Once more the aging Wilbur Cowan stood alone by night thrillingly to
watch the arched splendour of stars above and muse upon the fleeting
years that carried off his youth. The moment marked another tremendous
epoch, for he was done with school. Now for all the years to come he
could hear the bell sound its warning and feel no qualm; never again
need sit confined in a stuffy room, breathing chalk dust, and compel his
errant mind to bookish abstractions. He had graduated from the Newbern
High School, respectably if not with distinguished honour, and the
superintendent had said, in conferring his rolled and neatly tied
diploma, that he was facing the battle of life and must acquit himself
with credit to Newbern.
The superintendent had seemed to believe it was a great moment; there
had been a tremor in his voice as he addressed the class, each in turn.
He was a small, nervous, intent man whose daily worries showed plainly
through the uplift of the moment, and Wilbur had wondered what he found
to be so thrilled about. His own battle with life--he must have gone out
to the fight years ago under much the same circumstances--had apparently
brought him none of the glory he was now urging his young charges to
strive for. He had to stay in a schoolroom and breathe chalk dust.
Whatever the battle of life might be, he was going to fight it
out-of-doors; not like imprisoned school-teachers and clerks and
bookkeepers in First National banks. Only when alone under that splatter
of stars did he feel the moment big with more than a mere release from
textbooks. Then at last he knew that he had become a man and must put
away childish things, and his mind floated on the thought, off to those
distant stars where other boys had that night, perhaps unwittingly,
become men.
He wished that people would not pester him with solemn questions about
what he now meant to make of himself. They seemed to believe that he
should be concerned about this. Winona was especially insistent. She
said he stood at the parting of the ways; that all his future hung upon
his making a seemly choice; and she said it gloomily, with frank
foreboding, as one more than half expecting him to choose amiss.
Judge Penniman was another who warned him heavily that it was time to
quit being a Jack-of-all-trades. The judge spoke as from a topless tower
of achievement, relating anecdotes of his own persistence under
difficulties at the beginning of a career which he allowed his hearer to
infer had been of shining merit, hampered, it is true, by the most
trying ill health. Even Mrs. Penniman said that they were expecting
great things of him, now that he had become a man.
The boy dimly felt that there was something false in all this urgency.
The superintendent of schools and Winona and the judge and Mrs. Penniman
seemed to be tightly wound up with expectancy about him, yet lived their
own lives not too tensely. The superintendent of schools was not
inspiring as a model; the judge, for all his talk, lived a life of fat
idleness, with convenient maladies when the Penniman lawn needed mowing.
Mrs. Penniman, it is true, fought the battle of life steadily with her
plain and fancy dressmaking, but with no visible glory; and Winona
herself was becoming a drab, sedate spinster, troubled about many
things. He wondered why they should all conceive him to be meant for so
much more than they had achieved. Why couldn't he relax into a life such
as they led, without all this talk of effort and planning? It seemed to
him that people pretty much allowed life to make itself for them, and
lived it as it came. He was not going to bother about it. Let it come.
He would find a way to live it. People managed. Judge Penniman was never
so ailing that he couldn't reach the harness shop for his game of
checkers. The only person he knew who had really worked hard to make
something of himself was Spike Brennon.
* * * * *
So he resorted to the golf links that summer, heedless and happy.
"Without ideals so far as one can read him," wrote Winona in her
journal, underlining the indictment and closing it with three bold
exclamation points. He was welcomed effusively to the golf course by
John Knox McTavish.
"Good!" said John on the morning of his appearance, which was effusive
for any McTavish.
He liked the boy, not only because he drove a sweet ball, but because
you could talk to him in a way you couldn't to par-r-r-rties you was
teaching to hold a club proper-r-r-r and to quit callin' it a stick.
He caddied that summer only for golfers of the better sort, and for
Sharon Whipple, choosing his employ with nice discrimination. John had
said golf was a grand game, because more than any other game it showed
how many kinds of fool a man could be betwixt his mind and his muscles.
