‘House match, of course, you lunatic. What match did you think I meant? How’s it going on?’
‘It’s not going on,’ said Baker, ‘it’s stopped.’
‘You needn’t be a funny goat,’ said Norris complainingly. ‘You know what I mean. What happened on Saturday?’
‘They won the toss,’ began Baker slowly.
‘Yes?’
‘And went in and made a hundred and twenty.’
‘Good. I told you they were no use. A hundred and twenty’s rotten.’
‘Then we went in, and made twenty-one.’
‘Hundred and twenty-one.’
‘No. Just a simple twenty-one without any trimmings of any sort.’
‘But, man! How? Why? How on earth did it happen?’
‘Gethryn took eight for nine. Does that seem to make it any clearer?’
‘Eight for nine? Rot.’
‘Show you the score-sheet if you care to see it. In the second innings—’
‘Oh, you began a second innings?’
‘Yes. We also finished it. We scored rather freely in the second innings. Ten was on the board before the fifth wicket fell. In the end we fairly collared the bowling, and ran up a total of forty-eight.’
Norris took a seat, and tried to grapple with the situation.
‘Forty-eight! Look here, Baker, swear you’re not ragging.’
Baker took a green scoring-book from the shelf and passed it to him.
‘Look for yourself,’ he said.
Norris looked. He looked long and earnestly. Then he handed the book back.
‘Then they’ve won!’ he said blankly.
‘How do you guess these things?’ observed Baker with some bitterness.
‘Well, you are a crew,’ said Norris. ‘Getting out for twenty-one and forty-eight! I see Gethryn got nine for thirty in the second innings. He seems to have been on the spot. I suppose the wicket suited him.’
‘If you can call it a wicket. Next time you specially select a pitch for the House to play on, I wish you’d hunt up something with some slight pretensions to decency.’
‘Why, what was wrong with the pitch? It was a bit worn, that was all.’
‘If,’ said Baker, ‘you call having holes three inches deep just where every ball pitches being a bit worn, I suppose it was. Anyhow, it would have been almost as well, don’t you think, if you’d stopped and played for the House, instead of going off to your rotten village match? You were sick enough when Gethryn went off in the M.C.C. match.’
‘Oh, curse,’ said Norris.
For he had been hoping against hope that the parallel nature of the two incidents would be less apparent to other people than it was to himself.
And so it came about that Leicester’s passed successfully through the first two rounds and soared into the dizzy heights of the semi-final.
[15]
From the fact that he had left his team so basely in the lurch on the day of an important match, a casual observer might have imagined that Norris did not really care very much whether his House won the cup or not. But this was not the case. In reality the success of Jephson’s was a very important matter to him. A sudden whim had induced him to accept his uncle’s invitation, but now that that acceptance had had such disastrous results, he felt inclined to hire a sturdy menial by the hour to kick him till he felt better. To a person in such a frame of mind there are three methods of consolation. He can commit suicide, he can take to drink, or he can occupy his mind with other matters, and cure himself by fixing his attention steadily on some object, and devoting his whole energies to the acquisition of the same.
Norris chose the last method. On the Saturday week following his performance for Little Bindlebury, the Beckford Eleven was due to journey to Charchester, to play the return match against that school on their opponents’ ground, and Norris resolved that that match should be won. For the next week the team practised assiduously, those members of it who were not playing in House matches spending every afternoon at the nets. The treatment was not without its effect. The team had been a good one before. Now every one of the eleven seemed to be at the very summit of his powers. New and hitherto unsuspected strokes began to be developed, leg glances which recalled the Hove and Ranjitsinhji, late cuts of Palairetical brilliance. In short, all Nature may be said to have smiled, and by the end of the week Norris was beginning to be almost cheerful once more. And then, on the Monday before the match, Samuel Wilberforce Gosling came to school with his right arm in a sling. Norris met him at the School gates, rubbed his eyes to see whether it was not after all some horrid optical illusion, and finally, when the stern truth came home to him, almost swooned with anguish.
‘What? How? Why?’ he enquired lucidly.
The injured Samuel smiled feebly.
‘I’m fearfully sorry, Norris,’ he said.
‘Don’t say you can’t play on Saturday,’ moaned Norris.
