Then came his moment. The little formidably padded lady who had dined at the Dower House overnight made a gallant attack upon Mrs. Teddy. Out of the confusion of this clash the ball spun into Mr. Direck’s radius. Where should he smite and how? A moment of reflection was natural.
But now the easy-fitting discipline of the Dower House style of hockey became apparent. Mr. Direck had last observed the tall young Indian gentleman, full of vitality and anxious for destruction, far away in the distance on the opposing right wing. Regardless of the more formal methods of the game, this young man had resolved, without further delay and at any cost, to hit the ball hard, and he was travelling like some Asiatic typhoon with an extreme velocity across the remonstrances of Mr. Britling and the general order of his side. Mr. Direck became aware of him just before his impact. There was a sort of collision from which Mr. Direck emerged with a feeling that one side of his face was permanently flattened, but still gallantly resolved to hit the comparatively lethargic ball. He and the staggered but resolute Indian clashed sticks again. And Mr. Direck had the best of it. Years of experience couldn’t have produced a better pass to the captain. …
“Good pass!”
Apparently from one of the London visitors.
But this was some game!
The ball executed some rapid movements to and fro across the field. Our side was pressing hard. There was a violent convergence of miscellaneous backs and such-like irregulars upon the threatened goal. Mr. Britling’s dozen was rapidly losing its disciplined order. One of the side-car ladies and the gallant Indian had shifted their activities to the defensive back, and with them was a spectacled gentleman waving his stick, high above all recognised rules. Mr. Direck’s captain and both Britling boys hurried to join the fray. Mr. Britling, who seemed to Mr. Direck to be for a captain rather too demagogic, also ran back to rally his forces by loud cries. “Pass outwardly!” was the burthen of his contribution.
The struggle about the Britling goal ceased to be a game and became something between a fight and a social gathering. Mr. Britling’s goal-keeper could be heard shouting, “I can’t see the ball! Lift your feet!” The crowded conflict lurched towards the goal-posts. “My shin!” cried Mr. Manning. “No, you don’t!”
Whack, but again whack!
Whack! “Ah! would you?” Whack.
“Goal!” cried the side-car gentleman.
“Goal!” cried the Britling boys. …
Mr. Manning, as goal-keeper, went to recover the ball, but one of the Britling boys politely anticipated him.
The crowd became inactive, and then began to drift back to loosely conceived positions.
“It’s no good swarming into goal like that,” Mr. Britling, with a faint asperity in his voice, explained to his followers. “We’ve got to keep open and not crowd each other.”
Then he went confidentially to the energetic young Indian to make some restrictive explanation of his activities.
Mr. Direck strolled back towards Cecily. He was very warm and a little blown, but not, he felt, disgraced. He was winning.
“You’ll have to take your coat off,” she said.
It was a good idea.
It had occurred to several people, and the boundary-line was already dotted with hastily discarded jackets and wraps and so forth. But the lady in the motoring dust-coat was buttoning it to the chin.
“One goal love,” said the minor Britling boy.
“We haven’t begun yet, Sunny,” said Cecily.
“Sonny! That’s American,” said Mr. Direck.
“No. We call him Sunny Jim,” said Cecily. “They’re bullying off again.”
“Sunny Jim’s American too,” said Mr. Direck, returning to his place. …
The struggle was resumed. And soon it became clear that the first goal was no earnest of the quality of the struggle. Teddy and Cecily formed a terribly efficient combination. Against their brilliant rushes, supported in a vehement but effective manner by the Indian to their right and guided by loud shoutings from Mr. Britling (centre), Mr. Direck and the side-car lady and Mr. Raeburn struggled in vain. One swift advance was only checked by the dust-coat, its folds held the ball until help arrived; another was countered by a tremendous swipe of Mr. Raeburn’s that sent the ball within an inch of the youngest Britling’s head and right across the field; the third resulted in a swift pass from Cecily to the elder Britling son away on her right, and he shot the goal neatly through the lattice of Mr. Lawrence Carmine’s defensive movements. And after that very rapidly came another goal for Mr. Britling’s side and then another.
