"All right, old man, you can dry up now," he remarked nervously, as Linklater paused for breath. "Let's drop the subject once and for all. It's all over."
"Is it? Pip, they say you won't be able to bowl next term."
This possibility had not occurred to Pip, but if he felt any disappointment he displayed none.
"Yes," he said, "it's a pity. Never mind!"
"And it's all my fault, my fault!" Linklater held his head in his hands and groaned aloud.
"Your fault? Piffle, my dear man! What on earth had you to do with my falling off a bar? You were at the other end of the dormitory. The whole thing was an accident: it happened at a rather lucky time for you, that's all. You'd better cut now."
Linklater rose to go, mightily comforted.
"I heard how you held out against Chilly, trying to keep him from coming—"
"Oh, hook it!" remarked the patient uneasily.
But Linklater lingered a moment. He wanted to say something.
"I'll—we'll look after the house till you come back, Pip," he said awkwardly.
"Right. Back Maxwell up. He's a puker, Link."
"Well, so long!"
"So long!"
Linklater reached the door, and turned.
"It's a rum world, Pip," he said. "If you hadn't tumbled off that bar at that precise moment I should have been sacked."
"You would," assented Pip.
Then, as the door closed upon his friend, he turned to the wall, and murmured with a contented chuckle,—
"That's why I did it, my son!"
"Pip!"
"Well?"
"May I come in?"
"All right," said Pip in a surprised tone. His sister was not in the habit of craving admission to his den in this formal manner.
The reason revealed itself with the opening of the door. Pipette entered the room with another girl, at whose appearance Pip, always deferential to the point of obsequiousness in female society, rose up hastily and removed his pipe from his mouth. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and otherwise unprepared for company. His private apartment was in a state of more than usual confusion, for a difference of opinion had arisen between John—the fox-terrier—and a cricket-boot, and the one-sided conflict that ensued, together with the subsequent chastisement of John, had deranged even the primitive scheme of upholstery that prevailed in "the pig-sty," as Pip's apartment was commonly called.
"This is Elsie Innes," said Pipette. "My brother."
Pip saw before him a girl of about sixteen.She had extremely fair hair, a clear skin, not unbecomingly freckled, and eyes which had a habit of changing from blue to grey in different lights. Girls of sixteen are not always graceful,—like their male prototypes they frequently run to knees and elbows,—but this girl appeared to be free from such defects. She possessed a slim, lithe, young figure, and carried herself with an elasticity and freedom that spoke of open air and early bedtimes. She was in the last stages of what slangy young men call "flapperdom," and her hair was gathered on the nape of her neck with a big black bow. Pip, of course, did not take in all these things at once, but he had time to note especially the neatness of Elsie Innes's feet and the whiteness of her teeth. From which it will be observed that, though his experience in these matters was limited and his judgment unformed, Pip's instincts were sound.
"Please sit down," he said, sweeping John and "The Field" from out of the armchair. "Pipette, what on earth did you bring Miss—Miss, er—"
"Innes."
"—Miss Innes up to this untidy hole for?"
"The drawing-room has got two plumbers in it, and they are laying lunch in the dining-room, and Father is in the study, so we came here," said Pipette.
Pip expressed his delight rather lamely, and the girls sat down.
"You must endure us till lunch," continued Pipette. "I suppose you know that this is the day of the Blanes' garden-party?"
"So it is! I had forgotten."
Pipette smiled amiably and turned to her friend.
"What did I tell you?" she said.
"You said," replied Miss Innes, "that he would say he had forgotten all about it."
"Pip, dear," continued Pipette, pointing an accusing finger, "don't think you can deceiveus!"
"What do you mean?" inquired Pip uneasily.
"You know," said Pipette. "Think."
Pip thought, apparently with success. "Oh," he said, growing red in the face,—he had never outgrown that childish weakness,—"you are a little ass, Pipette!"
Pipette nodded sagely and smiled at Miss Innes. That young person smiled indulgently upon Pip, and heaved a little sigh which intimated that boys would be boys.
For Pip was at this time involved in the meshes of his first serious love-affair. Being without skill in the art of dissimulation, he made no attempt to conceal his condition, and in consequence was now acting as target for theplayful and occasionally rather heavy banter of his friends. Why, goodness knows! We have grown so accustomed to regard the youthful lover as an object of humour, that a young man, if he happens to fall in love, is now compelled to conceal the fact, or, at any rate, dress it up, and endeavour to pass the affair off as at most a mere airy flirtation.
Now, roughly speaking, a man is in love from his fifteenth birthday onwards: nature has ordained it. But in most cases civilisation, convention, society—call it what you like—has ordained that he must not treat this, the most inspiring passion of human life, as anything more than a jest for another ten years or so. And therein lie more little tragedies—disintegrated castles-in-the-air, secret disappointments, and endless efforts of self-repression—than this world dreams of. The boy may keep the girl's photograph on his mantelpiece, and that is just about all he may keep. Contrast with this the happy case of the girl. Ifshechooses to fall in love at the age of eighteen, nothing is deemed prettier or more natural: she is at liberty to enjoy her birthright openly; she receives sympathetic assistance on every hand; and if at the age of nineteen or twenty she decides to marry, society comes and sheds rapturous tears at the wedding. What of the boy who has been her playmate foryears back; who has taken the lead in all their childish escapades; who has been her trusted guardian and confidant ever since they pulled crackers and kissed under the mistletoe at children's parties? What of him? He is still a boy. True, he is a year older than she is, but by an immutable law he is for all practical purposes ten years her junior. She has sprung up at a stroke of some mysterious magician's wand into a woman, a personage with an acknowledged position in the scheme of things; and he, her old sweetheart, is only a poor, broken-hearted hobbledehoy. He will get over it, you say? Quite true. But that will not make things any easier for him at present. Ten years later he will take a girl away from some other hobbledehoy and marry her. He will then be in the prime of young manhood; and he will behold his first love, plump, matronly, and ratherpassée, sitting in a back pew at the wedding. It seems rather a dull sort of revenge, somehow.
