MYSELF WHEN YOUNG
BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Fiction
THE LOOM OF YOUTH
PLEASURE
THE LONELY UNICORN

Studies
THE PRISONERS OF MAINZ
PUBLIC SCHOOL LIFE

MYSELF
WHEN YOUNG
CONFESSIONS

BY
ALEC WAUGH

LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS LTD.
ST MARTIN’S STREET
1923

Printed in Great Britain by
Neill & Co., Ltd., Edinburgh.

FOR
MY MOTHER
TO WHOM I FIRST SPOKE OF IT
WITH MY LOVE

Contents: [I, ] [II, ] [III, ] [IV, ] [V, ] [VI, ] [VII, ] [VIII, ] [IX, ] [X, ] [XI, ] [XII, ] [XIII, ] [XIV.]

I

IF the majority of one’s friends live in Kensington and Bloomsbury, and if one is fond of going out to parties in the evening, then one should live somewhere midway between these two extremities of charm and culture. With the acceptance of each fresh invitation, I am led increasingly to appreciate that there is no stronger deterrent to one’s enjoyment of an evening than the knowledge that one has at the end of it to get to Golders Green. However agreeable the company, however profuse the hospitality, there must always come that moment when one is forced to weigh the expense of a taxi against the degree of entertainment likely to be derived from a refusal to be disturbed by the sirens of the last tube.

It is twenty-five minutes past twelve; in thirteen minutes the shutters of Warren Street Station will be down. You rise from your cushioned comfort. You inform your hostess that it is very late, that you are very busy just now, that you have to be up early in the morning, that you really feel that the time has come. But you rarely complete your explanations. “Oh, but no, really; must you?” she says. “Surely you can stay a little longer. I’m expecting ‘so-and-so’ and ‘so-and-so’ any moment now. They promised faithfully they would come. They’ll be frightfully disappointed if they find you have gone.” Your vanity arrays itself before your prudence. You remind yourself that a taxi will only cost ten shillings; you consider with what speed, with the writing of how few extra words you will be able to earn that sum next morning; you remember a copy-book platitude about a ship and a small amount of tar; you vacillate; and whichever way you decide, eventually you will come to regret your choice. If you stay it is more than likely that the owners of the distinguished names that were dangled as a bait in front of you will never come at all; or, if they do, they will arrive exhausted from some previous entertainment, and will sit silent and unapproachable in a corner. There is a strong probability that the last syphon will be discovered to be finished. Certainly by half-past one you will be in no humour to exchange with the taxi-driver those formalities of reluctance and solicitation that are forced on everyone who lives north of the Marlborough Road.

Wearily will you say to him “145 North End Road.” “Fulham?” will be his answer. “Golders Green,” will you snap back at him. “Oh, sir!” and he will tell you how late it is, how cold he is, and that he has got to get back to Balham or Brixton or Upper Clapton. One day I think I shall say “Fulham” for the mere pleasure of learning that taximeter cabriolets can be parked at Barnet or Finchley or St Albans. In the end, as always, you assure him that you will make it worth his while; and as you sink back into the ill-sprung, ill-cushioned seat you wonder what folly has persuaded you to stay that extra hour; you reflect on the disinclination with which you will settle down to work next morning; you ponder the slump of the literary market and the extreme difficulty of making it yield sustenance; you ask yourself by what right you chose to spend ten shillings on a journey that you could have made for fourpence; thus you remind yourself did the hero of your last story set in motion that process of reckless degeneration the details of which you so masterfully exposed.

Nor, though you will be the richer by nine and eightpence, will you be any less the victim of self-criticism, should you catch the 12.38 from Warren Street. As you pull wearily up the North End Road, you will be assailed by all those arguments that, had you stayed, you would in the taxi have exposed to high derision.

And it was in such a mood, after such a decision, on a wet, breathless January evening that I walked homewards past the few melancholy trees that were once part of the proud avenue down which Dick Turpin cantered plunderwards. Why, I asked myself, had I yielded to those instincts of economy that are the only heritage with which my Scots ancestry has thought prudent to endow me; why, for the sake of a few pennies had I deserted the party at the very moment when it was about to become genuinely amusing. Parties are like bonfires: they smoulder wretchedly for a couple of hours; they emit columns of malodorous, unsightly smoke; then suddenly, gloriously, unexpectedly, they burst into a splendour of leaping flame. Such a transformation had been, I now felt, about to enshrine that party for all time in the memory of those present at the very moment when I had decided to desert it. Harold Scott had just arrived from the Everyman Theatre. And than Harold Scott there are few persons who can be, when he so desires, more cheering and more exhilarating. He had regaled himself, not inappropriately, as he had been that evening impersonating Feste, with a stoup of wine, had been led to the piano, and had struck the first chords of “Another Little Job for the Tombstone Maker.” It was a song of which the fame and the refrain had often reached me, the words never: and why, I asked myself, had I allowed to pass so agreeable an opportunity of making their acquaintance. In a mood, therefore, of uncomfortable self-depreciation, cautiously, so that the dog might not bark and awake the household, I opened the front door, to find on the hat cupboard below the window a letter addressed to me in a bright green envelope.

There is only one person who writes to me in bright green envelopes, and I never see that handwriting without a thrill. Whatever else may in time pass from memory, it is improbable that I shall ever forget the excitement which I felt when, for the first time, I saw that handwriting, and read in the left hand of the envelope the words “Grant Richards Ltd.” I was at Sandhurst at the time, and the day had begun unfortunately. I had appeared on early parade without a lanyard, and had been requested to appear after breakfast at Company Office. I was, indeed, waiting in the passage to be marched before the Major when the mail arrived, and among the letters flung haphazardly on the table of the ante-room was the one telling me that my first book had found a publisher. At such a moment I should with equanimity have accepted any punishment with which the authorities might have thought well to chasten me; but even then I could not help reading into my dismissal, without the reprimand that would have suspended my week-end leave, a happy augury for my book. And after six years a green envelope is still for me a symbol of romance; the miracle may be repeated. I am not of a particularly credulous nature, but I always half expect to find there some equally sensational announcement; and on this grey January evening my dissatisfaction was by the sight of it instantly and marvellously removed.

The letter contained, however, no reckless offer for film rights from America; merely an encouraging inquiry about my new novel. “Soon,” it said, “we shall be preparing our spring and summer list. Can you not at least give us the title of your book?” My dissatisfaction returned. My novel was little nearer its last chapter than it had been when I had discussed its prospects three months earlier with Grant Richards. That is the worst of a creative as opposed to a routine publisher. You have had an admirable lunch; you sit back in a deep and comfortable arm-chair; you smoke a good Egyptian cigarette; a fire is blazing merrily in front of you; your eyes are wooed pleasantly by Sancha’s frescoed decoration, by the photographs on the mantelpiece and walls of those whose names have from time to time appeared among your publisher’s announcements, and among which you are pleased to observe your own conspicuously displayed: you feel content, in harmony, reassured. You begin to talk of your new novel. In this pleasant atmosphere it becomes suddenly very real to you.

“Splendid! splendid!” says Grant Richards; “now, you’ll let me have that in time for the spring, won’t you?” He stands with his back to the fireplace, adjusts his monocle, and begins to tell you of the artist who will design the wrapper, of the cloth in which it will be bound, of the type in which it will be printed, of the special instructions he will give his travellers. You leave his study feeling that your book is finished; that in a few days it will be presented to an enraptured world. Your imagination is already carrying you to your club and opening newspaper after newspaper over which you bow before a volley of critical applause. You discover through fuddled channels of mental mathematics the extent of the fortune that is to be yours, and, on the strength of it, you proceed to order two new suits of clothes. Then you go home, and you accept an invitation to a party, and you play football, and you review a book, and you read a few manuscripts at your office, and you turn into a short story an anecdote you overheard at your club; and in six months’ time you find your novel where you left it, your tailor’s bill in front of you, and your royalties account crippled by a process of diminishing returns.

Regretfully I replaced the letter in its bright green envelope. There were still a few coals glowing in my study grate; the room was warm and kindly and sympathetic. The sky-blue walls with the deep black line running round the door and beneath the ceiling, the long low tier of bookshelves which had wooed me so often from my work, the black framed etchings of Nevinson and Wadsworth, the two water colours by Prout, the patterned tiling of the fireplace, and that dazzling screen by Roger Fry which I had bought at the Omega workshop sale with such thrilled misgiving and which has since taken its place so unobtrusively against a background of many coloured volumes; every book and ornament and picture in the room where I had wasted so many hours seemed to welcome me with a smile of affectionate indulgence. “It does not matter,” they seemed to say. “You have been very happy among us—all those hours passing from one book to another, from one chain of memories to another. You have idled away, doubtless, a deal of time in our company, but it was so that we would have you be, and for all we know you may be the richer for that idleness, richer than if you had pursued, as you had intended, with eyes riveted on the green baize of your desk, the fortunes of your really rather dismal heroine!”

Our study, because it is an expression of ourself, our taste, our personality, becomes at times as reassuring, as persuasive, as that rascally confidante of introspection—a friend whom we can persuade to view our failings through our own eyes and in terms of our own conscience.

I made up the fire, turned up the switch of my electric-lamp, drew my arm-chair within the narrow circle of its light, and paused to wonder with what book, with what companion, I should spend the hour or so before I should be tired enough to go to bed. At such an hour one cannot choose a book from the shelves haphazardly and allow it to evoke its own particular series of emotions. The book must suit the mood, must fit it as the words of a song fit the accompaniment. The varied incidents of the day, the people we have seen and spoken to, the words we have written and read, have created little by little the nature and intensity of the state of mind that is upon us at this late hour.

Slowly I ran my eye along the shelves. There in the corner of the wall were the novels, marshalled like soldiers on parade, an even row, with their plain cloth bindings and ink lettering—serviceable stuff for the most part; fashioned to supply a want; strong enough to resist a six months’ battery on the shelves of Smith’s and Boot’s and Mudie’s, and flimsy enough to sink afterwards, without too great resistance, into coverless, dog-eared decomposition. Next to them the taller, prouder, more exclusive demy octavos; the gleaming white backs of the George Moore limited edition; the slim, calf-bound Maupassants; the heavy, formidable works of reference and criticism; and beyond them the gay adventurers; the many sized, the many coloured, the many covered; plays and books of verse, and volumes of essays; “Jurgen,” Max Beerbohm, and Petronius; anthologies, large and square and squat and oblong; personal books whose shape and format have been the result of much thought; for whose sake many specimen pages, many bindings have been returned to their artificer; and on the extreme left, in the shadow of the screen, the cricket books, a shelf of reminiscence and exhortation; and below it a long row of battered Wisden’s, and beside them the faded rust-red Lillywhite’s. A small library, not more than a thousand books probably; but I would rather have a few friends than many acquaintances, and there is hardly a book there that has not some personal significance.

And yet on this particular evening I found the choice of a book by no means easy. I felt in no mood for a book that should deal exclusively with any one subject; and I searched unsuccessfully for the book that should pass casually, irresponsibly as conversation does, from one theme to another. I recalled the many evenings I have spent, tired after a day’s work or an afternoon’s football, talking, in a studio in Edwardes Square, of cricket and poetry, of life and literature and love; thinking how quickly the hours had passed as I lingered talking there. And there came back to me the memory of one particular evening when we had discussed the prospects of a new paper shortly to be presented to the world, in which we were jointly interested: Clifford Bax as editor, myself as publisher; I had been asked how happy I considered to be its prospects. But I disclaimed the rôle of prophet.

“One can’t begin to guess,” I said; “a magazine is like a novel: it’s the expression of the editor’s personal taste. If the editor starts to include work he doesn’t like because he thinks it may succeed, he will fail as surely as the good novelist would fail if he tried to write a pot-boiler. It would be insincere. Think of Tit-Bits. There was a paper produced by a man who stated a fact and asked himself a question. A paper, he said, is a thing that a man wants to read when he’s tired at the end of the day. And the question he set himself was this: ‘What should I myself like to read under similar circumstances?’ He decided that Tit-Bits was the sort of thing that he would like to read; and as he was the average man to the extent that he was miraculously in tune with the taste of the average man, Tit-Bits was a big success. In the same way the success or failure of your paper will depend on the number of people who are sufficiently in harmony with your standard of taste to be prepared to increase their annual expenditure to the extent of one guinea. It is, it must always be, a pure gamble.”

And I remember thinking that it was doubtless for this reason that the career of the literary periodical is so invariably short-lived. It is always the same thing. The paper is launched, fresh painted, with flags gaily fluttering. At the oars are to be seen renowned sailors: men who have ventured on noble hazards in the cause of letters. There is a shout of acclamation from the shore. “Never,” they say, “has a ship been launched under happier auspices. See how it cuts the waves! See how the oars rise and fall together! Of a surety it will win through safely to the fortunate islands.”

But before the ship is many miles from land, the watchers from the land observe signs of disquiet and dissension. The flags begin to droop. The sails are slack. The oarsmen no longer work in harmony. Some of them have indeed ceased to row at all and others are making arrangements to put back to shore while the waters are still smooth. The bright speed of that first passage is forgotten. The ship sways in midsea at the mercy of tide and current. The faithful few are hard put to it to keep the boat afloat. They can make no headway, and the watchers from the land lose interest and give their ears to the tales of some newer seaman who brings tidings by another route of merchandise and treasure and perilous journeyings.

A sad story, but one whose details have grown so familiar as to cease almost to sadden us. We talk of the literary market. How, we ask, can a private enterprise hope to enter the lists against the vested interests of printer and publisher and bookseller. If the editor has a number of friends, he can produce two or three good numbers. But if his contributors are paid at all, they receive remuneration at a rate so low as to amount practically to insult. And however much the artificers of the new world, the evangelists of the dawn of brotherhood, may speak of the sacred trusts of art, a man is loath to sell for three guineas a commodity for which elsewhere he can obtain fifteen. The editor of such a paper receives from an “established author” only those compositions that cannot be satisfactorily sold in the open market. For two reasons may such compositions be unmarketable. Either they are bad, or they are unsuited for family consumption. Indeed, the student of literary history will find that most of the contributions to such periodicals of a lasting æsthetic value are of a nature to justify their inclusion in “the index”; which is unfortunate commercially; for one does not particularly care to spend six shillings on a production that cannot be decently left about the house.

