Willow the king

THE third telegram ran to this tenour,—

“If Hawke wants you for India, sing slow. You are going with me. Stoddart.”

Miss Grace had a mounting colour as she read this, and I believe swimming eyes and a reeling brain. I think she would have liked to weep for joy.

“Oh, Dimmy,” she said, “isn’t it divine! Isn’t it noble of old Stoddy! But I knew it, I knew it all along. It would have been impossible not to take old Charlie. Wonder what the boys’ll say?”

At last it seemed that something of sufficient importance had occurred to tear her mind from her all-absorbing occupation. She got up, her cheeks still flushed, and moved to the door with a sort of look on her face that implied that for the present she was performing the extremely difficult feat of walking on air.

But I was too quick for her. With a bound I got to the door, and had my back snugly against it by the time she arrived.

“Now then, Dimmy, get out of the way,” she imperiously said. “Can’t wait a moment, you know. Must tell the boys. They’ll just go mad.”

“Oh, you can’t,” said I immovably. “Really. How nice! And you must tell the boys?”

“No more ragging, Dimmy,” said she. “Honour bright, I can’t hold myself till I’ve told ’em. What are you standing there like that for? I want to pass.”

“Oh, you do,” said I. “How interesting! Awf’ly glad you’ve told me. Jolly glad to know, you know.”

“Dimmy, if you don’t drop your jolly jaw, and let me pass, I’ll be downright angry. Do you hear, Dimmy. Don’t play the Angora.”

“Well, it’s like this,” said I. “For the last hour you have been spending your time in deliberately disregarding every word I’ve said. But now, my dear Grace, pointedly speaking, you’ve bally well got to listen, and the sooner you make your mind up to it, the sooner you’ll get it over.”

At this Miss Grace began to flare up like anything.

“The music’ll play in a minute,” she said. “Tell you straight, Dimmy, I’m a terror when I get my turkey up. If I do get my wool off, the feathers’ll fly.”

“Nineteen from forty-one, quick!” said I. “But, my dear Grace, you sit down and listen. That’s my tip. It’s the only way you’ll get out just yet, anyhow.”

“Don’t say I haven’t given you fair warning, Dimmy, will you?” she cried, with her face in a blaze.

“All right,” said I cheerily; “just give me time, Grace, and I’ll laugh, I’m positive I’ll laugh.”

Grace stamped her foot. She looked things.

“Very nice, indeed,” said I. “I’m certain I’ll laugh.”

“Oh, it is too bad!” she wailed. “Dimmy, you are a brute! I must go and tell ’em. I must really. Dimmy, do come away from that door, there’s a good soul!”

“No,” said I callously; “not until you have considered and replied to my proposal.”

“Proposal!” cried Grace, midway between amazement and rage. “What proposal?”

“That comes of not listening,” said I. “Think what you’ve missed. Am I to understand that you didn’t hear a word I said?”

“That’s about it,” said Grace.

“Then, my dear Grace,” said I; “you take a chair and listen. If I keep you here till two, I’m going over it again, and I’m going to make you listen.”

“Oh, are you?” Had Grace been any one but Grace, I should have said she positively snorted. “Oh, are you, Dimmy? Don’t you be too jolly sure about it.”

I grieve to state that my ultimatum in Grace’s opinion constituted a casus belli. The flying squadron immediately received orders to sail, the blood darted all over her face in the most pictorial manner, and she picked one of the books of the Rector’s off the table. She began to skirmish a bit, making several feints, and awaiting her opportunity.

“I don’t want to, Dimmy, you know,” said she.

“But by Jingo if you do, Grace,” said I.

“You’d better come out of it, Dimmy, you know,” said this armed belligerent, trying to show that our relations were not yet so strained but that a conciliatory tone might preserve the peace, even at this late hour. “It’s not a bit funny, you know. It wasn’t exactly what one ’ud call a good joke at the start, and now it’s getting as stale as anything.”

“If it is a joke,” I quoted, “it’s not at all obvious. When I want to be bored I read Punch.”

Crash came Pearson on the Creed full at my head. I dodged, of course, but the momentum of that weighty theological work as it hurtled against the resisting oak panel of the library door was really ominous. The noise appeared to shake the foundations of the house.

“I’m glad,” said I, “that my nerves are fitted with rubber tyres and ball bearings.”

It was some relief to see that the countenance of the enemy had now changed to one of rue. Pearson on the Creed, lay sans covers and practically disembowelled at my feet. Poor Grace flopped on her knees and began to gather the mutilated members of this old but highly respectable tome.

“Dimmy, you’re a brute! a beast! that’s what you are!” she cried. “Do you see what you’ve done? Oh, father will be angry! Oh, he will talk! He will be eloquent! He’ll be ever such a lot worse than he is on Sundays.”

His daughter, still on her knees, looked the picture of despair.

