by Unknown
“Well, Kay’s very nearly won the cricket cup last year. You ought to get it next season, now that you and Fenn are both in the team.”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’ll be a fluke if we do. Still, we’re hoping. It isn’t every house that’s got a county man in it. But we’re breaking out in another place. Don’t let it get about, for goodness’ sake, but we’re going for the sports’ cup.”
“Hope you’ll get it. Blackburn’s won’t have a chance, anyhow, and I should like to see somebody get it away from the School House. They’ve had it much too long. They’re beginning to look on it as their right. But who are your men?”
“Well, Fenn ought to be a cert for the hundred and the quarter, to start with.”
“But the School House must get the long run, and the mile, and the half, too, probably.”
“Yes. We haven’t anyone to beat Milligan, certainly. But there are the second and third places. Don’t forget those. That’s where we’re going to have a look in. There’s all sorts of unsuspected talent in Kay’s. To look at Peel, for instance, you wouldn’t think he could do the hundred in eleven, would you? Well, he can, only he’s been too slack to go in for the race at the sports, because it meant training. I had him up here and reasoned with him, and he’s promised to do his best. Eleven is good enough for second place in the hundred, don’t you think? There are lots of others in the house who can do quite decently on the track, if they try. I’ve been making strict inquiries. Kay’s are hot stuff, Jimmy. Heap big medicine. That’s what they are.”
“You’re a wonderful man, Kennedy,” said Jimmy Silver. And he meant it. Kennedy’s uphill fight at Kay’s had appealed to him strongly. He himself had never known what it meant to have to manage a hostile house. He had stepped into his predecessor’s shoes at Blackburn’s much as the heir to a throne becomes king. Nobody had thought of disputing his right to the place. He was next man in; so, directly the departure of the previous head of Blackburn’s left a vacancy, he stepped into it, and the machinery of the house had gone on as smoothly as if there had been no change at all. But Kennedy had gone in against a slack and antagonistic house, with weak prefects to help him, and a fussy house-master; and he had fought them all for a term, and looked like winning. Jimmy admired his friend with a fervour which nothing on earth would have tempted him to reveal. Like most people with a sense of humour, he had a fear of appearing ridiculous, and he hid his real feelings as completely as he was able.
“How is the footer getting on?” inquired Jimmy, remembering the difficulties Kennedy had encountered earlier in the term in connection with his house team.
“It’s better,” said Kennedy. “Keener, at any rate. We shall do our best in the house-matches. But we aren’t a good team.”
“Any more trouble about your being captain instead of Fenn?”
“No. We both sign the lists now. Fenn didn’t want to, but I thought it would be a good idea, so we tried it. It seems to have worked all right”
“Of course, your getting your first has probably made a difference.”
“A bit, perhaps.”
“Well, I hope you won’t get the footer cup, because I want it for Blackburn’s. Or the cricket cup. I want that, too. But you can have the sports’ cup with my blessing.”
“Thanks,” said Kennedy. “It’s very generous of you.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Jimmy.
From which conversation it will be seen that Kay’s was gradually pulling itself together. It had been asleep for years. It was now waking up.
When the winter term ended, there were distinct symptoms of an outbreak of public spirit in the house.
The Easter term opened auspiciously in one way. Neither Walton nor Perry returned. The former had been snapped up in the middle of the holidays—to his enormous disgust—by a bank, which wanted his services so much that it was prepared to pay him 40 pounds a year simply to enter the addresses of its outgoing letters in a book, and post them when he had completed this ceremony. After a spell of this he might hope to be transferred to another sphere of bank life and thought, and at the end of his first year he might even hope for a rise in his salary of ten pounds, if his conduct was good, and he had not been late on more than twenty mornings in the year. I am aware that in a properly-regulated story of school-life Walton would have gone to the Eckleton races, returned in a state of speechless intoxication, and been summarily expelled; but facts are facts, and must not be tampered with. The ingenious but not industrious Perry had been superannuated. For three years he had been in the Lower Fourth. Probably the master of that form went to the Head, and said that his constitution would not stand another year of him, and that either he or Perry must go. So Perry had departed. Like a poor play, he had “failed to attract,” and was withdrawn. There was also another departure of an even more momentous nature.
