The lonely plough

It was still scarcely day when he heard the house rouse to action, and dragged his miserable body out of bed for a look at the weather. He had not slept much—most of the night he had been toying with an imaginary hockey-stick in a dull stupor—but every time he had waked to acute consciousness he had been certain that the rain was dripping heavily down the pane. He would have been bitterly disappointed if Harriet’s hockey-match had been frustrated, and that little ecstasy of five minutes had slipped his reach. But he might have remembered that Harriet always got everything she wanted—almost everything; little things like weather and Rural District Councillorships, anyhow. And certainly it was not raining now, though the brightening earth had a watery look which would be dried presently from its clean, green face, sparkling through its veil of soft, gray air, and clothed around with the dark zone of wood. It was going to be just the right sort of day for hockey, with the ground springy and true, and the air soft but strong, and all the little spring-voices calling to you as you line up, light and free. He wondered what sort of a stick Lanty would be able to find him, and hoped it wouldn’t be a Bulger. You wanted something lighter and whippier to bring that point-twist off properly. But of course it would be a Bulger. It was just the right sort of steady whacker for a respectable person like a land agent, playing back. He was absolutely certain Lancaster had played back. He always seemed to be behind things, somehow, on guard and keeping watch.

Then he heard Hamer’s voice in the passage, and realised suddenly that he was very cold, and the bed a terribly long way off. However, he got back there all right, and was busily reminding himself about the nice, quiet day, and trying not to think of the Bulger, when Hamer knocked and entered. How was he? Oh, topping, thanks! Just a bit tired, though. Hoped they’d excuse him for not showing to see them off. Would get up after a bit and have a nice, quiet breakfast. It was awfully decent of them to think they would miss him, but he was sure the Show atmosphere would have bowled him over at once. He hoped Hamer would buy that motor lawn-roller they were advertising. It would save the gardeners a lot of work, and he might lend it to Harriet, perhaps, for the hock—well, why on earth shouldn’t he say “hockey-ground”? The motor-roller kept his host off the guest’s health for the next five minutes, and by that time the car was at the door.

He had handled Hamer rather artistically, he thought, sinking back with somewhat weary satisfaction, and then came Dandy’s fingers drumming lightly on the panel.

Was he better? Sure he was better? If he didn’t say it more convincingly than that, nothing on earth would induce her to leave him. She wasn’t half-certain she wanted to go, as it was! But it was going to be a lovely day, and she loved the long run, and of course she loved the aeroplanes and the lovely, big cars—

“In fact, God’s in His Heaven, and no doubt about it, my lovely dear!” Wiggie observed sadly to his sorry self, and, because the panel was between them, put into his hearty wish for her day’s happiness all the melody of the beautiful things he would never say to her now as long as she lived. And then there came the pulsing roar of the car beneath his window, throttled down after to a steady purr, and the big wheels gripped the drive and slurred off and out into the distance. He lay in bed, listening to the sudden silence of the house, and feeling in every nerve the desolation of being left behind.

After an argument—carried on, it seemed, independently of his own brain—between a body which flatly refused to arise, and something brandishing threats with faces like Harriet’s—he found the body dressed and at breakfast, by some curious conjuring, and feeling a little braver and bigger by virtue of a large bath, strong coffee and the bright morning. Blenkinship’s Marget waited on him with ardent devotion, and he began hastily to lay his evil plans, seeing sofa-cushions and beaten-up eggs quite plainly in her yearning eye. With a royal air he ordered the limousine and the under-chauffeur for ten minutes to eleven.

Blenkinship’s Marget stared, as well she might, for although she knew that everything at Watters was entirely at Mr. Wigmore’s service, down to the last salt-spoon, he had never so much as ordered a wheelbarrow before. Wiggie read the newspaper upside down, and tried not to look as though he knew she was staring.

“I thought you’d to keep quiet, sir, to-day, if you’ll excuse my mentioning it,” she ventured at last, “and you’re looking that poorly, it fair makes my heart ache! There’s them two gents., too, as was to call at eleven. You’ll just miss them.”

“No, Marget, I shall not!” he replied firmly. “I shall meet them on the road, and so you will be saved answering the bell. And we shall both be saved having to throw them out of the house, because they will never be inside it. You can’t say it isn’t keeping quiet to sit perfectly still on a padded seat while things called spiggots and stub-axles and tappets and gudgeon-pins pull you along. And I’m looking poorly this morning because you didn’t bring me that treacle-posset you promised, yesterday. You can’t expect me to be very hearty and blooming after screaming with hunger all night.”

Marget looked conscience-stricken, and then brightened. The treacle-posset might atone in some measure for the lack of egg-and-sofa treatment.

“You shall have it this evening, sir, honest and faithful! I thought it was only your bit of joke. Then you’ll see the gents., sir?”

“Oh, I’ll certainly see them!” Wiggie promised cheerfully. “And look here, Marget, if they come worrying again to the house and make out they haven’t met me, just pretend you’re all dead or something, will you, and keep on keeping out of the way? I’ve to have a nice, quiet day, you know—master’s orders!”

