The Clicking of CuthbertWodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville)
General
The Clicking of Cuthbert
Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville)
Golf stories; Humorous stories
Eunice gasped. Indeed, had she been of a less remarkable beauty one
would have said that she snorted. The sky turned black, and all her
amiability was swept away in a flood of fury. The blood left her face
and surged back in a rush of crimson. You are engaged to be married and
I take it that there exists between you and your _fiancee_ the
utmost love and trust and understanding; but would you have the nerve,
could you summon up the cold, callous gall to tell your Genevieve that
she wasn't capable of using her wooden clubs? I think not. Yet this was
what Ramsden Waters had told Eunice, and the delicately nurtured girl
staggered before the coarse insult. Her refined, sensitive nature was
all churned up.
Ever since she had made her first drive at golf, she had prided herself
on her use of the wood. Her brother and her brassey were the only
things she loved. And here was this man deliberately.... Eunice choked.
"Mr. Waters!"
Before they could have further speech George Perkins and little
Wilberforce ambled in a bloated way out of the clubhouse.
"I've had three ginger ales," observed the boy. "Where do we go from
here?"
"Our honour," said Ramsden. "Shoot!"
Eunice took out her driver without a word. Her little figure was tense
with emotion. She swung vigorously, and pulled the ball far out on to
the fairway of the ninth hole.
"Even off the tee," said Ramsden, "you had better use an iron. You must
keep 'em straight."
Their eyes met. Hers were glittering with the fury of a woman scorned.
His were cold and hard. And, suddenly, as she looked at his awful,
pale, set golf face, something seemed to snap in Eunice. A strange
sensation of weakness and humility swept over her. So might the cave
woman have felt when, with her back against a cliff and unable to
dodge, she watched her suitor take his club in the interlocking grip,
and, after a preliminary waggle, start his back swing.
The fact was that, all her life, Eunice had been accustomed to the
homage of men. From the time she had put her hair up every man she had
met had grovelled before her, and she had acquired a mental attitude
toward the other sex which was a blend of indifference and contempt.
For the cringing specimens who curled up and died all over the
hearthrug if she spoke a cold word to them she had nothing but scorn.
She dreamed wistfully of those brusque cavemen of whom she read in the
novels which she took out of the village circulating library. The
female novelist who was at that time her favourite always supplied with
each chunk of wholesome and invigorating fiction one beetle-browed hero
with a grouch and a scowl, who rode wild horses over the countryside
till they foamed at the mouth, and treated women like dirt. That,
Eunice had thought yearningly, as she talked to youths whose spines
turned to gelatine at one glance from her bright eyes, was the sort of
man she wanted to meet and never seemed to come across.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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