A FINE DAY
I
It was a fine day. Jeremy, waking and turning over in his bed, could see
beyond and above Stokesley’s slumbering form a thin strip of pale blue
sky gleaming like a sudden revelation of water behind folds of amber
mist. It would be a real thumping autumn day and he was to play half for
the first fifteen against The Rest that afternoon. He also had three
hundred lines to do for the French master that he had not even begun,
and it must be handed up completed at exactly 11.30 that same morning.
He had also every chance of swapping a silver frame containing a
photograph of his Aunt Amy with Phipps minor for a silver pencil, and he
was to have half Raseley’s sausage for breakfast that morning in return
for mathematical favours done for him on the preceding day. As he
thought of all these various things he rolled round like a kitten in his
bed, curling up as it was his pleasantest habit into a ball so that his
toes nearly met his forehead and he was one exquisite lump of warmth.
Rending through this came the harsh sound of the first bell, murmurs
from other rooms, patterings down the passage, and then suddenly both
Stokesley and Raikes sitting up in bed simultaneously, yawning and
looking like bewildered owls. In precisely five minutes the three boys
were washed, dressed and down, herding with the rest in the long cold
class-room waiting for call-over. When they had answered their names
they slipped across the misty playground into chapel and sat there like
all their companions in a confused state of half sleep, half
wakefulness, responding as it were in a dream, screaming out the hymn
and then all shuffling off to breakfast again like shadows in a Japanese
pageant.
It was not, in fact, until the first five minutes at breakfast, when
Raseley strongly resisted the appeal for half his sausage, that Jeremy
woke to the full labours of the day. Raseley was sitting almost opposite
to him and he had a very nice sausage, large and fat and properly
cracked in the middle. Jeremy’s sausage was a very small one, so that,
whereas on other days he might have passed over the whole episode, being
of a very generous nature, to-day he was compelled to insist on his
rights. “I didn’t,” protested Raseley. “I said you could have half a
sausage if you did the sums, and you only did two and a half.”
“I did them all,” said Jeremy stoutly. “It wasn’t my fault that that
beastly fraction one was wrong. I only said I’d do them. I never said
I’d do them right.”
“Well, you can jolly well come and fetch it,” said Raseley, pursuing in
the circumstances the wisest plan, which was to eat his sausage as fast
as he could.
“All right,” said Jeremy indifferently. “You know what you’ll get
afterwards if you don’t do what you said,” and this was bold of Jeremy
because he was smaller than Raseley, but he was learning already whom he
might threaten and whom he might not, and he knew that Raseley was as
terrified of physical pain as Aunt Amy was of a cow in a field. With
very bad grace Raseley pushed the smaller half of the sausage across,
and Jeremy felt that his day was well begun.
He did not know why, but he was sure that this would be a splendid day.
There are days when you feel that you are under a special care of the
gods and that they are arranging everything for you, background,
incident, crisis, and sleep at the end in a most delightful, generous
fashion. Nothing would go wrong to-day.
On the whole, human beings are divided into the two classes of those who
realize when they may step out and challenge life, and those to whom one
occasion is very much the same as another.
Jeremy, even when he was eight years old and had sat in his sister
Helen’s chair on his birthday morning, had always realized when to step
out. He was going to step out now.
The insufferable Baltimore, who was a wonderful cricketer and therefore
rose to great glories in the summer term, but was no footballer at all,
and equally, therefore, was less than the dust in the autumn, came with
his watery eyes and froggy complexion to ask Jeremy to lend him
twopence. Jeremy had at that moment threepence, but there were a number
of things that he intended to do with it. Because he detested Baltimore
he lent him his twopence with the air of Queen Elizabeth accepting Sir
Walter Raleigh’s cloak, and got exquisite pleasure from doing so. All
these little things, therefore, combined to put him in the best of
spirits when, at half-past eleven, Monsieur Clemenceau (not then a name
known the wide world over) requested Monsieur Cole to be kind enough to
allow him to peruse the three hundred lines which should have been done
several days before so admirably provided by him.
Jeremy wore the cloak of innocence, sitting in the back row of the
French class with several of his dearest friends and all the class ready
to support him in any direction that he might follow.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Jeremy said. “Did you say three hundred
lines?”
