A moment before he had surveyed his blistered hands with sombre disgust.
“It’s no good,” he said. “I shall never learn this beast of a game. And I don’t want to either. It’s only fit for lunatics. Where’s the sense in it? Hitting a rotten little ball with a stick! If I want exercise, I’ll take a stick and go and rattle it along the railings. There’s something in that! Well, let’s be getting along. No good wasting the whole morning out here.”
“Try one more drive, and then we’ll go.”
“All right. If you like. No sense in it, though.”
He teed up the ball, took a careless stance, and flicked moodily. There was a sharp crack, the ball shot off the tee, flew a hundred yards in a dead straight line never ten feet above the ground, soared another seventy yards in a graceful arc, struck the turf, rolled, and came to rest within easy mashie distance of the green.
“Splendid!” I cried.
The man seemed stunned.
“How did that happen?”
I told him very simply.
“Your stance was right, and your grip was right, and you kept your head still, and didn’t sway your body, and never took your eye off the ball, and slowed back, and let the arms come well through, and rolled the wrists, and let the club-head lead, and kept your balance, and pivoted on the ball of the left foot, and didn’t duck the right knee.”
“I see,” he said. “Yes, I thought that must be it.”
“Now let’s go home.”
“Wait a minute. I just want to remember what I did while it’s fresh in my mind. Let me see, this was the way I stood. Or was it more like this? No, like this.” He turned to me, beaming. “What a great idea it was, my taking up golf! It’s all nonsense what you read in the comic papers about people foozling all over the place and breaking clubs and all that. You’ve only to exercise a little reasonable care. And what a corking game it is! Nothing like it in the world! I wonder if Betty is up yet. I must go round and show her how I did that drive. A perfect swing, with every ounce of weight, wrist, and muscle behind it. I meant to keep it a secret from the dear girl till I had really learned, but of course I have learned now. Let’s go round and rout her out.”
He had given me my cue. I put my hand on his shoulder and spoke sorrowfully.
“Mortimer, my boy, I fear I have bad news for you.”
“Slow; back—keep the head—What’s that? Bad news?”
“About Betty.”
“About Betty? What about her? Don’t sway the body—keep the eye on the—”
“Prepare yourself for a shock, my boy. Yesterday afternoon Betty called to see me. When she had gone I found that she had stolen my silver matchbox.”
“Stolen your matchbox?”
“Stolen my matchbox.”
“Oh, well, I dare say there were faults on both sides,” said Mortimer. “Tell me if I sway my body this time.”
“You don’t grasp what I have said! Do you realize that Betty, the girl you are going to marry, is a kleptomaniac?”
“A kleptomaniac!”
“That is the only possible explanation. Think what this means, my boy. Think how you will feel every time your wife says she is going out to do a little shopping! Think of yourself, left alone at home, watching the clock, saying to yourself, ‘Now she is lifting a pair of silk stockings!’ ‘Now she is hiding gloves in her umbrella!’ ‘Just about this moment she is getting away with a pearl necklace!’ ”
“Would she do that?”
“She would! She could not help herself. Or, rather, she could not refrain from helping herself. How about it, my boy?”
“It only draws us closer together,” he said.
I was touched, I own. My scheme had failed, but it had proved Mortimer Sturgis to be of pure gold. He stood gazing down the fairway, wrapped in thought.
“By the way,” he said, meditatively, “I wonder if the dear girl ever goes to any of those sales—those auction-sales, you know, where you’re allowed to inspect the things the day before? They often have some pretty decent vases.”
He broke off and fell into a reverie.
From this point onward Mortimer Sturgis proved the truth of what I said to you about the perils of taking up golf at an advanced age. A lifetime of observing my fellow-creatures has convinced me that Nature intended us all to be golfers. In every human being the germ of golf is implanted at birth, and suppression causes it to grow and grow till—it may be at forty, fifty, sixty—it suddenly bursts its bonds and sweeps 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,
