“So it did,” he said. “I’ll back you against any one in the world, Bags, for bald literal prosaicness. You haven’t got an ounce of imagination. You see things just exactly as they happen. You’ve less of romance than—than a horse-roller,” he said, looking round for inspiration and seeing that useful article with its shafts in the air.
“Perhaps I have, perhaps I haven’t,” said Bags. “But it’s perfectly true I don’t jaw about it. Never mind that. Look here: supposing you might either kiss Violet Gray, twice, we’ll say, or see the Oxford and Cambridge match, which would you choose?”
“Depends on the match,” said David. “Of course if Frank was going to make a century, and I were to see him do that, I don’t know what else I could choose. O Lord, but fancy kissing her, though! I wish you wouldn’t ask such stumpers. But that’s you all over. You want me to be practical, and say which I should like best. But I just can’t! I—I feel like a dog which is being whistled to from opposite directions by two fellows it loves. Doesn’t know which way to go.”
Bags sniffed scornfully.
“Oh, you’ve not got it so desperately, if you only feel like that,” he said.
David shut his eyes and made his mouth tight with an air of martyr-like determination.
“I should choose kissing her,” he said, “because Frank could tell me all about the match afterwards, and besides, it would all be reported in the Sportsman, and I could read about it. But I couldn’t read about my kissing her in the paper; at least, I don’t know in which. Oh Lord, but fancy missing seeing Frank putting perfectly straight balls away to the leg boundary in the ’Varsity match, and then scratching his ear, as he always does when he hits a boundary, as if wondering what on earth has happened to the ball. I don’t know which I should choose. I Don’t Know.”
David looked mournfully round for inspiration and lay down again.
“After all, I wonder whether it’s worth while doing anything or getting anything,” he said with a sudden lugubrious accent. “I tried to think it would be a damned fine—jolly fine thing to get into the sixth, and yet before a month was out we both got absolutely accustomed to it. It’s been just the same about getting into school-eleven—oh, well, not quite, because I do enjoy that most awfully still. But I dare say it won’t last. Why, a year ago, if I had been told that I might have any two things I wanted, I should have chosen to get into the sixth and the eleven. It didn’t seem that there was anything more to want.”
“I should have thought you would have chosen that Maddox shouldn’t leave,” remarked Bags.