The Clicking of Cuthbert

fixed rule. But what I do say is that a golfer should be cautious. He

should not be led away by the first pretty face. I will tell you a

story that illustrates the point. It is the story of those two men who

have just got on to the ninth green--Peter Willard and James Todd.

There is about great friendships between man and man (said the Oldest

Member) a certain inevitability that can only be compared with the

age-old association of ham and eggs. No one can say when it was that

these two wholesome and palatable food-stuffs first came together, nor

what was the mutual magnetism that brought their deathless partnership

about. One simply feels that it is one of the things that must be so.

Similarly with men. Who can trace to its first beginnings the love of

Damon for Pythias, of David for Jonathan, of Swan for Edgar? Who can

explain what it was about Crosse that first attracted Blackwell? We

simply say, "These men are friends," and leave it at that.

In the case of Peter Willard and James Todd, one may hazard the guess

that the first link in the chain that bound them together was the fact

that they took up golf within a few days of each other, and contrived,

as time went on, to develop such equal form at the game that the most

expert critics are still baffled in their efforts to decide which is

the worse player. I have heard the point argued a hundred times without

any conclusion being reached. Supporters of Peter claim that his

driving off the tee entitles him to an unchallenged pre-eminence among

the world's most hopeless foozlers--only to be discomfited later when

the advocates of James show, by means of diagrams, that no one has ever

surpassed their man in absolute incompetence with the spoon. It is one

of those problems where debate is futile.

Few things draw two men together more surely than a mutual inability to

master golf, coupled with an intense and ever-increasing love for the

game. At the end of the first few months, when a series of costly

experiments had convinced both Peter and James that there was not a

tottering grey-beard nor a toddling infant in the neighbourhood whose

downfall they could encompass, the two became inseparable. It was

pleasanter, they found, to play together, and go neck and neck round

the eighteen holes, than to take on some lissome youngster who could

spatter them all over the course with one old ball and a cut-down cleek

stolen from his father; or some spavined elder who not only rubbed it

into them, but was apt, between strokes, to bore them with personal

reminiscences of the Crimean War. So they began to play together early

and late. In the small hours before breakfast, long ere the first faint

piping of the waking caddie made itself heard from the caddie-shed,

they were half-way through their opening round. And at close of day,

when bats wheeled against the steely sky and the "pro's" had stolen

home to rest, you might see them in the deepening dusk, going through

the concluding exercises of their final spasm. After dark, they visited

each other's houses and read golf books.

If you have gathered from what I have said that Peter Willard and James

Todd were fond of golf, I am satisfied. That is the impression I

intended to convey. They were real golfers, for real golf is a thing of

the spirit, not of mere mechanical excellence of stroke.

It must not be thought, however, that they devoted too much of their

time and their thoughts to golf--assuming, indeed, that such a thing is

possible. Each was connected with a business in the metropolis; and

often, before he left for the links, Peter would go to the trouble and

expense of ringing up the office to say he would not be coming in that

day; while I myself have heard James--and this not once, but

frequently--say, while lunching in the club-house, that he had half a

mind to get Gracechurch Street on the 'phone and ask how things were

going. They were, in fact, the type of men of whom England is

proudest--the back-bone of a great country, toilers in the mart,

untired businessmen, keen red-blooded men of affairs. If they played a

little golf besides, who shall blame them?

So they went on, day by day, happy and contented. And then the Woman

came into their lives, like the Serpent in the Links of Eden, and

perhaps for the first time they realized that they were not one

entity--not one single, indivisible Something that made for topped

drives and short putts--but two individuals, in whose breasts Nature

had implanted other desires than the simple ambition some day to do the

dog-leg hole on the second nine in under double figures. My friends

tell me that, when I am relating a story, my language is inclined at

times a little to obscure my meaning; but, if you understand from what

I have been saying that James Todd and Peter Willard both fell in love

with the same woman--all right, let us carry on. That is precisely what

I was driving at.

I have not the pleasure of an intimate acquaintance with Grace

Forrester. I have seen her in the distance, watering the flowers in her