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.”