He was in the changing-room when suddenly the atmosphere of the coming game was close about him. He had that strange mixture of fear and excitement, terror and pleasure. He suddenly felt cold in his jersey and shorts, and shivered a little. At the other side of the room was Turnbull, one of the three-quarters playing for the “Rest,” a large, bony boy with projecting knees. The mere thought that he would have in all probability to collar Turnbull and bring him to the ground made Jeremy feel sick. His confidence suddenly deserted him. He knew that he was going to play badly. Worse than ever in his life before. He wished that he could suddenly develop scarlet fever and be carried off to the infirmary. He even searched his bare legs for spots. He had rather a headache and his throat felt queer, and he was not at all sure that he could see straight. One of those silly fools who always comes and talks to you at the wrong moment sniggered and said he felt awfully fit. It was all right for him; he was one of the forwards playing for the “Rest.” It would be perfectly easy for him to hide himself in the scrum and pretend to be pushing when he was not. No one ever noticed. But the isolation of a half was an awful thing to consider, and that desperate moment when you had to go down to the ball, with at least five hundred enormous boots all coming at your head at the same moment, was horrible to contemplate. Millett, the scrum half playing for the “Rest,” and Jeremy’s bitterest rival for the place in the fifteen, was looking supremely self-confident and assured. Certainly he was not as good as Jeremy on Jeremy’s day, but was this Jeremy’s day? No, most certainly it was not.

They went out to the field, and everything was not improved by the fact that a large crowd was gathered behind the ropes to watch them. This was an important game. The big school match was a fortnight from to-day, and Millett might get his colours on to-day’s game quite easily. And then suddenly the feel of the turf under his feet, the long, sweeping distance of the good grey sky above his head, the tang of autumn in the air, brought him confidence again. He was not aware that a lady visitor who had come out with Mr. Thompson to watch the game was saying at that moment, “Why, what a tiny boy! You don’t mean to say, Mr. Thompson, that he’s going to play with all those big fellows?” And Thompson said, “He’s the most promising footballer we have in the school. The half-back has to be small, you know.”

“Oh, I do hope he won’t get hurt,” said the lady visitor.

“Won’t do him any harm if he is,” said Mr. Thompson.

The whistle went and the game began. Almost at once Jeremy was in trouble. Within the first minute the school fifteen were lining out in their own half of the field, and a moment later some of the “Rest” forwards had broken through, dribbled, tried to pass, thrown forward, and there was a scrum within Jeremy’s twenty-five. This is the kind of thing to make you show your mettle. To be attacked before you have found your atmosphere, realized the conditions of the day, got your feel of yourself as part of the picture, gained your first win, to have to fight for your team’s life with your own goal looming like the gallows just behind you, and to know that the loss of three or five points in the first few minutes of the game is very often a decisive factor in the issue of the battle—all this tests anybody’s greatness. Jeremy in that first five minutes was anything but great. He had a consciousness of his own miserable inadequacy, a state not common to him at all. He seemed to be one large cranium spread out balloon-wise for the onrush of his enemies. As he darted about at the back of the scrum waiting for the ball to be thrown in, he felt as though he could not go down to it; and then, of course, the worst possible thing happened. The “Rest” forwards broke through the scrum; he tried to fling himself on the ball, and missed it, and there they were sliding away past him, making straight for the goal-line. Fortunately, the man with the ball was flung to touch just in time, and there was a breathing space. Jeremy, nevertheless, was tingling with his mistake as acutely as though a try had been scored. He knew what they were saying on the other side of the rope. He knew that Baltimore, for instance, was winking his bleary eyes with pleasure, that all the friends of his rival half were saying in chorus, “Well, young Cole’s no good; I always said so,” and that Riley was glaring fiercely about him and challenging anyone to say a word. He knew all this and, unfortunately, for more than a minute had time to think of it, because one of the cool three-quarters got away with the ball and then kicked it to touch, and there was a line out and a good deal of scrambling before the inevitable scrum. This time it was for him to throw in the ball, crying in his funny voice, now hoarse, now squeaky, “Coming on the right, school—shove!” They did shove, and carried it on with them; and then the “Rest” half got it, threw it to one of his three-quarters, who started racing down the field, with only Jeremy in his way before he got to the back. It was that very creature with the bony knees whom Jeremy had watched in the changing-room. The legs wobbled towards him as though with a life of their own. He ran across, threw himself at the knees, and missed them. He went sprawling on to the ground, was conscious that he had banged his nose, that somebody near him was calling out “Butters,” and that his career as a football half was finally and for ever concluded. After that he could do nothing right. The ball seemed devilishly to slip away from him whenever he approached it. He was filled with a demon of anger, but that did not serve him. He again went now here, now there, and always he seemed to be doing the wrong thing. For once that strange sure knowledge innate in him, part of his blood and his bones, of the right, inevitable thing to do, had left him, and he could only act on impulse and hope that it would turn out well, which it never did. The captain, who was a forward, pausing beside him for a moment, said, “Go on, Cole, you can play better than that.” He knew that his worst forebodings were fulfilled.

