From a Cornish Window Part 16

"'The bowler, whether born or made, should cultivate and acquire a high action and a good swing of arm and body, as such a delivery will make the ball rise quickly and perpendicularly from the pitch; but the action must at all costs be easy and free, qualities which neither imitation nor education must allow to disappear.'

"We often hear complaints--and reasonable ones for the most part--that the wage given to first-cla.s.s professional cricketers is no longer adequate.

But one of the pet arguments for increasing it is that their employment begins and ends with the summer. Now, I certainly think that, while bowlers write in this fas.h.i.+on, they can have little or nothing to dread from the winter months."

"I declare," said Grayson, "I believe you are jealous!"

"Well, and why not? For, mark you, Mr. Richardson's is no singular case, of which we might say--to comfort ourselves--that the G.o.ddess of Cricket, whom he serves so mightily, has touched his lips and inspired him for a moment. Turn over these pages. We poor novelists, critics, men of letters, have no such paper, such type, as are lavished on the experts who write here upon their various branches of sport. _Our_ efforts are not ill.u.s.trated by the Swan Engraving Company. And the rub for us is that these gentlemen deserve it all! I am not going to admit--to you, at any rate--that their subjects are of higher interest than ours, or of more importance to the world. But I confess that, as a rule, they make theirs more interesting. When Mr. C. B. Fry discourses about Long Jumping, or Mr. W. Ellis about Coursing, or Mr. F. C. J. Ford upon Australian Cricket, there are very few novelists to whom I had rather be listening. It cannot be mere chance that makes them all so eloquent; nor is it that they have all risen together to the height of a single great occasion; for though each must have felt it a great occasion when he was invited to a.s.sist in this sumptuous work, I remarked a similar eloquence in those who contributed, the other day, to Messrs. Longmans' 'Badminton Library.'

When sportsmen take to writing admirable English, and peers of the realm to editing it, I hardly see where we poor men of letters can expect to come in."

"The only cure that I can see," said Verinder, "is for Her Majesty to turn you into peers of the realm. Some of you suggest this from time to time, and hitherto it has puzzled me to discover why. But if it would qualify you to edit the writings of sportsmen--"

"And why not? These books sell: and if aristocracy have its roots in Commerce, shall not the sale of books count as high as the sale of beer?

The principle has been granted. Already the purveyors of cheap and wholesome literature are invited to kneel before the Queen, and receive the _accolade_."

"She must want to cut t.i.t-bits out of them," put in the Boy.

"Of course we must look at the proportion of profit. Hitherto the profits of beer and literature have not been comparable; but this wonderful boom in books of sport may redress the balance. Every one buys them. When you entered I was glancing through a volume of new verse, but without the smallest intention of buying it. My purchases, you see, are all sporting works, including, of course, Prince Ranjitsinhji's _Jubilee Book of Cricket_."

"Just so," snapped Verinder. "You buy books about sport: we spend an afternoon in looking on at sport. And so, in one way or another, we a.s.sist at the d.a.m.nation of the sporting spirit in England."

When Verinder begins in this style an oration is never far distant.

I walked back with the three to the Temple. On our way he hissed and sputtered like a kettle, and we had scarcely reached his chamber before he boiled over in real earnest.

"We ought never to have been there! It's well enough for the Boy: he has been playing steadily all the summer, first for Cambridge and afterwards for his county. Now he has three days off and is taking his holiday.

But Grayson and I--What the deuce have we to do in that galley?

Far better we joined a club down at Dulwich or Tooting and put in a little honest play, of a week-end, on our own account. We should be crocks, of course: our cricketing is done. But we should be honest crocks.

At least it is better to take a back row in the performance, and find out our own weakness, than pay for a good seat at Lord's or the Oval, and be Connoisseurs of what Abel and Hearne and Brockwell can and cannot do.

If a man wants to sing the praises of cricket as a national game, let him go down to one of the Public Schools and watch its close or cricket-ground on a half-holiday: fifteen acres of turf, and a dozen games going on together, from Big Side down to the lowest form match: from three to four hundred boys in white flannels--all keen as mustard, and each occupied with his own game, and playing it to the best of his powers.