Unquestionably this is one of the main cross-currents that hinder the progress of the brave adventurers. But there are others, and I am not certain that the greatest of them is not the lack of harmony between the editor and the public. The magazine is a thing with which to pass the evening hours of half-past nine to eleven; and the man whose day has been spent among books, whose eyes are tired with the sight of print, would prefer, when his work is finished, to dance or play bridge or go to a theatre or a party. The dinner-jacket and white shirt into which we change after our evening bath is the symbol of a change of atmosphere. We have put away the traffic of the day’s business; and those of us whose livelihood depends on letters find it difficult to establish contact with the civil servant and the bank manager who is content after dinner to settle down happily before a solid scholarly review.

The editor has put his paper to bed; he leans back exhausted in his chair. “Thank God, that’s over,” he says; “and thank God,” he adds, “that I haven’t got to read it.”

That is the problem for an editor. If he prints what he would himself like to read at such a time, his choice will, as likely as not, fail to satisfy the man who has spent his day beside the telephone and whose ears are weary with listening to applications for an overdraft; while, if he prints what he feels his public would like to read, if he substitutes a standard of decision other than “I like” or “I don’t like it,” his paper will cease to be an expression of his own personality, and will be insincere. The ideal editor shares the tastes of the public that he is addressing.

And it was, I think, on that same evening that Clifford Bax asked me how the paper that I should myself most eagerly welcome would be constituted; and I answered that the paper would have to take the place of a friend, and that I should wish for such a paper as would reproduce the essence of the evening that we had spent together.

“We have talked,” I said, “much of cricket, of the great matches that we have seen and read of. We have wondered how we could persuade the M.C.C. to arrange a single-wicket match between Hearne and Woolley. We have fought old battles again, and have drawn weapons that have long lain rusty on the shelf. And we have spoken of our own achievements as may with complete propriety two such indifferent performers as ourselves. We need make no display of modesty. Our figures prove conclusively enough our quality. We do not apply to our cricket the standards that we apply to Hendren’s. We deal kindlily with one another, as reviewers do with those friendly, worthless little volumes of verse that do no one any harm and may quite conceivably cause innocent entertainment to their authors and their friends. So in my paper there could be some such talk of cricket.

“And as we have spoken of the technique of writing, and of the literary market, on these subjects should I commission articles. We have repeated a number of anecdotes, slightly scandalous ones for the most part, and the short story in my paper would not be sophisticated or obscure or modern: a piece of straightforward, concrete narrative that would aim less at vigour than at charm. I would have it a pretty, sentimental thing, with here and there a suggestion of wantonness, of riot. There would be personalities; for the peeping Tom that is in all of us clamours for satisfaction. And we pass a great deal of our time discussing the peculiarities of our acquaintances.

Each number should contain a character sketch of some public figure, and I should not object if it were malicious. It is a sign of vulgarity, I am told, to feel curious about the routine of other people’s lives. A number of critics dealt very harshly with Mrs Watts-Dunton’s little book on Swinburne. He was a poet, they said, a great poet. His work remains. That is all that matters. What purpose is served by this trivial gossip about boots and comforters and garters. Personally I found her book admirably entertaining. I felt, after reading it, that I knew Swinburne better than I had before. Routine is, after all, the framework of a man’s life; and it is interesting for a writer to learn how others work; at what time they write; how many words they write a day; whether they work steadily throughout the year, or in short bursts of intense concentration. It may dispel the illusion to watch a play from the wings of a theatre instead of from the stalls. But there are some things about the showman that can be only learnt behind the scenes. At any rate, that is the sort of stuff that I would like to read in my paper.”

The fire had begun to burn merrily in the grate; the warm light fell caressingly in a glowing haze on books and chairs and pictures; and I turned towards it from the book-shelves that had become to me inhospitable, wondering why one’s interests should be kept separate in literature if they are not so kept in life; why one book should be devoted exclusively to fiction, another to criticism, another to reminiscence, and another to sport. Would it not be for a change amusing to find unity of theme and subject abandoned for a unity of tone. And suddenly I knew in what words I should reply to Grant Richards in the morning.

“My dear Richards,” I should write, “I am afraid that I have no news for you about my novel. But I shall be sending you quite soon, I think, a book that you will, I hope, like a very great deal better. It will not be fiction, though there will be short stories in it, nor a sporting book, though there will be there both football and cricket: there will be much talk of books, but it will not be literary criticism. Indeed, I do not know to what shelf the librarian at the Times Book Club will consign it.”

It would be a sort of cousin to my dream paper; one feature only would be omitted. There would be no malicious personalities. There are some things that one may like to read, but does not care to write. For the sake of a few pennies and a few paragraphs, I would not run the risk of injuring a friendship.

And, lying back in the depths of my arm-chair, watching the dusky shadows of the firelight move over the ceiling as waves do on a calm day in mid-channel, I thought how pleasant would be the writing of such a book that would pass as conversation does from books to life, and from life to cricket, and so back to books again. How pleasant to let the pen follow the fancy of the anecdote, to let impression flow into impression, to snatch away the blinkers of the technique of formal narrative and criticism. Tired and well content and drowsy I let my thoughts wander out of my control on their lazy, haphazard journey.

II

ABOUT a year ago my American publishers asked me to send them some personal material for press publicity, and I spent a hot summer afternoon describing my parentage, my tastes, my aversions, and what use I made of days and hours. I am now receiving by every second mail syndicated cuttings of my confessions. I am learning quite a lot about myself. I am, I have discovered, a methodical and industrious person. Every Monday and Friday I go to a publisher’s office in Henrietta Street where I read manuscripts, draft advertisements, and generally entertain myself and my employers. During the three middle days of the week I write.

I follow a regular routine on my writing days. I have breakfast at half-past eight. From nine to ten I walk over Hampstead Heath. From ten to one o’clock I write. In the afternoon I go to a cinema. From five to seven I write again. I work at the rate of 3500 words a day. During the week-end I enjoy myself. I dance, I play football or cricket as the time of year ordains. I see my friends. It is, in fact, a picture of the sort of young man who wins prizes at a Sunday school and makes good in the business novel.

I suppose that I must have in some such way spent the week previous to my confession. Or perhaps I felt that I needed organising, that it was on such lines my time should be arranged, and that by the mere fact of writing down a time-table I should “Coué” myself into an observance of it; at any rate it is not, I need perhaps hardly say, very much like that. I do not confine my entertainment entirely to the weekends. Usually three days a week in summer-time are spent lazily on a cricket field. Were I to maintain an average rate of ten thousand words a week, I should produce some half a million words a year, and heaven knows what I should do with them. Nor am I very often down to breakfast by half-past eight.

A mendacious chronicle that confession. But then are we not always drawing up schemes and time-tables. At the beginning of the year we estimate the extent of our income. We make two columns. We put down the items of general expenditure: rent, insurance, income-tax, club subscriptions, clothes, and washing. And we decide how much remains over for personal indulgence. “I may allow myself,” we say, “three or four or five or six pounds a week in pocket money, and I will not,” we continue, “spend one penny more than that.” Nor do we for a week or so till we become so inflamed with a sense of merit that we adjudge our economy entitled to some worthy tribute, and we arrange a dinner party and twelve pounds go in a single night. It is the same with time-tables. They always get upset somewhere, and the people who stick to them are an infernal nuisance.

I recall a certain fellow-prisoner of war with a day curiously and exhaustively pigeon-holed. “Come and make a fourth at bridge,” you would say. “Sorry,” he would answer; “but in five minutes I shall be starting on my second pipe.” And when you wanted him to walk round the square his next drink was due. And when you wanted him to split a bottle, it was his time for exercise. Even his romantic nature marched in fetters. He was ordered by the irrefrangible mandate of his time-table to devote the hour between half-past three and tea to a “siesta of sensual reverie.”

But that is the way with time-tables. There would seem to be no half-way house. You must either scrap them or become their slave.

Habits are different, though. It is nice to know that, at a certain time of the day, you can always find a certain person in a certain spot. E. S. P. Haynes, for instance. You know that any day of the week you have only to drop into the back room of a certain oyster shop at half-past two to find him, lunching off oysters and white Burgundy and port. And that as you enter he will wave a large, genial hand and start filling glasses for you.

There is something essentially companionable about the man with habits. A habit is a proof of contentment, of satisfaction. The man with habits accepts life as essentially a good thing. Otherwise he would have made experiments. He would have sampled new clubs, new restaurants, new houses. I admire the old gentlemen who lunch day after day in the same club and at the same table. It is good to hear a man say, “I have been to the same tailor now for thirty years, and he has not made me a bad suit.” We ourselves feel no inducement to carry our patronage to that particular house; but in these days of change and revolution, faithfulness, even to a tailor, is a commendable and righteous act. Laziness? Perhaps. But then, is not laziness a philosophy, the expression of a mellow, placid, harmonious nature. The war presented us with few more pathetic spectacles than that of the tired, harassed mortals turned out of commandeered hotels, adrift in a strange world, torn from the habits that had sheltered them for twenty or thirty years. They had grown old there, they had hoped to die there. They were trees planted firmly and happily in congenial soil. It was cruel to uproot them.

It is through our habits that we strive at harmony. They are the feelers that our timidity flings out towards an illusion of permanence in an impermanent and fleeting world. There is a rhythm in the recurrence, day by day, of simple tastes indulged, of prejudices flattered. It is only the superficial people who have no habits; the rudderless, inconsequent people and those fortunate few who carry in the stability of their own temperaments a balance, a sense of continuity; and because it is towards that state of poise that we are aiming in literature and life, because it is pattern, because it is rhythm that we are seeking in our lives and in our work, we draw up time-tables and describe ourselves in interviews as persons of routine and method.

One Saturday last November I made the discovery on a football field at Tonbridge that the human head is a far more solid object than the human knee. For a fortnight I stayed indoors, my leg supported by a bank of cushions. In some such way, I told myself, in four or five, in six or seven years’ time, I should make an end of Rugby football. Not many people play Rugby much after they are thirty. How many were left, I asked myself, of the odd forty-five or fifty who had turned up for those first post-war trials at the Old Deer Park. How many of those who had played in the 1919 A sides were still playing? Half a dozen? Barely that, perhaps. You do not notice them as they slip out. A side alters so little from one week to another, from one season to another. You always seem to be playing with the same people. But when you compare the team photograph of 1919 with the team photograph of 1923, then you realise. Where have they all gone, you ask yourself. Have they gone abroad, or have they married or taken up golf? Usually the end comes abruptly. There is no gradual retirement. Rugby is a game that you play every Saturday, or not at all. You cannot pick it up and drop it, and pick it up again as you can cricket and golf and tennis. You go on playing till a knee goes, or an ankle, or a shoulder, and your doctor tells you that rugger is a young man’s game.

That is why, perhaps, we value it so highly: why we are ready to sacrifice for it so much that tempts us. We know that it is an excitement that will be soon taken from us. I am twenty-five. It is nine years since I spent a day in bed. But already I am beginning to find football something of a strain. The stiffness that used to last rarely over Sunday is still with me on Tuesday night. And as I pondered this, I began to realise to what an extent football, during the last four years, has given pattern to my life. For four years I have been unable during the winter to accept any invitation to lunch on Saturday. I have never been able to go away for a week-end. Saturday evenings I have striven hard to keep free from parties; and I have done my best for Friday nights as well. I have never been able to go away anywhere between October and the end of March for more than six days on end.

But this, you will say, is folly, a supreme example of the perverse slavery of habits. So be it: but there is only one way of playing Rugby football, to play it regularly, to come on the field fresh, and not to worry during the last five minutes, when so many matches are lost and won, whether you will be able to catch the only train that will allow you to change in comfort for that dance. And you have to decide whether or not the thing is worth it. It is an affair of personal preference. Myself I know that for myself rugger has a thrill, a sensation for which the equivalent can be found in no other sport, nor in any other interest. On a cold October day, when ball and ground are greasy with a morning’s rain, and the halves and backs have to go down to it if they would stop a rush, life is for the forward a very rich, a very splendid thing. It is a fine thing to feel a half-volley on the very drive of one’s blade, to see cover dive for it and miss it. It is a fine thing to run fifteen yards backwards and sideways in the deep, to feel that hot, tingling stab as the ball lands within one’s palm, to know that sudden beat of the heart that says, “It’s there, you’ve held it.” It is a fine thing to see a man play forward and miss the pitch of it, to watch the ball pass between the bat and leg, to hear the rattle of stumps. Fine and noble things, with life at such moments marvellously rich. But it is a finer thing that dribbling on a wet day of a slippery, bouncing ball; a finer thing that hard-won sense of battle, as your shins crash against the half who falls in front of you. His fingers clutch at the ball. You kick blindly at them; you stagger; but the ball is free; it bounces into the open; you follow, panting, a singing in your ears. The back is rushing at the ball. Your feet are heavy with mud and a long day’s shoving. Somehow you get to the ball before him. You kick just clear of him. The wing three is coming up behind you. He is fresher, he is faster than you are. Ten yards; will the ball bounce right for you? Your toe turns it ever so slightly to the left; the line is muddily white beneath you. You dive forward, flinging yourself upon the ball, your arms close over it. The three-quarter crashes over you, half-stunning you. You do not care. You hardly notice. You have scored a try.

You get at rugger something that you can get nowhere else. It is the game of youth, the supreme expression of youth, and it is taken from us, not unfittingly, perhaps, in early manhood.

