“Shall I come to you as soon as term is over?” asked Markham. “The last day of term is Saturday week, you know.”
“Hang it! so it is. Yes, come at once; it will be the twenty-ninth, won’t it? Thirty days hath--no there are thirty-one. Tuesday will be the first. You may come and carry my cartridges if you won’t shoot.”
“That will be charming. I can’t see what the fun of hitting little brown birds is.”
“Oh, well, you may always miss! But if you come to that, what’s the fun of hitting a little red cricket-ball?”
“Well, you may always miss that,” said Markham, “just as you did, Tom! Besides, if you hit it you score runs.”
“Well, if you hit the little brown bird twice, you score a brace of partridges. Besides, you have a nice walk over turnips and mangolds----”
“Oh, Teddy, there’s no hope for you!” said Tom. “When you die and go to hell, they’ll make you shoot all day until you love it, and then they’ll send you to heaven, where there is no shooting at all. I don’t suppose there are such things as rocketing angels, are there?”
“Tom, the only excuse for being profane is being funny.”
“All right. But I don’t see why there shouldn’t be. There is such a thing as a shooting star.”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Tom. “Of course there was some connection in my mind, or I shouldn’t have said it.”
“Do you mean that no one, even you, can talk sheer drivel?”
“Don’t ask so many questions, Teddy. We shall be all out in a minute; there’s the ninth wicket down. Come on, we’ll give those beggars a chance. You know it is all nonsense saying that trousers and shirts are not beautiful. Look at Harold bowling there. Do you see how the wind blows the shirt tight over his shoulder? That’s an opportunity for a sculptor which the Greeks didn’t use--you get all the shape of the arm, and that look of wind and motion which the loose flap of the sleeve gives.”
“I should advise you to do a statue of a man bowling in a high wind,” said Markham.
“I’m going to--just at the moment when the ball leaves his hand, one leg right forward, with the trouser loose on it, the other leg back with the trouser tight. It’s all nonsense about momentary postures not being statuesque. They are statuesque above all others. I don’t call those knights in armour on Gothic tombs statuesque. Sculpture represents life, not death. There! why the deuce Hargrave tried to hit that ball, I don’t know. Of course it bowled him.”