_Playing it_--mark you: not looking on. That's the point: and that's what Wellington meant by saying--if he ever said it--that Waterloo was won upon the playing-fields at Eton. In my old school if a boy s.h.i.+rked the game he had a poor time. Say that he s.h.i.+rked it for an afternoon's lawn-tennis: it was lucky for him if he didn't find his racquet, next day, nailed up on the pavilion door like a stoat on a gamekeeper's tree. That was the sporting spirit, sir, if the sporting spirit means something that is to save England: and we shall not win another Waterloo by enclosing twenty-two gladiators in a ring of twenty-two thousand loafers, whose only exercise is to cheer when somebody makes a stroke, howl when some other body drops a catch, and argue that a batsman was not out when the umpire has given him 'leg-before.' Even at football matches the crowd has _some_ chance of taking physical exercise on its own account--by manhandling the referee when the game is over. Sport? The average subscriber to Lord's is just as much of a sportsman as the Spaniard who watches a bull-fight, and just a trifle more of a sportsman than the bar-loafer who backs a horse he has never clapped eyes on. You may call it Cricket if you like: I call it a.s.sisting at a Gladiatorial Show. True cricket is left to the village greens."

"Steady, old man!" protested the Boy.

"I repeat it. For the spirit of the game you might have gone, a few years ago, to the Public Schools; but even they are infected now with the gladiatorial ideal. As it is you must go to the village green; for the spirit, you understand--not the letter--"

"I believe you!" chuckled young Dawkins. "Last season I put in an off day with the villagers at home. We played the nearest market town, and I put myself on to bowl slows. Second wicket down, in came the fattest man I ever saw. He was a nurseryman and seedsman in private life, and he fairly hid the wicket-keep. In the first over a ball of mine got up a bit and took him in the ab-do-men. 'How's that?' I asked. 'Well,' said the umpire, 'I wasn't azackly looking, so I leave it to you. If it hit en in the paunch, it's 'not out' and the fella must have suffered. But if it took en in the rear, I reckon it didn't hurt much, and it's 'leg-before.''

I suppose that is what you would call the 'spirit' of cricket. But, I say, if you have such a down on Lord's and what you call the gladiatorial business, why on earth do you go?"

"Isn't that the very question I've been asking myself?" replied Verinder testily.

"Perhaps we have an explanation here," I suggested; for during Verinder's harangue I had settled myself in the window-seat, and was turning over the pages of Prince Ranjitsinhji's book.

"'It is a grand thing for people who have to work most of their time to have an interest in something or other outside their particular groove. Cricket is a first-rate interest. The game has developed to such a pitch that it is worth taking interest in. Go to Lord's and a.n.a.lyse the crowd. There are all sorts and conditions of men there round the ropes--bricklayers, bank-clerks, soldiers, postmen, and stockbrokers. And in the pavilion are Q.C.'s, artists, archdeacons, and leader-writers. . . .'"

"Oh, come!" Grayson puts in. "Isn't that rather hard on the stockbroker?"

"It is what the book says.

"'Bad men, good men, workers and idlers, all are there, and all at one in their keenness over the game. . . . Anything that puts very many different kinds of people on a common ground must promote sympathy and kindly feelings. The workman does not come away from seeing Middles.e.x beating Lancas.h.i.+re, or vice versa, with evil in his heart against the upper ten; nor the Mayfair _homme de plaisir_ with a feeling of contempt for the street-bred ma.s.ses. Both alike are thinking how well Mold bowled, and how cleanly Stoddart despatched Briggs's high-tossed slow ball over the awning. Even that cynical _nil admirari_ lawyer--'"

I pointed a finger at Verinder.

"'Even that cynical _nil admirari_ lawyer caught himself cheering loudly when Sir Timothy planted Hallam's would-be yorker into the press-box. True, he caught himself being enthusiastic, and broke off at once--'"

"When I found it hadn't killed a reporter," Verinder explained. "But I hope Ranjitsinhji has some better arguments than these if he wants to defend gladiatorial cricket. At least he allows that a change has come over the game of late years, and that this change has to be defended?"

"Yes, he admits the change, and explains how it came about. In the beginning we had local club cricket pure and simple--the game of your Village Green, in fact. Out of this grew representative local cricket-- that is, district or county cricket which flourished along with local club cricket. Out of county cricket, which in those days was only local cricket glorified, sprang exhibition or spectacular or gladiatorial cricket, which lived side by side with, but distinct from, the other.