“That is the exact amount,” said M. Clemenceau, “that I require from you
_immediatement_.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Jeremy politely.
“I need not repeat,” said M. Clemenceau. “Three hundred lines by you at
once for impertinence three days previous.”
“Why, sir, surely,” said Jeremy, “you told me that I need not do them
this term because . . .”
“No because,” interrupted M. Clemenceau at the top of a rather squeaky
voice. “There is no because.”
“But, sir,” began Jeremy; and from all sides of the class there broke
out: “Why, certainly, sir, don’t you remember——” and “Cole is quite
right, sir; you said——” and “I think you’ve forgotten, sir, that——”
and “It really wouldn’t be fair, sir, if——” A babel arose. As the boys
very well knew, M. Clemenceau had a horror of too much noise, because
Thompson was holding a class in the next room, and on two occasions that
very term had sent a boy in to request that if it were possible M.
Clemenceau should conduct his work a little more softly. And this had
been agony for M. Clemenceau’s proud French spirit. “I will have
silence,” he shrieked. “This is no one’s business but mine and the young
Cole. Let no one speak until I tell them to do so. Now, Cole, where are
the three hundred lines?”
There was a complete and absolute silence.
“Vill you speak or vill you not speak?” M. Clemenceau cried.
“Do you mean me, sir?” asked Jeremy very innocently.
“Of course, I mean you.”
“You said, sir, that no one was to speak until you told them to.”
“Well, I tell you now.”
Jeremy looked very injured. “I didn’t understand,” he said. “If I could
explain to you quietly.”
“Well, you shall explain afterwards,” said M. Clemenceau, and Jeremy
knew that he was saved because he could deal _à deux_ with M. Clemenceau
by appealing to his French heart, his sense of honour, and a number of
other things, and might even, with good fortune, extract an invitation
to tea, when M. Clemenceau, in his very cosy room, had a large supply of
muffins and played on the flute. “Yes,” he thought to himself as they
pursued up and down the class-room, sometimes ten at a time, sometimes
only three or four, the intricacies of that French grammar that has to
do with the pen of my aunt and the cat of my sister-in-law and “this is
going to be a splendid day.”
II
Coming out of school at half-past twelve, he found to his exquisite
delight that there was a letter for him. He was, of course, far from
that grown-up attitude of terror and misgiving at the sight of the daily
post. Not for him yet were bills and unwelcome reminiscence, broken
promises and half-veiled threats. He received from his mother one letter
a week, from his father perhaps three a term, and from his sister Mary
an occasional confused scribbling that, like her stories, introduced so
many characters one after another that the most you obtained from them
was a sense of life and of people passing and of Mary’s warm and
emotional heart. Once and again he had a letter from Uncle Samuel, and
these were the real glories. It was natural that on this day of days
there should be such a letter. The very sight of his uncle’s
handwriting—a thin, spidery one that was in some mysterious way charged
with beauty and colour—cockled his heart and made him warm all over. He
sat in a corner of the playground where he was least likely to be
disturbed and read it. It was as follows. It began abruptly, as did all
Uncle Samuel’s letters:
Your mother has just taken your Aunt Amy to Drymouth on a
shopping expedition. The house is so quiet you wouldn’t know it.
I am painting a very nice picture of two cows in a blue field.
The cows are red. If you were here I would put you into the
picture as a dog asleep under a tree. Because you aren’t here, I
have to take that wretched animal of yours and use him instead.
He is not nearly as like a dog as you are. I had two sausages
for breakfast because your Aunt Amy is going to be away for two
whole days. I generally have only one sausage and now just about
five o’clock this evening I shall have indigestion which will be
one more thing I shall owe your Aunt Amy. The woman came in
yesterday and washed the floor of the studio. It looks beastly,
but I shall soon make it dirty again, and if only you were here
it would get dirty quicker. There’s a rumour that your Uncle
Percy is coming back to stay with us again. I am training your
dog to bite the sort of trousers that your Uncle Percy wears. I
have a pair very like his and I draw them across the floor very
slowly and make noises to your dog like a cat. The plan is very
successful but to-morrow there won’t be any trousers and I shall
have to think of something else. Mrs. Sampson asked your mother
whether she thought that I would like to paint a portrait of her
little girl. I asked your mother how much money Mrs. Sampson
would give me for doing so and your mother asked Mrs. Sampson.
