‘Good,’ said the Bishop. ‘You’re a great man, Wilson. You can make a small selection of those biscuits, and if you bag all the sugar ones I’ll slay you, and then you can go quietly downstairs, and rejoin your sorrowing friends. And don’t you go telling them what I’ve been saying.’
‘Rather not,’ said Wilson.
He made his small selection, and retired. The Bishop turned to Marriott again.
‘I shall tell Reece, because he deserves it, and I rather think I shall tell Gosling and Pringle. Nobody else, though. What’s the good of it? Everybody’ll forget the whole thing by next season.’
‘How about Norris?’ asked Marriott.
‘Now there you have touched the spot. I can’t possibly tell Norris myself. My natural pride is too enormous. Descended from a primordial atomic globule, you know, like Pooh Bah. And I shook hands with a duke once. The man Norris and I, I regret to say, had something of a row on the subject last term. We parted with mutual expressions of hate, and haven’t spoken since. What I should like would be for somebody else to tell him all about it. Not you. It would look too much like a put-up job. So don’t you go saying anything. Swear.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you mustn’t. Swear. Let me hear you swear by the bones of your ancestors.’
‘All right. I call it awful rot, though.’
‘Can’t be helped. Painful but necessary. Now I’m going to tell Reece, though I don’t expect he’ll remember anything about it. Reece never remembers anything beyond his last meal.’
‘Idiot,’ said Marriott after him as the door closed. ‘I don’t know, though,’ he added to himself.
And, pouring himself out another cup of tea, he pondered deeply over the matter.
Reece heard the news without emotion.
‘You’re a good sort, Bishop,’ he said, ‘I knew something of the kind must have happened. It reminds me of a thing that happened to—’
‘Yes, it is rather like it, isn’t it?’ said the Bishop. ‘By the way, talking about stories, a chap I met in the holidays told me a ripper. You see, this chap and his brother—’
He discoursed fluently for some twenty minutes. Reece sighed softly, but made no attempt to resume his broken narrative. He was used to this sort of thing.
It was a fortnight later, and Marriott and the Bishop were once more seated in their study waiting for Wilson to get tea ready. Wilson made toast in the foreground. Marriott was in football clothes, rubbing his shin gently where somebody had kicked it in the scratch game that afternoon. After rubbing for a few moments in silence, he spoke suddenly.
‘You must tell Norris,’ he said. ‘It’s all rot.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Then I shall.’
‘No, don’t. You swore you wouldn’t.’
‘Well, but look here. I just want to ask you one question. What sort of a time did you have in that scratch game tonight?’
‘Beastly. I touched the ball exactly four times. If I wasn’t so awfully ornamental, I don’t see what would be the use of my turning out at all. I’m no practical good to the team.’
‘Exactly. That’s just what I wanted to get at. I don’t mean your remark about your being ornamental, but about your never touching the ball. Until you explain matters to Norris, you never will get a decent pass. Norris and you are a rattling good pair of centre threes, but if he never gives you a pass, I don’t see how we can expect to have any combination in the First. It’s no good my slinging out the ball if the centres stick to it like glue directly they get it, and refuse to give it up. It’s simply sickening.’
Marriott played half for the First Fifteen, and his soul was in the business.
‘But, my dear chap,’ said Gethryn, ‘you don’t mean to tell me that a man like Norris would purposely rot up the First’s combination because he happened to have had a row with the other centre. He’s much too decent a fellow.’
‘No. I don’t mean that exactly. What he does is this. I’ve watched him. He gets the ball. He runs with it till his man is on him, and then he thinks of passing. You’re backing him up. He sees you, and says to himself, “I can’t pass to that cad”—’
‘Meaning me?’
‘Meaning you.’
‘Thanks awfully.’
‘Don’t mention it. I’m merely quoting his thoughts, as deduced by me. He says, “I can’t pass to that—well, individual, if you prefer it. Where’s somebody else?” So he hesitates, and gets tackled, or else slings the ball wildly out to somebody who can’t possibly get to it. It’s simply infernal. And we play the Nomads tomorrow, too. Something must be done.’
‘Somebody ought to tell him. Why doesn’t our genial skipper assert his authority?’
‘Hill’s a forward, you see, and doesn’t get an opportunity of noticing it. I can’t tell him, of course. I’ve not got my colours—’
‘You’re a cert. for them.’
‘Hope so. Anyway, I’ve not got them yet, and Norris has, so I can’t very well go slanging him to Hill. Sort of thing rude people would call side.’