Of course boy and girl marriages would never do. Joint inexperience is a sure guarantee of disaster. Still, sentimental persons may be permitted one sigh of regret for a millennium which, however hopelessly idyllic and unpractical it might be, would at any rate prevent young men from marrying wealthy widows, and pretty girls from giving themselves, in exchange for a positionin society, to middle-aged gentlemen with five-figure incomes. And if a young man must spend the best years of his life in repressing his tenderest instincts, let us at any rate refrain from laughing at his struggles.
All of which brings us back to Pip.
The female sex exercised a more than usual fascination over him. Brought up in a circle almost exclusively male,—Pipette was too completely subservient to himself to have any direct influence on the moulding of his character,—Pip regarded women in general much as the poor Indian regards the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies,—as things not to be understood or approached, but merely to be worshipped. Pip was a Galahad,—an extremely reserved, slow-moving, and, at times, painfully shy Galahad,—but a very perfect gentle knight for all that. He treated all women, from his sister's friends to the most plebeian young person who ever dispensed refreshment across a bar, with a grave courtesy which the more frivolous members of that captious sex occasionally found rather dull.
Such a girl was Miss Madeline Carr. Pip had met her six months before on a visit to the home of his friend Dick Blane, and, being a healthy young man and twenty-one, had fallen in love with her. Being Pip, he did the thing thoroughly, and made no attempt to conceal his devotion.Unfortunately, Madeline was of a type, not uncommon, which only wants what it cannot get, and thinks but little of what may be had for nothing.
She was an exceedingly pretty girl of twenty, in her second season, and consequently almost sufficiently worldly-wise to be Pip's mother. Having made an absolutely bloodless conquest of Pip, she valued him accordingly, and Pip was now beginning to realise that there must be something wrong with an attachment which consisted of perpetual devotion on the one side and nothing but an occasional careless acknowledgment of services rendered on the other. Of late, however, the situation had improved. Madeline had come up to Cambridge for the May Week, and finding that Pip occupied a position of authority and even admiration among his fellows that she had never dreamed of, and of which she had gathered no hint from Pip's own references to his 'Varsity life, Miss Carr decided in her shrewd, business-like, and thoroughly cold-blooded little heart that, for the time being, considerablekudosmight accrue to her as the exclusive proprietress of the most popular man of his year. Consequently for a brief week Pip had basked in the unaccustomed sunshine of her smiles; and though there had been a perceptible lowering of temperature since their return totown, he was still about as cheerful as a man in love has any right to be.
He turned to Miss Innes.
"Are you going to the party?" he asked.
"Look at me!" replied his guest. "No, not at my face,"—Pip was regarding her resolutely between the eyes,—"my clothes. Can't you see I'm dressed for a party?"
"Ah!" remarked Pip meditatively, shifting his gaze lower down, "I see. You are coming with us, I suppose?"
"Not us," interposed Pipette,—"you."
"What! aren't you coming yourself?"
"No. The Lindons are to be here for lunch, and I must stay and entertain the old lady while Father and Sir John sit in the study and talk shop."
"Bad luck!" replied Pip. "Sir John Lindon and the dad are always searching about inside people and finding new diseases," he explained, turning to Elsie. "It is called Research. I remember once in the 'lab' at—"
"So you must escort Miss Innes, Pip," said Pipette hastily.
"Right! That will be first-rate," said Pip, with a heartiness which quite surprised himself.
Presently they went down to lunch, and after Pip had arrayed himself in tennis costume, the two set off for the Blanes' garden-party.
It was the last week in June. Term was over, and ten places had been filled up in the Cambridge Eleven against Oxford. Pip so far had not received his Blue. He had just completed his first year, for he had not gone direct from school to the University, partly because his attainments were not quite up to the standard of the Previous Examination, and partly because he had never quite shaken off the effects of his fall in the dormitory that eventful night two-and-a-half years ago. A trip round the world with a tutor had corrected these deficiencies, and Pip was now at the end of his period of "Fresherdom" at the University of Cambridge.
But somehow all was not well with his cricket. He had been tried against the M.C.C. and had not been a success. His chief rival, Honeyburn of Trinity, had been tried against Yorkshire, and had been a failure. The University captain had been reduced to experimenting with a lob-bowler, and such a creature had been tried against an England Eleven a week before. But though he had taken two good wickets they had cost forty-four runs apiece; and his further services had been dispensed with. So the last place was still unsettled. Pip, knowing that University captains very seldom go back to their first loves, had little hope of being chosen, though he had a good college record. Most probably the captain,rendered desperate, would fall back on some well-tried friend of his own on whom he could rely to a certain, if limited, extent; or else—horror of horrors!—bring up some last year's Blue, dug out of an office or a public school, and so blight the last faint pretensions of all those gentlemen who were still hoping to be chosen, if only in the humble rôle of apis aller.
It was now Wednesday, and Cambridge was to play Oxford at Lord's on the following Monday. Pip was a phlegmatic youth, but the knowledge that Cayley, the Cambridge captain, who was Mrs. Blane's nephew, would probably be at the garden-party, gave him a vague feeling of unrest. Perhaps Cayley had not made up his mind yet; perhaps the proverb about "out of sight out of mind" was capable of working negatively; perhaps—
"Do you imagine you are entertaining me?" inquired a cold voice at his side.
Pip started guiltily. "I had forgotten you were there," he said.
"I thought you had," said Miss Innes composedly.
Pip smiled at her in his most friendly and disarming fashion. "Very rude of me," he continued: "I'm sorry. The fact is, I never can think of things to say to people."
"Why not tell me what has been going onin your mind all this time?" suggested the girl. "That would be something."
"Oh, that was only cricket," said Pip.
"I thought so. You were wondering if you were going to get your Blue."
Pip turned and regarded this discerning young person with increasing interest.
"How did you guess that?"
"Well, it was not very difficult. I should be too, if I were in your place. The papers are quite full of it. 'The Sportsman' says—"
"Do you read 'The Sportsman'?" asked Pip, much softened.
"Yes; and of course I read 'The Field' on Saturdays. Now, tell me what you were twisting your left wrist about for?"
"Great Scott! Was I?" cried Pip, turning pink.
"Yes; and you were skipping about just like you do when you run up to the wicket to bowl."
Pip was too perturbed by this information to notice the compliment implied by Miss Innes's familiarity with his bowling action.
