The Clicking of Cuthbert

Betty Weston drew herself up. Her face was hard.

"Here is your ring!" she said, and swept from the room.

       *       *       *       *       *

For a moment after she had gone Mortimer remained very still, looking

at the glistening circle in his hand. I stole across the room and

patted his shoulder.

"Bear up, my boy, bear up!" I said.

He looked at me piteously.

"Stymied!" he muttered.

"Be brave!"

He went on, speaking as if to himself.

"I had pictured--ah, how often I had pictured!--our little home! Hers

and mine. She sewing in her arm-chair, I practising putts on the

hearth-rug----" He choked. "While in the corner, little Harry Vardon

Sturgis played with little J. H. Taylor Sturgis. And round the

room--reading, busy with their childish tasks--little George Duncan

Sturgis, Abe Mitchell Sturgis, Harold Hilton Sturgis, Edward Ray

Sturgis, Horace Hutchinson Sturgis, and little James Braid Sturgis."

"My boy! My boy!" I cried.

"What's the matter?"

"Weren't you giving yourself rather a large family?"

He shook his head moodily.

"Was I?" he said, dully. "I don't know. What's bogey?"

There was a silence.

"And yet----" he said, at last, in a low voice. He paused. An odd,

bright look had come into his eyes. He seemed suddenly to be himself

again, the old, happy Mortimer Sturgis I had known so well. "And yet,"

he said, "who knows? Perhaps it is all for the best. They might all

have turned out tennis-players!" He raised his niblick again, his face

aglow. "Playing thirteen!" he said. "I think the game here would be to

chip out through the door and work round the club-house to the green,

don't you?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Little remains to be told. Betty and Eddie have been happily married

for years. Mortimer's handicap is now down to eighteen, and he is

improving all the time. He was not present at the wedding, being

unavoidably detained by a medal tournament; but, if you turn up the

files and look at the list of presents, which were both numerous and

costly, you will see--somewhere in the middle of the column, the words:

  STURGIS, J. MORTIMER.

    Two dozen Silver King Golf-balls and one patent Sturgis

         Aluminium Self-Adjusting, Self-Compensating Putting-Cleek.

4

 Sundered Hearts

In the smoking-room of the club-house a cheerful fire was burning, and

the Oldest Member glanced from time to time out of the window into the

gathering dusk. Snow was falling lightly on the links. From where he

sat, the Oldest Member had a good view of the ninth green; and

presently, out of the greyness of the December evening, there appeared

over the brow of the hill a golf-ball. It trickled across the green,

and stopped within a yard of the hole. The Oldest Member nodded

approvingly. A good approach-shot.

A young man in a tweed suit clambered on to the green, holed out with

easy confidence, and, shouldering his bag, made his way to the

club-house. A few moments later he entered the smoking-room, and

uttered an exclamation of rapture at the sight of the fire.

"I'm frozen stiff!"

He rang for a waiter and ordered a hot drink. The Oldest Member gave a

gracious assent to the suggestion that he should join him.

"I like playing in winter," said the young man. "You get the course to

yourself, for the world is full of slackers who only turn out when the

weather suits them. I cannot understand where they get the nerve to

call themselves golfers."

"Not everyone is as keen as you are, my boy," said the Sage, dipping

gratefully into his hot drink. "If they were, the world would be a

better place, and we should hear less of all this modern unrest."

"I am pretty keen," admitted the young man.

"I have only encountered one man whom I could describe as keener. I

allude to Mortimer Sturgis."

"The fellow who took up golf at thirty-eight and let the girl he was

engaged to marry go off with someone else because he hadn't the time to

combine golf with courtship? I remember. You were telling me about him

the other day."

"There is a sequel to that story, if you would care to hear it," said

the Oldest Member.

"You have the honour," said the young man. "Go ahead!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Some people (began the Oldest Member) considered that Mortimer Sturgis

was too wrapped up in golf, and blamed him for it. I could never see

eye to eye with them. In the days of King Arthur nobody thought the

worse of a young knight if he suspended all his social and business

engagements in favour of a search for the Holy Grail. In the Middle

Ages a man could devote his whole life to the Crusades, and the public

fawned upon him. Why, then, blame the man of today for a zealous

attention to the modern equivalent, the Quest of Scratch! Mortimer

Sturgis never became a scratch player, but he did eventually get his

handicap down to nine, and I honour him for it.

The story which I am about to tell begins in what might be called the

middle period of Sturgis's career. He had reached the stage when his

handicap was a wobbly twelve; and, as you are no doubt aware, it is

then that a man really begins to golf in the true sense of the word.