I had come to spend a few weeks at a boarding establishment in Deal. He was the only other young man in the house, and I was naturally thrown a good deal upon his society. He was a pleasant, genial young fellow, but he would have been better company had he been a little less enthusiastic as regards tennis.
He played tennis ten hours a day on the average. He got up romantic parties to play it by moonlight (when half his time was generally taken up in separating his opponents), and godless parties to play it on Sundays. On wet days I have seen him practising services by himself in a mackintosh and goloshes.
He had been spending the winter with his people at Tangiers, and I asked him how he liked the place.
“Oh, a beast of a hole!” he replied. “There is not a court anywhere in the town. We tried playing on the roof, but the mater thought it dangerous.”
Switzerland he had been delighted with. He counselled me next time I went to stay at Zermatt.
“There is a capital court at Zermatt,” he said. “You might almost fancy yourself at Wimbledon.”
A mutual acquaintance whom I subsequently met told me that at the top of the Jungfrau he had said to him, his eyes fixed the while upon a small snow plateau enclosed by precipices a few hundred feet below them—
“By Jove! That wouldn’t make half a bad little tennis court—that flat bit down there. Have to be careful you didn’t run back too far.”
When he was not playing tennis, or practising tennis, or reading about tennis, he was talking about tennis. Renshaw was the prominent figure in the tennis world at that time, and he mentioned Renshaw until there grew up within my soul a dark desire to kill Renshaw in a quiet, unostentatious way, and bury him.
One drenching afternoon he talked tennis to me for three hours on end, referring to Renshaw, so far as I kept count, four thousand nine hundred and thirteen times. After tea he drew his chair to the window beside me, and commenced—