And see them he did, meet them he did, quite five minutes before their time, just as the limousine had cleared Watters and settled down into the straight. But it is quite easy to see and yet not be seen in a closed car with a deep back seat, and at the wheel an enthusiastic under-chauffeur, blessed with the Heaven-sent chance of “letting her rip.” Wiggie was over at Crabtree asking for garments by the time the “two gents.” had finished knocking and peering at an apparently deserted house. As they were leaving, in intense irritation and disgust, they met a gardener’s boy, who told them that the whole family had gone to the Show. Which Show? “Why, t’ gert ’un i’ Manchester, o’ coorse!” Mr. Wigmore, too? Yes, certainly Mr. Wigmore, too. The gardener’s boy was always at least twenty-four hours behind the clock, so his knowledge of Wiggie’s indisposition was not due for some time yet.

The wily quarry found Helwise in the attic, hunting for the shirt and shorts that she had assured Lanty were safe in the green ottoman on the front landing. She had believed her own statement quite honestly, and as Lancaster was in a hurry, he believed he believed it, too, which he would not have done in a calmer moment, but no amount of belief had conjured the garments into the ottoman. Wiggie joined in the search with zest, and though it was not Wiggie’s attic, it was certainly Wiggie who suggested twenty hiding-places and discovered the treasure in the twenty-first. And after Lanty’s hockey-stick had been run to earth in the jam-cupboard, it was nearly lunch-time, so at Miss Lancaster’s request the borrower stayed to join her at the scrapings of something potted. She was driving over to the match in any case, so he sent the car home and changed in Lanty’s room. He fell asleep by the dining-room fire while he was waiting for Helwise to decide whether she looked more sporting in her own golf jersey or Lanty’s aquascutem, and dreamed he was the sparking-plug in a very large motor-roller at the Show, over which Dandy’s face was bent in earnest struggle after comprehension. Hamer had bought the motor-roller, and wished to see it roll something, if only a little Manchester mud, so it was trotted out and set to work, and then everything went to smithereens in a hundred and forty different directions, and he could hear Dandy’s voice, far and very far off, remarking: “Something wrong with the sparking-plug! I knew it last night on the stairs!”

He woke gasping and clutching at things, and if Helwise (in Lanty’s ’scutem) had been anybody but Helwise, she would have rung all the bells and ordered doctors and hot bottles and brandy, but instead she asked him to button her gloves, and thought him tiresomely stupid and fumbling as she tried to see exactly how sporting she looked in the sideboard mirror.

He felt better again, however, as they jogged along to the ground, and began to experience joyful thrills as strenuous figures with bare knees and flapping overcoats push-biked past them, armed with sticks. He drew his own from under the rug so that the push-bikers could see it. It was a Bulger, as he had anticipated, slightly elegantised by wear and tear, but a Bulger for all that. Still, it might possibly bring off the twist all right, if he hurried it a bit.

The field under the farm was already dotted by the red shirts of the opposing team, and a sprinkling of spectators edged the neat touch-lines. The white-topped Bluecastrians were grouped beside the little pigeon-house of a pavilion (where at least two people who liked each other might have found room to shelter) listening to Harriet’s barked directions. When the trap drove up, she looked at a very strong watch on her wrist so emphatically that Helwise tried to leap the wheel, and tore Lanty’s ’scutem on the lamp-bracket.

The home team stared curiously at Wiggie as he came in, carrying a few mufflers and a camp-stool belonging to Helwise, for half of them had heard him sing, the day before, and the half that hadn’t wished it had, while both halves had just been told by Harriet that of course he wouldn’t be the slightest use in the game, so that they must all back him as much as they could. Certainly, he did not give an impression of superfluous strength; indeed, when he had taken off his coat, he looked as fragile and hopeless an athlete as you could possibly expect to see, so much so that the brawny captain-back of the opposing side came up and implored Harriet to “put it somewhere where I can’t hit it!”

Wiggie didn’t hear him, but he wouldn’t have cared if he had. The soft, bright air was wine in his blood. The press of the spring turf lent him a buoyancy not his own. The strength of union, of interdependence and support, put fire into his slack muscles. He stole the ball from the red shirts when it shot out suddenly from the circle, and was trying to persuade the Bulger that he had always belonged to it, when Harriet stalked up. She looked very trim and hard and clean and extremely well put together. You could picture her lasting through half-a-dozen matches without losing so much as a hairpin.

“Where do you want to play?” she demanded. “You’d better go and stand about somewhere at the back, hadn’t you? I’m putting all the strength into the attack—it’s the only thing to do with this team. Johnson” (the brawny captain) “loses his head if you keep on nagging at him. Suppose you take the right, and mark that little black-headed curate on their left outer? You’ll be worth your salt if you only keep him occupied. He’s a terror! Cut him over the shins if he won’t behave. There’s plenty of weft in that stick of yours.”

