CHAPTER VI
PETTICOAT INFLUENCE
"Pip!"
"Well?"
"May I come in?"
"All right," said Pip in a surprised tone. His sister was not in the habit of craving admission to his den in this formal manner.
The reason revealed itself with the opening of the door. Pipette entered the room with another girl, at whose appearance Pip, always deferential to the point of obsequiousness in female society, rose up hastily and removed his pipe from his mouth. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and otherwise unprepared for company. His private apartment was in a state of more than usual confusion, for a difference of opinion had arisen between John—the fox-terrier—and a cricket-boot, and the one-sided conflict that ensued, together with the subsequent chastisement of John, had deranged even the primitive scheme of upholstery that prevailed in "the pig-sty," as Pip's apartment was commonly called.
"This is Elsie Innes," said Pipette. "My brother."
Pip saw before him a girl of about sixteen. She had extremely fair hair, a clear skin, not unbecomingly freckled, and eyes which had a habit of changing from blue to grey in different lights. Girls of sixteen are not always graceful,—like their male prototypes they frequently run to knees and elbows,—but this girl appeared to be free from such defects. She possessed a slim, lithe, young figure, and carried herself with an elasticity and freedom that spoke of open air and early bedtimes. She was in the last stages of what slangy young men call "flapperdom," and her hair was gathered on the nape of her neck with a big black bow. Pip, of course, did not take in all these things at once, but he had time to note especially the neatness of Elsie Innes's feet and the whiteness of her teeth. From which it will be observed that, though his experience in these matters was limited and his judgment unformed, Pip's instincts were sound.
"Please sit down," he said, sweeping John and "The Field" from out of the armchair. "Pipette, what on earth did you bring Miss—Miss, er—"
"Innes."
"—Miss Innes up to this untidy hole for?"
"The drawing-room has got two plumbers in it, and they are laying lunch in the dining-room, and Father is in the study, so we came here," said Pipette.
Pip expressed his delight rather lamely, and the girls sat down.
"You must endure us till lunch," continued Pipette. "I suppose you know that this is the day of the Blanes' garden-party?"
"So it is! I had forgotten."
Pipette smiled amiably and turned to her friend.
"What did I tell you?" she said.
"You said," replied Miss Innes, "that he would say he had forgotten all about it."
"Pip, dear," continued Pipette, pointing an accusing finger, "don't think you can deceive us!"
"What do you mean?" inquired Pip uneasily.
"You know," said Pipette. "Think."
Pip thought, apparently with success. "Oh," he said, growing red in the face,—he had never outgrown that childish weakness,—"you are a little ass, Pipette!"
Pipette nodded sagely and smiled at Miss Innes. That young person smiled indulgently upon Pip, and heaved a little sigh which intimated that boys would be boys.
For Pip was at this time involved in the meshes of his first serious love-affair. Being without skill in the art of dissimulation, he made no attempt to conceal his condition, and in consequence was now acting as target for the playful and occasionally rather heavy banter of his friends. Why, goodness knows! We have grown so accustomed to regard the youthful lover as an object of humour, that a young man, if he happens to fall in love, is now compelled to conceal the fact, or, at any rate, dress it up, and endeavour to pass the affair off as at most a mere airy flirtation.
Now, roughly speaking, a man is in love from his fifteenth birthday onwards: nature has ordained it. But in most cases civilisation, convention, society—call it what you like—has ordained that he must not treat this, the most inspiring passion of human life, as anything more than a jest for another ten years or so. And therein lie more little tragedies—disintegrated castles-in-the-air, secret disappointments, and endless efforts of self-repression—than this world dreams of. The boy may keep the girl's photograph on his mantelpiece, and that is just about all he may keep. Contrast with this the happy case of the girl. If she chooses to fall in love at the age of eighteen, nothing is deemed prettier or more natural: she is at liberty to enjoy her birthright openly; she receives sympathetic assistance on every hand; and if at the age of nineteen or twenty she decides to marry, society comes and sheds rapturous tears at the wedding. What of the boy who has been her playmate for years back; who has taken the lead in all their childish escapades; who has been her trusted guardian and confidant ever since they pulled crackers and kissed under the mistletoe at children's parties? What of him? He is still a boy. True, he is a year older than she is, but by an immutable law he is for all practical purposes ten years her junior. She has sprung up at a stroke of some mysterious magician's wand into a woman, a personage with an acknowledged position in the scheme of things; and he, her old sweetheart, is only a poor, broken-hearted hobbledehoy. He will get over it, you say? Quite true. But that will not make things any easier for him at present. Ten years later he will take a girl away from some other hobbledehoy and marry her. He will then be in the prime of young manhood; and he will behold his first love, plump, matronly, and rather passée, sitting in a back pew at the wedding. It seems rather a dull sort of revenge, somehow.
