“You are being absurd. Or is it one of your riddles, at which I am not clever?”
“I’m giving you a test in self-analysis. The Ibsen character whom you suggest, particularly when you play your iron shots, is Little Eyolf. The l silent, as in ‘Hades.’”
“I do not think that a very funny joke,” she said scornfully.
“It’s been turned down by three comic papers, though,” he defended.
“Then why must I bear it?”
“To make the point stick in your memory. Once, quite early in the morning, I came around the corner of a barn on a Philadelphia golf course, and there was a nice-looking elderly lady whom I had seen the day before taking her two small grandchildren out walking, addressing a ball with a brassie and saying, ‘Eye on the ball; slow back; carry through. Eye on the ball; slow back; carry though’ over and over again. Brassie shots were her weakness. The next day that persevering old grandma went out and made low score in the National Women’s Championship. Now, if you’ll just think of yourself as Little Eyolf until you’re good and man, it’ll help do the trick.”
“What were you doing in Philadelphia?” inquired the girl irrelevantly.
“Not golfing,” he returned. “So, if you don’t mind, we’ll postpone that. This is a golf lesson, and right here the serious business of the day begins. The first consideration is to cure you of star-gazing. You appreciate that that’s your main trouble?”
“Raising my head, you mean?”
“That’s it. Star-gazing, we call it.”
“It occurs because I forget myself.”
“And mostly on your irons. You get your wooden shots off clean. Now, let’s drive.”
Two straight shots flew down the course, his the longer by fifteen yards. A ninety-yard approach lay before her.
“Beginneth here the first lesson,” said Jeremy. “It’s a sure cure, on the homeopathic principle. Invented it myself for a fellow on our college team who was a stargazer, and he showed his gratitude by eliminating me from the individual championship, that fall.” He took a cardboard box from his pocket, and extracted from it one of a number of small, gilt stars such as stationers carry in stock. This he pressed down upon the grass so close behind his pupil’s ball as almost to touch its lower arc. “Behold the star of your hopes.”
“What am I to do with it?”
“Keep your eye on it—if you can.”
“Until after I have struck the ball?”
“Longer than that. After you’ve played, step forward and plant the sole of your foot on the star. But you won’t be able to do it. Not the first time.”
“I shall,” said the girl with quiet conviction.
Taking her stance, she measured the distance with a careful eye, and sent the ball off with a clean click. Her head remained bent with an almost devotional intentness. She stepped forward and covered the star with that boot which Eli Wade had so warmly praised.
“Good!” approved the instructor. “You’ve got willpower.”
“I have needed to have,” replied the girl. Her tone was curiously musing and confidential. “May I look up now?”
“Surely. You’ll like the view.”
The ball, rising high, had landed upon the edge of the green and rolled to within ten feet of the cup.
“Oh!” she cried. “Do you suppose I could do it again?”
“Any number of times, if you’ll keep your eye on the star.”
“But one could not carry about a box of stars in a match, could one?”
“One could. But it won’t be necessary. Two weeks’ practice at that will get you clean out of the Little Eyolf habit.”
“Will it, indeed? But why do you look so intently at the spot?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Jeremy hastily. “It was your boot—I mean, I was thinking what that queer old codger Eli Wade said when I went after your boots.”
“And was that golf?” inquired Miss Ames with a demure and candid air. “No? Then, if you do not mind, we will postpone it, shall we not?”
“Stung!” confessed Jeremy. “We shall.”
The bestarred second round cut no less than five strokes from the score of the gratified pupil and her even more highly pleased instructor. This in spite of the fact that she had once lifted her head and perpetrated a lamentable foozle, whereupon Jeremy gravely pasted one of the stars on the toe of her left boot: “To keep you reminded,” he explained.
“But,” he added, “you’ve got to clip at least three more strokes off to be safe. That’ll take you all your time.”
It took a disproportionate amount of Jeremy Robson’s, too, which, to do him justice, he did not begrudge. As a corollary to the morning lessons he took to dropping in at the Pritchard mansion of an evening to discuss some of the more abstruse points of the game, where he found himself in active competition with the picked youth of the University and the town, for Miss Marcia gathered a court as irresistibly as a flower gathers bees. Quite unjustifiably Jeremy was inclined to sulk a bit over this, unmindful of the favor of the gods in affording him her undivided companionship in those early morning hours. Whereupon the gods, as is their custom, withdrew their unappreciated bestowals. Buddy Higman discovered the golf practice and straightway volunteered as caddy. Jealousy as well as desire to be of service to the liege lady prompted his offer, which was straightway accepted. So the morning practice continued while bobolink from his daisied choir-loft (no longer invaded by balls wandering from the straight and narrow path which leads to the House of Bogie) alternately cheered and jeered at this chaperoned companionship.
One stroke, two strokes, and finally five strokes were subtracted from the aspirant’s nine-hole score. Her master gave her his blessing and told her to go in and win. In the Varsity competition, she qualified with a highly respectable round, and in the play-off for the team, won her place. The team captain posted the choice for the yearly match against Kirk College on the athletic bulletin, one line of which read:
No. 4–M. Ames.