Mr Kay had left Eckleton.
Kennedy was no longer head of Kay’s. He was now head of Dencroft’s.
Mr Dencroft was one of the most popular masters in the school. He was a keen athlete and a tactful master. Fenn and Kennedy knew him well, through having played at the nets and in scratch games with him. They both liked him. If Kennedy had had to select a house-master, he would have chosen Mr Blackburn first. But Mr Dencroft would have been easily second.
Fenn learned the facts from the matron, and detailed them to Kennedy.
“Kay got the offer of a headmastership at a small school in the north, and jumped at it. I pity the fellows there. They are going to have a lively time.”
“I’m jolly glad Dencroft has got the house,” said Kennedy. “We might have had some awful rotter put in. Dencroft will help us buck up the house games.”
The new house-master sent for Kennedy on the first evening of term. He wished to find out how the Head of the house and the ex-Head stood with regard to one another. He knew the circumstances, and comprehended vaguely that there had been trouble.
“I hope we shall have a good term,” he said.
“I hope so, sir,” said Kennedy.
“You—er—you think the house is keener, Kennedy, than when you first came in?”
“Yes, sir. They are getting quite keen now. We might win the sports.”
“I hope we shall. I wish we could win the football cup, too, but I am afraid Mr Blackburn’s are very heavy metal.”
“It’s hardly likely we shall have very much chance with them; but we might get into the final!”
“It would be an excellent thing for the house if we could. I hope Fenn is helping you get the team into shape?” he added.
“Oh, yes, sir,” said Kennedy. “We share the captaincy. We both sign the lists.”
“A very good idea,” said Mr Dencroft, relieved. “Good night, Kennedy.”
“Good night, sir,” said Kennedy.
XXIII
THE HOUSE-MATCHES
The chances of Kay’s in the inter-house Football Competition were not thought very much of by their rivals. Of late years each of the other houses had prayed to draw Kay’s for the first round, it being a certainty that this would mean that they got at least into the second round, and so a step nearer the cup. Nobody, however weak compared to Blackburn’s, which was at the moment the crack football house, ever doubted the result of a match with Kay’s. It was looked on as a sort of gentle trial trip.
But the efforts of the two captains during the last weeks of the winter term had put a different complexion on matters. Football is not like cricket. It is a game at which anybody of average size and a certain amount of pluck can make himself at least moderately proficient. Kennedy, after consultations with Fenn, had picked out what he considered the best fifteen, and the two set themselves to knock it into shape. In weight there was not much to grumble at. There were several heavy men in the scrum. If only these could be brought to use their weight to the last ounce when shoving, all would be well as far as the forwards were concerned. The outsides were not so satisfactory. With the exception, of course, of Fenn, t
hey lacked speed. They were well-meaning, but they could not run any faster by virtue of that. Kay’s would have to trust to its scrum to pull it through. Peel, the sprinter whom Kennedy had discovered in his search for athletes, had to be put in the pack on account of his weight, which deprived the three-quarter line of what would have been a good man in that position. It was a drawback, too, that Fenn was accustomed to play on the wing. To be of real service, a wing three-quarter must be fed by his centres, and, unfortunately, there was no centre in Kay’s—or Dencroft’s, as it should now be called—who was capable of making openings enough to give Fenn a chance. So he had to play in the centre, where he did not know the game so well.
Kennedy realised at an early date that the one chance of the house was to get together before the house-matches and play as a coherent team, not as a collection of units. Combination will often make up for lack of speed in a three-quarter line. So twice a week Dencroft’s turned out against scratch teams of varying strength.
