“It all depends,” Denys was saying, “on whether we can get Ted Burgess out before he’s set.”
I pricked up my ears.
“I don’t fancy he’s their best bat,” Lord Trimingham said. “In my opinion—and—” (I have forgotten their names) “are more likely to make runs than he is. He’s just a hitter, and the pitch is a bit bumpy.”
I glanced across at Marian, who was sitting next to Lord Trimingham, but she made no comment.
“But he’ll flog the bowling,” Denys persisted, “and then where shall we be?”
“We’ll get him caught in the deep field,” Lord Trimingham said.
“But if he breaks the back of the bowling?”
“If he shows signs of doing that, I shall put myself on,” said Lord Trimingham, with a smile. He was our captain.
“I know you’re a useful bowler, very useful, Hugh,” said Denys, “no one knows that better than I do. But if he were to just capture the bowling—”
“I don’t think you’ll find he will,” said Mrs. Maudsley unexpectedly. “I don’t know a great deal about cricket, but I seem to remember that you made the same prophecy last year, Denys, and this Mr. Burgess got out for a duke or whatever they call it.”
“Duck, Mama.”
“Well, duck then.”
Denys subsided in the general laugh, which was more at his expense than Mrs. Maudsley’s. His unfinished features, handsome when you didn’t look at them too closely, turned red, and I too felt uncomfortable. As schoolboys we snubbed each other unmercifully and it seemed the right thing to do: it was our code. But I knew it was a deviation from the code of grown-ups, and I was a stickler for codes.
Presently, however, Denys piped up again.
“And you know we haven’t settled the side yet. Who is going to be the A. N. Other?”
At this there was a silence. One or two of the breakfasters glanced at me, but I saw no significance in this. I was interested in the composition of our side, of course, and had speculated as to who would be playing; but in the Olympian deliberations of the selection committee I had taken no part.
“It’s rather a delicate question, isn’t it?” said Lord Trimingham, stroking his chin.
“Yes, it is a delicate question, I grant you, Hugh, but we shall have to decide it one way or another, shan’t we? I mean, we’ve got to put eleven men in the field.”
That was undeniable, but no one offered an opinion.
“What do you think, Mr. Maudsley?” asked Lord Trimingham. “There are two candidates for the place, I believe.”
Lord Trimingham often appealed to his host in this way, and it always came as a surprise, for since his lordship’s arrival it had seemed as though he, and not Mr. Maudsley, was the master of the house. Mr. Maudsley, though he spoke so seldom, was never at a loss for an answer.
“Perhaps we had better go into conclave,” he said, and the men of the party rose rather self-consciously and trooped out.
I hung about the smoking-room door (a room into which I had never penetrated) so as to lose no time in satisfying my curiosity and carrying the news to Marcus. They were so long deliberating that I thought they must have gone out another way, but at last the door opened, and one after another, with portentously grave faces, they emerged. I tried to look as though I was passing the door by accident. Lord Trimingham came last.
“Hullo, there’s Mercury!” he said, and his face, which he had to pull about to register any special feeling, contracted into a grimace. “Hard luck, old fellow,” he said, “I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”
I stared at him.
“Yes. We couldn’t get you into the team because Jim” (Jim was the pantry boy) “played last year and the year before and he’s a promising bowler and we daren’t leave him out. Miss Marian will be furious with me, but you can tell her it’s not my fault. So you’re to be twelfth man.”
His whole speech so surprised me that I had hardly time to feel disappointed before I was again raised to a pinnacle of happiness.
“Twelfth man!” I gasped. “So I shall be in the team!—at least,” I added, “I shall sit with them.”
“So you’re pleased?” he said.
“Rather! You see I never expected anything! Shall I go down with you?”
“Yes.”
“Shall I get ready now?”
“You can, but we don’t start till two o’clock.”
“Will you tell me when it’s time to go?”
“The band will strike up.”
I was racing off to tell the news to Marcus when he called me back.
“Do you feel like taking a message?”
“Oh yes.”