To give up football is to change the pattern of your life. You will drop suddenly a whole series of habits. Someone will invite you down to Winchester for the week-end; there is an admirable train from Waterloo, they will tell you, on Friday night. Without thinking you will begin to excuse yourself. You are very sorry, but Saturdays ... and then suddenly you remember—that is all over now. You can go when you like, and where you like. And you are appalled by the enormity of your liberation, and hastily begin to form other habits, to fling out fresh feelers, to take up golf, or to join dining clubs that meet on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month; to be once again entangled in the pattern of recurring engagements; once again to be the lackey of custom, the creature of use and wont.

There is always cricket, though; and summer weaves of its four short months a surer, clearer pattern than the winter does. There is cricket every day, and there is the county championship. And if you follow closely the fortunes of any county, as I follow those of Middlesex, you have a firm framework for your personal peradventures. I find it difficult, even now, at this early date, to place with immediate accuracy the date of any given winter circumstance. “When did that happen?” I ask myself. I try and build round it a frame of associations. What else was happening at about that time? What book was I reading? What suit was I wearing? What friend had I just seen?

And gradually, detail by detail, I re-create the scene. But it takes time. And football only occasionally helps me. There are no championships in rugger. There are no figures, no individual scores, to help one. One game is so like another. Season after season one plays against the same teams, on the same grounds, and with only slightly varying results. It is difficult sometimes even to place offhand any particular game in its right season. And anyhow, football is only a key to week-end associations. It is of small assistance in the dating of a meeting that took place in the middle of the week.

It is different, though, with cricket. People tell me sometimes that I have an uncanny memory for dates. “Did you ever,” they will say, “see that film ‘The Old Nest,’ that was on at the Alhambra about two years ago?” “Yes,” I will answer, “I went there the last Monday in August 1921—the 29th, I think it was.” But it is not “The Old Nest” that I remember. I only remember it through its associations of Lord’s and the second day of that wonderful Middlesex and Surrey match; the morning of inexplicable failure; Donald Knight’s magnificent innings in the afternoon; tea-time with Surrey in an impregnable position. Two fifty runs ahead and eight wickets still to go. And then afterwards that startling, that glorious collapse. Nigel Haig taking wicket after wicket from the nursery end. Fender trying to play for keeps, and being taken by Murrell wide on the leg side off Hearne. The match a match again.

And I remember that evening riding on a bus down Oxford Street and reading the red placards of the newspapers that had been printed while Knight and Shepherd were in. I remember the shriek of the paper boys: “Surrey making sure. Paper! Surrey making sure!” And because it was the climax of an unforgettable day I remember afterwards dining with my mother at the Spanish Restaurant and taking her to “The Old Nest” at the Alhambra.

But that, you will say, is an exceptional occasion. There have only been three such matches since you went first to Lord’s, in a sailor suit, in the May of 1904, and cried when Plum Warner’s wicket fell. But in a lesser way of lesser things; I remember the books I have read, the friends I have met, the parties I have been to, by the matches that were then in progress. Should I, for example, be able to fix the date of the inaugural banquet at the Connaught Rooms of that ill-fated League of Youth, had I not read on the way there in the evening paper the score of the tie-match between Somerset and Sussex; and were I to hear two people wondering in what year and in what month Compton Mackenzie’s Rich Relatives was published, there would be to guide me the picture of a sun-drenched day at Lord’s with Greville Stevens asking me what I thought of the bright red volume that lay unopened on the seat before me. I have never kept a diary. I shall have no need to as long as Wisden’s Almanack is published—during the summer, at any rate. There is always some association. You have met a person for the first time. You walk down Bedford Street towards the Strand. A newsboy rushes past you with the first issue of the late night special. You read in the stop-press column that Fender has taken eight wickets at Trent Bridge. The date and hour of that first meeting is in your memory for ever. And when you come to write your reminiscences, you have only to turn for verification to the Wisden for 1921.

But I begin to detect in the reader an ominous stir of irritation. “Has this man,” he is beginning to ask himself, “no sense of proportion? Does he think that a book or a picture or a romantic episode is of less importance than a game of cricket? Does he seriously discuss in the same breath an innings by Knight and a novel by Mackenzie? Cricket and football! what do they matter, anyway?”

Little enough, no doubt; but then in the face of eternity does anything matter so very greatly? What are we and our works, our triumphs, our ambitions, our disasters, but accidents in the long process of effect and cause. We talk of the eternal verities, but the flowering of art is as temporal as the enjoyment we draw from it. In sixty years we shall be no longer here to admire El Greco’s painting. And in six hundred years its colours will have faded, the canvas will have lost its beauty. It will be valueless. And in the presence of eternity what is six years, or sixty, or six hundred?

Already we are ceasing to read the classics. The Latin and Greek quotation has passed from the leading article and the debate in Parliament. The past is being rapidly immersed in the ever-widening flood of modern literature. The past and present are always at war with one another. China has produced no poetry for two thousand years. “There is already,” they say, “so immense a collection of excellent work that it would be a folly to attempt to add to it.” In China the past has stifled and killed the present. Here in the western world we are busy making an end of Greece and Rome. Will anyone be reading Virgil in the nineteen-eighties? And of Shakespeare as of Virgil.

We are always asking ourselves, “Who will be reading what in 1980?” We have always in our minds that unborn generation that we would influence and address. But either way, does it matter very much? These buildings of ours, these restaurants, and shops, and cinemas, that we are flinging up on all sides of us so recklessly, so haphazardly for purposes of convenience and display, they will speak of us far more distinctly to the men and women of the twenty-second century than these poems and plays and pictures, this music and these novels that we are producing in such profusion.

Contemporary political thought, and its resulting bills and measures and defences, will be as obsolete as is to-day the policy of Gladstone. Our points of issue in religion and morality will doubtless be the occasion for music-hall derision. But our buildings will be there; and as, to the majority of us to-day, the sense of Augustan repose and polish and formality is most easily suggested by the rectangular windows and low lines of London squares; and as the vulgarity, and the pretentiousness, solemnity, and solidity that were the worst characteristics of the Early Victorian age are forced continually on our attention by the elaborate porticos and columns, the theatricality of over-decoration that obscure for us so much that was at that time excellent and that make us exclaim contemptuously, “How typically Victorian,” so shall we too in our turn be judged.

As I am carried on the top deck of a bus down Oxford Street, and see at the end of that avenue of brightly decorated windows the majestic façade of Peter Robinson’s emporium, and consider how it dwarfs the circus it surveys, and when I see from the top of Regent Street, far down beyond the jagged row of roofs and chimney stacks, the lovely low-roofed curve that the demands of utility are busy condemning as a piece of unserviceable decoration, I grow a little wistful, not so much because a beautiful thing is being taken from us, but out of a distrust as to what manner of buildings will take its place. I look nervously into the future. I see a young man, his coat and waistcoat flowered with the brocade of early twenty-second century fashion, passing here in whatever means of locomotion the young blood of that period elects to honour. I see his eye resting contemptuously on this jagged mosaic of ill-assortment. “They made that mess,” he will say to his companion, “in the beginning of the twentieth century.” I am afraid that of the Georgian poets and novelists he will be as ignorant as the majority of us are to-day of the obscure contemporaries of Wordsworth; that he will find a history of our political practices as tedious and as corrupt as those of the other periods with which he has had to acquaint himself for the satisfaction of his university examiners. He will be merely interested, casually, in his spare time in the form life took in 1923 for the average man and woman, and, as he will have inherited from us the amiable quality of laziness, he will favour the short cut; he will be content to contemplate, to absorb the atmosphere of our public buildings, and I am more than a little afraid that, as he passes through Regent Street to Oxford Circus, he will shudder, as we do when we wake from a bad dream, with the shudder that becomes a smile, with the slow reassurance through familiar objects of an averted evil. And he will laugh and point to the façade of Peter Robinson’s, “Typical Twentieth Century!”

But will it matter? Will it affect us how people live on this earth in 1990? We shall not be here to see them. They will be unable to distract and confuse and harass us with their intelligence or stupidity. It is only our egotism that makes us humbly prostrate ourselves before them. It is considered unworthy in a writer to address himself to the men and women of his own generation. But surely it is more sociable in us to wish to be of service and entertainment to our friends than to their grandchildren, who may develop, for all we know, into singularly unpleasant persons. Personally, I would much prefer my books to be read now by my contemporaries, by people I know and like, than by strangers when I am dead, with my books incidentally out of copyright.

George Moore has protested that each man finds heaven in his own way, claiming characteristically that he himself discovered it in the bedroom of that mistress who was so faithless and so constant. And I could produce, as a witness in his defence, a parson of my acquaintance who has discovered heaven in the gallery at Lord’s. A small, wizened, weather-beaten parson, in a long chesterfield coat that looks in the sunlight sadly green; a guinea-pig, I suspect. For if he has a flock it can be rarely shepherded.

A familiar, an unmistakable figure; I do not know his name, though we have chatted together once or twice. He carries always with him a little black notebook in which he enters every score of over fifty that he has ever watched. When a wicket falls and a new batsman walks down the pavilion steps, he takes out his book, verifies the newcomer’s identity with the aid of the scoring card and telegraph and proceeds to examine his record. “Ah, yes,” he says to his companion, “Miles Howell; a number of good innings he has played. Let me see—99 against Kent. I remember it; the silly fellow! Ran himself out: an impossible run. I don’t think he will ever make a hundred for Surrey; he gets so nervous in the nineties. Just the same at Lord’s in that big innings of his. He could have got the record easily; only another two runs. Then he flings away his wicket. After being missed, too, three balls earlier.”

An old man he is, nearly eighty. During the war I used to wonder if I should ever see him again, whether he would be able to survive, at his age, four years of rationing and air raids and overwork. And no cricket. Very lonely, very much at a loose-end he must have been. Very many hours he must have spent studying that small black book of his, wondering whether the good days would ever return in his lifetime.

But he was there on the 16th of May, on the first morning of the Notts v. Middlesex match at Lord’s. And his little black book was in his hand. “Ah, yes,” he was saying; “A. W. Carr—now the last time I saw him play was against Surrey on the Tuesday before the war. Thirty he made, if I remember. And out to a remarkably good catch, too, in the slips. They brought a telegram to him while he was batting, recalling him to the colours, I expect. A month later he was wounded.”

I think that more than anything else, the sight of that old man in that Armistice summer, reassured me of the changelessness of the human heart, of its stability under altering conditions. And I think it was on that day I first appreciated the native wisdom of that old man.

Before the war I had always felt that he was sadly neglecting his duty to his congregation. He watched cricket all the week; he thought cricket all the week; what could he find to say to his flock on Sundays? But I learned on that first day of post-war cricket that as long as you see life steadily in terms of something, you can acquire a true sense of human values, and that county cricket is as serviceable a spade as literature if you would unearth the absolute.

Someone, I half think that it was Flint, had just missed Saville rather badly. The old man shook his head. “Poor, poor,” he muttered, “and they were a bad fielding side in the eighties.” Suddenly I saw the parson’s life in relief. He had seen life in terms of county cricket. He had seen in the varying fortunes of the field as surely as has the historian in the rise and the crash of empires, the arrogance and impermanence of success, the courage of despair, the vanity of ambition. He had seen men rise to fame and sink into mediocrity. Counties had had their hour. There had been the years of Surrey’s domination, then of Yorkshire’s, then of Kent’s. Middlesex was now the rising power. There was all history in his recollection of “Nottingham’s weak fielding in the eighties.” And I felt that he would be able to give true wisdom to his flock on Sunday; he would not be easily misled by the shouting in the market-place; he would have a sense of values. He would have a norm with which to judge the traffic and confusion of modern life. We are children, he would say, with the child’s right to choose such toys as please it; or rather, perhaps, we are in search of some trumpery half-crown clothes-peg on which to hang the sixty guinea fur-lined coat of our immortal natures. One must have a peg; but it is the coat, and not the peg, that matters.

And so back upon my traces. Habits are good things; a framework gives purpose to one’s life, and cricket and football make as good a hat-rack for literature and romance and friendship as the routine of a civil servant or a bank clerk or an income-tax surveyor. There must be a background for bright colour, and that is mine.

III

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.

He was a heavy, thick-set man, square-jawed, clean-shaven, middle-aged; the sort of fellow who acts the part of the strong business man in American films, who sits back in a chair with a cigar stuck into the side of his face, his hand on the receiver of his telephone, while a secretary in the corner watches the fluctuations of the tape machine. The sort of man, in fact, whom one meets too often in London to be able to welcome with any enthusiasm on a holiday.

And he would not talk.

I hazarded a few remarks about the trade slump, to which he listened with interest, agreeing that things were in a bad way. I discussed the situation in Russia, and he was of opinion that drastic measures were required. He agreed with everything I said, and one does not get very far in a conversation when one’s companion never says much more than: “Yes, I think that’s quite true. That’s exactly what I feel myself.”

He showed a little more excitement when I said that the fine weather would be to England’s advantage in the International, but his opinions were those of the daily Press. He thought we had been lucky to beat France, that Davies and Kershaw were the only men in the side up to the 1913 standard, and that Lowe was being starved as usual. Yes, he often went to Twickenham. Had I seen Pillman’s last-minute try against Wales just before the war, and F. E. Chapman’s first-minute try in 1910. He certainly knew something about football, but nothing that he might not have learned from the columns of the Sportsman, and besides, it was not to discuss football that I had come to Sussex. I began to regret my eagerness in accepting his company. He looked the sort of fellow who stuck to one, who would probably come up to me next day after breakfast with a “Well, and what about a walk this morning?”

I should be unable to refuse. He would insist on walking to the very top of the Downs. With what had I saddled myself? Directly after dinner I went straight up to my bedroom to avoid an increased intimacy over a cigarette and a liqueur.

Next morning I woke to see the line of the Downs hidden in mist and rain. “A day spent in the smoking-room,” I said to myself, “and in so small a place I shall be unable to avoid my comrade of yesterday evening. Perhaps he plays chess.” Fortified with this hope, I had my bath, shaved, dressed, and went down to the breakfast-room. My friend had been before me. There was a teapot and a dirty plate upon the table. I was glad of the respite.

