I drew him aside.
“Tonks,” I said, “that incident is forgotten—also the cause of it. You understand?”
He had the uncomfortable perspicacity to glance over at Daisy as he replied:
“Right O; I won't spoil any one's sport.”
This game of pheasant-shooting is played in England with that gravity and seriousness that the Briton displays in all his sports. No preparations are wanting, no precautions omitted. You stand in a specially prepared opening in a specially grown plantation, while a specially trained company of beaters scientifically drive towards you several hundred artificially incubated birds invigorated by a patent pheasant food. Owing to the regulated height of the trees and the measured distance at which you stand these birds pass over you at such a height (and, owing to the qualities of the patent food, at such a pace), and the shot is rendered what they call “sporting.” Then, at a certain distance from his gun and a certain angle, the skilful marksman discharges both barrels, converts two pheasants into collapsed bundles of feathers, snatches a second gun from an attendant, and in precisely similar fashion accounts for two more. The flight of the bird is so calculated that the bad shot has little chance of hitting anything at all, so that the pheasant may return to his coop and be preserved intact for another day. When such a shot is firing, you will hear the host anxiously say to the keeper at the end of the day: “Did he miss them all clean?”
And if the answer is in the affirmative, he will add:
“Excellent! I shall ask him to shoot again.”
A clean miss or a clean kill—that is what is demanded in order that you may strictly obey the rules of the sport, and at my first stand, where I was able to exhibit five severed tails, a mangled mass which had received both barrels at three paces, and seven swiftly running invalids, my enthusiasm was quickly damped by the face Sir Philip pulled on hearing my prowess.
“Never mind,” said Daisy, who had come to see the sport, “you couldn't expect to get into it just at first.”
“Come and give me instruction,” I implored her. “Don't be in such a hurry!” she cried, as she stood beside me at the next beat. “Look before you shoot—that's what Dick always says you ought to do. Now you've forgotten to put in your—wait! Of course! No wonder nothing happened; you had forgotten to put in the cartridges. Steady, now. Oh, but don't wait till it's past you! Dick says—Good shot! Was that the bird you aimed at?”