The Clicking of Cuthbert

"I will select," said the Sage, "from the innumerable memories that

rush to my mind, the story of Cuthbert Banks."

"Never heard of him."

"Be of good cheer," said the Oldest Member. "You are going to hear of

him now."

       *       *       *       *       *

It was in the picturesque little settlement of Wood Hills (said the

Oldest Member) that the incidents occurred which I am about to relate.

Even if you have never been in Wood Hills, that suburban paradise is

probably familiar to you by name. Situated at a convenient distance

from the city, it combines in a notable manner the advantages of town

life with the pleasant surroundings and healthful air of the country.

Its inhabitants live in commodious houses, standing in their own

grounds, and enjoy so many luxuries--such as gravel soil, main

drainage, electric light, telephone, baths (h. and c.), and company's

own water, that you might be pardoned for imagining life to be so ideal

for them that no possible improvement could be added to their lot. Mrs.

Willoughby Smethurst was under no such delusion. What Wood Hills needed

to make it perfect, she realized, was Culture. Material comforts are

all very well, but, if the summum bonum is to be achieved, the

Soul also demands a look in, and it was Mrs. Smethurst's unfaltering

resolve that never while she had her strength should the Soul be handed

the loser's end. It was her intention to make Wood Hills a centre of

all that was most cultivated and refined, and, golly! how she had

succeeded. Under her presidency the Wood Hills Literary and Debating

Society had tripled its membership.

But there is always a fly in the ointment, a caterpillar in the salad.

The local golf club, an institution to which Mrs. Smethurst strongly

objected, had also tripled its membership; and the division of the

community into two rival camps, the Golfers and the Cultured, had

become more marked than ever. This division, always acute, had attained

now to the dimensions of a Schism. The rival sects treated one another

with a cold hostility.

Unfortunate episodes came to widen the breach. Mrs. Smethurst's house

adjoined the links, standing to the right of the fourth tee: and, as

the Literary Society was in the habit of entertaining visiting

lecturers, many a golfer had foozled his drive owing to sudden loud

outbursts of applause coinciding with his down-swing. And not long

before this story opens a sliced ball, whizzing in at the open window,

had come within an ace of incapacitating Raymond Parsloe Devine, the

rising young novelist (who rose at that moment a clear foot and a half)

from any further exercise of his art. Two inches, indeed, to the right

and Raymond must inevitably have handed in his dinner-pail.

To make matters worse, a ring at the front-door bell followed almost

immediately, and the maid ushered in a young man of pleasing appearance

in a sweater and baggy knickerbockers who apologetically but firmly

insisted on playing his ball where it lay, and, what with the shock of

the lecturer's narrow escape and the spectacle of the intruder standing

on the table and working away with a niblick, the afternoon's session

had to be classed as a complete frost. Mr. Devine's determination, from

which no argument could swerve him, to deliver the rest of his lecture

in the coal-cellar gave the meeting a jolt from which it never

recovered.

I have dwelt upon this incident, because it was the means of

introducing Cuthbert Banks to Mrs. Smethurst's niece, Adeline. As

Cuthbert, for it was he who had so nearly reduced the muster-roll of

rising novelists by one, hopped down from the table after his stroke,

he was suddenly aware that a beautiful girl was looking at him

intently. As a matter of fact, everyone in the room was looking at him

intently, none more so than Raymond Parsloe Devine, but none of the

others were beautiful girls. Long as the members of Wood Hills Literary

Society were on brain, they were short on looks, and, to Cuthbert's

excited eye, Adeline Smethurst stood out like a jewel in a pile of

coke.

He had never seen her before, for she had only arrived at her aunt's

house on the previous day, but he was perfectly certain that life, even

when lived in the midst of gravel soil, main drainage, and company's

own water, was going to be a pretty poor affair if he did not see her

again. Yes, Cuthbert was in love: and it is interesting to record, as

showing the effect of the tender emotion on a man's game, that twenty

minutes after he had met Adeline he did the short eleventh in one, and

as near as a toucher got a three on the four-hundred-yard twelfth.

I will skip lightly over the intermediate stages of Cuthbert's

courtship and come to the moment when--at the annual ball in aid of the

local Cottage Hospital, the only occasion during the year on which the

lion, so to speak, lay down with the lamb, and the Golfers and the

Cultured met on terms of easy comradeship, their differences

temporarily laid aside--he proposed to Adeline and was badly stymied.

That fair, soulful girl could not see him with a spy-glass.