Willow the king

CHARLIE’S second ball was one of his best breakbacks. The Captain in his carelessness played a bit outside it. Back went his off stick. At last the great partnership was dissolved. 312 for two, last man, 204. 301 had been added for the wicket, which beat by 37 the record partnership of Barclay and Perkins in 1882. Barclay’s 178 made on that occasion, the previous individual best, was also superseded. As the hero ran into the pavilion, the crowd simply rose at him.

The Pessimist succeeded. He was very correct, watchful, and resourceful. Charlie smashed a yorker at him to begin with, but the Pessimist had heard of such things before. It takes more than a common yorker to discompose a county man. Presently the Ancient so far forgot himself as to indulge in a drive for four.

“Has he got his fifty yet?” I asked.

“He’s made 98, the little horror!” said Grace indignantly. “I wonder if he ever will get out.”

“He’s all right,” said I. “He’s quite enjoying it.”

A spell of very quiet play followed. Charlie’s wicket provoked him to bowl five maidens in succession to the Pessimist. But his sister was so keen a critic that this proceeding mightily displeased her.

“Fast bowlers,” said she, “are all big hearts and brute force—no intellect at all you know. They’ve got about as many brains as a giddy old crocodile. What’s Charlie bowling like that for? Can’t he see that he’s just helping that man to play himself in? Why don’t he chuck him a ‘tice’ or a full toss, or something that’s downright bad—anything to make him have a go before he gets his eye in.”

Ere long a thunderclap informed Hickory that yet another century had been scored against them that humiliating afternoon. The Ancient in defiance of all criticism had had the audacity to complete his hundred; and I for one believe most firmly that Hickory never would have got him out had not the Fates interfered on their behalf. For as he attempted one of his favourite short ones directly afterwards, A. H., fielding deep mid-off, dashed in like a deer, gathered the ball, and hurled down the Ancient’s wicket with the energy of despair, whilst that unfortunate was still cavorting a yard outside the crease. Oldknow had played a great innings, but——no, the Ancient is too sound a bat and far too good a fellow for a Little Clumpton man to say rude things about his play. Miss Grace, a thorough-going Hickoryite, had no such scruples.

“Wasn’t that a bit of lovely fielding,” said she, drawing a deep breath. “I do like to see ’em field like that; and it’s Oldknow, is it? Helped himself to a hundred and one. I call that cheek. If he could only bat I shouldn’t care.”

“Genius covers a multitude of sins,” said I.

“It’s got to, if he’s a genius,” said Miss Grace; “but if that’s genius, give me something common. Bad taste and all that, I know; but that chap worries me. Besides, if he’s a genius, why don’t he wear long hair and look intense, like Paderewski. That might carry things off a bit, and keep people from looking at his batting, don’t you think?”

“By Jove,” said I, “very good idea. I’ll suggest it to him.”

The Humourist, known as Merryweather in private life, came out to the Pessimist. Cheers greeted his appearance. The crowd knew him of old. He was the most uncertain bat that ever put on pads. Oh, but if he only stayed! One Gilbert Jessop had to take second place if Merryweather only stayed. True, he only did stay about five times a season, but as no one knew the occasion he was likely to honour with his presence for any lengthened period, the apparition of his six feet three of smiling insolence always sent a thrill through the assembly.

“Bloomin’ ’ard and bloomin’ ’igh and bloomin’ often,” was his game. He was a man who carried few theological ideas, but it was understood that his conception of Paradise was a place of short boundaries and unlimited lob-bowling. He had a partiality for the Park, as it fulfilled the first of these conditions.

“Isn’t this your Slogger?” asked Miss Grace.

“Now that slogging’s at a premium,” said I, “we’d call him a fine, free, forcing batsman.”

“I wish these boundaries weren’t so jolly small,” said Miss Grace with an apprehensive eye. “I don’t like to see a man his inches come in smiling.”

The first ball the Humourist received he sent humming over our coach into a cornfield at the back. During the interval in which Hickory endeavoured to recover it, the remarkable silence of the Optimist attracted my attention. It was so foreign to his usual habit of kind discursiveness that I felt there must be some grave reason for it. He had not uttered a word for forty minutes.

“Brightside, when do you go in?” said I.

“Next but one,” he sighed.

