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There had appeared to him something rather fine in his policy of refusing to identify himself in any way with Sedleigh, a touch of the stone-walls-do-not-a-prison-make sort of thing. He now saw that his attitude was to be summed up in the words, "Sha'n't play." It came upon Mike with painful clearness that he had been making an ass of himself.
I think Spiller's an ass." "How many will there be, then?" asked Mike. "He might get about half a dozen, not more, because most of the chaps don't see why they should sweat themselves just because Spiller's study has been bagged." "Sturdy common sense," said Psmith approvingly, "seems to be the chief virtue of the Sedleigh character." "We shall be able to tackle a crowd like that," said Mike.
In a big public school or six or seven hundred, his influence is felt less; but in a small school like Sedleigh he is like a tidal wave, sweeping all before him. There were two hundred boys at Sedleigh, and there was not one of them in all probability who had not, directly or indirectly, been influenced by Adair.
The team listened, but were not comforted. Wrykyn might be below their usual strength, but then Wrykyn cricket, as a rule, reached such a high standard that this probably meant little. However weak Wrykyn might be for them there was a very firm impression among the members of the Sedleigh first eleven that the other school was quite strong enough to knock the cover off them.
But he bore no grudge against the inmates of the bank, such as he had borne against the inmates of Sedleigh. He had looked on the latter as bound up with the school, and, consequently, enemies. His fellow workers in the bank he regarded as companions in misfortune. They were all in the same boat together. There were men from Tonbridge, Dulwich, Bedford, St Paul's, and a dozen other schools.
And they had both worked it off, each in his own way Mike sullenly, Psmith whimsically, according to their respective natures on Sedleigh. If Psmith, therefore, did not consider it too much of a climb-down to renounce his resolution not to play for Sedleigh, there was nothing to stop Mike doing so, as at the bottom of his heart he wanted to do. "By Jove," he said, "if you're playing, I'll play.
But," said Psmith solemnly, fixing an owl-like gaze on Mike through the eyeglass, "it was not to be." "No?" said Mike. "No. I was superannuated last term." "Bad luck." "For Eton, yes. But what Eton loses, Sedleigh gains." "But why Sedleigh, of all places?" "This is the most painful part of my narrative.
It is pleasant to be out on a fine night in summer, but the pleasure is to a certain extent modified when one feels that to be detected will mean expulsion. Mike did not want to be expelled, for many reasons. Now that he had grown used to the place he was enjoying himself at Sedleigh to a certain extent.
But Adair and Psmith, helped by the wicket, had never been easy, especially Psmith, who had taken six wickets, his slows playing havoc with the tail. It would be too much to say that Sedleigh had any hope of pulling the game out of the fire; but it was a comfort, they felt, at any rate, having another knock.
What made it worse was that he saw, after watching behind the nets once or twice, that Sedleigh cricket was not the childish burlesque of the game which he had been rash enough to assume that it must be. Numbers do not make good cricket. They only make the presence of good cricketers more likely, by the law of averages. Mike soon saw that cricket was by no means an unknown art at Sedleigh.
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