Strix
At the Shrine
LUUNCHEON was served in what appeared to be a kind of mezzanine oubliette. An hour earlier the sky over the north-western districts of the city had turned pale black. Here and there, round the edges of this soft and stationary pall, there was a sort of insalubrious yellow luminosity; the combination of black and yellow strongly, but not very happily, suggested the hard-boiled yolk of an old, old egg, bulk- purchased by some civil servant in his zeal.
We groped our way to the table and struck matches to identify the viands. The dungeon-like chamber in which we found ourselves was not provided with artificial lighting, and the window admitted, via the foliage of a tree, only the filtered, subaqueous dregs of the poor visibility prevailing outside. Through a small, barred aperture almost flush with the floor we could, by bringing our heads down to the level of our knees, squinny through the lowest tiers of the grandstand at the empty expanse of turf beyond.
Our eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. Nobody put cream on the smoked trout or horseradish sauce on the straw- berries, and gradually it became apparent that the light really was improving and that we could stop being facetious about the glorious uncertainties of our national game and go back to. our box. The South Africans resumed their efforts to make the 138 runs which they needed for victory. Everybody wanted them to succeed in this.
They never, even for one moment, looked like doing so. If fast bowlers are the cavalry of cricket, Trueman is a sort of heavy dragoon, horrific, intimidating, and for all his pace rather ponderous; on Monday his deliveries seemed more likely to strike terror than the stumps. Statham is a beau sabreur, all point and purpose and precision; he bowled unchanged throughout an innings in ,which he took the first seven wickets that fell, and before long the hope (soon recog- nised as forlorn) that South Africa would win was replaced in the minds of all by a vague, insensate wish that Statham might be allowed to bag the lot. He deserved to.
The batsmen showed a manly fortitude; it was not enough. In every partnership both partners were equally intent on lay- ing the foundations and equally averse from building. 'I'll stay here; you get the runs'—the unspoken words .seemed to materialise, as in a night-starvation advertisement, above each dark green cap. But nobody did get the runs; and though every- body meant to stay there, nobody did.
Only McLean gave us a glimpse of the formula which might have worked. A well-judged. mildly insulting run off his first ball and a couple of perilous but profitable slashes at rising balls which whizzed, well out of reach, over the slips' heads— for a brief interlude it looked as if the South African ranks might rally round the oriflamme of country-house cricket and give themselves a chance of consolidating a position on less unorthodox lines. But a moment later axball from Statham beat McLean decisively. It happened early in the afternoon, but it was the end of the game.
* * * Since an offer to resign from my club would be regarded—on economic grounds—askance, and since I am too old to join the Foreign Legion, it seems safe to admit, that my visit to Lord's on Monday was my first for twenty-nine yiars. It is a frightful thing to confess; but all ceremonies, at all shrines, perhaps present to the uninitiated, or the lapsed, a richer and more curious spectacle than they do to regular worshippers. Throughout a day when pawky, martyred batsmen were parry- ing the attacks of fast bowlers who both take very long runs, the theatre itself was scarcely less interesting than the stage.
What deep, primordial allergy (for instance) prompted the lady sitting just below me to protest so vehemently against some unseen vandal with a portable wireless set? 'Turn it or she screamed, 'It's getting on my nerves.' She had blocked up her ears with handkerchiefs. Others around her had been lodging, in the ventriloquial, not-me-Sir British way, muttered objections to this intrusion by the BBC; it was she who silenced it Yet the curious thing was that what we all objected to was not some distracting irrelevance, like Wimbledon or Mrs. Dale, but a well-informed and judicious commentary on the game we were watching. I suppose we were being wounded in that soft under-belly, the sense of privilege.
Then there were the two men on the roof of the Synagogue which overlooks the ground. Although no rain was, or looked like falling, one of them had an umbrella up. 'It's part of their religion,' said a wiseacre. People were still arguing, as the bowlers counter-marched, turned, and charged, about what the ultimate significance of this supramural rite might be, when I saw that the man with the umbrella had furled it.
Why had he sheltered under it for long enough to become a landmark? As well ask whether the man in an invalid chair at the righthand corner of the pavilion rails had, while play was interrupted by the encircling gloom, kept his sidelights on from a sense of irony or from pure inadvertence. As well ask about the pigeons. Perhaps fifty, split into compact, methodical groups, were picking up some form of sustenance in the outfield. Presumably it was insects; they mostly left to the sparrows the jetsam of crust and crumb which spectators scattered round the boundary. Why only fifty? If it is worth their while to feed on one corner of the ground, why is it not worth the while of 5,000 of their friends to carpet the sward, making unserious the business for which it is intended?
Of all uninitiated foreigners, I think that perhaps a Tibetan might get the' hang of Lord's the quickest. Its architecture cannot compare with that of his own holy places, but he would recognise, in the inconsequent and asymmetrical layout of the stands round the central majesty of the pavilion, the higgledy-piggledy pattern on which, in his own country, lamaseries have grown up round a venerated shrine. Among the crowds of pilgrims he would certainly feel at home, and would quickly learn to differentiate between the brown-faced country folk who have journeyed great distances to worship and the paler, more learned men who live all the year round in the shadow of the shrine; there would be nothing strange for him in their habit of eating or drinking, abstractedly and for the most part frugally, while gazing with rapt eyes at the, wonders they had come to see. He would quickly learn to identify red and yellow insignia as distinctive of the most powerful of the numerous sects; and though he would look in vain for stuffed yaks hanging from the balconies and for large images made out of butter, he would see many sights scarcely less remarkable in their way. As an invocation `Howzzat?' is, compared with `Ont padme mani hum,' rather strident and boorish, but both are intended to improve the position of those who utter them.
Yes, I think a Tibetan would very quickly feel at home at Lord's Cricket Ground.
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