“I feel, you know, Luney,” he confessed, in one of his moments of expansiveness, “I am behaving like a fool in taking you up like I do. I am acting against my own interests. You will never do anything; you are d——d unpopular with all my pals; you are not a bit bright or clever; you never drink or smoke or bet or make love to the ladies; you can’t hold your own even with a chap like young Davis; even when your leg is being pulled you haven’t got the sense to notice it; in short, Luney, and in a word, you are just a worm; but, somehow, there is an odd sort of something about you that I feel I can’t do without. What it is I don’t know. If you were a girl I should say it was love; and yet, my son, I’ll swear to you on my solemn oath that I don’t believe there is such a thing as love. All the talk about it, all the plays and penny novelettes about it, are the biggest bunkum imaginable.”
However, in spite of many speeches as uncompromising as this, Mr. Dodson could not bring himself to relinquish his patronage of his strange companion. Seldom can a more incongruous pair have walked together along the perilous paths of the great nowhither, since the far-off days of the Knight of La Mancha and his faithful squire. And it chanced that on the eve of the very next Bank Holiday, which befell on a stifling day in August, when the town lay choked in dust and seemed to swoon with the arid air, Mr. Dodson made the proposal to his singular friend that they should go forth on that festal day and “see a bit of life” together.
“No more Margate, my son,” said Mr. Dodson, “never again, as long as I live, will I go with you there. But we will spend a day at the Oval, my boy—they are giving Joe Cox a trial for the first eleven, and we must see what he does. Then we will get a bit of dinner somewhere, and round up the evening at the Alcazar. You have never seen Hermione in full war paint, have you? Off the stage she is a bit of all right, but on it, my son, she beats anything you ever saw. When you see her she will knock you.”
To this carefully devised programme William Jordan assented submissively. During this phase of his existence, when every day that he passed brought a further largesse of knowledge, the overpowering curiosity to see, to know, to understand all things seemed to return upon him. His mentor had taken him already into divers and strange places. He owed it to that friendly but mysterious guidance that the curtain was rolled back from many hidden recesses of the life about him, which otherwise could never have been revealed.
On that burning August forenoon he mingled with the throng about the gates of the cricket-ground, and passed through its portals and came to stand on the parched grass under the pitiless sun. All about him was a close-packed and vastly excited multitude. Yet to the young man, who was sandwiched within the very heart of the perspiring crowd of street-persons, with the skin being frizzled upon his neck, the solemn rites, of which occasionally he caught a glimpse, had no meaning for his eyes.
“Surrey’s fielding,” said his mentor, in a voice that was by no means as calm as was its wont. “See, there’s Joe standing at mid-on. Why don’t they put him on to bowl?”
“Not his wicket,” said Mr. Dodson’s neighbour, an enthusiast in a straw hat with a yellow ribbon, and dirty white flannel trousers.
“Then why do they play him?” demanded Mr. Dodson.
“The Committee have had private information of a thunderstorm to-morrow night,” said Mr. Dodson’s neighbour, who appeared to be extremely well-informed.
To Mr. William Jordan, however, these technicalities and a thousand others, which were even more recondite, proved very baffling indeed.