12 Mike Read online

  “But you told me you didn’t like cricket. You said you only liked watching it.”

  “Quite right. I do. But at schools where cricket is compulsory you have to overcome your private prejudices. And in time the thing becomes a habit. Imagine my feelings when I found that I was degenerating, little by little, into a slow left-hand bowler with a swerve. I fought against it, but it was useless, and after a while I gave up the struggle, and drifted with the stream. Last year, in a house match”—Psmith’s voice took on a deeper tone of melancholy—”I took seven for thirteen in the second innings on a hard wicket. I did think, when I came here, that I had found a haven of rest, but it was not to be. I turn out to-morrow. What Comrade Outwood will say, when he finds that his keenest archaeological disciple has deserted, I hate to think. However–-“

  Mike felt as if a young and powerful earthquake had passed. The whole face of his world had undergone a quick change. Here was he, the recalcitrant, wavering on the point of playing for the school, and here was Psmith, the last person whom he would have expected to be a player, stating calmly that he had been in the running for a place in the Eton eleven.

  Then in a flash Mike understood. He was not by nature intuitive, but he read Psmith’s mind now. Since the term began, he and Psmith had been acting on precisely similar motives. Just as he had been disappointed of the captaincy of cricket at Wrykyn, so had Psmith been disappointed of his place in the Eton team at Lord’s. And they had both worked it off, each in his own way—Mike sullenly, Psmith whimsically, according to their respective natures—on Sedleigh.

  If Psmith, therefore, did not consider it too much of a climb-down to renounce his resolution not to play for Sedleigh, there was nothing to stop Mike doing so, as—at the bottom of his heart—he wanted to do.

  “By Jove,” he said, “if you’re playing, I’ll play. I’ll write a note to Adair now. But, I say—” he stopped—”I’m hanged if I’m going to turn out and field before breakfast to-morrow.”

  “That’s all right. You won’t have to. Adair won’t be there himself. He’s not playing against the M.C.C. He’s sprained his wrist.”

  CHAPTER LVI

  IN WHICH PEACE IS DECLARED

  “Sprained his wrist?” said Mike. “How did he do that?”

  “During the brawl. Apparently one of his efforts got home on your elbow instead of your expressive countenance, and whether it was that your elbow was particularly tough or his wrist particularly fragile, I don’t know. Anyhow, it went. It’s nothing bad, but it’ll keep him out of the game to-morrow.”

  “I say, what beastly rough luck! I’d no idea. I’ll go round.”

  “Not a bad scheme. Close the door gently after you, and if you see anybody downstairs who looks as if he were likely to be going over to the shop, ask him to get me a small pot of some rare old jam and tell the man to chalk it up to me. The jam Comrade Outwood supplies to us at tea is all right as a practical joke or as a food for those anxious to commit suicide, but useless to anybody who values life.”

  On arriving at Mr. Downing’s and going to Adair’s study, Mike found that his late antagonist was out. He left a note informing him of his willingness to play in the morrow’s match. The lock-up bell rang as he went out of the house.

  A spot of rain fell on his hand. A moment later there was a continuous patter, as the storm, which had been gathering all day, broke in earnest. Mike turned up his coat-collar, and ran back to Outwood’s. “At this rate,” he said to himself, “there won’t be a match at all to-morrow.”

  When the weather decides, after behaving well for some weeks, to show what it can do in another direction, it does the thing thoroughly. When Mike woke the next morning the world was grey and dripping. Leaden-coloured clouds drifted over the sky, till there was not a trace of blue to be seen, and then the rain began again, in the gentle, determined way rain has when it means to make a day of it.

  It was one of those bad days when one sits in the pavilion, damp and depressed, while figures in mackintoshes, with discoloured buckskin boots, crawl miserably about the field in couples.

  Mike, shuffling across to school in a Burberry, met Adair at Downing’s gate.

  These moments are always difficult. Mike stopped—he could hardly walk on as if nothing had happened—and looked down at his feet.

  “Coming across?” he said awkwardly.

