THE COMPLETE DAVID BLAIZE TRILOGY (Illustrated Edition). Эдвард Бенсон
up to twenty. During lunch he made a beautiful plan that he would really go in for hitting hard afterwards; but this miscarried, and he lost his wicket off the first ball he received, owing to his hitting hard at it at the moment when his bails were already whizzing like driven partridges through the air. Three quarters of an hour later the innings closed for a hundred and thirty-five, a total which might have easily been worse, but undeniably should have been better.
David’s heart sank when he saw two immense figures coming out of the pavilion to open the innings of the old boys, and found that he had to begin bowling to one with a moustache and a forearm that seemed about as big as his own leg. But, as the Head had augured might happen, the sun had come out during lunch-time, and this, after the rain of the night before, which had rendered the wicket easy this morning, might render it very difficult (and also very suitable for his mode of attack) during the afternoon. Without doubt the turf would cake, and a ball, if judiciously handled, might do very odd things indeed. He felt as if the Head had ordered the sun on purpose for him, which was a kind thought, and, suddenly glowing with optimism again, pranced up to the crease with his usual extravagant action, and was immediately hit clean out of the ground. The Head had appeared in front of the pavilion just in time to see this done, and David candidly reflected that it was worth seeing. It didn’t often happen that the first ball of an innings was slogged for six. Juicy hit, too!
David approached the crease again in a much more staid manner, and delivered a second ball exactly like the first. There was really no reason why it should not have been treated in exactly the same way, but the giant carefully blocked it instead, for it looked different. That thoroughly pleased David: he was creating an atmosphere. He did not use that phrase to himself, he merely thought that the batsman suspected something.
Again he altered his action, and took hardly any run at all. But this time he delivered the slightly faster ball which had puzzled Hughes during the practice at the nets. And it was feebly returned straight into his hands, where it remained till he buzzed it vertically into the air.
“Gosh, I’m devilish deep,” said David to himself in a spasm of odious pride.
By six it was all over. Helmsworth had won by twenty runs, and David had taken eight wickets. And though, since his return from Marchester, he had often told himself that this was only a scuggy little private school, this was a moment worth living for, for not only did the scuggy little private school roar at him as he came to the pavilion with the rest of the team, but the disgraced and vanquished giants of public schools, people of sixteen and seventeen, came out shouting “Well bowled, Blaize,” with the most generous appreciation. The Head was there, too, clapping his hands, and Goggles was there, beaming through her large round spectacles, and Carrots, with her hair shining in the sun . . . they were all there.
David came up the steps to the pavilion all alone, for the rest of the eleven suddenly stood away from him and shoved him forward, crimson in the face with exertion and joy.
“Oh, ’twasn’t me, sir,” he said to the Head, who patted his shoulder. “It was just the ground: it played awfully queer.”
And he buried his delightful confusion in a quart of lemonade.
So in delicious triumph the last hours of David’s school-life passed, and from the train next morning he saw between the trees the fleeting glances of the roofs which for three years had been his home.
Chapter VII
David’s father lived in a grey, rambling house in the close at Baxminster, a plan of his that, as far as David went, had something to be said both for and against it. In its favour was the fact that the house contained a whole top-story of dusky and mysterious attics, roofed in the dimness by cobwebby beams, and used only for lumber-places and cisterns. Here it had been delightful in years gone by to find pleasing terrors in these dark and doubtful corners, amid the gurgles of water-pipes. Here he and his sister (in those years gone by, or in other words until a few months ago) had often passed entrancing wet afternoons, daring each other, particularly at the closing in of dusk, to explore the farthest recesses even to that last attic of all, which contained a large coffin-like box and a cistern that unexpectedly gave sudden and mirthless goblin-chuckles to itself, most harrowing to nerves already keenly on edge. The rules generally in force were that one of them had to go and sit alone in that very spooky chamber, with face turned honestly away from the door, while the other dressed up in any horrific garb that might suggest itself to a fevered imagination, and, having stealthily entered, frightened the watcher with this hideous apparition, accompanying it by any such noise of screaming or groaning that might appear suitable. With the victim looking steadily away from the door, these noises might go on, like an artillery attack, until his nerves were thoroughly shaken, though he had not yet seen what the apparition was to be. David had once frightened Margery into hysterics here, having entered the room in silence, swathed in a sheet, and wriggling snake-wise along the floor. He had coloured his face purple from Margery’s paint-box, and, having serpentined along till he was in front of her, suddenly yelled and disclosed the horrors of that apoplectic countenance. On that occasion the gurgling cistern had been useful, for he swiftly washed his own face to reassure her. But, by a variation of the rules, it having been ordained that the frightener should enter the room first and get himself up to receive the frightened on entry, Margery had got back her own again, for she had chalked her face and put her tongue out, and lain down in the coffin-shaped box, closing the lid as usual. David had looked for her with quaking tremors behind the cistern, and found her not; he had peered into the darkest of all corners, where an empty bookcase concealed a dangerous recess, when suddenly the lid of the coffin-box, which he had not suspected, flew open, disclosing Margery lying quite still, with white face and protruding tongue. . . . David had run as far as the nursery-landing before he could master the panic of his legs.
Clearly, then, there was, or rather had been, advantages in this house, but to-day as Margery and David sat idly beneath the mulberry-tree in the garden, from which every now and then a fat sun-ripened fruit plopped on to the grass, David announced that there was no more savour in these childish things. Margery was a year older than he, but, being a girl, and already turned fifteen, and he a boy who had but last week celebrated his fourteenth birthday (his father had given him a copy of the “Christian Year,” for which he had very little use) she was essentially some five years his senior, and knew how David felt.
“Yes, it used to be ripping,” he said discontentedly, in allusion to those years, “and I used to be awfully excited, but I don’t care now. You see the point was that we were frightened: that was the ripping part of it. Besides, you know, if any of the fellows at Adams’s asked me what sort of games we played at home, it would be sickening to have to say that we just hid behind boxes in a frowsty attic. ’Tain’t no use any more! So what are we to do all this afternoon and to-morrow and the next day? It’s funny that you can’t suggest something else.”
Margery gave a long sigh and ate one of the fallen mulberries. She would have given anything to be able to suggest something else. In appearance she was so like David that if brother and sister had dressed in the other’s clothes, and corrected the discrepancy of hair and broken front tooth, either might have passed a frontier with the passport of the other.
“Well, I’ve suggested heaps of things, and you say they are all rot,” she said. “I’ll play anything you like. We used to have rather fun playing cricket. Wouldn’t you like to play cricket?”
“Oh, what’s the use?” said David. “I should hit you into the Deanery garden all afternoon, and always bowl you first ball. I took eight wickets against——”
Margery had a good deal of David’s spirit, as well as his bodily aspect.
“I know, you told me that,” she said. “Twice.”
David had a certain sense of being ill-used, common to his sex at his age.
“Oh, all right,” he said with dignity. “But you used to be interested in my things.”