The twins grinned at each other as they crossed.
“Go on being desperate!” Jean said. “It pays!”
Which may or may not have been why within two minutes the Merriwiggians were tumultuously applauding a “love” game as emphatic as that which only a few moments earlier had been delightedly acclaimed by the ranks of Kooringal!
The sett ran to a swift and exciting conclusion. The twins’ play was occasionally erratic, but never for a moment dull: they had decided upon ways of desperation, and they fled wildly from one place to another, hitting at everything, possible or impossible; occasionally achieving what seemed to be impossible, by reason of amazing agility. They were a lithe and active pair, built on economical lines that suggested that wire and whipcord were largely used in their composition. Certainly, both whipcord and wire were in evidence in their strokes. There was no special science in their method, but it was good, hard-hitting play; and as they always played together, they knew exactly what to expect of each other, and never overlapped.
The Kooringal pair were taken aback. The first sett had made them feel confident of an easy victory. Mona Burton knew that she was not playing well, but then Eva seemed to be on her usual superb pinnacle of self-confidence, and would be sure to pull them through. She had not worried, even when she had “muffed” a few strokes. But in the second sett the small pair of Merriwiggians seemed to be transformed into a couple of inspired imps, who bounded and twisted and ran—how they ran, thought Mona, who was inclined to plumpness, and preferred a game conducted mainly from the back line! Nothing came amiss to them, and they served balls that seemed to Mona to be compounded of quicksilver and electricity. Even the redoubtable Eva was nonplussed; the opening games had not prepared her for anything like this. Her own play showed distinct signs of being “rattled”: she missed strokes that would ordinarily have been easy to her, and her service lost a good deal of its “bite.” Silence—dismayed silence—fell upon the ranks of Kooringal, while among the Merriwiggians rapture and amazement mounted until the sett came to a triumphant conclusion at 6-3!
“Can you make it last?” Helen Forester, the Merriwa captain, managed to whisper to Jean, as the twins changed ends with their opponents.
Jean gave a rapturous gurgle.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “We’re both quite mad, of course. It would be an awful lark, if only it weren’t so terrible!” She caught her twin’s eye and they grinned at each other. In Jo’s glance there was something of a look familiar to Jean: she had seen it often when they were mustering young cattle with their father, and an excited bullock had needed determination and hard riding to bring him round to the main mob. The twins loved such jobs, and Jo used to gallop after a fugitive with her jaw set in a firm line, but her eyes alight with laughter. So she looked now: the immaculate, white-clad girls in the other court might have been a pair of unruly steers, bent on breaking away, and the racquet she swung loosely, a stock-whip ready for use, as she waited for Eva’s service. The familiar look gave Jean fresh courage. Terrible the game might be, but it was certainly also a lark!
Possibly, had they been girls bred to games, with years of school-life behind them, and the importance of tennis tournaments ground into their beings by tradition and experience, the twins might have been unable to tackle that last sett with the cheery courage that somehow communicated itself to the tense onlookers. They would have been crushed by the importance of their task; and in that case they would most certainly have gone under. But Jean and Jo Weston had had only a year of a Melbourne school, and behind that lay a lifetime of the lonely country, where games were mere incidents, and where recreation meant, for the most part, sharing their father’s work on the station. Even after a year of school, tennis—even tournament tennis—was only a game to the twins. They had taken to it with quick natural aptitude, and being unusually tough and wiry, with eye and hand trained by the use of stock-whip and rifle, they had soon found themselves in the front rank, with the consequent responsibility of match play. That, if they could but adopt the view-point of their school-mates, was rather terrible. Jean and Jo obediently echoed them, and said it was terrible. But at the back of their minds was the conviction that it was only a game after all.
They had played the first sett with a due sense of responsibility. In the second, they had cast responsibility to the winds, and had been merely desperate. It had paid, and there was no question as to which method was the more enjoyable. Therefore, there seemed to the twins no reason why they should not continue to be cheerfully insane. They did better when they were insane, and it was so very much more pleasant!