Part 7

The indifferent batsman possesses as fair a chance of success as the most refined player. And the reason for this is obvious, because from the random manner of delivering the ball it is impossible for the fine batsman to have time for that finesse and delicate management which so peculiarly distinguished the elegant manœuvring of the chief players who occupied the field about eight, ten, or more years ago.

And he goes on to state his belief that if the present system be persisted in a few years longer “the elegant and scientific game of cricket will develop into a mere exhibition of rough, coarse horse-play.”

What would he say if he could return to the pavilion at the Oval, and see Hitch bowling at how many miles is it an hour, and Hendren hooking him to the square-leg boundary? And the last paragraph of his protest is that of every man since the beginning of time who has seen his day pass, his heroes overthrown, and a rash, irreverent generation in their place.

I can use my eyes [he writes], I can compare notes and points in the two styles of playing, and they who have known me will bear testimony that I have never been accustomed to express myself rashly.

A forlorn figure, trusting so simply in the permanence of a static world.

It is sad to think how quickly that world has passed, and how effectively the machinery of our industrial system has already taken cricket to itself. Nyren’s game is no longer the entertainment of a few. It has become part of the national life, and probably, if the Bolshevists get their way here, it will be nationalised with the cinema and the theatre and association football. It is hard to find much in common between the old men who smoked long pipes and drank strong porter and watched Mr Haygarth bat three hours for sixteen runs, and the twenty thousand who flock to the Middlesex and Surrey match because the newspapers have told them to, and who barrack any batsman who plays through a maiden over. Indeed, on those big days, I do not think that you find there the survival of the old enthusiast. You will find him rather on a cold morning shivering at the back of the mound, on the third day of a match that is certain to be a draw, when there are only a couple of hundred spectators. No one knows why he goes there. He will be very cold. He will not see particularly good cricket. Professional batsmen will play for a draw in the most professional manner. The fielding towards four o’clock will grow slack, and half an hour before the end the captains will decide that it is no good going on, and that they might just as well draw stumps. Your old man in the mound knows that this must happen. But he goes there all the same, and at three o’clock he buys an evening paper to read an account of the match and he sees that the reporter says: “Hardstaff was beaten and bowled by a yorker.” And the old man will chuckle, knowing that it was a half-volley and that Hardstaff hit over it. And in January, when he reads through his _Wisden_, he will put a tick against that match, with the others that he has seen, and he will add them up and find that he has spent five more days at Lord’s this year than he did the year before. He will remember how his grandfather used to talk to him of Fuller Pilch; and he will smile, knowing the superiority of Hendren. And he will continue to watch cricket as his grandfather watched it on cold days as well as warm, when a draw is certain and when there is a chance of a great finish. One day he believes the professional batsmen will fail, there will be a collapse and a sensational victory, and only two hundred people will have seen it. He knows that many matches are played in the year and that very few of them yield great finishes, and he knows that the only way to make sure of the big occasion is to go there whenever stumps are pitched. And it is of him that we must think when we would reconstruct the cricket world of 1830.

For Nyren was the Homer of cricket and the Homeric days have passed. In 1923 the soil is no longer virgin. Cricket is a different game, and for the novelist it is less intriguing. There is no betting, there is no dishonesty, and, though we hear whispers of the questionable diplomacy of the northern leagues, it would hardly be possible to invent a cricket story with a credible villain. Nat Gould found no difficulty in writing a hundred novels of the racecourse; it is extremely difficult to write one of the cricket field. No scope is provided for dramatic narrative. Cricket in the lives of most of us is a delightful interlude--pleasant hours in pleasant company; and we do not take our success or failure very seriously. At school it is important: caps and cups are at stake, positions of authority go to the most proficient; and it so happens that the only great cricket story of recent times is a school story, P. G. Wodehouse’s _Mike_. But apart from school it is hard to find in cricket a motive of sufficient strength to allow of the development and presentation of dramatic action. On the racecourse large sums of money are at stake. On the success of a horse may depend the future happiness of the hero and the heroine. But I doubt if the result of a cricket match has in recent years ever involved much more than the temporary loss or gain of personal prestige. In _Willow the King_ J. C. Snaith chose a cricket match as the setting for a summer idyll, but the author of _Brooke of Covenden_ would hardly rank that story highly among his many very considerable achievements. The moment for the great cricket novel has passed: irrecoverably perhaps. And in the winter months we find ourselves returning as of old to a few books of reminiscence and to our long yellow-backed, tattered row of _Wisden_, and of the two we find _Wisden_ the more companionable.