Mrs. Sampson said that if she liked it when it was done she’d
hang it up in her drawing-room where everybody could see and
that that would be such a good advertisement for me that there
wouldn’t need to be any payment, so I told your mother to tell
Mrs. Sampson that I was so busy sweeping a crossing just now
that I was afraid I wouldn’t have time to paint her daughter.
When I have done these cows, if they turn out really well,
perhaps I’ll send the best of them to Mrs. Sampson and tell her
that that’s the best portrait of her daughter I was capable of
doing. Some people in Paris like my pictures very much and two
of them have been hanging in an exhibition and people have to
pay to go in and see them. I sold one of them for fifty pounds
and therefore I enclose a little bit of paper which if you take
it to the right person will help you buy enough sweets to make
yourself sick for a whole week. Don’t tell your mother I’ve done
this.
Your sister Mary is breaking out into spots. She has five on her
forehead. I think it’s because she sucks her pencil so hard.
Your sister Barbara tumbled all the way down the stairs
yesterday but didn’t seem to mind. She is the best of the family
and shortly I intend to invite her into the studio and let her
lick my paint box.
Outside my window at this moment there is an apple tree and the
hills are red, the same colour as the apples. Someone is burning
leaves and the smoke turns red as it gets high enough and then
comes white again when it gets near the moon, which is a new one
and exactly like one of your Aunt Amy’s eyelashes.
I am getting so fat that I think of living in a barrel, as a
very famous man about whom I’ll tell you one day, used to do. I
think I’ll have a barrel with a lid on the top of it so that
when people come into the studio whom I don’t want to see, I
shall just shut the lid and they won’t know I’m there. I think
I’ll have the barrel painted bright blue.
Your dog thinks there’s a rat just behind my bookcase. He lies
there for hours at a time purring like a kettle. There may be a
rat but knowing life as well as I do there never is a rat where
you most expect one. That’s one of the things your father hasn’t
learnt yet. He is writing his sermon in his study. If he knew
there weren’t any rats he wouldn’t write so many sermons.
I’ve been reading a very funny book by a man called France, and
the funny thing is that he is also a Frenchman. Isn’t that a
funny thing? You shall read it one day when you’re older and
then you’ll understand your Uncle Samuel better than you do now.
Well, good-bye. I hope you’re enjoying yourself and haven’t
entirely forgotten your
UNCLE.
P.S.—I promise you that the lid shall never be on the barrel
when you’re there, and if you don’t get too fat, there’s room
for two inside.
He read the letter through three times before finishing with it; then,
sitting forward on the old wooden bench scarred with a thousand
penknives, he went over the delicious details of it. How exactly Uncle
Samuel realized the things that he would want to know! No one else in
the family wrote about anything that was exciting or intriguing. Uncle
Samuel managed in some way to make you see things. The studio, the sky
with the little moon, the red apples, Hamlet flat on the floor, his head
rigid, his eyes fixed; Aunt Amy shopping in Drymouth, Barbara tumbling
downstairs. That whole world came towards him and filled the playground
and blotted out the school, so that for a moment school life was unreal,
shadowy, and did not matter. He sighed with happy contentment. Young
though he was, he realized that great truth that one person in the world
is quite enough. One human being who understands your strange mixture
equalizes five million who think you are simply black, white or purple.
