Indeed, this was sensitive work. But already I knew enough about my job to know that I was doing something just by listening and accepting whatever role the rage of these men imposed on me. I was the stupid artillery. I was the ungrateful Europe that took the best of a man’s life and gave nothing in return. I was the girlfriend who did not want a crippled husband. I was the doc who couldn’t solve an insoluble problem. Little by little the men, or most of them, quieted down, and though their troubles were no less, they were borne with a better courage. And slowly it became apparent that this rage, this disillusion, this disappointment was not what it seemed. It was the duct through which flowed an unhappiness and a pathos that lay at the very bottom of the spirit, and might perhaps be inborn, or, to use a more scientific and fashionable word, it was genetic. Something had to be done, and I cudgelled my brain to find out what it might be.
The large hospital camp, of which my unfortunates made a part, was near Oxford, and whenever I could get away—which was not very often—I bicycled into Oxford and refreshed myself in its excellent bookshops. It was in one of these—in Blackwell’s indeed, and if the shop had not been substantially remodelled since, I could identify the very place where I stood—it was there that I had my Good Idea.
I was re-establishing my little library. I had carried a few books with me through Italy; my medical kit made it possible to disguise them because we were not supposed to have books, diaries, or anything that would possibly convey information to the enemy. But several men had books. The copy of Browne’s Religio Medici that Charlie had given me, my three-volume Everyman edition of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and The Oxford Book of English Verse; these had disappeared in the bombing of the hotel. I had chosen these because they would last; they were books that could be read and reread and read again. I particularly valued crusty old Burton. Sir William Osler, my hero among medical men, had called it the greatest medical treatise written by a layman. This was because it was rooted in deep scholarship and unresting curiosity, not because it was especially scientific. Burton wrote about melancholy, he said, to dispel his own melancholy, but I don’t think he can have been a serious melancholic. Such humour as his does not accord with the depression that edges toward despair. These books I had easily replaced, and I was gathering as many others as I thought I could carry in my luggage, or have shipped home across the still perilous Atlantic. But suddenly, there in Blackwell’s, in the poetry section, I saw the book which for a while I called The Golden Trashery, until I gained too much respect for it to deny it the name of Treasury. It was called The Reciter’s Companion and the title page promised that it contained pieces suitable for recitation on all occasions.
It brought into focus a notion I had been pondering for some time: what could be done to take my patients’ minds off the grievance which was devouring them? The hospital had occasional visits from ENSA groups who did plays and variety shows to entertain the men, but their effect was fleeting. The men were distracted for a couple of hours, but they were not left with anything to think about, or talk about. If I were to read to them, not a novel, but something short enough to be contained within an hour, and which they could then talk about as long as they chose, would it be entertainment that lasted longer, and perhaps aroused something deeper than ENSA?
Poetry was what I wanted. But it would be patronizing lunacy to read to these men out of my Oxford Book of English Verse. Not to be patronizing was the secret. Not to appear to be dispensing education or “culture.” Of my twenty-six patients only three had completed a High School education, and they were no advertisements for the system. I needed poetry, or better call it verse, that would catch the ear, stick in the memory, and tell a story. Bardic poetry, indeed, but not on the Gothick, Walter Scott level, A quick look through The Reciter’s Companion showed that it was just what I needed.
So I initiated my Reading Hour. I told Corporal George that if any of the men thought they would like to hear me read, I would be in the ward at eight o’clock. Nobody who did not want to listen was under any compulsion to join the group. Corporal George was the acknowledged spokesman and leader of the ward, and he was a man with some ability as an organizer. The first night there were eighteen of the men at one end of the ward to hear me. After three nights the whole twenty-six had joined the group, and I had strong intimations of success.
My experience in the Players’ Guild stood me in good stead. I could read, loud and clear, and what I read seemed to fill the bill with these men; I don’t suppose any of them had heard verse read in their lives, and it was an astonishment to them.
The Reciter’s Companion was aimed at just such an audience as this. I had never heard a reciter, myself, but my parents had spoken of such people with laughter; they were a terror of social life that had just been fading from view when they were young. There was the lady reciter, who imitated children and sometimes attempted a “serious” piece about Spring, or the death of a child. There was the male reciter, who was under the spell of Henry Irving, whom he had never seen but of whom he had heard misleading stories; he recited pieces about murder and remorse, or perhaps some heroic deed like that of Grace Darling, the Light-house Keeper’s Daughter. And of course there was the comic reciter, who raised gales of laughter with “How Father Papered the Parlour.” But all three reciters might, if encouraged, sink themselves deep in pathos, and assault the heartstrings. I decided to go for the heartstrings, first.
When I told the men that I was going to read some verse they looked sceptical, but when I said that I would lead off with “Christmas Day In The Workhouse” they went off into fits of laughter. Everybody knew some parody of the poem, and there were roars of—
“I wish you a Merry Christmas,” said he;
The paupers answered BALLS.
“Yes,” said I; “that’s what people remember now, but let me read you the original poem.” And I suppose because I was an officer, and not unpopular in the ward, they quieted down and I began:
It is Christmas Day in the Workhouse
And the cold bare walls are bright
With garlands of green and holly
And the place is a pleasant sight.