His apprentice was already sensitive to the grosser kinds. In addition
to caddying he taught the secrets of the game when pupils came too
plenteously for John. But he lacked John's tried patience, and for the
ideal teacher was too likely to utter brutal truths instead of polite
and meandering diplomacies. He had caught perhaps a bit too much of
Spike Brennon's manner of instruction, a certain strained brusquerie,
out of pace with people who are willing to pay largely for instruction
which they ignore in spite of its monotonous repetition. John warned him
that he must soften his clients--butter-r-r 'em up with nice words--or
they wouldn't come back. He must say they was doing gr-r-rand. He did
say it now and then, but with no ring of conviction.
Still it was a good summer. Especially good, because all the time he
knew he was waiting for that morning in early September when the school
bell would ring and he would laugh carelessly at what had once been the
imperious summons. He thought that after this high moment he might be
able to plan his life at least a little--not too minutely.
* * * * *
Late that summer Merle and Patricia Whipple came by appointment to play
the course with him. Merle, too, had become a man--he would enter
college that fall. Apparently no one was bothering about the plan of his
life. And Patricia had become, if not a woman, at least less of a girl,
though she was still bony and utterly freckled. They drove off, Patricia
not far but straight, and Merle, after impressive preliminaries that
should have intimidated any golf ball, far but not straight. After his
shot he lectured instructively upon its faults. When he had done they
knew why he had sliced into the miry fen on the right. Then with an
expert eye he studied his brother's stance and swing. The ball of Wilbur
went low and straight and far, but the shot was prefaced, apparently, by
no nice adjustment of the feet or by any preliminary waggles of the
club.
"No form," said Merle. "You ought to have form by this time, but you
don't show any; and you put no force into your swing. Now let me show
you just one little thing about your stance."
With generous enthusiasm he showed his brother not only one little
thing, but two or three that should be a buckler to him in time of need;
and his brother thanked him, and so authoritative was the platform
manner of Merle that he nearly said "Yes, sir." After which Patricia
played a brassy shot, and they all went to find Merle's ball among the
oaks. After that they went on to Wilbur's ball, which--still without a
trace of form--he dropped on the green with a mashie, in spite of
Merle's warning that he would need a mid-iron to reach it.
They drove, and again Merle lectured upon the three reasons why his ball
came to rest in a sand trap that flanked the fairway. He seemed to feel
this information was expected from him, nor did he neglect a generous
exposition of his brother's failure to exhibit form commensurate with
his far, straight drive. His brother was this time less effusive in his
thanks, and in no danger whatever of replying "Yes, sir!" He merely
retorted, "Don't lunge--keep down!" advice which the lecturer received
with a frowning, "I know--I know!" as if he had lunged intentionally,
with a secret purpose that would some day become known, to the confusion
of so-called golf experts. Wilbur and Patricia waited while Merle went
to retrieve his ball. They saw repeated sand showers rise over the top
of a bunker. From where they stood the player seemed to be inventing a
new kind of golf, to be played without a ball. A pale mist hung over the
scene.
"I know just what he's saying," Patricia told Wilbur.
"Shame on you!" said he, and they both laughed, after which Patricia
glanced at him oftener.
It should be said that he was now arrayed as Winona would have him, in
summer sports attire of careless but expensive appearance, including a
silk shirt alleged by the maker to be snappy, and a cap of real
character. The instinct of the male for noticeable plumage had at last
worked the reform that not all of Winona's pleading had sufficed for.
Wilbur Cowan at the moment might, but for his excellent golf, have been
mistaken for a genuine Whipple.
Merle's homilies continued after each shot. He subjected his own drives
to a masterly analysis, and strove to incite his brother to correct
form, illustrating this for his instruction with practice swings that
were marvels of nicety, and learnedly quoting Braid and Vardon.
It was after one of these informative intervals, succeeding a
brilliantly topped drive by the lecturer, that Patricia Whipple, full in
the flooding current of Merle's discourse, turned her speckled face
aside and flagrantly winked a greenish eye at Wilbur Cowan; whereupon
Wilbur Cowan winked his own left eye, that one being farthest from the
speaker. The latter, having concluded his remarks for the moment, went
to find his ball, and the two walked on.
