Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

Then, like the barber, I shall be moved to do something desperate. I shall want some oblation to lay on the altar, and if I know my companion he will not have forgotten his hundred foot of rope or his craft of the mountains and together we will

Leave our rags on Pavey Ark,
Our cards on Pillar grim.

And then, the consecration and the offering complete, back to the world that is shuddering, white-faced and wondering, into its Paradise Regained.... Why, here is St. John's Wood already. And Lord's! Of course, I must have a day at Lord's. It will be a part of the ritual of reconciliation. The old players will not be there, for the gulf with the past is wide and the bones of many a great artist lie on distant fields. But we must recapture their music and pay homage to their memory. Yes, I will take my lunch to Lord's—or perchance the Oval—and sit in the sunshine and hear the merry tune of bat and ball, and walk over the greensward in the interval and look at the wicket, and talk for a whole day with my companion of the giants of old and of the doughty things we have seen them do. Haig and Hindenburg, Tirpitz and Jellicoe, all the names that have filled our nightmare shall be forgotten: there shall fall from our lips none but the names of the goodly game—"W.G." and Ranji, Johnny Briggs and Lohmann, Spofforth and Bonner, Ulyett and Barnes (a brace of them) and all the jolly host. We'll not forget one of them. Not one. For a whole day we will go it, hammer and tongs.

And there are ever so many more things I shall want to do. I shall want to go and see the chestnuts at Bushey Park on Chestnut Sunday. I shall want to send Christmas cards, and light bonfires on the Fifth, and make my young friends April fools on the First, and feel what a tennis racket is like, and have hot cross buns on Good Friday and pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. I shall want to go and sit on the sands and hear nigger minstrels again, and talk about the prospects of the Boat Race, and take up all the pleasant threads of life that fell from our hands nearly four years ago. In short, I shall plunge into all the old harmless gaieties that we have forgotten, have no time for, no heart for, no use for to-day.

But the bus has stopped and I am turned out of Eden into the snow and the slush and the never-ending night. The magic chariot goes on with its blazing lights, and a bend in the road quenches the pleasant vision in darkness.

ON A COMIC GENIUS

"Like to see Harry Lauder? Of course I should like to see Harry Lauder. But how can I decently go and see Harry Lauder with Lord Devonport putting us on rations, with every hoarding telling me that extravagance is a crime, and with Trafalgar Square aflame with commands to me to go to the bank or the post-office and put every copper I have, as well as every copper I can borrow, into the War Loan? Do you realise that the five shillings I should pay for a seat to see Harry Lauder would, according to the estimate of the placards on the walls, buy thirty-one and a half bullets to send to the Germans? Now, on a conservative estimate, those thirty-one and a half bullets ought to——"

"My dear fellow, Harry Lauder has subscribed £52,000 to the War Loan. In going to see him, therefore, you are subscribing to the War Loan. You are making him your agent. You pass the cash on to him and he passes the bullets on to the Germans. It is a patriotic duty to go and see Harry Lauder."

I fancy the reasoning was more ingenious than sound, but it seemed a good enough answer to the hoardings, and I went. It was a poor setting for the great man—one of those dismal things called revues, that are neither comedies nor farces, nor anything but shambling, hugger-mugger contraptions into which you fling anything that comes handy, especially anything that is suggestive of night-clubs, fast young men and faster young women. I confess that I prefer my Harry without these accompaniments. I like him to have the stage to himself. I like Miss Ethel Levy to be somewhere else when he is about. I do not want anything to come between me and the incomparable Harry any more than I want anyone to help me to appreciate the Fifth Symphony by beating time with his foot and humming the melody.