The Clicking of Cuthbert

what Ramsden Waters had told Eunice, and the delicately nurtured girl

staggered before the coarse insult. Her refined, sensitive nature was

all churned up.

Ever since she had made her first drive at golf, she had prided herself

on her use of the wood. Her brother and her brassey were the only

things she loved. And here was this man deliberately.... Eunice choked.

"Mr. Waters!"

Before they could have further speech George Perkins and little

Wilberforce ambled in a bloated way out of the clubhouse.

"I've had three ginger ales," observed the boy. "Where do we go from

here?"

"Our honour," said Ramsden. "Shoot!"

Eunice took out her driver without a word. Her little figure was tense

with emotion. She swung vigorously, and pulled the ball far out on to

the fairway of the ninth hole.

"Even off the tee," said Ramsden, "you had better use an iron. You must

keep 'em straight."

Their eyes met. Hers were glittering with the fury of a woman scorned.

His were cold and hard. And, suddenly, as she looked at his awful,

pale, set golf face, something seemed to snap in Eunice. A strange

sensation of weakness and humility swept over her. So might the cave

woman have felt when, with her back against a cliff and unable to

dodge, she watched her suitor take his club in the interlocking grip,

and, after a preliminary waggle, start his back swing.

The fact was that, all her life, Eunice had been accustomed to the

homage of men. From the time she had put her hair up every man she had

met had grovelled before her, and she had acquired a mental attitude

toward the other sex which was a blend of indifference and contempt.

For the cringing specimens who curled up and died all over the

hearthrug if she spoke a cold word to them she had nothing but scorn.

She dreamed wistfully of those brusque cavemen of whom she read in the

novels which she took out of the village circulating library. The

female novelist who was at that time her favourite always supplied with

each chunk of wholesome and invigorating fiction one beetle-browed hero

with a grouch and a scowl, who rode wild horses over the countryside

till they foamed at the mouth, and treated women like dirt. That,

Eunice had thought yearningly, as she talked to youths whose spines

turned to gelatine at one glance from her bright eyes, was the sort of

man she wanted to meet and never seemed to come across.

Of all the men whose acquaintance she had made recently she had

despised Ramsden Waters most. Where others had grovelled he had tied

himself into knots. Where others had gazed at her like sheep he had

goggled at her like a kicked spaniel. She had only permitted him to

hang round because he seemed so fond of little Wilberforce. And here he

was, ordering her about and piercing her with gimlet eyes, for all the

world as if he were Claude Delamere, in the thirty-second chapter of

"The Man of Chilled Steel", the one where Claude drags Lady Matilda

around the smoking-room by her hair because she gave the rose from her

bouquet to the Italian count.

She was half-cowed, half-resentful.

"Mr Winklethorpe told me I was very good with the wooden clubs," she

said defiantly.

"He's a great kidder," said Ramsden.

He went down the hill to where his ball lay. Eunice proceeded direct

for the green. Much as she told herself that she hated this man, she

never questioned his ability to get there with his next shot.

George Perkins, who had long since forfeited any confidence which his

partner might have reposed in him, had topped his drive, leaving Miss

Bingley a difficult second out of a sandy ditch. The hole was halved.

The match went on. Ramsden won the short hole, laying his ball dead

with a perfect iron shot, but at the next, the long dog-leg hole, Miss

Bingley regained the honour. They came to the last all square.

As the match had started on the tenth tee, the last hole to be

negotiated was, of course, what in the ordinary run of human affairs is

the ninth, possibly the trickiest on the course. As you know, it is

necessary to carry with one's initial wallop that combination of stream

and lake into which so many well meant drives have flopped. This done,

the player proceeds up the face of a steep slope, to find himself

ultimately on a green which looks like the sea in the storm scene of a

melodrama. It heaves and undulates, and is altogether a nasty thing to

have happen to one at the end of a gruelling match. But it is the first

shot, the drive, which is the real test, for the water and the trees

form a mental hazard of unquestionable toughness.

George Perkins, as he addressed his ball for the vital stroke,

manifestly wabbled. He was scared to the depths of his craven soul. He

tried to pray, but all he could remember was the hymn for those in

peril on the deep, into which category, he feared, his ball would

shortly fall. Breathing a few bars of this, he swung. There was a

musical click, and the ball, singing over the water like a bird,

breasted the hill like a homing aeroplane and fell in the centre of the

fairway within easy distance of the plateau green.