It was the most perfect September day that anyone could remember. The
sun had risen in a dewy mist. The early air was pungent with yellowing
bracken.
Then the mist cleared, the dew disappeared from everywhere but the
shadows, and the Red Admirals again settled on the Michaelmas daisies.
A young man walked up and down the paths of the garden and drank in its
sweetness; then he passed on to the orchard and picked from the wet
grass a reddening apple, which he ate. Something pulled at his flannel
trousers: it was a spaniel puppy, and with it he played till
breakfast-time.
He was staying with some friends for a cricket match. It was the last of
the season and his only game that year. As one grows older and busier,
cricket becomes less and less convenient, and on the two occasions that
he had arranged for a day it had been wet.
He had never been a great hand at the game. He had never made 100 or
even 70, never taken any really good wickets; but he liked every minute
of a match, so much so that he was always the first to volunteer to
field when there was a man short, or run for some one who was lame, or
even to stand as umpire.
To be in the field was the thing. Those rainy interludes in the pavilion
which so develop the stoicism of the first-class cricketer had no power
to make a philosopher of him. All their effect on him was detrimental:
they turned him black. He fretted and raged.
But to-day there was not a cloud; nothing but the golden September sun.
It was one of the jolly matches. There was no jarring element: no bowler
who was several sizes too good; no bowler who resented being taken off;
no habitual country-house cricketer whose whole conversation was the
jargon of the game; no batsman too superior to the rest; no acerbitous
captain with a lost temper over every mistake; no champagne for lunch.
Most of the players were very occasional performers: the rest were
gardeners and a few schoolboys. Nice boys--boys who might have come from
Winchester.
He was quickly out, but he did not mind, for he had had one glorious
swipe and was caught in the deep field off another, and there is no
better way of getting out than that.
In the field he himself stood deep, and the only catch that came to him
he held; while in the intervals between wickets he lay on the sweet
grass while the sun warmed him through and through. If ever it was good
to be alive....
And suddenly the sun no longer warmed him, and he noticed that it had
sunk behind a tree in whose hundred-yard-long shadow he was standing.
For a second he shivered, not only at the loss of tangible heat, but at
the realization that the summer was nearly gone (for it was still early
in the afternoon), and this was the last cricket match, and he had
missed all the others, and he was growing old, and winter was coming on,
and next year he might have no chance; but most of all he regretted the
loss of the incredible goodness of this day, and for the first time in
his life the thought phrased itself in his mind: "No sooner do we grasp
the present than it becomes the past." The haste of it all oppressed
him. Nothing stands still.
"A ripping day, wasn't it?" said his host as they walked back.
"Perfect," he replied, with a sigh. "But how soon over!"
They stopped for a moment at the top of the hill to look at the sunset,
and he sighed again as his thoughts flew to that print of the
"Melancholia" which had hung on the stairs in his early home.
"Notice the sunset," some visitor had once said to him. "Some day you
will know why Dürer put that in."
And now he knew.
That evening he heard the Winchester boys making plans for the winter
sports at Pontresina in the Christmas vac.