But I found him in the smoking-room, sitting, as I had suspected, in the best armchair, with his feet on either side of the fireplace. He was reading a book. I looked over his shoulder to see what it was, and read across the top of the left-hand page: Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

So that was it. A schoolmaster. Why had I not thought of it before? A schoolmaster, who had long ago abandoned the habit of independent thought, who was interested in little except athletics, and was even there distrustful of himself, basing his opinions on standard authorities. “A mind,” I said, “that has been dead many years, but that continues to acquire information. He has heard someone speak of Einstein in the common-room, and considers that a schoolmaster should know something about everything. So he buys a handbook at the railway station—a short cut to knowledge, that is his idea of education.”

And that evening at dinner I decided to draw him on to his own ground. I spoke of the educational systems of France and Germany. I contrasted the Lycée with the Public School.

“We don’t understand education in England,” I said. “We send boys from one classroom to another, a bit of Latin here, a bit of French there, half an hour’s mathematics, and a little science. We call it a general education. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s knowing a little about several things, but nothing thoroughly; and it’s better to know one thing thoroughly than fifty things in bits.”

I paused, waiting to be contradicted.

“You may very well be right,” he said. “But I’m in no position to judge. I don’t know anything about Public Schools.”

“But surely——”

“No; I never went to one, and, though I’ve met a good many Public School men in my run of life, I’ve had few opportunities of contrasting their standard of intelligence with that of the French and German. Your criticism would not apply to the men I know, because we are all more or less specialists in the army.”

A soldier! And to be reading Einstein. I should have been hardly more astonished if I had discovered a parish priest reading Casanova.

“You are surprised?” he said.

“Well, a little; I hadn’t thought of you as a soldier.”

“So I would suppose; one wouldn’t, but I am, though. A Major in the Inniskillings.”

And, in order to cover my surprise, I began to ask him about the war; which had been his division; where had he been at Cambrai; had he been to Ypres?

But, after dinner in the smoking-room, I drew the conversation round to philosophy and science. I forgot how I managed it, probably through Plato. The theory of platonic love provides an easy bridge for a discussion of army life to cross over into the fields of speculation. And the Major proceeded to define with real enthusiasm the difference between the Socratic and the Aristotelian view of knowledge. His eyes glowed as he spoke. But there was no originality in anything he said. His conversation was a précis of the preface to the Socratic Dialogues in the Everyman Edition. On no subject was he capable of independent thought.

“You must have made a considerable study of philosophy,” I said.

“Yes. It’s the one thing I really care for. I have not done badly in the army, and, on the whole, I suppose that I have been happy there. But I have always thought that my mind’s natural bent is towards speculation, rather than towards action. It has always been an effort to me to concentrate my attention on my army work. I should have preferred a life of quiet study.”

A look of wistful resignation crossed his face, and I waited for him to continue. He was in the mood when confidence comes easily, and it is less difficult to reveal even the most intimate secrets of one’s life to a stranger, a person whom one has never met before, and will, in all probability, never meet again, than to an acquaintance with whom one is brought in contact every day.

“Yes,” he said, “I should have preferred a life of study. I never wanted to go into the army. It was a question of money. I was an only child. My father, a civil servant, died when I was three years old, and I was brought up by my mother. I never went to school. I had few friends. I used to sit and read for hours together; there was an idea of my going into the Church. But my mother died when I was fifteen years old, and I went to live with an uncle of mine—my father’s eldest brother. He was not well off. I doubt very much whether, even if he had wanted to, it would have been possible for him to send me to the University. But he never entertained the project. He did not regard the Church as a suitable career for a man—at any rate, not for his brother’s son. For a month or so after my mother’s death he was patient with me and sympathetic. But, when he thought the first grief had passed, he reassumed his usual business manner. One morning after breakfast he asked me to come into his study.

“‘Ah, come along, John,’ he said. ‘Now come, bring your chair up in front of the fire and let’s have a chat about what’s going to happen to you!’

“I am sure that he did his best to understand me. He regarded me then, I know—for he has told me so since—as an absurd molly-coddle.

“‘You would not be the man you are now, John, if I hadn’t sent you into the army.’

“He said that to me only a few months ago. And I daresay that he was right. I was not at all the type of boy that he admired. I must have been a great worry to him.”

“And he gave you no choice?” I said.

“Practically none, and I was too miserable at that time to care greatly what happened to me. I sat in the armchair and said ‘Yes’ and ‘Yes’ and ‘Yes.’ In twenty minutes the course of my whole life was settled. It is rather strange when you come to think of it. We live for seventy years. But everything that happens to us during those seventy years may be dependent on the course of a conversation that lasts twenty minutes, and takes place before we have lived a quarter of our lives, when we have no experience of the world at all.

“I had a bad time at the beginning. It was, as my uncle called it, ‘a licking into shape.’ Sandhurst is no fun for a man who has never been to school. They gave me an ink-bath because I sat on the wrong side of the ante-room. I was no good at games, and I could see how the staff-sergeants and officers despised me. But at last I managed to fit into my box.”

“I think you’ve done a bigger thing in winning through against so many odds,” I said, “than anything you would have done sitting in your study. You’ve made a success out of a career that was uncongenial to you. That’s a big thing.”

He seemed pleased with me for saying that.

“Yes. I suppose I have made a success of it,” he said, “and it hasn’t been easy. It’s been against the grain, and I have had temptations—one big temptation.”

“Yes?”

“At least I suppose it was a big temptation, and I suppose I did right in resisting it; I don’t know. I’ve never been able to decide. I should rather like——”

He paused, a little uncertainly, and looked at me hard from beneath his great, heavy eyebrows.

“I should be very interested, and, of course, I should regard anything you might tell me as a confidence,” I said.

“I wasn’t thinking of that,” he said. “But, oh well, it does not matter very much either way, now. I might as well tell you.”

And I sat back in my chair and prepared myself for the usual story—a clash between love and duty; that was what I expected. The wife of a brother officer; a scene of passion and resignation; and then the long regret, deepening with the years. It is a story frequent enough, though everyone regards his own version of it as peculiar to himself. But the story of the major’s temptation was quite different, or perhaps it would be truer to say that it was the same story seen from another side. It was a clash between honour and the thing that he valued most highly in the world. For he was the sort of man in whose life women play only a casual part. At any rate, this was his story as he told it me.

“It was out East,” he said, “but I won’t tell you where; and there was trouble, I won’t tell you what. It never got into the papers, and it has nothing to do with the story. I was a fairly senior subaltern at that time, and with half a company I was guarding the mouth of a small river. Our chief job was to see that no boats passed up it unsearched. It was a fairly lazy job; not very much anxiety, and there was a jolly little town three miles down the river, where I used to go in the evenings for a drink and a smoke. It was here that I met one evening one of those Europeans who have lived so long in the East as to have lost their nationality. His face and hands were brown, and he had not shaved for at least thirty-six hours. He looked dirty, and was without self-respect.

“We talked for a little while about indifferent things, and all the time I felt him watching me closely with his crafty eyes. Then suddenly he made a masonic sign. I replied. And he gave a sigh of relief.

“‘I had hoped so,’ he said, ‘but I was not certain; that makes everything so very much more simple. Now I can say what I like, and it will be a secret between us. You will not break your faith.’

“I nodded.

“He leant forward across the table, his face framed in his hands.

“‘You have seen a ship out to sea this morning?’

“‘Yes,’ I said.

“‘I am on that ship. I have some very important material that I wish to get through to this village, and I cannot because of your outposts.’

“‘But we let all merchandise pass through after we have searched it.’

“‘You will not allow passage to what I bring?’

“‘Rifles?’

“‘Opium. I have many thousand pounds’ worth of opium upon that ship, and I cannot get it through to the interior.’

“He expected me to show surprise, but I have played poker a good deal in the mess, and have learnt not to let my face express emotion.

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘and what’s it got to do with me?’

“‘You can help me get it through.’

“‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’ and I prepared to rise.

“‘No, no,’ he said; ‘sit down. Don’t be a fool. Hear me out.’

“I looked straight at him for a moment.

“‘I shan’t do what you want me to.’

“‘If you will only listen.’

“‘I don’t know what’s to prevent me walking across the room to that policeman, and having you arrested.’

“‘Your oath.’ And a smile glinted in his shifty eyes. ‘You would never break your oath as a mason. I would not, and I should not call myself a man of honour. I know I am safe where a mason is concerned.’ And, leaning across the table he touched my sleeve, tugging it a little. ‘It will be so simple,’ he said softly. ‘There is only one sentry on the river. At five minutes to ten you go on your rounds. At ten o’clock the cook brings round a dixie full of cocoa. I could give you a little powder that you could drop in the sentry’s cup. He would faint. For an hour he would know nothing. In that time a boat could be brought up the river and taken away again. The sentry would recover. He would shake himself, would stand at his post again, and would say nothing. It is quite safe.’

“‘It’s no good your talking,’ I said; ‘I shan’t do it.’

“‘But why not? If you do not let me through, someone else will, farther up the coast. It is a question of waiting, and I would prefer not to wait, but sooner or later I shall find my friend. One can do anything with two thousand pounds.’

“‘Two thousand pounds!’

“‘That is what I am offering. Big profits can be made in opium.’

“‘But you won’t be able to bribe a British officer.’

“He laughed at that.

“‘Every man has his price, and it was the Prime Minister of Great Britain who said it. Even British officers are glad of a little pocket money. Well?’

“I said nothing. I picked up my hat and stick, and rose.

“‘All right,’ he said, ‘but don’t be in such a hurry, and remember, if you don’t, someone else will. Why should he have the money rather than you?’

“I walked quickly out of the restaurant, but I had hardly gone a hundred yards when, putting my hand into my pocket for a box of matches, I felt my fingers touch a smooth leather purse. I took it out, opened it, and saw inside a small grey envelope. Inside the envelope was a reddish powder.

“I shall never forget what I endured during the next few hours. I brought forward all the arguments that I could summon—duty, patriotism, my name, but there remained always at the back of my mind this thought: ‘Two thousand pounds means an income of a hundred pounds a year. I can resign my commission, and spend the rest of my life in quiet study.’ I began to picture the long evenings before a fire, with a lamp shedding a mild light upon my book, and I contrasted it with the smoky atmosphere of the mess and the Colonel’s interminable anecdotes. And there was no real reason why I should refuse this opportunity. Someone else would accept it. The opium was certain to be got through. This was the chance for which I had waited all my life: it would never come again.”

“But you did refuse?” I said.

“Yes. I did, and I do not know whether or not I did wisely. I went through agonies of mind, and when my orderly came at half-past nine to tell me that it was time for me to be starting on my rounds I knew that if I once got out there I should be unable to resist. So I took out a bottle of whisky, filled up my glass, spilt the powder into it, and before the red powder had had time to reach the bottom I had raised the glass to my mouth and emptied it.

“It was a good drug for the purpose for which it was required. I sat down in my chair. I did not feel ill, or sick, or dizzy. I just went off, and when I came round it was after half-past ten, and I was safe. I felt no ill effects.”

“And that was the end of it?” I said.

“As far as I was concerned. But I suppose that the story does not end there really. I met the same man a couple of months later in another café a few miles farther up the coast. He looked cleaner and smarter than when I had seen him before, and he greeted me effusively and stood me drinks. After a while he took me aside.

“‘You were a fool,’ he said.

“I shrugged my shoulders.

“‘I’m glad I was, then.’

“‘You were a fool,’ he repeated, ‘and what has happened? You fling away two thousand pounds—someone else picks them up.’

“‘So you got it through?’

“‘Of course. What did I tell you? The world is not full of Josephs.’

“And two weeks later one of the officers in my company applied for leave to go home to be married. We were all surprised, as he hadn’t much money—only his pay—and had often been heard to lament the length of his engagement. When someone asked if his grandmother had died and left him a fortune, he blushed awkwardly, and said something about a bit of luck on horses.

“He never rejoined us after his marriage.”

He stopped, and we looked at each other for a moment.

“And you wonder whether what you did was right, or not?”

“Yes; I’ve been wondering that for twelve years, and I shall go on wondering it to the end. If I had given the powder to the sentry instead of to myself I could have spent the end of my life as I should like to spend it. And I don’t know that it would have been wrong. I am inclined to think that the end justifies the means, and, anyhow, the stuff was bound to be got through.”

“But, after all,” I said, “you’ve been happy in the army on the whole?”

“Oh yes,” he said, “I’ve been happy enough, but it’s not the sort of life for which I was intended. It’s not easy to explain, but I feel that it could have so easily been so much more happy—if the rough edges had only been ever so slightly trimmed.”

And for a long while he sat in silence. He was thinking no doubt of the quiet tragedy of a life lived happily but not intensely. But I thought of the kindly Providence that takes the handling of our destinies out of our control, and had saved this curious old soldier from a career of speculation that could have ended only in pathetic failure.

IV

BUT it is not only nor indeed even chiefly through meeting new types of people that we can arrive at that angle of detachment. We need an entire change of setting. It would be hard to overrate the subconscious influence on us of our surroundings. A sudden sensation of taste and smell will recall to us a cycle of associated memoirs. The glimpse through a railway-carriage window of a gabled roof, a square church tower, a particular shade of sunlight on red brick will open the pages of a chapter whose existence we had almost forgotten; will reveal in relief, in perspective—with an objective reality that at the time it did not hold for us—a facet of the past. The obvious, the superficial reflection on such occurrences would be an expression of surprise that so trivial an affair as the taste of cocoa, the smell of wet stone, the glimpse of a square-towered church, should become a window opening on childhood. But probably nearer to the truth would be the assumption that these moments of sight and taste of which, at the time, we hardly more than recognised the existence, and to which we attached no value, were an essential part of the framework of our thoughts, and our hopes, and our actions, and that it was from them that what we have come to regard in our lives as personal and important drew its nourishment, its colour, and its direction.

