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.