Marget looked conscience-stricken, and then brightened. The treacle-posset might atone in some measure for the lack of egg-and-sofa treatment.
“You shall have it this evening, sir, honest and faithful! I thought it was only your bit of joke. Then you’ll see the gents., sir?”
“Oh, I’ll certainly see them!” Wiggie promised cheerfully. “And look here, Marget, if they come worrying again to the house and make out they haven’t met me, just pretend you’re all dead or something, will you, and keep on keeping out of the way? I’ve to have a nice, quiet day, you know—master’s orders!”
And see them he did, meet them he did, quite five minutes before their time, just as the limousine had cleared Watters and settled down into the straight. But it is quite easy to see and yet not be seen in a closed car with a deep back seat, and at the wheel an enthusiastic under-chauffeur, blessed with the Heaven-sent chance of “letting her rip.” Wiggie was over at Crabtree asking for garments by the time the “two gents.” had finished knocking and peering at an apparently deserted house. As they were leaving, in intense irritation and disgust, they met a gardener’s boy, who told them that the whole family had gone to the Show. Which Show? “Why, t’ gert ’un i’ Manchester, o’ coorse!” Mr. Wigmore, too? Yes, certainly Mr. Wigmore, too. The gardener’s boy was always at least twenty-four hours behind the clock, so his knowledge of Wiggie’s indisposition was not due for some time yet.
The wily quarry found Helwise in the attic, hunting for the shirt and shorts that she had assured Lanty were safe in the green ottoman on the front landing. She had believed her own statement quite honestly, and as Lancaster was in a hurry, he believed he believed it, too, which he would not have done in a calmer moment, but no amount of belief had conjured the garments into the ottoman. Wiggie joined in the search with zest, and though it was not Wiggie’s attic, it was certainly Wiggie who suggested twenty hiding-places and discovered the treasure in the twenty-first. And after Lanty’s hockey-stick had been run to earth in the jam-cupboard, it was nearly lunch-time, so at Miss Lancaster’s request the borrower stayed to join her at the scrapings of something potted. She was driving over to the match in any case, so he sent the car home and changed in Lanty’s room. He fell asleep by the dining-room fire while he was waiting for Helwise to decide whether she looked more sporting in her own golf jersey or Lanty’s aquascutem, and dreamed he was the sparking-plug in a very large motor-roller at the Show, over which Dandy’s face was bent in earnest struggle after comprehension. Hamer had bought the motor-roller, and wished to see it roll something, if only a little Manchester mud, so it was trotted out and set to work, and then everything went to smithereens in a hundred and forty different directions, and he could hear Dandy’s voice, far and very far off, remarking: “Something wrong with the sparking-plug! I knew it last night on the stairs!”
He woke gasping and clutching at things, and if Helwise (in Lanty’s ’scutem) had been anybody but Helwise, she would have rung all the bells and ordered doctors and hot bottles and brandy, but instead she asked him to button her gloves, and thought him tiresomely stupid and fumbling as she tried to see exactly how sporting she looked in the sideboard mirror.
He felt better again, however, as they jogged along to the ground, and began to experience joyful thrills as strenuous figures with bare knees and flapping overcoats push-biked past them, armed with sticks. He drew his own from under the rug so that the push-bikers could see it. It was a Bulger, as he had anticipated, slightly elegantised by wear and tear, but a Bulger for all that. Still, it might possibly bring off the twist all right, if he hurried it a bit.
The field under the farm was already dotted by the red shirts of the opposing team, and a sprinkling of spectators edged the neat touch-lines. The white-topped Bluecastrians were grouped beside the little pigeon-house of a pavilion (where at least two people who liked each other might have found room to shelter) listening to Harriet’s barked directions. When the trap drove up, she looked at a very strong watch on her wrist so emphatically that Helwise tried to leap the wheel, and tore Lanty’s ’scutem on the lamp-bracket.
The home team stared curiously at Wiggie as he came in, carrying a few mufflers and a camp-stool belonging to Helwise, for half of them had heard him sing, the day before, and the half that hadn’t wished it had, while both halves had just been told by Harriet that of course he wouldn’t be the slightest use in the game, so that they must all back him as much as they could. Certainly, he did not give an impression of superfluous strength; indeed, when he had taken off his coat, he looked as fragile and hopeless an athlete as you could possibly expect to see, so much so that the brawny captain-back of the opposing side came up and implored Harriet to “put it somewhere where I can’t hit it!”
Wiggie didn’t hear him, but he wouldn’t have cared if he had. The soft, bright air was wine in his blood. The press of the spring turf lent him a buoyancy not his own. The strength of union, of interdependence and support, put fire into his slack muscles. He stole the ball from the red shirts when it shot out suddenly from the circle, and was trying to persuade the Bulger that he had always belonged to it, when Harriet stalked up. She looked very trim and hard and clean and extremely well put together. You could picture her lasting through half-a-dozen matches without losing so much as a hairpin.