Wiggie twiddled the Bulger discontentedly, showing the “L. Lancaster” cut clearly on the blade. A tinge of colour came into Harriet’s face.

“It’s too heavy!” he murmured mournfully. “You see, when you get going up the field, it’s always just a second behind your wrist——” He tried to execute a double twist that didn’t come off. Harriet looked scornful.

“You don’t need to ‘get going’ when you’re back. All you’ve got to do is to let out, but I suppose you won’t be able to clear far. And if the thing tires you”—she looked down casually at her own lighter, handier weapon—“I don’t mind changing. An ounce or so makes no odds to me!”

“Oh, but I shouldn’t dream—I didn’t mean——!” Wiggie protested, and then stopped. “If you’re sure you don’t mind, I dare say I should get on ever so much better.”

Harriet did not mind. You could see how little she minded, running her firm fingers along the rubber where Lancaster’s hands had so often gripped. Wiggie tried the double twist with ecstatic success.

“This’ll do me all right.” Harriet tucked the stick under her arm with a kind of savage shame. “By the way, of course you know Lanty let me in, too? I’ve the rottenest lot of friends anywhere—barring you, of course! You’ve been a sport. Very well, then, you get along back and do what you can if anything comes your way. Johnson won’t have to worry about you, then. He seems nervous of breaking you. Don’t get crocked up or anything—it wastes time so rottenly; and let Saunders have as much of the game as he wants, otherwise he’ll sulk. For goodness’ sake remember that the goal-posts are none too steady, so don’t get shoving against them. And keep an eye on the curate!”

Wiggie walked sadly to the back. He had never played back, and he had no wish to begin now. How was he to get his glorious five minutes if he stood about and did nothing? He would just dodder and shiver and wither away into thin air, and there was nothing dramatic about that. And the point-twist simply wouldn’t get a show. Delicate art of that kind wasn’t needed at back. You hit out slashingly, and then stood with your feet crossed and bowed to the crowd, until the idiot in front whom you had fed so prettily allowed another idiot to grab the ball and send it back again. He wouldn’t clear far, having parted with Lanty’s sledge. Harriet’s possession was nearly sure to sting if he began putting anything into it, and in any case Saunders was to have the limelight.

Saunders, fair-haired and finely built, greeted him without enthusiasm. He had just been telling the goalkeeper that he would have all the work to do, just as if that wasn’t exactly what he wanted. Five minutes before he had told her that, owing to the rotten scheme of attack, he never hoped to see a ball all afternoon, but he expected her to have forgotten that. The goalkeeper said it was a shame to both remarks, and prayed that, if a ball ever did arrive, he wouldn’t knock her down inside the goal-posts and sit on her, as he had a trick of doing. She was a bright-faced young person in pads, and nodded genially to Wiggie as he came up shyly. She wanted to tell him that she had heard him sing, and though of course she liked this sort of thing much better, she could do with a tune now and then. Wiggie thanked her sweetly for doing with it, and told her how much he admired her in her perilous position. At least Harriet had not put him there, to combine the philosophy of a fisherman with the stoicism of an Aunt Sally.

Saunders suddenly felt rather jealous, and came and joined them. He was pleased to be patronising and instructive, if somewhat contra-law-and-order.

“The great thing is to keep in your place!” he said kindly. “Never mind if you think the ball is six yards nearer your side than mine; it probably isn’t. You leave it to me. I’ll see to it all right. But if you come barging in just as I get there, we shan’t hit anything but each other, and the ball will be pushed through; whereas, if you keep out of the way, I can give our forwards a chance. You spend your time looking after the left outer. He’s always offside—know what that is, of course?—and fouls every other minute, but it’s no earthly use appealing. Knewstubb is much too busy looking after his legs to remember he’s a whistle in his mouth, and in any case no referee pays any attention to appeals about Davids—they’re too fed up on ’em. So don’t waste your breath yelling over his operations, but sneak the ball from him any way you can get at it, and if he starts shoving, just shove him back!”

Wiggie cheered a little. The glorious five minutes were evidently not to be his, but something offered. To go down to death in a locked struggle with the curate was not exactly an heroic finish, but it was better than shivering into nothingness. He went to his post with more hope.

The teams lined up under the faint but kindly sun, between the clean, white lines and the clean flags at the corners. There was a graceful, curly-headed youth bullying-off for Bluecaster, with Harriet at centre-half a good deal closer behind the ball than was safe for her excellent front teeth. On her left she had a strong Army Major, backing a wild and ineffectual left outer with masses of hair on the point of descent, and a clever left inner, the kindest and most unselfish player in the team. At her other hand was a long-legged person of the male persuasion, excitably pretending to support the best right outer in the county, a young girl with a tightly tied mane and the cheerful trot of a Shetland pony. As her inner she had a meek little man who lived only to get rid of the ball to somebody else, after the manner of cowards who funk the sixpence in “Up Jenkins!” Stubbs was in the middle of the field, with a nervous eye revolving round him. Raymond, the opposing centre-forward, had a trick of lifting the ball about the level of your knee-cap. If it came his way, he should skip. He blew the whistle, and skipped.

