“Oh, yes, I suppose so. He was jolly decent to me last half when a lot of the fellows were against me. But he doesn’t play games, you know, and has got a weak heart, and he’s rather an ass in some ways . . . and he says he has persuaded his governor to let him go to Marchester, just because of me.”
“Well then, he’s very fond of you,” said Margery.
“I know he is. That makes me feel rather a cad. Of course it’ll be awfully nice to have Bags there and all that, but . . . oh, I can’t explain, and you can’t understand.”
But Margery, being a child herself, could completely understand the unfathomable mind of childhood.
“I shouldn’t worry about that, David,” she said. “Even if Bags can’t play cricket, perhaps you’ll find he can do something else that’ll make him all right.”
David regarded the roof of mulberry-leaves severely.
“Well, I suppose I’ve just got the hump,” he said. “I don’t care for the old things, and I haven’t got any new ones yet. Look at these holidays! I hate cathedrals, and we’re going to stop here all August. I don’t want to grub in the attics any more, or to play pirates, and there’s no cricket except one match against those rotten little choirboys. And father talks the most awful tosh about cricket. Says he never wore pads when he was a boy—I dare say they weren’t invented—and, anyhow, he could never have played for nuts. I can’t argue with him; it isn’t any use, because he doesn’t know!”
David sat up in a despair of indignation.
“Only the other day,” he said, “at the county match, he asked me where Jessop was fielding. So of course I said, ‘At cover-point,’ which he was. And father said, ‘Perhaps.’ It wasn’t ‘perhaps’; it was cover-point. There wasn’t a ‘perhaps’ in the whole blooming show. Why, even you know that! That makes it so unfair. If father tells me that dog-tooth ornament comes in Norman architecture I don’t say ‘Perhaps.’”
The wise Margery continued her course of consolation.
“Oh, but David,” she said. “There are a lot of things you like besides cricket. There’s that ripping poem you read me the other day, Keats’s ‘Ode to the Nightingale.’ I loved it. Was he head master of Eton?”
David wiped the final remains of the burst mulberry from his face in a magisterial manner.