As the novels of Alphonse Daudet are steeped in the sunshine of the south and the simple, lazy kindliness that it engenders, so are Maupassant’s stories children of the mud, the lights, the rain, the gallantries of Paris. And so over the poetry and novels of Thomas Hardy lies the deep shadow of the Wessex countryside. And among these many influences that tend, unknown to us, to make our lives gay or sombre, deep or shallow, or it would be more true perhaps to say that tend to accentuate in us those characteristics that are gay or sombre, deep or shallow, there are few that touch us more surely or more closely than that of the nature of the buildings, the streets, the shops, the churches among which we live.

It would be worth while, indeed, discussing whether the classical scholar of some old foundation derives the sense of antiquity, that knowledge that we are parts of a pattern, the threads of which pass out on either side of us, which forms so human, so tolerant a basis for his ideas and his actions, more from the study of Homer and Catullus than from the tranquillising presence on every side of him of old buildings, gothic arches and cloisters, and curious quadrangles. British administration, whatever may have been said against it, has been credited always with a genial tolerance, an admirable refusal to be perturbed by trifles, a policy of “let it pass.” A capital social lubricant, this characteristic. And I wonder whether it would be too fanciful to attribute a part, at any rate, of this placidity in the class from which the majority of officers and civil servants are drawn, to the mellowing influence of the school buildings among which are spent their most impressionable years. Some such effect there must be, I am very sure. A mind continually encountering the survivals of early generations acquires a detachment from the immediate present. A boy who, on his way from one classroom to another, from the dayroom to the cricket field, and the library to the chapel, has always before him the silent grey-brown witnesses of continuity and tradition, cannot help thinking often consciously, and unconsciously times without number: “all this was going on two hundred years ago and, without any very considerable alteration, it will be going on two hundred hence.”

That sensation we rarely if ever get in London. I doubt if there is in the road I live in a single brick that is fifty-five years old. Twenty years ago Golders Green did not exist. I can barely picture this North End road as it was in the spring of 1907 when my father decided to build a house here, and to call it Underhill. A muddy, unpaved affair it was, with fields on either side of it as far as I remember: and it would remain so, we were told, for the Hampstead tube was in process of construction, and it would be impossible to build houses on the narrow gap between it and the road. Land’s End for a while it seemed to us after our nine years in a dingy West Hampstead thoroughfare. There were no shops then at the Cross Roads. We had to walk across the heath to Hampstead. Indeed, only one train in every four or six came through to Golders Green. Hampstead, Highgate, Golders Green; that was the electric sign then on the Euston platform. There were no non-stops. And one had to decide whether it would be quicker and pleasanter to walk across the heath or to wait for a Golders Green train.

And then the Garden Suburb came, and the builders discovered that there was ample room for a row of houses between the railway and the road, and Smith and Boots and Sainsbury added each of them another branch to their activities. And ’buses ceased to stop at Child’s Hill and tubes at Hampstead. And within four years the cross roads became as good a spot as Piccadilly for the unwary to be run over.

When I came home at the end of the first term at my prep. I could hardly recognise the North End Road. I believe that had I been transported there by a motor in the night I should not have known where I was, any more than I should have known where I was had I found myself in the spring of 1920 suddenly beside Potije Chateau on the road from Ypres to Zonnebeke. Golders Green sprang into life as speedily and as haphazardly as have the devastated areas. That immense hippodrome that confronts you as you turn to the left out of the station; they had not begun work on it when I went back to Sherborne in the autumn of 1913; but the curtain rang up on Boxing-Day. In less than three months they built it; working from start to finish against the clock. They had no time to instal a heating apparatus. On that first evening we shivered in greatcoats; but within a week the fires were banked up. The heat dripped on to us from the ceiling. An achievement, undoubtedly. Golders Green is a comfortable and commodious spot. There is the heath for exercise; the hippodrome for amusement; there are barbers and baths and cinemas, and trams and tubes and ’buses, and a taxi rank; an illuminated clock at the cross roads; two restaurants. A place, I am told, where one may dance, that even.

An impressive outpost, doubtless of Newer London: a fine tribute to progress, and mechanical invention. But there is one thing that, search how you may, you will never find at Golders Green. You will not find anywhere any indication that the world was inhabited a hundred years ago.

Nor will you find any such indication at Tottenham, or Balham, or at Upper Clapton; new streets; new shops; new houses; travel by what road you choose through any of the London suburbs: you will find everywhere the same cross-roads, with their policemen, and their electric cars; and the white sham stone-fronted cinema; and the local empire, and the long stretch of detached and semi-detached villas, with their garages and garden plots, very pleasant, very clean, very comfortable: cheap amusement and good amusement; such as grandparents knew not. But that sense of antiquity; those reminders in the gables at street corners of other men and other fortunes, that is lost to us. The old streets and the old buildings are being swept away. History in London can only be found in the places where one cannot afford to live, and the places where one would not want to live. We have no eternal landscape to speak to us of the passage of human life. We have no equivalent for the Sussex Downs; the Downs that have hardly altered since the Romans camped on them. We have neither the modesty nor the pride of heritage. Family feeling dies where there are no family seat and no family possessions. We are parvenus, we townsfolk. It is only through a detaching of ourselves from our surroundings, through travel, or the company of books, most particularly, perhaps, through moments of intense self-realisation when we are in touch with eternal instincts or eternal forces, that we recover our sense of values, that we see ourselves simply as part of a pattern, a footfall in the sound of passage.

And it may have been that it was in search of some such amulet that Clifford Bax and I set out last April across the North Sea to Norway.

A long journey it was, with a good twenty-four hours of open sea, twenty-four hours in which to wonder what crazed splendour, what folly of irresponsible ambition, urged our Viking forefathers to desert their sheltered fjords in those flat-bottomed, high-prowed craft of theirs. A long unheroic journey on my part, at any rate. I lay supine and neither stirred nor ate, consoling myself as best I might with Geoffrey Moss’s entertaining if scandalous Sweet Pepper.

It was worth it, though, that harassing, exacting journey, for the sake of the two hours of quiet passage in the late evening through the fjords. There is no country that welcomes its guests less ostentatiously than Norway does, that stands more simply on its own attainments. There is no parade of harbours and high buildings and imposing statues. Just the long stretches of receding waterways, motionless, many coloured waterways, green and grey and purple; a purple that shimmers now and then to the rich transparent red of Homer’s sea, Homer’s wine-coloured midland sea; the fading waterways, and about them the long, endless, low-crested circling hills. Hardly a sign of life, only now and then below the promontories of rock, a warning light, and near it on the land some small wooden house.

But then Norway is an empty country. It is as large as England, and it has a population of three million. You will see no towns on the long fourteen-hour journey from Bergen to Christiania. Only here and there a collection of scattered hutments and the long stretches of the fjords. And it is remarkable that so small a nation should have made such a considerable contribution to the literature of Europe. A useless, hopeless task it must sometimes seem, we felt, to the young Norwegian. “I am writing,” one can imagine him to say, “in a language that only three million people are able to understand. It is possible that my work may be some day read and appreciated in the foreign cities of Europe; but it will be read there in translation; and the phrasing, the colour, the rhythm, on which I have expended so much labour, will have gone out of it. If only I had been born in America!”

And then we remembered that the population of England when Shakespeare wrote was little greater than that of Norway is to-day; that it seemed worth while to him to write for three million people; that these, as all other, things are relative; that it would be impossible without detachment, without a sense of the eternal values, to produce a masterpiece; and that such a one as Björnson would know out of the direct simplicity of his nature, that it is enough to plough one’s furrow to the end.

We were bound for Finse and its winter sports, and it was exciting to look for the first signs of ice and snow at the edge of the water, to watch at each halt on the way the fall of the thermometer. We seemed to get little colder, though, for that is the charm of Norway. The sun shines out of a blue sky, and your face tingles with the glare that the snow flings up on it. It is a pity, though, that you have to wear darkened glasses to protect your eyes. It robs the sky of its colour, and if such a phrase may be permitted, it seems to bleach the snow, with the effect of an unreal twilight. Only now and again in glimpses, through windows for the most part, can one see the landscape as it really is.

But then it is not for the sake of its scenery that one goes to Finse; the long sheets of snow have, it is true, a certain remote, cold loveliness of their own; but the continued sight of snow is apt by itself to be depressing. Finse is not, shall we say, an ideal place for the ancient and infirm; it would be unexhilarating for them to sit all day long, looking out of the drawing-room window. Finse is very nearly the highest place on the Bergen-Christiania railway. It is well above the vegetation line. It consists of a station, an hotel, and some half-dozen hutments. It is quite simply an encampment among the hills, and from the windows of the hotel one sees nothing but snow and mountains.

But one does not go to Finse to sit in drawing-rooms, not, that is to say, till nightfall, when one collapses among cushions, exhausted after a day on skies. Finse is the greatest place in the world for ski-ing; in its season, that is to say, in March and April and the first weeks of May. During the Swiss season it is a place of fog and mist and some three hours’ precarious sunlight, but the snow is fine and hard there, when Mürren has become a bog.

We went there as novices, Clifford Bax and I. And it is a good place, Finse, for the novice. It is built beside a lake, frozen over for the great part of the year; and the banks that slope gently down to it provide a scale of ascending difficulty. For the first morning one stumbles helplessly within a hundred yards of the hotel on a slope with a gradient of something, I suppose, like one in fifty. By the afternoon one has come to master it. And as one returns tired to one’s tea, one looks southwards beyond the lake and one says, “I think we’ll try that slope to-morrow.”

One cannot, or at least we could not, cease in six days to be a novice. But we managed to amuse ourselves thoroughly climbing up slopes and falling down them. Perhaps, had we been more proficient, we should have enjoyed it less. A thing ceases to be exciting when you are certain of success, and you avoid the slope that you have been down ten times in succession without disaster. How thrilling a bicycle was in those early days. How proud we were to free-wheel down a hill, how we looked forward to the day when we should be able to mount and unmount without damage to our trousers. How we envied the blasé tradesboy who just seemed to pick up the handlebars and jump on the machine. And now that we can bicycle, the last thing that we would do would be to ride on one for pleasure.

But then that is hardly a fair parallel. Cycling is a form of athletics limited in scope by cross-roads and motor regulations and police. You cannot enlarge your craft. But ski-ing must be like cricket, and must be always new. As soon as you can do a thing one way, you learn to do it in another. We spend hours in the nets at school learning to drive a straight half volley over the bowler’s head or past midoff along the grass. And then as soon as we have got it, we start trying to turn it to mid-wicket, so that I do not suppose we could drive the thing straight now even if we wanted, any more than Nevinson, an accurate draughtsman and a prizewinner at the Slade, could draw a horse that would resemble a photograph of one.

And at Finse there must be always new worlds to conquer. And always there must be that splendid compensating sense of exhilaration that comes from a complete physical fitness. It would be hard to imagine a more healthy life. There is no bar there; and no late hours. You are in bed an hour before midnight. And you wake wonderfully fit to the most colossal breakfast that I have ever seen.

In the middle of the dining-room there is a large table on which is spread an incredibly diverse collection of dishes. We counted them one morning: there were forty-eight; all manner of cold meats, all manner of cheese, all manner of hors d’œuvres. And there are shrimps, and prawns, and lobsters, and fish puddings; there are egg omelettes and ham omelettes, curious cold game, and fruit and jams and marmalade. Breakfast was a very great adventure. You were, in addition, served with a boiled egg and a beaker of cold milk. We never quite knew whether it was intended to be drunk as a cocktail or a liqueur or a table wine. We tried it in all three ways; and it was in each equally delightful. The Norwegian breakfast is the finest type of meal that I have, I think, ever eaten; and I was delighted to find certain personal peculiarities endorsed by Norwegian taste. I always, when I lunch at home, eat marmalade and cheese, preferably gruyère cheese, together. It is a protective taste developed gradually since the days when I was made to eat at my preparatory school milk-pudding every day for four years. It was doubtless a very admirable form of discipline. But I have not since eaten any pudding of any kind, and have instead developed what is, my brother tells me, a disgusting habit, but one which the Norwegian would apparently approve. At any rate, they place side by side on their middle table mountains of gruyère cheese and basins of marmalade. Coldt bord they called it, that centre table, and we thought of inscribing a ballad to it, in whose every line should be the name of some new dish.

A noble foundation, that breakfast, for a long day in the open; and when evening came one was glad to sit and talk quietly; one’s brain fresh and one’s body tired. It is no part of my intention here—and I half hope that it never will be—to draw pictures of my friends. Enough to say that the evenings passed very happily in such casual intermittent talk as can only be exchanged between two friends who know each other so well as to have left scarcely a secret from one another.

It is an eight-hour journey from Finse to Christiania. But eight-hour journeys abroad seem of no more matter than a week-end run to Brighton. We are frightened in London of any place that we cannot find on a tube map. I have never once been to watch a county match at Leyton. “Heavens,” I say, “but that’s miles away. I could not think of going there.” It never even occurred to me three years ago to watch the third day of the Middlesex and Yorkshire match at Bradford, although the championship was at stake there. And yet it would not have been, I expect, such a terribly fatiguing affair. I could have probably caught a train at about ten o’clock. I should have read a couple of novels for review, lunched on the way, and arrived at the ground shortly after two. I should have seen the finish of the match. By six o’clock I should have been in the train, reviewing one novel before dinner, the other after; and arriving at home certainly before midnight.

I remember being considerably surprised last summer when an officer on leave from India told me that he was going to spend a week in Blackpool to see the D’Oyly Carte Company in the Gilbert and Sullivan Operas. “Lord,” I said, “what, all the way up there?” “It doesn’t seem very far,” he answered, “when you’ve come all the way from Poona.” Certainly we did not feel that we were undertaking a great enterprise when we left behind us the mountains and the snow of Finse.

It is a good city, Christiania, clean and fresh and compact, with broad streets, and an honest sprinkling of restaurants and cafés: a good city, shall we say, to spend four days in.