Harriet’s offensive policy answered very well at first. The home team knew the tiny drop in the gradient that carried a sudden rush irresistibly into the net, and made the most of it. For some time a furious warfare raged round the visitors’ circle, and then the Shetland pony got a pretty shot home, passed her politely by the unambitious inner. After that, though Bluecaster still kept in the foreign half, they were held away from the ring, and Wiggie watched the curate edging slowly up, waiting for the hungry backs to rush into the fray, leaving him offside and well ahead for his centre-half’s clearing drive. He was a black-headed, blue-eyed, boyish little thing, as strong as a horse, with an impudent, twinkling smile and no sporting conscience whatever. Wiggie, drooping wearily on the exact square foot of earth appointed him by Saunders, tried to intimidate him with a glance, and failed.

The drive came, a long, low, steady shot with half the field before it, aimed clean and true at the red shirt on the line, and Wiggie’s white shirt stepped out to meet it. But even as he stopped it neatly with his stick, earning a cheer from the spectators, a plunging, leaping Saunders fell upon him out of the far distance and squashed him to the earth, hacking wildly as he tumbled after him; and while they were busy disentangling themselves, the ball was passed to the waiting curate, who banged it in at the net, regardless of the shrieked appeals of the deserted goalkeeper. Stubbs had met Saunders in his kangaroo career and was badly injured in the ribs, which rendered him incapable of listening to claims of any kind. He gave the goal with a mule-like obstinacy. He knew Harriet would make it hot for him afterwards, but he didn’t care. He would give that galloping Saunders something to remember him by—dashed if he wouldn’t!

And all the way back to their posts, Saunders pointed out to his colleague that that was what came of not playing the game, and hoped he’d profit by it.

“You see, my dear fellow,” he said earnestly, “everything went wrong just because you didn’t follow our arrangement. If you’d stayed and minded the curate, as I think you said you would, I should have got the ball away nicely, and you wouldn’t have been there to hamper me when I arrived. Yes, I know it looked as if it was coming straight to you, and as if it was in your half of the ground and not mine, but it doesn’t do to be led away by these things. I admit I was a second late, because I ran over that idiot Knewstubb, who was watching you instead of attending to me. And, by the way, it really isn’t safe on a ground like this to stop a long shot with your stick. All very well on South-Country cricket-pitches, but no use on rough stuff like ours up here. Very pretty and swanky, of course, if it comes off, and goes down A 1 with the crowd, but it’s too big a risk to be really sporting. Use your feet, man—use your feet!—and do give me a free hand. A really first-class player has no chance, my dear fellow, if he isn’t allowed to have his head.”

Wiggie didn’t answer because Saunders had flattened all the breath out of him, and the next minute Harriet came up and pitched into both of them. He felt a hearty, uprising hatred of several people, but especially of the curate, twinkling cheerfully where he now stood decorously with his front line.

The little imp grew shameless after that, and Wiggie had his hands full with him. He had all the engaging tricks of the trade—turning on the ball, putting his foot on it, pushing with his shoulder or his little black head, and using more or less any part of his stick that came first; perpetrating each offence with the same maddening, childlike gaiety and delight. The gentle Wiggie could gladly have strangled him. They fought away in a far corner—Stubbs turning a blind eye, and Saunders behind, shouting a lordly—“Here, sir, here!”—the little, scratching, jabbing, twisting, poking game that kills quicker than the wildest spurt, until the singer was sick and stupid, with a swimming brain and a clamour in his ears. Bits of the “Elijah” joined forces with Saunders and added their quota to the muddle in his poor head. “What have I to do with thee, O man of God?” “Here, sir, here!” “They have laid a net for my feet.” (The curate had his wicked little stick hooked firmly round Wiggie’s leg.) “Yet doth the Lord see it not.” “Behind you, sir! Back to your left.... Left, I said, you ass!” “Mark how the scorner derideth.... It is enough.... See mine affliction!” “Shoot! Shoot!” “There is no breath left in me.”

By the end of the first half he was trembling, gasping and half-blind, and he had had no five minutes. Harriet came up and looked at him anxiously.

“Bit done, aren’t you?” she said. He was working for her at the present moment, so must be cared for, just as he had had to have glasses of new milk during the election. “Afraid you’ve had a thin time with Davids. I can’t think why the clubs don’t combine and refuse to play against him. He’s quite a decent little chap, though, off the field. Doesn’t take the thing seriously enough—that’s what’s wrong. I thought that stick of mine wouldn’t be any good to you—you want something beefy for Davids. Perhaps you’d like to have Lanty’s back again? Saunders brought you down a nasty whack; must have hurt you somewhere. He’s a clumsy ass. Only last week, he got his stick fast in a girl’s hair, and pulled some of it out by the roots. Look here, hadn’t you better knock off altogether? We’ll get along somehow. Saunders hasn’t begun to stretch himself yet, and I can do a bit more, too. I’m resigned to lose, anyhow. Stubbs will just simply give the whole blooming game away if Saunders hits him again. I wish Lanty had been here! There’ll be no saving us in any case if Teddy Dunn” (the centre-forward) “loses his wool after half-time, as he always does. His nerves aren’t guaranteed to wear the whole seventy minutes. Well, ease up for a while, won’t you? Hang about on the touch-line if you don’t care to go up to the house, and if you feel like chipping in again later, well, chip!”