Of course boy and girl marriages would never do. Joint inexperience is a sure guarantee of disaster. Still, sentimental persons may be permitted one sigh of regret for a millennium which, however hopelessly idyllic and unpractical it might be, would at any rate prevent young men from marrying wealthy widows, and pretty girls from giving themselves, in exchange for a position in society, to middle-aged gentlemen with five-figure incomes. And if a young man must spend the best years of his life in repressing his tenderest instincts, let us at any rate refrain from laughing at his struggles.
All of which brings us back to Pip.
The female sex exercised a more than usual fascination over him. Brought up in a circle almost exclusively male,—Pipette was too completely subservient to himself to have any direct influence on the moulding of his character,—Pip regarded women in general much as the poor Indian regards the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies,—as things not to be understood or approached, but merely to be worshipped. Pip was a Galahad,—an extremely reserved, slow-moving, and, at times, painfully shy Galahad,—but a very perfect gentle knight for all that. He treated all women, from his sister's friends to the most plebeian young person who ever dispensed refreshment across a bar, with a grave courtesy which the more frivolous members of that captious sex occasionally found rather dull.
Such a girl was Miss Madeline Carr. Pip had met her six months before on a visit to the home of his friend Dick Blane, and, being a healthy young man and twenty-one, had fallen in love with her. Being Pip, he did the thing thoroughly, and made no attempt to conceal his devotion. Unfortunately, Madeline was of a type, not uncommon, which only wants what it cannot get, and thinks but little of what may be had for nothing.
She was an exceedingly pretty girl of twenty, in her second season, and consequently almost sufficiently worldly-wise to be Pip's mother. Having made an absolutely bloodless conquest of Pip, she valued him accordingly, and Pip was now beginning to realise that there must be something wrong with an attachment which consisted of perpetual devotion on the one side and nothing but an occasional careless acknowledgment of services rendered on the other. Of late, however, the situation had improved. Madeline had come up to Cambridge for the May Week, and finding that Pip occupied a position of authority and even admiration among his fellows that she had never dreamed of, and of which she had gathered no hint from Pip's own references to his 'Varsity life, Miss Carr decided in her shrewd, business-like, and thoroughly cold-blooded little heart that, for the time being, considerable kudos might accrue to her as the exclusive proprietress of the most popular man of his year. Consequently for a brief week Pip had basked in the unaccustomed sunshine of her smiles; and though there had been a perceptible lowering of temperature since their return to town, he was still about as cheerful as a man in love has any right to be.
He turned to Miss Innes.
"Are you going to the party?" he asked.
"Look at me!" replied his guest. "No, not at my face,"—Pip was regarding her resolutely between the eyes,—"my clothes. Can't you see I'm dressed for a party?"
"Ah!" remarked Pip meditatively, shifting his gaze lower down, "I see. You are coming with us, I suppose?"
"Not us," interposed Pipette,—"you."
"What! aren't you coming yourself?"
"No. The Lindons are to be here for lunch, and I must stay and entertain the old lady while Father and Sir John sit in the study and talk shop."
"Bad luck!" replied Pip. "Sir John Lindon and the dad are always searching about inside people and finding new diseases," he explained, turning to Elsie. "It is called Research. I remember once in the 'lab' at—"
"So you must escort Miss Innes, Pip," said Pipette hastily.
"Right! That will be first-rate," said Pip, with a heartiness which quite surprised himself.
Presently they went down to lunch, and after Pip had arrayed himself in tennis costume, the two set off for the Blanes' garden-party.
It was the last week in June. Term was over, and ten places had been filled up in the Cambridge Eleven against Oxford. Pip so far had not received his Blue. He had just completed his first year, for he had not gone direct from school to the University, partly because his attainments were not quite up to the standard of the Previous Examination, and partly because he had never quite shaken off the effects of his fall in the dormitory that eventful night two-and-a-half years ago. A trip round the world with a tutor had corrected these deficiencies, and Pip was now at the end of his period of "Fresherdom" at the University of Cambridge.
