They and I

“Hush,” said Dick.

The Captain drew his cue back and gently pushed it forward.

“Pretty stroke,” I whispered to Malooney; “now, that’s the sort – ”

I offer, by way of explanation, that the Captain by this time was probably too full of bottled-up language to be master of his nerves. The ball travelled slowly past the red. Dick said afterwards that you couldn’t have put so much as a sheet of paper between them. It comforts a man, sometimes, when you tell him this; and at other times it only makes him madder. It travelled on and passed the white – you could have put quite a lot of paper between it and the white – and dropped with a contented thud into the top left-hand pocket.

“Why does he do that?” Malooney whispered. Malooney has a singularly hearty whisper.

Dick and I got the women and children out of the room as quickly as we could, but of course Veronica managed to tumble over something on the way – Veronica would find something to tumble over in the desert of Sahara; and a few days later I overheard expressions, scorching their way through the nursery door, that made my hair rise up. I entered, and found Veronica standing on the table. Jumbo was sitting upon the music-stool. The poor dog himself was looking scared, though he must have heard a bit of language in his time, one way and another.

“Veronica,” I said, “are you not ashamed of yourself? You wicked child, how dare you – ”

“It’s all right,” said Veronica. “I don’t really mean any harm. He’s a sailor, and I have to talk to him like that, else he don’t know he’s being talked to.”

I pay hard-working, conscientious ladies to teach this child things right and proper for her to know. They tell her clever things that Julius Cæsar said; observations made by Marcus Aurelius that, pondered over, might help her to become a beautiful character. She complains that it produces a strange buzzy feeling in her head; and her mother argues that perhaps her brain is of the creative order, not intended to remember much – thinks that perhaps she is going to be something. A good round-dozen oaths the Captain must have let fly before Dick and I succeeded in rolling her out of the room. She had only heard them once, yet, so far as I could judge, she had got them letter perfect.

The Captain, now no longer under the necessity of employing all his energies to suppress his natural instincts, gradually recovered form, and eventually the game stood at one hundred and forty-nine all, Malooney to play. The Captain had left the balls in a position that would have disheartened any other opponent than Malooney. To any other opponent than Malooney the Captain would have offered irritating sympathy. “Afraid the balls are not rolling well for you to-night,” the Captain would have said; or, “Sorry, sir, I don’t seem to have left you very much.” To-night the Captain wasn’t feeling playful.

“Well, if he scores off that!” said Dick.

“Short of locking up the balls and turning out the lights, I don’t myself see how one is going to stop him,” sighed the Captain.

The Captain’s ball was in hand. Malooney went for the red and hit – perhaps it would be more correct to say, frightened – it into a pocket. Malooney’s ball, with the table to itself, then gave a solo performance, and ended up by breaking a window. It was what the lawyers call a nice point. What was the effect upon the score?

Malooney argued that, seeing he had pocketed the red before his own ball left the table, his three should be counted first, and that therefore he had won. Dick maintained that a ball that had ended up in a flower-bed couldn’t be deemed to have scored anything. The Captain declined to assist. He said that, although he had been playing billiards for upwards of forty years, the incident was new to him. My own feeling was that of thankfulness that we had got through the game without anybody being really injured. We agreed that the person to decide the point would be the editor of The Field.

It remains still undecided. The Captain came into my study the next morning. He said: “If you haven’t written that letter to The Field, don’t mention my name. They know me on The Field. I would rather it did not get about that I have been playing with a man who cannot keep his ball within the four walls of a billiard-room.”

“Well,” I answered, “I know most of the fellows on The Field myself. They don’t often get hold of anything novel in the way of a story. When they do, they are apt to harp upon it. My idea was to keep my own name out of it altogether.”

“It is not a point likely to crop up often,” said the Captain. “I’d let it rest if I were you.”

I should like to have had it settled. In the end, I wrote the editor a careful letter, in a disguised hand, giving a false name and address. But if any answer ever appeared I must have missed it.

Myself I have a sort of consciousness that somewhere inside me there is quite a good player, if only I could persuade him to come out. He is shy, that is all. He does not seem able to play when people are looking on. The shots he misses when people are looking on would give you a wrong idea of him. When nobody is about, a prettier game you do not often see. If some folks who fancy themselves could see me when there is nobody about, it might take the conceit out of them. Only once I played up to what I feel is my real form, and then it led to argument. I was staying at an hotel in Switzerland, and the second evening a pleasant-spoken young fellow, who said he had read all my books – later, he appeared surprised on learning I had written more than two – asked me if I would care to play a hundred up. We played even, and I paid for the table. The next evening he said he thought it would make a better game if he gave me forty and I broke. It was a fairly close finish, and afterwards he suggested that I should put down my name for the handicap they were arranging.

