THE MATCH WITH DOWNING’S
It is the curious instinct which prompts most people to rub a thing in
that makes the lot of the average convert an unhappy one. Only the
very self-controlled can refrain from improving the occasion and
scoring off the convert. Most leap at the opportunity.
It was so in Mike’s case. Mike was not a genuine convert, but to Mr.
Downing he had the outward aspect of one. When you have been
impressing upon a non-cricketing boy for nearly a month that
(_a_) the school is above all a keen school, (_b_) that all
members of it should play cricket, and (_c_) that by not playing
cricket he is ruining his chances in this world and imperilling them
in the next; and when, quite unexpectedly, you come upon this boy
dressed in cricket flannels, wearing cricket boots and carrying a
cricket bag, it seems only natural to assume that you have converted
him, that the seeds of your eloquence have fallen on fruitful soil and
sprouted.
Mr. Downing assumed it.
He was walking to the field with Adair and another member of his team
when he came upon Mike.
“What!” he cried. “Our Jackson clad in suit of mail and armed for the
fray!”
This was Mr. Downing’s No. 2 manner--the playful.
“This is indeed Saul among the prophets. Why this sudden enthusiasm
for a game which I understood that you despised? Are our opponents so
reduced?”
Psmith, who was with Mike, took charge of the affair with a languid
grace which had maddened hundreds in its time, and which never failed
to ruffle Mr. Downing.
“We are, above all, sir,” he said, “a keen house. Drones are not
welcomed by us. We are essentially versatile. Jackson, the
archaeologist of yesterday, becomes the cricketer of to-day. It is the
right spirit, sir,” said Psmith earnestly. “I like to see it.”
“Indeed, Smith? You are not playing yourself, I notice. Your
enthusiasm has bounds.”
“In our house, sir, competition is fierce, and the Selection Committee
unfortunately passed me over.”
* * * * *
There were a number of pitches dotted about over the field, for there
was always a touch of the London Park about it on Mid-term Service
day. Adair, as captain of cricket, had naturally selected the best for
his own match. It was a good wicket, Mike saw. As a matter of fact the
wickets at Sedleigh were nearly always good. Adair had infected the
ground-man with some of his own keenness, with the result that that
once-leisurely official now found himself sometimes, with a kind of
mild surprise, working really hard. At the beginning of the previous
season Sedleigh had played a scratch team from a neighbouring town on a
wicket which, except for the creases, was absolutely undistinguishable
from the surrounding turf, and behind the pavilion after the match
Adair had spoken certain home truths to the ground-man. The latter’s
reformation had dated from that moment.
* * * * *
Barnes, timidly jubilant, came up to Mike with the news that he had
won the toss, and the request that Mike would go in first with him.
In stories of the “Not Really a Duffer” type, where the nervous new
boy, who has been found crying in the boot-room over the photograph of
his sister, contrives to get an innings in a game, nobody suspects
that he is really a prodigy till he hits the Bully’s first ball out of
the ground for six.
With Mike it was different. There was no pitying smile on Adair’s face
as he started his run preparatory to sending down the first ball.
Mike, on the cricket field, could not have looked anything but a
cricketer if he had turned out in a tweed suit and hobnail boots.
Cricketer was written all over him--in his walk, in the way he took
guard, in his stand at the wickets. Adair started to bowl with the
feeling that this was somebody who had more than a little knowledge of
how to deal with good bowling and punish bad.
Mike started cautiously. He was more than usually anxious to make runs
to-day, and he meant to take no risks till he could afford to do so.
He had seen Adair bowl at the nets, and he knew that he was good.
The first over was a maiden, six dangerous balls beautifully played.
The fieldsmen changed over.
The general interest had now settled on the match between Outwood’s
and Downing’s. The fact in Mike’s case had gone round the field, and,
as several of the other games had not yet begun, quite a large crowd
had collected near the pavilion to watch. Mike’s masterly treatment of
the opening over had impressed the spectators, and there was a popular
desire to see how he would deal with Mr. Downing’s slows. It was
generally anticipated that he would do something special with them.
Off the first ball of the master’s over a leg-bye was run.
Mike took guard.
Mr. Downing was a bowler with a style of his own. He took two short
steps, two long steps, gave a jump, took three more short steps, and
ended with a combination of step and jump, during which the ball
emerged from behind his back and started on its slow career to
the wicket. The whole business had some of the dignity of the
old-fashioned minuet, subtly blended with the careless vigour of
a cake-walk. The ball, when delivered, was billed to break from
leg, but the programme was subject to alterations.
If the spectators had expected Mike to begin any firework effects with
the first ball, they were disappointed. He played the over through
with a grace worthy of his brother Joe. The last ball he turned to leg
for a single.
His treatment of Adair’s next over was freer. He had got a sight of
the ball now. Half-way through the over a beautiful square cut forced
a passage through the crowd by the pavilion, and dashed up against the
rails. He drove the sixth ball past cover for three.
