EVERYONE has some sort of framework, some series of pigeon-holes that divides the year arbitrarily into its component parts. For Mayfair there is Ascot and Goodwood and the London Season. For the sportsman there is the 12th of August. For the cricketer summer begins on 1st May with the pitching of the first wicket, and ends when the last ball is bowled midway in September. He cannot say, as may the gardener: Summer began earlier this year than it did last. There may come the St Martin’s summer of late October, the days of blue sky and mellow sunlight, when girls put on their light frocks again and when tea is taken in the garden, and butterflies wake from their winter sleep. But he will not care how blue the sky may be, nor how warm the air. Football has begun; the white screens are stacked out of the wind between the pavilion and the wall.
On the whole he is inclined to resent the unseasonable aspect of the weather. He considers it a waste of sunshine. He remembers the wet days of June when he tramped up and down the pavilion in his spiked boots, listening to the rain beat upon the corrugated-iron roof, watching the wicket turn slowly to a quagmire. Winter sunshine rarely fails to rouse in him a feeling of homesickness. So nearly cricket weather, he thinks, and he remembers that May is still four months distant. Equally he distrusts the summer that begins almost before March is over. He would prefer to have April a month of rain and cold. We are only entitled, he thinks, every year to a certain number of fine days. We shall want all we can of them when cricket is again with us. Sunshine is wasted when it does not fall caressingly on white flannels and parasols and the sound of bat on ball.
He would prefer April to be cold and wet, although, probably owing to the peculiar formation of his time’s hat-rack, he will be forced to take his holiday in the course of it, forced because it is the one month that provides a gap between the demands of cricket and of football. September does not. We play our last cricket match somewhere about the 13th, and on the next Saturday the District Railway is bearing us to the Old Deer Park and the rugger trials. There is no breathing space in September. But in April there is no cricket, and only a few desultory games of rugger; the grounds are too hard, the sun is too hot, and seven months at one game is quite enough. We dubbin our boots, put them on the shelf, begin oiling our bats, and spend a couple of Saturday afternoons in comfortable leisure.
I nearly always go away myself in April, not because I particularly want to, not because I need a rest,—is not cricket, the most complete of all rests, imminent? but because a holiday which involves a sudden dropping of routine and interests and relationships is our one chance of recovering that sense of proportion which we tend to lose so rapidly in London. It is the equivalent of the Catholic retreat; a pause; the provision of an angle of detachment. If one has a varied and amusing life; if one enjoys one’s work; if no place nor person has particularly got upon one’s nerves, then a holiday is, from the mere point of enjoyment, an unnecessary extravagance. I rarely return home from one without thinking that I could have enjoyed myself more thoroughly and less expensively in London. I look on a holiday, a formal holiday that is to say, not an impromptu four days’ stay in Brussels, or in Paris, somewhat as a duty.
In London we are always meeting the same people. Everyone knows everything about everybody, their literary and domestic arrangements and entanglements, their tastes, their ambitions, their peculiarities; and it gives us an overweaning sense of our own impotence. It is healthy for us to be transported into a society where books are not read and writers not discussed, where we are all strangers to one another.
That is the chief charm of isolated country inns. One never knows whom one may meet, one is always encountering new types; and it is often easier to talk intimately to an acquaintance than a friend.
Three years ago I went away for a fortnight to a small Sussex village, ten miles from any station. It is right underneath the Downs, and from my bedroom window I could see the shadows moving across them in the early morning. I have sometimes thought, as I looked down on it from a balcony in Hammersmith, that I should never see any natural object more varying than the river. Its greys and greens and browns flow continually into one another, the lights and the water taking on different shades under the influence of the tides and currents. “I shall never see anything better than the river,” I used to say, and I don’t know that I have. Not better; but the Downs are as good. They are as full of colour as the river—brown, green, black, in certain aspects very nearly red. It is wonderful to see the sunshine moving over them; the long shadows changing their positions during the afternoon, revealing unexpected projections of the ground. It is the Downs, I suppose, that draw people to the place; no celebrity lives there, there is no artistic colony, no local industry; it has not been written up by the Sussex Cyder School. And yet there are enough visitors to support a really quite tolerable hotel.
It is not smart; I can hardly compliment our host upon his cellar, and there is not much choice of food; but the bedrooms are large, and two of the smoking-room windows can be opened. It is not too cheerful on a wet day, but I have been less comfortable in a smart hotel in Brussels at eighty francs a day.
And one does meet quaint people. Funny old couples discussing the income-tax; young folk on a honeymoon; retired politicians buried beneath the Morning Post. It was a real thrill, that first evening in the Downs Hotel. I had a long hot bath after my journey, changed leisurely, carefully brushed back what little a steel helmet has left me of my hair, and waited for the dinner-gong. I went down at once, selected a table as far away from the door as possible, and watched the regular residents troop slowly down. And when, on my second evening, the waiter came up to ask whether I would mind another gentleman sitting at my table, I was able to assure him honestly that it would be a real pleasure to me.
Half an hour later, however, I had to confess that he might have found me a more interesting companion.