It is at moments such as these that a man reaps the reward of a good upbringing.
In similar circumstances those who have not had the benefit of a sound training in golf are too apt to go wrong. Goaded by the sudden anguish, they take to drink, plunge into dissipation, and write vers libre. Chester was mercifully saved from this. I saw him the day after he had been handed the mitten, and was struck by the look of grim determination in his face. Deeply wounded though he was, I could see that he was the master of his fate and the captain of his soul.
“I am sorry, my boy,” I said, sympathetically, when he had told me the painful news.
“It can’t be helped,” he replied, bravely.
“Her decision was final?”
“Quite.”
“You do not contemplate having another pop at her?”
“No good. I know when I’m licked.”
I patted him on the shoulder and said the only thing it seemed possible to say.
“After all, there is always golf.”
He nodded.
“Yes. My game needs a lot of tuning up. Now is the time to do it. From now on I go at this pastime seriously. I make it my lifework. Who knows?” he murmured, with a sudden gleam in his eyes. “The Amateur Championship—”
“The Open!” I cried, falling gladly into his mood.
“The American Amateur,” said Chester, flushing.
“The American Open,” I chorused.
“No one has ever copped all four.”
“No one.”
“Watch me!” said Chester Meredith, simply.
It was about two weeks after this that I happened to look in on Chester at his house one morning. I found him about to start for the links. As he had foreshadowed in the conversation which I have just related, he now spent most of the daylight hours on the course. In these two weeks he had gone about his task of achieving perfection with a furious energy which made him the talk of the club. Always one of the best players in the place, he had developed an astounding brilliance. Men who had played him level were now obliged to receive two and even three strokes. The pro himself, conceding one, had only succeeded in halving their match. The struggle for the President’s Cup came round once more, and Chester won it for the second time with ridiculous ease.
When I arrived, he was practising chip-shots in his sitting-room. I noticed that he seemed to be labouring under some strong emotion, and his first words gave me the clue.
“She’s going away tomorrow,” he said, abruptly, lofting a ball over the whatnot on to the Chesterfield.
I was not sure whether I was sorry or relieved. Her absence would leave a terrible blank, of course, but it might be that it would help him to get over his infatuation.
“Ah!” I said, non-committally.
Chester addressed his ball with a well-assumed phlegm, but I could see by the way his ears wiggled that he was feeling deeply. I was not surprised when he topped his shot into the coal-scuttle.
“She has promised to play a last round with me this morning,” he said.
Again I was doubtful what view to take. It was a pretty, poetic idea, not unlike Browning’s “Last Ride Together,” but I was not sure if it was altogether wise. However, it was none of my business, so I merely patted him on the shoulder and he gathered up his clubs and went off.
Owing to motives of delicacy I had not offered to accompany him on his round, and it was not till later that I learned the actual details of what occurred. At the start, it seems, the spiritual anguish which he was suffering had a depressing effect on his game. He hooked his drive off the first tee and was only enabled to get a five by means of a strong niblick shot out of the rough. At the second, the lake hole, he lost a ball in the water and got another five. It was only at the third that he began to pull himself together.
The test of a great golfer is his ability to recover from a bad start. Chester had this quality to a preeminent degree. A lesser man, conscious of being three over bogey for the first two holes, might have looked on his round as ruined. To Chester it simply meant that he had to get a couple of “birdies” right speedily, and he set about it at once. Always a long driver he excelled himself at the third. It is, as you know, an uphill hole all the way, but his drive could not have come far short of two hundred and fifty yards. A brassie-shot of equal strength and unerring direction put him on the edge of the green, and he holed out with a long putt two under bogey. He had hoped for a “birdie” and he had achieved an “eagle.”
I think that this splendid feat must have softened Felicia’s heart, had it not been for the fact that misery had by this time entirely robbed Chester of the ability to smile. Instead, therefore, of behaving in the wholesome, natural way of men who get threes at bogey five holes, he preserved a drawn, impassive countenance; and as she watched him tee up her ball, stiff, correct, polite, but to all outward appearance absolutely inhuman, the girl found herself stifling that thrill of what for a moment had been almost adoration. It was, she felt, exactly how her brother Crispin would have comported himself if he had done a hole in two under bogey.
And yet she could not altogether check a wistful sigh when, after a couple of fours at the next two holes, he picked up another stroke on the sixth and with an inspired spoon-shot brought his medal-score down to one better than bogey by getting a two at the hundred-and-seventy-yard seventh. But the brief spasm of tenderness passed, and when he finished the first nine with two more fours she
