I realized instantly that, as might have been expected, there was a public-school4 attached to the religious building from which I had emerged, and that the whole life of its young and grown-up inhabitants was at present absorbed by, fiercely concentrated upon, the cricket match in progress—which was no doubt a serious event against a visiting school. No wonder I had had that feeling of tension.
The pavilion, packed as I could see from here, with a crowd of relations and masters, was at the far end of the ground from where I stood, and all around, seated on benches or lying sprawled on the ground, were the boys—every member of this far-flung circle of young and old gazing at the centre of the field with the immobility of Red Indians in ambush.
It was, indeed, as though this, the very first of the strange scenes I was to witness in the land of Moribundia, had been specially prepared for me—so arranged that the members of the community were spread out before me, for my benefit, as it were, in a state of absolute naturalness and unself-consciousness, and so absorbed in their own rites that a stranger could move among them with less conspicuousness than a ghost.
I knew at once that I must seize this moment—drink in these unspoiled impressions while I could, and keeping close to the trees, I began to circle slowly but without stealth in the direction of the pavilion.
It was not until I had passed the second or third group of boys lying sprawled upon the grass that I became aware that something was ‘wrong’—had my first intimation, in other words, that this world into which I had come had certain physical characteristics and peculiarities which differed, however faintly, from those in the world from which I had come. There was, in fact, something ‘wrong’ about these boys themselves. And this something ‘wrong’ derived from the fact that there was something much too ‘right’ about them.
To one accustomed to the lean, lanky, pimpled, and somewhat smutty appearance of the average public-school boy in England, there was an air of sunburned masculinity about each of these boys I was now looking at—of handsome muscular earnestness, of lissom gracefulness, of blue-eyed burning idealism, of manly fortitude, of disciplined (above all, disciplined) perfection, which simply took one’s breath away. Gazing intently at the game, with their eager profiles presented to me, they seemed a set of young dreaming Raleighs. And indeed, it was clear enough that, in looking at the game, they were seeing something more than a mere game—they were looking into their own future, imbibing lessons of sportsmanship, self-sacrifice, and courage which would certainly serve them in good stead in the battle of life ahead.
A thrill ran through me as it occurred to me that I had, perhaps, alighted upon a world of ideal creatures, of gods—or demi-gods at last. I did not know then what I found out later, that in Moribundia this perfection of spiritual and physical demeanour was confined exclusively to public-school boys or ex-public-school boys—to a race, or caste, known in a general way as the Akkup Bihas5—and that each other caste, without necessarily being considered lower in grade, had a completely different set of characteristics, sometimes very much the opposite of perfect, and exaggerated upon lines of its own.
As I drew nearer to the pavilion I began to look at the adults, who were either seated on the benches, or standing in little groups around. I did not care to get too close to them, but I was at once struck by the immaculateness of their clothes and their figures—all of which (those of the women and men alike) were tall and willowy, to a remarkable, almost fantastic degree. That this was a fixed peculiarity of the adult Akkup Bihas, by which he might be instantly recognized from a good distance off, I did not of course then know—any more than I knew that there was another class, the Gnikrow class, which was characterized by a somewhat detestable shortness and round-shouldered squatness. This well-defined physical distinction between classes, and even professions, was one of the features of Moribundia which made things very simple in some respects for the newcomer. For instance, whereas an unpleasantly corpulent member of the class of the Akkup Bihas was a thing practically inconceivable in this strange land, the idea of a thin Reknab, or a thin Rekamkoob, or a thin Reetiforp, was equally out of the question.
But I am anticipating. Choosing a spot on the grass as near to the pavilion as I dared, I sat down and began to look at the game itself. It was at once evident that the tenseness and quietness, the breathless hush6 prevailing everywhere, was due to the fact that a climactic and crucial moment had been reached. The Scoreboard showed that the other side had totalled 120, and that the side now batting had produced 111 runs for 8 wickets. Ten more runs to make and two wickets to fall!—in schoolboy cricket about as thrilling a situation as you could desire.