But somehow all was not well with his cricket. He had been tried against the M.C.C. and had not been a success. His chief rival, Honeyburn of Trinity, had been tried against Yorkshire, and had been a failure. The University captain had been reduced to experimenting with a lob-bowler, and such a creature had been tried against an England Eleven a week before. But though he had taken two good wickets they had cost forty-four runs apiece; and his further services had been dispensed with. So the last place was still unsettled. Pip, knowing that University captains very seldom go back to their first loves, had little hope of being chosen, though he had a good college record. Most probably the captain, rendered desperate, would fall back on some well-tried friend of his own on whom he could rely to a certain, if limited, extent; or else—horror of horrors!—bring up some last year's Blue, dug out of an office or a public school, and so blight the last faint pretensions of all those gentlemen who were still hoping to be chosen, if only in the humble rôle of a pis aller.
It was now Wednesday, and Cambridge was to play Oxford at Lord's on the following Monday. Pip was a phlegmatic youth, but the knowledge that Cayley, the Cambridge captain, who was Mrs. Blane's nephew, would probably be at the garden-party, gave him a vague feeling of unrest. Perhaps Cayley had not made up his mind yet; perhaps the proverb about "out of sight out of mind" was capable of working negatively; perhaps—
"Do you imagine you are entertaining me?" inquired a cold voice at his side.
Pip started guiltily. "I had forgotten you were there," he said.
"I thought you had," said Miss Innes composedly.
Pip smiled at her in his most friendly and disarming fashion. "Very rude of me," he continued: "I'm sorry. The fact is, I never can think of things to say to people."
"Why not tell me what has been going on in your mind all this time?" suggested the girl. "That would be something."
"Oh, that was only cricket," said Pip.
"I thought so. You were wondering if you were going to get your Blue."
Pip turned and regarded this discerning young person with increasing interest.
"How did you guess that?"
"Well, it was not very difficult. I should be too, if I were in your place. The papers are quite full of it. 'The Sportsman' says—"
"Do you read 'The Sportsman'?" asked Pip, much softened.
"Yes; and of course I read 'The Field' on Saturdays. Now, tell me what you were twisting your left wrist about for?"
"Great Scott! Was I?" cried Pip, turning pink.
"Yes; and you were skipping about just like you do when you run up to the wicket to bowl."
Pip was too perturbed by this information to notice the compliment implied by Miss Innes's familiarity with his bowling action.
"I must have looked an ass," he said apologetically. "Bad luck on you, too!"
"Oh, I was all right. I walked a yard or two behind. People didn't know I was with you."
"Oh!" said Pip, rather sheepishly.
"And as I was watching your action," continued the girl judicially, "I thought of something—just as you dodged round that old gentleman at the corner of Reedham Gardens."
"I didn't notice him," said Pip humbly.
"No? Well, he noticed you, I think, because he stopped and spoke to the policeman at the corner after he had passed us," said the girl gravely.
"I seem to have been going it. But what was the thing you thought of?"
"Well, you bowl left-handed."
"Yes; I know."
"You run up to the wicket in rather a queer way, as though you were going to bowl at point, and then you suddenly swing round the corner and let the batsman have it instead."
"Quite right. But where on earth—?"
"Don't interrupt! I am speaking to you for your good." The girl was genuinely in earnest now. "Well, you always bowl over the wicket, don't you?"
"Yes; why not?"
Elsie looked at him severely.
"Don't you see what a grand chance you have been throwing away all this time?" she said. "If you bowled round the wicket, you would—"
"I see, I see!" roared Pip, slapping his leg. "Confound my thick head! The umpire! If I bowl over the wicket I'm in full view of the batsman all the time; but with my diagonal run, if I bowled round the wicket I should pass behind the umpire just before delivering the ball, and so bother the batsman? Is that it?"
"That's it. You should have thought it out for yourself years ago," said the girl reprovingly.
The conversation was interrupted by their arrival at Mrs. Blane's house.
Miss Innes was immediately snapped up to play tennis, and Pip drifted off in search of the lady to whom he was wont to refer with mingled pride and depression as his "best girl." They greeted each other in their usual manner, the balance of cordiality being heavily on Pip's side; and Miss Carr inquired—
"Who is your friend—the school-girl person in the white frock?"
Pip, anxious to clear himself of any appearance of faithlessness, explained that Miss Innes was a friend of his sister's, and hastened on his own part to disclaim anything approaching intimacy with the lady. He then craved the favour of a game of croquet.
"Not at present," said Miss Carr, who had just been introduced to a young Guardsman,—"I'll see later. But you can go and get me some strawberries and bring them over to the croquet-lawn."