The crowd was now reluctantly dispersing to its own games, but it
stopped as Mr. Downing started his minuet-cake-walk, in the hope that
it might see something more sensational.
This time the hope was fulfilled.
The ball was well up, slow, and off the wicket on the on-side. Perhaps
if it had been allowed to pitch, it might have broken in and become
quite dangerous. Mike went out at it, and hit it a couple of feet from
the ground. The ball dropped with a thud and a spurting of dust in the
road that ran along one side of the cricket field.
It was returned on the instalment system by helpers from other games,
and the bowler began his manoeuvres again. A half-volley this time.
Mike slammed it back, and mid-on, whose heart was obviously not in the
thing, failed to stop it.
“Get to them, Jenkins,” said Mr. Downing irritably, as the ball came
back from the boundary. “Get to them.”
“Sir, please, sir----”
“Don’t talk in the field, Jenkins.”
Having had a full-pitch hit for six and a half-volley for four, there
was a strong probability that Mr. Downing would pitch his next ball
short.
The expected happened. The third ball was a slow long-hop, and hit the
road at about the same spot where the first had landed. A howl of
untuneful applause rose from the watchers in the pavilion, and Mike,
with the feeling that this sort of bowling was too good to be true,
waited in position for number four.
There are moments when a sort of panic seizes a bowler. This happened
now with Mr. Downing. He suddenly abandoned science and ran amok. His
run lost its stateliness and increased its vigour. He charged up to
the wicket as a wounded buffalo sometimes charges a gun. His whole
idea now was to bowl fast.
When a slow bowler starts to bowl fast, it is usually as well to be
batting, if you can manage it.
By the time the over was finished, Mike’s score had been increased by
sixteen, and the total of his side, in addition, by three wides.
And a shrill small voice, from the neighbourhood of the pavilion,
uttered with painful distinctness the words, “Take him off!”
That was how the most sensational day’s cricket began that Sedleigh
had known.
A description of the details of the morning’s play would be
monotonous. It is enough to say that they ran on much the same lines
as the third and fourth overs of the match. Mr. Downing bowled one
more over, off which Mike helped himself to sixteen runs, and then
retired moodily to cover-point, where, in Adair’s fifth over, he
missed Barnes--the first occasion since the game began on which that
mild batsman had attempted to score more than a single. Scared by this
escape, Outwood’s captain shrank back into his shell, sat on the
splice like a limpet, and, offering no more chances, was not out at
lunch time with a score of eleven.
Mike had then made a hundred and three.
* * * * *
As Mike was taking off his pads in the pavilion, Adair came up.
“Why did you say you didn’t play cricket?” he asked abruptly.
[Illustration: “WHY DID YOU SAY YOU DIDN’T PLAY CRICKET?” HE ASKED]
When one has been bowling the whole morning, and bowling well, without
the slightest success, one is inclined to be abrupt.
Mike finished unfastening an obstinate strap. Then he looked up.
“I didn’t say anything of the kind. I said I wasn’t going to play
here. There’s a difference. As a matter of fact, I was in the Wrykyn
team before I came here. Three years.”
Adair was silent for a moment.
“Will you play for us against the Old Sedleighans to-morrow?” he said
at length.
Mike tossed his pads into his bag and got up.
“No, thanks.”
There was a silence.
“Above it, I suppose?”
“Not a bit. Not up to it. I shall want a lot of coaching at that end
net of yours before I’m fit to play for Sedleigh.”
There was another pause.
“Then you won’t play?” asked Adair.
“I’m not keeping you, am I?” said Mike, politely.
It was remarkable what a number of members of Outwood’s house appeared
to cherish a personal grudge against Mr. Downing. It had been that
master’s somewhat injudicious practice for many years to treat his
own house as a sort of Chosen People. Of all masters, the most
unpopular is he who by the silent tribunal of a school is convicted
of favouritism. And the dislike deepens if it is a house which he
favours and not merely individuals. On occasions when boys in his
own house and boys from other houses were accomplices and partners
in wrong-doing, Mr. Downing distributed his thunderbolts unequally,
and the school noticed it. The result was that not only he himself,
but also--which was rather unfair--his house, too, had acquired a
good deal of unpopularity.
The general consensus of opinion in Outwood’s during the luncheon
interval was that, having got Downing’s up a tree, they would be fools
not to make the most of the situation.
Barnes’s remark that he supposed, unless anything happened and wickets
began to fall a bit faster, they had better think of declaring
somewhere about half-past three or four, was met with a storm of
opposition.
“Declare!” said Robinson. “Great Scott, what on earth are you talking
about?”
“Declare!” Stone’s voice was almost a wail of indignation. “I never
saw such a chump.”
“They’ll be rather sick if we don’t, won’t they?” suggested Barnes.
