children of the poor? Apples! Go on, my boy, take another bite. Take several. Enjoy yourself! Never mind if it seems to cause me a fleeting annoyance. Go on with your lunch! You probably had a light breakfast, eh, and are feeling a little peckish, yes? If you will wait here, I will run to the clubhouse and get you a sandwich and a bottle of ginger-ale. Make yourself quite at home, you lovable little fellow! Sit down and have a good time!”
I turned the pages of Professor Rollitt’s book feverishly. I could not find a passage that had been marked in blue pencil to meet this emergency. I selected one at random.
“Mitchell,” I said, “one moment. How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.”
“Well, look what I’ve done myself! I’m somewhere down at the bottom of that dashed ravine, and it’ll take me a dozen strokes to get out. Do you call that just and holy? Here, give me that book for a moment!”
He snatched the little volume out of my hands. For an instant he looked at it with a curious expression of loathing, then he placed it gently on the ground and jumped on it a few times. Then he hit it with his driver. Finally, as if feeling that the time for half measures had passed, he took a little run and kicked it strongly into the long grass.
He turned to Alexander, who had been an impassive spectator of the scene.
“I’m through!” he said. “I concede the match. Goodbye. You’ll find me in the bay!”
“Going swimming?”
“No. Drowning myself.”
A gentle smile broke out over my old friend’s usually grave face. He patted Mitchell’s shoulder affectionately.
“Don’t do that, my boy,” he said. “I was hoping you would stick around the office awhile as treasurer of the company.”
Mitchell tottered. He grasped my arm for support. Everything was very still. Nothing broke the stillness but the humming of the bees, the murmur of the distant wavelets, and the sound of Mitchell’s caddie going on with his apple.
“What!” cried Mitchell.
“The position,” said Alexander, “will be falling vacant very shortly, as no doubt you know. It is yours, if you care to accept it.”
“You mean—you mean—you’re going to give me the job?”
“You have interpreted me exactly.”
Mitchell gulped. So did his caddie. One from a spiritual, the other from a physical cause.
“If you don’t mind excusing me,” said Mitchell, huskily, “I think I’ll be popping back to the clubhouse. Someone I want to see.”
He disappeared through the trees, running strongly. I turned to Alexander.
“What does this mean?” I asked. “I am delighted, but what becomes of the test?”
My old friend smiled gently.
“The test,” he replied, “has been eminently satisfactory. Circumstances, perhaps, have compelled me to modify the original idea of it, but nevertheless it has been a completely successful test. Since we started out, I have been doing a good deal of thinking, and I have come to the conclusion that what the Paterson Dyeing and Refining Company really needs is a treasurer whom I can beat at golf. And I have discovered the ideal man. Why,” he went on, a look of holy enthusiasm on his fine old face, “do you realize that I can always lick the stuffing out of that boy, good player as he is, simply by taking a little trouble? I can make him get the wind up every time, simply by taking one or two extra practice-swings! That is the sort of man I need for a responsible post in my office.”
“But what about Rupert Dixon?” I asked.
He gave a gesture of distaste.
“I wouldn’t trust that man. Why, when I played with him, everything went wrong, and he just smiled and didn’t say a word. A man who can do that is not the man to trust with the control of large sums of money. It wouldn’t be safe. Why, the fellow isn’t honest! He can’t be.” He paused for a moment. “Besides,” he added, thoughtfully, “he beat me by six and five. What’s the good of a treasurer who beats the boss by six and five?”
The Long Hole
The young man, as he sat filling his pipe in the clubhouse smoking-room, was inclined to be bitter.
“If there’s one thing that gives me a pain squarely in the centre of the gizzard,” he burst out, breaking a silence that had lasted for some minutes, “it’s a golf-lawyer. They oughtn’t to be allowed on the links.”
The Oldest Member, who had been meditatively putting himself outside a cup of tea and a slice of seed-cake, raised his white eyebrows.
“The Law,” he said, “is an honourable profession. Why should its practitioners be restrained from indulgence in the game of games?”
“I don’t mean actual lawyers,” said the young man, his acerbity mellowing a trifle under the influence of tobacco. “I mean the blighters whose best club is the book of rules. You know the sort of excrescences. Every time you think you’ve won a hole, they dig out Rule eight hundred and fifty-three, section two, subsection four, to prove that you’ve disqualified yourself by having an ingrowing toenail. Well, take my case.” The young man’s voice was high and plaintive. “I go out with that man Hemmingway to play an ordinary friendly round—nothing depending on it except a measly ball—and on the seventh he pulls me up and claims the hole simply because I happened to drop my niblick in the bunker. Oh, well, a tick’s a tick, and there’s nothing more to say, I suppose.”
The Sage shook his head.
“Rules are rules, my boy, and must be kept. It is odd that you should have brought up this subject, for only a moment before you came in I was thinking of a somewhat curious match which ultimately turned upon a question of the rule-book. It is true that, as far as the actual prize was
