The Clicking of CuthbertWodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville)
General
The Clicking of Cuthbert
Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville)
Golf stories; Humorous stories
I had been right in my estimate of Vincent Jopp. His forceful stroke
never wavered. The head of his club struck the ball, despatching it a
good two hundred yards down the middle of the fairway. As we left the
tee I saw Amelia Merridew being led away with bowed head by two members
of the Greens Committee. Poor girl! My heart bled for her. And yet,
after all, Fate had been kind in removing her from the scene, even in
custody, for she could hardly have borne to watch the proceedings.
Vincent Jopp made rings round his antagonist. Hole after hole he won in
his remorseless, machine-like way, until when lunch-time came at the
end of the eighteenth he was ten up. All the other holes had been
halved.
It was after lunch, as we made our way to the first tee, that the
advance-guard of the Mrs. Jopps appeared in the person of Luella
Mainprice Jopp, a kittenish little woman with blond hair and a
Pekingese dog. I remembered reading in the papers that she had divorced
my employer for persistent and aggravated mental cruelty, calling
witnesses to bear out her statement that he had said he did not like
her in pink, and that on two separate occasions had insisted on her dog
eating the leg of a chicken instead of the breast; but Time, the great
healer, seemed to have removed all bitterness, and she greeted him
affectionately.
"Wassums going to win great big championship against nasty rough strong
man?" she said.
"Such," said Vincent Jopp, "is my intention. It was kind of you,
Luella, to trouble to come and watch me. I wonder if you know Mrs.
Agnes Parsons Jopp?" he said, courteously, indicating a kind-looking,
motherly woman who had just come up. "How are you, Agnes?"
"If you had asked me that question this morning, Vincent," replied Mrs.
Agnes Parsons Jopp, "I should have been obliged to say that I felt far
from well. I had an odd throbbing feeling in the left elbow, and I am
sure my temperature was above the normal. But this afternoon I am a
little better. How are you, Vincent?"
Although she had, as I recalled from the reports of the case, been
compelled some years earlier to request the Court to sever her marital
relations with Vincent Jopp on the ground of calculated and inhuman
brutality, in that he had callously refused, in spite of her pleadings,
to take old Dr. Bennett's Tonic Swamp-Juice three times a day, her
voice, as she spoke, was kind and even anxious. Badly as this man had
treated her--and I remember hearing that several of the jury had been
unable to restrain their tears when she was in the witness-box giving
her evidence--there still seemed to linger some remnants of the old
affection.
"I am quite well, thank you, Agnes," said Vincent Jopp.
"Are you wearing your liver-pad?"
A frown flitted across my employer's strong face.
"I am not wearing my liver-pad," he replied, brusquely.
"Oh, Vincent, how rash of you!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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