After four days one begins to weary of shop windows, and museums, and public buildings, and a drifting in and out of cafés. But for four days it was very pleasant to watch the stir of life in a foreign capital. Very different from ours, it would seem, the framework of their routine: their mealtimes, for example. You will find a notice outside the principal restaurants: Breakfast, 11-2; dinner, 2-6; supper, 8-11. Between the hours of six and eight, that is to say, you cannot get a solid meal, and the big meal of the day is taken at about half-past three. The restaurants were quite empty at two o’clock when we used to begin our lunch.

As far as we could gather Norway knows not our heavy half-past one lunch, over which so much profitable business is transacted. When the Norwegian sits down before a table with a menu and a wine list in front of him, his day’s work is finished. If he feels any need for casual sustenance he goes into a café and has a snack.

Christiania has made a speciality of the snack. I suppose that any stranger abroad must wonder who do the work and when they do it. There are never anywhere any signs of industry. The Italian who is taken to the Oval on a weekday would certainly wonder how ten thousand workmen could afford to watch cricket on a Monday. Indeed, I have yet to discover how they can. If they are in work they should be in factories and offices, and if out of work one would assume them to be penniless. There is no Oval in Christiania, but there are, as I said, an honest number of cafés; and the coldt bord is spread in ample welcome. Not quite as amply perhaps as in Finse. But still amply enough to make an Englishman a little ashamed of the hospitality that the Bodega offers to its guests. Great trays of various hors d’œuvres, cold meats and cold poached eggs, and cheese sandwiches: sandwiches that are a vast improvement on our own; with the cheese or meat arranged on one and not between two slices of bread, so that you can see what you are buying and cannot be deceived into the purchase of a ham sandwich entirely composed of fat.

Perhaps I am talking too much of the pleasures of the table, but food has a large share in the right ordering of a holiday. A sense of moral indignation is not a characteristic with which we should be inclined to associate the engaging and fantastic personality of Mr Norman Douglas. But he has known such moments; and those of us who consider good food and good wine two of God’s greatest gifts to man, remember gratefully his attitude to the traveller who confessed that he did not mind what he ate; and in truth it was a disarming of revelation. “The man who is indifferent to women,” George Moore makes one of his characters say, “is indifferent to all things,” and so is the man who is indifferent to food and wine. Such a one is incomplete. He lacks a sense. He is an abnormality. And myself I should be equally pained were someone to say to me, “Oh, let’s go anywhere, I don’t mind where I dine.” I should feel as pained, and for that matter as shocked, as if someone who had asked me to lend him a book were to say, “Oh, any old novel, I don’t care!” Far preferable the lady who said to the assistant at Bumpus’s, “I’ve got a green book and a red book, now I should like a blue book.” She had at least a sense of setting, of décor. Her drawing-room would have been, I am sure, a very delicate symphony in blue and grey, and the light from the electric lamp would have fallen softly on an exquisite disarray of cushions. Certainly she would never have said, “Oh, let’s go anywhere. I don’t mind where I dine.” She would know that evening is the artist of the day’s traffic, who smooths, and composes and selects, and achieves a harmony out of disorder; that it is for us to co-operate by the choice of the right book, the right companion, and the right setting.

That is why the choice of the right restaurant is so important. If we are in the mood for conversation there is our club or the Café Royal; if we are alone and it would amuse us to watch other people dance, or should we wish to add as a flavouring to the music and the dancing the note ever so slightly struck of fugitive romances, there is the balcony of the Elysée Café. Perhaps we feel sentimental, and at a certain table in a certain restaurant, to the accompaniment of “Tango Dream” or of some other tune of yesteryear that we have specially asked the orchestra to play, we recall a phase of life that is concluded, and quote with appropriate melancholy, Ah me, ah me, with what another heart ...! And there are again times when we ask simply for a quiet meal in our own company.

It may have been good fortune, or it may have been through trained instinct, that we discovered on our first day in Christiania the Theatre Café: the restaurant was on the first floor, and there was a band on the balcony above the café on the floor below; so that the music rose softly and mysteriously through the floor, making it easy for us to weave stories round the various couples of the other tables.

That middle-aged man and the young girl at the table by the window, were they father and daughter; or were we attending the first scene, the prelude, of some grey seduction? That young couple two tables from us, they were not noticing what they ate. They hardly spoke a word to one another; but their eyes kept meeting: and as they met, they smiled. She was not wearing an engagement ring and we wondered whether he would propose to her that afternoon, or whether he had already proposed to her as they had driven there that morning in a taxi. Were they sitting now shy and happy in the memory of their first kisses? We wondered if they would make a success of life together. They were very young, we thought. Would she still be pretty in ten years’ time? Would that fragile charm of hers survive in womanhood? And we decided that it depended largely on the life that awaited her, that hers was not a prettiness to sustain long hours of toil and housework; and we hoped in that atmosphere of unseen music that fortune would be kind to her, that her man would invest their money wisely and present her with a large house and many servants.

We went a couple of times, on the invitation of the management, to the National Theatre, once to a modern piece—a Galsworthy sort of play—the other time to a costume drama—Madame Legros, by Heinrich Mann. We were not, either of us, I think, able to follow the plots at all closely; but as a compensation we were able to study more carefully those little mannerisms of dress and acting that are obscured by the quick action of the play; that the Norwegian dandy, for example, does not hitch up his trousers on sitting down. And we were able to concentrate our attention, more than we should otherwise, on the stage effects, the lighting, the technique, the carpentry of the business.

But it was, I think, as a picture that the theatre there appealed chiefly to us. The theatre in a small town tends to become, as it can never hope to become in London, a social and intellectual centre. One seemed there to be in touch with the life of Christiania. And it was pleasant to stroll between the acts down the long promenade behind the stalls, to watch the various groups greet and mingle and separate; to walk up the wide-columned staircase and turn into the large reception-rooms, with their gilt chairs and the inevitable bar for snacks; the gruyère and ham sandwiches, and the Hansa Ol; and it was pleasant to walk out into the cool air of the balcony and look out over the city as it lay below us in light and shadow. In the immediate foreground the stern statues of Ibsen and Björnson; the trees, the gardens and the bandstand; beyond, the turreted house of parliament; and on either side running parallel the bright thoroughfares of the Carl Johansgate and the Storthingsgarten with their trams and restaurants and throng of people.

A pretty picture, but one that might at such an hour wake sadly in the heart of the young Norwegian a sense of life hasting from him. His whole life would seem to be enclosed by the bright boundaries of those streets, going no farther than the eye could see. A nation, he would say, of three million people, a capital of two streets and a few restaurants, and he would think regretfully of the scope and freedom of other countries and other cities—London, America, New York.

A story might be well began there on the balcony of the National Theatre in Christiania, with a young man confronted suddenly by the challenge of his life’s tether; a young man dreaming of a world wider and more glamorous than his own, a world that would hold fit employment for his youth and courage and ambition. He would turn from the balcony with an ache about him, and it might be that in the wide reception-room behind it he would find himself suddenly beside the girl whose image had been never long absent from his thoughts, and there would be comfort for him in the sight of her cool skin and light flaxen hair and pale cornflower blue eyes, eyes that would smile softly into his, that would seem to bid him “take life easy as the grass grows on the weirs.” And her sweetness would be cast as a net about him, entangling alike his dreams and purpose and his discontent. They will say nothing: there will be no need of words; but they will turn and walk out of the large room and stand together alone and silent on the balcony, in the evening air, happy, unutterably happy in their nearness one beside the other.

And he will never leave the city: he will be unfaithful to his dream; he will build a chalet on the hills of Majorstuen. And his youth will pass; and one evening he will stand again alone upon the balcony, and remember how thirty years earlier he had stood there, dreaming of a wider city, and the old ache will rise in him and he will wonder if he has been wise to accept the immediate adventure, the adventure that lay to hand. He will ask himself whether he might not have found elsewhere employment for that faith and energy of which the years have robbed him.

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.

For Wisden is the cricketer’s bible, though the unbaptized make mock of it. “What is it,” they say, “but a record? We can understand your wanting to look at the scores of matches that you have seen, that will recall to you pleasant hours in pleasant company. But what possible enjoyment can you derive from the bare figures and accounts of games you have never watched, on grounds you have never been to? It is no doubt an admirable work of reference for the statistician, but as literature, as a thing that is read for pleasure! why, it reminds us of the half-pay major who spent his evenings reading the Army List of 1860!”

It is hard to explain. In the same way that the letters x and y possess a significance for the mathematician, so for the cricketer these bare figures are a symbol and a story. We can clothe the skeleton with flesh. We can picture the scene. We know what the score-board looked like when that seventh wicket fell; we can gauge the value of Strudwick’s 5 not out. When we read, “Ducat, l.b.w. b. Woolley 12”; we can imagine the emotion of the man sitting at the end of the free seats below the telegraph. “If only Ducat can stay in,” he had thought, “Surrey may win yet. There are several people who might stop at the other end while he gets the runs.” But the umpire’s finger rose, and we know the depression with which he wrote on the thumb-marked score-card “l.b.w. b. Woolley 12,” and then pulled himself together, prepared to watch “in a dream untroubled of hope” the inevitable end delayed for a few minutes by Smith and Rushby.

That for the games one has not seen. But for those that one has seen,—for them, Wisden indeed becomes almost an autobiography. Our cricket life, or rather the passive, the contemplative side of it, is written there; and I am not sure that the receptive side is not the more important. We only write, I sometimes think, to bring ourselves closer to great writing; so that through our own fumblings after self-expression we shall come to an understanding of the difficulties that great writers have had to face, and a consequent appreciation of their triumphs. Certainly had we not spent hours of scratching at a net, learning to get our left shoulder over to the line of ball, we should not feel so intensely the thrill of pleasure that Spooner’s off-drive brings to us. It may well be that the hours of spent energy are an apprenticeship for the intellectual calm of an afternoon at Lord’s.

Not always calm, though. Cricket, for all its leisure, is in its long-drawn expectation the most emotional of games. It has not, doubtless, any equivalent for the delirium of a try at Twickenham. But then cricket does not aim at that particular sensation. It is drama, not melodrama. Its atmosphere is heavily charged, one’s nerves are geared high, one fidgets awkwardly in one’s seat. The effect is one of continuously suspended action. One is always wondering. As often as not the tension passes. The climax is never reached. I have watched a good deal of cricket, but I have seen only four, five, at the most six, big finishes.

There was that Middlesex and Essex game in 1910. On the whole, I am inclined to think the most remarkable match I have ever seen. From the very start it was remarkable. I arrived at lunch-time to find Essex batting, with 93 runs on the board for the loss of two wickets. Half an hour later they were all out for 110. J. W. Hearne, an unknown bowler then, took seven wickets for no runs. And I shall not easily forget the excitement and the pride of that last afternoon, when Middlesex, with 242 to win, lost eight wickets for 142. The pitch was bad. Buchenham was bowling, as at that time Buchenham alone could bowl. Warner was still in; but there was only Mignon to come, a bad bat even among fast bowlers, and a newcomer to county cricket, who had made a duck in the first innings and batted quite indifferently against Surrey in the previous week. But in an hour Warner and S. H. Saville had won the match.

A memorable evening. We had resigned ourselves to defeat. “They can’t do it,” we had said; “it’s no use worrying. Let’s buy an evening paper and see how Somerset are doing against Kent.” And we had smiled indulgently when the boundaries began to come. “Fireworks,” we had said, and remarked that it was rather stupid to have a tea interval. “They might just as well,” we said, “have finished the thing off first.” But something warned us not to leave the ground.

And they came in forty minutes, the last seventy-three runs; a glorious forty minutes. Our indifference turning to a wondering hope: “Can they; is it possible?” And then the recurring certainty they would. Forty such minutes as come rarely in a lifetime.

Then there was the Kent match in ’21, when Middlesex, with the championship to win, made over three hundred runs in four hours, to win the match; then the great battle four days later against Surrey. And as I correct these proofs I feel that, in spite of the printer’s bill, it would be ungenerous in me to pay no tribute to the second day of this year’s Sussex game at Lord’s. It began dingily enough, with a dull sky and a cold wind, and H. L. Dales taking ninety minutes to make sixteen. But fortunately I spent that first hour or so in the warm comfort of a tube. And after lunch the sun came out; the cricket became exciting, and the afternoon grew into one of the happiest that I have ever spent at Lord’s. The excitement, curiously enough, was focussed on a battle for a first innings lead. Usually one does not enthuse about points on the first innings. But one is out to enjoy oneself on a Whit Monday. There is in the presence of a big crowd the contagion of a herd emotion. And certainly the cricket was very good. Sussex is the best fielding side in England; I am not certain that J. W. Hearne is not to-day the finest batsman in the world. And the afternoon was a long struggle between Hearne and Sussex.

I have not the exact figures by me, but Middlesex wanted some 311 runs for their two points, and seven wickets were down with the follow-on still unsaved, when Twining came in to partner Hearne. On some of his partners Hearne must, I think, exert a magnetic influence. Certainly Twining, when he is in with him, looks and is a fifty per cent. better player than when Lee or Hendren is at the other end. He has never done anything comparable with the great partnership with Hearne that won Middlesex the championship in 1921. Indeed, I rather think that his fifty-seven not out that Whit Monday afternoon is his second highest score in a county match. A useful rather than a good innings, perhaps, but he stayed there; and I doubt if I ever saw a finer innings than Hearne’s 140.

Some people find Hearne dull, as some people find Tolstoy dull. He has not the volcanic, the eruptive vigour of Hendren and Dostoieffsky. He is moving with a complete economy of effort towards a very distant point. Where other batsmen think in fifties, he thinks in double centuries. He knows exactly what he is doing all the time. Batsmen like Holmes and Mead and Ducat get there somehow in the end; but they have not all the time the end in view, or rather, perhaps, the spectator as he watches them, has not the end in view. Holmes, whether he makes a cypher or a century, never looks anything but an ordinary player. Hearne is a great batsman the moment he walks on to the field. No one who knows anything about cricket could see him play one stroke and have any doubts as to his quality.

