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Updated: May 8, 2025
To similise the state superstitions and observances of Rome with our official devotions and ministration, the precise busts in the British Museum with the "speaking likenesses" in the National Portrait Gallery, the academic republicanism of the cultivated patricians with English Liberalism, and the thrills of the arena with those of the playing-field, would be pretty sport for any little German boy.
I become conscious here of how noisily and hurriedly I have lived my life; happily enough, I will confess; but the thought of it all the class-room, the street, the playing-field bright and vivacious as it all was, seems now like a boisterous prelude of blaring brass and tingling string, which lapses into some delicate economy of sweet melody and gliding chord.
When I had sent my disfigured property on to the hotel, I began to look about me; and the first discovery I made, was, that the Station had swallowed up the playing-field. It was gone.
Specks, and I, and we spoke of our old selves as though our old selves were dead and gone, and indeed, indeed they were dead and gone as the playing-field that had become a wilderness of rusty iron, and the property of S.E.R.
And, reviewing all this, a profound nostalgia of all those minor happinesses which are the natural inheritance of the average man arose in him happiness of healthy, light-hearted activities, not only of the athlete and the fighting-man, but of the playing-field, and the ball-room, and the river happinesses to him inevitably denied. With an almost boyish passion of longing, he cried out for these.
Moreover, they know well that games conduce, not merely to physical, but to moral health; that in the playing-field boys acquire virtues which no books can give them; not merely daring and endurance, but, better still, temper, self-restraint, fairness, honour, unenvious approbation of another's success, and all that "give and take" of life which stand a man in such good stead when he goes forth into the world, and without which, indeed, his success is always maimed and partial.
The playing-field was a quagmire, and the girls had to depend upon walking for their daily exercise. Their tramps were somewhat of an adventure, for in places the swollen brooks were washing over the tops of their bridges, and they would be obliged to turn back, or go round by devious ways. The river in the valley had overflowed its banks and spread over the low-lying meadows like a lake.
It was growing dark when he passed the lodge, and crossed the playing-field towards the school-house. The cabman was awaiting him in the square. "Never gave me your name," explained he, "and nobody knows nothink about you here. Five miles is seven-and-six, and luggage is two bob more, and waiting another 'alf-hour's a crown, namely, twelve shillings, and thank you, mister."
The area railings, the beloved shop-window, the smell of semi- suburban tanpits, the song of the church bells upon a Sunday, the thin, high voices of compatriot children in a playing-field what a sudden, what an overpowering pathos breathes to him from each familiar circumstance! The assaults of sorrow come not from within, as it seems to him, but from without.
In less than a fortnight's time he ought to have been with her again, and what would she think of him now? Dinner was over in the big hall, and most of the boys had started for the playing-field. Mr. Ward sat correcting exercises in the deserted Fifth Form classroom, when there was a knock at the door, and Valentine entered. "Well, Fenleigh," said the master kindly, "what do you want?"
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