"What are you doing?" I asked. "Playing tennis?"
"No," he said. "I am just practising against the side of the house. It
improves your game wonderfully."
"It don't improve my night's rest," I answered somewhat surlily I fear.
"I came down here for peace and quiet. Can't you do it in the daytime?"
"Daytime!" he laughed. "Why it has been daytime for the last two hours.
Never mind, I'll go round the other side."
He disappeared round the corner, and set to work at the back, where he
woke up the dog. I heard another window smash, followed by a sound as of
somebody getting up violently in a distant part of the house, and shortly
afterwards I must have fallen asleep again.
I had come to spend a few weeks at a boarding establishment in Deal. He
was the only other young man in the house, and I was naturally thrown a
good deal upon his society. He was a pleasant, genial young fellow, but
he would have been better company had he been a little less enthusiastic
as regards tennis.
He played tennis ten hours a day on the average. He got up romantic
parties to play it by moonlight (when half his time was generally taken
up in separating his opponents), and godless parties to play it on
Sundays. On wet days I have seen him practising services by himself in a
mackintosh and goloshes.
He had been spending the winter with his people at Tangiers, and I asked
him how he liked the place.
"Oh, a beast of a hole!" he replied. "There is not a court anywhere in
the town. We tried playing on the roof, but the _mater_ thought it
dangerous."
Switzerland he had been delighted with. He counselled me next time I
went to stay at Zermatt.
"There is a capital court at Zermatt," he said. "You might almost fancy
yourself at Wimbledon."
A mutual acquaintance whom I subsequently met told me that at the top of
the Jungfrau he had said to him, his eyes fixed the while upon a small
snow plateau enclosed by precipices a few hundred feet below them--
"By Jove! That wouldn't make half a bad little tennis court--that flat
bit down there. Have to be careful you didn't run back too far."
When he was not playing tennis, or practising tennis, or reading about
tennis, he was talking about tennis. Renshaw was the prominent figure in
the tennis world at that time, and he mentioned Renshaw until there grew
up within my soul a dark desire to kill Renshaw in a quiet,
unostentatious way, and bury him.
One drenching afternoon he talked tennis to me for three hours on end,
referring to Renshaw, so far as I kept count, four thousand nine hundred
and thirteen times. After tea he drew his chair to the window beside me,
and commenced--
"Have you ever noticed how Renshaw--"