"He just ought to be taken down," suggested Patricia, malevolently.
"Think so?" demanded Wilbur.
"Know so!" declared the girl. "'Tisn't only golf. He's that way about
everything--telling people things--how to do it and everything. Only no
one at our house dares come down on him. Harvey D. and Ella and even
grandfather--they all jump through hoops for him, the cowards! I give
him a jolt now and then, but I get talked to for it."
"The boy needs some golf talk--he certainly does," conceded the other.
"Too bad you're afraid to do it," Patricia said, resignedly.
She looked sadly away, then quickly back at him to see if it had taken.
She thought it hadn't. He was merely looking as if he also considered it
too bad. But on the next tee he astonishingly asserted himself
as---comparatively--a golfing expert. He wasn't going to have this
splendid brother, truly his brother for all the change of name, making a
fool of himself before a girl. Full in the tide of Merle's jaunty
discourse he blazed out with an authority of his own, and in tones so
arrogant that the importance of the other oozed almost pitiably from
him.
"Quit that! Listen! We've played ten holes, and you haven't made one
clean drive, and I've got off every one clean. I make this course in
seventy-three, and you'd never make it in one hundred and twenty the way
you're going. But every time you stand there and tell me things about
your drive and about mine as if you could really play golf."
"Well, but my dear chap--" Merle paused, trying to regain some lost
spiritual value--"I'm merely telling you some little things about form."
"Forget it!" commanded the other. "You haven't any form yourself; you
don't have form until you can play the game, and then you don't think
about it. Maybe my form doesn't stick out, but you bet it must be tucked
in there somewhere or I couldn't hit the ball. You don't want to think
I haven't any just because I don't stand there and make a long speech to
the ball before swatting it."
"Well, I was only saying----" Merle began again, but in meekness such as
Patricia had never observed in him.
Hearing a sound in the background Wilbur turned. She was staging a
pantomime of excessive delight, noiselessly clapping her thin brown
hands. He frowned at her--he was not going to have any girl laughing at
his brother--and returned his attention to the late exponent of Braid
and Vardon.
"Here"--he teed a ball--"you do about every wrong thing you could. You
don't overlook a single one. Now I'll show you. Take your stance,
address the ball!"
He had forgotten, in the heat of his real affection, all the difference
in their stations. He was talking crisply to this Whipple as if he were
merely a Cowan twin. Merle, silent, dazed, meek, did as he was directed.
"Now take your back swing slower. You've been going up too quick--go up
slow--stay there! Wait--bend that left wrist under your club--not out
but under--here"--he adjusted the limp wrist. "Now keep your weight on
the left foot and come down easy. Don't try to knock the ball a mile--it
can't be done. Now up again and swing--easy!"
Merle swung and the topped ball went a dozen feet.
"There, now I suppose you're satisfied!" he said, sulkily, but his
instructor was not, it seemed, satisfied.
"Don't be silly! You lifted your head. You have to do more than one
thing right to hit that ball. You have to stay down to it. Here"--he
teed another ball--"take your stance and see if you can't keep down.
I'll hold you down." In front of the player he grasped his own driver
and rested it lightly upon the other's head. "Just think that club
weighs a hundred pounds, and you couldn't lift your head if you wanted
to. Now swing again, turn the left wrist under, swing easy--there!"
They watched the ball go high and straight, even if not far.
"A Texas leaguer," said Wilbur, "but it's all right. It's the first
time this afternoon you've stayed in the fairway. Now again!"
He teed another ball, and the threesomes had become a mere golf lesson,
plus a clash of personalities. Wilbur Cowan did all the talking; he was
grim, steely eyed, imperious. His splendid brother was mute and
submissive, after a few feeble essays at assertion that were brutally
stifled. Patricia danced disrespectfully in the background when neither
brother observed her. She had no wish to incur again the tightly drawn
scowl of Wilbur. The venom of that had made her uncomfortable.