In special celebration of the event, the pupil accepted an invitation to dine at the Country Club that evening with the instructor.
“Will you make an agreement?” she asked, as they faced each other across the little table, pleasantly remote in a far corner of the veranda.
“Unsight-unseen?” he smiled. “All right. I’ll swap.”
“That is quite too American for me. But you agree. Then let us not speak the word ‘golf’ all this evening. I am tired of it.”
“Stale,” commented the expert. “You must lay off for a week. Well, let’s forget it. What shall we talk about?”
“What are you doing here in Fenchester?”
He smiled at the directness of the question. “Plain and fancy reporting.”
“You do not seem to belong here.”
“What makes you think that?”
She considered him meditatively. “I suppose it was your clothes, first. You dress differently from the others. More like the men I have known over there.”
“Remnants of past glory,” he assured her lightly. “I haven’t always lived here, you know.”
“Where then? Do you mind my asking?”
“Not a bit. I’ve drifted about doing worthless things for several years. Philadelphia mainly, New York a little. Getting myself mis-educated. You see, I’m something of a failure.”
“You should not say that even in fun. I do not like to hear it.”
“It isn’t in fun. Ask my aged and highly respectable great-aunt, Miss Greer, in Philadelphia, and you’ll learn something to my disadvantage.”
“I shall,” said the girl gravely, “if I ever go back there. Did you live with her?”
“For a time. After my college course she sent me on a year’s tour and then made me take one of those ornamental post-graduate courses that lead into the lily-fingered occupations that are neither professions nor business. She had a fond hope that I’d take to diplomacy.”
“No!” said the girl with unflatte
ring surprise. “I know many diplomats. I do not think you would be successful there.”
“I’m about as diplomatic as a punch in the eye,” admitted her companion. “The old lady considered it plumb disgusting of me not to take to refined international mendacity. But then I didn’t take to much of anything else that she laid out for me. I had vulgar tastes. I wanted to go into the newspaper business, and when I’d learnt it, have Great-Aunt kindly buy me a paper to play with. Great-Aunt didn’t see it that way. She cut me off with a small amount of hard cash and a large amount of hard talk, and I took a School of Journalism1 course and eventually drifted out here because I liked what I remembered of the town and wanted to bore in where I wasn’t hampered by friends and acquaintances. Does that strike you as a record of glowing success? Considering that I’m nearly twenty-seven years old, and haven’t made a scratch on the face of the world yet?”
“But you began late,” condoned his companion. “And you are still learning. But I cannot see why your aunt should object to your wishing to own a newspaper. One would say, a harmless ambition.”
“One that I’m quite unlikely to realize, now. As for its being harmless, why, my dear child—excuse the freedom of an aged golf-professor—there’s a charge of dynamite in every font of type.”
“Then you have a penchant for high explosives?”
“Have I? I don’t think I’d put it that way,” mused Jeremy. “I’ve a taste for adventure. And running a newspaper of your own has always seemed to me about the liveliest and most adventurous job going. But I don’t want to blow things up.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Oh, just to have a hand in things, in a real, live American community like this, where the soil is good and new ideas sprout. I’d like to get into the political fight, too. A really good one, I mean, with something worth aiming at.”
“That I can understand. But I still fail to make you fit into this environment.”
“What about yourself?” he countered. “Haven’t you rather the air of coming out of the great world and condescending to this raw and rural town?”
“Have I? Have I been condescending to you?”
“If you had, it would be more than I deserve,” he said contritely. “I’d no business to say that. And I didn’t mean it, anyway. But this is a queer place for you to be, isn’t it?”
“Not for my purposes?”
“Are you specializing at Old Central?”
“One might call it that. I made inquiries for the most typically American college, and a list was made up for me. I chose the University of Centralia to be with my mother’s cousin, Miss Pritchard.”
“Just like that? All yourself?”
“All myself,” she assented gravely.
“You came here to get Americanized?”
“Yes. My mother married again. A German. A man of great scientific attainments and high position. He is very gentle and vague and absent-minded, and good to me. And when I told them that I would like to take my own money and come here to my own country for a year before”—she hesitated almost imperceptibly—“before anything was settled for me, he consented. Think what a wrench it must have been for his old-world prejudices against emancipated women and all that!”
“Yet I don’t think you need Americanizing. You’re a real American type if there ever was one.”
She flushed a little. “I like to hear that. My father would have liked it. What makes you say it?”
“It’s—it’s your honesty, I think. There’s a quality of frankness about you that could be—well, almost brutal, I think. Do you know what I mean?”
“I suppose I am a crank. That is American enough, is it not?” she laughed. “A crank about the truth. I hate anything that even suggests a lie, or a dodging, or an evasion. So perhaps I should not like your newspaper profession.”
“But that’s just it!” he cried eagerly. “If one had a paper of one’s own, he could make his own rules for the game.”
“If he were big enough—and brave enough.”
“Brave enough,” he repeated. “Eli Wade said that about you, too. Reading your character from your shoes, you know. That you had courage and honesty. I think he thought it a rare thing in a woman.”
