I went white as I saw that Neil already understood life better than I did.
Soon again he was on the wing. Here is interesting autobiographical matter I culled years later from the fly-leaf of his Cæsar: “Aetat 12, height 4 ft. 11, biceps 8¼, kicks the beam at 6-2.”
The reference is to a great occasion when Neil stripped at his preparatory (clandestinely) for a Belt with the word “Bruiser” on it. I am reluctant to boast about him (this is untrue), yet must mention that he won the belt, with which (such are the ups and downs of life) he was that same evening gently belted by his preceptor.
It is but fair to Neil to add that he cut a glittering figure in those circles: captain of the footer, and twenty-six against Juddy’s.
“And even then,” his telegram to me said, “I was only bowled off my pads.”
A rural cricket match in buttercup time with boys at play, seen and heard through the trees; it is surely the loveliest scene in England and the most disarming sound. From the ranks of the unseen dead, for ever passing along our country lanes on their eternal journey, the Englishman falls out for a moment to look over the gate of the cricket field and smile. Let Neil’s 26 against Juddy’s, the first and perhaps the only time he is to meet the stars on equal terms, be our last sight of him as a child. He is walking back bat in hand to the pavilion, an old railway carriage. An unearthly glory has swept over the cricket ground. He tries to look unaware of it; you know the expression and the bursting heart. Our smiling Englishman who cannot open the gate waits to make sure that this boy raises his cap in the one right way (without quite touching it, you remember), and then rejoins his comrades. Neil gathers up the glory and tacks it over his bed. “The End,” as he used to say in his letters.
I never know him quite so well again. He seems henceforth to be running to me on a road that is moving still more rapidly in the opposite direction.
2. The First Half
The scene has changed. Stilled is the crow of Neil, for he is now but one of the lowliest at a great public school, where he reverberates but little. The scug Neil fearfully running errands for his fag-master is another melancholy reminder of the brevity of human greatness.
Lately a Colossus he was now infinitely less than nothing. What shook him was not the bump as he fell, but the general indifference to his having fallen. He lay there like a bird in the grass winded by a blunt-headed arrow, and was cold to his own touch. The Bruiser Belt and his score against Juddy’s had accompanied him to school on their own legs, one might say, so confident were they of a welcome from his mantelshelf, but after an hour he hid them beneath the carpet. Hidden by him all over that once alluring room, as in disgrace, were many other sweet trifles that went to the making of the flame that had been Neil; his laugh was secreted, say in the drawer of his desk; his pranks were stuffed into his hat-box, his fell ambitions were folded away between two pairs of trousers, and now and then a tear would mix with the soapy water as he washed his cheerless face.