"Pip" Part 18

All of which brings us back to Pip.

The female s.e.x 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 wors.h.i.+pped. 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 s.e.x 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 d.i.c.k 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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, s.h.i.+fting 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 Yorks.h.i.+re, 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 role 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 fas.h.i.+on. "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 Sat.u.r.days. 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 a.s.s," 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 pa.s.sed 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.