over the victim like a tidal wave. The wise man, who begins to play in
childhood, is enabled to let the poison exude gradually from his
system, with no harmful results. But a man like Mortimer Sturgis, with
thirty-eight golfless years behind him, is swept off his feet. He is
carried away. He loses all sense of proportion. He is like the fly that
happens to be sitting on the wall of the dam just when the crack comes.
Mortimer Sturgis gave himself up without a struggle to an orgy of golf
such as I have never witnessed in any man. Within two days of that
first lesson he had accumulated a collection of clubs large enough to
have enabled him to open a shop; and he went on buying them at the rate
of two and three a day. On Sundays, when it was impossible to buy
clubs, he was like a lost spirit. True, he would do his regular four
rounds on the day of rest, but he never felt happy. The thought, as he
sliced into the rough, that the patent wooden-faced cleek which he
intended to purchase next morning might have made all the difference,
completely spoiled his enjoyment.
I remember him calling me up on the telephone at three o'clock one
morning to tell me that he had solved the problem of putting. He
intended in future, he said, to use a croquet mallet, and he wondered
that no one had ever thought of it before. The sound of his broken
groan when I informed him that croquet mallets were against the rules
haunted me for days.
His golf library kept pace with his collection of clubs. He bought all
the standard works, subscribed to all the golfing papers, and, when he
came across a paragraph in a magazine to the effect that Mr. Hutchings,
an ex-amateur champion, did not begin to play till he was past forty,
and that his opponent in the final, Mr. S. H. Fry, had never held a club
till his thirty-fifth year, he had it engraved on vellum and framed and
hung up beside his shaving-mirror.
* * * * *
And Betty, meanwhile? She, poor child, stared down the years into a
bleak future, in which she saw herself parted for ever from the man she
loved, and the golf-widow of another for whom--even when he won a medal
for lowest net at a weekly handicap with a score of a hundred and three
minus twenty-four--she could feel nothing warmer than respect. Those
were dreary days for Betty. We three--she and I and Eddie Denton--often
talked over Mortimer's strange obsession. Denton said that, except that
Mortimer had not come out in pink spots, his symptoms were almost
identical with those of the dreaded mongo-mongo, the scourge of
the West African hinterland. Poor Denton! He had already booked his
passage for Africa, and spent hours looking in the atlas for good
deserts.
In every fever of human affairs there comes at last the crisis. We may
emerge from it healed or we may plunge into still deeper depths of
soul-sickness; but always the crisis comes. I was privileged to be
present when it came in the affairs of Mortimer Sturgis and Betty
Weston.
I had gone into the club-house one afternoon at an hour when it is
usually empty, and the first thing I saw, as I entered the main room,
