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.
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, readjusted; 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.
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