"See now how you hit 'em out when you do what I tell you!" said the
instructor at last, when Merle had a dozen clean drives to his credit.
But the sun had fallen low and the lesson must end.
"Awfully obliged, old chap--thanks a heap!" said Merle, recovering
slightly from his abjectness. "I dare say I shall be able to smack the
little pill after this."
The old chap hurled a last grenade.
"You won't if you keep thinking about form," he warned. "Best way to
forget that--quit talking so much about it. After you make a shot, keep
still, or talk to yourself."
"Awfully good of you," Merle responded, graciously, for he was no longer
swinging at a ball, but merely walking back to the clubhouse, where one
man was as good as another. "There may be something in what you say."
"There is," said Wilbur.
He waved them a curt farewell as they entered the latest Whipple car.
"But, you know, the poor kid after all hasn't any form," the
convalescent Merle announced to Patricia when they were seated.
"He has nice hair and teeth," said the girl, looking far ahead as the
car moved off.
"Oh, hair--teeth!" murmured Merle, loftily careless, as one possessing
hair and teeth of his own. "I'm talking about golf."
"He lines 'em out," said Patricia, cattishly.
"Too much like a professional." Merle lifted a hand from the wheel to
wave deprecation. "That's what the poor kid gets for hanging about that
clubhouse all the time."
"The poor kid!" murmured Patricia. "I never noticed him much before."
"Beastly overbearing sort of chap," said Merle.
"Isn't he?" said Patricia. "I couldn't help but notice that." She
shifted her eyes sidewise at Merle. "I do wish some of the folks could
have been there," she added, listlessly.
"Is that so?" he demanded, remembering then that this girl was never to
be trusted, even in moods seemingly honeyed. He spurted the new roadster
in rank defiance of Newbern's lately enacted ordinance regulating the
speed of motor vehicles.
Yet the night must have brought him counsel, for he appeared the next
afternoon--though without Patricia--to beseech further instruction from
the competent brother. He did this rather humbly for one of his station.
"I know my game must be pretty rotten," he said. "Maybe you can show me
one or two more little things."
"I'll show you the same old things over again," said Wilbur, overjoyed
at this friendly advance, and forthwith he did.
For a week they played the course together, not only to the betterment
of Merle's technic, but to the promotion of a real friendliness between
this Whipple and a mere Cowan. They became as brothers again, seeming to
have leaped the span of years during which they had been alien. During
those years Wilbur had kept secret his pride in his brother, his
exultation that Merle should have been called for this high eminence and
not found wanting. There had been no one to whom he could reveal it,
except to Winona, perhaps in little flashes. Now that they were alone in
a curious renewal of their old intimacy, he permitted it to shine forth
in all its fullness, and Merle became pleasantly aware that this
sharp-speaking brother--where golf was concerned--felt for him something
much like worship. The glow warmed them both as they loitered over the
course, stopping at leisure to recall ancient happenings of their
boyhood together. Far apart now in their points of view, the expensively
nurtured Merle, and Wilbur, who had grown as he would, whose education
was of the street and the open, they found a common ground and rejoiced
in their contact.
"I don't understand why we haven't seen more of each other all these
years," said Merle on a late day of this renewed companionship. "Of
course I've been away a lot--school and trips and all that."
"And I'm still a small-towner," said Wilbur, though delightedly. It was
worth being a small-towner to have a brother so splendid.
"We must see a lot of each other from now on," insisted Merle. "We must
get together this way every time I come back."
"We must," said Wilbur. "I hope we do, anyway," he added, reflecting
that this would be one of those things too good to come true.
"What I don't understand," went on Merle, "you haven't had the
advantages I have, not gone off to school or met lots of people, as I'm
always doing, not seen the world, you know, but you seem so much older
than I am. I guess you seem at least ten years older."
"Well, I don't know." Wilbur pondered this. "You do seem younger some
way. Maybe a small town makes people old quicker, knocking round one the
way I have, bumping up against things here and there. I don't know at
all. Sharon Whipple says the whole world is made up mostly of small
towns; if you know one through and through you come pretty near knowing
the world. Maybe that's just his talk."
