But the Captain had changed his tactics. Instead of the leisurely, high-curving delivery with which he had done such execution hitherto, the ball left his hand straight and low and as quick as light. It pitched no more than an inch or two in front of the waiting bat, then struck vertically upward. A crack resounded through the field. The batsman staggered—clapped a hand to his head. A moment more and he was picking an uneven course towards the tent, thoroughly satiated with the Captain’s magic.
Very slowly the next man set out for the pitch. He stopped on the way to tighten a strap of his leg-guard, and again unconscionably long to adjust his batting-glove. Once he turned back a tallowy face, and seemed to be in two minds about something. But at length he got to the wicket and grounded his bat. The long arm uprose again, and the ball sped. It proved to be the last bowled that day. For once more that terrible upward break ended with a thud and a yell, echoed from nine panic-stricken men about me. The luckless batsman fled with as gory a visage as his companion had done, and none would take his place, though the grocer charmed and stormed never so wisely. Windlecombe had won by six.
Later by an hour the victorious eleven gathered in the parlour of the Three Thatchers Inn, old Stallwood grimly smiling in their midst. Tom Clemmer shook his fist at him, delight in his eyes.
‘But ’twarn’t crickut, Stall’ard!’ he said reproachfully.
‘Noa,’ returned the old man, ‘not crickut, leastways not all on’t. That there sing-chin-summat or other—Red Hot Ball, I calls un—that wur a trick as I larned in Chaney.’
III
How fast time flies you can never truly estimate until you go step and step with it through the summer woods and fields. In a sense, town-life—where there is so much of permanence in environment—puts a drag on time, and not seldom pulls it up altogether. Moreover, in towns time is estimated by events, by experiences. You hear a great musician, see a great play, look on at some magnificent pageant, or are shocked by some catastrophe; and straightway there is half a lifetime of emotion thrust between two strokes of the clock. By so much in very truth your life has been lengthened; for it is the intensity of living that counts in the civic tale of years. If you find an old man not only declaring that he has lived long, but believing it, it is a great chance but he tells you so in the close-clipped cockney tongue of the town.
And yet it is better to live in some far-away country nook like Windlecombe, and be reminded with every gliding summer hour that time flies and life is short, if only because of the undoubted fact that such a frame of mind carries a belief in eternal youth as a necessary implication. Between life’s dawn and the dusk of its western sky, there is literally no time to grow old in a natural, aboriginal environment. So inextricably interwoven are the threads of human existence and that of the green world round about, that the annual rejuvenation of the one infallibly communicates itself to the other. With every spring we start life afresh. Though we may live to threescore years and ten, we are children still; and come upon death at last like an unexpected gust at a corner, old age unrealised to the very end.
In the weeks that are closing now, I have heard and seen more of the galloping hoofs of this swift, high-stepping jade, summer, than is good for entire peace of mind. Years ago I made a vow that I would never again eke out the fleeting golden days, like a miser to whom spending is not pleasure but only pain. I vowed that I would always squander time at this season; let it drift by unthinkingly; get my fill of sunshine, and fill and fill again to my heart’s content; yet do it as a strayed heifer in the corn, wantoning over an acre to each mouthful. But this time, as ever, the good resolution has been forgotten. The old parsimony has dogged the way at every step. I must be up with the sun in the small hours of each morning, fearful of losing a single beam from the millions. To waste in sleep the blue, spangled summer nights, when all the country-side is resonant of life and fragrant with the scent that comes only with the darkness, has seemed like sacrilege. Yet, for all my industry, July is nearing its end, and I know that I have drunk but a drop or two out of its vast ocean. And already I have renewed the old vow, to be disregarded as ever, doubtless, when July again comes round.
On all the high-lying corn lands now, harvest has begun; and the fields in the valley are fast taking on that deep tinge of gipsy-gold which is the sign of full maturity. Scarce had the shrill note of the mowing-machine stilled in the meadows, when the deeper voice of the reaper-and-binder began on the hill. All day long I sat in this cool quiet nook of a study, and the steady jarring sound came over to me from the hillside, filling the little room. I saw the machine with its pair of grey horses, waiting at the field-gate, while the scythe-men cut a way for it into the amber wall of the grain. Steadily hour after hour it worked round the field, until at last, looking forth towards noon, I saw that only a small triangular piece remained uncut in the middle of the field.