“Sick! I should think they would,” said Stone. “That’s just the gay
idea. Can’t you see that by a miracle we’ve got a chance of getting a
jolly good bit of our own back against those Downing’s ticks? What
we’ve got to do is to jolly well keep them in the field all day if we
can, and be jolly glad it’s so beastly hot. If they lose about a dozen
pounds each through sweating about in the sun after Jackson’s drives,
perhaps they’ll stick on less side about things in general in future.
Besides, I want an innings against that bilge of old Downing’s, if I
can get it.”
“So do I,” said Robinson.
“If you declare, I swear I won’t field. Nor will Robinson.”
“Rather not.”
“Well, I won’t then,” said Barnes unhappily. “Only you know they’re
rather sick already.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” said Stone with a wide grin. “They’ll be
a lot sicker before we’ve finished.”
And so it came about that that particular Mid-term Service-day match
made history. Big scores had often been put up on Mid-term Service
day. Games had frequently been one-sided. But it had never happened
before in the annals of the school that one side, going in first early
in the morning, had neither completed its innings nor declared it
closed when stumps were drawn at 6.30. In no previous Sedleigh match,
after a full day’s play, had the pathetic words “Did not bat” been
written against the whole of one of the contending teams.
These are the things which mark epochs.
Play was resumed at 2.15. For a quarter of an hour Mike was
comparatively quiet. Adair, fortified by food and rest, was bowling
really well, and his first half-dozen overs had to be watched
carefully. But the wicket was too good to give him a chance, and Mike,
playing himself in again, proceeded to get to business once more.
Bowlers came and went. Adair pounded away at one end with brief
intervals between the attacks. Mr. Downing took a couple more overs,
in one of which a horse, passing in the road, nearly had its useful
life cut suddenly short. Change-bowlers of various actions and paces,
each weirder and more futile than the last, tried their luck. But
still the first-wicket stand continued.
The bowling of a house team is all head and no body. The first pair
probably have some idea of length and break. The first-change pair are
poor. And the rest, the small change, are simply the sort of things
one sees in dreams after a heavy supper, or when one is out without
one’s gun.
Time, mercifully, generally breaks up a big stand at cricket before
the field has suffered too much, and that is what happened now.
At four o’clock, when the score stood at two hundred and twenty
for no wicket, Barnes, greatly daring, smote lustily at a rather
wide half-volley and was caught at short-slip for thirty-three. He
retired blushfully to the pavilion, amidst applause, and Stone came
out.
As Mike had then made a hundred and eighty-seven, it was assumed by
the field, that directly he had topped his second century, the closure
would be applied and their ordeal finished. There was almost a sigh of
relief when frantic cheering from the crowd told that the feat had
been accomplished. The fieldsmen clapped in quite an indulgent sort of
way, as who should say, “Capital, capital. And now let’s start
_our_ innings.” Some even began to edge towards the pavilion.
But the next ball was bowled, and the next over, and the next after
that, and still Barnes made no sign. (The conscience-stricken captain
of Outwood’s was, as a matter of fact, being practically held down by
Robinson and other ruffians by force.)
A grey dismay settled on the field.
The bowling had now become almost unbelievably bad. Lobs were being
tried, and Stone, nearly weeping with pure joy, was playing an innings
of the How-to-brighten-cricket type. He had an unorthodox style, but
an excellent eye, and the road at this period of the game became
absolutely unsafe for pedestrians and traffic.
Mike’s pace had become slower, as was only natural, but his score,
too, was mounting steadily.
“This is foolery,” snapped Mr. Downing, as the three hundred and fifty
went up on the board. “Barnes!” he called.
There was no reply. A committee of three was at that moment engaged in
sitting on Barnes’s head in the first eleven changing-room, in order
to correct a more than usually feverish attack of conscience.
“Barnes!”
“Please, sir,” said Stone, some species of telepathy telling him what
was detaining his captain. “I think Barnes must have left the field.
He has probably gone over to the house to fetch something.”
“This is absurd. You must declare your innings closed. The game has
become a farce.”
“Declare! Sir, we can’t unless Barnes does. He might be awfully
annoyed if we did anything like that without consulting him.”
“Absurd.”
“He’s very touchy, sir.”
“It is perfect foolery.”
“I think Jenkins is just going to bowl, sir.”
Mr. Downing walked moodily to his place.
* * * * *
In a neat wooden frame in the senior day-room at Outwood’s, just above
the mantelpiece, there was on view, a week later, a slip of paper. The
writing on it was as follows:
OUTWOOD’S _v_. DOWNING’S
_Outwood’s. First innings._
J. P. Barnes, _c_. Hammond, _b_. Hassall... 33
M. Jackson, not out........................ 277
W. J. Stone, not out....................... 124
Extras............................... 37
-----
Total (for one wicket)...... 471
Downing’s did not bat.