And so on, as the thankful paupers receive their Christmas pudding—pudding which is provided on the rates, be it known—until there is an interruption—
But one of the old men mutters,
And pushes his plate aside:
“Great God!” he cries; “but it chokes me!
For this is the day she died.”
Gradually the story unfolds: the Christmas before, the wretched man’s wife lay at death’s door, and he had gone to the workhouse to beg for bread. He was turned away; the house offered no “out relief”; if the woman was in trouble, she must come to the house as a professed pauper, and take what the parish had to give. But the man and his wife were proud. Not the hated workhouse. No! He is tempted to steal, but his better nature intervenes and he returns to his miserable lodgings, to hear his wife cry—
“Give me a crust—I’m famished—
For the love of God!” she groaned.
Beside himself with grief he rushes back to the workhouse gate, crying, “Food for a dying woman!” but the answer comes, “Too late.” The husband sees a dog eating a crust in the street; he wrestles with the animal, seizes the crust and returns to his wife—
My heart sank down on the threshold
And I paused with a sudden thrill
For there in the silv’ry moonlight
My Nance lay, cold and still.
His heart is torn; Nance died alone. Yes, there in a land of plenty lay a loving woman dead; cruelly starved and murdered for a loaf of the parish bread.
“At yonder gate, last Christmas
I craved for a human life,
You, who would feed us paupers,
What of my murdered WIFE?”
The man who has been brought down to accepting parish charity has a strain of magnanimity. He concludes:
?
??There, get you gone to your dinners;
Don’t mind me in the least;
Think of the happy paupers
Eating your Christmas feast;
And when you recount their blessings
In your smug parochial way
Say what you did for me, too,
Only last Christmas day.”
I gave it everything I had. My voice, which Darcy Dwyer had helped me to make firm and resonant, laid on the pathos firmly, but not with disgusting unction. It was—no getting away from it—it was a wow. The men clapped, some laughed, some murmured, and one or two of them seemed to be dashing aside a tear. The grim old story had hit the mark.
Had anybody anything to say? I asked. Nobody wanted to comment. But all the week that followed, in their private sessions with me, the men spoke about the poem. It was crap, of course, old stuff that nobody pays any attention to nowadays. You couldn’t get away with anything like that on the radio. But God, nobody understood what a Raw Deal you got when you were hard up. Go to a bank? Don’t make me laugh. Ask the boss for an advance? That’d be the first step to getting laid off. No use talking to the union; they weren’t in the money-lending business and they were quick to say so. The kids demanding more and more. What gets into kids nowadays, when they have to have a quarter here, fifty cents there, all the time, and as like as not it was for something at school? If they didn’t have the money like the other kids, they felt cheap and out of everything. And the wife: always complaining, never had been much of a cook, wouldn’t let you have your rights in bed for fear of another young one. Christ! sometimes you just wanted to drop the whole bundle and get out. At least in the Army the wife’s allowance was regular, but God, it was miserable. Ask a man to fight for what we get? Lose an arm or a couple of legs and what kind of a pension would there be? What chance has a fellow like me got, Doc? Here I am twenty-six and where am I going?
I did not harrow the men every night, but I quickly found that the verses about pathetic situations—and especially those about merit which was overlooked, or injustice nobly borne—were the favourites, and repeats were demanded. I did not scorn the patriotic string. They liked Robert W. Service. Pauline Johnson’s Canadian Born went very well:
I first saw light in Canada,
The land beloved of God—
and the odd bit of Gothick thrill was much relished; of this genre Poe’s “The Raven” was the favourite, but there was strong approval of Southey’s “Bishop Hatto and the Rats”; it was about a wicked bishop who, when his poor neighbours pleaded with him for corn, coaxed them into a barn and burned them; they were rats, you see, who consumed the corn—or so the Bishop said; but when a thousand rats pursued him he shut himself in his tower, where the rats found him—
They have whetted their teeth against the stones,
And now they pick the Bishop’s bones,
They gnawed the flesh from every limb,
For they were sent to do judgement on him!
Strong stuff. Poetic Justice, and the very thing to evoke the deep, inveterate feelings of grievance in these men, who had suffered wrong—wrong that was nobody’s fault, because a surprising amount of wrong is nobody’s fault, or certainly not the fault of anybody who can be identified.
Saturday night was “funny” night, when I read something to make the men laugh. Things went so well that one night I ventured to read Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale” in a modern translation. It went, as we used to say in the Players’ Guild, like a bird. The best bit of all was, understandably—
“Alas!” said Absolon. “I knew it well
True love is always mocked and girded at
So kiss me, if you can’t do more than that
For Jesus love and for the love of me!”
“And if I do, will you be off?” said she
“Promise you, darling,” answered Absolon.
“Get ready then; wait, I’ll put something on.”
>> >> >> >>
She flung the window open then in haste
And said “Have done, come on, no time to waste,
The neighbours here are always on the spy.”
Absolon started wiping his mouth dry.