VII

We read _Wisden_ in the winter on cold nights before a leaping fire and it brings back to us the sense of new-mown grass, the feel of a cricket ball and the stir of sunlight. It is a substitute for cricket: and the old harassing doubt creeps up again, the doubt whether any literature is anything beyond a substitute, the focus of an unfulfilled desire. We know how old people drug themselves with novels. Every day they go down to the library and choose a new book, and for twenty-four hours cease to be themselves, becoming again in a story of adventure and young love all that they were and are not. Does not foiled ambition, we ask ourselves, always seek to realise itself in plays and pictures. Inevitably some side of ourselves must remain undeveloped, and through a process that the advanced psychologists describe as sublimation, we find that undeveloped side a substitute for its expression. Is a book anything more than a spade digging down to our subconsciousness, to our real self? Is anything ever quite what we take it for?

Influence: they’ll talk for hours about it from the pulpit. Influence: every little thing, every word and thought and act. It has its effect on someone somewhere. I can still hear a certain old parish priest’s thin voice falling across the dark silence of benediction. It was his pet theme: influence. “They will tell you in the big world,” he used to say to us, “that the strong man can be independent of his actions, that they fall from him as raindrops from a sloping roof. It may be so. Perhaps: for the very few, the very strong. But the water that falls from the clouds rests somewhere. It may slip from the sloping roofs, but it will find its level. Its level where it must complete its task, where it will rot wood, rust iron, or make the corn golden for the hands of man. Your acts, your words, your thoughts, they are like the falling rain. Somewhere they will create beauty or decay. They will never fall unheeded.”

He was right, of course. Every moment of the day we impart, as we receive, impressions. But the nature of those impressions. It is there that I’m just a little doubtful. That “as we sow we reap” theory. It looks all right. It ought to be all right. But life has a way of contradicting theories. It isn’t always the good tree that bears good fruit. Sometimes, unquestionably; but one fact is worth a string of arguments. Or rather, perhaps, there’s no argument that can withstand a fact. And here, as my contribution to the argument, is the story of Pussy Willow, as she told it me a couple of months ago raffishly across the table of a dingy restaurant, in one of those back streets that filter through from Shaftesbury Avenue across Soho.

I drop in there quite often after closing time. There’s dancing there and music, if you can so grace an unwashed foreigner’s strumming on a banjo. And they’ve got a licence to carry on till twelve. I don’t know how they got it. They don’t even call themselves a club. But they’ll dump a property sandwich down in front of you and serve you, up till midnight, with villainous concocted cognac at half-a-crown a glass. It’s like most of those Soho Bohemian places: a poisonous atmosphere to live in, but amusing and profitable enough to visit now and again. I like to sit quietly in a corner and watch a crowd of people, laughing and quarrelling and drinking--and try to make stories up round each of them, wondering who is in love with whom, and who will be so and so’s successor. Sometimes I signal to one of them to come and share a drink with me; more often they come across of their own accord and await an invitation.

It was in this way that I met, or should rather say, perhaps, re-met, Pussy Willow. A plump, flashily, but poorly dressed woman planted herself down in front of me and announced that she was two sheets in the wind.

“Mine being,” she concluded, “a double Scotch, and water, not too much of it.”

“Admirable,” I answered. “One double, waiter, and a benedictine.”

She swallowed her double at a gulp, then leant forward across the table. “You don’t know who I am?” she said.

I shook my head.

“Then I’ll introduce myself. Miss Pussy Willow, late of the Vaudeville Theatre!”

