Cricket 1914

No. 19. V o l. I. SATURDAY, AUGUST 8, 1914. P r ic e 3 d. A Cricket Tragedy. Shall we count offences or coin excuses, Or weigh with scales the soul of a man, Whom a strong hand binds and a sure hand looses, Whose light is a spark and his life a span ? The seed he sow’d or the soil he cumbered, The time he served or the space he slumber’d ; Will it profit a man when his days are number’d, Or his deeds since the days of his life began ? So wrote Adam Lindsay Gordon, the man whose verses are so often on the lips of stockriders and sheep-shearers in the back-blocks of Australia, the dashing rider who died by his own hand. As poor Albert Trott died—a cricket tragedy, and not the first. Probably the game has not had more than its due share of these tragedies. In the warp and woof of life they will occur from time to time, and they are naturally of more frequent occurrence in callings which bring those who follow them into the strong limelight of publicity than in the more private walks of daily life. The play is played. The curtain is rung down. The footlights are out. Dead is the glamour of the past; and the disillusioned man who has held the centre of the stage a brief while, but can hold it no longer, finds life a burden, and severs its thread. Does anyone doubt that Arthur Shrewsbury, one of the greatest batsmen of any day, died because he believed him­ self doomed never to play again the game he loved ? His is the case which most closely parallels Trott’s ; but there are points of difference which need not be laboured here. There was—this it is permissible to recall—a very great difference in the characters of the two men. Reserved, thought unsociable by some, very sure of his own ability but no braggart, Shrewsbury was utterly unlike the genial, good-natured Albert Trott—a man of the type to which the epithet, “ No one’s enemy but his own,” is all too readily applied. It is not easy for a man to be no one’s enemy but his own in the true sense—that is, in the sense that he harms none but himself. He may mean harm to none ; but the man who is his own enemy must inevitably cause his friends endless trouble. Trott had many friends. He was popular with a wide circle. The man had his faults, like the rest of us ; but he was a man for all that, and a very likeable man. But he passed out of the limelight, and he fell a victim to an in­ curable disease ; the tedium of hospital life bored him so that he could bear it no longer; he discharged himself while those who wanted to help him protested ; he went to his lodgings, and put a bullet through his brain. He was A . E . T rott . out of the limelight, and for him there seemed nothing left worth living for ; he knew himself doomed to further illness and further pain ; and he could not face the prospect. One neither excuses nor blames ; to no human being, fallible