Golf stories, English; Golfers -- Fiction; Humorous stories, English
You are overlooking the fact that Bradbury Fisher’s was the trained
and educated conscience of a man who had passed a large portion of his
life in Wall Street; and years of practice had enabled him to reduce
the control of it to a science. Many a time in the past, when an
active operator on the Street, he had done things to the Small Investor
which would have caused raised eyebrows in the fo’c’sle of a pirate
sloop--and done them without a blush. He was not the man, therefore, to
suffer torment merely because he was slipping one over on the Little
Woman.
Occasionally he would wince a trifle at the thought of what would
happen if she ever found out; but apart from that, I am doing no more
than state the plain truth when I say that Bradbury Fisher did not care
a whoop.
Besides, at this point his golf suddenly underwent a remarkable
improvement. He had always been a long driver, and quite abruptly he
found that he was judging them nicely with the putter. Two weeks after
he had started on his campaign of deception he amazed himself and all
who witnessed the performance by cracking a hundred for the first
time in his career. And every golfer knows that in the soul of the
man who does that there is no room for remorse. Conscience may sting
the player who is going round in a hundred and ten, but when it tries
to make itself unpleasant to the man who is doing ninety-sevens and
ninety-eights, it is simply wasting its time.
I will do Bradbury Fisher justice. He did regret that he was not in a
position to tell his wife all about that first ninety-nine of his. He
would have liked to take her into a corner and show her with the aid
of a poker and a lump of coal just how he had chipped up to the pin on
the last hole and left himself a simple two-foot putt. And the forlorn
feeling of being unable to confide his triumphs to a sympathetic ear
deepened a week later when, miraculously achieving ninety-six in
the medal round, he qualified for the sixth sixteen in the annual
invitation tournament of the club to which he had attached himself.
“Shall I?” he mused, eyeing her wistfully across the Queen Anne table
in the Crystal Boudoir, to which they had retired to drink their
after-dinner coffee. “Better not, better not,” whispered Prudence in
his ear.
“Bradbury,” said Mrs. Fisher.
“Yes, darling?”
“Have you been hard at work to-day?”
“Yes, precious. Very, very hard at work.”
“Ho!” said Mrs. Maplebury.
“What did you say?” said Bradbury.
“I said ho!”
“What do you mean, ho?”
“Just ho. There is no harm, I imagine, in my saying ho, if I wish to.”
“Oh, no,” said Bradbury. “By all means. Not at all. Pray do so.”
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Maplebury. “Ho!”
“You do have to slave at the office, don’t you?” said Mrs. Fisher.
“I do, indeed.”
“It must be a great strain.”
“A terrible strain. Yes, yes, a terrible strain.”
“Then you won’t object to giving it up, will you?”
Bradbury started.
“Giving it up?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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