All you want is to be reassured about your own suspicions of yourself. A
devoted dog is almost enough, and one friend ample. Jeremy went in to
dinner with his head in the air, trailing after him, like Peter Pan, one
shadow of the world immediately around him, the world in which the
school sergeant was carving the mutton at the end of the table so
ferociously that it might have been the corpse of his dearest enemy, and
the masters at the high table were getting fried potatoes and the boys
only boiled, and Jeremy was not having even those because he had got to
play football in an hour’s time; and the other world, where there was
Aunt Amy’s eyelash high in the air, and the cathedral bells ringing, and
Uncle Samuel painting cows. Jeremy would have liked to consider the
strange way in which these two worlds refused to mingle, to have
developed the idea of Uncle Samuel carving the mutton instead of the
sergeant, and the sergeant watching the evening sky instead of Uncle
Samuel, and why it was that these two things were so impossible! His
attention was occupied by the fact that Plummy Smith, who was a fat boy,
was sitting in his wrong place and making a “squash” on Jeremy’s side of
the table, which led quite naturally to the game of trying to squeeze
Plummy from both ends of the table into a purple mass, and to do it
without Thompson noticing. Little pathetic squeals came from Plummy, who
loved his food, and saw his mutton mysteriously whisked away on to some
other plate, and knew that he would be hungry all the afternoon in
consequence. He was one of those boys who had on the first day of his
arrival, a year earlier, unfortunately confided to those whom he thought
his friends that he lived with two aunts, Maria and Alice. His fate was
sealed from the moment of that unfortunate confidence. He did not know
it, and he had been in puzzled bewilderment ever since as to why the way
of life was made so hard for him. He meant no one any harm, and could
not understand why the lower half of his person should be a constant
receptacle for pins of the sharpest kind. The point in this matter about
Jeremy was that, as with Miss Jones years before, he could not resist
pleasant fun at the expense of the foolish. He had enough of the wild
animal in him to enjoy sticking pins into Plummy, to enjoy squeezing the
breath out of his fat body, to enjoy seeing him without any mutton; and
yet, had it been really brought home to him that Plummy was a miserable
boy, sick for his aunts, dazed and puzzled, spending his days in an orgy
of ink, impositions and physical pain, he would have been horrified that
himself could be such a cad. He was not a cad. It was a fine day, he was
in splendid health and spirits, he had had a letter from Uncle Samuel,
and so he stuck pins into Plummy.
When the meal was over he walked down to the football ground with Riley,
and told him about Uncle Samuel. He told Riley everything, and Riley
told him everything. He never considered Riley as an individual human
being, but rather as part of himself, so that if he were kicked in the
leg it must hurt Riley too; and there was something in Riley’s funny
freckled forehead, his large mouth, and his funny, clumsy way of
walking, as though he were a baby elephant, that was as necessary to
Jeremy and his daily life as putting on his clothes and going to sleep.
He showed Riley the piece of paper that Uncle Samuel had sent to him.
“By gosh!” said Riley, “that’s a pound.”
“It’s an awful pity,” said Jeremy, “that you are not in Little Dorm.
Perhaps you could come in to-night. I’m sure Stokesley and Pug wouldn’t
mind. We’re going to have sardines and marmalade and dough-nuts.”
“If I get a chance, I will,” said Riley; “but I don’t want to be caught
out just now, because I’ve been in two rows already this week. Perhaps
you could keep two sardines for me, and I’ll have them at breakfast
to-morrow.”
“All right; I’ll try,” said Jeremy. He looked about and sniffed the air.
It was an ideal day for football. It was cold, and not too cold. The
hills above the football field were veiled in mist. The ground was soft,
but not too soft. It ought to be a good game.
“Do you feel all right?” asked Riley.
They proceeded in the accustomed manner to test this. Jeremy hurled
himself at Riley, caught him round the middle, tried to twine his legs
round Riley’s, and they both fell to the ground. They rolled there like
two puppies. Jeremy exerted all his strength to bring off what he had
never yet succeeded in doing, namely, to turn Riley over and pin his
elbows to the ground. Riley wriggled like a fish. Jeremy was very strong
to-day, and managed to get one elbow down and was in a very good way
towards the other when they heard an awful voice above them. “And what
may this be?” They scrambled to their feet, flushed and breathless, and
there was old Thompson staring at them very gravely in that way that he
had so that you could not tell whether he were displeased or no.
“We were only wrestling, sir,” said Jeremy, panting.
“Excellent thing for your clothes,” said Thompson. “What do you suppose
the gym is for?”
“It was only a minute, sir,” said Riley. “Cole wanted to see whether he
was all right.”
“And he is?” asked Thompson.
Jeremy perceived that Olympus was smiling.
“I’m a little out of breath,” he said, “but of course it’s just after
dinner. The ground isn’t muddy yet.”