“Ask her if she’s going to sing ‘Home, Sweet Home’ at the concert.”
I darted off and found Marian, as I thought I should, arranging the flowers. Lord Trimingham’s message at once went out of my head.
“Oh, Marian, I’m playing!”
“Playing?” she said. “Aren’t you always playing?”
“No, I mean this afternoon, in the cricket match. At least I’m twelfth man, which is nearly as good. I shouldn’t be able to bat, of course, even if one of our side was to die.”
“So it’s no good hoping for that,” she said.
“No … But if one of the batsmen got very out of breath I could run for him, and I could field too, if somebody broke his leg or sprained his ankle.”
“Who would you like it to be?” she asked teasingly. “Papa?”
“Oh no.”
“Denys?”
“No.” But I wasn’t able to put quite so much conviction into this denial.
“I believe you want it to be Denys. Or do you want it to be Brunskill?” Brunskill was the butler. “He’s very stiff in the joints. He’d easily break.”
I laughed at this.
“Or Hugh?”
“Oh no, not him!”
“Why not?”
“Oh, because he’s hurt himself already—and besides—”
“Besides what?”
“Besides he’s our captain and I like him so much, and—oh, Marian!”
“Yes?”
“He asked me to give you a message.” I recollected myself. “Two really, but one doesn’t matter.”
“Tell me about the one that doesn’t matter. And why doesn’t it matter?”
“Because it’s about me. He said you weren’t to be angry with him—”
“Why shouldn’t I be angry with him?” She pricked her finger on the thorn of a white rose. “Blast!” she exclaimed. “Why shouldn’t I be angry with him?”
“Because I wasn’t in the eleven.”
“But I thought you were.”
“No, only twelfth man.”
“Of course, you told me. What a shame! I shall be angry with him.”
“Oh no, please not!” I exclaimed, for by the vindictive way she was thrusting the flowers into their vases I thought she really might be. “It wasn’t his fault, and anyhow captains have to—I mean, it would be awful if there was favouritism. So it wouldn’t be fair if you were cross with him. Now,” I added hurriedly, dismissing the topic of her anger, “would you like to hear the other message?”
“Not specially.”
I was very much taken aback at this reply, but again I put it down to the facetiousness that grown-ups practised on young people.
“Oh, but—” I began.
“Well, I suppose I had better hear it. You said it mattered more than the other. Why?”
“Because it’s about you,” I said.
“Oh.” She took some dripping roses from the white enamelled bowl where they were lying, and held them up and examined them critically. “Pretty poor specimens, aren’t they?” she said, and it was true that compared with her they did look wilted. “But I suppose you can’t expect much of roses at the end of July, and in all this heat, too.”
“It isn’t quite the end,” I reminded her, always calendar-conscious. “It’s only the 21st.”
“Is it?” she said. “I lose count of the days. We live in such a whirl of gaiety, don’t we? Parties all the time. Don’t you get sick of it? Don’t you want to go home?”
“Oh no,” I said, “unless you want me to.”
“I certainly do not. You’re the one ray of light. I couldn’t do without you. How long are you staying, by the way?”
“Until the 30th.”
“But that’s so near. You can’t go then. Stay until the end of the holidays. I’ll arrange it with Mama.”
“Oh, I couldn’t. Mother would miss me. She does miss me, as it is.”
“I don’t believe it. You’re flattering yourself. Stay another week, then. I’ll arrange it with Mama.”
“I should have to write home—”
“Yes, of course. Well, now that’s all settled. And the flowers are arranged, too. Can I trust you to carry one of these vases for me?”
“Yes, please,” I said. “But, Marian—”
“Yes?”
“You haven’t heard Hugh’s other message.”
Her face clouded. She put down the vases she was carrying and said almost irritably: “Well, what is it?”
“He wants to know if you will sing ‘Home, Sweet Home’ at the concert.”
“What concert?”
“The concert tonight after the cricket match.”
Marian’s face took on its most sombre look; she thought a moment and then said: “Tell him I’ll sing it if he will sing—oh well—if he’ll sing ‘She Wore a Wreath of Roses.’”