  “Right ho!” said Adair.

  They walked on in silence.

  “It’s only about ten to, isn’t it?” said Mike.

  Adair fished out his watch, and examined it with an elaborate care born of nervousness.

  “About nine to.”

  “Good. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  “Yes.”

  “I hate having to hurry over to school.”

  “So do I.”

  “I often do cut it rather fine, though.”

  “Yes. So do I.”

  “Beastly nuisance when one does.”

  “Beastly.”

  “It’s only about a couple of minutes from the houses to the school, I should think, shouldn’t you?”

  “Not much more. Might be three.”

  “Yes. Three if one didn’t hurry.”

  “Oh, yes, if one didn’t hurry.”

  Another silence.

  “Beastly day,” said Adair.

  “Rotten.”

  Silence again.

  “I say,” said Mike, scowling at his toes, “awfully sorry about your wrist.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. It was my fault.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Oh, no, rather not, thanks.”

  “I’d no idea you’d crocked yourself.”

  “Oh, no, that’s all right. It was only right at the end. You’d have smashed me anyhow.”

  “Oh, rot.”

  “I bet you anything you like you would.”

  “I bet you I shouldn’t…. Jolly hard luck, just before the match.”

  “Oh, no…. I say, thanks awfully for saying you’d play.”

  “Oh, rot…. Do you think we shall get a game?”

  Adair inspected the sky carefully.

  “I don’t know. It looks pretty bad, doesn’t it?”

  “Rotten. I say, how long will your wrist keep you out of cricket?”

  “Be all right in a week. Less, probably.”

  “Good.”

  “Now that you and Smith are going to play, we ought to have a jolly good season.”

  “Rummy, Smith turning out to be a cricketer.”

  “Yes. I should think he’d be a hot bowler, with his height.”

  “He must be jolly good if he was only just out of the Eton team last year.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the time?” asked Mike.

  Adair produced his watch once more.

  “Five to.”

  “We’ve heaps of time.”

  “Yes, heaps.”

  “Let’s stroll on a bit down the road, shall we?”

  “Right ho!”

  Mike cleared his throat.

  “I say.”

  “Hullo?”

  “I’ve been talking to Smith. He was telling me that you thought I’d promised to give Stone and Robinson places in the–-“

  “Oh, no, that’s all right. It was only for a bit. Smith told me you couldn’t have done, and I saw that I was an ass to think you could have. It was Stone seeming so dead certain that he could play for Lower Borlock if I chucked him from the school team that gave me the idea.”

  “He never even asked me to get him a place.”

  “No, I know.”

  “Of course, I wouldn’t have done it, even if he had.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I didn’t want to play myself, but I wasn’t going to do a rotten trick like getting other fellows away from the team.”

  “No, I know.”

  “It was rotten enough, really, not playing myself.”

  “Oh, no. Beastly rough luck having to leave Wrykyn j
ust when you were going to be captain, and come to a small school like this.”

  The excitement of the past few days must have had a stimulating effect on Mike’s mind—shaken it up, as it were: for now, for the second time in two days, he displayed quite a creditable amount of intuition. He might have been misled by Adair’s apparently deprecatory attitude towards Sedleigh, and blundered into a denunciation of the place. Adair had said “a small school like this” in the sort of voice which might have led his hearer to think that he was expected to say, “Yes, rotten little hole, isn’t it?” or words to that effect. Mike, fortunately, perceived that the words were used purely from politeness, on the Chinese principle. When a Chinaman wishes to pay a compliment, he does so by belittling himself and his belongings.

  He eluded the pitfall.

  “What rot!” he said. “Sedleigh’s one of the most sporting schools I’ve ever come across. Everybody’s as keen as blazes. So they ought to be, after the way you’ve sweated.”

  Adair shuffled awkwardly.

  “I’ve always been fairly keen on the place,” he said. “But I don’t suppose I’ve done anything much.”

  “You’ve loosened one of my front teeth,” said Mike, with a grin, “if that’s any comfort to you.”