She brought him his coat, and snatched the camp-stool from a bleating Helwise, and a kind little kid-gloved lady, who had been calling somewhere, produced some smelling-salts from a russia-leather bag. He sat on the camp-stool with his head in his hands, bitterly ashamed but helpless, and wishing with all his heart that Saunders had finished him off completely. He had not meant any of it to be in the least like this. He had hugged a vision of fleeting, soaring ecstasy, and—with God be the rest!—but it seemed that things didn’t happen like that. This was shrieking farce and despicable exhibition—no saving grace about it anywhere. But he would not go up to the house, though his face burned every time anybody looked at him. He was an object of utter derision, and, worse—pity, but he would not go up to the house, though his whole soul turned to it with longing. He must stop until the last chance of glory was past; so he clung to his stick, refusing to give it up, and sniffed bravely at the smelling-salts, hoping and praying that he might feel able to “chip in again, later.”

The second half opened with instant trouble for Bluecaster, for the visiting team, having now the better of the gradient, ran through like greased lightning before Saunders had finished impressing upon his goalkeeper that he was perfectly equal to doing both Wigmore’s work and his own without her stepping out of the net. Harriet said nothing—just looked at him—and he was a good deal more careful after that. Wiggie found himself admiring her as he sat on his camp-stool, noticing her steady control of the team, absence of fuss, and the neat strength of her play. She spoke out when necessary, but she did not nag, and she took reversal with stoic calm. She had not even opened her lips to Stubbs when he had failed her so disgracefully. There was something rather fine about her, even if she did push you; and again he felt the queer sense of comfort in being pushed.

The curate came and condoled with him, standing the while in his usual illegal and colossally impertinent position, and Wiggie found him quite a decent sort, after all, if somewhat weak in customary sporting ethics. Nevertheless, he had a philosophy of his own which he expounded with charming insouciance.

“What’s the fun of sticking to rules?” he asked brightly. “Any old donkey can stick to rules, but it takes brain to be always just on the wrong side of the law without getting collared. Besides, it’s frightfully interesting seeing how the other man gets his hair up when you foul him all round the place. You took it first-class, like a regular turn-the-other-cheek Sunday-school teacher. You were jolly nippy, too—took me all my time to keep ahead of you! Awfully sorry if I worried you too much; you do look rottenly off colour. Wish you’d buck up, though, and come on again. I can’t get any fun out of Hoofy Saunders—he doesn’t enter into the spirit of the thing like you. Hoofy just gets his hair blazing and lams into you and yells for help, and there’s no seeing past his feet when once the ball’s on the other side.”

Play kept pretty well to the middle of the ground for some time after this, the Witham attack being warded off by Harriet and a somewhat humbled Saunders. Then the Most Kind and Unselfish Member of the Team put in a kind and unselfish goal, so gently that the goalkeeper did not even see it; but there the luck ended. Fresh disaster fell upon Bluecaster. Teddy Dunn “lost his wool.”

Teddy was a pretty player, supple and light, very quick on the ball, and very easy with his stick, but the excitement of the game invariably set his usually pleasant temper bubbling hot. In common with the whole team, he had been thoroughly ruffled by Stubbs’ cruel behaviour in presenting Witham with a patently unearned goal, and when, fifteen minutes before time, the opposing centre-half caught him napping over a simple shot at the nets, incidentally waking him with a drive across the shins, he shook off Harriet’s yoke and let himself go altogether.

