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At Wrykyn he had always charged in at the beginning of term at the boys' entrance, but this formal reporting of himself at Sedleigh suited his mood. He inquired for Mr. Outwood, and was shown into a room lined with books. Presently the door opened, and the house-master appeared. There was something pleasant and homely about Mr. Outwood. In appearance he reminded Mike of Smee in "Peter Pan."
"Well, have you thought of the massacre which will ensue? You will have left, Adair will have left. Incidentally, I shall have left. Wrykyn will swamp them." "I suppose they will. Still, the great thing, you see, is to get the thing started. That's what Adair was so keen on. Now Sedleigh has beaten Wrykyn, he's satisfied.
"I'm not going to play here, at any rate," said Mike. He had made up his mind on this point in the train. There is a certain fascination about making the very worst of a bad job. Achilles knew his business when he sat in his tent. The determination not to play cricket for Sedleigh as he could not play for Wrykyn gave Mike a sort of pleasure.
"It is not a large school," he said, "and I don't suppose it could play Wrykyn at cricket, but it has one merit boys work there. Young Barlitt won a Balliol scholarship from Sedleigh last year." Barlitt was the vicar's son, a silent, spectacled youth who did not enter very largely into Mike's world. They had met occasionally at tennis parties, but not much conversation had ensued.
The excitement of the past few days must have had a stimulating effect on Mike's mind shaken it up, as it were, for now, for the second time in two days, he displayed quite a creditable amount of intuition. He might have been misled by Adair's apparently deprecatory attitude toward Sedleigh, and blundered into a denunciation of the place.
"There are lines on my face, dark circles beneath my eyes. The fierce rush of life at Sedleigh is wasting me away." "Stone and I had a discussion about early-morning fielding-practice," said Adair, turning to Mike. Mike said nothing. "I thought his fielding wanted working up a bit, so I told him to turn out at six to-morrow morning. He said he wouldn't, so we argued it out.
It would not be so till long after he was gone and forgotten, but he did not mind that. His devotion to Sedleigh was purely unselfish. He did not want fame.
They were useful at cricket, but apt not to take Sedleigh as seriously as he could have wished. As for Mike, he now found them pleasant company, and began to get out the tea-things. "Those Fire Brigade meetings," said Stone, "are a rag. You can do what you like, and you never get more than a hundred lines." "Don't you!" said Mike. "I got Saturday afternoon." "What!" "Is Wilson in too?" "No.
Having arrived there, he sat on the steps, looking out onto the cricket field. His thoughts were miles away, at Wrykyn, when he was recalled to Sedleigh by the sound of somebody running. Focusing his gaze, he saw a dim figure moving rapidly across the cricket field straight for him.
In a way one might have said that the game was over, and that Sedleigh had lost; for it was a one-day match, and Wrykyn, who had led on the first innings, had only to play out time to make the game theirs. Sedleigh were paying the penalty for allowing themselves to be influenced by nerves in the early part of the day. Nerves lose more school matches than good play ever won.
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