“Wicket pitched at twelve o’clock,” said Grace. “And it’s all right, Dimmy, I saw you. You can fetch it out again. You want to do a bit of bowling, don’t you? Want to find a bit of a length? Well, if you’ll just roll a few up I’ll give you some tips.”
Impatient Reader, I ask you to conceive the situation! Conceive the irony, the pathos! Here was the very person I was trying to overcome in deadly combat, having the audacity to show me how to set about it. A person of a more sanguine temperament, the Optimist for instance, might have argued from these premises that the enemy was actually courting defeat. But I knew by the half-pitying, half-contemptuous way in which the offer was made, that it sprang from her own joyous self-confidence, and that she was inclined to regard me as a foe who not for a single moment was to be considered seriously.
Grace’s keen eye and her deductive faculty made me decidedly uncomfortable. It is not nice to be found out and then be so ruthlessly exposed. And I regret to say that the Optimist, who had nothing at stake, was sufficiently human to enjoy my misfortune.
“Who told you what Dimsdale was up to?” he said. I believe that it is no injustice to the Optimist to state that he was trying to prolong my pain.
“Was it very clever of me?” said Grace. “Do you know it makes me laugh awfully to see the way you men try to dodge and hedge and that sort o’ thing. You’re that horribly clumsy. There was old Dimmy’s face saying as plain as print, ‘Don’t look, please, till I’ve put it away, will you?’ But let’s have that ball, old chap, and I’ll see if I can’t lick you into shape a bit. I do mean to do the right thing by you, you know.”
Pitching a single stump on yesterday’s wicket, she got behind it, and caused me to begin bowling from the opposite crease. The first ball I tried to deliver almost wrenched my unaccustomed right arm from its socket. It pitched about halfway down and trickled along the ground till it ultimately rolled a good yard wide of the mark. My tutor raised her brows with a mild air of protest.
“My dear man,” she said, “is that what you call bowling? It strikes me that it’s more like bowls than anything.”
“I’m only loosening my arm, you know,” said I weakly.
“Keep pegging away,” said she, valiantly suppressing a smile.
Fancy the other side adopting this kind of tone. And the Optimist was enjoying it.