"Pip" Part 21

"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 worship 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.

The doctor shook his head.

"Can't get away, my boy," he said. "Wish I could. But it can't be done.

I have consultations every day for five weeks, and hospital work as well. After that, perhaps--"

"After that your fixture-card will have been still further filled up,"

said Pip.

His father laughed.

"You are right," he said, "I believe it will: it's a way it has."

"Well, why not fix up a month's holiday, say in five weeks' time, and stick to it?"

"And who is going to do my work?"

"I wish _I_ could," said Pip, impulsively for him. "Dad, I must be a devil of a disappointment to you. Fancy you--and me!"

By the latter rather condensed expression Pip meant to express his surprise that such a clever father should have produced such a stupid son.

"We don't all get ten talents, old man," said his father. "But soon, I dare say, when you are qualified, there will be lots--"

Pip put down his gla.s.s of port.

"Dad, I shall never be qualified," he said.

"Why?"

"Because I haven't got it in me. You are so clever that you can't conceive what a fool's brain can be like. I tell you honestly that this thing is beyond me, Governor. I have worked pretty hard--"

"I know that," said his father heartily.

"--And I think I am rather more at sea now than I was four years ago. I have learned a few things by heart--anything that can be picked up by those jingles and tips that coaches give one--and that is just about all. Fancy me going over a patient's ribs and mumbling rhymes to myself to remind me what part of his anatomy I had got to!"

Father and son laughed. Some of the _memoria technica_ of the medical student are peculiar.

"I have been meaning to tell you a long time," continued Pip, "but I saw you were keen on my getting through, if possible, so I stuck to it. I think I know my limits. I'm not cut out for the learned professions.

Fact is, I'm a blamed fool."

They smoked on silently after that. The doctor was not altogether surprised at Pip's outburst, for he had lately been realising, from the casual utterances of lecturers and examiners of his acquaintance, that Pip's prospects were hopeless. But he was sadly disappointed for all that. He had been a lonely man all his life, and now, especially that his health was uncertain, he realised the unhappy fact that his son--his big, strong, healthy son, to whose intellectual companionship he had looked forward so eagerly--was never to give him a shoulder to lean on save in a physical sense.

At this moment, much to the relief of both, the door opened and Pipette came in. She was just twenty-two, and to the tired man in the armchair by the fire she was her mother over again.