But it was after Hearne was out leg-before to Gilligan and Murrell had failed, that the excitement really started. Twelve runs were wanted, I think, when Durston came in to bat. They got them somehow, amazingly, but they got them. There was a shriek of hysterical excitement every time the ball hit the middle of the bat and trickled safely to mid on. There were byes, and there was an overthrow, and miraculously Durston turned Gilligan to leg and along the ground. It is the only good stroke that I have ever seen him make. Sometimes I think I am uncharitable to Durston. “He is not so awfully bad,” I tell myself, “not worse, really, than Mignon was, or Rushby. It is only that there is so much of him to look incompetent.” And then I see him bat again and I say, “No, really he is absolutely the worst, without exception the worst. There can be no man living whom the captain could, save as a practical joke, put in No. 11 for a side of which Durston was a member.” But on Whit Monday, when he made that stroke for two off Gilligan, he was cheered as has rarely any stroke by Hobbs been cheered, and the large, jolly, holiday crowd poured homewards the happier for his batting.

Every summer has its own landmarks, its own sensations, its own big matches; even this cold and miserable spring of numb fingers and dropped catches. There is no season so poor that we cannot look back to it for some things gratefully. And the future will be as good; better, perhaps. And yet——. I wonder whether ever again there will be a day at Lord’s to equal that of the 31st of August three years ago.

No cricketer will need me to remind him of what happened then, or to retell the story of “Plum” Warner’s last and greatest match. Enough to say that it was the most dramatic, the most fitting thing that has happened in any sport in any country. If no championship even had been at stake it would have been a great, a memorable match. With the championship dependent on the result it was a titanic battle. But with the added sentiment of Warner’s last appearance—such things come only once in a generation.

I was not there on the first day. I was playing cricket at Hayward’s Heath, and I remember the excitement with which I tore open the first issue of the Evening Argus to see which side had won the toss. Middlesex batting. I gave a sigh of relief. That will be all right, I thought. A plumb wicket. The Surrey bowling is weak. They took all day yesterday to get out Northampton. There will be three hundred on the board by six o’clock; and then came edition after edition with the news that things were not going well at Lord’s. Lee out, Hearne out. Hendren only 41; 109 for 5; 149 for 6. And then tardily in the last issue news of a stand starting between Warner and Greville Stevens.

But even so, it was not good enough. To bat all day and only make 250. And all through the Monday I watched hour by hour the match and championship slip away. Catches were put down; the bowling had no sting. And in the intervals one read on the tape machine of the manner of mess that Lancashire were making of Worcester in the north. I left the ground when Fender declared his innings closed. Seventy-three runs behind. Only a day left for play. We could make a draw of it probably if we wanted to. But only with a win could we win the championship. It was no use. It was over. Better not see the end.

And yet I went down there on the Tuesday. There was still a chance; should we win, I should never forgive myself had I not been there to cheer the team. And hope came back to me when I met “Skipper” Pawling on the steps of the pavilion. “It’s all right, my boy,” he said; “it’s all right. We’ll just manage it.” Mrs Warner had come down with white heather for the professionals. And I can still hear the eager, high-pitched tension of her voice, “We shall do it, shan’t we, Mr Pawling.” I am not certain that Sydney Pawling is not the most vivid memory to me of that long August day. I can see him drawing his great hand across his mouth; I can see him muttering when Hearne came in to bat, “He’s looking ill; fine drawn. I must send him over some champagne; some champagne.” And I can remember him almost in tears at the end of the day as the Surrey wickets fell.

But then we were all of us, I think, very near to tears at the end of that great evening. When I went to Lord’s for the first time in a sailor suit in the spring of 1904, I cried when Warner’s wicket fell, and I rather think I cried at the end of it all at twenty past six on the thirty-first of August, when the huge crowd swept over the playing field and carried him shoulder high to the pavilion.

Will Lord’s ever see such a scene again? Will Lord’s ever again know anything to equal the excitement of that last hour, from the moment when Hendren caught Shepherd high over his left shoulder as he backed against the screen? It was the turning-point, that catch. In half the time Surrey had got half the runs, and only two wickets had gone down. Then came that catch which only Hendren could have held off a stroke that from the other end would have been a six. It was a match again. Fender came in next; there was an awful hush. Half an hour of Fender and the match was Surrey’s. But he hit right across a straight length ball from Durston. 112-4-1. Still there was Peach to come, and Reay, and Hitch and Ducat, with Sandham batting beautifully at the other end. The odds were still on Surrey. But Hearne and Stevens did not fail their captain in that last hour. Hendren, of all people, missed Hitch low down at mid-wicket, but the bowlers could afford to do without their fielders. Wicket after wicket fell. 176 for 9, and Rushby came in, swinging his arms, while the crowd laughed. Rushby, a clown batsman; nothing more. But he stood there, and singles began to come; and one looked at the clock and reminded oneself that Rushby had once stayed in while Crawford put on 80. Twelve runs in ten minutes; would the end never come? Then an unplayable ball from Stevens. It was all over. The ball trickled to short leg. Hearne and Hendren rushed from the slips after it. Hearne got there first, ran with his “souvenir” to the pavilion. And the great crowd swarmed about the wicket.

I do not expect ever to see again anything to equal it. But I am proud and glad to have been there, to have taken part in that tribute to the greatest hearted cricketer the world has ever known.

VI

HOW many hours during the year, I wonder, must we spend over our Wisden? A great many surely, so many, indeed, that we cannot help thinking how small is the literature of cricket. Only two shelves out of thirty. There are one or two novels, Willow the King, A. A. Milne’s The Day’s Play, a few of Mr Lucas’s Essays, the complete works of P. F. Warner, W. J. Ford’s Middlesex Cricket, Lord Harris’s Lord’s and the M.C.C., a few volumes of reminiscence, one or two textbooks, P. G. Wodehouse’s delightful Mike, The Hambleden Men, and Neville Cardus.

Poor stuff, too, for the most part. The literature of cricket can be divided into two categories. There are the books by men who understand cricket but do not know how to write, and the books by the men who know how to write but do not understand cricket. In the course of a year many books and stories dealing with the game are published, but only rarely in a generation comes combined the sportsman and the man of letters. Whom have we to-day: P. G. Wodehouse; but he prefers to write of golf. A. A. Milne; but he is dabbling in grease paint. E. V. Lucas; but so rarely nowadays. Neville Cardus; yes, the only one, the only genuine one, perhaps. The first man to make literature out of cricket. His essay on Tom Richardson; his description of Maclaren leaving the field for the last time at Eastbourne; his “Greatest Test Match.” They were written for the columns of a daily paper, but there is literature in them, real prose, real melody, real emotion. He is alone, though, Neville Cardus.

Hardly any poetry has been written about the game. There is Thompson’s “Oh, my Hornby and my Barlow Long Ago,” and there is a quantity of verse, pleasant jingly stuff of the drinking-song variety, the best of it valedictory, such as Andrew Lang’s “Beneath the Daisies Now They Lie.” But the few attempts that have been made at serious poetry have not been fortunate. Edward Cracroft Lefroy, for example, to whom cricket appealed chiefly as an æsthetic spectacle, included in his catalogue of the physical attributes of a bowler the

Elbows apt to make the leather spin
Up the slow bat and round the unwary shin,

which is not only poor verse but proves on the part of the author an inadequate knowledge of the no-ball rule.

But perhaps verse is not a happy medium through which to express an enjoyment of cricket. Phrases like “unwary shin” will intrude themselves, and, although Pindar used to celebrate with equally appropriate ardour the feats of generals and of athletes, the very idea of commemorating in heroic couplets Woolley’s two great test-match innings at Lord’s seems ridiculous. We have grown so accustomed to reading accounts of cricket matches in the prose style of the sporting press that any other treatment is impossible. Perhaps Mr Masefield will one day attempt an epic of the fifth test match at the Oval, but I doubt if it would be a success. It would be a quaint performance, as though one were to walk down the Strand in court dress of Jacobean cut. The jargon of a cricket report is unsuited to heroic verse, but it is indispensable. If, for instance, we were informed that Hendren,

Snared into over-confidence, stept back,
Swinging his bat as though he would eclipse
The thundered violence of Albert Trott.
Yet had he not correctly judged the flight
Of the quick spinning ball.
Aghast he heard
Behind his back the rattle of the stumps,

we should not be very much the wiser. We should prefer to learn of such a tragedy in straightforward narrative: “Hendren hooked Mailey to the on-boundary twice in succession; but, in an attempt to repeat the stroke to a ball that was pitched farther up to him and that went away with the arm, he was clean bowled.”

Indeed, A. E. Housman’s “On an Athlete Dying Young” is the best serious poem that can be said to interpret any side of cricket, and that poem is written to a runner. But it is universal, for it contains the tragedy of all professional sport:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran,
And the name died before the man.

Contemporary reference to any cricketer no longer playing is made in the past tense, “Tarrant was ...”; and how many of the enthusiastic Ovalites who recall so eagerly the great days of “Locky and Brocky” pause to consider that their hero is still alive?

The lack of prose literature dealing with cricket is, however, as surprising as it is deplorable. For a hundred years ago the game must have been able to supply an intriguing background for a novel. Lord’s was like Paddington recreation-ground, and, when there was no match, the public were allowed to hire a pitch there for a shilling, a sum that included the use of stumps, bat, and ball; there were no mowing machines then, and the grass was kept down by a flock of sheep, which was penned up on match days. On Saturdays, four or five hundred sheep were driven on to the ground on their way to the Smithfield Market. And then half a dozen small boys would run out and pick out any long grass or thick tufts that were still left. It is not surprising that there were shooters then. And never since the days of the gladiators can there have been such wholesale bribery and corruption as there was in the days of Lord Frederic Beauclerk.

Enormous bets were made. Matches were played for stakes of one thousand guineas a side—in those days no small sum, and professionals found it hard to live on their pay; indeed, they made little effort to; and in big matches where a lot of money was at stake it was not uncommon to find one side trying to get themselves out while their opponents were trying to give them easy balls to make runs off. Indeed Lord Harris tells a story of how two professionals had a dispute at one of the annual general meetings at Lord’s, and in the presence of the noble lords of the M.C.C. such questions as “Who sold the match at Nottingham?” and “Who would bowl at anything but the wicket for Kent?” were bandied about to the consternation, Lord Harris says, “of some of those present who had lost their money contrary to all calculation on the matches referred to”! There were few newspaper reporters then, and things could be done at Old Trafford news of which would come tardily to Lord’s.

The only persons who appear to have remained incorruptible during these early days are, strangely enough, the umpires. Perhaps they put too high a premium on their honesty, and the bookmakers found it cheaper to have dealings with the players, or perhaps there was a general conspiracy of silence, no one being sufficiently without blame to cast a stone. At any rate, the interpreters of the law seem to have given satisfaction, and they can have had no easy time. For it was during these years that the code of rules under which we play to-day was compiled. And it was compiled in a most haphazard fashion. No committee sat over a table and weighed every possible contingency and interpretation of the laws. The authorities were worthy fellows, but lazy and unimaginative. They drew up a rough code and waited for things to happen. If any particular practice began to cause a nuisance they were prepared to put a stop to it. In the meantime let the wheel turn.

It did turn, and often with uncomfortable complications. At one time, for instance, in the days when there were only two stumps, a hole was cut between and beneath the wickets, and when a batsman completed a run he had to pop his bat into this hole. If the bowler succeeded in popping the ball there before the bat the batsman was run out. It was found, however, that bat and ball would often arrive in the hole simultaneously, with sad results to the bowler’s fingers; and often enough, when a fieldsman had anticipated the bat, the defeated player would take what revenge he could by driving his bat upon the knuckles of his conqueror. After a certain number of fingers had been broken the authorities thought fit to substitute for the hole the present popping crease.

Much the same thing happened in the case of leg-before-wicket. As pads were not then invented, and as the ball was delivered with much rapidity, it had never seemed likely that any batsman would, with deliberate intention, place his unprotected legs in the path of a hard ball. But one day the cricket world was thrown into consternation by the tactics of one Ring, who placed his body in front of the wicket in such a way that it was impossible for him to be bowled out. His shins became very sore, but his score became very large. This gallant act of self-sacrifice for the good of his side did not win the admiration it deserved; it was described by a contemporary writer as “a shabby way of taking advantage of a bowler,” so that when Tom Taylor adopted the same tactics the bowlers “declared themselves beaten”: a leg-before-wicket rule was drawn up, and another opportunity for Spartan courage was lost to an effeminate age.

The rules were altered to suit each fresh development. And when we remember the manifold and barbarous practices of that day, we cannot but shudder when we try to imagine what fearsome and horrible atrocities must have taken place before the rule about “obstruction of the field” was invented. Cannot we picture some burly butcher skying the ball to point and then, in order to save his wicket, rushing at the fieldsman and prostrating him with his bat? Cannot we see the batsman at the other end effecting a half-nelson upon the bowler who was about to catch his partner? The laws of Rome were not built up without bloodshed, nor were the laws of cricket. What opportunities for humorous narrative have been lost!

If only there had been some naturalistic writer who would have collected laboriously all these stories and made a novel of them. If Zola had been an Englishman we could have forgiven him his endless descriptions of gold-beaters and agricultural labourers, if one of the Macquarts had been a professional cricketer and one of those interminable novels had reconstructed the cricket world of his day. If only the caprice of things had allowed George Moore to spend his early years near a cricket field instead of a racing stable.

But even those few novelists who have included cricket in their panorama of the period appear woefully ignorant of the management of the game. What a sad mess Dickens made of it, and how well he might have done it! How entertaining Mr Winkle might have been behind the wicket: what sublime decisions he would have given as an umpire! But, no: Muggleton play Dingley Dell, and the great Podder “blocked the doubtful balls, missed the bad ones, took the good ones and sent them flying to all parts of the field,” which is surely the most quaint procedure that any batsman has ever followed; and as a climax Dingley Dell give in and allow the superior prowess of all Muggleton, apparently before they have had their own innings—an action without precedent in the annals of the game.