She was a good actress. She had always known how to get the most out of her voice, how to lay the bait for an effect. And she got it all right. I sat back and looked at her, looked at the puffed, swollen cheeks, the pouches under the eyes, the unshapely mouth where the powder caked along the wrinkles, the bulging double chin, and searched there, as one might search in the face of a long drowned friend for some sign of accustomed features, searched for that face, so pretty, so delicate, so appealing, so utterly, so entrancingly soubrette, that had made so many hearts beat quickly fifteen years ago. Not a trace of it. Not a trace of the woman who had once been Pussy Willow, of the radiant creature who had swayed in that great silver dress, before the chorus, singing the song that had been for six months the rage of London: “Love is the song of a girl and a boy.” Gone: all of it. That youth, that charm, that divine mingling of simplicity and wantonness--buried beneath this coated unhealthy mask of flesh and powder. I did not know what to say. She was looking at me in a half-dazed, half-resentful manner, ready to hit back if what I might say should hurt her. In the end I thought it better to say nothing.

“So it’s silence, is it?” she said. “Ah, well, I guessed as much. I know what you’re thinking--the pity of it, that’s what you’re saying to yourself. Poor Pussy Willow, you’ll say. Drunk herself down to this. And then you’ll go back home and think what a damned fine fellow you are. And to-morrow you’ll tell your friends up at the club: ‘Do you know whom I saw yesterday?’ you’ll say. ‘Pussy Willow, quite drunk, she was. All her looks gone. You wouldn’t have recognised her.’ And you’ll all raise your hands and say: ‘The pity of it!’ and get self-righteous. And then you’ll go back to your office and swindle some wretched underdog and talk about leaving the world better than you found it. I know your sort. You only come here to get warm with self-righteousness. Ah, you--But, well, I’ll tell you this, mister: you talk about leaving the world better than you found it, but I’ve probably done a sight more good in it than you have.”

She paused on a high-pitched note of challenge.

But again I made no answer. I knew that I had only to wait to be told the story. I caught the waiter’s eye, nodded, and another double was at her elbow. She gulped it down quickly, as she had the other. She leant forward, warmed, softened, recollective to continue on the note where she had paused. “More good than you,--a blooming sight more good than you. I saved a man once from becoming--well, you know what men become if they don’t pull the reins up tight in the early thirties. Yes, me--I saved a man. It makes me laugh now when I think of it.

“I met him here a couple of months ago, just as I met you. Tall, fine-looking man, he was, white-haired, with a short, close-cut beard. Well dressed: a successful family business man--that’s what he looked. Heaven knows what he thought he was doing here. Change, I suppose; an empty hour to be filled in somehow. Perhaps he used to come here when he was a boy and felt sentimental suddenly. At any rate, he came in and stood at the corner of the bar and ordered a brown sherry and looked very self-conscious and out of place. I nudged the girl next me. ‘The 396th hymn,’ I said. ‘Two minutes and he’ll be in the pulpit.’ And we laughed and had another, and told a couple of bluish stories. And then, suddenly, I found myself getting uncomfortable, and I realised that I was being stared at, stared at in a curious, creepy sort of way, as though I was being looked through for something that was behind me. It went on that stare, till I couldn’t stick it any longer. I walked across to him. ‘Well, old sport,’ I said, ‘this is me. Now, what about it?’

“He stammered a little and looked embarrassed.

“‘Yes--I--I’m sorry. It was rude of me, but ... well, you remind me very much of someone.’

“‘And who might that be?’ I asked.

“‘An actress. You probably wouldn’t know her. We thought a lot of her once--Pussy Willow.’

“It knocked me sideways, I can tell you. I thought the world had forgotten Pussy, or that those who did remember wouldn’t recognise her now in what she is.

“‘You ought to be a detective then,’ I says, ‘you’ve touched the right target.’

“It told. I hoped it would. He stammered: ‘What! you--you really are the Pussy Willow who----’

“And suddenly, for cheek, I cocked back my hat as I used to at the jolly old Vaudeville, and I plumped my fists down on my hips and swayed backwards and began to sing the first verse of that old thing of mine--you remember it, when I wore that great silver dress, ‘Love is the song of a girl and a boy.’