For the next five minutes or so I watched the game with rapt attention. In three overs no further run was scored, and yet the pair at the wicket seemed to be holding their own. This in itself (although I know very little about cricket) seemed to me something of a feat, as the pitch was bumping fiercely, and the light of the declining sun had a blinding quality which I should imagine must have made the ball very hard to see.
Hearing a noise behind me, I turned my head and saw near to me a boy of from twelve to fourteen years of age, wearing white flannels and putting on cricket-pads. It was at once evident to me that he was the last man in, and that when the next wicket fell the game would depend upon him.
As I looked at this boy, admiring his extreme good looks, and the calm, determined expression on his face, I saw, approaching him from behind, another boy, older, taller and of an even more noble appearance.
There followed a curious incident. The older boy, coming up unnoticed from behind until he was within close range, suddenly raised his hand and smote the other on the shoulders with a smack so violent and resounding that I half expected to see its recipient fall to the ground.
Instead of this, however, and instead of resenting this assault from the back in any way, the younger boy turned, with that peculiar upright grace of manner which showed in every movement made by these young super-men, and faced his Captain (for the Captain of the team it obviously was) with a look of disciplined expectancy and manly adoration astonishing in its intensity.
What followed was even more curious still. For a moment or two there was a silence in which they glared, half-hypnotically, into each other’s eyes. Then the Captain spoke.
“Play up,” he said, in a ringing, measured, almost savagely emphatic tone. “Play up!—and play the game!”
He then walked immediately away with the slightly jaunty air of a man by no means displeased at having been able to express his requirements in so precise a manner.
I must confess that this little episode, which, I was soon to learn, was entirely in keeping with the whole strange atmosphere and standards of behaviour of Moribundia, filled me at the time with something like apprehension. I began to suspect, in fact, that I was in the society of people not very far removed from lunatics. However, my attention was diverted at that moment by a kind of whoop and murmur all around the ground, and looking out again at the field I saw that another wicket had fallen—the ninth. Now, indeed, it was up to the last man if the game was to be saved!
Full of excitement myself, I looked eagerly at the face of the boy whose shoulder had been hit so hard, and upon whom so much now depended. I can truthfully say that I have never seen such a wonderful expression on any boy’s face. It amazed me that a mere game, a mere school cricket match, could evoke so brave and lovely a gleam of selflessness and determination. I stress the selflessness, for it was obviously not for the thought of any fame he might win that season amongst his school-fellows, nor was it for any hope of getting a permanent place in the first eleven and so having the privilege of wearing a blazer (a curious ribboned affair—rather exotic, I thought) like his Captain’s—that this boy meant to go in and win. No, it was because his Captain had hit him upon the shoulder and told him to play up, and to play the game.
At that moment of impact, so strong had been the hypnotic force which I had felt flowing from the Ca
ptain, through the Captain’s hand, into the boy’s shoulder, and so on into the boy, that to me it was an almost foregone conclusion that he would succeed now in making the ten runs required. And I was proved right. After leaving two balls on the off-side severely alone, he hit a four off the last ball of the over; there was a tense maiden over at the other end; and then, having played forward to two balls cautiously and with a very straight bat (I noticed, by the way, that these youngsters had been taught to hold their bats and play every stroke with a positively Prussian straightness which I could not help feeling was in some measure cramping their style), our friend hit a glorious six clean over the pavilion, the heads of the parents and the masters, and the game was over.
A storm of applause and cheering broke out on all sides, the players came in, and a thing happened which I have never actually seen happen in any English public-school, or in any school at all for that matter—the boy, now the hero of the match, was lifted high upon the shoulders of his friends, and amidst shouts and cheers and the singing of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ carried back in triumph all the way to the school buildings.