And so it has happened that our one complete picture of the Homeric days has come to us not from the novelists, the official recorders of the hour, but from John Nyren, who wrote without any thought of posterity a guide-book for the young cricketer. There are some books that, like wine, acquire qualities with the passage of time, and for us to-day the Cricketer’s Tutor possesses a value that it did not have for those in whose service it was written. To the young blood of 1840 it was merely a manual, a sort of field service regulations; to-day it is a piece of literature; it interprets a period; it reveals a personality.

As we read John Nyren’s advice we can see how the game was played in 1820 on rough pitches, without pads, in top hats, and with a courage the extent of which may be gauged from the instructions that he gives to long-stop:

When the ball does not come to his hand with a fair bound, he must go down upon his right knee with his hands before him: then in case these should miss it, his body will form a bulwark and arrest its further progress.

In those days we learn that spectators were patient folk who sat on backless seats, drank porter, smoked long pipes, and made bets about the match. There was leisure then, and John Nyren believed that the batsman should wait to make his runs till bowler and fieldsmen were exhausted:

I would strongly recommend the young batsman to turn his attention to stopping: for by acting this part well, he becomes a serious antagonist to the bowler; who, when he sees a man coming in that he knows will stop all his length balls with ease, is always in a degree disheartened. He has no affection for such a customer. Besides, in this accomplishment lies the distinction between the scientific and the random batsman.

The random batsman: it is an adjective we find often in the Cricketer’s Tutor. For Nyren had an intense hatred of unskilled success. Cricket was to him an art the technique of which could only be mastered after an elaborate apprenticeship. He distrusted the short cut, and we find him the most bitter opponent of the young idea. He is the eternal Tory of yesterday, of to-day and of to-morrow. And he is very human to us as he stands on the brink of change uttering his solemn warning. For it was towards the end of his career that round-arm bowling was introduced, and it is hard to realise the revolution this caused in the world of sport. It made as much stir and roused as many bad feelings in its own province as its contemporary the Reform Bill. This bowling was described as the “new march of intellect—style,” and in 1827 three matches were played between Sussex and England to test the merits of the two methods. The county won the first two matches, and the nine professionals on the England side were so incensed that they signed a formal petition “that we, the undersigned, do agree that we will not play the third match between all England and Sussex unless the Sussex bowlers bowl fair—that is, abstain from throwing.” And the great Mr Ward, when asked his opinion, said, “I can only say cricketers are a peaceable class of men. With this bowling I never see a match that might not end in a wrangle.”

John Nyren was its most fierce opponent, and it is rather pathetic to read his violent and ineffectual protest. This invention would ruin cricket. He saw a new game that would lack the grace and skill of the game as he and his friends had played it. The ball would come so fast that the batsman would not have time to prepare for it.

The indifferent batsman possesses as fair a chance of success as the most refined player. And the reason for this is obvious, because from the random manner of delivering the ball it is impossible for the fine batsman to have time for that finesse and delicate management which so peculiarly distinguished the elegant manœuvring of the chief players who occupied the field about eight, ten, or more years ago.

And he goes on to state his belief that if the present system be persisted in a few years longer “the elegant and scientific game of cricket will develop into a mere exhibition of rough, coarse horse-play.”

What would he say if he could return to the pavilion at the Oval, and see Hitch bowling at how many miles is it an hour, and Hendren hooking him to the square-leg boundary? And the last paragraph of his protest is that of every man since the beginning of time who has seen his day pass, his heroes overthrown, and a rash, irreverent generation in their place.

I can use my eyes [he writes], I can compare notes and points in the two styles of playing, and they who have known me will bear testimony that I have never been accustomed to express myself rashly.

A forlorn figure, trusting so simply in the permanence of a static world.

It is sad to think how quickly that world has passed, and how effectively the machinery of our industrial system has already taken cricket to itself. Nyren’s game is no longer the entertainment of a few. It has become part of the national life, and probably, if the Bolshevists get their way here, it will be nationalised with the cinema and the theatre and association football. It is hard to find much in common between the old men who smoked long pipes and drank strong porter and watched Mr Haygarth bat three hours for sixteen runs, and the twenty thousand who flock to the Middlesex and Surrey match because the newspapers have told them to, and who barrack any batsman who plays through a maiden over. Indeed, on those big days, I do not think that you find there the survival of the old enthusiast. You will find him rather on a cold morning shivering at the back of the mound, on the third day of a match that is certain to be a draw, when there are only a couple of hundred spectators. No one knows why he goes there. He will be very cold. He will not see particularly good cricket. Professional batsmen will play for a draw in the most professional manner. The fielding towards four o’clock will grow slack, and half an hour before the end the captains will decide that it is no good going on, and that they might just as well draw stumps. Your old man in the mound knows that this must happen. But he goes there all the same, and at three o’clock he buys an evening paper to read an account of the match and he sees that the reporter says: “Hardstaff was beaten and bowled by a yorker.” And the old man will chuckle, knowing that it was a half-volley and that Hardstaff hit over it. And in January, when he reads through his Wisden, he will put a tick against that match, with the others that he has seen, and he will add them up and find that he has spent five more days at Lord’s this year than he did the year before. He will remember how his grandfather used to talk to him of Fuller Pilch; and he will smile, knowing the superiority of Hendren. And he will continue to watch cricket as his grandfather watched it on cold days as well as warm, when a draw is certain and when there is a chance of a great finish. One day he believes the professional batsmen will fail, there will be a collapse and a sensational victory, and only two hundred people will have seen it. He knows that many matches are played in the year and that very few of them yield great finishes, and he knows that the only way to make sure of the big occasion is to go there whenever stumps are pitched. And it is of him that we must think when we would reconstruct the cricket world of 1830.

For Nyren was the Homer of cricket and the Homeric days have passed. In 1923 the soil is no longer virgin. Cricket is a different game, and for the novelist it is less intriguing. There is no betting, there is no dishonesty, and, though we hear whispers of the questionable diplomacy of the northern leagues, it would hardly be possible to invent a cricket story with a credible villain. Nat Gould found no difficulty in writing a hundred novels of the racecourse; it is extremely difficult to write one of the cricket field. No scope is provided for dramatic narrative. Cricket in the lives of most of us is a delightful interlude—pleasant hours in pleasant company; and we do not take our success or failure very seriously. At school it is important: caps and cups are at stake, positions of authority go to the most proficient; and it so happens that the only great cricket story of recent times is a school story, P. G. Wodehouse’s Mike. But apart from school it is hard to find in cricket a motive of sufficient strength to allow of the development and presentation of dramatic action. On the racecourse large sums of money are at stake. On the success of a horse may depend the future happiness of the hero and the heroine. But I doubt if the result of a cricket match has in recent years ever involved much more than the temporary loss or gain of personal prestige. In Willow the King J. C. Snaith chose a cricket match as the setting for a summer idyll, but the author of Brooke of Covenden would hardly rank that story highly among his many very considerable achievements. The moment for the great cricket novel has passed: irrecoverably perhaps. And in the winter months we find ourselves returning as of old to a few books of reminiscence and to our long yellow-backed, tattered row of Wisden, and of the two we find Wisden the more companionable.

VII

WE read Wisden in the winter on cold nights before a leaping fire and it brings back to us the sense of new-mown grass, the feel of a cricket ball and the stir of sunlight. It is a substitute for cricket: and the old harassing doubt creeps up again, the doubt whether any literature is anything beyond a substitute, the focus of an unfulfilled desire. We know how old people drug themselves with novels. Every day they go down to the library and choose a new book, and for twenty-four hours cease to be themselves, becoming again in a story of adventure and young love all that they were and are not. Does not foiled ambition, we ask ourselves, always seek to realise itself in plays and pictures. Inevitably some side of ourselves must remain undeveloped, and through a process that the advanced psychologists describe as sublimation, we find that undeveloped side a substitute for its expression. Is a book anything more than a spade digging down to our subconsciousness, to our real self? Is anything ever quite what we take it for?

Influence: they’ll talk for hours about it from the pulpit. Influence: every little thing, every word and thought and act. It has its effect on someone somewhere. I can still hear a certain old parish priest’s thin voice falling across the dark silence of benediction. It was his pet theme: influence. “They will tell you in the big world,” he used to say to us, “that the strong man can be independent of his actions, that they fall from him as raindrops from a sloping roof. It may be so. Perhaps: for the very few, the very strong. But the water that falls from the clouds rests somewhere. It may slip from the sloping roofs, but it will find its level. Its level where it must complete its task, where it will rot wood, rust iron, or make the corn golden for the hands of man. Your acts, your words, your thoughts, they are like the falling rain. Somewhere they will create beauty or decay. They will never fall unheeded.”

He was right, of course. Every moment of the day we impart, as we receive, impressions. But the nature of those impressions. It is there that I’m just a little doubtful. That “as we sow we reap” theory. It looks all right. It ought to be all right. But life has a way of contradicting theories. It isn’t always the good tree that bears good fruit. Sometimes, unquestionably; but one fact is worth a string of arguments. Or rather, perhaps, there’s no argument that can withstand a fact. And here, as my contribution to the argument, is the story of Pussy Willow, as she told it me a couple of months ago raffishly across the table of a dingy restaurant, in one of those back streets that filter through from Shaftesbury Avenue across Soho.

I drop in there quite often after closing time. There’s dancing there and music, if you can so grace an unwashed foreigner’s strumming on a banjo. And they’ve got a licence to carry on till twelve. I don’t know how they got it. They don’t even call themselves a club. But they’ll dump a property sandwich down in front of you and serve you, up till midnight, with villainous concocted cognac at half-a-crown a glass. It’s like most of those Soho Bohemian places: a poisonous atmosphere to live in, but amusing and profitable enough to visit now and again. I like to sit quietly in a corner and watch a crowd of people, laughing and quarrelling and drinking—and try to make stories up round each of them, wondering who is in love with whom, and who will be so and so’s successor. Sometimes I signal to one of them to come and share a drink with me; more often they come across of their own accord and await an invitation.

It was in this way that I met, or should rather say, perhaps, re-met, Pussy Willow. A plump, flashily, but poorly dressed woman planted herself down in front of me and announced that she was two sheets in the wind.

“Mine being,” she concluded, “a double Scotch, and water, not too much of it.”

“Admirable,” I answered. “One double, waiter, and a benedictine.”

She swallowed her double at a gulp, then leant forward across the table. “You don’t know who I am?” she said.

I shook my head.

“Then I’ll introduce myself. Miss Pussy Willow, late of the Vaudeville Theatre!”

She was a good actress. She had always known how to get the most out of her voice, how to lay the bait for an effect. And she got it all right. I sat back and looked at her, looked at the puffed, swollen cheeks, the pouches under the eyes, the unshapely mouth where the powder caked along the wrinkles, the bulging double chin, and searched there, as one might search in the face of a long drowned friend for some sign of accustomed features, searched for that face, so pretty, so delicate, so appealing, so utterly, so entrancingly soubrette, that had made so many hearts beat quickly fifteen years ago. Not a trace of it. Not a trace of the woman who had once been Pussy Willow, of the radiant creature who had swayed in that great silver dress, before the chorus, singing the song that had been for six months the rage of London: “Love is the song of a girl and a boy.” Gone: all of it. That youth, that charm, that divine mingling of simplicity and wantonness—buried beneath this coated unhealthy mask of flesh and powder. I did not know what to say. She was looking at me in a half-dazed, half-resentful manner, ready to hit back if what I might say should hurt her. In the end I thought it better to say nothing.

“So it’s silence, is it?” she said. “Ah, well, I guessed as much. I know what you’re thinking—the pity of it, that’s what you’re saying to yourself. Poor Pussy Willow, you’ll say. Drunk herself down to this. And then you’ll go back home and think what a damned fine fellow you are. And to-morrow you’ll tell your friends up at the club: ‘Do you know whom I saw yesterday?’ you’ll say. ‘Pussy Willow, quite drunk, she was. All her looks gone. You wouldn’t have recognised her.’ And you’ll all raise your hands and say: ‘The pity of it!’ and get self-righteous. And then you’ll go back to your office and swindle some wretched underdog and talk about leaving the world better than you found it. I know your sort. You only come here to get warm with self-righteousness. Ah, you—But, well, I’ll tell you this, mister: you talk about leaving the world better than you found it, but I’ve probably done a sight more good in it than you have.”

She paused on a high-pitched note of challenge.

But again I made no answer. I knew that I had only to wait to be told the story. I caught the waiter’s eye, nodded, and another double was at her elbow. She gulped it down quickly, as she had the other. She leant forward, warmed, softened, recollective to continue on the note where she had paused. “More good than you,—a blooming sight more good than you. I saved a man once from becoming—well, you know what men become if they don’t pull the reins up tight in the early thirties. Yes, me—I saved a man. It makes me laugh now when I think of it.

“I met him here a couple of months ago, just as I met you. Tall, fine-looking man, he was, white-haired, with a short, close-cut beard. Well dressed: a successful family business man—that’s what he looked. Heaven knows what he thought he was doing here. Change, I suppose; an empty hour to be filled in somehow. Perhaps he used to come here when he was a boy and felt sentimental suddenly. At any rate, he came in and stood at the corner of the bar and ordered a brown sherry and looked very self-conscious and out of place. I nudged the girl next me. ‘The 396th hymn,’ I said. ‘Two minutes and he’ll be in the pulpit.’ And we laughed and had another, and told a couple of bluish stories. And then, suddenly, I found myself getting uncomfortable, and I realised that I was being stared at, stared at in a curious, creepy sort of way, as though I was being looked through for something that was behind me. It went on that stare, till I couldn’t stick it any longer. I walked across to him. ‘Well, old sport,’ I said, ‘this is me. Now, what about it?’