He had a word with the outcoming batsman, who was captain of the Cambridge team, and was told to keep steady at all costs. But when your knees are trembling and the inside of your hands is damp with the dews of anxiety, such advice does not seem to be within the spheres of practical usefulness. And with a sinking heart that for the moment was far out of the range of any encouraging influence, he went forth on that awful pilgrimage to the scene of execution.
There ensued two or three extremely trying minutes. The wicket-keep appealed for a catch at the wickets off the first ball he received, in accents of supreme confidence. But the umpire happened to disagree with him. The next was a long-hop which Birds slashed at and completely missed, the third beat him as completely, and must have grazed his leg-stump. And if there was a thoroughly unhappy Pythias out there, there was an even more miserable Damon in the pavilion. Jim wished he was anywhere but here, watching this deplorable performance; had it been possible, he would have been back in the lecture-room, listening to Butler’s droning interpretation of Cicero’s remarks on friendship; anything was better than seeing his friend behave as if he had never had a bat in his hands before.
Then quite suddenly, while Birds was waiting for the return of the ball, that had so nearly dismissed him, Jim’s aspect of the situation struck him. Up till this moment he had only been conscious of his own nervousness; now as by a flash he realized how Jim must be hating it, and that would never do. And he ceased to wriggle his toes inside his cricket boots, and awaited the last ball of the over. It was a half-volley, just outside the leg-stump. About four seconds afterwards Jim picked it up from the seat on which it had fallen in the pavilion, and threw it out to square-leg. He gave two or three wild yells, and a long sigh of relief. Never was there a more confident shot than that; nobody in a state of twittering nerves could possibly have played it. He made the sound deduction that Birds had suddenly pulled himself together.
As the morning wore on, the pavilion began to fill up; Tobin came and talked for a little, in a state of the highest disgust at himself, and soon Badsley also appeared. All the time the total on the telegraph board mounted with rapidity, for Birds was playing with that swift, effortless precision that made him the prettiest bat in the world to watch, if only he happened to be making runs. He had a trick of making difficult bowling appear perfectly easy, and put it away to all corners of the field. By one flick of his slim wrist he cut the ball late between point and slip, by another almost more imperceptible he sent it racing behind square-leg to the pavilion boundary. And as Jim had prophesied, he did not have word with him again till he came across the field at lunch-time with eighty-two to his credit. But his innings were worth more than that to his side, for going in at a critical moment he had stopped the rot which had begun to set in.
There was the added excitement for Jim after lunch of seeing Birds make the necessary eighteen runs to complete his century, and it is certain that this engrossed him much more than any consideration of what the ‘Varsity total might be. Birds began by hitting three fours off the first over he received, and then a three and a two brought his total up to ninety-nine. He then skied a ball so high that it looked as if it really might be going to soar beyond the power of the earth’s attraction, and become a new and sporting planet. But it failed quite to reach the required altitude, and after a pause that seemed to last many minutes he was caught at long on, and retired amid rounds of applause and sympathetic yellings.
“Bloody ass,” said Jim to him, as he came into the pavilion.
“Rather. Did you ever see a ball go so high? Hullo, there’s Badders. Why not amorously engaged, Badders? Lord, I have been enjoying myself, and I want an enormous drink, and why should not the young Cantab have one? One or two, several, in fact, as the Red King said——”
’Twasn’t, it was the White Knight.”
“I daresay. As long as it got said, what’s the odds? Ninety-nine; that’s what they tell you to say when they think you’ve got consumption. Shall I have tea first and three bottles of ginger-beer afterwards, or the other way round? Good-bye.”