Then just before the whistle went for half-time, just when he was at his busiest, he had a curious, distinct picture of Uncle Samuel, the red apple tree, and Hamlet lying on the floor of the studio waiting for his rat. People talk about concentration and its importance, and nobody who has ever played a game well but will agree that to let your mind wander at a very critical moment is fatal; but this was not so much the actual wandering of a mind as of a curious insistence from without of this other picture that went with the scene in which he was figuring. It was like the pouring of cold clear water upon his hot and muddled brain. It was also as though Uncle Samuel, in his thick, good-natured voice, had said to him, “Now, look here, I know nothing about this silly game that you’re trying to play, but I’m here to see you go through it, and the two of us together it’s impossible to beat.” The whistle went before he had time to realize the effects of this little intrusion. He stood about during the interval talking to no one, wishing he were dead, but armoured in a cold resolve. After all, he would not write to Uncle Samuel and tell him that he had been left out of the school fifteen because he had not played well enough. No one as yet had scored. The teams seemed to be very evenly matched, which was a bad thing for the school. Everyone in the school team was depressed, and the men in the “Rest” were equally elated. If the whole truth were known, the play in the first half had been very ragged indeed, but, as Mr. Thompson explained to the lady visitor, “You mustn’t expect anything else early in the term.” She made the fatuous remark that “after all, they were such little boys,” which made Mr. Thompson reply, with more heat than true politeness required, that his boys, even though they were all under fourteen, could on their day show as good a game as any public school, to which the lady visitor replied that she was sure that they could—she thought they played wonderfully for such little boys.

The whistle sounded, and the game tumbled about, up and down, in and out. Jeremy knew now that all was well. His “game sense” had suddenly come back to him, and the ball seemed to know its master, to tumble to him just when he wanted it, to stick in his hands when he touched it, and even to smile at him when it was quite a long way away, as though it were saying to him, “I’m yours now, and you can do what you like with me.” He brought off a neat piece of collaring, then a little later passed the ball back to his three-quarters, who got, for the first time that day, a clear run, leading to a try in the far corner of the field. Then there came a moment when all the “Rest” forwards were dribbling the ball, the school forwards at their heels, but not fast enough to stop their opponents; and he was down on the ball, had it packed tight under his arm, lying flat upon it, and the whole world of boots, legs, knees, bodies seemed to charge over him. A queer sensation that was, everything falling upon him as though the ceiling of the world had suddenly collapsed. Then the sensation of being buried deep in the ground, bodies wriggling and heaving on top of him, his nose, chin, eyes deep in earth, some huge leg with a gigantic boot at the end of it hovering like a wild animal just above his head; and then the whistle and the sudden clearing of the ground away from him; his impulse to move, and his discovery that his right leg hurt like a piercing sword. He tried to rise, and could not. He was quite alone now, the sky and the wind, the field and the distant hills encircling him, with nobody else in the world. The game stopped, people came back to him. They felt his leg, and it hurt desperately, but not, he knew at once, so desperately that he never would be able to use it again. They rubbed his calf and jerked his knee. He heard somebody say, “Only a kick—no bones broken,” and he set his teeth and stumbled to his feet and stood for a moment feeling exquisite pain. Then, like an old man of ninety, tottered along. At this there was universal applause from behind the ropes. There were cries of “Well stopped, Stocky! Good old Stocky!” and he would not have exchanged that moment for all the prizes in the bookshop or all the tuckshops in Europe. “Are you all right?” his captain shouted across to him. He nodded his head because he certainly would have burst into tears if he had spoken, and he was biting his lower lip until his teeth seemed to go through to his gums. But, in that marvellous fashion that all footballers know, his leg became with every movement easier, and although there was a dull, grinding pain there, he found he could move about quite easily and soon was in the thick of it once more. He was only a “limper” to the end of that game, but he did one or two things quite nicely, and had the happiness of seeing the school score another two tries, which put the issue of the game beyond doubt. At the end, after cheers had been given and returned, the pain in his leg reasserted itself once more, and he could only limp very feebly off the field, but he had the delirious happiness of the captain—who was going to Rugby next year, and was therefore very nearly a man—putting his hand on his shoulder and saying, “That was a plucky game of yours, Cole. Hope your leg isn’t bad.”

“Oh, it isn’t bad at all, thank you,” he said very politely. “I almost don’t feel it,” which was a terrific lie. He had done well. He knew that from the comments on every side of him. The crowd had forgotten his earlier failure, which, if he had only known it, should have taught him that word of wisdom invaluable to artists and sportsmen alike: “Don’t be discouraged by a bad beginning. It’s the last five minutes that count.” Finally there was Riley. “You didn’t play badly,” he said. “You were better than Millett.”