Dark was the night as pitch, as black as coal,
And at the window she put out her hole,
And Absolon, so fortune framed the farce,
Put up his mouth and kissed her naked arse,
Most savourously before he knew of this,
And back he started, something was amiss;
For well he knew a woman hath no beard,
Yet something rough and hairy had appeared.
“What have I done?” he said. “Can it be you?”
“Teehee!” she cried, and clapped the window to.
If it is true that Chaucer read his Canterbury Tales aloud to his patron, King Richard the Second, I am sure that the King rolled right off his throne at that one; but he cannot have been more delighted than these Canadian Soldiers of the King five hundred years later. Chaucer was every bit as good as George R. Sims. Pretty raw, mind you. Who would expect an educated guy like the Doc to come out with a Raw One like that? You never know, eh?
The laughter roused by Chaucer was heard in high places, and on Monday morning I was summoned by the head of the hospital.
“I hear great things about what you are doing in Ward J,” said he. “Could you just fill me in on what the program is?”
“I suppose in the end it boils down to this. I listen to them talk. It helps them to get things off their chest.”
“I’ve heard about that. And you read to them. That’s novel. In fact, I’ve never heard of such a thing before. But there are one or two disturbing rumours—nothing serious, you know, but still rumours—that you are reading some rather inflammatory stuff.”
“Not a bit. Quite old stuff, as a matter of fact.”
“Yes, but grievance stuff. About the government not doing enough in the way of social service. That kind of stuff.”
“Grievance is what’s at the root of a lot of their trouble, Doctor. Not grievance against the government, or the Army, particularly, but just a general sense of not having had a square deal from life. They get it off their chests, and their rate of recovery is improved. I can show it from my records.”
“Sounds like Freud.”
“Oh no, nothing as profound as that.”
“Not psychoanalysis?”
“Nothing so profound.”
“That wouldn’t do in the Army.”
“Of course not.”
“Somebody hinted you were using hypnosis.”
“Not now. Not after the first week. The men didn’t like it. I suppose they had the usual notion that it gave me some uncanny power over them.”
“Silly, of course. But perhaps unwise, with patients who aren’t in a position to reject your treatment. It seems one of your men said something to somebody, who said it to somebody else, that you did use a form of hypnosis. He said he was aware of it when he had his session with you.”
“I think I know the man you mean. Unusually suggestible. But I don’t, you know. I just sit very still and say as little as possible. I suppose the effect may seem hypnotic to someone who has never been listened to, has never had anybody’s whole attention, perhaps ever before.”
“Yes. Well, don’t think I’m interfering. Your results are good. Surprising, in fact. But go easy on any socialist stuff. That won’t do in the Army.”
Socialist stuff? I suppose to the ear of some medical colleague, like that nincompoop Norton, down the hall from Ward J, whose mind never ventured outside his medical training, “Christmas Day In The Workhouse” might have had a socialist ring. But I was an unpolitical creature, and all I knew of socialism suggested that it might very well serve as a vessel into which to pour the undifferentiated sense of grievance, the feeling of having had a Raw Deal, which was so prevalent I began to think it might be significant when a medical diagnosis was called for.
I had,
indeed, found the direction in which my later medical practice was to go.
>> >> >> >>
I had given the essence, but not the whole, of my war story to the party of Esme, Gil, and McWearie. I think I had been talking for some time and when I stopped, they were silent.
“I’ve never heard you talk so frankly about yourself, Uncle Jon,” said Gil.
“It’s your excellent Beaune, Gil. It loosens the tongue. And I am getting old, you know. We old men are garrulous.”
“All that about the underlying Raw Deal,” said Esme. “Of course it’s true. Is it your very own?”
“Great God, no!” said McWearie. “Old as time. Anyway, as old as literature. Hinc illae lacimae—”
“Wait!” said Esme. “Alms for the ignorant poor! What did you say?”
“ ‘Hence the tears shed.’ It’s old Terence. And Wordsworth: ‘The still, sad music of humanity.’ Old stuff to poets, but of course brand-new to science, which is always behind literature.”
“And old Burton,” said I. ‘ “If there is a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man’s heart.’ ”
“And that’s what you’ve founded your medical practice on?” said Esme.
“Within the limits of reason.”
“You understand now why they called him The Cunning Man,” said McWearie.
“Who called him that?”
“The Ladies.”
Damn! Now that cat is out of the bag. I had hoped Esme would not find out about The Ladies. But—
“I must know about The Ladies,” she said.
III
Glebe House
Cockcroft Street
Toronto, Ontario
Canada
Dearest Barbara:
So long since I have written, what with one thing and another and knowing you were so tied up in the divorce business, that I don’t know where to begin. As you see, we now have a permanent address (and proper paper, isn’t it smart, done by a little man, Mr. Russell, quite close by) having taken the plunge and bought this place, which is a leap in the dark I can tell you. But everything else we tried was utterly impossible, with no place where Dear One could work with peace of mind and the space she needs. Of course I can do my scratching anywhere (almost) but she must have space and quiet and decent light. And this place gives all of that, because the huge old conservatory is just right for a sculptor,1 and in the winter oil stoves will keep her from freezing. But it has almost cleared us out of the ready, and neither of us is earning enough to stick in your eye.