“You’d better wait until you’re in football things,” Thompson said,
“then you can roll about as much as you like.”
He walked away, rolling a little as he went. The two boys looked after
him and suddenly adored him. Their feelings about him were always
undergoing lightning changes. At one moment they adored, at another they
detested, at another they admired from a distance, and at another they
wondered.
“Wasn’t that decent of him?” said Riley.
“That’s because he’s just had his dinner,” said Jeremy. “It’s his glass
of beer. My uncle’s just the same.”
“Oh, you and your uncle,” said Riley. “I’ll race you to the end of the
playground.”
They ran like hares, and Jeremy led by a second.
III
He was in the changing-room when suddenly the atmosphere of the coming
game was close about him. He had that strange mixture of fear and
excitement, terror and pleasure. He suddenly felt cold in his jersey and
shorts, and shivered a little. At the other side of the room was
Turnbull, one of the three-quarters playing for the “Rest,” a large,
bony boy with projecting knees. The mere thought that he would have in
all probability to collar Turnbull and bring him to the ground made
Jeremy feel sick. His confidence suddenly deserted him. He knew that he
was going to play badly. Worse than ever in his life before. He wished
that he could suddenly develop scarlet fever and be carried off to the
infirmary. He even searched his bare legs for spots. He had rather a
headache and his throat felt queer, and he was not at all sure that he
could see straight. One of those silly fools who always comes and talks
to you at the wrong moment sniggered and said he felt awfully fit. It
was all right for _him_; he was one of the forwards playing for the
“Rest.” It would be perfectly easy for him to hide himself in the scrum
and pretend to be pushing when he was not. No one ever noticed. But the
isolation of a half was an awful thing to consider, and that desperate
moment when you had to go down to the ball, with at least five hundred
enormous boots all coming at your head at the same moment, was horrible
to contemplate. Millett, the scrum half playing for the “Rest,” and
Jeremy’s bitterest rival for the place in the fifteen, was looking
supremely self-confident and assured. Certainly he was not as good as
Jeremy on Jeremy’s day, but was this Jeremy’s day? No, most certainly it
was not.
They went out to the field, and everything was not improved by the fact
that a large crowd was gathered behind the ropes to watch them. This was
an important game. The big school match was a fortnight from to-day, and
Millett might get his colours on to-day’s game quite easily. And then
suddenly the feel of the turf under his feet, the long, sweeping
distance of the good grey sky above his head, the tang of autumn in the
air, brought him confidence again. He was not aware that a lady visitor
who had come out with Mr. Thompson to watch the game was saying at that
moment, “Why, what a tiny boy! You don’t mean to say, Mr. Thompson, that
he’s going to play with all those big fellows?” And Thompson said, “He’s
the most promising footballer we have in the school. The half-back has
to be small, you know.”
“Oh, I do hope he won’t get hurt,” said the lady visitor.
“Won’t do him any harm if he is,” said Mr. Thompson.
The whistle went and the game began. Almost at once Jeremy was in
trouble. Within the first minute the school fifteen were lining out in
their own half of the field, and a moment later some of the “Rest”
forwards had broken through, dribbled, tried to pass, thrown forward,
and there was a scrum within Jeremy’s twenty-five. This is the kind of
thing to make you show your mettle. To be attacked before you have found
your atmosphere, realized the conditions of the day, got your feel of
yourself as part of the picture, gained your first win, to have to fight
for your team’s life with your own goal looming like the gallows just
behind you, and to know that the loss of three or five points in the
first few minutes of the game is very often a decisive factor in the
issue of the battle—all this tests anybody’s greatness. Jeremy in that
first five minutes was anything but great. He had a consciousness of his
own miserable inadequacy, a state not common to him at all. He seemed to
be one large cranium spread out balloon-wise for the onrush of his
enemies. As he darted about at the back of the scrum waiting for the
ball to be thrown in, he felt as though he could not go down to it; and
then, of course, the worst possible thing happened. The “Rest” forwards
broke through the scrum; he tried to fling himself on the ball, and
missed it, and there they were sliding away past him, making straight
for the goal-line. Fortunately, the man with the ball was flung to touch
