“Well, why doesn’t he confide in me, the poor fish?” cried the high-spirited girl, petulantly flicking a pebble at a passing grasshopper. “I can’t be expected to fling myself into his arms unless he gives some sort of a hint that he’s ready to catch me.”
“Would it help if I were to repeat to him the substance of this conversation of ours?”
“If you breathe a word of it, I’ll never speak to you again,” she cried. “I’d rather die an awful death than have any man think I wanted him so badly that I had to send relays of messengers begging him to marry me.”
I saw her point.
“Then I fear,” I said, gravely, “that there is nothing to be done. One can only wait and hope. It may be that in the years to come Ferdinand Dibble will acquire a nice lissom wristy swing with the head kept rigid and the right leg firmly braced and—”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was toying with the hope that some sunny day Ferdinand Dibble would cease to be a goof.”
“You mean a goop?”
“No, a goof. A goof is a man who—” And I went on to explain the peculiar psychological difficulties which lay in the way of any declaration of affection on Ferdinand’s part.
“But I never heard of anything so ridiculous in my life,” she ejaculated. “Do you mean to say that he is waiting till he is good at golf before he asks me to marry him?”
“It is not quite so simple as that,” I said, sadly. “Many bad golfers marry, feeling that a wife’s loving solicitude may improve their game. But they are rugged, thick-skinned men, not sensitive and introspective like Ferdinand. Ferdinand has allowed himself to become morbid. It is one of the chief merits of golf that non-success at the game induces a certain decent humility which keeps a man from pluming himself too much on any petty triumphs he may achieve in other walks of life; but in all things there is a happy mean, and with Ferdinand this humility has gone too far. It has taken all the spirit out of him. He feels crushed and worthless. He is grateful to caddies when they accept a tip instead of drawing themselves up to their full height and flinging the money in his face.”
“Then do you mean that things have got to go on like this forever?”
I thought for a moment.
“It is a pity,” I said, “that you could not have induced Ferdinand to go to Marvis Bay for a month or two.”
“Why?”
“Because it seems to me, thinking the thing over, that it is just possible that Marvis Bay might cure him. At the hotel there he would find collected a mob of golfers—I use the term in its broadest sense, to embrace the paralytics and the men who play left-handed—whom even he would be able to beat. When I was last at Marvis Bay, the hotel links were a sort of Sargasso Sea into which had drifted all the pitiful flotsam and jetsam of golf. I have seen things done on that course at which I shuddered and averted my eyes—and I am not a weak man. If Ferdinand can polish up his game so as to go round in a fairly steady hundred and five, I fancy there is hope. But I understand he is not going to Marvis Bay.”
“Oh, yes, he is,” said the girl.
“Indeed! He did not tell me that when we were talking just now.”
“He didn’t know it then. He will when I have had a few words with him.”
And she walked with firm steps back into the clubhouse.
It has been well said that there are many kinds of golf, beginning at the top with the golf of professionals and the best amateurs and working down through the golf of ossified men to that of Scotch University professors. Until recently this last was looked upon as the lowest possible depth; but nowadays, with the growing popularity of summer hotels, we are able to add a brand still lower, the golf you find at places like Marvis Bay.
To Ferdinand Dibble, coming from a club where the standard of play was rather unusually high, Marvis Bay was a revelation, and for some days after his arrival there he went about dazed, like a man who cannot believe it is really true. To go out on the links at this summer resort was like entering a new world. The hotel was full of stout, middle-aged men who, after a misspent youth devoted to making money, had taken to a game at which real proficiency can only be acquired by those who start playing in their cradles and keep their weight down. Out on the course each morning you could see representatives of every nightmare style that was ever invented. There was the man who seemed to be attempting to deceive his ball and lull it into a false security by looking away from it and then making a lightning slash in the apparent hope of catching it off its guard. There was the man who wielded his midiron like one killing snakes. There was the man who addressed his ball as if he were stroking a cat, the man who drove as if he were cracking a whip, the man who brooded over each shot like one whose heart is bowed down by bad news from home, and the man who scooped with his mashie as if he were ladling soup. By the end of the first week Ferdinand Dibble was the acknowledged champion of the place. He had gone through the entire menagerie like a bullet through a cream puff.
First, scarcely daring to consider the possibility of success, he had taken on the man who tried to catch his ball off its guard and had beaten him five up and four to play. Then, with gradually growing confidence, he tackled in turn the Cat-Stroker, the Whip-Cracker, the Heart