“Will he be cursive?” I amiably inquired.

“No,” said the miserable Grace, vainly trying to readjust the fragments. “He don’t take on like that. Wish he did; then it wouldn’t be so rough. When he has you on the carpet, he chucks a lot of high dictionary language at you, like he does in his sermons—awful big words, you know; what you can’t understand, you know. And they must mean a dreadful lot more than those you can, mustn’t they? Oh, he’s just horribly, awfully polite. Last time he told me ‘to restrain my primeval instincts.’ That’s a nice thing to say, isn’t it? Does he mean don’t play the goat, or what? Shouldn’t mind if I only knew what he meant.”

“He means don’t play the Angora,” said the luminous I, with an air of knowledge.

“Oh, that’s it, is it,” said Grace; “then why don’t he jolly well say so, then, instead of rolling up ‘primeval instincts’ to you and that kind o’ lingo?”

Grace having by this tenderly gathered Pearson on the Creed, and having cunningly contrived to restore him to some semblance of his former unimpeachable respectability, rose from her knees, and returned to the attack.

“Dimmy, do come from that door, there’s a nice old chap,” she said. “I’ll be so good. I’m sure I’ll listen to you when I’ve told the boys. I’m simply dying to tell ’em. Dimmy, you brute! come from that door at once!”

“Sit down,” said I, stretching my finger out in my laconic sternness.

“If you don’t,” said she, “I’ll get Hengstenberg’s Dissertations on the Genuineness and Authenticity of the Pentateuch to you. That’ll make you howl if it hits you, I’ll give you my word. And it don’t matter if we do knock the stuffing out o’ that, ’cause it isn’t orthodox, you know.”

“Why, a girl couldn’t even lift a name like that?” said I, to encourage her.

“Oh, you don’t draw me,” said the experienced Grace. She had served an apprenticeship with four brothers. However, I was glad to find that the unhappy and distraught Grace had by this arrived at the conclusion that there was only one course open to her, if she was to be enabled to convey the burning news to the dining-room in a reasonable time. That one course was complete submission. Accordingly, after a terrible struggle, in which the native Eve, or perhaps the primeval instincts, within her were persuaded to lie down, she retired a few paces, leant against the table, sighed heart-rendingly, and then laid her mutinously twitching hands down by her sides as placidly as possible.

“Fire away,” she said dismally; “I’ll listen.”

“Thanks awf’ly,” said I; “so good of you to listen.”

“Oh, but, Dimmy, you great beast!” she implored, “please do look nippy; I’m simply dying.”

“Well, what I’ve got to say’s just this,” said I, and the courage I found wherewith to utter it came partly, I suppose, from the excitement of my late employments, and partly from the get-there-sometime Anglo-Saxon spirit that makes us all feel such wonderful fine fellows. “Grace, I want you to be my wife,” said I.

“Oh, if that’s all your nodding, and winking, and reddening, and stuttering’s been about,” said Grace, with evident relief, “I’ll be your anything, so long as you’ll let me go immediately.”

“You misunderstand me rather,” said I, nearing desperation. “’Pon my honour as a gentleman, I want you to be my wife.”

“But the boys wouldn’t let me,” she said.

“The boys!” I cried. “What the devil—no, I mean what the dickens have the boys got to do with it? Who are the boys, pray? Never heard of such a thing in my life.”

“Well, you see, Dimmy, it’s like this, you see,” said Grace confidentially, but with her eye for ever wandering to the door. “Nothing under a county man’s their motto.”

“You mean it’s yours,” said I indignantly.

“Oh, I daresay,” said she. “If I’ve got to have somebody, I’ll have a county man or nobody.”

“You’d have the Right Honourable Arthur James Balfour, M.P.,” said I, to illustrate how monstrously untenable was the position she had taken up. “There’s never a girl that wouldn’t, if I know anything.”

“Balfour, Balfour,” said Grace. “Balfour. Oh, yes, you mean the golf Johnny. Golf! What next? Look here, Dimmy, do you take me for a muff? Why, I wouldn’t marry Willie Park.”

“No,” said I; “because you’re going to marry me.”

“Nothing under a county cricketer,” said she, with an air of finality. “Besides, the boys ’ud be just awful. Now then, Dimmy, out o’ the way. I’ve heard you out all fair and square, haven’t I?”

“Not by a lot,” said I. “My dear Grace, if you don’t be reasonable, I shall have to declaim. Don’t want to, I can assure you, but as a last resort I shall certainly be obliged to lift up my voice.”

“Angels and ministers of grace!” cried the unhappy young person of that name; “I’ve let you down ever so gently, and this is what I get for it. You’re ungrateful, Dimmy, that’s what you are! Now then, let me pass.”

“I’m not a county cricketer,” I began.

“It’s no secret,” said Grace.

