The Clicking of Cuthbert

again. He shuffles his feet once more, then raises his club. He waggles

the club smartly over the ball three times, then lays it behind the

globule. At this point he suddenly peers at the horizon again, in the

apparent hope of catching it off its guard. This done, he raises his

club very slowly, brings it back very slowly till it almost touches the

ball, raises it again, brings it down again, raises it once more, and

brings it down for the third time. He then stands motionless, wrapped

in thought, like some Indian fakir contemplating the infinite. Then he

raises his club again and replaces it behind the ball. Finally he

quivers all over, swings very slowly back, and drives the ball for

about a hundred and fifty yards in a dead straight line.

It is a method of procedure which proves sometimes a little

exasperating to the highly strung, and I watched Mitchell's face

anxiously to see how he was taking his first introduction to it. The

unhappy lad had blenched visibly. He turned to me with the air of one

in pain.

"Does he always do that?" he whispered.

"Always," I replied.

"Then I'm done for! No human being could play golf against a one-ring

circus like that without blowing up!"

I said nothing. It was, I feared, only too true. Well-poised as I am, I

had long since been compelled to give up playing with Alexander

Paterson, much as I esteemed him. It was a choice between that and

resigning from the Baptist Church.

At this moment Millicent spoke. There was an open book in her hand. I

recognized it as the life-work of Professor Rollitt.

"Think on this doctrine," she said, in her soft, modulated voice, "that

to be patient is a branch of justice, and that men sin without

intending it."

Mitchell nodded briefly, and walked to the tee with a firm step.

"Before you drive, darling," said Millicent, "remember this. Let no act

be done at haphazard, nor otherwise than according to the finished

rules that govern its kind."

The next moment Mitchell's ball was shooting through the air, to come

to rest two hundred yards down the course. It was a magnificent drive.

He had followed the counsel of Marcus Aurelius to the letter.

An admirable iron-shot put him in reasonable proximity to the pin, and

he holed out in one under bogey with one of the nicest putts I have

ever beheld. And when at the next hole, the dangerous water-hole, his

ball soared over the pond and lay safe, giving him bogey for the hole,

I began for the first time to breathe freely. Every golfer has his day,

and this was plainly Mitchell's. He was playing faultless golf. If he

could continue in this vein, his unfortunate failing would have no

chance to show itself.

The third hole is long and tricky. You drive over a ravine--or possibly

into it. In the latter event you breathe a prayer and call for your

niblick. But, once over the ravine, there is nothing to disturb the

equanimity. Bogey is five, and a good drive, followed by a

brassey-shot, will put you within easy mashie-distance of the green.

Mitchell cleared the ravine by a hundred and twenty yards. He strolled

back to me, and watched Alexander go through his ritual with an

indulgent smile. I knew just how he was feeling. Never does the world

seem so sweet and fair and the foibles of our fellow human beings so

little irritating as when we have just swatted the pill right on the

spot.

"I can't see why he does it," said Mitchell, eyeing Alexander with a

toleration that almost amounted to affection. "If I did all those

Swedish exercises before I drove, I should forget what I had come out

for and go home." Alexander concluded the movements, and landed a bare

three yards on the other side of the ravine. "He's what you would call

a steady performer, isn't he? Never varies!"

Mitchell won the hole comfortably. There was a jauntiness about his

stance on the fourth tee which made me a little uneasy. Over-confidence

at golf is almost as bad as timidity.

My apprehensions were justified. Mitchell topped his ball. It rolled

twenty yards into the rough, and nestled under a dock-leaf. His mouth

opened, then closed with a snap. He came over to where Millicent and I

were standing.

"I didn't say it!" he said. "What on earth happened then?"

"Search men's governing principles," said Millicent, "and consider the

wise, what they shun and what they cleave to."

"Exactly," I said. "You swayed your body."

"And now I've got to go and look for that infernal ball."

"Never mind, darling," said Millicent. "Nothing has such power to

broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly

all that comes under thy observation in life."

"Besides," I said, "you're three up."

"I shan't be after this hole."

He was right. Alexander won it in five, one above bogey, and regained

the honour.

Mitchell was a trifle shaken. His play no longer had its first careless

vigour. He lost the next hole, halved the sixth, lost the short

seventh, and then, rallying, halved the eighth.

The ninth hole, like so many on our links, can be a perfectly simple

four, although the rolling nature of the green makes bogey always a