“I am afraid,” I answered, “that I hardly play well enough. Just a quiet game with you is one thing; but in a handicap with a crowd looking on – ”

“I should not let that trouble you,” he said; “there are some here who play worse than you – just one or two. It passes the evening.”

It was merely a friendly affair. I paid my twenty marks, and was given plus a hundred. I drew for my first game a chatty type of man, who started minus twenty. We neither of us did much for the first five minutes, and then I made a break of forty-four.

There was not a fluke in it from beginning to end. I was never more astonished in my life. It seemed to me it was the cue was doing it.

Minus Twenty was even more astonished. I heard him as I passed:

“Who handicapped this man?” he asked.

“I did,” said the pleasant-spoken youngster.

“Oh,” said Minus Twenty – “friend of yours, I presume?”

There are evenings that seem to belong to you. We finished that two hundred and fifty under the three-quarters of an hour. I explained to Minus Twenty – he was plus sixty-three at the end – that my play that night had been exceptional. He said that he had heard of cases similar. I left him talking volubly to the committee. He was not a nice man at all.

After that I did not care to win; and that of course was fatal. The less I tried, the more impossible it seemed for me to do wrong. I was left in at the last with a man from another hotel. But for that I am convinced I should have carried off the handicap. Our hotel didn’t, anyhow, want the other hotel to win. So they gathered round me, and offered me sound advice, and begged me to be careful; with the natural result that I went back to my usual form quite suddenly.

Never before or since have I played as I played that week. But it showed me what I could do. I shall get a new table, with proper pockets this time. There is something wrong about our pockets. The balls go into them and then come out again. You would think they had seen something there to frighten them. They come out trembling and hold on to the cushion.

I shall also get a new red ball. I fancy it must be a very old ball, our red. It seems to me to be always tired.

“The billiard-room,” I said to Dick, “I see my way to easily enough. Adding another ten feet to what is now the dairy will give us twenty-eight by twenty. I am hopeful that will be sufficient even for your friend Malooney. The drawing-room is too small to be of any use. I may decide – as Robina has suggested – to ‘throw it into the hall.’ But the stairs will remain. For dancing, private theatricals – things to keep you children out of mischief – I have an idea I will explain to you later on. The kitchen – ”

“Can I have a room to myself?” asked Veronica.

Veronica was sitting on the floor, staring into the fire, her chin supported by her hand. Veronica, in those rare moments when she is resting from her troubles, wears a holy, far-away expression apt to mislead the stranger. Governesses, new to her, have their doubts whether on these occasions they are justified in dragging her back to discuss mere dates and tables. Poets who are friends of mine, coming unexpectedly upon Veronica standing by the window, gazing upward at the evening star, have thought it was a vision, until they got closer and found that she was sucking peppermints.

“I should so like to have a room all to myself,” added Veronica.

“It would be a room!” commented Robin.

“It wouldn’t have your hairpins sticking up all over the bed, anyhow,” murmured Veronica dreamily.

“I like that!” said Robin; “why – ”

“You’re harder than I am,” said Veronica.

“I should wish you to have a room, Veronica,” I said. “My fear is that in place of one untidy bedroom in the house – a room that makes me shudder every time I see it through the open door; and the door, in spite of all I can say, generally is wide open – ”

“I’m not untidy,” said Robin, “not really. I know where everything is in the dark – if people would only leave them alone.”

“You are. You’re about the most untidy girl I know,” said Dick.

“I’m not,” said Robin; “you don’t see other girls’ rooms. Look at yours at Cambridge. Malooney told us you’d had a fire, and we all believed him at first.”

“When a man’s working – ” said Dick.

“He must have an orderly place to work in,” suggested Robin.

Dick sighed. “It’s never any good talking to you,” said Dick. “You don’t even see your own faults.”

“I can,” said Robin; “I see them more than anyone. All I claim is justice.”

“Show me, Veronica,” I said, “that you are worthy to possess a room. At present you appear to regard the whole house as your room. I find your gaiters on the croquet lawn. A portion of your costume – an article that anyone possessed of the true feelings of a lady would desire to keep hidden from the world – is discovered waving from the staircase window.”

“I put it out to be mended,” explained Veronica.

“You opened the door and flung it out. I told you of it at the time,” said Robin. “You do the same with your boots.”