The Lonely Unicorn: A Novel

by Alec Waugh

"But there's no rule that says you mayn't hit a long hop with a crooked bat."

Mr Arnold fidgeted angrily.

"My dear boy, it's no good arguing. I've been playing cricket and watching cricket for forty years, and the good batsmen always played a straight ball with a straight bat."

"There are a good many who don't."

"That means nothing. A big man's a rule to himself. The pull's a dangerous stroke; it's all right in village cricket perhaps, but no one who doesn't play with a straight bat would get into a county side."

"But isn't it the object of the game to make runs?"

"Not altogether—even if you do get four runs from it instead of one, which I am prepared to doubt. We wear our clothes to keep our bodies warm, but you wouldn't be pleased if your tailor made your coat button up to the throat, and said: 'It covers more of you, sir; you'll be warmer that way, and the object of clothes is to keep you warm.'"

There was a general laugh at Roland's expense, and before it had subsided Mr Marston had introduced another subject. Roland was annoyed; he had a distaste for anything that savoured of cleverness. He regarded it as an unfair weapon in an argument. An argument should be a weighing of facts. Each side should produce its facts, and an impartial witness should give judgment. It was not fair to obscure the issue with an untrue, if amusing, simile. And once the laugh is against you it is no good continuing an argument. Arnold Marston had learnt this on his election platform. He had once been asked what his party proposed to do for the unemployed; it was an awkward question, that gave many opportunities for adverse heckling. But he had obscured the issue with a laugh: "When my party gets in there will be no unemployment." And the meeting had gone home with the opinion that he was a jolly fellow—not too serious—the sort of man that anyone could understand. It was a good trick on the platform, but it was very annoying at the dinner-table, at least so the discomfited found. And Roland felt even more aggrieved as they were leaving the room and the silly ass in the Harrow XI. slapped him on the back and informed him that, "The old man got in a good one on you there." He could understand Beatrice hating him.

He did not have another opportunity of speaking to her that evening, but as he sat in the big drawing-room among the members of the house party his attention drifted continually from the agreeable, superficial conversation that had been up to now so sympathetic to him. These trivial discussions of cricket, their friends, their careers, and, in a desultory manner, of life itself, had been invaded by a stern, critical silence. His eyes kept turning towards Beatrice as she sat in a deep arm-chair, her hands folded quietly in her lap; they followed her when she walked to the window and stood there, her arm raised above her head, looking into the garden. He would have liked to go across the room and speak to her; but what would he have been able to say? He could not tell what thoughts were passing beneath the unruffled surface: was she fretting impatiently at the tedious cricket shop? Was she criticising them all?—she, who had seen deeper and farther and come nearer to tragedy than any of them—or was she what she appeared—a young woman moved by the poetry of a garden stilled by moonshine? When she turned away he thought that he detected a movement of her shoulders, a gesture prompted by some wandering thought or gust of feeling, that would have been significant to one who knew her, but for him was meaningless. And that night he lay awake for nearly an hour, a long time for one who thought little and to whom sleep came easily, remembering her words and actions, the intonation of her voice, and that movement by the window. As he began to lose control over thoughts she became transfigured, the counterpart of those princesses, shut away in high-walled castles, of whom he had dreamed in childhood; her husband became an ogre, leering and vindictive, who laughed at him from the turrets of impregnable battlements.

Breakfast at Hogstead was a haphazard business. It began at eight and ended at ten. No one presided over it. There were cold things on the sideboard to which you helped yourself. As soon as you came down you rang the bell and a maid appeared to ask you whether you would prefer tea or coffee and whether you would take porridge. You then sat down where you liked at the long wide table.