"Billiards" in the Home
Few who witness, or otherwise follow, the spirited contests at Thurston's or other billiard halls, are guiltless of a feverish desire to emulate the dexterity of the professional cue-pusher. Now, it is not so easy as it looks to become a champion billiard player.
In the first place, it is absolutely essential that you should possess clean shirt-sleeves and a nonchalant manner. I should have been a billiard champion long ago but for the fact that by the time Wednesday comes I hardly like to take my coat off. In the second place, you must accustom yourself to carrying your chalk in your trousers pocket and remembering that it is there, and not hanging by a bit of cord from the ceiling. To reach up over your head for the chalk while you are playing Inman or Smith for the championship would at once give you away as a mere frequenter of pot-houses or local Clubrooms. And, finally, you must acquire the knack of sitting in your shirt sleeves (I know this savours somewhat of an acrobatic feat, but you will grasp my meaning) and looking calm and pleasant while your opponent makes a break of nine hundred and seventy-three. The cartoonists will do the rest for you.
As regards the game itself, billiards, like charity, is best begun at home, where the area of destruction and personal injury is more or less limited. If you possess only the ordinary suburban villa accommodation (or lack of accommodation) you can either purchase a small-size billiard table, or else follow the example of my friend, Murdoch. I was round at his place the other evening, and Murdoch, who has recently become an enthusiast, asked me, with ill-concealed excitement, if I would care for a game of billiards.
"Where's the table?" I inquired sarcastically. "In the backyard?" By way of reply he handed me a polished wooden box about three feet long. "You play it on the dining-room table," he said, rubbing his hands. "It's the neatest thing out."
I unpacked the box of tricks while he shifted the furniture about and cleared things off the sideboard and mantelpiece. Everything was there in miniature, even down to a miniature framed "Rules of Billiards," and a miniature scoring-board, which fell down when you touched it. There was a beautiful miniature green baize cloth, and miniature pockets, which we clamped on the sides and corners. There was a neat arrangement of powerful elastic for cushions. If you struck the ball at all hard it either jumped the cushion altogether or else came back and hit you before you could get clear.
Occasionally the cushion would work off its moorings and project a ball, catapult fashion, through a window or into the overmantel. If a ball went into a pocket, the pocket would fall to the ground, where the dog would be waiting for it, under the impression that it was a kind of celestial rat. Not infrequently the entire contraption would follow, when it would take us a quarter of an hour to disentangle the dog and sort ourselves out. The cloth, too, had a way of rucking itself at critical moments, which gave a golfing touch to the game.
"The more one plays," said Murdoch, tenderly feeling the place on his forehead where an unusually savage ball had struck him, "the more one realizes what a lot there is in it." He added that he had bought the set with the idea of keeping his boys at home. When I asked where they were, he replied that they had gone out.
I have never known a ball possessed of more fiendish intelligence for discovering positions where I could not get at it without breaking something or committing personal assault. It seemed to have taken a special dislike to Murdoch's aunt. She was a meek; smiling old lady, and after I had prodded her three or four times she said she was afraid she was in the way, and perhaps she had better sit on the couch.
In the course of the next twenty minutes I had butted Murdoch's aunt three times round the room, after which she complained gently of feeling tired, and said she would go to bed. She said she had no idea that billiards afforded so much exercise.
Baulked of one prey, my ball pursued Mrs. Murdoch until that lady took refuge in the kitchen, when it broke a photograph frame, and then went and sulked under the bottom cushion whenever it got the chance. At eleven o'clock I was a statuette and two vases ahead of Murdoch, but just before twelve he put his cue through the window, thus making the biggest break of the evening.