Willow the king

IT was the eve of Little Clumpton versus Hickory. To those who are unfamiliar with these haunts of ancient peace this may seem a chronicle of the infinitely little. The Utopians, however, dwelling there remote, were quite aware that Waterloo, nay, even the Battle of Omdurman, was a picnic in comparison with Little Clumpton versus Hickory. Therefore let the nations heed.

Half our team were sitting in my billiard-room discussing the prospects of the morrow. Opinion really was unanimous for once: Little Clumpton must not lose.

“Lose!” said the Optimist grandly, “is it England, or is it Hickory?”

“Only Hickory,” said the Pessimist, “and the Trenthams.”

“It can be W. G. and Jackson, if they like to bring ’em,” said the Optimist; “and then they’ll finish sick. They’ll simply flop before Charlie’s ribsters, and Billy’s slows.”

“H’m!” said the Pessimist.

“Think so?” said the Worry.

“Certain,” said the Optimist. “Before now we’ve had ’em out for fifty.”

“Yes,” said the Pessimist, “and before now we’ve had ’em out for three hundred and fifty.”

“But,” said the Humourist, “I hadn’t developed my head-ball then.”

The Humourist would find it as difficult to exist without his “head-ball,” as Attewell without his gentle maiden.

“Well, I suppose it all depends upon the weather,” said the Worry, with his usual inconsequence. “How’s the glass?”

“Quite well, thank you,” said the Humourist, brandishing a huge whisky and Apollinaris.

“Going down,” said the Treasurer, with great gloominess. The Treasurer had been elected to his dignity because it was feared that he was Scotch on his mother’s side.

Here the Captain came into the conversation. He took his corn-cob slowly from his mouth, pressed the tobacco down with that air of simple majesty that is the hall-mark of the great, and then began to smoke again in a very solemn manner. This, for the Captain, was a speech. And as it is only the fool who can speak without giving himself away, this was as it should be. His words were fit though few. Hence the tradition, that though he didn’t say much his ideas were very beautiful. The Secretary regularly sat in a listening attitude behind his chair, so that if by any chance the great man did commit an utterance, he could jot it down upon his cuff. And it was an open secret that every time the Secretary changed his shirt he entered the Captain’s requests for a milk and soda or a pipe-light in the archives of the Club.

The Captain was the gentlest of men. There was a suavity in his coffee-coloured face and his pale blue eye that grew positively weird in one who was good for another fifty every time he had the screen moved. Though he had developed a peculiar habit of playing for the Gentlemen at Lord’s, he had a charity that covered a multitude of umpires, and when l.b.w. did not attempt to demonstrate to the pavilion by the laws of Sir Isaac Newton that the ball had not pitched straight by the vulgarest fraction of an inch. His mien had the wholly classic calm of those who have their biographies in Wisden. His language in its robustest passages was as fragile as Mrs. Meynell’s prose. If a small boy danced behind the bowler’s arm, it was claimed for the Captain that he actually employed “please” and “thank you.”[A] Even in the throes of a run out his talk retained its purity to a remarkable degree. His strongest expletive was a pained expression. His beverage seldom rose beyond a milk and soda. Life with him was a very chaste affair.

The Secretary was of another kidney. He always got up a bit before the lark, since his rule of life was to get a start of the rest of nature. He was eminently fitted for great place. Had he been other than Secretary to the Little Clumpton Cricket Club he must have been Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and dictated carefully chosen insults to the French and other dwellers in outer darkness. Nevertheless, he was all things to all men. He could be as persuasive as tobacco, he could unloose the wrath of Jove. If you came to him at the eleventh hour and said: “Beastly sorry, Lawson, but can’t possibly play to-morrow,” you could rely on his well of English being defiled. On the other hand, if he came to you and said: “I say, old man, Jordan’s lost his jolly aunt; Boulter’s split his blighted thumb, and I really can’t take no, you know, shall want your batting awful bad, you know,” his accent was a song. He was the only man who could subdue the best bowler when the slips weren’t snapping ’em. He was the only man who dared address the Captain on the field. He had the courage to explain to the fair sex, “what those strange things in white coats with mufflers round their waists are standing there for?” He could suggest to the intelligent foreigner that the criquette is a sport, not a religious exercise; and he was such a fine tactician that he always fielded point. Merryweather, known familiarly as “Jessop,” because of his audacity, was the one person who ventured to tell the Secretary that he couldn’t play to-morrow, “as I’m going golfing.” And even he, lion-hearted as he was, presently gave up that pastime for less violent amusements. “Billiards gone to grass,” the Secretary considered an insufficient phrase, but the Secretary’s views on golf are not going to be printed.

