The Peripatetic Reviewer

I BELIEVE I am one of the few who went to war with a tennis racket. In the autumn of 1916 I was slowly drowning as a student of mechanical engineering. For going on three terms I had passing grades in two courses and flat failure in three. When it became evident that my time as an engineer was limited, I looked around for a graceful exit and found it as a volunteer in the French Army. I sailed for France the following spring (before the final exams), and with me went a Slazenger tennis racket which I hoped to use on leave.

My first permission occurred after a spell of duty at Verdun that summer. I packed up my racket, which had been stored at the University Club in Paris, bought a few books at Brentano’s, — Sonia by Stephen McKenna, Lockhart’s Napoleon, and Le Feu by Barbusse, — and took the night train for Nice. A friend and I had been offered the most exquisite quarters in a villa overlooking the harbor of Villefranche. The house — Pershing was to occupy it a month later — was capacious, with long French windows looking out over the terrace to the Mediterranean. A marvelous staff and no one at home but ourselves. As a contrast to Haudainville and Carrière-Sud, our mucky and most unpleasant paste de secours, it was almost unbelievable. We lay abed until nine, had our breakfast—I remember the great fistful of heavy purple grapes — in the sunlight before the open French windows, and at half-past ten I took the tram for Nice armed with my tennis racket. The Secretary of the Nice Lawn Tennis Club was M. Lenglen, the father of the famous Suzanne. He it was who provided me with white flannels, tennis shirts, and a guest card. And for live mornings in a row I rallied and played a set or two with Suzanne. My service began to come back, and in time I was able to take three games a set from her.

Then came a tournament. A handicap men’s singles. All went well for me until the semifinals, where my opponent was an old American architect (he was probably all of forty-five!). He played with a loosely strung Horseman racket and had a reputation for cutting the ball and getting everything back. I banged my way through the first set, thanks to my first serve and my persistence in going to the net. Then we changed courts.

Now the Nice Lawn Tennis Club was surrounded by plane trees whose trim boughs provided a green background to a height of perhaps twenty-five feet. But above the trees rose the pensions and hotels, which were now blazing whitely in the sunlight. As I looked up to serve at the start of the second set, my eye was caught by die whiteness.

I served my first ball blindly and there was a scream from a stout woman who laid been sitting in the gallery under the shade of a large feathered hat. The hat had been knocked off her head into the lap of the gentleman behind her. She was flustered and so was I. When order was restored I served a soft pat ball, the architect chopped it swiftly down my backhand, and I lost the point.

I went on to lose the game and the set. We changed courts on the odd game in the third and decisive set, and each time my opponent passed me he would commiserate about the spectator. “Don’t worry about the old girl,” he would say, “she’s over it by now,” or “That first service of yours has a real hop to it — when you can keep it in.” His psychology was perfect. Of course I couldn’t keep it in — in fact I gave up trying — and when I played safe the architect cut the life out of the ball. When I congratulated him on his victory at the end of the third set, I dimly realized that I had been given a lesson in Gamesmanship.

Now the secret has been made public by Stephen Potter, in his discerning and laughable little book. Gamesmanship or The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating (Holt, $2.50). This will appeal to any amateur of tennis, golf, billiards, cards, or croquet who has suffered from the mental competition of a deft and older opponent. It is the shrewd, mock-serious rule book of behavior which every club will cherish. In a chapter entitled “The Pre-Game,” Mr. Potter dwells on what he calls the “flurry.” Supposing, for instance, that your tennis opponent picks you up before the game. Your procedure, Mr. Potter suggests, should be as follows: Be late in answering the bell. Don’t have your things ready. Walk down path and realize that you have forgotten shoes. Return with shoes. Then just before getting into car pause and wonder whether racket is at the club or whether you have left it in the bathroom at top of the house.

Once on the court, with the game a toss-up, the older opponent can resort to “Game Leg,” also known as “Limpmanship.” (“I hope I shall be able to give you a game, but my back . . .”) Compassion, as it gnaws away at the younger man, sometimes must elicit a comment from the winning oldster. “In my pamphlet for the British Council,” writes Mr. Potter, “I listed eighteen ways of saying ‘Bad luck.’ I do not believe there are more.”