"Surly old beggar. Somehow I never hit it off well with him. Too
sarcastic, thinking he's funny all the time; uncouth, too."
"Well, perhaps so." Wilbur was willing to let this go. He did not
consider Sharon Whipple surly or uncouth or sarcastic, but he was not
going to dispute with this curiously restored brother. "Try a brassy on
that," he suggested, to drop the character of Sharon Whipple.
Merle tried the brassy, and they played out the hole. Merle made an
eight.
"I should have had a six at most," he protested, "after that lovely long
brassy shot."
Wilbur grinned.
"John McTavish says the should-have-had score for this course is a
mar-r-rvel. He says if these people could count their should-have-hads
they'd all be playing under par. He's got a wicked tongue, that John."
"Well, anyway," insisted Merle, "you should have had a four, because you
were talking to me when you flubbed that approach shot; that cost you a
couple."
"John says the cards should have another column added to write in
excuses; after each hole you could put down just why you didn't get it
in two less. He says that would be gr-r-r-and f'r th' dubs."
"The hole is four hundred and eighty yards, and you were thirty yards
from the green in two," said Merle. "You should have had--"
"I guess I should have had what I got. Sharon Whipple says that's the
way with a lot of people in this life--make fine starts, and then flub
their short game, fall down on easy putts and all that, after they get
on the lawn. He calls the fair greens lawns."
"Awful old liar when he counts his own score," said Merle. "I played
with him just once."
Wilbur grinned again. He would cheerfully permit this one slander of his
friend.
"You certainly can't trust him out of sight in a sand trap," he
conceded. "You'll say, 'How many, Mr. Whipple?' and he'll say, 'Well,
let me see--eight and a short tote--that's it, eight and a tote.' He
means that he made eight, or about eight, by lifting it from the rough
about ten feet on to the fairway."
"Rotten sportsmanship," declared Merle.
"No, no, he's a good sport, all right! He'd expect you to do the same,
or tee up a little bit for a mid-iron shot. He says he won't read the
rules, because they're too fine print. I like the old boy a lot," he
concluded, firmly. He wanted no misunderstanding about that, even if
Merle should esteem him less for it.
They drove from the next tee. One hundred and fifty yards ahead the
fairway was intersected by a ditch. It was deep, and its cruel maw
yawned hungrily for golf balls. These it was fed in abundance daily.
"Rottenly placed, that ditch!" complained Merle as he prepared to drive.
"Only because you think so," replied his brother. "Forget it's there,
and you'll carry it every time. That's what Sharon Whipple does. It's
what they call psychology. It's a mental hazard. Sharon Whipple says
that's another thing about golf that's like real life. He says most all
things that scare us are just mental hazards."
"Stuff!" said Merle. "Stuffy stuffness! The ditch is there, isn't it,
psychology or no psychology? You might ignore a hungry tiger, but
calling him a mental hazard wouldn't stop him from eating you, would it?
Sharon Whipple makes me tired." He placed a drive neatly in the ditch.
"There!" he exploded, triumphantly. "I guess that shows you what the old
gas bag knows about it."
"Oh, you'll soon learn to carry that hole!" his brother soothed. "Now
let's see what you can do with that niblick." He grinned again as they
went on to the ditch. "Sharon Whipple calls his niblick his 'gitter'."
Merle, however, would not join in the grin. Sharon Whipple still made
him tired.
In the course of their desultory playing they discussed the other
Whipples.
"Of course they're awfully fond of me," said Merle.
"Of course," said Wilbur.
"I guess Harvey D.--Father--would give me anything in the world I asked
for, ever since I was a kid. Horses, dogs, guns, motor cars--notice the
swell little roadster I'm driving? Birthday! You'd almost think he looks
up to me. Says he expects great things of me."
"Why wouldn't he?" demanded the other.
"Oh, of course, of course!" Merle waved this aside. "And Grandfather
Gideon, he's an old brick. College man himself--class of sixty-five.
