“I just contrived to touch it.”
Willow, the King.] [Page [306].
“Dimmy,” said the one wielding the willow, “aren’t you afraid o’ your backbone at all?”
It was apparent that she was becoming impressed. With that thought I recalled the words of the penetrating Archie: “All women have their weakness. Grace’s is for good fielding.” I must show her what I could do. After vainly striving to reach one that she pulled well wide of mid-on for three, she said,—
“Dimmy, please don’t do that. It worries me. I’m so afraid that you’ll twist yourself into something that could never be untied. That would be horrible, wouldn’t it? And I’m so afraid of your backbone.”
“It is in your own power,” said I, “to end these gyrations. You have only got to get out, you know.”
Her score had now reached twenty. Four more and a life’s happiness was wrecked. Hope there was none. She was thoroughly set, and capable of doing anything with the miserable stuff that I was rolling up. It was in vain that I altered the position of the field after the delivery of every ball. She inevitably dispatched the one that followed past the precise place from which the man had just been taken. Her batting was really cruel in its complacence and resource. The grim gleam that illuminated her look knocked at my heart. A gleam does not knock as a rule, I know, but many and strange things are allowed to happen to the heart of a man in my desperate predicament. The light-minded fieldsmen thought it quite a joke, however, and they proferred no end of wise suggestions. Had I not better have my point a bit squarer; my mid-off a bit deeper; my extra cover a bit more round; and the two men guarding the cucumber frame standing in front of the cucumbers, instead of sitting on the woodwork?
I thanked them in a chastened tone for being so very helpful.
My pitiful bowling has already been the subject of various painful home truths. But I do believe that my fielding was not unworthy of kind phrases. At least, it argues unusual excellence to gain the open approbation of the great. Yet when I stopped three smashing half-volley hits in sharp succession, and cut the knees of Archie’s unmentionables in a fall I had in endeavouring to combine the duties of cover-point and the bowler, I heard Grace sigh most distinctly, and Archie said,—