“He knew then: ‘Pussy Willow!’ he murmured. Then stood looking at me as they all do, those that remember me, when I tell them who I am; looked at me till I got all hot and shivery.

“‘Oh, come off it,’ I said, ‘Give me a drink, old pal.’

“He seemed to pull himself together with a start. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I forgot. Waiter, send a bottle of champagne over to that table and some sandwiches.’

“By the time one’s got to my age one’s learnt not to be surprised at anything. ‘Gee, girls,’ I said, ‘but it’s a party!’ And I followed him across and began to chatter about old times. I thought that was what he wanted, to be made to feel young again. But I soon saw that he was not listening to what I was saying, that he had something of his own to say, but didn’t know how to say it, so I just chattered on till he was ready.

“It came, all of a heap, like an explosion, right across one of my best stories.

“‘Pussy, look here--I’m ... well, I’m not rich, but I want to do something for you. I want to--may I give you an allowance of two pounds a week?’

“I sat back on my chair flabergasted, absolutely. It was five years since anyone had made me that sort of offer.

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘the old lady’s a bit weatherbeaten, but what there is of her is good.’

“He shook his hand; quite a stage gesture, quietly in front of me.

“‘Oh, no, no, no,’ he said. ‘Please don’t misunderstand me. I didn’t mean anything like that--as a present, simply.’

“I tried him with a dead straight glance.

“‘Now, look here, my lad,’ I said, ‘cough it up. What’s it all about? People don’t give things for nothing--not in this world, any way.’

“He nodded. ‘That’s why I want to do something for you. You’ve done me the greatest service that anyone has ever done me. I have a very happy home and three very happy children, and but for you I don’t think I should have ever married.’

“That made me laugh. ‘So you heard me sing: “Love me in a cottage by the sea,” and caught the next train to Margate?’

“‘Oh, no, no! Something--something perhaps you’d rather not be reminded of. But, do you remember when “The Eastern Princess” was running at the Clarion, and you flung up your part at a moment’s notice and weren’t seen again in London for six months?’

“I nodded. One of the landmarks in my life, that show was.

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘I was twenty-seven then. I’d just passed my first medical exam. in Ireland and had come up to London to open a practice in Richmond. I wasn’t badly off. I had good prospects. I was a sportsman. For eight years, ever since I had gone up to Oxford, I had been working really hard. All my friends told me that my innings was just going to begin. “You’ll have a wonderful time,” they said; “there’s no place like London.”’

“‘And then I fell in love with a very young and very unsophisticated girl, the daughter of a country parson whom I had got to know during a cricket tour. My friends did their very best to dissuade me. “It’s perfect madness,” they said, “you’re going to chuck your life away before you’ve started it. You could have a wonderful time. My dear chap, don’t be an ass!” And they took me to dancing clubs, and the heat and colour mounted to my brain. I began to agree with them: marriage was a fetter, a prison house. One didn’t chuck one’s life away.

“‘And then I heard a rumour about you. They were saying that you had gone away because--well, your name was coupled with the producer’s there. What was his name? Ah, yes, Clive Ferguson,--and they said that you were--well--er--very ill.

“‘It’ll surprise you, but I don’t think anything’s ever shocked me quite so much. I had heard you sing a great many times. I had made a sort of ideal of you, as young men will of actresses. You had become the embodiment to me of the gay, brightly coloured butterfly life of London; and, when I heard that rumour, your ruin seemed a criticism of the whole life you represented. That’s where it ends, I told myself. I thought of you as I had last seen you, singing in that great silver dress of yours. And then I thought of what life would be to you from then on. And I don’t know, but beneath its warmth and glitter that life seemed hard and cruel and revengeful. A month later I was married, and I’ve been very, very happy. And--well, it’s a bit late, I’m afraid, but if I can I should like to be able to do something for you now.’”