With my schoolboy’s exaggerated sense of fairness I thought this a most satisfactory arrangement, and as soon as I had finished carrying the flowers for Marian, which perforce I had to do at a walking pace, I ran off to find Lord Trimingham.
“Well, what did she say?” he asked eagerly.
I told him the bargain Marian had proposed.
“But I don’t sing,” he said.
His voice was much more expressive than his face. I knew at once that the answer had been a blow. He had said “I don’t sing” not “I can’t sing,” but it was obvious that he couldn’t and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before. At school such rebuffs were all in the day’s work, and I was surprised that he was so dejected; but I wanted to cheer him up, so I said, my mind working quicker than usual: “Oh, it was only a joke.”
“A joke?” he repeated. “But she knows I don’t sing.”
“That was what made it a joke,” I patiently explained.
“Oh, do you think so?” he said, his voice brightening. “I wish I could be sure.”
It might have been better if I had left him with his original impression.
Later in the morning I saw Marian again, and she asked me if I had given Lord Trimingham her message. I told her I had.
“What did he say?” she asked.
“He laughed,” I said. “He thought it was a very good joke, because, you see, he doesn’t sing.”
“Did he really laugh?” She looked put out.
“Oh yes.” I was beginning to fancy myself as an editor as well as a messenger.
With Marcus’s full approval I put on my school cricket-clothes, but when I asked him if I could wear the school cap—a blue one made in segments converging on a crowning button, and having a white gryphon woven on the front—he was doubtful. “It would be all right,” he said, “if it was an England cap, or even a county cap or a club cap. But being only a school cap, people might think you were putting on side.”
“They wouldn’t if it was to keep the rain off, you old heifer.”
“It won’t rain, stomach-pump.”
We argued for some time about the propriety of wearing a cap, heaping ingenious insults on each other.
Sunshine and shadow outside, sunshine and shadow in my thoughts. Since Marcus’s return I had become vaguely aware that I was leading a double life. In one way this exhilarated me; it gave me a sense of power and called out my latent capacities for intrigue. But also I was afraid, afraid of making some slip, and at the back of my mind I knew that the practical difficulty of keeping Marcus in the dark about the letters still existed, though I had been half persuaded to ignore it. I carried about with me something that made me dangerous, but what it was and why it made me dangerous I had no idea; and soon my thought of it was banished by the imminence of the cricket match, which was making itself felt throughout the house. I caught glimpses of white-clad figures striding purposefully to and fro, heard men’s voices calling each other in tones of authority and urgency, as if life had suddenly become more serious, as if a battle were in prospect.
We had a stand-up, buffet luncheon, all going to the sideboard and helping ourselves, and this seemed a tremendous innovation. It relieved the excitement and suspense to be always jumping up, and Marcus and I busied ourselves with waiting on the others. Waiting on and waiting for them; for we had long ago finished our meal and were kicking our heels when Lord Trimingham caught Mr. Maudsley’s eye and said: “Ought we to be moving now?”
I remember walking to the cricket ground with our team, sometimes trying to feel, and sometimes trying not to feel, that I was one of them; and the conviction I had, which comes so quickly to a boy, that nothing in the world mattered except that we should win. I remember how class distinctions melted away and how the butler, the footman, the coachman, the gardener, and the pantry boy seemed completely on an equality with us, and I remember having a sixth sense that enabled me to foretell, with some accuracy, how each of them would shape.
All our side were in white flannels. The village team, most of whom were already assembled in the pavilion, distressed me by their nondescript appearance; some wore their working clothes, some had already taken their coats off, revealing that they wore braces. “How can they have any chance against us?” I asked myself, for though less conventional than Marcus, I did not believe you could succeed at a game unless you were dressed properly for it. It was like trained soldiers fighting natives. And then it crossed my mind that perhaps the village team were like the Boers, who did not have much in the way of equipment by our standards, but could give a good account of themselves, none the less; and I looked at them with a new respect.
