Part 21 (1/2)

”Gracious, no!” cried Pip in genuine distress. ”I meant about my playing.”

Elsie Innes looked him straight in the face. ”Pip,” she said, ”do you wear gloves?”

Pip extended two enormous palms and inspected them doubtfully.

”Sometimes,” he said--”at weddings.”

”Very good. I'll bet you ten pairs of gloves to one that you get your Blue.”

”Don't!” said Pip appealingly. ”You couldn't afford it. I take nines.”

”My size,” said Miss Innes, ”is six-and-a-quarter. White kid--eight b.u.t.tons. Good-bye!”

She turned and vanished into the recesses of the hall, a receding vision of white frock, glinting hair, and black bow.

After Pip had walked down two streets and halfway across a square, he stopped suddenly and dealt his leg a blow with a tennis-racquet that would have maimed an ordinary limb for life.

”By gad,” he cried to a scandalised pug-dog which was taking the evening air on an adjacent doorstep, ”she called me Pip!”

Next morning he received a communication from the authorities of the Cambridge University Cricket Club.

An hour later he was being shepherded, scarlet in the face, by a posse of stentorian shopwalkers, through an embarra.s.sing wilderness of ladies'

hosiery to the Glove Department of an establishment in Oxford Street.

BOOK TWO

THE MAKING OF A MAN

CHAPTER VII

A CRICKET WEEK

I

BY the time that Pip had reached his twenty-fifth year his name was scarcely less familiar to the man in the street than that of the leading picture-postcard divinity, and considerably more so than that, say, of the President of the Royal Academy. The English are a strange race, and wors.h.i.+p strange G.o.ds. Pip's admission to the national Pantheon had been secured by the fact of his having been mainly responsible for the sensational dismissal of the Australians, for an infinitesimal score, in the second innings of the third Test Match.

The morning papers referred to him as ”that phenomenal trundler, the young Middles.e.x amateur”; the sporting press hailed him as ”the left-handed devastation-merchant”; and the evening ”specials” called him ”Pip,” pure and simple.

To do him justice, Pip cared for none of these things. He was much more concerned with the future than the present. He had sc.r.a.ped a pa.s.s degree at Cambridge, and was now nominally studying medicine. But he knew in his heart that he had not the brains to succeed in his task, and he persevered only to please his father, who, though he admitted that his son could never hope to put up a specialist's plate in Harley Street, considered him (just as a race-horse might consider that anything on four legs can haul a cab) quite capable of doing well in a country practice.

One morning in July Pip received an invitation to play in the Rustleford Cricket Week, an honour calculated to inflate the chest of any rising amateur with legitimate pride. John Ch.e.l.l, the Squire of Rustleford Manor, was of a type now too rare. An old Grandwich captain, an old Oxford captain, and an old All England Eleven player, descended from a long line of top-hatted cricketers, he devoted what he called his ”declining years” to fostering the spirit of the game. Rustleford Manor was one of the strongholds of English cricket. John Ch.e.l.l's reputation as a judge of the game was a recognised a.s.set of the English Selection Committee, and more than one great professional had received his first chance on the Rustleford ground.

Pip was not intimately acquainted with John Ch.e.l.l, though he had frequently met him at Lord's and elsewhere, and had known his son Jacky at Cambridge. But he was genuinely pleased with this recognition of his merit. It was a thing apart from journalistic celebrity and the adulation of a Surrey crowd. No man was invited to Rustleford who was not a cricketer, out and out; and a man who played in the Rustleford Manor Eleven was hall-marked for life.

The night before his departure he dined alone with his father. Pipette was out at the theatre.

The great physician looked aged and ill, and Pip, noticing this for the first time,--we are un.o.bservant creatures where our daily companions are concerned,--and stricken with sudden pity, offered to abandon his cherished cricket week and accompany his father on a short holiday to a health resort.