The Clicking of Cuthbert

"Nice work, partner," said Miss Bingley, speaking for the first and

last time in the course of the proceedings.

George unravelled himself with a modest simper. He felt like a gambler

who has placed his all on a number at roulette and sees the white ball

tumble into the correct compartment.

Eunice moved to the tee. In the course of the last eight holes the

girl's haughty soul had been rudely harrowed. She had foozled two

drives and three approach shots and had missed a short putt on the last

green but three. She had that consciousness of sin which afflicts the

golfer off his game, that curious self-loathing which humbles the

proudest. Her knees felt weak and all nature seemed to bellow at her

that this was where she was going to blow up with a loud report.

Even as her driver rose above her shoulder she was acutely aware that

she was making eighteen out of the twenty-three errors which complicate

the drive at golf. She knew that her head had swayed like some

beautiful flower in a stiff breeze. The heel of her left foot was

pointing down the course. Her grip had shifted, and her wrists felt

like sticks of boiled asparagus. As the club began to descend she

perceived that she had underestimated the total of her errors. And when

the ball, badly topped, bounded down the slope and entered the muddy

water like a timid diver on a cold morning she realized that she had a

full hand. There are twenty-three things which it is possible to do

wrong in the drive, and she had done them all.

Silently Ramsden Waters made a tee and placed thereon a new ball. He

was a golfer who rarely despaired, but he was playing three, and his

opponents' ball would undoubtedly be on the green, possibly even dead,

in two. Nevertheless, perhaps, by a supreme drive, and one or two

miracles later on, the game might be saved. He concentrated his whole

soul on the ball.

I need scarcely tell you that Ramsden Waters pressed....

Swish came the driver. The ball, fanned by the wind, rocked a little on

the tee, then settled down in its original position. Ramsden Waters,

usually the most careful of players, had missed the globe.

For a moment there was a silence--a silence which Ramsden had to strive

with an effort almost physically painful not to break. Rich oaths

surged to his lips, and blistering maledictions crashed against the

back of his clenched teeth.

The silence was broken by little Wilberforce.

One can only gather that there lurks in the supposedly innocuous amber

of ginger ale an elevating something which the temperance reformers

have overlooked. Wilberforce Bray had, if you remember, tucked away no

fewer than three in the spot where they would do most good. One

presumes that the child, with all that stuff surging about inside him,

had become thoroughly above himself. He uttered a merry laugh.

"Never hit it!" said little Wilberforce.

He was kneeling beside the tee box as he spoke, and now, as one who has

seen all that there is to be seen and turns, sated, to other

amusements, he moved round and began to play with the sand. The

spectacle of his alluring trouser seat was one which a stronger man

would have found it hard to resist. To Ramsden Waters it had the aspect

of a formal invitation. For one moment his number II golf shoe, as

supplied to all the leading professionals, wavered in mid-air, then

crashed home.

Eunice screamed.

"How dare you kick my brother!"

Ramsden faced her, stern and pale.

"Madam," he said, "in similar circumstances I would have kicked the

Archangel Gabriel!"

Then, stooping to his ball, he picked it up.

"The match is yours," he said to Miss Bingley, who, having paid no

attention at all to the drama which had just concluded, was practising

short chip shots with her mashie-niblick.

He bowed coldly to Eunice, cast one look of sombre satisfaction at

little Wilberforce, who was painfully extricating himself from a bed of

nettles into which he had rolled, and strode off. He crossed the bridge

over the water and stalked up the hill.

Eunice watched him go, spellbound. Her momentary spurt of wrath at the

kicking of her brother had died away, and she wished she had thought of

doing it herself.

How splendid he looked, she felt, as she watched Ramsden striding up to

the club-house--just like Carruthers Mordyke after he had flung

Ermyntrude Vanstone from him in chapter forty-one of "Gray Eyes That

Gleam". Her whole soul went out to him. This was the sort of man she

wanted as a partner in life. How grandly he would teach her to play

golf. It had sickened her when her former instructors, prefacing their

criticism with glutinous praise, had mildly suggested that some people

found it a good thing to keep the head still when driving and that

though her methods were splendid it might be worth trying. They had

spoken of her keeping her eye on the ball as if she were doing the ball

a favour. What she wanted was a great, strong, rough brute of a fellow

who would tell her not to move her damned head; a rugged Viking of a

chap who, if she did not keep her eye on the ball, would black it for