"I must have looked an ass," he said apologetically. "Bad luck on you, too!"
"Oh, I was all right. I walked a yard or two behind. People didn't know I was with you."
"Oh!" said Pip, rather sheepishly.
"And as I was watching your action," continuedthe girl judicially, "I thought of something—just as you dodged round that old gentleman at the corner of Reedham Gardens."
"I didn't notice him," said Pip humbly.
"No? Well, he noticed you, I think, because he stopped and spoke to the policeman at the corner after he had passed us," said the girl gravely.
"I seem to have been going it. But what was the thing you thought of?"
"Well, you bowl left-handed."
"Yes; I know."
"You run up to the wicket in rather a queer way, as though you were going to bowl at point, and then you suddenly swing round the corner and let the batsman have it instead."
"Quite right. But where on earth—?"
"Don't interrupt! I am speaking to you for your good." The girl was genuinely in earnest now. "Well, you always bowl over the wicket, don't you?"
"Yes; why not?"
Elsie looked at him severely.
"Don't you see what a grand chance you have been throwing away all this time?" she said. "If you bowledroundthe wicket, you would—"
"I see, I see!" roared Pip, slapping his leg. "Confound my thick head! The umpire! If I bowl over the wicket I'm in full view of thebatsman all the time; but with my diagonal run, if I bowledroundthe wicket I should pass behind the umpire just before delivering the ball, and so bother the batsman? Is that it?"
"That's it. You should have thought it out for yourself years ago," said the girl reprovingly.
The conversation was interrupted by their arrival at Mrs. Blane's house.
Miss Innes was immediately snapped up to play tennis, and Pip drifted off in search of the lady to whom he was wont to refer with mingled pride and depression as his "best girl." They greeted each other in their usual manner, the balance of cordiality being heavily on Pip's side; and Miss Carr inquired—
"Who is your friend—the school-girl person in the white frock?"
Pip, anxious to clear himself of any appearance of faithlessness, explained that Miss Innes was a friend of his sister's, and hastened on his own part to disclaim anything approaching intimacy with the lady. He then craved the favour of a game of croquet.
"Not at present," said Miss Carr, who had just been introduced to a young Guardsman,—"I'll see later. But you can go and get me some strawberries and bring them over to the croquet-lawn."
Pip departed as bidden; but somehow he wasnot conscious of the glow of heroic devotion that usually actuated him when obeying Madeline Carr's behests. He had a feeling that she might have said "Please!" and a further feeling that "other people"—no further specification—would have done so at once.
At this point in his reflections he arrived at the croquet-lawn with the strawberries, and was promptly commanded to put them down and stand by for further orders. This treatment, customary though it was, annoyed him; and, feeling unusually independent and assertive, he drifted behind a rhododendron bush, where he encountered his crony, Mr. Richard Blane, the son of the house, who was enjoying a quiet cigarette during a brief lull in the arduous labour of dispensing hospitality.
"Hallo, Pip!"
"Hallo!"
"Cigarette?"
"Thanks."
The two smoked silently for a moment, sitting side by side on the garden-roller.
"I say," inquired Mr. Blane, "who is that flapper you brought with you? All right—eh?"
"Name of Innes," replied Pip shortly. "Scotch—pal of Pipette's."
"Seems to be a pal of Cayley's, too," saidBlane. "They were having a quiet ice in the shrubbery just now. Very thick, they looked."
"Is Cayley here, then?" said Pip, looking more interested.
"Yes. Has he given you your Blue yet?"
Pip shook his head gloomily.
"Bad luck! Well, there are still a few days. I expect he is waiting to see if the wicket is going to be hard or soft."
"I suppose he hasn't given it to Honeyburn?"
"Don't think so."
"I expect he will," said Pip in resigned tones.
"Rot! You seem to be fearfully down on your luck this afternoon, old man. Come and have an orgy of claret-cup. It's about all we keep to-day." Mr. Blane rose from the roller, brushing some blades of grass from his immaculate flannels.
"Sorry—can't," said Pip. "Miss Carr said she might be able to play croquet with me about now," he explained awkwardly.
Dick knew all about his infatuation.
"Pip," said that youthful sage, inclining his head at a judicial angle, "you drop that girl! She's the wrong sort."
"Look here, Dick—" began Pip indignantly.
"Yes, I know," continued the voice of the misogynist. "She's perfect and all that; but no woman is worth the seriousness you are puttinginto this business. I believe it's spoiling your eyes, for one thing. Madeline Carr is simply making use of you. You see how she is behaving just now—playing a sort of in-and-out game? Well, she is waiting to see if you get your Blue. If you do, she will trot about with you during the luncheon interval at Lord's, and so on. It'll make the other girls jealous. If you don't—well, she'll have no use for you. Oh, I know 'em!" The orator wagged his head and paused for breath.
To Pip most of this diatribe was rank blasphemy, but he felt uncomfortably conscious that there was some truth in his friend's remarks. Still, he stood up stoutly for his ideal.
"Don't talk rot, Dick!" he said. "There may be a few women like that,—just one or two,—but this girl isn't one of them. Why, you have only got to look at her face to see that!"
The world-weary Blane surveyed his friend with something approaching consternation.
"A bad case!" he remarked, shaking his head. "Her face? My boy, faces are the most deceptive things in the world."
"Hers isn't," maintained Pip. "She is most sincere. You have only to look her in the eyes to see what is going on inside."
He stopped suddenly. He realised that he was growing too communicative.
"Eyes? That's just it. A girl makes eyes at you, Pip, and you crumple up. I had no idea you were in such a drivelling state as this, or I should have jawed you sooner. Come and drink stimulants,—claret-cup, lemonade, iced-coffee, anything to drown the past,—but come. And never again, after this experience, trust a girl with big eyes and little ways."
So saying, the counsel for the prosecution took the counsel for the defence by the arm, and the two, nobly sinking their differences in a common cause, cast their cigarettes away and sallied forth to distribute tea and ices among hungry chaperons and plain girls.
Meanwhile Miss Elsie Innes and the Cambridge captain were conversing in a retired part of the garden. An introduction had been effected by Miss Blane, though at whose instigation need not concern us.