  “I couldn’t eat anything except porridge this morning. My jaw still aches.”

  For the first time during the conversation their eyes met, and the humorous side of the thing struck them simultaneously. They began to laugh.

  “What fools we must have looked!” said Adair.

  “You were all right. I must have looked rotten. I’ve never had the gloves on in my life. I’m jolly glad no one saw us except Smith, who doesn’t count. Hullo, there’s the bell. We’d better be moving on. What about this match? Not much chance of it from the look of the sky at present.”

  “It might clear before eleven. You’d better get changed, anyhow, at the interval, and hang about in case.”

  “All right. It’s better than doing Thucydides with Downing. We’ve got math, till the interval, so I don’t see anything of him all day; which won’t hurt me.”

  “He isn’t a bad sort of chap, when you get to know him,” said Adair.

  “I can’t have done, then. I don’t know which I’d least soon be, Downing or a black-beetle, except that if one was Downing one could tread on the black-beetle. Dash this rain. I got about half a pint down my neck just then. We sha’n’t get a game to-day, of anything like it. As you’re crocked, I’m not sure that I care much. You’ve been sweating for years to get the match on, and it would be rather rot playing it without you.”

  “I don’t know that so much. I wish we could play, because I’m certain, with you and Smith, we’d walk into them. They probably aren’t sending down much of a team, and really, now that you and Smith are turning out, we’ve got a jolly hot lot. There’s quite decent batting all the way through, and the bowling isn’t so bad. If only we could have given this M.C.C. lot a really good hammering, it might have been easier to get some good fixtures for next season. You see, it’s all right for a school like Wrykyn, but with a small place like this you simply can’t get the best teams to give you a match till you’ve done something to show that you aren’t absolute rotters at the game. As for the schools, they’re worse. They’d simply laugh at you. You were cricket secretary at Wrykyn last year. What would you have done if you’d had a challenge from Sedleigh? You’d either have laughed till you were sick, or else had a fit at the mere idea of the thing.”

  Mike stopped.

  “By jove, you’ve struck about the brightest scheme on record. I never thought of it before. Let’s get a match on with Wrykyn.”

  “What! They wouldn’t play us.”

  “Yes, they would. At least, I’m pretty sure they would. I had a letter from Strachan, the captain, yesterday, saying that the Ripton match had had to be scratched owing to illness. So they’ve got a vacant date. Shall I try them? I’ll write to Strachan to-night, if you like. And they aren’t strong this year. We’ll smash them. What do you say?”

  Adair was as one who has seen a vision.

  “By Jove,” he said at last, “if we only could!”

  CHAPTER LVII

  MR. DOWNING MOVES

  The rain continued without a break all the morning. The two teams, after hanging about dismally, and whiling the time away with stump-cricket in the changing-rooms, lunched in the pavilion at one o’clock. After which the M.C.C. captain, approaching Adair, moved that this merry meeting be considered off and himself and his men permitted to catch the next train back to town. To which Adair, seeing that it was out of the question that there should be any cricket that afternoon, regretfully agreed, and the first Sedleigh v. M.C.C. match was accordingly scratched.

  Mike and Psmith, wandering back to the house, were met by a damp junior from Downing’s, with a message that Mr. Downing wished to see Mike as soon as he was changed.

  “What’s he want me for?” inquired Mike.

  The messenger did not know. Mr. Downing, it seemed, had not confided in him. All he knew was that the housemaster was in the house, and would be glad if Mike would step across.

  “A nuisance,” said Psmith, “this incessant demand for you. That’s the worst of being popular. If he wants you to stop to tea, edge away. A meal on rather a sumptuous scale will be prepared in the study against your return.”

  Mike changed quickly, and went off, leaving Psmith, who was fond of simple pleasures in his spare time, earnestly occupied with a puzzle which had been scattered through the land by a weekly paper. The prize for a solution was one thousand pounds, and Psmith had already informed Mike with some minuteness of his plans for the disposition of this sum. Meanwhile, he worked at it both in and out of school, generally with abusive comments on its inventor.