This was a sufficient explanation. The man was suffering. He was determined to be cheerful, but could not disguise the pallor underneath his tan. He drummed his fingers nervously on his knees; a restlessness had taken him; there was a wild look in his eye. Seizing a moment when Miss Grace was occupied in evolving from the analysis the number of runs Charlie had paid for his solitary wicket the Optimist whispered,—

“Shouldn’t care a bit, you know, if she wasn’t here. I was never properly coached at school, you know. I will draw away from leg balls, you know. If Charlie bowls any, you know, sure as death, I shall retire towards the umpire. Do you think she’ll be able to tell that from here?”

“They say Abel does the same,” said I evasively.

“And I’ve got no wrist, you know. Can’t cut a bit, you know. Have to sort o’ shove ’em, you know, with my arms and shoulders.”

“Quite a coincidence,” said I, “for they always say that the Old Man does all his cutting with his arms and shoulders.”

“And I’m always scraping forward and feeling for ’em. Get so beastly flurried if I wait, that I’m certain to be bowled.”

“Well,” said I, “it’s the sort of wicket on which you can play forward to anything. Hard as concrete.”

“But she’s fair death on style,” said the poor old Optimist. “She’s got such a terrible high standard, don’t you know? Asked her this morning what she thought of A. H.’s batting. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘Archie’s a pretty fair rustic bat.’”

“She may take a much higher view of yours,” said I. “Women are that funny, you don’t know when you’ve got ’em. Shouldn’t be a bit surprised if she don’t fall in with your style on the spot, for really I’ve seen worse.”

“Not much,” groaned the poor old Optimist.

Here the voice of this unflinching critic, who really had been born half a century too late, such an ornament she would have been to Blackwood and the Quarterly in their palmy days, put an end to our painful conversation. As the field were returning with the ball, she bent over the wheels to tell her brother Charlie, in a not inaudible undertone:

“Forty-three overs, twelve maidens, eighty-nine runs, one wicket. Sounds good don’t it. ’Nother wicket’d be a rather nice idea. Trying bowling left hand Charlie,—couldn’t be worse than Tommy’s plough-and-harrow-agricultural-produce anyhow.”

The Harrow captain hearing this was observed to display some colour, and march hastily out of earshot. But a worse fate awaited him on his arrival at the crease.

The Humourist, having hit his first ball for six in his playful way, proceeded to treat his second with a similar levity by lifting that over the pavilion. This, however, did not appeal in the least to Harrow’s sense of humour. Therefore, when its captain pitched his third ball ridiculously short, the gentle Humourist had time to wait and sweep it round to the square-leg boundary. But it was not here that the youthful Tom’s humiliation ended. The Humourist walked sedately down the wicket to the bowler’s end, and proceeded to pat down the turf near the bowler’s foot.

“’Serves him jolly well right,” said Miss Grace hotly, “it’ll teach these public school cubs not to be so jolly cheeky.”

But here the spirit of compassion suddenly appeared in the victim’s sister. Her eyes showed that she also resented the liberties thus taken with a member of her family. “I tell you what though,” she added as an afterthought; “it strikes me that that Merryweather of yours is a pretty big piece of a brute. Poor old Tommy! I wish he’d bowl him.”

For some little time, however, the Humourist went on his way rejoicing. He swiped two of Charlie’s best, high over the head of cover-point, in the most amazing manner, and it was only when in the exuberance of his heart that he tried to serve a yorker in a similar fashion, that the honour of the Trenthams was avenged. The playful Humourist had included two sixes and three fours in his twenty-eight.

“Why don’t Halliday declare,” said the poor Optimist, overborne with the knowledge that he must go forthwith and put his pads on.

“Yes, why don’t he?” said Miss Grace.

“We’ve not got a bit of bowling,” said I.

“But our batting’s not very clever, you know,” said Miss Grace enticingly.

“Really,” said I. “But then some of us looked in this morning’s Sportsman, and from our point of view it didn’t read pretty.”

“But what price the bowling?” said Miss Grace more coaxingly than ever. “Notts is almost too awful, an’ Yorkshire’s a bit fluffy on a plumb pitch. As for Household Brigade and Gentlemen o’ Cheshire, I wouldn’t mind an hour or two myself of their sort—just about my weight. Do hope Halliday’ll declare. Great error if he don’t. Our men are so tired, too; you might scuttle us like fun.”