Cayley, whose conversational stock-in-trade was limited, was feeling unusually complacent. The conversation had never flagged once, for this girl, though obviously young and inexperienced, had proved herself to be intelligent and appreciative beyond her years.
"I suppose you are going to beat Oxford," said Miss Innes, looking at her companion with innocent admiration.
"That is a large question," replied Cayleyheavily. "These things aren't settled by the spin of a coin. But we are going to do our best," he added, with an indulgent smile.
"Have you picked your team yet?"
"All but one. I want another bowler."
"I see. What sort of bowler?"
"A good bowler," replied the captain, facetiously. It was hardly worth while wasting technicalities on a girl.
"Oh! Can't you find one?"
"I have got three in my eye, but I can only choose one."
"I saw the Cambridge Eleven play against the M.C.C.," said Miss Innes, apparently changing the subject.
"Which day?"
"The second.Youmade sixty-nine, not out."
Mr. Cayley, much gratified, coughed confusedly.
"Oh, that was a fluke," he said. "The difficulty that day was to get wickets."
"There was one Cambridge bowler," continued the girl, "who looked as though he ought to take wickets but didn't."
"Who was that?" inquired the captain, much amused.
"A man with black hair and blue eyes."
Mr. Cayley scratched his nose reflectively. His recollections of the eyes of his team werevague. Their individual shades he had never observed, though he had frequently condemned them collectively.
"Well, really—" he said. "Do you remember anything else about him?"
"He was a medium-paced, left-handed bowler, breaking both ways, with a good deal of swerve as well," said Miss Innes, becoming suddenly and surprisingly technical: "he had a curious oblique run, and he usually bowled about one really fast ball every over."
"Oh—Pip!" said the captain at once.
"That is the name," said the girl; "I remember now, when a catch went to him in the outfield, you called out, 'Run for it, Pip!'"
"That's him," said Cayley. "Yes, he has been disappointing lately. He is a good bowler, too; but somehow he is not taking wickets at present."
"Have you ever tried him round the wicket?" asked Elsie. "With his run he would pass behind the umpire just before delivering the ball."
The captain was fairly startled this time. He turned and regarded theingénuebeside him with undisguised interest and admiration.
"I say," he remarked, with the air of one who has just made a profound discovery, "you know something about cricket!"
Miss Innes, much to his surprise, blushed like a little schoolboy at the compliment.
"I was brought up to it," she said. "I am a sister of Raven Innes."
Then the captain understood; and he almost fell at her feet, for the name of Raven Innes is honourably known from Lord's to Melbourne.
"Do you play yourself?" he asked.
"A bit. I don't bat quite straight, but I can bowl a little. Leg-breaks," she added, with a touch of pride.
The captain's appreciative reverie was interrupted by the appearance of a third party—Pip, to wit—who now drifted into view and hovered rather disconsolately in the offing, as if uncertain whether to approach. He was a prey to melancholy, having just completed a final rupture with Madeline Carr, and under the stress of subsequent reaction was anxious to escape home.
"Hallo!" said Cayley. "There's your man, Miss Innes."
Miss Innes glanced in Pip's direction.
"So it is. I can recognise him," she answered, with an air of gratified surprise. "Will you take me to have some strawberries now, please?"
The couple departed, leaving Pip still hove-to on the horizon.
"Rum things, women," mused the captain. "This girl's quite out of the common. I thoughtat first she must be keen on Pip, or something; but she doesn't seem even to know him. Not often you get a woman taking a purely sporting interest in a man like that!"
Which is nothing but the truth.
Delighted to find a woman possessed of "some sense," Cayley, who was by nature a homely person with bachelor instincts, unbent still further, with the result that the end of a long bout of cricket "shop" with Elsie found him fully convinced—somewhat to his surprise, for he had hitherto been unable to make up his mind on the subject—that Pip was exactly the man he wanted for next Monday.
Elsie finally joined Pip, who was waiting, slightly depressed, to take her away.
"Had a good time?" she inquired brightly, as they walked home.
"Rotten," said Pip.
"Didn't you meet any friends?"
"Yes, a good many 'Varsity men."
"I meant lady friends."
"I haven't got any," said Pip glumly.
"You should speak the truth," said his companion with some acerbity. "How about Miss Carr?"
Pip glanced at her; and then, moved by an impulse which he did not quite understand at the time, he said, with sudden and unwonted heat,—
"I never wish to set eyes on Miss Carr again."
After this outburst they walked on silently, till they came to a house in Sussex Gardens.
"I live here," said Miss Innes. "Good-bye, and thank you so much for bringing me home."
They shook hands.
"When shall I see you again?" said Pip regretfully.
The girl smiled at his frank seriousness.
"Lord's, on Monday," she said. "Come and see me in the luncheon hour, or before, if Cambridge is batting."
"I say," said Pip gruffly, "aren't you rather taking things for granted?"
"You mean your coming to see me?"
"Gracious, no!" cried Pip in genuine distress. "I meant about my playing."
Elsie Innes looked him straight in the face. "Pip," she said, "do you wear gloves?"
Pip extended two enormous palms and inspected them doubtfully. "Sometimes," he said—"at weddings."
"Very good. I'll bet you ten pairs of gloves to one that you get your Blue."
"Don't!" said Pip appealingly. "You couldn't afford it. I take nines."
"My size," said Miss Innes, "is six-and-a-quarter. White kid—eight buttons. Good-bye!"
She turned and vanished into the recesses of the hall, a receding vision of white frock, glinting hair, and black bow.
After Pip had walked down two streets and halfway across a square, he stopped suddenly and dealt his leg a blow with a tennis-racquet that would have maimed an ordinary limb for life.
"By gad," he cried to a scandalised pug-dog which was taking the evening air on an adjacent doorstep, "she called me Pip!"
Next morning he received a communication from the authorities of the Cambridge University Cricket Club.
An hour later he was being shepherded, scarlet in the face, by a posse of stentorian shopwalkers, through an embarrassing wilderness of ladies' hosiery to the Glove Department of an establishment in Oxford Street.
Bythe time that Pip had reached his twenty-fifth year his name was scarcely less familiar to the man in the street than that of the leading picture-postcard divinity, and considerably more so than that, say, of the President of the Royal Academy. The English are a strange race, and worship strange gods. Pip's admission to the national Pantheon had been secured by the fact of his having been mainly responsible for the sensational dismissal of the Australians, for an infinitesimal score, in the second innings of the third Test Match.
