Part 5

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.