The Clicking of Cuthbert | Page 9

I do say is that a golfer should be cautious. He
should not be led away by the first pretty face. I will tell you a story
that illustrates the point. It is the story of those two men who have just
got on to the ninth green--Peter Willard and James Todd.
There is about great friendships between man and man (said the Oldest
Member) a certain inevitability that can only be compared with the
age-old association of ham and eggs. No one can say when it was that
these two wholesome and palatable food-stuffs first came together, nor
what was the mutual magnetism that brought their deathless partnership
about. One simply feels that it is one of the things that must be so.
Similarly with men. Who can trace to its first beginnings the love of
Damon for Pythias, of David for Jonathan, of Swan for Edgar? Who
can explain what it was about Crosse that first attracted Blackwell? We
simply say, "These men are friends," and leave it at that.
In the case of Peter Willard and James Todd, one may hazard the guess
that the first link in the chain that bound them together was the fact that
they took up golf within a few days of each other, and contrived, as
time went on, to develop such equal form at the game that the most
expert critics are still baffled in their efforts to decide which is the
worse player. I have heard the point argued a hundred times without
any conclusion being reached. Supporters of Peter claim that his
driving off the tee entitles him to an unchallenged pre-eminence among

the world's most hopeless foozlers--only to be discomfited later when
the advocates of James show, by means of diagrams, that no one has
ever surpassed their man in absolute incompetence with the spoon. It is
one of those problems where debate is futile.
Few things draw two men together more surely than a mutual inability
to master golf, coupled with an intense and ever-increasing love for the
game. At the end of the first few months, when a series of costly
experiments had convinced both Peter and James that there was not a
tottering grey-beard nor a toddling infant in the neighbourhood whose
downfall they could encompass, the two became inseparable. It was
pleasanter, they found, to play together, and go neck and neck round
the eighteen holes, than to take on some lissome youngster who could
spatter them all over the course with one old ball and a cut-down cleek
stolen from his father; or some spavined elder who not only rubbed it
into them, but was apt, between strokes, to bore them with personal
reminiscences of the Crimean War. So they began to play together
early and late. In the small hours before breakfast, long ere the first
faint piping of the waking caddie made itself heard from the
caddie-shed, they were half-way through their opening round. And at
close of day, when bats wheeled against the steely sky and the "pro's"
had stolen home to rest, you might see them in the deepening dusk,
going through the concluding exercises of their final spasm. After dark,
they visited each other's houses and read golf books.
If you have gathered from what I have said that Peter Willard and
James Todd were fond of golf, I am satisfied. That is the impression I
intended to convey. They were real golfers, for real golf is a thing of
the spirit, not of mere mechanical excellence of stroke.
It must not be thought, however, that they devoted too much of their
time and their thoughts to golf--assuming, indeed, that such a thing is
possible. Each was connected with a business in the metropolis; and
often, before he left for the links, Peter would go to the trouble and
expense of ringing up the office to say he would not be coming in that
day; while I myself have heard James--and this not once, but
frequently--say, while lunching in the club-house, that he had half a

mind to get Gracechurch Street on the 'phone and ask how things were
going. They were, in fact, the type of men of whom England is
proudest--the back-bone of a great country, toilers in the mart, untired
businessmen, keen red-blooded men of affairs. If they played a little
golf besides, who shall blame them?
So they went on, day by day, happy and contented. And then the
Woman came into their lives, like the Serpent in the Links of Eden, and
perhaps for the first time they realized that they were not one
entity--not one single, indivisible Something that made for topped
drives and short putts--but two individuals, in whose breasts Nature had
implanted other desires than the simple ambition some day to