The morning papers referred to him as "that phenomenal trundler, the young Middlesex amateur"; the sporting press hailed him as "the left-handed devastation-merchant"; and the evening "specials" called him "Pip," pure and simple.
To do him justice, Pip cared for none of these things. He was much more concerned with the future than the present. He had scraped a pass degree at Cambridge, and was now nominally studying medicine. But he knew in his heartthat he had not the brains to succeed in his task, and he persevered only to please his father, who, though he admitted that his son could never hope to put up a specialist's plate in Harley Street, considered him (just as a race-horse might consider that anything on four legs can haul a cab) quite capable of doing well in a country practice.
One morning in July Pip received an invitation to play in the Rustleford Cricket Week, an honour calculated to inflate the chest of any rising amateur with legitimate pride. John Chell, the Squire of Rustleford Manor, was of a type now too rare. An old Grandwich captain, an old Oxford captain, and an old All England Eleven player, descended from a long line of top-hatted cricketers, he devoted what he called his "declining years" to fostering the spirit of the game. Rustleford Manor was one of the strongholds of English cricket. John Chell's reputation as a judge of the game was a recognised asset of the English Selection Committee, and more than one great professional had received his first chance on the Rustleford ground.
Pip was not intimately acquainted with John Chell, though he had frequently met him at Lord's and elsewhere, and had known his son Jacky at Cambridge. But he was genuinely pleased with this recognition of his merit. Itwas a thing apart from journalistic celebrity and the adulation of a Surrey crowd. No man was invited to Rustleford who was not a cricketer, out and out; and a man who played in the Rustleford Manor Eleven was hall-marked for life.
The night before his departure he dined alone with his father. Pipette was out at the theatre.
The great physician looked aged and ill, and Pip, noticing this for the first time,—we are unobservant creatures where our daily companions are concerned,—and stricken with sudden pity, offered to abandon his cherished cricket week and accompany his father on a short holiday to a health resort.
The doctor shook his head.
"Can't get away, my boy," he said. "Wish I could. But it can't be done. I have consultations every day for five weeks, and hospital work as well. After that, perhaps—"
"After that your fixture-card will have been still further filled up," said Pip.
His father laughed.
"You are right," he said, "I believe it will: it's a way it has."
"Well, why not fix up a month's holiday, say in five weeks' time, and stick to it?"
"And who is going to do my work?"
"I wishIcould," said Pip, impulsively forhim. "Dad, I must be a devil of a disappointment to you. Fancy you—and me!"
By the latter rather condensed expression Pip meant to express his surprise that such a clever father should have produced such a stupid son.
"We don't all get ten talents, old man," said his father. "But soon, I dare say, when you are qualified, there will be lots—"
Pip put down his glass of port.
"Dad, I shall never be qualified," he said.
"Why?"
"Because I haven't got it in me. You are so clever that you can't conceive what a fool's brain can be like. I tell you honestly that this thing is beyond me, Governor. I have worked pretty hard—"
"I know that," said his father heartily.
"—And I think I am rather more at sea now than I was four years ago. I have learned a few things by heart—anything that can be picked up by those jingles and tips that coaches give one—and that is just about all. Fancy me going over a patient's ribs and mumbling rhymes to myself to remind me what part of his anatomy I had got to!"
Father and son laughed. Some of thememoria technicaof the medical student are peculiar.
"I have been meaning to tell you a long time," continued Pip, "but I saw you were keen on mygetting through, if possible, so I stuck to it. I think I know my limits. I'm not cut out for the learned professions. Fact is, I'm a blamed fool."
They smoked on silently after that. The doctor was not altogether surprised at Pip's outburst, for he had lately been realising, from the casual utterances of lecturers and examiners of his acquaintance, that Pip's prospects were hopeless. But he was sadly disappointed for all that. He had been a lonely man all his life, and now, especially that his health was uncertain, he realised the unhappy fact that his son—his big, strong, healthy son, to whose intellectual companionship he had looked forward so eagerly—was never to give him a shoulder to lean on save in a physical sense.
At this moment, much to the relief of both, the door opened and Pipette came in. She was just twenty-two, and to the tired man in the armchair by the fire she was her mother over again.
She threw off her opera-cloak and wrap and slipped into the chair beside her father. Then after one brief glance into his face she inquired—
"Well, old boy, what's the trouble?"
"Pip wants me to go for a holiday," said her father.
"Carried unanimously!" announced Pipette. "When shall we start?"
"Can't be done at present. Too busy."
"Get somebody from the hospital staff to do your work."
"Hear, hear!" said Pip.
Dr. Wilmot gazed into the fire. Presently he said,—
"It's not altogether professional work. Pip, you said just now that you were a blamed fool. Your father is another."
"Let us hear all about it," said Pipette maternally.
"Well, I am a prosperous man as professional men go. But a few years ago I realised a good many of my investments—"
"What does that mean?"
"I sacrificed my savings to get ready money, to finance that private cancer-research commission that Sir John Lindon and I got up,—you remember, Pip?"
"Yes; go on."
"Well, the Government ultimately paid the expenses of the commission,—we shamed them into it,—and I got my money back. When I came to reinvest it, instead of putting it into the old safe place, I devoted most of it to buying shares in a wild-cat Australian scheme—"
"Which has gone bust?" said Pip.
"Not quite. But the shares are down to the bottom mark, and there is no dividend. I believethe thing is sound, and that in a year or two we shall be all right again. Meanwhile—meanwhile, children, I am extremely hard up!"
To people who have never been hungrier than an unpunctual cook can make them, the prospect of actual poverty is always rather sobering. There was a long pause. Presently Pipette slipped a soft and protecting arm round her father's neck.
"Dad," she asked, "why did you buy those queer shares?"
"To get rich quick."
"Why quick?"
"Because"—the doctor hesitated, surveyed his son and daughter rather doubtfully, and finally proceeded—"because human life in general is an uncertain thing, old lady, and my life in particular happens to be—don't choke me, child!"
Pipette's encircling arm had grown suddenly rigid, and her father heard her heart flutter.