“It is not,” she flashed. “But if I have, it is no credit to me. I have wholly loved and trusted only one person on earth. That was my father, and he was the soul of truth. So, some of my friends laugh at me a little and think me a crank, because I have—what do you Americans—we Americans say?—no use for any one whom I cannot wholly trust.”
“And you would be hard, too,” he said.
“Perhaps. If I were, it would be because I could not help it. I think that I do things because something inside makes me before I have even time to consider, sometimes.”
“Like your standing up alone at the Federated German meeting. By the way, I brought my story of it for you to read.”
She held out her hand for the proofs. “I am glad,” she said.
She read it, slowly and studiously, and as she read an expression, new to Jeremy in the changeful charm of her face, puzzled his watchful eyes.
“It is very vivid,” she said, “and enthusiastic.”
She rose. On their way back to the Pritchard house she plied him with questions bearing on the technique of journalism. As he stood, bareheaded under the porch light looking up at her, she asked:
“May I keep the proof of the article?”
“Yes. You like it, then?”
“I love it. But I am glad that it was not published.”
“Why?”
“There is too much Me in it.” She paused. “Did I seem to you like that—then?”
“Yes. And more.”
She shook her head. “I am glad that it was not published,” she repeated. “It would have said to too many people—” She hesitated.
“What?” he asked.
For the first time her eyes faltered before his. They were hesitant, and deep-shadowed and troubled.
“What?” he repeated.
“What should have been said to only one.”
“Marcia!” he cried.
But the door had closed on her and he barely heard her soft-toned “Good-night” from beyond its jealous interception.
6
Abstention from the art and practice of golf for one week had been Professor Robson’s ukase. Had he foreseen the course of more personal events he would never have issued it. For he now had no opportunity of seeing his pupil alone. Nothing so direct as avoidance could be charged against her. But since that parting on the Pritchard porch, he had never been able to achieve so much as two minutes of her undivided time. Her eyes, when they met his only to be swiftly withdrawn, were sweetly troubled. The Eternal Feminine within her was, for the time at least, in flight. And along those paths of delicate elusiveness, the clumsy and pursuing feet of man stumble and trip. Jeremy’s soul was sorely tried and not less sorely puzzled.
If he found difficulties in Marcia’s attitude, his own future course with regard to her was dubious. What could he, in his position and with his resources, ask of her? To wait? Certainly nothing more than that. And was even that much fair to her? His own feeling was simplicity itself. Life had, in these few short weeks of association, summed and compressed itself into his love for Marcia Ames. Until that abrupt change in the tone of their relations brought about by her half-acceptance of his devotion, she had never evinced anything more than a frank and confident comradeship. Now he felt that he might speak—if he could find opportunity. That he could not, almost caused him to accuse Marcia of unfairness. Yet could he honorably ask her to marry him and tie herself to a meager and as yet unpromising career? Within himself Jeremy had begun to assume that confidence of future success which comes with the assured sense of workmanship. He would cheerfully gamble his own future on it. But how could he ask her to risk hers? Even supposing that she cared for him! There was the thought that ached; the uncertainty of it. In any case he had to know
how it stood with him in her heart.
Upon her inviolable truthfulness he could depend for a full and fair answer, if he were able to state his case. He knew that all her frank and unevasive courage would answer to his demand; that she would look that fate, or any other, steadily in the eyes. But not before her own good time. And that the time was not yet, became sufficiently apparent, one week before the match when the lessons were resumed, for with the resumption Buddy Higman was quietly established at once as caddy, chaperon, and dragon with the added qualities of the modestly adhesive burdock. The skill and technique of “No. 4.—M. Ames” prospered and improved mightily, which is more than can be said of the disposition of her instructor.
Some men’s work would have suffered. Not Jeremy’s. He was of that fortunate temperament which, keeping its troubles to itself, boils them out into steam and transforms the steam into energy. Besides, he had now “the grip of his pen.” He derived a glowing satisfaction from the expert performance of his craft. The editorial page was hospitable to him, especially for contributions in lighter vein. Many special assignments for work out of the ordinary, calling for a knack of description or characterization, came to him. His writings were beginning to earn the knighthood conferred by the clipping shears and the paste-pot. Newspapers in larger cities than Fenchester copied and privately asked questions about them. But what made it all so worthwhile, what gave a touch of exaltation to the dogged purpose for success, was the conviction that all this forwarded him upon the road which led to Marcia.
The tournament with Kirk College, on the Fenchester Country Club grounds, was now two days away. Jeremy had asked for and obtained the assignment to cover it. He had long before applied for and received the job of caddying for No. 4 of the team opposing his own college, which was regarded by the visiting Kirks as an ignoble instance of loyalty corrupted by the baser passions. However, Jeremy was perfectly willing that Kirk should win; rather hoped it would, in fact, provided only the No. 4 of Old Central beat her man. He believed her capable of doing it, unless her nerve faltered, which he deemed improbable. On her most recent performances she was from two to four strokes lower than anyone but himself and Buddy Higman appreciated.
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