just in time, and there was a breathing space. Jeremy, nevertheless, was
tingling with his mistake as acutely as though a try had been scored. He
knew what they were saying on the other side of the rope. He knew that
Baltimore, for instance, was winking his bleary eyes with pleasure, that
all the friends of his rival half were saying in chorus, “Well, young
Cole’s no good; I always said so,” and that Riley was glaring fiercely
about him and challenging anyone to say a word. He knew all this and,
unfortunately, for more than a minute had time to think of it, because
one of the cool three-quarters got away with the ball and then kicked it
to touch, and there was a line out and a good deal of scrambling before
the inevitable scrum. This time it was for him to throw in the ball,
crying in his funny voice, now hoarse, now squeaky, “Coming on the
right, school—shove!” They did shove, and carried it on with them; and
then the “Rest” half got it, threw it to one of his three-quarters, who
started racing down the field, with only Jeremy in his way before he got
to the back. It was that very creature with the bony knees whom Jeremy
had watched in the changing-room. The legs wobbled towards him as though
with a life of their own. He ran across, threw himself at the knees, and
missed them. He went sprawling on to the ground, was conscious that he
had banged his nose, that somebody near him was calling out “Butters,”
and that his career as a football half was finally and for ever
concluded. After that he could do nothing right. The ball seemed
devilishly to slip away from him whenever he approached it. He was
filled with a demon of anger, but that did not serve him. He again went
now here, now there, and always he seemed to be doing the wrong thing.
For once that strange sure knowledge innate in him, part of his blood
and his bones, of the right, inevitable thing to do, had left him, and
he could only act on impulse and hope that it would turn out well, which
it never did. The captain, who was a forward, pausing beside him for a
moment, said, “Go on, Cole, you can play better than that.” He knew that
his worst forebodings were fulfilled.
Then just before the whistle went for half-time, just when he was at his
busiest, he had a curious, distinct picture of Uncle Samuel, the red
apple tree, and Hamlet lying on the floor of the studio waiting for his
rat. People talk about concentration and its importance, and nobody who
has ever played a game well but will agree that to let your mind wander
at a very critical moment is fatal; but this was not so much the actual
wandering of a mind as of a curious insistence from without of this
other picture that went with the scene in which he was figuring. It was
like the pouring of cold clear water upon his hot and muddled brain. It
was also as though Uncle Samuel, in his thick, good-natured voice, had
said to him, “Now, look here, I know nothing about this silly game that
you’re trying to play, but I’m here to see you go through it, and the
two of us together it’s impossible to beat.” The whistle went before he
had time to realize the effects of this little intrusion. He stood about
during the interval talking to no one, wishing he were dead, but
armoured in a cold resolve. After all, he would not write to Uncle
Samuel and tell him that he had been left out of the school fifteen
because he had not played well enough. No one as yet had scored. The
teams seemed to be very evenly matched, which was a bad thing for the
school. Everyone in the school team was depressed, and the men in the
“Rest” were equally elated. If the whole truth were known, the play in
the first half had been very ragged indeed, but, as Mr. Thompson
explained to the lady visitor, “You mustn’t expect anything else early
in the term.” She made the fatuous remark that “after all, they were
such _little_ boys,” which made Mr. Thompson reply, with more heat than
true politeness required, that his boys, even though they were all under
fourteen, could on their day show as good a game as any public school,
to which the lady visitor replied that she was sure that they could—she
thought they played wonderfully for such little boys.
The whistle sounded, and the game tumbled about, up and down, in and
out. Jeremy knew now that all was well. His “game sense” had suddenly
come back to him, and the ball seemed to know its master, to tumble to
him just when he wanted it, to stick in his hands when he touched it,
and even to smile at him when it was quite a long way away, as though it
were saying to him, “I’m yours now, and you can do what you like with
me.” He brought off a neat piece of collaring, then a little later
passed the ball back to his three-quarters, who got, for the first time
that day, a clear run, leading to a try in the far corner of the field.