Lawson’s was not the highest form of cricket. His bowling was a jest; his batting was a comic interlude. Yet his Captain was wont to say, “Give me Lawson at a pinch, and I’ll give you Grace and Ranjitsinhji.” For his force of character was such that when the bowling was used up he would go on with lobs and take a wicket; when a rot set in, before going in to stop it, he would tell them to send him a cup of tea at five; whilst he was such a master in the art of playing for a draw that light-minded persons called him “Notts.” True, his style was not the style of Gunn and Shrewsbury, nor were his methods conspicuously pretty, but none the less he was the source of several letters to the M.C.C. As an instance of his powers, last year but one, against I. Zingari, he stayed two hours for seven, brought down the rain and saved the match. There was not a breath of vanity about him, and in appearance he looked quite a simple ordinary soul. But if it was an absolute necessity that Little Clumpton should win the toss, the Captain generally sent Lawson out to spin; and if the other side, in the innocence of their hearts, thought they knew a trick that Little Clumpton didn’t, the Secretary usually held it right to encourage them in that opinion.

Now though there was not a man present who would have admitted for a moment that he had the faintest fear of Hickory, there was no overriding the hard fact that the Captain had twice withdrawn his pipe from his mouth in the space of twenty minutes. The Secretary had noted this grim portent as he noted everything, and sat tugging his moustache with one hand, whilst with the other he worked out the Theory of the Toss (invented by himself) to five places of decimals. Indeed, such an air of gloom presently settled on us all that the Pessimist declared that we had got already a bad attack of the Trenthams. Perhaps we had. Never previously had we faced more than two members of this redoubtable family at a time, but report said that to-morrow we must suffer the full brotherhood of four. Their deeds that season had been more terrible than ever. A. H., of Middlesex, had helped himself to 146 against Surrey at the Oval the previous week, and was going out with Stoddart in the autumn. H. C. was reputed to be the best bowler either ’Varsity had seen since Sammy Woods, an opinion poor Oxford had subscribed to in July at Lord’s; Captain George, although he liked to call himself a veteran, had an average of 72·3 for the Royal Artillery; whilst T. S. M., the Harrow Captain, had enjoyed the Eton match very much indeed, and rather thought he should enjoy the match with Little Clumpton too. As if this was not enough, the General Nuisance presently sauntered in, exactly an hour behind his time as usual. And to the consternation of us all the General Nuisance wore his most expansive simper.

“He’s only heard that the Trenthams are coming,” said the Worry. By trying to reassure us he sought to reassure himself.

“Confound you! are you going to dislocate your face?” said the Secretary, aiming a cushion and a string of unprintable expressions at the General Nuisance. “What’s up now? Is Charlie crocked? Is Billy drinking? Good Lord! I hope there’s nothing gone wrong with the bowling!”

“Not yet,” said the General Nuisance sweetly; “but there will be, I’ll give you my word.”

“We shall have to try that muck o’ yours then,” said the Pessimist.

“Unfortunately I’m not playing to-morrow; I’m going fishing,” said the General Nuisance affably.

“Eh? What?”

It was the voice of the Secretary from behind the Captain’s chair. It was a psychological moment. Each man present had that nightmare of a feeling that afflicts you in the long-field when A. H. Trentham lifts one to you steeples high, curling some fifteen ways at once, which all the time you are hopelessly misjudging and that you know you are bound to drop. However, I had the presence of mind to distract the General Nuisance with a drink, while the Captain laid a soothing hand on the Secretary’s knee, and appealed to his moral nature. Brandy and soda, one grieves to say, inflamed rather than appeased the personal appearance of the General Nuisance. His simper became a grin.

“Pipe up,” said that heroical man, the Treasurer, preparing for the worst; “out with it.”

“You will be very brave?” said the General Nuisance.

“Comfort, you blackguard,” said the Secretary, “Why do you grin? Speak or die!”

When the General Nuisance grinned, homicidal tendencies soiled minds of the most virgin whiteness.

The Captain took his pipe out and tapped it on his boot. It was a command that even the revolutionary spirit of the General Nuisance dared not disregard. It had the authority of an Act of Parliament.

“Well, brethren,” said the General Nuisance, “they are bringing Carteret and Elphinstone, that’s all.”

“And the Trenthams, too?” said I.

“And the Trenthams, too,” said he.

“It’s a good job we’re a good team,” said the Humourist.

It is true that the Secretary sat behind the Captain’s chair, but in the course of three minutes he contrived to emit such a quantity of language of a free and painful character, that to relieve the tension the Humourist kindly propounded this conundrum. Why is Bobby Abel batting like Lawson’s small talk? Because to look at ’em you’d wonder how they could. This, I regret to say, is quite in the Humourist’s early manner, ere art had chastened nature. It lacks the polished pathos of those slow-drawn agonies at which the world grew pale. But as the Humourist strutted in his title because he took himself quite seriously, do not let us forget that this offspring of his wit was born in an hour of mental stress.