Then Mr. Britling cried out that it was “Half Time,” and explained to Mr. Direck that whenever one side got to three goals they considered it was half time and had five minutes’ rest and changed sides. Everybody was very hot and happy, except the lady in the dust-coat, who was perfectly cool. In everybody’s eyes shone the light of battle, and not a shadow disturbed the brightness of the afternoon for Mr. Direck except a certain unspoken anxiety about Mr. Raeburn’s trousers.
You see Mr. Direck had never seen Mr. Raeburn before, and knew nothing about his trousers.
They appeared to be coming down.
To begin with they had been rather loose over the feet and turned up, and as the game progressed, fold after fold of concertina-ed flannel gathered about his ankles. Every now and then Mr. Raeburn would seize the opportunity of some respite from the game to turn up a fresh six inches or so of this accumulation. Naturally Mr. Direck expected this policy to end unhappily. He did not know that the flannel trousers of Mr. Raeburn were like a river, that they could come down for ever and still remain inexhaustible. …
He had visions of this scene of happy innocence being suddenly blasted by a monstrous disaster. …
Apart from this worry Mr. Direck was as happy as any one there!
Perhaps these apprehensions affected his game. At any rate he did nothing that pleased him in the second half, Cecily danced all over him and round and about him, and in the course of ten minutes her side had won the two remaining goals with a score of Five-One; and five goals is “game” by the standards of Matching’s Easy.
And then with the very slightest of delays these insatiable people picked up again. Mr. Direck slipped away and returned in a white silk shirt, tennis trousers and a belt. This time he and Cecily were on the same side, the Cecily-Teddy combination was broken, and he it seemed was to take the place of the redoubtable Teddy on the left wing with her.
This time the sides were better chosen and played a long, obstinate, even game. One-One. One-Two. One-Three. (Half Time.) Two-Three. Three all. Four-Three. Four all. …
By this time Mr. Direck was beginning to master the simple strategy of the sport. He was also beginning to master the fact that Cecily was the quickest, nimblest, most indefatigable player on the field. He scouted for her and passed to her. He developed tacit understandings with her. Ideas of protecting her had gone to the four winds of heaven. Against them Teddy and a side-car girl with Raeburn in support made a memorable struggle. Teddy was as quick as a cat. “Four-Three” looked like winning, but then Teddy and the tall Indian and Mrs. Teddy pulled square. They almost repeated this feat and won, but Mr. Manning saved the situation with an immense oblique hit that sent the ball to Mr. Direck. He ran with the ball up to Raeburn and then dodged and passed to Cecily. There was a lively struggle to the left; the ball was hit out by Mr. Raeburn and thrown in by a young Britling; lost by the forwards and rescued by the padded lady. Forward again! This time will do it!
Cecily away to the left had worked round Mr. Raeburn once more. Teddy, realising that things were serious, was tearing back to attack her.
Mr. Direck supported with silent intentness. “Centre!” cried Mr. Britling. “Cen-tre!”
“Mr. Direck!” came her voice, full of confidence. (Of such moments is the heroic life.) The ball shot behind the hurtling Teddy. Mr. Direck stopped it with his foot, a trick he had just learned from the eldest Britling son. He was neit
her slow nor hasty. He was in the half-circle, and the way to the goal was barred only by the dust-coat lady and Mr. Lawrence Carmine. He made as if to shoot to Mr. Carmine’s left and then smacked the ball, with the swiftness of a serpent’s stroke, to his right.
He’d done it! Mr. Carmine’s stick and feet were a yard away.
Then hard on this wild triumph came a flash of horror. One can’t see everything. His eye followed the ball’s trajectory. …
Directly in its line of flight was a perambulator.
The ball missed the legs of the lady with the noble nose by a kind of miracle, hit and glanced off the wheel of the perambulator, and went spinning into a border of antirrhinums.
“Good!” cried Cecily. “Splendid shot!”
He’d shot a goal. He’d done it well. The perambulator it seemed didn’t matter. Though apparently the impact had awakened the baby. In the margin of his consciousness was the figure of Mr. Britling remarking: “Aunty. You really mustn’t wheel the perambulator just there.”
