Heroes of To-Day

by Mary Rosetta Parkman

When I had time to observe the players, who were practising about the ground, I was shocked. They wear dust-colored shirts and dingy knickerbockers, fastened under the knee, and heavy boots. They strike the English eye as being attired for football, or a gladiatorial combat, rather than a summer game. The very close-fitting caps, with large peaks, give them picturesquely the appearance of hooligans. Baseball is a good game to watch, and in outline easy to understand, as it is merely glorified rounders. A cricketer is fascinated by their rapidity and skill in catching and throwing. There is excitement in the game, but little beauty except in the long-limbed “pitcher,” whose duty it is to hurl the ball rather farther than the length of the cricket-pitch, as bewilderingly as possible. In his efforts to combine speed, mystery, and curve, he gets into attitudes of a very novel and fantastic, but quite obvious, beauty.

One queer feature of this sport is that unoccupied members of the batting side, fielders, and even spectators, are accustomed to join in vocally. You have the spectacle of the representatives of the universities endeavoring to frustrate or unnerve their opponents, at moments of excitement, by cries of derision and mockery, or heartening their own supporters and performers with exclamations of “Now, Joe!” or “He’s got them!” or “He’s the boy!” At the crises in the fortunes of the game, the spectators take a collective and important part. The Athletic Committee appoints a “cheer-leader” for the occasion. Every five or ten minutes this gentleman, a big, fine figure in white, springs out from his seat at the foot of the stands, addresses the multitude through a megaphone with a “One! Two! Three!” hurls it aside, and, with a wild flinging and swinging of his body and arms, conducts ten thousand voices in the Harvard yell.... It all seemed so wonderfully American, in its combination of entire wildness and entire regulation, with the whole just a trifle fantastic....

“The glimpses you give of the ‘States’ are brief and, for the most part, superficial,” we accused him, not unjustly. “You approach what you are pleased to call our ‘rag-time civilization’ in a rag-time mood.”

“You delightful Americans are too sensitive,” he replied with his irresistible smile. “Of course no mere Briton could do you justice in a few random, hastily-flung newspaper letters. One of these days I hope to work up these trivial jottings in some more thoughtful and not unworthy fashion.”

He describes Niagara Falls, the Canadian Rockies, and the South Seas with a poet’s appreciation, but with an irrepressible homesickness for his little England. He wonders and admires, but misses the haunting echoes of humanity, the sense of a loving, lingering past, that make the English landscape dear:

It is indeed a new world. How far away seem those grassy, moonlit places in England that have been Roman camps or roads, where there is always serenity, and the spirit of a purpose at rest, and the sunlight flashes upon more than flint! Here one is perpetually a first-comer.... The flowers are less conscious than English flowers, the breezes have nothing to remember, and everything to promise. There walk, as yet, no ghosts of lovers in Canadian lanes.... There is nothing lurking in the heart of the shadows, and no human mystery in the colors, and neither the same joy nor the kind of peace in dawn and sunset that older lands know....

In the perfect lazy content of the South Pacific isles, that are, he says, “compound of all legendary heavens,” Rupert Brooke led a blissful, lotus-eating existence. Nowhere had he even imagined such serene bodily well-being as he found darting, floating, and dreaming through the irised waves, lulled by the faint thunder of the surf on the distant reef. It seemed, too, that this must be the seventh heaven of song. If swimming and poetry had been all, home and friends might have called in vain. But the young poet’s love of England was proof against every beguiling lure. Do you remember how Tennyson in his “Palace of Art,” after showing pictures of every sort of loveliness—beautiful, enchanting, magical glimpses of many lands—turns at last to this scene as best of all?—

And one, an English home—gray twilight poured
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep—all things in order stored,
A haunt of ancient Peace.

Even so Rupert Brooke, from his South Sea paradise, longed for the “ancient peace” of the old vicarage by the River Cam. Never for a moment did he forget that he was England’s—flesh of her flesh, soul of her soul.

Soon after his return from his wander year, before his joy in all the dear home ways had lost any of its new zest, it seemed as if the old comfortable order of things might pass away forever. The face of his world was changed in a day. From a brand fired somehow, somewhere, in the mysterious Balkans, all Europe was suddenly ablaze. England awoke from her preoccupation with her own family difficulties—the Irish Home-rule question, the disputes between capital and labor, and the militant suffragettes. She could not see Belgium and France destroyed. Englishmen who had been reading with incredulous amazement the daily reports of the threatening violence of the continental misunderstanding, and congratulating themselves on their sane and secure aloofness, awoke to find that they were at war with Germany and Austria.