have to add that he had taken the whole burden of the till and its attendant accounts (a hut-leader's business) off the shoulders of inexperience. Friends who predicted the worst of me in this connection, and are surprised to see me still outside a defaulter's cell, will please accept the only explanation.

It was a musical tea that opening afternoon, for another of our talented troupe brought the pick of his orchestra from the Association Cinema in the main street hard by; and for an hour it was like the Carlton, with a difference. I wonder what the Carlton could charge for that difference, even at this stage of the war!

Altogether I thought myself the luckiest civilian alive that February afternoon; but my bed of roses had its crumpled leaf. On the fine great cardboard programme for the week (next the map: our Illuminator again), with its cunning slots for moveable amusements, besides that of the Cinema Orchestra there was something about Prayers. That was where I was coming in—on the wrong side of the counter—and as the night advanced it blew a gale inside me. Five minutes before the time, I mounted the platform and made known the worst; and ever afterwards finished the evening by pursuing the same plan, so that all who wished could withdraw, losing only the last five minutes, and no man (I promised them) have anything unpalatable thrust down his throat. I am not sure that it was the most courageous method of procedure; but it was mine, and the men knew where they were. I used to read a few verses, a Vailima Prayer and but one or two more: some men went out, but there was the satisfaction of feeling that those who stayed were in the mood for Prayers.

After the first week or ten days, a third worker came to help us; and he being a minister, I persuaded him to relieve me of this nightly duty, though with a sigh that was not all relief. I always loved reading to the men, but Prayers are shy work for an old layman, and soldiers (if I know them) care less for the deathless composition of a Saint than for the unpremeditated outpouring of the man before their eyes. The minister used to give them all that, perched on a chair in their midst; and he kept a much fuller hut than I at my rostrum of American cloth.