These miserable forebodings, well founded on bitter experience, were interrupted by the arrival of the team from Eagles School, and the home team took the visitors off to the dormitories to put on their flannels. It fell to David’s lot to be host to a boy called Ward, of trying deliberation in the matter of dress, who parted his hair four times before he arrived at the desired result, and looked, with a marked abstention from comment, at the decorations in David’s cubicle. Consequently, when they got down to the field again, the rest of the two elevens were practising at the nets, the grass was dotted over with groups of boys whose parents had misguidedly determined to visit their sons, while the happier class, unhampered with the dangers and responsibilities attaching to relations, were comfortably dispersed on rugs in the shade of the elms. David cast an anxious glance round to see if his own responsibility had yet arrived, when his eye fell on the figures at the nets, and the appalling truth burst upon him.
There was no possibility of mistake. Mingled with the crowd at the nets on the other side of the field was a figure in gaiters and a shovel-hat just taking off his coat and betraying—an added horror—a brown flannel shirt. He held up a cricket-ball to his eye a moment, in the manner of fifty years ago, and, taking a short stodgy run, delivered it. His hat fell off and the ball was so wide that it went, not even into the net for which it was intended, but into the next adjoining.
David’s companion saw (for that matter, David felt that all Europe saw) and laughed lightly.
“I say, look at that funny old buffer in a flannel shirt!” he said. “He bowled into the wrong net. I wonder why he wears such rummy clothes.”
David felt his heart sink into the toes of his cricket-boots, and leak out. But there was no help for it: his father was perfectly certain to kiss him when he joined the fellows at the nets, and the truth might as well come out now.
“Oh, that’s my pater,” he said.
“Oh, is it?” said Ward politely, with a faint suppressed smile. “But I expect he’s—he’s awfully clever, isn’t he? My guv’nor played cricket for England one year, and made fifty.”
Just then David was beyond the reach of human comfort. At any other time it would have been a glorious thing to be walking with the son of a man who had made fifty for England, but just now such glory was in total eclipse. There, fifty yards away, was his own father putting his shovel-hat on again: he wore gaiters and a flannel shirt, he bowled into the wrong net, he would preach to-morrow, and perhaps again eat twice of resurrection-bolly. But a certain innate loyalty made him stand up for this parody of a parent.
“Oh, my father doesn’t know a thing about cricket,” he said, “but he’s frightfully clever. He writes books about”—David could not remember what they were about—“he writes books that are supposed to be jolly good. He took a double-first at Oxford, too.”
The Archdeacon had seen his son, and, to David’s great relief, did not bowl any more, but came towards him. There were bad moments to follow, for he kissed him in sight of the whole school, at which Ward looked delicately away. Also he had turned up the sleeves of his brown flannel shirt (as if brown flannel was not bad enough) and revealed the fact that below it he wore a long-sleeved Jaeger vest. How hopelessly impossible that was words fail to convey. Nobody ever wore vests in the summer: you had your coat, waistcoat and shirt, and then it was you. It was “fuggy” to wear a vest in the summer unless you had a cold, and everybody would see that he had a fuggy father. And, oh, the idiocy of his attempting to bowl! It was pure “swank” to try it, for at home he never joined in his children’s games, but here the deplorable habit of “joining in the life of the place” asserted itself. The same habit made him, when at the seaside, talk knowingly to bewildered fishermen, before whom he soon exposed his ignorance by mistaking a mackerel for a herring, or, when in Switzerland in summer holidays, to walk about the milder slopes of the Alps with a climber’s rope about his shoulders and a piece of edelweiss stuck into his shovel-hat. If he would only stick to the things at which he was “frightfully clever,” and not go careering about in these amateur excursions!