"Rotten!" said the boy austerely.
Ramsden gulped. And then suddenly he saw that the boy was not alone.
About a medium approach-putt distance, moving gracefully and languidly towards him, was a girl of such p.r.o.nounced beauty that Ramsden Waters"s heart looped the loop twice in rapid succession. It was the first time that he had seen Eunice Bray, and, like most men who saw her for the first time, he experienced the sensations of one in an express lift at the tenth floor going down who has left the majority of his internal organs up on the twenty-second. He felt a dazed emptiness. The world swam before his eyes.
You yourself saw Eunice just now: and, though you are in a sense immune, being engaged to a charming girl of your own, I noticed that you unconsciously braced yourself up and tried to look twice as handsome as nature ever intended you to. You smirked and, if you had a moustache, you would have twiddled it. You can imagine, then, the effect which this vision of loveliness had on lonely, diffident Ramsden Waters. It got right in amongst him.
"I"m afraid my little brother spoiled your stroke," said Eunice. She did not speak at all apologetically, but rather as a G.o.ddess might have spoken to a swineherd.
Ramsden yammered noiselessly. As always in the presence of the opposite s.e.x, and more than ever now, his vocal cords appeared to have tied themselves in a knot which would have baffled a sailor and might have perplexed Houdini. He could not even gargle.
"He is very fond of watching golf," said the girl.
She took the boy by the hand, and was about to lead him off, when Ramsden miraculously recovered speech.
"Would he like to come round with me?" he croaked. How he had managed to acquire the nerve to make the suggestion he could never understand.
I suppose that in certain supreme moments a sort of desperate recklessness descends on nervous men.
"How very kind of you!" said the girl indifferently. "But I"m afraid----"
"I want to go!" shrilled the boy. "I want to go!"
Fond as Eunice Bray was of her little brother, I imagine that the prospect of having him taken off her hands on a fine summer morning, when all nature urged her to sit in the shade on the terrace and read a book, was not unwelcome.
"It would be very kind of you if you would let him," said Eunice. "He wasn"t able to go to the circus last week, and it was a great disappointment; this will do instead."
She turned toward the terrace, and Ramsden, his head buzzing, tottered into the jungle to find his ball, followed by the boy.
I have never been able to extract full particulars of that morning"s round from Ramsden. If you speak of it to him, he will wince and change the subject. Yet he seems to have had the presence of mind to pump Wilberforce as to the details of his home life, and by the end of the round he had learned that Eunice and her brother had just come to visit an aunt who lived in the neighbourhood. Their house was not far from the links; Eunice was not engaged to be married; and the aunt made a hobby of collecting dry seaweed, which she pressed and pasted in an alb.u.m. One sometimes thinks that aunts live entirely for pleasure.
At the end of the round Ramsden staggered on to the terrace, tripping over his feet, and handed Wilberforce back in good condition. Eunice, who had just reached the chapter where the hero decides to give up all for love, thanked him perfunctorily without looking up from her book; and so ended the first spasm of Ramsden Waters"s life romance.
There are few things more tragic than the desire of the moth for the star; and it is a curious fact that the spectacle of a star almost invariably fills the most sensible moth with thoughts above his station. No doubt, if Ramsden Waters had stuck around and waited long enough there might have come his way in the fullness of time some nice, homely girl with a squint and a good disposition who would have been about his form. In his modest day dreams he had aspired to nothing higher. But the sight of Eunice Bray seemed to have knocked all the sense out of the man. He must have known that he stood no chance of becoming anything to her other than a handy means of getting rid of little Wilberforce now and again. Why, the very instant that Eunice appeared in the place, every eligible bachelor for miles around her tossed his head with a loud, snorting sound, and galloped madly in her direction. Dashing young devils they were, handsome, well-knit fellows with the figures of Greek G.o.ds and the faces of movie heroes. Any one of them could have named his own price from the advertisers of collars.
They were the sort of young men you see standing grandly beside the full-page picture of the seven-seater Magnifico car in the magazines.
And it was against this field that Ramsden Waters, the man with the unshuffled face, dared to pit his feeble personality. One weeps.
Something of the magnitude of the task he had undertaken must have come home to Ramsden at a very early point in the proceedings. At Eunice"s home, at the hour when women receive callers, he was from the start a mere unconsidered unit in the mob scene. While his rivals cl.u.s.tered thickly about the girl, he was invariably somewhere on the outskirts listening limply to the aunt. I imagine that seldom has any young man had such golden opportunities of learning all about dried seaweed.
Indeed, by the end of the month Ramsden Waters could not have known more about seaweed if he had been a deep sea fish. And yet he was not happy. He was in a position, if he had been at a dinner party and things had got a bit slow, to have held the table spellbound with the first hand information about dried seaweed, straight from the stable; yet nevertheless he chafed. His soul writhed and sickened within him.
He lost weight and went right off his approach shots. I confess that my heart bled for the man.
His only consolation was that n.o.body else, not even the fellows who worked their way right through the jam and got seats in the front row where they could glare into her eyes and hang on her lips and all that sort of thing, seemed to be making any better progress.