In concluding this chapter, this narration of my first adventure, if so it may be called, in a new world, I cannot resist the temptation to say something about a remarkable poem which—after I had been some months in Moribundia and had settled down to a study of its literature—I came across quite by accident in a popular anthology out there (or should I say up there?) bearing the title of Smeop Fo Yadot.
This poem was by one of Moribundia’s most famous and most dearly cherished authors, Yrneh Tlobwen, but the effect it had upon me was caused not so much by its authorship or merits, as by the chord of memory it suddenly and almost alarmingly struck in me as I read it. The whole cricket match, and the whole scene, was described in this poem almost exactly as I had seen it. The breathless hush overhanging the Close, the bumping quality of the pitch, the blinding light, the state of the game, the amount of runs to be made, even the strange ribboned coat which the Captain wore, and the Captain’s thunderous exhortation to his junior—all were set out within the limited space of the first verse!
My surprise at reading this can be imagined—as, for a moment or two, I felt certain that the author himself must actually have been present at this very cricket match I have been describing, must indeed have been standing within a few yards of where I had been standing, and have seen and felt what had been seen and felt by myself.
My feeling of wonderment, however, only lasted a few seconds. As soon as I had had time to reflect I realized there was no coincidence in the matter at all. For I knew, by that time, that that thrilling sort of encounter, in which, at the end, there are ten runs to make and only one wicket to fall, was as common and ordinary event in Moribundia as any of those miserably dull affairs in England, in which, at the end, there are probably less than ten runs to make and ten wickets to fall.
I knew, in fact, that all those things which are dreamed about and fondly nurtured in the mind of the ordinary person on our own earth, were in the wonderful world of Moribundia transformed into hard truths, matters of concrete fact. I knew that that delightful scene of youthful idealism and sportsmanship which I had witnessed on the evening of my arrival was one which took place, in an almost identical form, wherever cricket matches were ever played by Moribundian schoolboys. In other words, I had by that time gleaned the inner secret of Moribundia—the land in which the ideals and ideas of our world, the striving and subconscious wishes of our time, the fictions and figments of our imagination, are calm, cold actualities. But I am still anticipating.
Notes
3. ‘breathless hush’: cf. the first line of the novel’s second epigraph and Note 6 below.
4. The public school is Clifton College near Bristol, which was attended by Sir Henry Newbolt (1862–1938), author of the epigraph poem glossed in Note 6. Another of his well-known poems about manly honour is ‘Clifton Chapel’ (in Collected Poems, 1897–1907 [1908]; cf. Note 41). But see below, Note 7.
5. Akkup Bihas is the first of Hamilton’s simple but effectively comic inversions of names and words. Here, it is, of course, ‘pukka sahib’, the (ultimately self-parodying) Anglo-Indian phrase for a complete gentleman of the Raj. [N.B. This device will not be explained on every occasion hereafter — unless it also seems obscure for some other reason.]
6. In this and the following paragraphs, ‘breathless hush’, ‘ten… to make’, ‘bumping’ pitch, ‘blinding’ light, ‘last man in’, ‘hand… smote… shoulders’, ‘“Play up,… Play up! —and play the game!”’, ‘fame… season’, ‘ribboned’ blazer, are all direct quotations from the opening stanza of Sir Henry Newbolt’s poem, ‘Vitaï Lampada’ (in Collected Poems‚ 1897–1907, [1908]), which is given as the second epigraph to the novel. Hamilton makes sure we don’t miss the point. See also Note 41.
CHAPTER III
I had been so absorbed in watching the emotional boys departing in that strange way, that I had not noticed that cars were being drawn up and were droning away from a spot behind the pavilion, and that amidst a general hubbub the parents were going off as well.
Consequently, I suddenly, as it were, woke up, to find myself alone in a silent, deserted playing field—a green, melancholy arena, recently so gay and full of life, but now filled with the bewildered sadness of a thing from which something has been suddenly and unreasonably snatched away, so that it seemed to look as your friend might look, if, at a moment when the conversation was at its brightest and most confidential, you had struck him in the face and walked away. Denuded even of the cricket stumps, stuck proudly in its middle a few minutes ago, it seemed to be wondering ‘what it had done.’