Pussy Willow stopped speaking, tossed back her head and smiled. “And that’s the way I got my beer money for life.”

“And was it true?” I asked.

“True--what true?”

“About Clive Ferguson?”

She laughed a loud, harsh, triumphing laugh. “True, that! good God, no. Clive Ferguson! I wouldn’t look at him. Dirty great oily Jew. I wouldn’t have looked twice at him, not that way. I expect he started that story one evening when he was drunk--sheer swank to save his vanity. Oh no, he wasn’t the cause of that little jaunt of mine. No, I was away for six months, old sport, with the only man I think I’ve ever really cared for. A young boxer, he was, engaged to some soppy fool in the chorus. She brought him round to see us one evening. I had one look at him and made my mind up. He wasn’t going to waste himself on the likes of her. God! but I was mad about that boy. That’s really what started things against me. I rushed him straight away; didn’t give him time to think; and Clive Ferguson never forgave me. The understudy was an utter dud; clean smashed the piece, it did, in its second month. He never forgave me. Wouldn’t take me back again. And the money I spent on that boy; all my jewellery went and the things I’d put away. And of course I couldn’t keep him. One never can keep them. They use one as a stepping-stone. I never really got over it. I shan’t ever forget. But, oh, well! two pound a week for life I’ve got out of it.

“And if it’s a woman’s job in life to make a man happy, to give him a good home and children, well, I suppose I’ve done it. I could laugh sometimes when I think how I have done it. But it doesn’t matter, does it, as long as the thing gets done.”

What are you going to argue against that? and in literature as in life.

As far as effect is concerned, social and moral effect that is to say, bad books, bad deeds, are just as valuable as good. Our contempt for the best seller, is it anything but a form of intellectual snobbery, or jealousy, which is the same thing, from another side.

Best sellers!

Whenever I see, on railway bookstalls and the shelves of Mudie’s library, a novel by Florence Barclay I am reminded of one of my first, certainly my strangest, school friends. He was not the conventional public-school type. He disliked games. He refused to join the corps. He had no house or school spirit. He was a fine swimmer, but never trained for the competitions. Games were compulsory. But I do not recollect to have ever seen him on the cricket field, and he played football scarcely once a fortnight. He arranged for every afternoon of the week a music lesson or a music practice. Authority let him go his own way. He was, in fact, the sort of person whom one would expect to be bullied, and thoroughly wretched generally. And yet he was not, I think, unhappy. Certainly he was never bullied. Even the swashbuckling element, in what was admittedly a fairly boisterous community, treated him with respect. This in itself would make him a well-placed candidate for immortality. But it is his study that I particularly remember. It was the sort of study that challenged enterprise, and an old boy on seeing it was reported to have exclaimed: “Good God! what must the house be coming to! Why hasn’t this place been shipped?”

It was like no study that had ever been. They were small dark rooms, our studies, monastic quarters that lay under the shadow, on one side, of the abbey, and on the other, of the lindens and big school. We tried to make them brighter with light festooned wallpapers, allegorical pictures, and brackets on which we placed china shepherdesses; to the height of four feet the walls were panelled, and fashion decreed that the woodwork should be covered with long strips of brightly coloured cloth. It was a fashion that had been handed down, like the pictures, from one generation to another. Thus in my father’s day did they disfigure honest handiwork, and thus will they disfigure it when I am fifty. My friend had, however, little use for fashions. He decided that he would have his woodwork painted in mauve and black. And to match it he had the walls covered with a deep mauve paper. From the ceiling he hung before the window a mauve curtain, edged with black. On the window seat and on the chairs he heaped high a profusion of mauve cushions; the walls, for he was a great admirer of Napoleon, he devoted exclusively to a picture gallery for the dictator. It was, in fact, a study that would, in Chelsea, occasion a mild surprise; at school it made you reel in outraged dismay across the passage. Yet no one shipped it, no one turned the portraits of Napoleon to the wall, nor bedecked the ceiling with red ink; nor did anyone tear from their bracket beneath the gas the calf-bound set of Mrs Barclay’s novels.