"Wh—what do you mean, Daddy?"
"I mean that I possess what insurance companies call 'a bad life.' Nothing serious—slight heart trouble, that's all. I shall have to be careful for a bit, and all will be well. It's the cracked pitcher that lasts longest." Dr. Wilmot had unconsciously dropped into the easy and optimistic tones which he reserved for nervous patients.
After a little further conversation Pip and Pipette, somewhat reassured, retired to bed.
Next morning Pip departed to Rustleford, but not before he had conferred briefly with Pipette.
"Do you think I ought to leave the Governor?" he said.
Pipette puckered her alabaster brow thoughtfully.
"Yes; why not?" she replied at length. "It isn't as if he were in bed or anything. He'll go to his work just the same whether you are here or not. I have made him faithfully promise to come away for a holiday for the whole of September, so we must just let him have his way just now. You go and enjoy yourself, little man. I'll look after him. Besides"—Pipette's angelic features relaxed into the suspicion of a smirk—"I heard yesterday that a particular friend of yours was to be there."
"Who? Linklater?"
"No—a lady."
"Not Madeline—"
"Dear no. I thought you had forgotten her. Can't you guess?"
Pip turned a delicate plum colour.
"Ah, now you are getting nearer," said Pipette. "It's your little flapper friend, Elsie Innes. How long is it since you saw her?"
"About a year, I think. She has been awayfrom town a lot lately," replied Pip, rather incautiously.
"She has put her hair up," said Pipette.
That evening Pip arrived at Rustleford.
He was hospitably greeted by John Chell, introduced to Mrs. Chell, Miss Emily Chell, and Miss Dorothy Chell, renewed his acquaintance with Jacky Chell, and then turned to the inspection of the rest of the house-party, most of whom were known to him.
The cricketers were headed by Raven Innes, a little past his best now, but still to be reckoned among the six finest bats in England. Then came Mallaby and Oake, the Oxford and Cambridge captains for that year. There was also a comic man—the Squire knew well that it takes all sorts to make an Eleven—a member of a noble house, with a polysyllabic and historic title; but nobody ever called him anything but "Cockles." There were one or two county cricketers of established merit, with or against whom Pip had waged many a gallant battle; and it was reported that the Squire had up his sleeve a young local professional, who would one day be the finest fast bowler in England.
Finally, there were two guests who require more elaborate introduction. The first was ayoung man of about twenty-three. His name was Gresley. His father was sole proprietor of the Gresley Motor Works, and (it was said) a man of millions. He had sent his only son to Cambridge; and the son, a shy and retiring boy, after devoting his first two years to the study of mechanical science, oblivious of the glad fact that the world contained other things to do, had suddenly sprung into fame, almostmalgré lui, as a bowler of absolutely natural "googlies," which fearsome term means an off-break with a leg-break action. This priceless talent had been accidentally discovered by Pip during a visit to Gresley's home in the vacation, in the course of a game of stump-cricket on the lawn after lunch. A year later Gresley had played for Cambridge at Lord's, with a success which had qualified him for an invitation to Rustleford. Indeed it was to him, together with Pip and the Squire's professional dark horse, that the Eleven looked for its wickets. Gresley was a small, slim fellow, looking much younger than he really was. He had been brought up by his widowed father almost by hand, and had never been to a public school. He was not quite at his ease in a crowd of people, and was devotedly attached to Pip, who had done him more than one good turn since they became acquainted.
The other man, Cullyngham, was of a verydifferent type; and indeed Pip's first action on catching sight of him playing bridge in the hall was to seek out Raven Innes and inquire, with unusual heat, what "that swine" was doing in the house.
"Can't say, laddie," said Innes. "The Squire asked him, not I. I suppose he has only met him casually, and just knows him as a first-class cricketer."
"First-class cad!" grumbled Pip.
"Quite so, my son; but it's not our house, and he's not our guest. Still, it will do no harm to keep an eye on him."
A sudden idea struck Pip.
"Wouldn't it be a sound scheme," he suggested, "to warn your young sister about him?"
Raven cocked an inquiring eye at him.
"Why her in particular?"
"I meant all of them," corrected Pip, rather lamely.
"I've only got one."
"No, no; I meant all the girls here."
"Not much," said the sagacious Raven; "they'd be after him like bees!"
After that the conversation reverted to ordinary channels, and Pip was apprised of the week's programme. On the morrow, Wednesday, the House Eleven, under the Squire himself, would play the village, led by the Vicar—atime-honoured fixture. Thursday would be an off-day; on Friday they would meet the Grandwich Old Boys, who were on tour and would put up at "The George"; and on Saturday would come the tug-of-war, the match against the Gentlemen of the County, who were reputed to have whipped up a red-hot side.
Pip, who had arrived late for tea, met the ladies of the party in the drawing-room before dinner. They were of the usual diverse types. There was Kitty Davenport, slangy and mannish, who would not thank you for describing her as "a charming girl," but would be your firm friend if you called her "a good sort." There were the Misses Chell, fresh, unaffected, and healthily English. There were the two Calthrop girls, pretty, helpless, and clinging—a dangerous sort this, O young man!—together with an assortment of girls who were plain but lively, and girls who were dull but pretty, and a few less fortunate girls who were neither lively nor pretty. There was a solitary "flapper" of fifteen, who, untrammelled as yet by fear of Mrs. Grundy, was having the time of her life with the two callowest members of the Eleven.
And there was Elsie. Pip encountered her suddenly on the staircase. She was clad in the severely simple white frock that marks thedébutante, and her lint-coloured hair was "up,"as Pipette had said. It was two years since Pip had seen her, for she had been to a finishing-school in Paris. He shook her hand in a manner which left that member limp and bloodless for the rest of the evening, and accompanied her downstairs, to find on reaching the hall that some never-to-be-sufficiently-blessed fairy had arranged that he was to take her in to dinner.