Pip departed as bidden; but somehow he was not conscious of the glow of heroic devotion that usually actuated him when obeying Madeline Carr's behests. He had a feeling that she might have said "Please!" and a further feeling that "other people"—no further specification—would have done so at once.
At this point in his reflections he arrived at the croquet-lawn with the strawberries, and was promptly commanded to put them down and stand by for further orders. This treatment, customary though it was, annoyed him; and, feeling unusually independent and assertive, he drifted behind a rhododendron bush, where he encountered his crony, Mr. Richard Blane, the son of the house, who was enjoying a quiet cigarette during a brief lull in the arduous labour of dispensing hospitality.
"Hallo, Pip!"
"Hallo!"
"Cigarette?"
"Thanks."
The two smoked silently for a moment, sitting side by side on the garden-roller.
"I say," inquired Mr. Blane, "who is that flapper you brought with you? All right—eh?"
"Name of Innes," replied Pip shortly. "Scotch—pal of Pipette's."
"Seems to be a pal of Cayley's, too," said Blane. "They were having a quiet ice in the shrubbery just now. Very thick, they looked."
"Is Cayley here, then?" said Pip, looking more interested.
"Yes. Has he given you your Blue yet?"
Pip shook his head gloomily.
"Bad luck! Well, there are still a few days. I expect he is waiting to see if the wicket is going to be hard or soft."
"I suppose he hasn't given it to Honeyburn?"
"Don't think so."
"I expect he will," said Pip in resigned tones.
"Rot! You seem to be fearfully down on your luck this afternoon, old man. Come and have an orgy of claret-cup. It's about all we keep to-day." Mr. Blane rose from the roller, brushing some blades of grass from his immaculate flannels.
"Sorry—can't," said Pip. "Miss Carr said she might be able to play croquet with me about now," he explained awkwardly.
Dick knew all about his infatuation.
"Pip," said that youthful sage, inclining his head at a judicial angle, "you drop that girl! She's the wrong sort."
"Look here, Dick—" began Pip indignantly.
"Yes, I know," continued the voice of the misogynist. "She's perfect and all that; but no woman is worth the seriousness you are putting into this business. I believe it's spoiling your eyes, for one thing. Madeline Carr is simply making use of you. You see how she is behaving just now—playing a sort of in-and-out game? Well, she is waiting to see if you get your Blue. If you do, she will trot about with you during the luncheon interval at Lord's, and so on. It'll make the other girls jealous. If you don't—well, she'll have no use for you. Oh, I know 'em!" The orator wagged his head and paused for breath.
To Pip most of this diatribe was rank blasphemy, but he felt uncomfortably conscious that there was some truth in his friend's remarks. Still, he stood up stoutly for his ideal.
"Don't talk rot, Dick!" he said. "There may be a few women like that,—just one or two,—but this girl isn't one of them. Why, you have only got to look at her face to see that!"
The world-weary Blane surveyed his friend with something approaching consternation.
"A bad case!" he remarked, shaking his head. "Her face? My boy, faces are the most deceptive things in the world."
"Hers isn't," maintained Pip. "She is most sincere. You have only to look her in the eyes to see what is going on inside."
He stopped suddenly. He realised that he was growing too communicative.
"Eyes? That's just it. A girl makes eyes at you, Pip, and you crumple up. I had no idea you were in such a drivelling state as this, or I should have jawed you sooner. Come and drink stimulants,—claret-cup, lemonade, iced-coffee, anything to drown the past,—but come. And never again, after this experience, trust a girl with big eyes and little ways."
So saying, the counsel for the prosecution took the counsel for the defence by the arm, and the two, nobly sinking their differences in a common cause, cast their cigarettes away and sallied forth to distribute tea and ices among hungry chaperons and plain girls.
Meanwhile Miss Elsie Innes and the Cambridge captain were conversing in a retired part of the garden. An introduction had been effected by Miss Blane, though at whose instigation need not concern us.
Cayley, whose conversational stock-in-trade was limited, was feeling unusually complacent. The conversation had never flagged once, for this girl, though obviously young and inexperienced, had proved herself to be intelligent and appreciative beyond her years.
"I suppose you are going to beat Oxford," said Miss Innes, looking at her companion with innocent admiration.
"That is a large question," replied Cayley heavily. "These things aren't settled by the spin of a coin. But we are going to do our best," he added, with an indulgent smile.
"Have you picked your team yet?"
"All but one. I want another bowler."
"I see. What sort of bowler?"
