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.

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 some of 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, but they 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 thing that 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 the Evening Argus to 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 only with 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 shoulder as 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.