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; ascene 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 livedhappily 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.
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 havecome 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 placidityin 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. Anachievement, 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 passageof 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 scandalousSweet 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 harboursand 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; thatthese, 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 encampmentamong 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 ofdishes. We counted them one morning: there were forty-eight; all manner of cold meats, all manner of cheese, all manner ofhors 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 bordthey 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 sitand 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?” “Itdoesn’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 theOval 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 thecoldt bordis 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 varioushors 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 isindifferent 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, ofdécor. 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 wehave 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 oftoil 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 sweetnesswould 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.
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 theEvening Newsto 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 along 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’ XVv.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 wetake downWisdenand, long after our usual bedtime, pore over the old scores.
ForWisdenis 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 lettersxandypossess 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,Wisdenindeed 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 itpossible?” 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 someof 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, butthey 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 thingthat 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 theEvening Argusto 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 onlywith 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 shoulderas 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.
HOW many hours during the year, I wonder, must we spend over ourWisden? 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’sThe Day’s Play, a few of Mr Lucas’s Essays, the complete works of P. F. Warner, W. J. Ford’sMiddlesex Cricket, Lord Harris’sLord’s and the M.C.C., a few volumes of reminiscence, one or two textbooks, P. G. Wodehouse’s delightfulMike, 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 literatureout 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