It was a tight place. I had challenged the village team, and had got together a scratch lot from anywhere; a boy home from school, elderly persons who "used to play, but haven't touched a bat for years, y'know," a man who had once played for his "house" at Harrow, another whose brother had been twelfth-man for his college, and so on—a team of great expectations, a team that might astonish the countryside or vanish in laughter.
It looked like vanishing in laughter. We had begun very hopefully. The village team had straggled up from the valley straight from the harvest fields that stretched below over the countryside. A few, including Alec, an enterprising young farmer, with a round cherubic face, who captained the team, were in flannels; the rest in their harvesting clothes. Alec won the toss and declared that he would take first smack. It was a wicket of fire, outwardly smooth and amiable, but charged with volcanic possibilities that made the ball work miracles, plunging, shooting, bumping, breaking like an untamed colt or an infuriated bull. We missed a catch or two in the first over, but two wickets fell in the second, and when Tom Wilkins, the local Jessop, was run out and six wickets were down for twenty we seemed to have the villagers at our mercy.
We found unsuspected support from an aged umpire—a responsible-looking person with a bowed back and a massive grey beard, sexton, bell-ringer and parson's factotum—who followed one simple rule. Whenever he was appealed to he held up his hand, gravely and benignantly, like a bishop administering a blessing. With his help we got rid of two or three truculent fellows who looked like scoring, and all the team were out for forty-nine. They would have been out for less if I had not, in a weak moment, put Jim Whelks on to bowl. Jim is the local higgler and had assured me that he had captained a team "down in the sheers," and that his bowling—underhand—was such a whirlwind affair that the local men stood in terror of him. "Don't suppose they'll let me bowl, sir," he said, confidentially, the night before. But they did. I wished they hadn't, for his whirlwind piled up twelve byes for them.
It seemed a small thing to score fifty runs. The publican was sure we should do it. "It's a team of dark horses," he said to me cheerfully, "and it stands to reason there's one flier amongst 'em." To Alec I fancy he had another tale, for the publican is above party, with a foot planted securely in each camp. But the dark horse did not appear. Our misfortunes began in the first over, and continued with remarkable regularity during the succeeding overs. If anyone looked like making a stand the venerable umpire, pursuing his sovereign rule with inflexible impartiality, held up his hand. Fifteen for nine, and as the last man went in smacking his leg with his bat, we wondered how we were to steal from the stricken field unobserved by the village folk, who were sitting in the shade under the hedge.
But what was this? Purple Cap, who had gone in last because he was so confident that he "wasn't worth a run," had cracked the first ball to the ditch for four and snicked the next for one. Twenty! Well, well, this was not disgraceful. He had the bowling again. The first ball went over the hedge—six; the second bounded down the hill towards the valley—four-thirty. "Well, he is a one-er," said the scorer, changing his straw to the other side of his mouth. Panic seized the bowlers; the fielders went farther and farther out into the landscape. But Purple Cap was insatiable. He seemed not a man but a hurricane. He leapt at everything with a devouring fury and the ball flew here, there, and everywhere. Once the stumper appealed, but he had the wrong umpire for judge. My bat was smashed, but I didn't care. "Send him more bats," I shouted. The score rose like magic. "A regular pelthoria of runs," said the publican. Forty—fifty (the match was won)—sixty—seventy——eighty—eighty-five—then a well-directed throw-in from the long-field knocked the wicket down. "How's that?" Up went the venerable umpire's arm like a semaphore at the familiar sound. And Purple Cap came back to the tussock in triumph.
"It was just as I said," remarked the publican when I saw him standing before the inn later in the evening. "'Mark my words,' I said, 'there's a dark horse in that lot somewhere,' and a dark horse there was. I ain't seen anything like it since my soldiering days in India. Killed a python we did—dead as a door-nail down to the last two-foot of his tail. I put my arm on his tail and he closed round it that tight you couldn't pull him away until his tail was dead too. I ain't seen such a lively tail since until I set eyes on that chap in the purple cap this evening. He's stirred this place up and no mistake. They won't forget him in a hurry."
Of course, the bat must remain. It was not a bat, but a living memorial, a thing that talked to me a joyous private language and seemed to secrete by some magic the very essence of myself. To destroy it would be a sort of suicide. As well might Nelson have broken up the timbers of the old Victory to heat the kitchen fire. I rubbed the dust from its battered face and put it honourably in the corner.
I began to feel as though I had been caught desecrating a cemetery. The vision of that additional bedroom, with windows, fresh air and electric light, was fading. I bent a little doubtfully and seized a large tome. It was an old album, one of those huge and ugly volumes that no household was without a generation ago, but no household visibly possesses to-day. And I began to turn over its leaves.... What is there more poignant than an old, forgotten album? Here are "the children" again, miraculously resurrected from the past, playing on the sands at Dawlish, swimming in the sea, standing against the sky-line of the cliffs at Sheringham with the sunshine upon their laughing faces and their hair streaming in the wind. How long I spent over that old album I do not know, for it stirred many thoughts that made me forgetful—thoughts that do not easily find words to clothe them. But I put the album aside for dusting. Really this lumber-room might be kept more tidily and reverently.
And what is this vast cover, sticking out, dog-eared, from the lumber? My old portfolio, given me forty-six years ago as a tribute from admiring parents to my artistic achievements. How I gloried in its ample blue covers. Why, Landseer himself, the incomparable Landseer, must have such a portfolio as that. And I laboured with my pencil to fill it with things worthy of its dignity, and here they were to-day, old portraits of grandmothers and aunts and copies of Landseer's dogs and horses and Peter Paul in his big hat, and the serene Dürer, with his long flaxen curls, and, on each one, in large, bold, boyish writing, "Drawn by ——" and the date carefully put in lest posterity should not know that these miracles were done by one so young. Ay de mi, as old Carlyle used to say. Ay de mi....
I have changed my mind about the lumber-room. We have plenty of bedrooms, and if we haven't we must go short. That lumber-room is the abode of finer things than bedsteads. It is a chamber of the spirits. But it must certainly be kept more tidy.