It delighted Kennedy to watch their improvement. The first side they played ran through them to the tune of three goals and four tries to a try, and it took all the efforts of the Head of the house to keep a spirit of pessimism from spreading in the ranks. Another frost of this sort, and the sprouting keenness of the house would be nipped in the bud. He conducted himself with much tact. Another captain might have made the fatal error of trying to stir his team up with pungent abuse. He realised what a mistake this would be. It did not need a great deal of discouragement to send the house back to its old slack ways. Another such defeat, following immediately in the footsteps of the first, and they would begin to ask themselves what was the good of mortifying the flesh simply to get a licking from a scratch team by twenty-four points. Kay’s, they would feel, always had got beaten, and they always would, to the end of time. A house that has once got thoroughly slack does not change its views of life in a moment.
Kennedy acted craftily.
“You played jolly well,” he told his despondent team, as they trooped off the field. “We haven’t got together yet, that’s all. And it was a hot side we were playing today. They would have licked Blackburn’s.”
A good deal more in the same strain gave the house team the comfortable feeling that they had done uncommonly well to get beaten by only twenty-four points. Kennedy fostered the delusion, and in the meantime arranged with Mr Dencroft to collect fifteen innocents and lead them forth to be slaughtered by the house on the following Friday. Mr Dencroft entered into the thing with a relish. When he showed Kennedy the list of his team on the Friday morning, that diplomatist chuckled. He foresaw a good time in the near future. “You must play up like the dickens,” he told the house during the dinner-hour. “Dencroft is bringing a hot lot this afternoon. But I think we shall lick them.”
They did. When the whistle blew for No-side, the house had just finished scoring its fourteenth try. Six goals and eight tries to nil was the exact total. Dencroft’s returned to headquarters, asking itself in a dazed way if these things could be. They saw that cup on their mantelpiece already. Keenness redoubled. Football became the fashion in Dencroft’s. The play of the team improved weekly. And its spirit improved too. The next scratch team they played beat them by a goal and a try to a goal. Dencroft’s was not depressed. It put the result down to a fluke. Then they beat another side by a try to nothing; and by that time they had got going as an organised team, and their heart was in the thing.
They had improved out of all knowledge when the house-matches began. Blair’s was the lucky house that drew against them in the first round.
“Good business,” said the men of Blair. “Wonder who we’ll play in the second round.”
They left the field marvelling. For some unaccountable reason, Dencroft’s had flatly refused to act in the good old way as a doormat for their opponents. Instead, they had played with a dash and knowledge of the game which for the first quarter of an hour quite unnerved Blair’s. In that quarter of an hour they scored three times, and finished the game with two goals and three tries to their name.
The School looked on it as a huge joke. “Heard the latest?” friends would say on meeting one another the day after the game. “Kay’s—I mean Dencroft’s—have won a match. They simply sat on Blair’s. First time they’ve ever won a house-match, I should think. Blair’s are awfully sick. We shall have to be looking out.”
Whereat the friend would grin broadly. The idea of Dencroft’s making a game of it with his house tickled him.
When Dencroft’s took fifteen points off Mulholland’s, the joke began to lose its humour.
“Why, they must be some good,” said the public, startled at the novelty of the idea. “If they win another match, they’ll be in the final!”
Kay’s in the final! Cricket? Oh, yes, they had got into the final at cricket, of course. But that wasn’t the house. It was Fenn. Footer was different. One man couldn’t do everything there. The only possible explanation was that they had improved to an enormous extent.
Then people began to remember that they had played in scratch games against the house. There seemed to be a tremendous number of fellows who had done this. At one time or another, it seemed, half the School had opposed Dencroft’s in the ranks of a scratch side. It began to dawn on Eckleton that in an unostentatious way Dencroft’s had been putting in about seven times as much practice as any other three houses rolled together. No wonder they combined so well.
When the School House, with three first fifteen men in its team, fell before them, the reputation of Dencroft’s was established. It had reached the final, and only Blackburn’s stood now between it and the cup.