“I thought,” said the aunt, indicating the goal-posts by a facial movement, “that those two sticks would be a sort of protection. … Aah! Did they then?”
Never mind that.
“That’s game!” said one of the junior Britlings to Mr. Direck with a note of high appreciation, and the whole party, relaxing and crumpling like a lowered flag, moved towards the house and tea.
§ 5
“We’ll play some more after tea,” said Cecily. “It will be cooler then.”
“My word, I’m beginning to like it,” said Mr. Direck.
“You’re going to play very well,” she said.
And such is the magic of a game that Mr. Direck was humbly proud and grateful for her praise, and trotted along by the side of this creature who had revealed herself so swift and resolute and decisive, full to overflowing of the mere pleasure of just trotting along by her side. And after tea, which was a large confused affair, enlivened by wonderful and entirely untruthful reminiscences of the afternoon by Mr. Raeburn, they played again, with fewer inefficients and greater skill and swiftness, and Mr. Direck did such quick and intelligent things that everybody declared that he was a hockey-player straight from heaven. The dusk, which at last made the position of the ball too speculative for play, came all too soon for him. He had played in six games, and he knew he would be as stiff as a Dutch doll in the morning. But he was very, very happy.
The rest of the Sunday evening was essentially a sequel to the hockey.
Mr. Direck changed again, and after using some embrocation, that Mrs. Britling recommended very strongly, came down in a black jacket and a cheerfully ample black tie. He had a sense of physical well-being such as he had not experienced since he came aboard the liner at New York. The curious thing was that it was not quite the same sense of physical well-being that one had in America. That is bright and clear and a little dry, this was—humid. His mind quivered contentedly, like sunset midges over a lake—it had no hard bright flashes—and his body wanted to sit about. His sense of intimacy with Cecily increased each time he looked at her. When she met his eyes she smiled. He’d caught her style now, he felt; he attempted no more compliments, and was frankly her pupil at hockey and Badminton. After supper Mr. Britling renewed his suggestion of an automobile excursion on the Monday.
“There’s nothing to take you back to London,” said Mr. Britling, “and we could just hunt about the district with the little old car and see everything you want to see. …”
Mr. Direck did not hesitate three seconds. He thought of Gladys; he thought of Miss Cecily Corner.
“Well, indeed,” he said, “if it isn’t burthening you, if I’m not being any sort of inconvenience here for another night, I’d be really very glad indeed of the opportunity of going around and seeing all these ancient places. …”
§ 6
The newspapers came next morning at nine, and were full of the Sarajevo Murders. Mr. Direck got The Daily Chronicle and found headlines quite animated for a British paper.
“Who’s this Archduke,” he asked, “anyhow? And where is this Bosnia? I thought it was a part of Turkey.”
“It’s in Austria,” said Teddy.
“It’s in the middle ages,” said Mr. Britling. “What an odd, pertinacious business it seems to have been. First one bomb, then another; then finally the man with the pistol. While we were strolling about the rose-garden. It’s like something out of ‘The Prisoner of Zenda.’ ”
“Please,” said Herr Heinrich.
Mr. Britling assumed an attentive expression.
“Will not this generally affect European politics?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps it will.”
“It says in the paper that Serbia has sent those bombs to Sarajevo.”
“It’s like another world,” said Mr. Britling, over his paper. “Assassination as a political method. Can you imagine anything of the sort happening nowadays west of the Adriatic? Imagine some one assassinating the American Vice-President, and the bombs being at once ascribed to the arsenal at Toronto! … We take our politics more sadly in the West. … Won’t you have another egg, Direck?”
“Please! Might this not lead to a war?”
“I don’t think so. Austria may threaten Serbia, but she doesn’t want to provoke a conflict with Russia. It would be going too near the powder-magazine. But it’s all an extraordinary business.”
“But if she did?” Herr Heinrich persisted.
“She won’t. … Some years ago I used to believe in the inevitable European war,” Mr. Britling explained to Mr. Direck, “but it’s been threatened so long that at last I’ve lost all belief in it. The Powers wrangle and threaten. They’re far too cautious and civilised to let the guns go off. If there was going to be a war it would have happened two years ago when the Balkan League fell upon Turkey. Or when Bulgaria attacked Serbia. …”
Herr Heinrich reflected, and received these conclusions with an expression of respectful edification.