Then there came a moment when all the “Rest” forwards were dribbling the
ball, the school forwards at their heels, but not fast enough to stop
their opponents; and he was down on the ball, had it packed tight under
his arm, lying flat upon it, and the whole world of boots, legs, knees,
bodies seemed to charge over him. A queer sensation that was, everything
falling upon him as though the ceiling of the world had suddenly
collapsed. Then the sensation of being buried deep in the ground, bodies
wriggling and heaving on top of him, his nose, chin, eyes deep in earth,
some huge leg with a gigantic boot at the end of it hovering like a wild
animal just above his head; and then the whistle and the sudden clearing
of the ground away from him; his impulse to move, and his discovery that
his right leg hurt like a piercing sword. He tried to rise, and could
not. He was quite alone now, the sky and the wind, the field and the
distant hills encircling him, with nobody else in the world. The game
stopped, people came back to him. They felt his leg, and it hurt
desperately, but not, he knew at once, so desperately that he never
would be able to use it again. They rubbed his calf and jerked his knee.
He heard somebody say, “Only a kick—no bones broken,” and he set his
teeth and stumbled to his feet and stood for a moment feeling exquisite
pain. Then, like an old man of ninety, tottered along. At this there was
universal applause from behind the ropes. There were cries of “Well
stopped, Stocky! Good old Stocky!” and he would not have exchanged that
moment for all the prizes in the bookshop or all the tuckshops in
Europe. “Are you all right?” his captain shouted across to him. He
nodded his head because he certainly would have burst into tears if he
had spoken, and he was biting his lower lip until his teeth seemed to go
through to his gums. But, in that marvellous fashion that all
footballers know, his leg became with every movement easier, and
although there was a dull, grinding pain there, he found he could move
about quite easily and soon was in the thick of it once more. He was
only a “limper” to the end of that game, but he did one or two things
quite nicely, and had the happiness of seeing the school score another
two tries, which put the issue of the game beyond doubt. At the end,
after cheers had been given and returned, the pain in his leg reasserted
itself once more, and he could only limp very feebly off the field, but
he had the delirious happiness of the captain—who was going to Rugby
next year, and was therefore very nearly a man—putting his hand on his
shoulder and saying, “That was a plucky game of yours, Cole. Hope your
leg isn’t bad.”
“Oh, it isn’t bad at all, thank you,” he said very politely. “I almost
don’t feel it,” which was a terrific lie. He had done well. He knew that
from the comments on every side of him. The crowd had forgotten his
earlier failure, which, if he had only known it, should have taught him
that word of wisdom invaluable to artists and sportsmen alike: “Don’t be
discouraged by a bad beginning. It’s the last five minutes that count.”
Finally there was Riley. “You didn’t play badly,” he said. “You were
better than Millett.”
IV
Later he was sitting with Riley, squashed into a corner of Magg’s,
eating dough-nuts. The crowd in there was terrific and the atmosphere
like a slab of chocolate. Riley and he were pressed close together, with
boys on every side of them. The noise was deafening. It was the last ten
minutes before Magg’s closed. It was Saturday evening, and everyone had
pocket-money. The two boys did not speak to one another. Jeremy’s leg
was hurting him horribly, but he was as happy as “Five kings and a
policeman,” which was one of Uncle Samuel’s ridiculous, meaningless
phrases. His arm was round Riley’s neck, more for support than for
sentiment, but he did _like_ Riley and he did _like_ Magg’s. He was,
perhaps, at that moment as completely alive as he was ever to be. He was
so small that he was almost entirely hidden, but somebody caught sight
of his hair, which would never lie down flat, and cried across the room,
“Three cheers for Stocky, the football hero!” The cheers were hearty if
a little absent-minded, the main business of the moment being food, and
not football. Jeremy, of course, was pleased, and in his pleasure
overbalanced from the edge of the table where he was sitting, slipped
forward, and disappeared from men. His leg hurt him too much, and he was
too comfortable on the floor and too generally sleepy to bother to get
up again, so he stayed there, his arm round Riley’s leg, swallowing his
last dough-nut as slowly as possible, feeling that he would like to give
dough-nuts in general to all the world.
Yes, it had been a _fine_ day, a splendid day, and there would be days
and days and days. . . .
Magg’s was closing. He limped to his feet, and, with their arms round
one another’s necks, Riley and he vanished into the dark.
PRINTED BY
CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED,
LA BELLE SAUVAGE, LONDON, E. C.4.
F85.823
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.
Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.