And so matters went on till one day Eunice decided to take up golf. Her motive for doing this was, I believe, simply because Kitty Manders, who had won a small silver cup at a monthly handicap, receiving thirty-six, was always dragging the conversation round to this trophy, and if there was one firm article in Eunice Bray"s simple creed it was that she would be hanged if she let Kitty, who was by way of being a rival on a small scale, put anything over on her. I do not defend Eunice, but women are women, and I doubt if any of them really take up golf in that holy, quest-of-the-grail spirit which animates men. I have known girls to become golfers as an excuse for wearing pink jumpers, and one at least who did it because she had read in the beauty hints in the evening paper that it made you lissome. Girls will be girls.
Her first lessons Eunice received from the professional, but after that she saved money by distributing herself among her hordes of admirers, who were only too willing to give up good matches to devote themselves to her tuition. By degrees she acquired a fair skill and a confidence in her game which was not altogether borne out by results. From Ramsden Waters she did not demand a lesson. For one thing it never occurred to her that so poor-spirited a man could be of any use at the game, and for another Ramsden was always busy tooling round with little Wilberforce.
Yet it was with Ramsden that she was paired in the first compet.i.tion for which she entered, the annual mixed foursomes. And it was on the same evening that the list of the draw went up on the notice board that Ramsden proposed.
The mind of a man in love works in strange ways. To you and to me there would seem to be no reason why the fact that Eunice"s name and his own had been drawn out of a hat together should so impress Ramsden, but he looked on it as an act of G.o.d. It seemed to him to draw them close together, to set up a sort of spiritual affinity. In a word, it acted on the poor fellow like a tonic, and that very night he went around to her house, and having, after a long and extremely interesting conversation with her aunt, contrived to get her alone, coughed eleven times in a strangled sort of way, and suggested that the wedding bells should ring out.
Eunice was more startled than angry.
"Of course, I"m tremendously complimented, Mr.----" She had to pause to recall the name. "Mr.----"
"Waters," said Ramsden, humbly.
"Of course, yes. Mr. Waters. As I say, it"s a great compliment----"
"Not at all!"
"A great compliment----"
"No, no!" murmured Ramsden obsequiously.
"I wish you wouldn"t interrupt!" snapped Eunice with irritation. No girl likes to have to keep going back and trying over her speeches.
"It"s a great compliment, but it is quite impossible."
"Just as you say, of course," agreed Ramsden.
"What," demanded Eunice, "have you to offer me? I don"t mean money. I mean something more spiritual. What is there in you, Mr. Walter----"
"Waters."
"Mr. Waters. What is there in you that would repay a girl for giving up the priceless boon of freedom?"
"I know a lot about dried seaweed," suggested Ramsden hopefully.
Eunice shook her head.
"No," she said, "it is quite impossible. You have paid me the greatest compliment a man can pay a woman, Mr. Waterson----"
"Waters," said Ramsden. "I"ll write it down for you."
"Please don"t trouble. I am afraid we shall never meet again----"
"But we are partners in the mixed foursomes tomorrow."
"Oh, yes, so we are!" said Eunice. "Well, mind you play up. I want to win a cup more than anything on earth."
"Ah!" said Ramsden, "if only I could win what I want to win more than anything else on earth! You, I mean," he added, to make his meaning clear. "If I could win you----" His tongue tied itself in a bow knot round his uvula, and he could say no more. He moved slowly to the door, paused with his fingers on the handle for one last look over his shoulder, and walked silently into the cupboard where Eunice"s aunt kept her collection of dried seaweed.
His second start was favoured with greater luck, and he found himself out in the hall, and presently in the cool air of the night, with the stars shining down on him. Had those silent stars ever shone down on a more broken-hearted man? Had the cool air of the night ever fanned a more fevered brow? Ah, yes! Or, rather, ah no!
There was not a very large entry for the mixed foursomes compet.i.tion.
In my experience there seldom is. Men are as a rule idealists, and wish to keep their illusions regarding women intact, and it is difficult for the most broad-minded man to preserve a chivalrous veneration for the s.e.x after a woman has repeatedly sliced into the rough and left him a difficult recovery. Women, too--I am not speaking of the occasional champions, but of the average woman, the one with the handicap of 33, who plays in high-heeled shoes--are apt to giggle when they foozle out of a perfect lie, and this makes for misogyny. Only eight couples a.s.sembled on the tenth tee (where our foursomes matches start) on the morning after Ramsden Waters had proposed to Eunice. Six of these were negligible, consisting of males of average skill and young women who played golf because it kept them out in the fresh air. Looking over the field, Ramsden felt that the only serious rivalry was to be feared from Marcella Bingley and her colleague, a 16-handicap youth named George Perkins, with whom they were paired for the opening round. George was a pretty indifferent performer, but Marcella, a weather-beaten female with bobbed hair and the wrists of a welterweight pugilist, had once appeared in the women"s open championship and swung a nasty iron.
Ramsden watched her drive a nice, clean shot down the middle of the fairway, and spoke earnestly to Eunice. His heart was in this compet.i.tion, for, though the first prize in the mixed foursomes does not perhaps ent.i.tle the winners to a place in the hall of fame, Ramsden had the soul of the true golfer. And the true golfer wants to win whenever he starts, whether he is playing in a friendly round or in the open championship.