“Or we mightn’t,” said I callously. “And I can’t help thinking that we mightn’t. Halliday will be well advised to go for the record. Of course, if we’d got some bowling, we’d be at you like a shot.”

The Captain was plainly of my mind, for he gave no sign, and the unhappy Optimist, much against his inclination, climbed down from the box, and wended his way to the pavilion.

“Why did Jack put me in so early?” his agonised expression said. “He knows I always like to go in tenth.”

The General Nuisance reigned in the stead of the Humourist now. Though the General Nuisance might be mistaken for an utter fiend in private life, his batting on hard grounds was angelic. People who had not to support the personal acquaintance of the Honourable John Blenkinsop-Comfort were often heard to inquire why he had never got his “blue,” and why his exquisite batting was not more generally recognised by the authorities. It is no desire of mine to betray anybody’s confidences, but I feel sure the authorities must have had very excellent reasons. No doubt, as in the melancholy case of Miss Grace and Harrow School, they felt that somewhere they were bound to draw the line.

“390 up, boy!” called Miss Grace. The next over she broke into mirth of a most undisguised character. “Toddles is going on,” she said. “I’ll put that in my diary.”

Forthwith producing a small book from her pocket, she inquired for the date, and placed this pleasant fact in the annals of the world.

“Well, there’s one thing to be said for Toddles’ bowling,” said its historian. “It can’t be called derogatory to his cloth. It’s just the stuff a parson should roll up.”

“Why?” I asked in my innocence.

“There’s no devil in it,” said Miss Grace.

“Oh!” I said. I subsided.

The Reverend Mr. Elphinstone’s deliveries were slow, simple-minded toss-ups of the most innocuous kind. The Pessimist and the General Nuisance having helped themselves to twenty-seven in two overs, the patentee and sole manufacturer of this sort of bowling was incontinently shunted for Captain George, who gallantly went on with lobs. The happiness of that intrepid officer’s sister was good to observe.

“Dear simple soul,” she said. “That’s just old George. So ingenuous you know. Look at him, rolling up his sleeves and setting out the field. If this ground’s big enough to hold old George, he’s altered lately. Now watch, he’s beginning his run. Oh, hang it, I’ve left my kodak on the billiard table. What lovely sights you do see when you haven’t got your kodak! Old George really ought to keep his bowling in a show, you know. It’s so sudden, so unexpected! It reminds me of those ‘Odes in Contribution to the Jolly Song, of the Jolly Something,’ that the Guv’nor’s got. I say, do look at him. There he goes—the dear old boy!—a hop, a stride, another hop, another stride, a double jump, and then he chucks up the innocentest cuckoo that you ever saw.”

His first ball came into collision with a tankard of beer in the refreshment booth; but it would be kinder to draw the veil of reticence around the gallant Captain’s trundling.

It was now something after five, the Little Clumpton score was 440 for four wickets, and the bowling of proud Hickory was dead, and longing for a quiet funeral. To see this haughty eleven, footsore, weary, limp, and very cross, not troubling to save the boundary, failing to back up, keeping the bowler waiting while they crossed over, was a sermon in itself on the instability of human triumphs and the cussedness of cricket. Five members of their side had totalled 727 between them the previous day, but now those five in common with their less gifted colleagues, were compelled to expiate their severities in as vigorous a leather-hunting as ever a team submitted to. And, to aggravate their pains, they knew quite well that on this occasion, Little Clumpton’s so-called bowling was an object of derision. The sight of these world-famed batsmen limping round the boundary, and repeatedly extracting the ball from a sharp-tongued and not too sympathetic multitude, was perilously like one of the ironies of life strained to the point of pathos. But as I have no desire to wallow in the pathetic, leaving that to my intellectual betters, let me touch as lightly as I can on the tragedy of Hickory. Let it suffice that the Pessimist and the General Nuisance remained at the wickets cutting, driving, leg hitting, and showing off their wrist work till stumps and the match were drawn. As a new record had been set up in Little Clumpton v. Hickory, I think it justifiable to reproduce the full score as it appeared in the Sportsman the following morning. The bowling analysis is withheld, however, out of compassion for Miss Grace, who took the matter so very much to heart, that a young person less sound in her constitution, and less right thinking in her mental habitudes, might perhaps have kept her bed in consequence for several days. As I have carefully copied this score out of my commonplace book, its correctness is guaranteed.

Hickory did not bat.