The most confirmed believer in the decadence of the Anglo-Saxon race might have been converted by the sight of the company round Squire Chell's table that night. Young men and maidens, healthy, noisy, effervescent, ate and drank, babbled and laughed, flirted and squabbled with whole-hearted thoroughness from the soup to the savoury; and Pip, sitting silently ecstatic by Elsie, beheld the scene and suddenly realised that life was very good. What a splendid assemblage! The girls, of course, were girls, and as such beyond criticism. And the men? Maybe they were youthful and conventional,—each would probably have cut his own father dead in the street if he had met him wearing a made-up tie,—but Pip knew that they were for the most part clean-run, straight-going people like himself, good fellows, "white" men all. With one exception. And suddenly Pip realised that the exception was sitting on the other side of Elsie.
Cullyngham was smiling and talking. Healways was smiling. He smiled when he made a century. He smiled when he made a blob. He smiled when a rising ball hit him on the knuckles. He was smiling now, and Elsie was smiling too; and Pip felt suddenly murderous.
They were talking of golf. Elsie, who had spent most of her life on the east coast of Scotland, was discussing matters that were Greek to poor cricketing Pip,—stymies, mashies, Kites, Falcons, and other fearful wild-fowl,—and Cullyngham was offering to play Elsie a match round the home course next day. A brief review in Pip's mind of the most expeditious forms of assassination was interrupted by a cheery hail across the table from Jacky Chell, a hearty but tactless youth of boisterous temperament.
"Quite like old times, seeing you and Cully together, Pip," he cried. "Played each other any billiard matches lately?"
Elsie scented a story.
"What billiard match?" she inquired, turning to Pip. "Did you two play much together at Cambridge?"
By this time Jacky Chell's stentorian laughter had reduced the table to silence, and all waited for Pip's answer, which when it finally came, was to the effect that Jacky Chell had better dry up. Cullyngham continued to smile, apparently without effort.
"What is the story, Jacky?" said the Squire down the table.
"Cockles will tell it," said Jacky. "He'll make much more of it than I can."
The patrician humourist, thus flatteringly introduced into the conversation, readily took up his parable.
"Well, it fell out on this wise, ladiesandgents," he began. "Old Cully here regards himself as an absolutely top-hole pill-player, and one day he was laying off to some of us in the Pitt—"
"In thewhat?" exclaimed Mrs. Chell.
"Undergraduates' Club," interpolated her husband swiftly. "Go on, Cockles."
"Well, suddenly Pip cuts in and says, 'Look here, you've talked about your billiards for the last twenty minutes. I'll play you a hundred up now and beat you!'"
"And did he?" said several ladies.
"Wait a bit,ifyou please. None of us knew much about Pip's game, as he had just joined the club, but we all went into the billiard place next door, and I stood on a sofa and made a book—"
"What price?"
"Three to one on Cully."
"Whowon?" cried the flapper.
"Waita bit," said Cockles severely. "Don't crab my story. Cully went off at the start andrattled up a couple of fifteens almost before Pip got his cue chalked. He reached his fifty just as Pip got to five."
Sensation.
"The odds," continued the narrator, smacking his lips, "then receded to ten to one, and no takers. Then Cully got to seventy-five just after Pip had reached eighteen—wasn't it, Pip?"
No reply.
"Right-o! Never mind if you're shy. Anyhow, old Cully, being naturally a bit above himself, gave a sort of chuckle, and said, 'What odds now, Pip, old man?'"
"Ooh!" said Miss Dorothy Chell. "How rash! It was quite enough to change your luck, Mr. Cullyngham."
"Did you tap wood when you said it, Mr. Cullyngham?" screamed the flapper down the table.
Mr. Cullyngham, possibly owing to the effort involved in keeping up a protracted smile, did not reply.
"Well," continued Cockles, "Pip just turned to him and said, 'I won't take any odds, but I'm da—blessed if I don't beat you yet.' And my word, do you know what he did?"
"What?" came from all corners of the table.
"He got the balls together a few minutes later, settled down—and ran out!"
"What for?" inquired Miss Calthrop languidly.
"What for? Hewon. A break of eighty-three, unfinished. He wouldn't go on. Said he had come there to beat Cully, not to make a show of himself. The old ruffian! He had lain pretty low about his powers. Hadn't he, Cully?"
Cullyngham, to his eternal credit, still smiled.
"Rather!" he said. "You had me that time, Pip, old man."
Cullyngham's good nature and tact having smoothed over the rather jarring sensation produced by Cockles's thoroughly tactless reminiscences, conversation became general again. But Pip wriggled in his seat. He hated publicity of any kind, and he felt, moreover, that although he was the undoubted hero of Cockles's story, the smiling, unruffled man on the other side of Elsie was coming out of the affair better than he, if only by reason of the easy nonchalance with which he had faced a situation that had been rather unfairly forced upon him.
Next day came the match against the village. It was a serio-comic fixture, and as such does not call for detailed description. The Squire was early astir in cricket flannels and Harris tweed jacket, the latter garment being replaced at high noon by an M.C.C. blazer which ought tohave been let out at the seams twenty years ago: and in good time all the company assembled on the Rustleford Manor cricket-ground.
The village won the toss, and the Vicar, accompanied by the blacksmith, opened the innings. The attack was entrusted to Pip and the local phenomenon. The latter proved to be a bowler of appalling pace but uncertain length; and the blacksmith, whose generous figure offered a fair target to any ball directed within a yard of the wicket, growing restive under the bombardment, forgot more than once in his comments on the situation that a clergyman was standing less than twenty-two yards away.
The Vicar, an old Blue, played a skilful and patient innings, but the blacksmith did not stay long. As was natural, his chief stroke was a rather laboured upheaval of the bat over his head, followed by a downward sledge-hammer drive across the path of the elusive ball. He timed it correctly just once, and the ball, rebounding from the ground like a flash, sang over the head of the Squire at point and proceeded to the boundary for four. That was all. Next time, in endeavouring to bring off a particularly pyrotechnic late cut, the batsman was bowled. He made doubly sure of his dismissal by simultaneously bringing down his bat upon the top of the off-stump with a force which calledfor the united efforts of the umpire and Cockles, who was keeping wicket, to get it out again.
The next comer was the Vicar's son, a public-school bat of the highest promise; and for a merry half-hourpère et filsset Pip and partner at defiance, and piled up runs to the credit of the village green. It was not until the Squire's prodigy had been taken off and Gresley put on that the schoolboy, tempted by one of the latter's insidious "googlies," mistimed a stroke and put up an easy one to Raven Innes at cover-point.
