“Oh, my father doesn’t know a thing about cricket,” he said, “but he’s frightfully clever. He writes books about”—David could not remember what they were about—“he writes books that are supposed to be jolly good. He took a double-first at Oxford, too.”
The Archdeacon had seen his son, and, to David’s great relief, did not bowl any more, but came towards him. There were bad moments to follow, for he kissed him in sight of the whole school, at which Ward looked delicately away. Also he had turned up the sleeves of his brown flannel shirt (as if brown flannel was not bad enough) and revealed the fact that below it he wore a long-sleeved Jaeger vest. How hopelessly impossible that was words fail to convey. Nobody ever wore vests in the summer: you had your coat, waistcoat and shirt, and then it was you. It was “fuggy” to wear a vest in the summer unless you had a cold, and everybody would see that he had a fuggy father. And, oh, the idiocy of his attempting to bowl! It was pure “swank” to try it, for at home he never joined in his children’s games, but here the deplorable habit of “joining in the life of the place” asserted itself. The same habit made him, when at the seaside, talk knowingly to bewildered fishermen, before whom he soon exposed his ignorance by mistaking a mackerel for a herring, or, when in Switzerland in summer holidays, to walk about the milder slopes of the Alps with a climber’s rope about his shoulders and a piece of edelweiss stuck into his shovel-hat. If he would only stick to the things at which he was “frightfully clever,” and not go careering about in these amateur excursions!
Presently the field was cleared for the match; the home side won the toss, and poor David, who was going in fifth wicket, endured the tortures of the lost. His father sat next him on a bench in front of the pavilion, still with his coat off, and continued to enter into the life of the place by pouring forth torrents of the most dreadful conversation. There were crowds of boys sitting and standing close round them, every one could hear exactly what was being said, and every one, David made no doubt, was saving it up for exact reproduction afterwards.
“And Virgil,” he said, “you wrote to me that you were reading the story of Dido, _Infandum regina jubes_—but we must attend to the cricket, mustn’t we? Ha! There’s a fine hit! Well played, sir; well played indeed.”