12 Mike Read online

  “Thanks,” said Adair. “You don’t happen to know if he’s in, I suppose?”

  “He went up with Smith a quarter of an hour ago. I don’t know if he’s still there.”

  “I’ll go and see,” said Adair. “I should like a word with him if he isn’t busy.”

  CHAPTER LIV

  ADAIR HAS A WORD WITH MIKE

  Mike, all unconscious of the stirring proceedings which had been going on below stairs, was peacefully reading a letter he had received that morning from Strachan at Wrykyn, in which the successor to the cricket captaincy which should have been Mike’s had a good deal to say in a lugubrious strain. In Mike’s absence things had been going badly with Wrykyn. A broken arm, contracted in the course of some rash experiments with a day-boy’s motor-bicycle, had deprived the team of the services of Dunstable, the only man who had shown any signs of being able to bowl a side out. Since this calamity, wrote Strachan, everything had gone wrong. The M.C.C., led by Mike’s brother Reggie, the least of the three first-class-cricketing Jacksons, had smashed them by a hundred and fifty runs. Geddington had wiped them off the face of the earth. The Incogs, with a team recruited exclusively from the rabbit-hutch—not a well-known man on the side except Stacey, a veteran who had been playing for the club since Fuller Pilch’s time—had got home by two wickets. In fact, it was Strachan’s opinion that the Wrykyn team that summer was about the most hopeless gang of dead-beats that had ever made an exhibition of itself on the school grounds. The Ripton match, fortunately, was off, owing to an outbreak of mumps at that shrine of learning and athletics—the second outbreak of the malady in two terms. Which, said Strachan, was hard lines on Ripton, but a bit of jolly good luck for Wrykyn, as it had saved them from what would probably have been a record hammering, Ripton having eight of their last year’s team left, including Dixon, the fast bowler, against whom Mike alone of the Wrykyn team had been able to make runs in the previous season. Altogether, Wrykyn had struck a bad patch.

  Mike mourned over his suffering school. If only he could have been there to help. It might have made all the difference. In school cricket one good batsman, to go in first and knock the bowlers off their length, may take a weak team triumphantly through a season. In school cricket the importance of a good start for the first wicket is incalculable.

  As he put Strachan’s letter away in his pocket, all his old bitterness against Sedleigh, which had been ebbing during the past few days, returned with a rush. He was conscious once more of that feeling of personal injury which had made him hate his new school on the first day of term.

  And it was at this point, when his resentment was at its height, that Adair, the concrete representative of everything Sedleighan, entered the room.

  There are moments in life’s placid course when there has got to be the biggest kind of row. This was one of them.

  Psmith, who was leaning against the mantelpiece, reading the serial story in a daily paper which he had abstracted from the senior day-room, made the intruder free of the study with a dignified wave of the hand, and went on reading. Mike remained in the deck-chair in which he was sitting, and contented himself with glaring at the newcomer.

  Psmith was the first to speak.

  “If you ask my candid opinion,” he said, looking up from his paper, “I should say that young Lord Antony Trefusis was in the soup already. I seem to see the consommé splashing about his ankles. He’s had a note telling him to be under the oak-tree in the Park at midnight. He’s just off there at the end of this instalment. I bet Long Jack, the poacher, is waiting there with a sandbag. Care to see the paper, Comrade Adair? Or don’t you take any interest in contemporary literature?”

  “Thanks,” said Adair. “I just wanted to speak to Jackson for a minute.”

  “Fate,” said Psmith, “has led your footsteps to the right place. That is Comrade Jackson, the Pride of the School, sitting before you.”

  “What do you want?” said Mike.

  He suspected that Adair had come to ask him once again to play for the school. The fact that the M.C.C. match was on the following day made this a probable solution of the reason for his visit. He could think of no other errand that was likely to have set the head of Downing’s paying afternoon calls.

  “I’ll tell you in a minute. It won’t take long.”

