THE PLAY'S THE THING.
Just outside Mrs. Ropes' drive gates there lies a famous and exclusive golf course, and when she turned her house into a Convalescent Home the secretary wrote offering the hospitality of the club to all officers who might come under her care.
Nevertheless, when Haynes and I first arrived, we were both too languid and feeble for any more exacting form of athletics than spillikins and jigsaws, and it was some time before the M.O. gave us permission to go on the links.
"And remember," he added, "gently to begin with. Stop at the thirteenth hole."
"Of course," I said apologetically to Haynes as we neared the club-house, "I was pretty putrid before the War, so I shall be simply indescribable now."
"My dear chap, this isn't going to be a match. Keep your excuses till we play serious golf. To-day's just a gentle knock round. Here we are. I'll go and borrow some clubs; you get a couple of caddies."
Five minutes later he rejoined me, carrying two sets of clubs.
"Hallo!" he remarked in surprise. "I didn't know you'd brought your family. Introduce me."
"Mabel," I said, "and Lucy—our caddies."
"Girls?"
"They have that appearance. Why not?"
"They'll cramp my style horribly; I like to be free."
"Can't you be free in French for once?"
"Most unsatisfying. Why didn't you get boys?"
"The caddy-master says (a) girls are better; (b) he has no boys; (c) all the boys he has are booked by plutocrats with season tickets."
"Oh, all right. Here are your clubs—the pro. gave me the only two sets he had available. You're a bit taller than I am, so I've given you the long ones."
I looked at them critically.
"Doesn't a pair of stilts go with them?" I asked.
"Well, mine are worse. Just a bundle of toothpicks. Here, catch hold, Lucy."
Mabel teed up for me. I selected a driver about the length of a telegraph pole and swept my ball away. It stopped just short of the first bunker.
Haynes bent himself double to address his ball, but straightened up while swinging and missed it by a foot. At the second attempt he hooked it over square-leg's head on to the fairway of the eighteenth hole.
"Sacré bleu!" he said with very fair freedom, "I'm not going all that way after it. Lucy, run and fetch it, there's a dear."
Lucy, highly scandalized at the idea of losing a hole so tamely, started off; Mabel and Haynes and I went after my ball.
I took the mashie, because I distrusted my ability to carry the bunker with another telegraph pole. That mashie would have been about the right length for me if I could have stood on a chair while making my stroke. As it was it entered the ground two feet behind the ball and emerged, with a superb divot, just in front.
"Aren't there any short clubs in the bag, Mabel?" I asked. She handed me a straight-faced putter ...
Five strokes later I picked my ball up out of the bunker.
"I'm over-exerting myself," I said. "We'll call that hole a half."
Neither of us was satisfied with his tee shot at the next hole. I picked my ball out of a gorse-bush, and Haynes rescued his from a drain. Then we strolled amicably towards the third tee. Our caddies, unused to such methods, followed reluctantly.
"Was that 'ole 'alved, too, Sir?" piped Mabel with anxious interest.
"It's a nice point. I hardly know. Why?"
She hung her head and blushed. A sudden suspicion struck me.
"Mabel," I said sternly, "are you—can you be—betting on this game?"
"Yes, Sir," she answered with a touch of defiance. "Boys always does."
I told Haynes, who appeared profoundly shocked.
"Good G——! I mean, Mon dieu!" he exclaimed. "What are we doing?"
"Surely you can't hold us responsible? The child's parents ..."
"I don't mean that, you ass. Here we have the innocent public putting its money on our play, and we're treating the whole thing as a joke. This has got to be a match, after all. A woman's fortune hangs upon the issue—doesn't it, Lucy?"
"Yes, Sir," she answered without comprehension.
From this point the game became a grim struggle. I won the third hole in seventeen, but Haynes took the fourth in nineteen to my twenty-two.
At the fifth I noticed a pond guarding the green. I carefully circumvented this with my faithful putter and holed out in my smallest score of the round so far.
"Hi!" shouted Haynes. "How many?" He had been having a little hockey practice by himself in the rough, and was now preparing to play an approach shot across the pond.
"Twelve!"
"Then I've this for the hole," he yelled, and topped his ball gently into the water ...
So it went on—what the papers call a ding-dong struggle. Suffice it to say that at the twelfth I was dormy one and in a state of partial collapse.
The thirteenth is a short hole. You drive from a kind of pulpit, and the green is below you, protected by large stiff-backed bunkers like pews.
"Last hole, thank Heaven," panted Haynes. "I couldn't bear much more. I'm all of a dither as it is."
Mabel, twittering with excitement, teed up. I looked at the green lying invitingly below and took that gigantic putter. The ball, struck with all my little remaining strength, flew straight towards the biggest bunker, scored a direct hit on the top of it, bounced high in the air—and trickled on to the green.
Haynes invoked the Deity (even at that stressful moment, to his eternal credit, in French) and took his miniature driver. His ball, hit much too hard, pitched in the same bunker, crossed it, climbed up the face of it, and joined mine on the green. Utterly unnerved, we toddled down and took our putts. Haynes, through sheer luck (as he admits), laid his ball stone dead; I had a brain-storm and over-ran the hole, leaving myself a thirty-foot putt for the match. I took long and careful aim, but my hands were shaking pitifully. The ball started on a grotesquely wrong line, turned on a rise in the ground, cannoned off a worm-cast and plopped into the tin. Mabel gave a shriek of joy, and Lucy—well, I regret to say that Lucy made use of a terse expression the French equivalent of which her employer had been at great pains to remember. Haynes and I lay flat on the ground, overcome as much by emotion as by our physical weakness.
At last I struggled to a sitting posture.
"Mabel," I croaked, "I shall want at least ten per cent. commission for that. How much have you won?"
"Please, Sir," she cooed happily, "a 'a'p'ny, Sir."