“Well, I could say that—that no one could do justice to some people. Or is that laying it on rather thick? Oh, by the way, I’ve been devilish cunning. The Head told me that my last iambics were pretty rotten, and that I’d better have some private tuition, so I asked if I might go to old Gray for it. Jolly smart, that. So I’m going to drop French and have private tu with Gray, beginning to-morrow.”
“ ‘Come into the garden, Maud,’ ” remarked Bags.
“What’s Maud got—oh, I see, you mean Violet. Yes, that’s the idea. Going in and out of the house, I’m sure to run across her. See? Why, it’s striking four. Let’s go down to house.”
David, as is the way of boys rising seventeen, had been growing tremendously these last six months, not in physical ways only, but in stature of the mind. It was impossible to imagine a boy less of a prig than he, or one so unweighted with the sense of duty or responsibility, but with his growth he had taken up his responsibilities quite simply and unconsciously and eagerly, without having any egoism about it. He did not, in fact, do these things and behave in a manner that made him so breezy a treasure to his house-master because he heavily realised that there were things he ought to do, and a manner in which he ought to behave, but because he obeyed unconsciously the bent of his natural instincts, which were those of a very high-spirited and excellent fellow now budding from boyhood into early manhood. He had no private meditations at all on the subject, but merely lived in active and wholesome ways and enjoyed himself immensely, and if by any chance he had come to learn what Adams really thought of him, he would have had no doubt that his informant was just “pulling his leg.” His genial unconsciousness that he had any influence at all was exactly that which made his influence so strong. He had the admirable gift of not thinking about himself, but purely about the large quantity of attractive affairs that made up life, and the number of “jolly chaps” with whom he was associated. He had even been known to admit that Manton and Crossley, to counteract whose ridiculous ineffectiveness the Court of Appeal had been founded, were decent enough, though of course no earthly good as prefects. In the same way, it was from no sense of conscious duty that he had educated and still watched over Jevons: “it was sport looking after a kid,” was exactly the true account of the trouble he had taken. Then, part of his growth, had come this violent adoration of Violet Gray, as natural as the strutting of the young male bird, when first it is conscious of another sex than his. David had suddenly perceived that though in many things girls are “rotters,” there was something about them that made it necessary to wear buttonholes, and, if possible, make runs or take wickets for other reasons than those generally necessary. . . .
The two boys strolled at Sunday pace down over the hot, sunny field, which wore its air of Sabbatical and empty leisure. May had been a wet month, and the grass still retained the varnished freshness of spring except where in patches it had been worn by pitches or practice-nets. But for the last fortnight no rain had fallen, and the light soil, quick to dry, was beginning to get hard and give bowlers such as David the crumbling wickets in which his soul delighted. Adams’s house had scraped through the first ties of house-matches, for though David, on whom they relied to thwart and discomfit their opponents, had proved on that occasion to be extremely expensive, and quite useless as a bowler, he had in some weird fashion of his own managed to make fifty of the most awful runs ever scored, chiefly by amazing miss-hits over the heads of point and slips. He had also been badly missed off the first ball he received, which added humour to the performance, and a little later his leg-stump had been smartly hit, though without displacing the bails. (He had hailed this with a shriek of laughter.) But in the second tie played last week he had shown himself in truer colours, and had been bowled fair and square in both innings without scoring at all, but had done things with the ball that really seemed inspired by Satan. He had grown into a bowler of the googliest type, and had discovered, all for himself, that if he let his shirt-sleeve wave in the air instead of rolling it tight up round his elbow it presented a much more puzzling outline to the batsman.[[1]] On that day there had been, too, a high cross-wind, and all that most of the batsmen who were favoured with his deliveries knew was that from very far off an immense lanky figure came prancing in a curved run up to the wickets, and that from somewhere at the end of clothes hung up to dry a quavering object that was supposed to be a cricket-ball skidded through the air in such a manner that it was really impossible to tell what it was doing or what it would do. Sometimes when it looked most charged with incalculable waywardness it did nothing but bounce as an innocent and rotund ball should; at other times (chiefly when it looked almost pathetically guileless) it played the lowest tricks that the laws of spin permitted. It kicked out like a horse when it pitched, or it leaped nervously aside as if trying to avoid the bat: in fact, the odds were that it did precisely what you didn’t expect. Or, again, the demoniac Blazes would run up to the wickets with less than his usual prance, but in a slow and thoughtful manner as if he had a headache. But if the wary batsman imagined (as he not unfrequently did) that this was the prelude to a slow and thoughtful ball, he occasionally (though not always) found he was quite in error. An extremely fast and straight ball was all that the thoughtful manner meant, whereby we learn the danger of trusting to appearances. And what made all these antics the more flustering and annoying was that David, with guileless sincerity, frankly confessed that he was often by no means clear himself what the ball was going to do.
“I always mean it to do something rum,” he said, “but of course it doesn’t always come off, and sometimes it does just the opposite. That’s such awful fun. It’s all silly tosh, my bowling, you know. Comes off in house-matches sometimes, but any school team would hit me over the moon.”
This perfectly sincere view of his own performance was not shared by Humphreys, the captain of the school eleven who had twice been one of David’s victims, and to whom this opinion was expressed.
“But the one you bowled me with in the first innings,” said that much-injured young man, “came round my legs and took the middle-stump, blast you. Didn’t you mean that?”
David put his head on one side, considering.
“Yes, I think I did,” he said. “It was rather a good ball for me. I thought it might do something of the sort. Every one gets a good ball in sometimes if they go on long enough.”