  “That,” said Psmith approvingly, “is right. Speed is the keynote of the present age. Promptitude. Despatch. This is no time for loitering. We must be strenuous. We must hustle. We must Do It Now. We–-“

  “Buck up,” said Mike.

  “Certainly,” said Adair. “I’ve just been talking to Stone and Robinson.”

  “An excellent way of passing an idle half-hour,” said Psmith.

  “We weren’t exactly idle,” said Adair grimly. “It didn’t last long, but it was pretty lively while it did. Stone chucked it after the first round.”

  Mike got up out of his chair. He could not quite follow what all this was about, but there was no mistaking the truculence of Adair’s manner. For some reason, which might possibly be made dear later, Adair was looking for trouble, and Mike in his present mood felt that it would be a privilege to see that he got it.

  Psmith was regarding Adair through his eyeglass with pain and surprise.

  “Surely,” he said, “you do not mean us to understand that you have been brawling with Comrade Stone! This is bad hearing. I thought that you and he were like brothers. Such a bad example for Comrade Robinson, too. Leave us, Adair. We would brood. Oh, go thee, knave, I’ll none of thee. Shakespeare.”

  Psmith turned away, and resting his elbows on the mantelpiece, gazed at himself mournfully in the looking-glass.

  “I’m not the man I was,” he sighed, after a prolonged inspection. “There are lines on my face, dark circles beneath my eyes. The fierce rush of life at Sedleigh is wasting me away.”

  “Stone and I had a discussion about early-morning fielding-practice,” said Adair, turning to Mike.

  Mike said nothing.

  “I thought his fielding wanted working up a bit, so I told him to turn out at six to-morrow morning. He said he wouldn’t, so we argued it out. He’s going to all right. So is Robinson.”

  Mike remained silent.

  “So are you,” added Adair.

  “I get thinner and thinner,” said Psmith from the mantelpiece.

  Mike looked at Adair, and Adair looked at Mike, after the manner of two dogs before they fly at one another. There was an electric silence in the study. Psmith peered with increased earnestness into the glass.

  “Oh?” said Mike at last. “What makes you think that?”

  “I don’t think. I know.”

  “Any special reason for my turning out?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re going to play for the school against the M.C.C. to-morrow, and I want you to get some practice.”

  “I wonder how you got that idea!”

  “Curious I should have done, isn’t it?”

  “Very. You aren’t building on it much, are you?” said Mike politely.

  “I am, rather,” replied Adair with equal courtesy.

  “I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “My eyes,” said Psmith regretfully, “are a bit close together. However,” he added philosophically, “it’s too late to alter that now.”

  Mike drew a step closer to Adair.

  “What makes you think I shall play against the M.C.C.?” he asked curiously.

  “I’m going to make you.”

  Mike took another step forward. Adair moved to meet him.

  “Would you care to try now?” said Mike.

  For just one second the two drew themselves together preparatory to beginning the serious business of the interview, and in that second Psmith, turning from the glass, stepped between them.

  “Get out of the light, Smith,” said Mike.

  Psmith waved him back with a depreca
ting gesture.

  “My dear young friends,” he said placidly, “if you will let your angry passions rise, against the direct advice of Doctor Watts, I suppose you must, But when you propose to claw each other in my study, in the midst of a hundred fragile and priceless ornaments, I lodge a protest. If you really feel that you want to scrap, for goodness sake do it where there’s some room. I don’t want all the study furniture smashed. I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows, only a few yards down the road, where you can scrap all night if you want to. How would it be to move on there? Any objections? None? Then shift ho! and let’s get it over.”

  CHAPTER LV

  CLEARING THE AIR

  Psmith was one of those people who lend a dignity to everything they touch. Under his auspices the most unpromising ventures became somehow enveloped in an atmosphere of measured stateliness. On the present occasion, what would have been, without his guiding hand, a mere unscientific scramble, took on something of the impressive formality of the National Sporting Club.