Ceasing to take any notice of the game, he concentrated his attention upon following up the centre-half in order to pay him back in his own coin, and various unauthorised persons dug the ball from under their feet as the murderous debt was cleared. General disorganisation ensued, ending in a passionate onslaught on the Bluecaster goal, setting Wiggie quivering to help. When he could bear it no longer, he dragged off his coat and took himself back to his place. Nobody noticed him in the hurly-burly, until the ball clove a miraculous path out of the crowded circle, leaving a fiery sting running clean up to his shoulder, and the first thrill of exultation that the game had brought him yet. But as the centre-forward was still adding interest to payment, the ball soon came back again, and the frantic scramble resumed. Wiggie slammed and rammed, saved and better saved, listening as in a dream to Saunders’ mechanical “With you, sir! Here, sir, here!” and to Stubbs’ announcement—somewhere on the lip of Hell—that there wanted only five minutes to time. He had a vision of the curate standing practically inside the nets, imperturbably ignoring the goalkeeper’s expostulations, and then, as if dropped from Heaven, his own chance rushed upon him. The ball was suddenly in the crook of his stick, cuddling there as though it loved it. He caught a glimpse of a Shetland mane away on the rim of the circle, and slipped through to it between a horde of clashing weapons. Saunders, drunk with agitation, tried to drive the ball back again, catching him on the foot with his heavy swing, but he hopped free, and was out in open country. Then was seen the shocking spectacle of a centre-forward far behind, doggedly leaning on his stick, while a staid full back carried the game home. The Shetland pony swung into line with a jolly little chuckle, and a second later the M.K. and U.P. came up on Wiggie’s left. The three passed up the field as the wind-shadows pass above clover. Harriet was not far after them; he could hear her call to the other halves to follow up, and was conscious of complete independence of all the halves in the United Kingdom. Now he felt the lift of the elastic earth, the free, flying joy that he had craved all afternoon. Now his choice of stick was justified, the ball running steadily before the sharp, little strokes. Wiggie might be fragile, but he was the right shape. His sally had the grace of a flying Mercury, and the Shetland pony, keeping easily level, chuckled a second time. She nodded across to the M.K. and U.P., and he sent back his own M.K. smile of content. This was the real stuff, the smile and the nod said alike. What on earth had this treasure been doing at the back?

He knew that he had no business where he was, the newly-imported rotter who ought to have been minding his nets, the miserable failure who so lately had sat on a camp-stool and sniffed at smelling-salts. He felt certain that Saunders sulked behind in utter scandalisation, but he did not care. Still inside the Bluecaster goal, the curate gaped in open-mouthed astonishment, but he had forgotten the curate. He had his five minutes. The gods had heard his prayer, and not allowed him to pass away shamed.

“He that shall endure to the end.... Arise, Elijah, for thou hast a long journey before thee.... Forty days and forty nights shalt thou go.” Not every part of him seemed to be working at once, but some of him would get there. His feet were still moving, and his wrist, but his eyes—“Night falleth round me, O Lord!” Saunders would say he hadn’t kept his place—Hoofy Saunders—but Harriet would be pleased, anyhow, and that was the chief thing. Here were the backs, Johnson and Co.—“Go, return upon thy way! Then did Elijah the prophet break forth like a fire”—that got him all right, and it was quite simple! If he fell down suddenly, would his feet still go on running, running? They seemed to know all about it, more than he did, but he would get away from here soon and lie down in Harriet’s parlour. “Though thousands languish and fall beside thee”—nasty E♯ that for the tenors in the fifty-seventh bar! There was a rocking-chair, too, and a kitten, and somebody with a black face. “Through darkness riseth light, light for the upright”—awful jar for Saunders, his getting away like this! Ah, but what came after? “Shall the dead arise, the dead arise and praise thee? Lord, our Creator, how excellent thy name is! My flesh also shall rest in hope.”

The Witham left back came out steadily and with discretion, and Wiggie’s twist carried the ball round him as easily as a dancer spins a pirouette, leaving him staring. The right sprang to meet the attack, and he passed out to the Pony, who passed back just as the racing left crossed them a second time. The Witham halves were coming up, thudding and panting, but the three were not to be caught. The right back sprang again, shouting to his partner, and Wiggie passed to the Most Kind, who dribbled cleverly to the line as if meaning to shoot, and then, with a lightning turn, centred back to the stranger. Wiggie took the ball daintily on his stick, Saunders or no Saunders, meeting the final rush of the recovered left with the same bewildering trick, and, as the goalkeeper danced and slashed, aimed delicately past her into the net. The whistle blew.

But as the teams came up, both sides ready with praise (always excepting Saunders, limping vaingloriously), Wiggie walked straight off the ground without looking at anybody, not discourteously, but as if very pressing business were hurrying him away. Indeed, from the moment he took the ball in the Bluecaster circle until he had scored his goal, crossed the field and disappeared, he never really stopped at all. It didn’t do to stop. He must go on walking ... walking ... “Lord, our Creator” ... not rushing, but just walking, or he would never get to the other end. The curate tore after him, waving a coat, but he did not look back. If he turned his head, he would never reach the farm, because he couldn’t see it any longer. He could only go on walking towards the place where it had been a minute ago. There was a stile somewhere in the field; his feet would find it all right. He had really wonderful feet; it was only all the rest of him that was wrong—his heart and his lungs and his head and his blind eyes. Well, it was something to have feet, anyhow. Gravel path, surely? Feet again! And then steps and a flagged floor. It was time he got there, because even his feet would have to stop soon. Yes, he was there ... he could feel the fire, though he could not see it ... there would be the kitten and the rocker.... “Lord, our Creator ... Lord, our——”

Harriet explained that Mr. Wigmore was knocked up, probably wanted to rest. No, she had not known he was that sort of player. He had given her to understand he knew nothing about the game. Anyhow, he had won the match for them, snatched it out of the fire at the last moment; not but what they had won it by rights already! If they would kindly make their way to the house, they would find tea in the usual place.

