* * * * *
At the club-house that evening I encountered Rupert Dixon. He was
emerging from a shower-bath, and looked as pleased with himself as
usual.
'Just been going round with old Paterson,' he said. 'He was asking
after you. He's gone back to town in his car.'
I was thrilled. So the test had begun!
'How did you come out?' I asked.
Rupert Dixon smirked. A smirking man, wrapped in a bath towel, with a
wisp of wet hair over one eye, is a repellent sight.
'Oh, pretty well. I won by six and five. In spite of having poisonous
luck.'
I felt a gleam of hope at these last words.
'Oh, you had bad luck?'
'The worst. I over-shot the green at the third with the best
brassey-shot I've ever made in my life--and that's saying a lot--and
lost my ball in the rough beyond it.'
'And I suppose you let yourself go, eh?'
'Let myself go?'
'I take it that you made some sort of demonstration?'
'Oh, no. Losing your temper doesn't get you anywhere at golf. It only
spoils your next shot.'
I went away heavy-hearted. Dixon had plainly come through the ordeal as
well as any man could have done. I expected to hear every day that the
vacant treasurership had been filled, and that Mitchell had not even
been called upon to play his test round. I suppose, however, that
Alexander Paterson felt that it would be unfair to the other competitor
not to give him his chance, for the next I heard of the matter was when
Mitchell Holmes rang me up on the Friday and asked me if I would
accompany him round the links next day in the match he was playing with
Alexander, and give him my moral support.
'I shall need it,' he said. 'I don't mind telling you I'm pretty
nervous. I wish I had had longer to get the stranglehold on that 'Are
You Your Own Master?' stuff. I can see, of course, that it is the real
tabasco from start to finish, and absolutely as mother makes it, but
the trouble is I've only had a few days to soak it into my system. It's
like trying to patch up a motor car with string. You never know when
the thing will break down. Heaven knows what will happen if I sink a
ball at the water-hole. And something seems to tell me I am going to do
it.'
There was a silence for a moment.
'Do you believe in dreams?' asked Mitchell.
'Believe in what?'
'Dreams.'
'What about them?'
'I said, 'Do you believe in dreams?' Because last night I dreamed that
I was playing in the final of the Open Championship, and I got into the
rough, and there was a cow there, and the cow looked at me in a sad
sort of way and said, 'Why don't you use the two-V grip instead of the
interlocking?' At the time it seemed an odd sort of thing to happen,