Think of that, way back in the last century! Sharon Whipple never got to
college. Ran off to fight in the Civil War or something. That's why he's
so countrified, I s'pose. You take Gideon now--he's a gentleman. Any one
could see that. Not like Sharon. Polished old boy you'd meet in a club.
And Mrs. Harvey D.--Mother--say, she can't do enough for me! Bores me
stiff lots of times about whether I'm not going to be sick or something.
And money--Lord! I'm supposed to have an allowance, but they all hand me
money and tell me not to say anything about it to the others. Of course
I don't. And Harvey D. himself--he tries to let on he's very strict
about the allowance, then he'll pretend he didn't pay me the last
quarter and hand me two quarters at once. He knows he's a liar, and he
knows I know it, too. I guess I couldn't have fallen in with a nicer
bunch. Even that funny daughter of Sharon's, Cousin Juliana, she warms
up now and then--slips me a couple of twenties or so. You should have
seen the hit I made at prep! Fellows there owe me money now that I bet I
never do get paid back. But no matter, of course."
"That Juliana always makes me kind of shiver," admitted Wilbur. "She
looks so kind of--well, kind of lemonish."
"She's all of that, that old girl. She's the only one I never do get
close to. Soured old maid, I guess. Looks at you a lot, but doesn't say
much, like she was sizing you up. That nose of hers certainly does stand
out like a peak or something. You wouldn't think it, either, but she
reads poetry--mushiest kind--awful stuff. Say, I looked into a book of
hers one day over at the Old Place--Something-or-Other Love Lyrics was
the title--murder! I caught two or three things--talk about raw
stuff--you know, fellows and girls and all that! What she gets out of
it beats me, with that frozen face of hers."
A little later he portrayed the character of Patricia Whipple in terms
that would have incensed her but that moved Wilbur to little but mild
interest.
"You never know when you got your thumb on that kid," he said. "She's
the shifty one, all right. Talk along to you sweet as honey, but all the
time she's watching for some chance to throw the harpoon into you.
Venomous--regular vixen. No sense of humour--laughs at almost anything a
fellow says or does. Trim you in a minute with that tongue of hers. And
mushy! Reads stories about a young girl falling in love with strange men
that come along when her car busts down on a lonely road. Got that bug
now. Drives round a whole lot all alone looking for the car to go blooey
and a lovely stranger to happen along and fix it for her that turns out
to be a duke or something in disguise. Sickening!
"Two years ago she got confidential one night and told me she was going
to Italy some day and get carried off to a cave by a handsome bandit in
spite of her struggles. Yes, she would struggle--not! Talk about mental
hazards, she's one, all right! She'll make it lively for that family
some day. With Harvey D. depending on me a lot, I'm expecting to have no
end of trouble with her when she gets to going good. Of course she's
only a kid now, but you can plot her curve easy. One of these kind
that'll say one thing and mean another. And wild? Like that time when
she started to run off and found us in the graveyard---remember?"
They laughed about this, rehearsing that far-off day with its
vicissitudes and sudden fall of wealth.
"That was the first day the Whipples noticed me," said Merle. "I made
such a good impression on them they decided to take me."
At another time they talked of their future. Wilbur was hazy about his
own. He was going to wait and see. Merle was happily definite.
"I'll tell you," said he when they had played out the last hole one
day, "it's like this. I feel the need to express my best thoughts in
writing, so I've decided to become a great writer--you know, take up
literature. I don't mean poetry or muck of that sort--serious
literature. Of course Harvey D. talks about my taking charge of the
Whipple interests, but I'll work him round. Big writers are
somebody--not bankers and things like that. You could be the biggest
kind of a banker, and people would never know it or think much about it.
Writers are different. They get all kinds of notice. I don't know just
what branch of writing I'll take up first, but I'll find out at college.
Anyway, not mucky stories about a handsome stranger coming along just
because a girl's car busts down. I'll pick out something dignified, you
bet!"
"I bet you will," said his admiring brother. "I bet you'll get a lot of
notice."
"Oh"--Merle waved an assenting hand--"naturally, after I get started
good."