Or it may be that he is faithful to his dream and faithless to his love; that he goes to America and prospers there, and all that other side of him, all that is not strong and hard and resolute, is crushed out in the fierce antagonism of finance, the ruthless fight for wealth, and he returns at length an old man to the country of his youth, to the city that stretches unaltered beneath him in light and shadow: the stern statues, the trees and garden, and the bright, thronged thoroughfare of the Carl Johansgate; and at the end of the balcony there stands a young man leaning, as he had leant thirty years earlier, against the stone of the balustrade, and he is filled swiftly, unaccountably, with an envy for that young man’s potentialities. “I was once,” he thinks, “all that he is now. I, too, was young, and fresh and gracious. I, too, stood with the twenties and the thirties at my feet, and what have I made of them? While others played, I worked. And while I worked the magic and the beauty of life passed by me. I made gold of the years that others turned to poetry.” And he feels lonely, and turns with a shiver to the warm lights at the back of him. And he starts, for it seems to him that there has risen suddenly at his side a figure out of the past: a pale slim girl with cool white skin and flaxen hair and pale cornflower blue eyes, and he is deserted by that assurance that has won him so many contracts, and he stammers and says, “But surely, somewhere,—forgive me, please; but, haven’t we....” And there is a low laugh, and at his side a voice, “But you should know her, she is my daughter.”
And turning, he sees all that her mother has become, and seeing it, sees also his own youth buried there. And life seems to me an utterly empty and worthless thing.
A story that perhaps Maupassant would have cared to write. For that was one of his favourite devices to bring a man face to face suddenly with the survival of his discarded self, and the theme is Maupassant’s; that we get always the thing we ask for, but never as we ask for it, never according to the letter of our desire.
V
VERY quickly, very pleasantly it passed, our week in Christiania, with driftings in and out of cafés, and visits to the chalet of an old friend of Clifford’s, Von Erpecom Sem, on the heights of Holmenhollen, from which we could see far below the harbour and fjords of Christiania. We never saw it in the sunlight, in all its many-coloured beauty, but at night we saw it; a long scattered stretch of twinkling lights across the water; and agreed that it deserved all that the guide-books have ever said of it.
I am not certain, though, that the best of that holiday was not the waking in a sleeper at 7.30 on a Monday morning at King’s Cross with the knowledge that in an hour’s time I should be at home. I should find, I knew, something between fifty and sixty letters waiting for me, for I have made it a rule never to have correspondence forwarded to me when I go away. There would be certainly something exciting for me in the congregation of a fortnight’s letters. It was the first week in May; the sun was shining out of a blue sky, with all the promise of summer’s splendour. Lord’s and cricket, and long, lazy afternoons reading in a deck-chair in the garden.
Once again the newspaper would become interesting. I should find myself buying each successive issue of the Evening News to know if Hearne was still not out at Lord’s. And once again at about three o’clock would steal over me that dissatisfaction with the manuscript that lay unfinished on my desk in front of me. My hand would steal out towards the receiver of the telephone. “Paddington 144. Yes: is that Lord’s? Middlesex batting,—189 for 3. Thank you very much.” And within half an hour I shall be sitting on the sun-baked gallery of the pavilion.
They pass so quickly those four golden months, that we are hardly conscious of their passage till the time comes for us to walk, at the close of the last match, wistfully across an emptying ground.
For eight months Lord’s will be shut; we shall pass by it on the ’bus, and the white seats of the mound will be empty. A few groundsmen will be pottering about; someone will be rolling the practice pitch. We shall stand up on the ’bus as we go by, for one always does stand up on a ’bus as one passes Lord’s; but no longer shall we crane our necks to read the figures on the telegraph, or peer eagerly to distinguish the players, to see whether it is Hearne or Hendren that is still not out. The season is not over yet, of course; there is still the Scarborough festival, and the champion county has to meet England at the Oval. But these games were, after all, an anti-climax; for the true cricketer the season is at an end when the last ball is bowled at Lord’s.
At first we are not too sorry. Four months is a long time at even the best of games, and it is pleasant to think that in a fortnight’s time we shall be getting out our football jerseys and putting new bars upon our boots. It will be great fun going down to the Old Deer Park for the trial games and meeting our old friends. Soon the season will be really started, and every Tuesday morning will bring the yellow card: “You have been selected to play for ‘A’ XV v. Exiles, or Harlequins ‘A,’ or Old Alleynians.” And then on Saturday we shall let the District Railway carry us out to strange places—Northfields and Boston Manor—places whose names are familiar to us on the tubes, but are distant in the imagination, like Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, places where we never expect anyone to live. For members of an ‘A’ XV life is always an adventure; and then, when the game is over, and we sit back in the carriage lazy and tired, it is amusing to read through the soccer results in the evening paper and learn that at Stamford Bridge 40,000 people saw “Cock outwit the custodian and net the ball in the first three minutes.” And afterwards we go on to Dehem’s and meet our friends from the other games, and eat a great deal of roast beef, and drink a great deal of beer. Oh, yes, there are many compensations for the loss of summer! The autumn passes quickly and pleasantly, but towards Christmas there will come, as there always must come, an evening when we shall sit over the fire and remember suddenly that it is four months since we have held a cricket bat, that May is still a long way off, and the procession of Saturdays seems endless. On such an evening we take down Wisden and, long after our usual bedtime, pore over the old scores.