Or if you find yourself in a four-ball tournament in golf, “do not forget,” says Mr. Potter, “the art of fomenting distrust between your two opponents. The basis of Split Play is to make friends with your opponent A, and in that same process undermine his carefully assumed friendship — so easily liable to strain — with his partner, your opponent B, in order that, after the first bad shot by B, the thought ‘Poor you!’ may be clearly implied by a glance from you, a shrug of the shoulders or the whistling of two notes as recommended by Gale (descending minor third).” All this of course would be utter nonsense were it not at the same time perfectly delightful and true.

Sport totally unlike anything to be found in this country is that described by Jim Corbett in The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag (Oxford, $2.50). Mr. Corbett is a white hunter who rose to be the best tiger exterminator in India. His aim, his patience, his ability to sleep in trees, to follow a trail, and to outthink a man-eater, we know from his earlier volume, Man-Eaters of Kumaon. Now, in the sequel, he tells of a hunt that lasted eight years, the hunt for an outsized male leopard (“the most beautiful and the most graceful of all the animals in our jungles”) who fed on the inhabitants of Garhwal—125 human beings and probably more, between the years 1918 and 1926.

This particular man-eater did his eating on the Hindu pilgrims bound for Golabrai. The pilgrims as they paused on the steep and incredibly rough trail, or slept in the grass-thatched pilgrim shelters, were so much anchovy on toast. When, after innumerable shikaris, the Government failed to bring the man-eater to bay, Jim Corbett was called in. Corbett stalked the leopard for two years, and this is the story of his resourcefulness, his honestly expressed fear.

In the hunt certain secrets are disclosed which I never hope to put to the test. I had not realized, for instance, that a man-eater would assault the latched door of a pilgrim shelter within which, in stifling heat, lay some thirty persons; I had not realized that a giant cat of this cunning would secrete himself in the lower story of a dwelling and, when the family slept, make off with his dessert; I had never imagined the length of his spring, or that he might carry his victim two or three miles before dining, and put another ten miles between himself and the invaded village if the alarm arose. Mr. Corbett met only two people, a Pundit and an indomitable woman with a lacerated arm, who survived contact with the Leopard of Rudraprayag, and his account of that escape reads like a bad dream, but a dream that comes all too true in the blood-clotted sunlight of the next morning.

Interspersed in this long sleepless vigil are telling descriptions of the native villages of Mother India, and of fishing (with what sounds very much like a spinning rod) for mahseer fish of thirty pounds or more, which Mr. Corbett plays to exhaustion and then, lacking net or gaff, lifts out of the stream with his thumbs. I think I’d rather go for the fish than the leopard.

For the third time the Book-of-the-Month Club has selected a Margery Sharp novel. This is a singular tribute. The Foolish Gentlewoman (Little, Brown, $3.00) is the post-war story of a sentimental widow, Isabel Brocken, whose large house eight miles from Charing Cross and whose income of £800 a year have survived into these days of austerity, thanks to the protective, crotchety trusteeship of her brother-in-law, Simon. Indeed by June, 1946, Chipping Lodge, Mrs. Brocken’s home, has become sanctuary to a variegated group: to Simon, whose London home has been bombed, to Jacqueline, her water-color painting companion, to Humphrey, her nephew from New Zealand, a young veteran from the 8th Army, and belowstairs, to the Pooles, mother and daughter, who do a little cooking when it doesn’t interfere with their films, dancing, and roller skating. The arrangement is cozy and protective until, out of compassion, Mrs. Brocken invites to their midst Tillie Cuff, a poor relative and governess whom she had once slighted when young. Tillie is meddlesome, ingratiating, envious, and a troublemaker from the word go. During her years of lonely subservience she has learned to pull the strings without letting it show. And the more she meddles at Chipping Lodge, the edgier the comedy becomes.

This is light writing by a novelist with a sure sense of order and a deft, dramatic touch. Throughout, the humor is saved from frivolity by scenes which hold the pathos of life: Jacqueline as she quarrels with Humphrey; Simon as he hugs to himself the inviolability of the bachelor; little Greta Poole as she tells Simon of why they ran away from her father; Tillie Cuff as she breaks down in the confession of her loneliness, — these are real people without grease paint.