  “The rounds,” he said, producing a watch, as they passed through a gate into a field a couple of hundred yards from the house gate, “will be of three minutes’ duration, with a minute rest in between. A man who is down will have ten seconds in which to rise. Are you ready, Comrades Adair and Jackson? Very well, then. Time.”

  After which, it was a pity that the actual fight did not quite live up to its referee’s introduction. Dramatically, there should have been cautious sparring for openings and a number of tensely contested rounds, as if it had been the final of a boxing competition. But school fights, when they do occur—which is only once in a decade nowadays, unless you count junior school scuffles—are the outcome of weeks of suppressed bad blood, and are consequently brief and furious. In a boxing competition, however much one may want to win, one does not dislike one’s opponent. Up to the moment when “time” was called, one was probably warmly attached to him, and at the end of the last round one expects to resume that attitude of mind. In a fight each party, as a rule, hates the other.

  So it happened that there was nothing formal or cautious about the present battle. All Adair wanted was to get at Mike, and all Mike wanted was to get at Adair. Directly Psmith called “time,” they rushed together as if they meant to end the thing in half a minute.

  It was this that saved Mike. In an ordinary contest with the gloves, with his opponent cool and boxing in his true form, he could not have lasted three rounds against Adair. The latter was a clever boxer, while Mike had never had a lesson in his life. If Adair had kept away and used his head, nothing could have prevented him winning.

  As it was, however, he threw away his advantages, much as Tom Brown did at the beginning of his fight with Slogger Williams, and the result was the same as on that historic occasion. Mike had the greater strength, and, thirty seconds from the start, knocked his man clean off his feet with an unscientific but powerful right-hander.

  This finished Adair’s chances. He rose full of fight, but with all the science knocked out of him. He went in at Mike with both hands. The Irish blood in him, which for the ordinary events of life made him merely energetic and dashing, now rendered him reckless. He abandoned all attempt at guarding. It was the Frontal Attack in its most futile form, and as unsuccessful as a frontal attack is apt to be. There was a swift exchange of blows, in the course of which Mike’s left elbow, coming into contact with his opponent’s right fist, got a shock which kept it tingling for the rest of the day; and then Adair went down in a heap.

  He got up slowly and with difficulty. For a moment he stood blinking vaguely. Then he lurched forward at Mike.

  In the excitement of a fight—which is, after all, about the most exciting thing that ever happens to one in the course of one’s life—it is difficult for the fighters to see what the spectators see. Where the spectators see an assault on an already beaten man, the fighter himself only sees a legitimate piece of self-defence against an opponent whose chances are equal to his own. Psmith saw, as anybody looking on would have seen, that Adair was done. Mike’s blow had taken him within a fraction of an inch of the point of the jaw, and he was all but knocked out. Mike could not see this. All he understood was that his man was on his feet again and coming at him, so he hit out with all his strength; and this time Adair went down and stayed down.

  “Brief,” said Psmith, coming forward, “but exciting. We may take that, I think, to be the conclusion of the entertainment. I will now have a dash at picking up the slain. I shouldn’t stop, if I were you. He’ll be sitting up and taking notice soon, and if he sees you he may want to go on with the combat, which would do him no earthly good. If it’s going to be continued in our next, there had better be a bit of an interval for alterations and repairs first.”

  “Is he hurt much, do you think?” asked Mike. He had seen knock-outs before in the ring, but this was the first time he had ever effected one on his own account, and Adair looked unpleasantly corpse-like.

  “He’s all right,” said Psmith. “In a minute or two he’ll be skipping about like a little lambkin. I’ll look after him. You go away and pick flowers.”

  Mike put on his coat and walked back to the house. He was conscious of a perplexing whirl of new and strange emotions, chief among which was a curious feeling that he rather liked Adair. He found himself thinking that Adair was a good chap, that there was something to be said for his point of view, and that it was a pity he had knocked him about so much. At the same time, he felt an undeniable thrill of pride at having beaten him. The feat presented that interesting person, Mike Jackson, to him in a fresh and pleasing light, as one who had had a tough job to face and had carried it through. Jackson, the cricketer, he knew, but Jackson, the deliverer of knock-out blows, was strange to him, and he found this new acquaintance a man to be respected.

