great deal more
strung-up and nervous than he would have had the others suspect. He had
had a moment of very swift thinking before he had decided to treat that
ugly little pistol in a spirit of contempt. Its production had given
him a decided shock, and now he was suffering from reaction. As a
consequence, because his nerves were strained, he lit his cigarette
very languidly, very carefully, and with an offensive superiority which
was to Mr Birdsey the last straw.

These things are matters of an instant. Only an infinitesimal fraction
of time elapsed between the spectacle of Mr Birdsey, indignant but
inactive, and Mr Birdsey berserk, seeing red, frankly and undisguisedly
running amok. The transformation took place in the space of time
required for the lighting of a match.

Even as the match gave out its flame, Mr Birdsey sprang.

Aeons before, when the young blood ran swiftly in his veins and life
was all before him, Mr Birdsey had played football. Once a footballer,
always a potential footballer, even to the grave. Time had removed the
flying tackle as a factor in Mr Birdsey's life. Wrath brought it back.
He dived at young Mr Waterall's neatly trousered legs as he had dived
at other legs, less neatly trousered, thirty years ago. They crashed to
the floor together; and with the crash came Mr Birdsey's shout:

'Run! Run, you fool! Run!'

And, even as he clung to his man, breathless, bruised, feeling as if
all the world had dissolved in one vast explosion of dynamite, the door
opened, banged to, and feet fled down the passage.

Mr Birdsey disentangled himself, and rose painfully. The shock had
brought him to himself. He was no longer berserk. He was a middle-aged
gentleman of high respectability who had been behaving in a very
peculiar way.

Waterall, flushed and dishevelled, glared at him speechlessly. He
gulped. 'Are you crazy?'

Mr Birdsey tested gingerly the mechanism of a leg which lay under
suspicion of being broken. Relieved, he put his foot to the ground
again. He shook his head at Waterall. He was slightly crumpled, but he
achieved a manner of dignified reproof.

'You shouldn't have done it, young man. It was raw work. Oh, yes, I
know all about that duty-of-a-citizen stuff. It doesn't go. There are
exceptions to every rule, and this was one of them. When a man risks
his liberty to come and root at a ball-game, you've got to hand it to
him. He isn't a crook. He's a fan. And we exiled fans have got to s