Some brightness seemed to vanish when the buoyant Mr. Trafford, still
undauntedly cheerful, limped off after his more injured friend, and
disappeared through the gate. Marjorie found herself in a world whose
remaining manhood declined to see anything but extreme annoyance in this
gay, exciting rupture of the afternoon. "Good God!" said Mr. Pope. "What
next? What next?"
"Registration, I hope," said Mr. Magnet,--"and relegation to the desert
of Sahara."
"One good thing about it," said Mr. Pope--"it all wastes petrol. And
when the petrol supply gives out--they're done."
"Certainly we might all have been killed!" said Mrs. Pope, feeling she
had to bear her witness against their visitors, and added: "If we hadn't
moved out of the way, that is."
There was a simultaneous movement towards the shattered apparatus, about
which a small contingent of villagers, who had availed themselves of the
withdrawal of the sentinel, had now assembled.
"Look at it!" said Mr. Pope, with bitter hostility. "Look at it!"
Everyone had anticipated his command.
"They'll never come to anything," said Mr. Pope, after a pause of silent
hatred.
"But they _have_ to come to something," said Marjorie.
"They've come to smash!" said Mr. Magnet, with the true humorist's air.
"But consider the impudence of this invasion, the
wild--objectionableness of it!"
"They're nasty things," said Mr. Magnet. "Nasty things!"
A curious spirit of opposition stirred in Marjorie. It seemed to her
that men who play golf-croquet and watch cricket matches have no
business to contemn men who risk their lives in the air. She sought for
some controversial opening.
"Isn't the engine rather wonderful?" she remarked.
Mr. Magnet regarded the engine with his head a little on one side. "It's
the usual sort," he said.
"There weren't engines like that twenty years ago."
"There weren't people like _you_ twenty years ago," said Mr. Magnet,
smiling wisely and kindly, and turned his back on the thing.
Mr. Pope followed suit. He was filled with the bitter thought that he
would never now be able to tell the history of the remarkable match he
had witnessed. It was all spoilt for him--spoilt for ever. Everything
was disturbed and put out.
"They've left us our tennis lawn," he said, with a not unnatural
resentment passing to invitation. "What do you say, Magnet? Now you've
begun the game you must keep it up?"
"If Marjorie, or Mrs. Pope, or Daffy...?" said Magnet.
Mrs. Pope declared the house required her. And so with the gravest
apprehensions, and an insincere compliment to their father's energy,
Daffy and Marjorie made up a foursome for that healthy and invigorating
game. But that evening Mr. Pope got his serve well into the bay of the
sagging net almost at once, and with Marjorie in the background taking
anything he left her, he won quite easily, and everything became
pleasant again. Magnet gloated upon Marjorie and served her like a
missionary giving Bibles to heathen children, he seemed always looking
at her instead of the ball, and except for a slight disposition on the
part of Daffy to slash, nothing could have been more delightful. And at
supper Mr. Pope, rather crushing his wife's attempt to recapitulate the
more characteristic sayings and doings of Sir Rupert and his friend, did
after all succeed in giving every one a very good idea indeed of the
more remarkable incidents of the cricket match at Wamping, and made the
pun he had been accustomed to use upon the name of Wiper in a new and
improved form. A general talk about cricket and the Immense Good of
cricket followed. Mr. Pope said he would make cricket-playing compulsory
for every English boy.
Everyone it seemed to Marjorie was forgetting that dark shape athwart
the lawn, and all the immense implication of its presence, with a
deliberate and irrational skill, and she noted that the usual move
towards the garden at the end of the evening was not made.