"A good bowler," replied the captain, facetiously. It was hardly worth while wasting technicalities on a girl.
"Oh! Can't you find one?"
"I have got three in my eye, but I can only choose one."
"I saw the Cambridge Eleven play against the M.C.C.," said Miss Innes, apparently changing the subject.
"Which day?"
"The second. You made sixty-nine, not out."
Mr. Cayley, much gratified, coughed confusedly.
"Oh, that was a fluke," he said. "The difficulty that day was to get wickets."
"There was one Cambridge bowler," continued the girl, "who looked as though he ought to take wickets but didn't."
"Who was that?" inquired the captain, much amused.
"A man with black hair and blue eyes."
Mr. Cayley scratched his nose reflectively. His recollections of the eyes of his team were vague. Their individual shades he had never observed, though he had frequently condemned them collectively.
"Well, really—" he said. "Do you remember anything else about him?"
"He was a medium-paced, left-handed bowler, breaking both ways, with a good deal of swerve as well," said Miss Innes, becoming suddenly and surprisingly technical: "he had a curious oblique run, and he usually bowled about one really fast ball every over."
"Oh—Pip!" said the captain at once.
"That is the name," said the girl; "I remember now, when a catch went to him in the outfield, you called out, 'Run for it, Pip!'"
"That's him," said Cayley. "Yes, he has been disappointing lately. He is a good bowler, too; but somehow he is not taking wickets at present."
"Have you ever tried him round the wicket?" asked Elsie. "With his run he would pass behind the umpire just before delivering the ball."
The captain was fairly startled this time. He turned and regarded the ingénue beside him with undisguised interest and admiration.
"I say," he remarked, with the air of one who has just made a profound discovery, "you know something about cricket!"
Miss Innes, much to his surprise, blushed like a little schoolboy at the compliment.
"I was brought up to it," she said. "I am a sister of Raven Innes."
Then the captain understood; and he almost fell at her feet, for the name of Raven Innes is honourably known from Lord's to Melbourne.
"Do you play yourself?" he asked.
"A bit. I don't bat quite straight, but I can bowl a little. Leg-breaks," she added, with a touch of pride.
The captain's appreciative reverie was interrupted by the appearance of a third party—Pip, to wit—who now drifted into view and hovered rather disconsolately in the offing, as if uncertain whether to approach. He was a prey to melancholy, having just completed a final rupture with Madeline Carr, and under the stress of subsequent reaction was anxious to escape home.
"Hallo!" said Cayley. "There's your man, Miss Innes."
Miss Innes glanced in Pip's direction.
"So it is. I can recognise him," she answered, with an air of gratified surprise. "Will you take me to have some strawberries now, please?"
The couple departed, leaving Pip still hove-to on the horizon.
"Rum things, women," mused the captain. "This girl's quite out of the common. I thought at first she must be keen on Pip, or something; but she doesn't seem even to know him. Not often you get a woman taking a purely sporting interest in a man like that!"
Which is nothing but the truth.
Delighted to find a woman possessed of "some sense," Cayley, who was by nature a homely person with bachelor instincts, unbent still further, with the result that the end of a long bout of cricket "shop" with Elsie found him fully convinced—somewhat to his surprise, for he had hitherto been unable to make up his mind on the subject—that Pip was exactly the man he wanted for next Monday.
Elsie finally joined Pip, who was waiting, slightly depressed, to take her away.
"Had a good time?" she inquired brightly, as they walked home.
"Rotten," said Pip.
"Didn't you meet any friends?"
"Yes, a good many 'Varsity men."
"I meant lady friends."
"I haven't got any," said Pip glumly.
"You should speak the truth," said his companion with some acerbity. "How about Miss Carr?"
Pip glanced at her; and then, moved by an impulse which he did not quite understand at the time, he said, with sudden and unwonted heat,—
"I never wish to set eyes on Miss Carr again."
After this outburst they walked on silently, till they came to a house in Sussex Gardens.
"I live here," said Miss Innes. "Good-bye, and thank you so much for bringing me home."
They shook hands.
"When shall I see you again?" said Pip regretfully.
The girl smiled at his frank seriousness.
"Lord's, on Monday," she said. "Come and see me in the luncheon hour, or before, if Cambridge is batting."
"I say," said Pip gruffly, "aren't you rather taking things for granted?"
"You mean your coming to see me?"
"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 buttons. 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 embarrassing wilderness of ladies' hosiery to the Glove Department of an establishment in Oxford Street.