She shepherded them up to the back of the farm, and through the kitchen into the house-place, where tea was set on the long table, but in her heart she was troubled. Wiggie had not joined them. Perhaps he was not in the house at all. Perhaps he had gone for quiet to the parlour. She had her hand on the door when a long, gray car drew up at the gate, and the men she had seen at the church hurried up the path. The tale of the gardener’s boy at Watters had not satisfied them, and after a dismal lunch at the “Four Feathers” they had started out on a fresh hunt. Rumours had met them at last of a match and a stranger playing for Bluecaster—“a lile chap what sings a bit”—and in spite of incredulity had come on the wanderer’s trail to Wild Duck. The hatchet-faced man pushed past Harriet into the house.

“Is he here?” he flashed. He looked ready to drop.

Harriet put her hand back to the parlour door and hesitated. She understood him at once, and for some reason she felt frightened, frightened as she had never been in her life.

“I—don’t know!” she stammered, holding the knob tight; then made an effort to pull herself together. “If you mean Mr. Wigmore, I am just looking for him. He may be resting in here, away from the crowd. He seemed very tired after the match.”

The hatchet-faced man echoed “Match!” in a tone that was half-bitter irony and half a snarling curse. The big man behind laughed a sad and perfectly hopeless laugh. One of them took the knob out of Harriet’s hand and pushed the door. On the hearth by the steel fender Wiggie was fallen, the comforting glow of the fire playing over his white shirt and his closed eyes. The rocker stood empty above his quiet head. The kitten curled, purring, in the curve of his helpless arm.

But he was not dead. Sitting alone in her own room, Harriet willed it with all the force of her personality. He should not be dead! The men had said he was, and he had looked it, lying there without a breath, but she would not have it so. After they had carried him up to Stubbs’ room and shut the door on her, she had gone across to her own and willed him violently back to existence. He had been her player, her loyal man; he was her guest. He could not die under her roof. In some inexplicable fashion he seemed to belong to her, this stranger from another life and another world.

Downstairs, the teams made merry, wondering a little what had happened to their hostess. Somebody had seen a car come up; perhaps she was wanted on business. That Wigmore chap had disappeared, too. Pity! They would have liked a word with him. Somebody said he was stopping at Watters, so probably he had cleared off at once. He had certainly looked thoroughly played out. Stubbs, explaining to a bursting Saunders exactly how and where he would not be hit by him again, was unaware of any tragedy passing overhead. Only the little curate, emerging last from a flying bath, with his round face glowing above the neatest of clericals, paused on the landing upstairs, brought to halt by a sure instinct of trouble. As he did so, the door sprang open in his face, and a desperate man strode out on top of him. He recoiled when he saw the parsonic figure, as if it had struck him.

“What’s brought you along?” he demanded roughly. “He’s not dead, yet—not going to be dead, I tell you! You can take yourself and your psalm-singing off again!”

Davids said: “Hockey—bath—just passing—can I help?” with cogent simplicity, and the other relaxed. He thrust a paper into the curate’s hand.

“Fetch the nearest doctor, will you, and ask him to bring anything he can? Car at the door. There’s a chemist somewhere in this county, I suppose? If not, send the chauffeur to Lancaster—Manchester—anywhere. Fire along, and never mind limits. We pay. But for God’s sake hurry!”

He shut the door as abruptly as he had opened it, and the little curate slid downstairs as if dropped from the banisters. They called him in to tea as he passed, but he did not stop to reply. Hungry but valiant, he tore down the path, sending before him the name of the profession that sets every wheel racing and every hoof at the beat. The chauffeur had his engine started before the passenger was in the car, and leaped back to his seat. They became a very sudden blur in the distance. Whatever his philosophy, the curate certainly had the knack of being always on the spot.

Tea finished in the house-place, and Johnson, shouting down a perfect roar of argument and contradiction, was busy illustrating with Harriet’s china just how Wigmore had got his goal, when a cool medical voice broke across the hubbub.

“Will somebody kindly tell me who owns this house?”

Stubbs took his head out of a teacup, and came forward and said that he did, which was not in the least true, but sounded well.

“Then perhaps you will forgive me for asking that it may be kept as quiet as possible? Mr. Wigmore is upstairs, dangerously ill. I doubt if he will live through the night.”

He disappeared before anybody’s breath had come back, and the stricken teams hunted hats and coats in a graveyard silence, stealing forth as if from a meeting in the Catacombs. Queer that Stubbs shouldn’t have known!—but then Stubbs never did know anything for two minutes together. Made a chap feel such a bounder, yelling and roaring with a sick man overhead! Certainly, Harriet had vanished clean off the earth; they might have guessed something was up, from that. It had been a queer match altogether; one they wouldn’t be likely to forget in a month of Sundays. The push-bikes crept down into the road, and silently faded away, and a death-like, terrible peace descended upon the farm.

