“Oh, it’s all right!” said Mr. Trimble with assumed nonchalance to Mr. Bent, who had just congratulated him on the results so far obtained. “We shall go to pieces sure enough in the second half! my fellows have a perfect genius for collapsing. The asses! If they hadn’t bungled all their chances we might have been three up.”
It looked as if Mr. Trimble’s gloomy prophecy were going to be fulfilled; for the game had hardly been restarted when a foolish misunderstanding among the Trimbleite backs enabled Chowdler’s to equalise; and, before their opponents had recovered from the shock and consequent demoralisation, le Willow sent in a lucky shot which put his side ahead. A yell of triumph went up from the Chowdlerites and their supporters, and Mr. Chowdler himself, in spite of a heavy fur coat, leapt into the air on the touch-line and beat his gloved hands one against the other.
“Well played, Harry!” he roared. “Well played all! Good lads! Stick to it, stick to it!”
“Given away with a pound of tea!” said Mr. Trimble with a short mirthless laugh. “That settles the game; and I must say that we thoroughly deserve to lose. Did you ever see such football!”
Mr. Trimble, though he was one of the best housemasters at Chiltern, was a man of rather insignificant appearance. The youngest Miss Gussy had once said of him that he always looked as if he were wearing somebody else’s cast-off clothes. On this particular afternoon he had on an ulster of antique design and faded yellow colour, which contrasted unfavourably with the smart coat of his rival and seemed to brand him as of inferior rank.
“The moral effect of that last goal,” said Mr. Bent, whose sympathies were with the ulster, “may be disastrous; but the game is not over yet. I must confess that I am beginning to be horribly excited. I have not got your philosophic detachment, Trimble; and the sight of Chowdler on the touch-line, clapping his great woollen gloves together, always arouses most unchristian feelings in me. I want to see him, not merely beaten, but crushed, disgraced, annihilated. Well played! Oh, well played!”
For the Trimbleites, stung by disaster, had roused themselves to superhuman efforts and were once more attacking fiercely. There was a confused mêlée in front of Chowdler’s goal. Suddenly the referee blew his whistle, and when the players separated it was seen that a Chowdlerite was lying disabled on the ground.
“Did you see that?” cried Mr. Chowdler, rushing up to Mr. Black, whom he spied in his neighbourhood.
Mr. Black was a cautious man and shy of committing himself to excitable colleagues, so he replied:
“I was just looking the other way, so I didn’t see what happened; but I fear somebody is injured.”