Most of the members of the opposing sides knew one another already; those who did not were formally made acquainted by Lord Trimingham. The process of successively shaking hands with person after person I found confusing, as I still do; the first name or two held, then they began to trickle off my memory like raindrops off a mackintosh. Suddenly I heard: “Burgess, this is our twelfth man, Leo Colston.” Automatically I stretched my hand out and then, seeing who it was, for some reason I blushed furiously. He, too, seemed embarrassed, but recovered himself more quickly than I did, and said: “Oh yes, my lord, we know each other, Master Colston and I, he comes to slide down my straw-stack.”
“Stupid of me,” said Lord Trimingham; “of course, he told us. But you should make him run errands for you, Burgess, he’s a nailer at that.”
“I’m sure he’s a useful young gentleman,” said the farmer, before I had time to speak.
Lord Trimingham turned away, leaving us together.
“I didn’t see you when I came,” I blurted out, eyeing the farmer’s white flannels, which transformed him almost as much as if he had been wearing fancy dress.
“I was with the mare,” he said, “but she’s comfortable now, she’s got her foal. You must come and see them.”
“Are you the captain?” I asked, for it was difficult to think of him in a subordinate position.
“Oh no,” said he, “I’m not much of a cricketer. I just hit out at them. Bill Burdock, he’s our skipper. That’s him over there, talking to his lordship.” Of course I was used to hearing the servants call Lord Trimingham his lordship, but it seemed odd to me that Ted should, and involuntarily I glanced round to see if Marian was there; but the ladies from the Hall had not appeared. “Look, they’re spinning the coin,” he said, with an eagerness that was almost boyish. “Bu
t it won’t signify; his lordship never wins the toss.”
This time he did, however, and we went in first.
The game was already under way when Mrs. Maudsley and her train arrived. I could hardly contain my disapproval of their lateness. “They simply wouldn’t start,” Marcus confided to me. “See you again, old man.” He went down with them to a row of chairs below the steps; I sat with the team in the pavilion.
I have never voluntarily watched a game of cricket since, and have forgotten most of the rules. If I can still remember this match in some detail, it is in the same way that I can still construe a passage, say, of Virgil that I learned at school. I may be word-perfect in it, but I couldn’t apply my accomplishment to the rest of Latin literature—an unknown passage would floor me, however simple it was. And so with cricket: I couldn’t transfer my understanding of this particular match, still less the emotions it aroused in me, to the game of cricket in general. If anyone said to me now that cricket is slow and dull, I should not contradict him, whereas if anyone had said it to me then, I should have wanted to hit him.
Cricket is more than a game, they say, or used to say: it is an attitude of mind, a point of view. I don’t know about that. You can think of it as a set of ritual movements, or as a ballet, a ballet in a green field, a ballet of summer, which you can enjoy without knowing what it’s about or what it means. At least that is how I should recommend other people to enjoy it—ballets are not for me. I like facts. In those days I knew the facts about cricket and I can still repeat some of them parrot-wise. It is like knowing the figures in a sum without being able to add them up. At least, if I added them up, they wouldn’t make a game of cricket as I used to know it.
There are eleven men on each side; the side that is “in” tries to make runs; the other side tries to get them “out.” Representing the side that is in are the two batsmen; as each batsman gets out, he is replaced by another until only one is left, and then the side is out. Meanwhile the other side—the “fielding” side—is present in full force. Prominent among them are the two bowlers, the batsmen’s most direct and determined enemies. There are the “fielders” too—the nine men posted at strategic points about the ground, to hinder the batsman in his task of making runs, and, if possible, get him “out.” But it is the batsmen and the bowlers who take the eye of the crowd. In them is crystallized the clash of wills that makes the match, so that to the uninitiated the game may seem like a duel between them. If the bowler sends down a ball that hits the batsman’s “wicket”—the three “stumps” which it is his honour, his glory, and (if he is a professional) his livelihood to defend—then the batsman is out. In a two-innings match he may get a second chance, but for the purpose of this innings he is dead. (Ours was a single-innings match.)