  The fight, in fact, had the result which most fights have, if they are fought fairly and until one side has had enough. It revolutionised Mike’s view of things. It shook him up, and drained the bad blood out of him. Where, before, he had seemed to himself to be acting with massive dignity, he now saw that he had simply been sulking like some wretched kid. There had appeared to him something rather fine in his policy of refusing to identify himself in any way with Sedleigh, a touch of the stone-walls-do-not-a-prison-make sort of thing. He now saw that his attitude was to be summed up in the words, “Sha’n’t play.”

  It came upon Mike with painful clearness that he had been making an ass of himself.

  He had come to this conclusion, after much earnest thought, when Psmith entered the study.

  “How’s Adair?” asked Mike.

  “Sitting up and taking nourishment once more. We have been chatting. He’s not a bad cove.”

  “He’s all right,” said Mike.

  There was a pause. Psmith straightened his tie.

  “Look here,” he said, “I seldom interfere in terrestrial strife, but it seems to me that there’s an opening here for a capable peace-maker, not afraid of work, and willing to give his services in exchange for a comfortable home. Comrade Adair’s rather a stoutish fellow in his way. I’m not much on the ‘Play up for the old school, Jones,’ game, but every one to his taste. I shouldn’t have thought anybody would get overwhelmingly attached to this abode of wrath, but Comrade Adair seems to have done it. He’s all for giving Sedleigh a much-needed boost-up. It’s not a bad idea in its way. I don’t see why one shouldn’t humour him. Apparently he’s been sweating since early childhood to buck the school up. And as he’s leaving at the end of the term, it mightn’t be a scaly scheme to give him a bit of a send-off, if possible, by making the cricket season a bit of a banger. As a start, why not drop him a line to say that you’ll play against the M.C.C. to-morrow?”

  Mike did not reply at once. He was feeling better disposed towards Adair and Sedleigh than he had felt, but he was not sure that he was quite prepared to go as far as a complete climb-down.

  “It wouldn’t be a bad idea,” continued Psmith. “
There’s nothing like giving a man a bit in every now and then. It broadens the soul and improves the action of the skin. What seems to have fed up Comrade Adair, to a certain extent, is that Stone apparently led him to understand that you had offered to give him and Robinson places in your village team. You didn’t, of course?”

  “Of course not,” said Mike indignantly.

  “I told him he didn’t know the old noblesse oblige spirit of the Jacksons. I said that you would scorn to tarnish the Jackson escutcheon by not playing the game. My eloquence convinced him. However, to return to the point under discussion, why not?”

  “I don’t—What I mean to say—” began Mike.

  “If your trouble is,” said Psmith, “that you fear that you may be in unworthy company–-“

  “Don’t be an ass.”

  “–-Dismiss it. I am playing.”

  Mike stared.

  “You’re what? You?”

  “I,” said Psmith, breathing on a coat-button, and polishing it with his handkerchief.

  “Can you play cricket?”

  “You have discovered,” said Psmith, “my secret sorrow.”

  “You’re rotting.”

  “You wrong me, Comrade Jackson.”

  “Then why haven’t you played?”

  “Why haven’t you?”

  “Why didn’t you come and play for Lower Borlock, I mean?”

  “The last time I played in a village cricket match I was caught at point by a man in braces. It would have been madness to risk another such shock to my system. My nerves are so exquisitely balanced that a thing of that sort takes years off my life.”

  “No, but look here, Smith, bar rotting. Are you really any good at cricket?”

  “Competent judges at Eton gave me to understand so. I was told that this year I should be a certainty for Lord’s. But when the cricket season came, where was I? Gone. Gone like some beautiful flower that withers in the night.”