“Very well, and we can sit outside the pavilion. I’m lunching out at half-past one.”
“Meals do run together so on Sunday. Sunday is really one long attack of confluent mastication,” said the Babe. “It’s a pity one can’t take them simultaneously.”
Though November had already begun, the air was deliciously warm and mild, and had it not been for the fast yellowing trees, one would have guessed it to be May. But there was a shouting wind overhead, which stripped off the leaves by hundreds and blew the rooks about the sky. Already the tops of the trees were bare, and the nests of last spring swung empty and half ruined high up among the forks of the branches. During the last week a good deal of rain had fallen, and the Cam was swirling down, yellow and turbid. The willow by the river was already quite bare, and its thin feathery branches lashed themselves against the stone coping of the bridge.
They went through the Fellows’ gardens, for Reggie by some means had got hold of a key; there a few bushes of draggled Michaelmas daisies were making pretence that the summer was not quite dead yet, but they only succeeded in calling attention to the long, desolate beds. The grass was growing rank and matted under the autumn rains, and little eddies of leaves had drifted up against the wires of the disused croquet-hoops. But the day itself seemed stolen from off the lap of spring, and two thrushes were singing in the bushes after an excellent breakfast of succulent worms.
“We play you to-morrow at Rugger,” remarked the Babe as they walked across the field, “and we play on this ground. It’s sticky enough, and I shall vex the soul of the half opposite me, because I like a sticky ground, and he is certain not to. In fact,” said he confidently, “I purpose to get two tries off my own bat, and generally to sit on this royal and ancient foundation.”
“The Babe has never yet been called modest,” said Ealing.
“If I have, I am not aware of it,” said the Babe.
“We’ve got three blues,” remarked Reggie.
“I am delighted to hear it,” said the Babe. “You will need them all. And you may tell our mutual friend Hargreave that if he attempts to collar me round the ancles again, I shall make no efforts whatever to avoid kicking him in the face. He did it last time we played you, and I spoke to him about it more in sorrow than in anger.”
“Upon which the referee warned you for using sorrowful language.”