At another time I might have extracted some æsthetic enjoyment from this scene: in my present circumstances, it had the contrary effect: a sudden realization of my precarious and uncanny situation in this world, my isolation, the vast distance (vaster than any man had ever known) dividing me from my friends and familiar things, flooded in upon me, and I was filled with loneliness and fright.
What was I to do now? Where was I to go? What was the rest of this world like? To whom was I to speak? Was it safe to speak to anyone? Would the people be friendly? How conspicuous would I be? How was I to live—to keep body and bone together—if I did not make myself known? Could I even make myself understood? I was lost—marooned! I cursed myself for a fool for being so utterly mentally unprepared for the difficulties and perils which anyone in their senses would have realized must beset a man coming out of the blue into a new world. I cursed Crowmarsh for his damned inconsequence. I even thought ill of my best friends, who had thought so little about the matter, and who had said good-bye to me with the same sort of cheerful complacency one shows in seeing an acquaintance off in a train for a week-end at Margate.
Suddenly a thought struck me which reassured me somewhat. Those words of the Captain—‘Play up—play up, and play the game’—had I not understood them as soon as they were uttered? In that case, had I not proof that the Moribundians spoke my own language—a language intelligible to myself. I cast my mind back, and tried to hear again what I had heard. No, the actual words spoken had fallen strangely upon my ears, had been uttered in a language I did not know—had sounded to me, now I thought about them, extraordinarily like Scandinavian, or Dutch (or double-Dutch, if you like!)—and yet I had been able to grasp their significance—their literal significance—without the slightest effort and at the moment they entered my ears and fell upon the brain within.
I should say now that this was one of the greatest mysteries of my extraordinary sojourn in this land. I never had, from the first moment, the slightest difficulty in understanding what was being said to me or all around me—and yet I never consciously made the smallest attempt to study the language or vocabulary. I can make no attempt to explain this satisfactorily: I can only say that I had a feeling while I was there, a very definite feeling, that my mind had been in some way reset, turned round, readjust
ed; so that the Moribundian language—whose diction will seem so harsh and whose general appearance will seem so unfamiliar to an English reader—was to me lucid, elegant, and simple—while, for the time being, my own language seemed uncouth and strange, so that I did not care to think in it or about it. I can only presume that the gift temporarily awarded to me was akin to that said to be possessed by mediums and others who, we are led to understand, often know five or six languages which they obviously do not know. To me there does not seem anything specially remarkable in such a thing happening to me—if you are a Crowmarsh and choose to spend your days sedulously playing ball with (and I might say, occasionally tweaking the noses of) such odd and dangerous gentlemen as Father Time and Uncle Space, you can hardly complain when something oddly resembling a supernatural miracle turns up every now and again.
But I am again out of my depth. No such reflections entered my head as I realized that I was going to understand and be understood in this new world. I merely felt a certain relief, and was encouraged to look around me, and set about making some plans.
First of all, where was I? If this school corresponded to the average public-school in England, presumably I was in the depths of the country somewhere. Was that good or bad? Should I, to begin with, hide in the country, or should I somehow make my way to a big town? A little reflection decided me in favour of the latter. In a large town I would be less conspicuous; and also I had at the back of my mind the idea of finding, perhaps, some central cultural or scientific institution, whose officials might find my story credible. But that would only be a last resort. Anything in the nature of a formal welcome, with the vast publicity it would entail, was what I most wanted to avoid. Such a thing might come later, and very pleasant and comfortable it might be, but so long as it could possibly be continued, my duty to science lay in observing this world and these people while they were not observing me, in studying their life, not in the selected, unreal and self-conscious form in which a modern royalty in our own world is compelled to see it, but as it was lived, by simple people, without a trace of self-consciousness, from day to day.
Impromptu in Moribundia Page 4