  He was still fiddling away at it when Mike returned.

  Mike, though Psmith was at first too absorbed to notice it, was agitated.

  “I don’t wish to be in any way harsh,” said Psmith, without looking up, “but the man who invented this thing was a blighter of the worst type. You come and have a shot. For the moment I am baffled. The whisper flies round the clubs, ‘Psmith is baffled.’”

  “The man’s an absolute drivelling ass,” said Mike warmly.

  “Me, do you mean?”

  “What on earth would be the point of my doing it?”

  “You’d gather in a thousand of the best. Give you a nice start in life.”

  “I’m not talking about your rotten puzzle.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That ass Downing. I believe he’s off his nut.”

  “Then your chat with Comrade Downing was not of the old-College-chums-meeting-unexpectedly-after-years’-separation type? What has he been doing to you?”

  “He’s off his nut.”

  “I know. But what did he do? How did the brainstorm burst? Did he jump at you from behind a door and bite a piece out of your leg, or did he say he was a tea-pot?”

  Mike sat down.

  “You remember that painting Sammy business?”

  “As if it were yesterday,” said Psmith. “Which it was, pretty nearly.”

  “He thinks I did it.”

  “Why? Have you ever shown any talent in the painting line?”

  “The silly ass wanted me to confess that I’d done it. He as good as asked me to. Jawed a lot of rot about my finding it to my advantage later on if I behaved sensibly.”

  “Then what are you worrying about? Don’t you know that when a master wants you to do the confessing-act, it simply means that he hasn’t enough evidence to start in on you with? You’re all right. The thing’s a stand-off.”

  “Evidence!” said Mike, “My dear man, he’s got enough evidence to sink a ship. He’s absolutely sweating evidence at every pore. As far as I can see, he’s been crawling about, doing the Sherlock Holmes business for all he’s worth ever since the thing happened, and now he’s dead certain that I painted Sammy.
”

  “Did you, by the way?” asked Psmith.

  “No,” said Mike shortly, “I didn’t. But after listening to Downing I almost began to wonder if I hadn’t. The man’s got stacks of evidence to prove that I did.”

  “Such as what?”

  “It’s mostly about my boots. But, dash it, you know all about that. Why, you were with him when he came and looked for them.”

  “It is true,” said Psmith, “that Comrade Downing and I spent a very pleasant half-hour together inspecting boots, but how does he drag you into it?”

  “He swears one of the boots was splashed with paint.”

  “Yes. He babbled to some extent on that point when I was entertaining him. But what makes him think that the boot, if any, was yours?”

  “He’s certain that somebody in this house got one of his boots splashed, and is hiding it somewhere. And I’m the only chap in the house who hasn’t got a pair of boots to show, so he thinks it’s me. I don’t know where the dickens my other boot has gone. Edmund swears he hasn’t seen it, and it’s nowhere about. Of course I’ve got two pairs, but one’s being soled. So I had to go over to school yesterday in pumps. That’s how he spotted me.”

  Psmith sighed.

  “Comrade Jackson,” he said mournfully, “all this very sad affair shows the folly of acting from the best motives. In my simple zeal, meaning to save you unpleasantness, I have landed you, with a dull, sickening thud, right in the cart. Are you particular about dirtying your hands? If you aren’t, just reach up that chimney a bit?”

  Mike stared, “What the dickens are you talking about?”

  “Go on. Get it over. Be a man, and reach up the chimney.”

  “I don’t know what the game is,” said Mike, kneeling beside the fender and groping, “but—_Hullo_!”

  “Ah ha!” said Psmith moodily.

  Mike dropped the soot-covered object in the fender, and glared at it.

  [Illustration: MIKE DROPPED THE SOOT-COVERED OBJECT IN THE FENDER.]

  “It’s my boot!” he said at last.

  “It is,” said Psmith, “your boot. And what is that red stain across the toe? Is it blood? No, ‘tis not blood. It is red paint.”

  Mike seemed unable to remove his eyes from the boot.