“I am naturally anxious,” he said, “because I am taking tickets for my holidays at an Esperanto Conference at Boulogne.”
§ 7
“There is only one way to master such a thing as driving an automobile,” said Mr. Britling outside his front door, as he took his place in the driver’s seat, “and that is to resolve that from the first you will take no risks. Be slow if you like. Stop and think when you are in doubt. But do nothing rashly, permit no mistakes.”
It seemed to Mr. Direck as he took his seat beside his host that this was admirable doctrine.
They started out of the gates with an extreme deliberation. Indeed twice they stopped dead in the act of turning into the road, and the engine had to be restarted.
“You will laugh at me,” said Mr. Britling: “but I’m resolved to have no blunders this time.”
“I don’t laugh at you. It’s excellent,” said Mr. Direck.
“It’s the right way,” said Mr. Britling. “Care—oh, damn! I’ve stopped the engine again. Ugh!—ah!—so!—Care, I was saying—and calm.”
“Don’t think I want to hurry you,” said Mr. Direck. “I don’t.”
They passed through the village at a slow, agreeable pace, tooting loudly at every corner, and whenever a pedestrian was approached. Mr. Direck was reminded that he had still to broach the lecture project to Mr. Britling. So much had happened——
The car halted abruptly and the engine stopped.
“I thought that confounded hen was thinking of crossing the road,” said Mr. Britling. “Instead of which she’s gone through the hedge. She certainly looked this way. … Perhaps I’m a little fussy this morning. … I’ll warm up to the work presently.”
“I’m convinced you can’t be too careful,” said Mr. Direck. “And this sort of thing enables one to see the country better. …”
Beyond the village Mr. Britling seemed to gather confidence. The pace quickened. But whenever other traffic or any indication of a side way appeared discretion returned. M
r. Britling stalked his sign-posts, crawling towards them on the belly of the lowest gear; he drove all the morning like a man who is flushing ambuscades. And yet accident overtook him. For God demands more from us that mere righteousness.
He cut through the hills to Market Saffron along a lane-road with which he was unfamiliar. It began to go up-hill. He explained to Mr. Direck how admirably his engine would climb hills on the top gear.
They took a curve and the hill grew steeper, and Mr. Direck opened the throttle.
They rounded another corner, and still more steeply the hill rose before them.
The engine began to make a chinking sound, and the car lost pace. And then Mr. Britling saw a pleading little white board with the inscription “Concealed Turning.” For the moment he thought a turning might be concealed anywhere. He threw out his clutch and clapped on his brake. Then he repented of what he had done. But the engine, after three Herculean throbs, ceased to work. Mr. Britling with a convulsive clutch at his steering-wheel set the electric hooter snarling, while one foot released the clutch again and the other, on the accelerator, sought in vain for help. Mr. Direck felt they were going back, back, in spite of all this vocalisation. He clutched at the emergency brake. But he was too late to avoid misfortune. With a feeling like sitting gently in butter, the car sank down sideways and stopped with two wheels in the ditch.
Mr. Britling said they were in the ditch—said it with quite unnecessary violence. …
This time two cart-horses and a retinue of five men were necessary to restore Gladys to her self-respect. …
After that they drove on to Market Saffron, and got there in time for lunch, and after lunch Mr. Direck explored the church and the churchyard and the parish register. …
After lunch Mr. Britling became more cheerful about his driving. The road from Market Saffron to Blandish, whence one turns off to Matching’s Easy, is the London and Norwich highroad; it is an old Roman Stane Street and very straightforward and honest in its stretches. You can see the crossroads half a mile away, and the low hedges give you no chance of a surprise. Everybody is cheered by such a road, and everybody drives more confidently and quickly, and Mr. Britling particularly was heartened by it and gradually let out Gladys from the almost excessive restriction that had hitherto marked the day. “On a road like this nothing can happen,” said Mr. Britling.
Mr. Britling Sees It Through Page 9