"Tough luck!" said Waddles.
Cyril turned and looked at him. I expected an outburst of some sort, but the boy was evidently trying to keep his hair on.
"I didn't hit it," said he at length, swallowing hard. I heard an odd choking noise behind me. It was the Major, attempting to remain calm.
"Of course you didn't hit it!" agreed Waddles. "You took a hatful of turf; and you know why, don't you?"
Cyril groaned and plunged into the ravine.
Why follow the harrying details too closely? With the Major as chief mourner, and Waddles holding sympathetic postmortems on all his bad shots, Cyril suffered a complete collapse. I could have beaten him—any one could have beaten him—and as a matter of fact he beat himself. Having found his weak spot, Waddles never let up for an instant. Talk, talk, talk; his flow of conversation was as irritating as a neighbour's phonograph, and as incessant. I wondered that Cyril contained himself as well as he did, until I remembered that it is tradition with the English to lose as silently as they win.
The Major, who saw it all, addressed but one remark to me. It was on the tenth hole, and Waddles was showing Cyril why he had topped an iron shot.
"Look here," said the Major, jerking his thumb at Waddles, "does he always do this sort of thing? Talk so much, I mean?"
I replied, and quite truthfully, that it depended on the way he felt. The Major grunted, and that ended the conversation.
The match was wound up on the thirteenth; Cyril shook hands, complimented Waddles on his game, and made a bee line for the clubhouse. Nobody could blame him for not wanting to finish the round. Waddles tagged along at his elbow, gesticulating, explaining the theory of golf, even offering to illustrate certain shots with which Cyril had had trouble.