The next batsman was the booking-clerk from the station. Humourists on the boundary cried out that they expected something "first-class" this journey. They were doomed to disappointment, for the batsman was bowled first ball, a mishap which a facetious friend in the shade of the refreshment tent attributed to natural anxiety not to waste the return half of his ticket.
Eighty-two for three wickets is a good score for a village club; but when the three wickets grew to four, and so on to six, without any appreciable increase in the score, things cannot be regarded as so satisfactory. A rot set in after the Vicar was dismissed, and it was not until the last man came in that the hundred was reached. A really creditable stand now ensued,the village policeman laying on for Tusculum at one end, while the curate (whom the parish darkly suspected of ritualistic tendencies) laid on for Rome at the other. These twain brought up the score to a hundred and twenty, at which point the policeman, in attempting a sort of truncheon-stroke to point, was deftly caught at second slip by Cullyngham.
The Rustleford Manor Eleven, as was usual in this fixture, took the field tail first, a proceeding which brought Pip to an unwontedly exalted position in the batting-list. He went in first wicket, two minutes after the commencement of the innings, Gresley having knocked off his bails in a misguided attempt to pull the first ball he received. The other end of the pitch was occupied by the Squire, who had gone in first in this match for twenty years. He liked plenty of time to make his runs, he explained, increasing girth precluding any great feats of agility between the wickets.
The bowling was shared by the Vicar and the policeman, the former with lobs, the latter with a delivery so frankly illegal that Pip, gazing open-mouthed at the bowler, made no attempt to play the first ball he received, and was nearly bowled.
"Rather a doubtful delivery that, isn't it?" he remarked to the umpire at the end of the over.
"No possible doubt about it whatever, sir," said the grizzled ground-man decisively.
"You mean to say he doesn't throw?"
"I mean to say he does throw, sir."
"Then why don't you take him off?"
"Take him off, sir?" The veteran smiled indulgently in the direction of the bowler. "Lor' bless you! Now, why, sir? 'E ain't doin' no 'arm."
Pip could not but agree with the undeniable correctness of this pronouncement, which was shortly afterwards endorsed by the captain of the side, the limb of the law being relegated to a distant beat in the outfield and his place taken by another. The newcomer, an erratic bowler of great swiftness, shot his first ball into the Squire's knee-pad, and immediately appealed for leg-before-wicket. The village umpire, after an obvious struggle between a desire to get rid of a dangerous batsman and an inherent sense of loyalty to the feudal system, finally decided in favor of the gyrating Squire, and the game proceeded. Pip was bowled next over by one of the Vicar's lobs, and retired amid applause with a score of two fours and a six to his credit.
Outside the tent he espied Elsie. He sat down beside her, and the subsequent proceedings interested him no more. However, the House Eleven, after losing five wickets for thirty runs,at last began to put real batsmen into the field. When the match ended at six o'clock the score was a hundred and eighty-five for seven wickets, the Oxford and Cambridge captains, Mallaby and Oake, being not out with fifty-five and forty-eight respectively. By this time Pip had asked for and been promised a lesson in golf next morning, when there was to be no cricket.
There was a nine-hole course round the house park, and here the lesson was given. After breakfast the two repaired to the tee, where Pip, whose whole weapon of offence consisted of an ancient left-handed cleek (discovered in the gunroom), made laborious and praiseworthy efforts to imitate Elsie's St. Andrew's swing, and to hit the little balls which she placed on the tee for him. He had asked for the lesson from purely ulterior motives, but in half an hour he was badly bitten with the desire to excel at the game itself. He no longer regarded golf as a means to an end, but found himself liking it for its own sake. He listened carefully to Elsie's helpful instructions, ground his teeth when she heaved a resigned sigh, and glowed rosily at her rare expressions of approbation. Twelve o'clock found him still hewing his way enthusiastically round the course, Elsie, appreciative of his keenness but a trifle bored, nonchalantly playing a ball to keep him company.
The afternoon was devoted to a river picnic, at which Pip, to his huge disgust, found himself in the wrong boat both going and returning. Beyond a few minutes of what he called "good work" under a tree after tea, the afternoon was a blank for him; and it was with mingled feelings of ordinary jealousy and real concern for the girl that he found himself a helpless spectator of Cullyngham's undoubted progress in Elsie's good graces.
The evening was given to bridge, and Pip—one of the few men in Great Britain who combined the misfortune of being a hopelessly bad player with the merit of realising the fact—played billiards with Raven Innes till bedtime. Next morning broke dull and cloudy, and by the time that the Grandwich Old Boys had won the toss and decided to bat, the clouds broke and the rain came down in torrents.
There is no duller or more depressing spectacle in this world than that of two elevens waiting in the pavilion for the rain to stop. Nervous men who have to go in next move restlessly about, much harassed by the exuberance of joyous youths who play small-cricket against the dressing-room door. Weather prophets gaze pessimistically at the weeping heavens and shake their heads, while optimists point out to each other fragments of blue sky, invisible to theunbiassed eye, in distant corners of the firmament. The pavilion bore descends upon you, and having backed you into a corner of the veranda, where the rain can comfortably drip through a leak in the roof down your neck, regales you with stories which Shem probably told to Ham and Japheth under precisely similar circumstances.
On this occasion the cricketers divided their energies pretty equally between bridge and bear-fighting. Pip, who was in a contemplative mood, sat smoking patiently on the veranda railing. Presently Cullyngham, who had just cut out at bridge, came to the doorway and looked round. His eye fell on Pip, and he smiled in a friendly manner.
"Game of picquet, old man?" he inquired.
"No, thanks. Get another mug!"
This was rude of Pip, but Cullyngham took it angelically.
"Dear old Pip!" he cooed. "I wish I could say caustic things with that air. It's so effective."
At this moment Gresley came up the steps.
"Ah, here's my man!" exclaimed Cullyngham. "You are a sportsman, anyhow, Gresley. Come and have a hand at picquet till lunch."
Gresley, much flattered at this notice from a celebrity, agreed readily, and the pair disappearedinto the dressing-room, where, since the rain continued for the greater part of the day, they were destined to spend a considerable time.