All this while Blackburn’s had been doing what was expected of them by beating each of their opponents with great ease. There was nothing sensational about this as there was in the case of Dencroft’s. The latter were, therefore, favourites when the two teams lined up against one another in the final. The School felt that a house that had had such a meteoric flight as Dencroft’s must—by all that was dramatic—carry the thing through to its obvious conclusion, and pull off the final.
But Fenn and Kennedy were not so hopeful. A certain amount of science, a great deal of keenness, and excellent condition, had carried them through the other rounds in rare style, but, though they would probably give a good account of themselves, nobody who considered the two teams impartially could help seeing that Dencroft’s was a weaker side than Blackburn’s. Nothing but great good luck could bring them out victorious today.
And so it proved. Dencroft’s played up for all they were worth from the kick-off to the final solo on the whistle, but they were over-matched. Blackburn’s scrum was too heavy for them, with its three first fifteen men and two seconds. Dencroft’s pack were shoved off the ball time after time, and it was only keen tackling that kept the score down. By half-time Blackburn’s were a couple of tries ahead. Fenn scored soon after the interval with a great run from his own twenty-five, and for a quarter of an hour it looked as if it might be anybody’s game. Kennedy converted the try, so that Blackburn’s only led by a single point. A fluky kick or a mistake on the part of a Blackburnite outside might give Dencroft’s the cup.
But the Blackburn outsides did not make mistakes. They played a strong, sure game, and the forwards fed them well. Ten minutes before No-side, Jimmy Silver ran in, increasing the lead to six points. And though Dencroft’s never went to pieces, and continued to show fight to the very end, Blackburn’s were not to be denied, and Challis scored a final try in the corner. Blackburn’s won the cup by the comfortable, but not excessive, margin of a goal and three tries to a goal.
Dencroft’s had lost the cup; but they had lost it well. Their credit had increased in spite of the defeat.
“I thought we shouldn’t be able to manage Blackburn’s,” said Kennedy, “What we must do now is win that sports’ cup.”
XXIV
THE SPORTS
There were certain houses at Eckleton which had, as it were, specia
lised in certain competitions. Thus, Gay’s, who never by any chance survived the first two rounds of the cricket and football housers, invariably won the shooting shield. All the other houses sent their brace of men to the range to see what they could do, but every year it was the same. A pair of weedy obscurities from Gay’s would take the shield by a comfortable margin. In the same way Mulholland’s had only won the cricket cup once since they had become a house, but they had carried off the swimming cup three years in succession, and six years in all out of the last eight. The sports had always been looked on as the perquisite of the School House; and this year, with Milligan to win the long distances, and Maybury the high jump and the weight, there did not seem much doubt at their success. These two alone would pile up fifteen points. Three points were given for a win, two for second place, and one for third. It was this that encouraged Kennedy in the hope that Dencroft’s might have a chance. Nobody in the house could beat Milligan or Maybury, but the School House second and third strings were not so invincible. If Dencroft’s, by means of second and third places in the long races and the other events which were certainties for their opponents, could hold the School House, Fenn’s sprinting might just give them the cup. In the meantime they trained hard, but in an unobtrusive fashion which aroused no fear in School House circles.
The sports were fixed for the last Saturday of term, but not all the races were run on that day. The half-mile came off on the previous Thursday, and the long steeplechase on the Monday after.
The School House won the half-mile, as they were expected to do. Milligan led from the start, increased his lead at the end of the first lap, doubled it half-way through the second, and finally, with a dazzling sprint in the last seventy yards, lowered the Eckleton record by a second and three-fifths, and gave his house three points. Kennedy, who stuck gamely to his man for half the first lap, was beaten on the tape by Crake, of Mulholland’s. When sports’ day came, therefore, the score was School House three points, Mulholland’s two, Dencroft’s one. The success of Mulholland’s in the half was to the advantage of Dencroft’s. Mulholland’s was not likely to score many more points, and a place to them meant one or two points less to the School House.