He handed Frank a double sheet of paper with some printed and written matter on the first page, and some printed lists on the third and fourth pages. The second page was blank; the first page read as follows:
"I am afraid not."He had become entangled with a lamp-post. There is no other way of describing his predicament. He came to rest with his forehead pressed against the post, and all his efforts to get round it ended in dismal failure. His legs kicked spasmodically and his arms revolved irregularly. There were intermittent explosions, like the back-firing of a petrol engine. The only person who witnessed these peculiar antics was P.C. Hawkins, who had been indulging in a quiet smoke beneath the shelter of a neighbouring archway.
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There was another person present at the cricket match to whom the appearance of the strange figure upon the hill seemed an unusual circumstance, only in his case it provided rather an agreeable diversion than an irritating[Pg 7] disturbance. It had been something to look at, and much more interesting than cricket. All the afternoon Arthur Withers had been lying in the long grass, chewing bits of it at intervals and hoping against hope that something would happen to prevent his having to go out to the pitch and make a fool of himself. He knew perfectly well that Tanner, the demon bowler of the opposing team, would get him out first ball. He might linger at the seat of operations whilst one or two byes were run; but there were few quests more unwarranted and hopeless than that excursion, duly padded and gloved, to the scene of instant disaster. He dreaded the unnecessary trouble he was bound to give, the waiting while he walked with shaking knees to the wicket; the careful assistance of the umpire in finding centre for him; all the ceremony of cricket rehearsed for his special and quite undeserved benefit. And afterwards he would be put to field where there was a lot of running to do, and only dead balls to pick up. Of course, he wasn't funking; that wouldn't be cricket. But he had been very miserable. He sometimes wondered why he paid a subscription in order to take part in a game that cost him such agony of mind to play. But it was the privilege that mattered as much as anything. Just to be allowed to play.The young ladies were in rapture. Miss Harper asked how he had done it."Hello, Smith." He scanned my dripping horse. "Your saddle's slipped, Smith. Yes, she's alive."He had grown to detest the time after dinner passed in the plushy, painted drawing-room. Hitherto, in all these years of increasing prosperity, during which the conscious effort of his brain had been directed to business and money-making, he had not objected after the work of the day to pass a quiescent hour or two before his early bedtime giving half an ear to his wifes babble, which, with her brain thickened with refreshment, always reached its flood-tide of voluble incoherence now, giving half an eye to Alice with her industrious{291} needle. All the time a vague simmer of mercantile meditation gently occupied him; his mind, like some kitchen fire with the damper pushed in, kept itself just alight, smouldered and burned low, and Alices needle was but like the bars of the grate, and his wifes prattle the mild rumble of water in the boiler. It was all domestic and normal, in accordance with the general destiny of prosperous men in middle age. Indeed, he was luckier in some respects than the average, for there had always been for him his secret garden, the hortus inclusus, into which neither his family nor his business interests ever entered. Now even that had been invaded, Norahs catalogue had become to him the most precious of his books: she was like sunshine in his secret garden or like a bitter wind, something, anyhow, that got between him and his garden beds, while here in the drawing-room in the domestic hour after dinner the fact of her made itself even more insistently felt, for she turned Lady Keelings vapidities, to which hitherto he had been impervious, into an active stinging irritation, and even poor Alices industrious needle and the ever-growing pattern of Maltese crosses on Mr Silverdales slippers was like some monotonous recurring drip of water that set his nerves on edge. This was a pretty state of mind, he told himself, for a hardheaded business man of fifty, and yet even as with all the force of resolution that was in him he tried to find something{292} in his wifes remarks that could awake a relevant reasonable reply, some rebellious consciousness in his brain would only concern itself with counting on the pink clock the hours that lay between the present moment and nine oclock next morning. And then the pink clock melodiously announced on the Westminster chime that it was half past ten, and Alice put her needle into the middle of the last Maltese cross, and Lady Keeling waddled across the room and tapped the barometer, which a marble Diana held in her chaste hand, to see if the weather promised well for the bazaar to-morrow. The evening was over, and there would not be another for the next twenty-four hours.No clocks, no pictures on the walls, no mirrors; in fact, the room was quite bare of ornament.Nothing that I can tell you, he said. I didnt mean to speak of myself."But you don't get all the whales you see, by a long shot. Many a whale gets away before you can fasten to him, and many another whale, after you have laid on and fastened, will escape you. He sinks, and tears the iron loose; he runs away to windward ten or twenty miles an hour, and you must cut the line to save your lives; he smashes the boat, and perhaps kills some of his assailants; he dies below the surface, and when he dies there he stays below, and you lose him; and sometimes he shows[Pg 66] such an amount of toughness that he seems to bear a charmed life. We fight him with harpoon and lance, and in these later days they have an invention called the bomb-lance or whaling-gun. A bomb-shell is thrown into him with a gun like a large musket, and it explodes down among his vitals. There's another gun that is fastened to the shaft of a harpoon, and goes off when the whale tightens the line; and there's another that throws a lance half-way through him. Well, there are whales that can stand all these things and live.