The car came back, bringing a local doctor and a nurse, who disappeared upstairs without asking for anybody. The curate had been explicit. He himself stayed outside with the chauffeur, munching a penny bun. Harriet came down into the parlour, and was joined by Stubbs, whose voluble demands for explanation she strangled savagely into silence. Nobody took any notice of either of them. They might not have existed.

The shadows were well down in the little room when the hatchet-faced man was heard in the garden, directing the chauffeur to take the curate to the station, and then the door opened, and the strangers came in. Harriet asked “How is he?” and Stubbs looked around and behind him, not recognising the voice.

The hatchet-faced man opened the fingers of an expressive hand, and shut them again.

“A long way on!” he answered, and wondered at himself. He had never heard the expression until a minute before, when the nurse had used it on the stairs. “But we shall bring him back,” he added—“perhaps. We won’t waste time discussing that. I have to apologise for taking possession of your house in this extraordinary manner. We cannot thank you enough for allowing us to do so. I should be glad to explain.”

Harriet said “Sit down, won’t you?” in the same voice that had set Stubbs peering into corners. She found a match and lighted the centre lamp. The big man said nothing.

“My name is Gardner. I am a Londoner—Wigmore’s medical adviser, and incidentally his oldest friend. Before he left town, last month, I told him—though he didn’t need telling—that his voice was killing him. I warned him that any out-of-the-way effort would probably finish him; that in any case he would not last another year unless he took instant precautions. He had just had a big concert in London, and I knew—what I knew. He promised me to throw up all his engagements and come down here for absolute rest, and I let him go because I believed he would keep his word. On Monday night I discovered by the merest chance that he was to sing here on Tuesday, and I left London before six in the morning—we left London—but we were too late to stop him. He would neither have listened to us then, nor forgiven us ever after. God! but I thought he would die before the thing was through! That was mad and bad enough, but on top of it he goes and plays in a hockey-match, after leading us a dance round half the county to prevent us finding out. What’s at the back of it all I can’t possibly imagine! Perhaps you can. Who is the insensate fool that led him to fling away his last little gasp of life?”

Stubbs stirred uneasily. He thought Dr. Gardner should be told that such language was unfitting the company of both a past and present Rur’l D’trict C’cillor. The big man by the window still said nothing, and nobody introduced him. His eyes travelled from one face to another with pathetic, questioning intensity.

And, at last, “I am the insensate fool!” said Harriet, in the voice of Eve after the Fall. “I bullied him to sing. I pestered him to play. I told him that all he wanted was fresh air and hopping about. He tried to say no, but I said yes, and he always did what I told him. I made him.”

The doctor drew in his breath as if physically hurt. He struck his hands together with a little movement of passionate regret.

“Then you will probably have the satisfaction of knowing that you have killed the finest singer in England.”

She winced sharply, but surprise came uppermost.

“I don’t understand! We knew he was a singer, of course, but not of any importance. His name is never in the papers.”

“He sings under his mother’s name—the famous Quetta. You’ve heard of her, I suppose, even at this Back o’ Beyond? You must have heard of him, too. He’s the great Quetta, now—makes pots of money, and is wanted everywhere. His agent in town was tearing his hair to come along with us. He can close his account now. Quetta’s done! I suppose you might not know, though. He liked to be incog. here, and his friends respected his wish for quiet. Well, you’ve quietened him all right! He should have stopped singing, years ago, but he had a reason for going on, a good reason——” He caught the big man’s eyes fixed earnestly on his lips, and checked himself with a vexed start. The other stood up slowly and looked at Harriet. (It was strange how both seemed to forget Stubbs.) His voice was low, with a curious intonation.

“I am that reason,” he said quietly. “I am Cyril’s half-brother, and once—it seems a very long time ago now—I was a singer, too. I had my own share of our mother’s gift, and I was getting on well. I might have been a great Quetta, also. Then I had an accident which left me totally deaf. I had no other trade in my hands, and I had both wife and children. Cyril was just coming out, and he took every engagement that came his way to bring us in a living. It was in those first hard years of fight that he broke his health. He kept us all then, and he keeps us all now. I do not know why he never told. Perhaps he was afraid that Mr. Shaw—his friend—would give him money. I do what I can for him—I learned the lip language, and I am now his secretary—but I do not earn half we cost him. And I have never heard him sing. I would give everything I have or ever hope to have, just to hear Cyril sing.”

Stubbs was sent down to the White Lion to telephone to Watters, and a middle-aged damsel at the other end clasped a treacle-posset to her bosom and wept. Long into the dawn Harriet sat by a burnt-out lamp in the little parlour. The walking-mail went by in the smallest hours, the creak of the wheels alone coming up to her, like a ghostly, undriven hearse of the dead. And when the first cock crew, just as if it were Harriet’s imperative voice calling him, the great Cyril Quetta, who was, after all, only Wiggie, struggled back to life, and observed that he was a sparking-plug.