The Hobby Rider

Bump. Bump. Bump-bump. Bump.

I sat up in bed and listened intently. It seemed to me as if someone with a muffled hammer were trying to knock bricks out of the wall.

"Burglars," I said to myself (one assumes, as a matter of course, that everything happening in this world after 1 a.m. is due to burglars), and I reflected what a curiously literal, but at the same time slow and cumbersome, method of housebreaking they had adopted.

The bumping continued irregularly, yet uninterruptedly.

My bed was by the window. I reached out my hand and drew aside a corner of the curtain. The sunlight streamed into the room. I looked at my watch: it was ten minutes past five.

A most unbusinesslike hour for burglars, I thought. Why, it will be breakfast-time before they get in.

Suddenly there came a crash, and some substance striking against the blind fell upon the floor. I sprang out of bed and threw open the window.

A red-haired young gentleman, scantily clad in a sweater and a pair of flannel trousers, stood on the lawn below me.

"Good morning," he said cheerily. "Do you mind throwing me back my ball?"

"What ball?" I said.

"My tennis ball," he answered. "It must be somewhere in the room; it went clean through the window."

I found the ball and threw it back to him,

*** Quick tidied and spell-checked to here--page 155 *** "What are you doing?" I asked. "Playing tennis?"

"No," he said. "I am just practising against the side of the house. It improves your game wonderfully."

"It don't improve my night's rest," I answered somewhat surlily I fear. "I came down here for peace and quiet. Can't you do it in the daytime?"

"Daytime!" he laughed. "Why it has been daytime for the last two hours. Never mind, I'll go round the other side."

He disappeared round the corner, and set to work at the back, where he woke up the dog. I heard another window smash, followed by a sound as of somebody getting up violently in a distant part of the house, and shortly afterwards I must have fallen asleep again.

I had come to spend a few weeks at a boarding establishment in Deal. He was the only other young man in the house, and I was naturally thrown a good deal upon his society. He was a pleasant, genial young fellow, but he would have been better company had he been a little less enthusiastic as regards tennis.

He played tennis ten hours a day on the average. He got up romantic parties to play it by moonlight (when half his time was generally taken up in separating his opponents), and godless parties to play it on Sundays. On wet days I have seen him practising services by himself in a mackintosh and goloshes.

He had been spending the winter with his people at Tangiers, and I asked him how he liked the place.

"Oh, a beast of a hole!" he replied. "There is not a court anywhere in the town. We tried playing on the roof, but the mater thought it dangerous."

Switzerland he had been delighted with. He counselled me next time I went to stay at Zermatt.

"There is a capital court at Zermatt," he said. "You might almost fancy yourself at Wimbledon."

A mutual acquaintance whom I subsequently met told me that at the top of the Jungfrau he had said to him, his eyes fixed the while upon a small snow plateau enclosed by precipices a few hundred feet below them -

"By Jove! That wouldn't make half a bad little tennis court--that flat bit down there. Have to be careful you didn't run back too far."

When he was not playing tennis, or practising tennis, or reading about tennis, he was talking about tennis. Renshaw was the prominent figure in the tennis world at that time, and he mentioned Renshaw until there grew up within my soul a dark desire to kill Renshaw in a quiet, unostentatious way, and bury him.

One drenching afternoon he talked tennis to me for three hours on end, referring to Renshaw, so far as I kept count, four thousand nine hundred and thirteen times. After tea he drew his chair to the window beside me, and commenced -

"Have you ever noticed how Renshaw--"

I said -

"Suppose someone took a gun--someone who could aim very straight-- and went out and shot Renshaw till he was quite dead, would you tennis players drop him and talk about somebody else?"

"Oh, but who would shoot Renshaw?" he said indignantly.

"Never mind," I said, "supposing someone did?"

"Well, then, there would be his brother," he replied.

I had forgotten that.

"Well, we won't argue about how many of them there are," I said. "Suppose someone killed the lot, should we hear less of Renshaw?"

"Never," he replied emphatically. "Renshaw will always be a name wherever tennis is spoken of."

I dread to think what the result might have been had his answer been other than it was.

The next year he dropped tennis completely and became an ardent amateur photographer, whereupon all his friends implored him to return to tennis, and sought to interest him in talk about services and returns and volleys, and in anecdotes concerning Renshaw. But he would not heed them.

Whatever he saw, wherever he went, he took. He took his friends, and made them his enemies. He took babies, and brought despair to fond mothers' hearts. He took young wives, and cast a shadow on the home. Once there was a young man who loved not wisely, so his friends thought, but the more they talked against her the more he clung to her. Then a happy idea occurred to the father. He got Begglely to photograph her in seven different positions.

When her lover saw the first, he said -

"What an awful looking thing! Who did it?"

When Begglely showed him the second, he said -

"But, my dear fellow, it's not a bit like her. You've made her look an ugly old woman."

At the third he said -

"Whatever have you done to her feet? They can't be that size, you know. It isn't in nature!"

At the fourth he exclaimed -

"But, heavens, man! Look at the shape you've made her. Where on earth did you get the idea from?"

At the first glimpse of the fifth he staggered.

"Great Scott!" he cried with a shudder, "what a ghastly expression you've got into it! It isn't human!"

Begglely was growing offended, but the father, who was standing by, came to his defence.

"It's nothing to do with Begglely," exclaimed the old gentleman suavely. "It can't be HIS fault. What is a photographer? Simply an instrument in the hands of science. He arranges his apparatus, and whatever is in front of it comes into it."

"No," continued the old gentleman, laying a constrained hand upon Begglely, who was about to resume the exhibition, "don't--don't show him the other two."

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