Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

Everyone has some sort of framework, some series of pigeon-holes that divides the year arbitrarily into its component parts. For Mayfair there is Ascot and Goodwood and the London Season. For the sportsman there is the 12th of August. For the cricketer summer begins on 1st May with the pitching of the first wicket, and ends when the last ball is bowled midway in September. He cannot say, as may the gardener: Summer began earlier this year than it did last. There may come the St Martin’s summer of late October, the days of blue sky and mellow sunlight, when girls put on their light frocks again and when tea is taken in the garden, and butterflies wake from their winter sleep. But he will not care how blue the sky may be, nor how warm the air. Football has begun; the white screens are stacked out of the wind between the pavilion and the wall.

On the whole he is inclined to resent the unseasonable aspect of the weather. He considers it a waste of sunshine. He remembers the wet days of June when he tramped up and down the pavilion in his spiked boots, listening to the rain beat upon the corrugated-iron roof, watching the wicket turn slowly to a quagmire. Winter sunshine rarely fails to rouse in him a feeling of homesickness. So nearly cricket weather, he thinks, and he remembers that May is still four months distant. Equally he distrusts the summer that begins almost before March is over. He would prefer to have April a month of rain and cold. We are only entitled, he thinks, every year to a certain number of fine days. We shall want all we can of them when cricket is again with us. Sunshine is wasted when it does not fall caressingly on white flannels and parasols and the sound of bat on ball.

He would prefer April to be cold and wet, although, probably owing to the peculiar formation of his time’s hat-rack, he will be forced to take his holiday in the course of it, forced because it is the one month that provides a gap between the demands of cricket and of football. September does not. We play our last cricket match somewhere about the 13th, and on the next Saturday the District Railway is bearing us to the Old Deer Park and the rugger trials. There is no breathing space in September. But in April there is no cricket, and only a few desultory games of rugger; the grounds are too hard, the sun is too hot, and seven months at one game is quite enough. We dubbin our boots, put them on the shelf, begin oiling our bats, and spend a couple of Saturday afternoons in comfortable leisure.

I nearly always go away myself in April, not because I particularly want to, not because I need a rest,--is not cricket, the most complete of all rests, imminent? but because a holiday which involves a sudden dropping of routine and interests and relationships is our one chance of recovering that sense of proportion which we tend to lose so rapidly in London. It is the equivalent of the Catholic retreat; a pause; the provision of an angle of detachment. If one has a varied and amusing life; if one enjoys one’s work; if no place nor person has particularly got upon one’s nerves, then a holiday is, from the mere point of enjoyment, an unnecessary extravagance. I rarely return home from one without thinking that I could have enjoyed myself more thoroughly and less expensively in London. I look on a holiday, a formal holiday that is to say, not an impromptu four days’ stay in Brussels, or in Paris, somewhat as a duty.

In London we are always meeting the same people. Everyone knows everything about everybody, their literary and domestic arrangements and entanglements, their tastes, their ambitions, their peculiarities; and it gives us an overweaning sense of our own impotence. It is healthy for us to be transported into a society where books are not read and writers not discussed, where we are all strangers to one another.

That is the chief charm of isolated country inns. One never knows whom one may meet, one is always encountering new types; and it is often easier to talk intimately to an acquaintance than a friend.

Three years ago I went away for a fortnight to a small Sussex village, ten miles from any station. It is right underneath the Downs, and from my bedroom window I could see the shadows moving across them in the early morning. I have sometimes thought, as I looked down on it from a balcony in Hammersmith, that I should never see any natural object more varying than the river. Its greys and greens and browns flow continually into one another, the lights and the water taking on different shades under the influence of the tides and currents. “I shall never see anything better than the river,” I used to say, and I don’t know that I have. Not better; but the Downs are as good. They are as full of colour as the river--brown, green, black, in certain aspects very nearly red. It is wonderful to see the sunshine moving over them; the long shadows changing their positions during the afternoon, revealing unexpected projections of the ground. It is the Downs, I suppose, that draw people to the place; no celebrity lives there, there is no artistic colony, no local industry; it has not been written up by the Sussex Cyder School. And yet there are enough visitors to support a really quite tolerable hotel.

It is not smart; I can hardly compliment our host upon his cellar, and there is not much choice of food; but the bedrooms are large, and two of the smoking-room windows can be opened. It is not too cheerful on a wet day, but I have been less comfortable in a smart hotel in Brussels at eighty francs a day.

And one does meet quaint people. Funny old couples discussing the income-tax; young folk on a honeymoon; retired politicians buried beneath the _Morning Post_. It was a real thrill, that first evening in the Downs Hotel. I had a long hot bath after my journey, changed leisurely, carefully brushed back what little a steel helmet has left me of my hair, and waited for the dinner-gong. I went down at once, selected a table as far away from the door as possible, and watched the regular residents troop slowly down. And when, on my second evening, the waiter came up to ask whether I would mind another gentleman sitting at my table, I was able to assure him honestly that it would be a real pleasure to me.

Half an hour later, however, I had to confess that he might have found me a more interesting companion.

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

And he would not talk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I paused, waiting to be contradicted.

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

“But surely----”

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

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

“You are surprised?” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And he gave you no choice?” I said.

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

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

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

He seemed pleased with me for saying that.

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

“Yes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I nodded.

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

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

“‘Yes,’ I said.

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

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

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

“‘Rifles?’

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

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

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

“‘You can help me get it through.’

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

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

“I looked straight at him for a moment.

“‘I shan’t do what you want me to.’

“‘If you will only listen.’

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