The Clicking of Cuthbert

"Now let's go home."

"Wait a minute. I just want to remember what I did while it's fresh in

my mind. Let me see, this was the way I stood. Or was it more like

this? No, like this." He turned to me, beaming. "What a great idea it

was, my taking up golf! It's all nonsense what you read in the comic

papers about people foozling all over the place and breaking clubs and

all that. You've only to exercise a little reasonable care. And what a

corking game it is! Nothing like it in the world! I wonder if Betty is

up yet. I must go round and show her how I did that drive. A perfect

swing, with every ounce of weight, wrist, and muscle behind it. I meant

to keep it a secret from the dear girl till I had really learned, but

of course I have learned now. Let's go round and rout her out."

He had given me my cue. I put my hand on his shoulder and spoke

sorrowfully.

"Mortimer, my boy, I fear I have bad news for you."

"Slow; back--keep the head---- What's that? Bad news?"

"About Betty."

"About Betty? What about her? Don't sway the body--keep the eye on

the----"

"Prepare yourself for a shock, my boy. Yesterday afternoon Betty called

to see me. When she had gone I found that she had stolen my silver

matchbox."

"Stolen your matchbox?"

"Stolen my matchbox."

"Oh, well, I dare say there were faults on both sides," said Mortimer.

"Tell me if I sway my body this time."

"You don't grasp what I have said! Do you realize that Betty, the girl

you are going to marry, is a kleptomaniac?"

"A kleptomaniac!"

"That is the only possible explanation. Think what this means, my boy.

Think how you will feel every time your wife says she is going out to

do a little shopping! Think of yourself, left alone at home, watching

the clock, saying to yourself, 'Now she is lifting a pair of silk

stockings!' 'Now she is hiding gloves in her umbrella!' 'Just about

this moment she is getting away with a pearl necklace!'"

"Would she do that?"

"She would! She could not help herself. Or, rather, she could not

refrain from helping herself. How about it, my boy?"

"It only draws us closer together," he said.

I was touched, I own. My scheme had failed, but it had proved Mortimer

Sturgis to be of pure gold. He stood gazing down the fairway, wrapped

in thought.

"By the way," he said, meditatively, "I wonder if the dear girl ever

goes to any of those sales--those auction-sales, you know, where you're

allowed to inspect the things the day before? They often have some

pretty decent vases."

He broke off and fell into a reverie.

       *       *       *       *       *

From this point onward Mortimer Sturgis proved the truth of what I said

to you about the perils of taking up golf at an advanced age. A

lifetime of observing my fellow-creatures has convinced me that Nature

intended us all to be golfers. In every human being the germ of golf is

implanted at birth, and suppression causes it to grow and grow till--it

may be at forty, fifty, sixty--it suddenly bursts its bonds and sweeps

over the victim like a tidal wave. The wise man, who begins to play in

childhood, is enabled to let the poison exude gradually from his

system, with no harmful results. But a man like Mortimer Sturgis, with

thirty-eight golfless years behind him, is swept off his feet. He is

carried away. He loses all sense of proportion. He is like the fly that

happens to be sitting on the wall of the dam just when the crack comes.

Mortimer Sturgis gave himself up without a struggle to an orgy of golf

such as I have never witnessed in any man. Within two days of that

first lesson he had accumulated a collection of clubs large enough to

have enabled him to open a shop; and he went on buying them at the rate

of two and three a day. On Sundays, when it was impossible to buy

clubs, he was like a lost spirit. True, he would do his regular four

rounds on the day of rest, but he never felt happy. The thought, as he

sliced into the rough, that the patent wooden-faced cleek which he

intended to purchase next morning might have made all the difference,

completely spoiled his enjoyment.

I remember him calling me up on the telephone at three o'clock one

morning to tell me that he had solved the problem of putting. He

intended in future, he said, to use a croquet mallet, and he wondered

that no one had ever thought of it before. The sound of his broken

groan when I informed him that croquet mallets were against the rules

haunted me for days.

His golf library kept pace with his collection of clubs. He bought all

the standard works, subscribed to all the golfing papers, and, when he

came across a paragraph in a magazine to the effect that Mr. Hutchings,

an ex-amateur champion, did not begin to play till he was past forty,

and that his opponent in the final, Mr. S. H. Fry, had never held a club

till his thirty-fifth year, he had it engraved on vellum and framed and

hung up beside his shaving-mirror.

       *       *       *       *       *

And Betty, meanwhile? She, poor child, stared down the years into a

bleak future, in which she saw herself parted for ever from the man she