Finally, exhibition and county cricket merged and became one. And that is where we are now."

"Does he explain how exhibition and county cricket came, as he puts it, to be merged into one?"

"Yes. The introduction of spectacular cricket (he says) changed the basis of county cricket considerably. For many years the exhibition elevens and the counties played side by side; but gradually the former died out, and the new elements they had introduced into the game were absorbed into county cricket. The process was gradual, but in the end complete.

The old county clubs and the new ones that from time to time sprang up added the exhibition side of cricket to the old local basis. The county clubs were no longer merely glorified local clubs, but in addition business concerns. They provided popular amus.e.m.e.nt and good cricket; in fact, they became what they are now--local in name, and partly local in reality, but also run upon exhibition or spectacular lines."

"A truly British compromise! Good business at the bottom of it, and a touch of local sentiment by way of varnish. For of course the final excuse for calling an eleven after Loams.h.i.+re (let us say), and for any pride a Loams.h.i.+re man may take in its doings, is that its members have been bred and trained in Loams.h.i.+re. But, because any such limitation would sorely affect the gate-money, we import players from Australia or Timbuctoo, stick a Loams.h.i.+re cap with the county arms on the head of each, and confidently expect our public to swallow the fiction and provide the local enthusiasm undismayed."

"My dear Verinder, if you propose to preach rank Chauvinism, I have done.

But I don't believe you are in earnest."

"In a sense, I am not. My argument would exclude Ranjitsinhji himself from all matches but a few unimportant ones. I vote for Greater Britain, as you know: and in any case my best arguments would go down before the sheer delight of watching him at the wicket. Let the territorial fiction stand, by all means. Nay, let us value it as the one relic of genuine county cricket. It is the other side of the business that I quarrel with."

"Be good enough to define the quarrel."

"Why, then, I quarrel with the spectacular side of the New Cricket; which, when you come to look into it, is the gate-money side. How does Ranjitsinhji defend it?"

"Let me see. 'Its justification is the pleasure it provides for large numbers of the public.'"

"Quite so: the bricklayer and the stockbroker by the ropes, and the cynical lawyer in the pavilion! But I prefer to consider the interests of the game."

"'From a purely cricket point of view,' he goes on, 'not much can be said against it.'"

"Let us inquire into that. The New Cricket is a business concern: it caters for the bricklayer, the stockbroker, and the whole crowd of spectators. Its prosperity depends on the attraction it offers them.

To attract them it must provide first-cla.s.s players, and the county that cannot breed first-cla.s.s players is forced to hire them. This is costly; but again the cash comes out of the spectators' pockets, in subscriptions and gate-money. Now are you going to tell me that those who pay the piper will refrain from calling the tune? Most certainly they will not.

More and more frequently in newspaper reports of cricket-matches you find discussions of what is 'due to the public.' If stumps, for some reason or other, are drawn early, it is hinted that the spectators have a grievance; a captain's orders are canva.s.sed and challenged, and so is the choice of his team; a dispute between a club and its servants becomes an affair of the streets, and is taken up by the press, with threats and counter-threats. In short, the interest of the game and the interest of the crowd may not be identical; and whereas a captain used to consider only the interest of the game, he is now obliged to consider both.

Does Ranjitsinhji point this out?"

"He seems, at any rate, to admit it; for I find this on page 232, in his chapter upon 'Captaincy':--

"'The duties of a captain vary somewhat according to the kind of match in which his side is engaged, and to the kind of club which has elected him. To begin with, first-cla.s.s cricket, including representative M.C.C., county and university matches, is quite different from any other--partly because the results are universally regarded as more important, partly _because certain obligations towards the spectators have to be taken into consideration.

The last point applies equally to any match which people pay to come to see_. . . . With regard to gate-money matches. The captains of the two sides engaged are, during the match, responsible for everything in connection with it. _They are under an obligation to the public to see that the match is played in such a way as the public has a reasonable right to expect_.'"

"And pray," demanded Verinder, "what are these 'obligations towards the spectators,' and 'reasonable rights' of the public?"

"Well, I suppose the public can reasonably demand punctuality in starting play; a moderate interval for luncheon and between innings; and that stumps shall not be drawn, nor the match abandoned, before the time arranged, unless circ.u.mstances make it absolutely necessary."

"And who is to be judge of these circ.u.mstances."

"The captain, I suppose."