“But I mean to be,” said I. “May get a trial for the county this year. And didn’t you say yourself that my crack to cover was all serene?”

These particular reminiscences of my batting promised to modify Grace’s point of view.

“I’d clean forgotten your crack to cover,” said she, with a fallen look. “Hope I’ve not said anything very rude, Dimmy. If I have, I’m awf’ly humble.”

“You’ve been pretty thick,” said I, following up what looked like an advantage. “And you said my forward stroke was not so dusty, didn’t you?”

“Very decent, indeed,” said the keen critic. “Honour bright, Dimmy, I wasn’t really very rude, was I?”

“Depends what you call rude,” said I. “You see, there’s no standard measure of rudeness in this country. You threw books and things at me, but that’s a detail.”

“So I did,” she said sadly. “But I’d clean forgot your crack to cover. Makes me feel rather sick, Dimmy, when I think what I may have said. You ought to have reminded me. One can’t think of everything; ’specially as you’re quite an ordinary looking sort o’ chap.”

“There you go again,” said I.

“That’s not what I meant exactly,” said this frank young person. “What I mean is, you’re not six four, and chest according. But, Dimmy, are you going to let me pass?”

“Not till I’ve had something definite,” said I.

“You’ve got it,” said she.

“Oh, dear no,” said I. “You say nothing under a county cricketer. Well, as I’m certain to be a county cricketer, your reply’s inadequate.”

“I like the certain,” said Grace. “I should go ‘Abundance’ on the certain.”

“The certain’s assumed for the sake of argument,” said I.

“Dimmy, will you let me pass—please!”

“Will you give me some hope?” said I.

“Let me pass first,” said Grace, “then we’ll talk about it.”

“You don’t come over me like that,” said I. “Must have something definite. If I made myself into a county man, would you give me a show?”

“Oh, anything, anything,” said Grace, “so long as you’ll let me pass!”

“Of course, I’ve not much to offer you, you know,” said I, reduced to the coarse expedient. “Only that crack to cover, you know, and a pretty decent forward stroke. And, Grace, I’m developing ever such a prime late cut, and I’ve great hopes of my leg glance. When I get my eye in and the pace o’ the ground, I can turn length balls off my leg and middle.”

It gladdened me to think that she was softening visibly.

“I should like to see all these fine things for myself,” said she. “Must confess I haven’t seen ’em yet. I’ll come and watch you play these strokes against a bit of class bowling.”

All at once an idea hit me in the middle of the waistcoat.

“Grace,” said I breathlessly, palpitatingly, “s’pose you play me to-morrow under Rectory rules on the lawn at single wicket. Then you can test my cricket yourself, don’t you know. What awful good fun! Isn’t that a big idea?”

“Dimmy, if you don’t let me go, I’m certain that I shall be obliged to be rude,” said Grace, still reining herself in nobly.

“You’d see me at work against a bit o’ class bowling, you know,” said I.

“S’pose I should,” she said, pondering.

“And we might arrange it like this,” said I, “just to lend a little interest to the thing. If you beat me at single wicket on the Rectory lawn to-morrow, I’m plucked, wiped out, clean done. On the other hand, if I beat you, you undertake to give my claims very serious consideration.”

“Oh, anything, anything,” said Grace, “if you’ll just let me go. Dimmy, I’m certain that if I didn’t know otherwise, I should think you were a Harrow boy, your behaviour’s that abominably crude. Oh, I am in a wax!”

“Look here, Grace,” said I, “I merely require your promise that you’ll play me to-morrow on these conditions, and then you are at liberty to go.”

“You’ve got my promise,” said she, with an off-hand haste that was by no means reassuring.

Thereupon I opened the door for the hot, angry, and impatient Grace, and she slipped past me in a flash, fearing no doubt that I should repent, and close the door once more upon her.

“Dimmy,” said she, as we repaired together to the boys, “I shall give you a most awful licking to-morrow, you know. By Jove, Dimmy, I wouldn’t be in your shoes! I will give you beans; I will take it out of you for this.”

“Per-haps,” said I saucily. “But, Grace, I shall go all the time, I can promise you. I mayn’t be a county man, but I’m not in the habit of letting girls walk over me with impunity.”

“Oh, I daresay,” said Grace cuttingly. “I should judge that girls are just about your weight. If you played your best, you might play very well indeed against girls. But there’s one thing, Dimmy, that I happen to know of your cricket. You can’t bowl for nuts. And I can let daylight into downright rubbish. Why, Toddles is actually better than you at bowling, and I hit him most horribly. Toddles funks me now. Oh, I shall enjoy myself to-morrow. I’ll pay you out for to-night’s disgusting behaviour. If I can’t knock the cover off your stuff, Dimmy, I’ll never touch a bat again, so there!”

Alas! that my miserable bowling should deserve every word she said about it. My heart sank.