The Clicking of Cuthbert | Page 3

upon this incident, because it was the means of introducing Cuthbert Banks to Mrs. Smethurst's niece, Adeline. As Cuthbert, for it was he who had so nearly reduced the muster-roll of rising novelists by one, hopped down from the table after his stroke, he was suddenly aware that a beautiful girl was looking at him intently. As a matter of fact, everyone in the room was looking at him intently, none more so than Raymond Parsloe Devine, but none of the others were beautiful girls. Long as the members of Wood Hills Literary Society were on brain, they were short on looks, and, to Cuthbert's excited eye, Adeline Smethurst stood out like a jewel in a pile of coke.
He had never seen her before, for she had only arrived at her aunt's house on the previous day, but he was perfectly certain that life, even when lived in the midst of gravel soil, main drainage, and company's own water, was going to be a pretty poor affair if he did not see her again. Yes, Cuthbert was in love: and it is interesting to record, as showing the effect of the tender emotion on a man's game, that twenty minutes after he had met Adeline he did the short eleventh in one, and as near as a toucher got a three on the four-hundred-yard twelfth.
I will skip lightly over the intermediate stages of Cuthbert's courtship and come to the moment when--at the annual ball in aid of the local Cottage Hospital, the only occasion during the year on which the lion, so to speak, lay down with the lamb, and the Golfers and the Cultured met on terms of easy comradeship, their differences temporarily laid aside--he proposed to Adeline and was badly stymied.
That fair, soulful girl could not see him with a spy-glass.
"Mr. Banks," she said, "I will speak frankly."
"Charge right ahead," assented Cuthbert.
"Deeply sensible as I am of----"
"I know. Of the honour and the compliment and all that. But, passing lightly over all that guff, what seems to be the trouble? I love you to distraction----"
"Love is not everything."
"You're wrong," said Cuthbert, earnestly. "You're right off it. Love----" And he was about to dilate on the theme when she interrupted him.
"I am a girl of ambition."
"And very nice, too," said Cuthbert.
"I am a girl of ambition," repeated Adeline, "and I realize that the fulfilment of my ambitions must come through my husband. I am very ordinary myself----"
"What!" cried Cuthbert. "You ordinary? Why, you are a pearl among women, the queen of your sex. You can't have been looking in a glass lately. You stand alone. Simply alone. You make the rest look like battered repaints."
"Well," said Adeline, softening a trifle, "I believe I am fairly good-looking----"
"Anybody who was content to call you fairly good-looking would describe the Taj Mahal as a pretty nifty tomb."
"But that is not the point. What I mean is, if I marry a nonentity I shall be a nonentity myself for ever. And I would sooner die than be a nonentity."
"And, if I follow your reasoning, you think that that lets me out?"
"Well, really, Mr. Banks, have you done anything, or are you likely ever to do anything worth while?"
Cuthbert hesitated.
"It's true," he said, "I didn't finish in the first ten in the Open, and I was knocked out in the semi-final of the Amateur, but I won the French Open last year."
"The--what?"
"The French Open Championship. Golf, you know."
"Golf! You waste all your time playing golf. I admire a man who is more spiritual, more intellectual."
A pang of jealousy rent Cuthbert's bosom.
"Like What's-his-name Devine?" he said, sullenly.
"Mr. Devine," replied Adeline, blushing faintly, "is going to be a great man. Already he has achieved much. The critics say that he is more Russian than any other young English writer."
"And is that good?"
"Of course it's good."
"I should have thought the wheeze would be to be more English than any other young English writer."
"Nonsense! Who wants an English writer to be English? You've got to be Russian or Spanish or something to be a real success. The mantle of the great Russians has descended on Mr. Devine."
"From what I've heard of Russians, I should hate to have that happen to me."
"There is no danger of that," said Adeline scornfully.
"Oh! Well, let me tell you that there is a lot more in me than you think."
"That might easily be so."
"You think I'm not spiritual and intellectual," said Cuthbert, deeply moved. "Very well. Tomorrow I join the Literary Society."
Even as he spoke the words his leg was itching to kick himself for being such a chump, but the sudden expression of pleasure on Adeline's face soothed him; and he went home that night with the feeling that he had taken on something rather attractive. It was only in the cold,