“Very well. I’ll play. It’s rather rot, though.”
“No, it’s all right, really. It’s only that you’ve got into a groove. You’re so used to doing the heavy martyr, that the sudden change has knocked you out rather. Come and have an ice before the shop shuts.”
So Gethryn came once more into the team, and travelled down to Charchester with the others. And at this point a painful alternative faces me. I have to choose between truth and inclination. I should like to say that the Bishop eclipsed himself, and broke all previous records in the Charchester match. By the rules of the dramatic, nothing else is possible. But truth, though it crush me, and truth compels me to admit that his performance was in reality distinctly mediocre. One of his weak points as a bowler was that he was at sea when opposed to a left-hander. Many bowlers have this failing. Some strange power seems to compel them to bowl solely on the leg side, and nothing but long hops and full pitches. It was so in the case of Gethryn. Charchester won the toss, and batted first on a perfect wicket. The first pair of batsmen were the captain, a great bat, who had scored seventy-three not out against Beckford in the previous match, and a left-handed fiend. Baynes’s leg-breaks were useless on a wicket which, from the hardness of it, might have been constructed of asphalt, and the rubbish the Bishop rolled up to the left-handed artiste was painful to witness. At four o’clock—the match had started at half-past eleven—the Charchester captain reached his century, and was almost immediately stumped off Baynes. The Bishop bowled the next man first ball, the one bright spot in his afternoon’s performance. Then came another long stand, against which the Beckford bowling raged in vain. At five o’clock, Charchester by that time having made two hundred and forty-one for two wickets, the left-hander ran into three figures, and the captain promptly declared the innings closed. Beckford’s only chance was to play for a draw, and in this they succeeded. When stumps were drawn at a quarter to seven, the score was a hundred and three, and five wickets were down. The Bishop had the satisfaction of being not out with twenty-eight to his credit, but nothing less than a century would have been sufficient to soothe him after his shocking bowling performance. Pringle, who during the luncheon interval had encountered his young friends the Ashbys, and had been duly taunted by them on the subject of leather-hunting, was top scorer with forty-one. Norris, I regret to say, only made three, running himself out in his second over. As the misfortune could not, by any stretch of imagination, be laid at anybody else’s door but his own, he was decidedly savage. The team returned to Beckford rather footsore, very disgusted, and abnormally silent. Norris sulked by himself at one end of the saloon carriage, and the Bishop sulked by himself at the other end, and even Marriott forbore to treat the situation lightly. It was a mournful homecoming. No cheering wildly as the brake drove to the College from Horton, no shouting of the School song in various keys as they passed through the big gates. Simply silence. And except when putting him on to bowl, or taking him off, or moving him in the field, Norris had not spoken a word to the Bishop the whole afternoon.
It was shortly after this disaster that Mr. Mortimer Wells came to stay with the Headmaster. Mr. Mortimer Wells was a brilliant and superior young man, who was at some pains to be a cynic. He was an old pupil of the Head’s in the days before he had succeeded to the rule of Beckford. He had the reputation of being a “ripe” scholar, and to him had been deputed the task of judging the poetical outbursts of the bards of the Upper Fifth, with the object of awarding to the most deserving—or, perhaps, to the least undeserving—the handsome prize bequeathed by his openhanded highness, the Rajah of Seltzerpore.
This gentleman sat with his legs stretched beneath the Headmaster’s generous table. Dinner had come to an end, and a cup of coffee, acting in cooperation with several glasses of port and an excellent cigar, had inspired him to hold forth on the subject of poetry prizes. He held forth.
“The poetry prize system,” said he—it is astonishing what nonsense a man, ordinarily intelligent, will talk after dinner—“is on exactly the same principle as those penny-in-the-slot machines that you see at stations. You insert your penny. You set your prize subject. In the former case you hope for wax vestas, and you get butterscotch. In the latter, you hope for something at least readable, and you get the most complete, terrible, uninspired twaddle that was ever written on paper. The boy mind”—here the ash of his cigar fell off on to his waistcoat—“the merely boy mind is incapable of poetry.”
From which speech the shrewd reader will infer that Mr. Mortimer Wells was something of a prig. And perhaps, altogether shrewd reader, you’re right.
Mr. Lawrie, the master of the Sixth, who had been asked to dinner to meet the great man, disagreed as a matter of principle. He was one of those men who will take up a cause from pure love of argument.
“I think you’re wrong, sir. I’m perfectly convinced you’re wrong.”
Mr. Wells smiled in his superior
