Tennis resulted in a set of doubles, Merle and his little friend playing Patricia and one of her little friends—the one with the necklace and the dark eyes. The desirable new man was not dressed for tennis, and could not have played it in any clothes whatever, and so had to watch from the back line, where he also retrieved balls. Both girls had insisted upon being at his end of the court. Their gentlemen opponents were irritated by this arrangement, because the girls paid far more attention to the new man than to the game itself. They delayed their service to catch his last remark; delayed the game seriously by pausing to chat with him. He retrieved balls for them, which also impeded progress.
When he brought the balls to the dark-eyed girl she acknowledged his courtesy with a pretty little "Thanks a lot!" Patricia varied this. She said "Thanks a heap!" And they both rather glared at the other girl—a mere pinkish, big-eyed girl whose name was Florrie—who lingered stanchly by the new man and often kept him in talk when he should have been watchful. Still this third girl had but little initiative. She did insinuatingly ask Wilbur what his favourite flower was, but this got her nowhere, because it proved that he did not know.
The gentlemen across the net presently became unruly, and would play no more at a game which was merely intended, it seemed, to provide their opponents with talk of a coquettish character. Wilbur ardently wished that Winona could have been there to hear this talk, because the peerless young things freely used the expletive "Darn!" after inept strokes. Still they bored him. He would rather have been on the links.
He confessed at last to his little court that he much preferred golf to tennis. Patricia said that she had taken up golf, and that he must coach her over the Newbern course. The dark-eyed girl at once said that she was about to take up golf, and would need even more coaching than Patricia. Once they both searched him—while the game waited—for class pins, which they meant to appropriate. They found him singularly devoid of these. He never even knew definitely what they were looking for.
He was glad when refreshments were served on the lawn, and ate sandwiches in a wholehearted manner that disturbed Winona, who felt that at these affairs one should eat daintily, absently, as if elevated converse were the sole object and food but an incident. Wilbur ate as if he were hungry—had come there for food. Even now he was not free from the annoying attentions of Patricia and her little friends. They not only brought him other sandwiches and other cake and other lemonade, which he could have condoned, but they chattered so incessantly at him while he ate that only by an effort of concentration could he ignore them for the food. Florrie said that he was brutal to women. She was also heard to say—Winona heard it—that he was an awfully stunning chap. Harvey D. Whipple was now a member of the party, beaming proudly upon his son. And Sharon Whipple came presently to survey the group. He winked at Wilbur, who winked in return.
After refreshments the young gentlemen withdrew to smoke. They withdrew unostentatiously, through a pergola, round a clump of shrubbery, and on to the stables, where Merle revealed a silver cigarette case, from which he bestowed cigarettes upon them. They lighted these and talked as men of the world.
"Those chickens make me sick," said the little friend of Merle quite frankly.
"Me, too!" said Wilbur.
They talked of horses, Merle displaying his new thoroughbred in the box stall, and of dogs and motor boats; and Merle and the other boy spoke in a strange jargon of their prep school, where you could smoke if you had the consent of your parents. Merle talked largely of his possessions and gay plans.
They were presently interrupted by the ladies, who, having withdrawn beyond the shrubbery clump to powder their noses from Florrie's gold vanity box, had discovered the smokers, and now threatened to tell if the gentlemen did not instantly return. So Merle's little friend said wearily that they must go back to the women, he supposed. And there was more tennis of a sort, more chatter. As Mrs. Harvey D. said, everything moved off splendidly.
Winona, when they left, felt that her charge had produced a favourable impression, and was amazed that he professed to be unmoved by this circumstance, even after being told, as the noble car wheeled them homeward, what the girl, Florrie, had said of him; and that Mrs. Harvey D. Whipple had said she had always known he was a sweet boy. He merely sniffed at the term and went on to disparage the little friends of Patricia.
"You told me not to say 'darn,'" he protested, "but those girls all said it about every other word."
"Not really?" said Winona, aghast.
"Darn this and darn that! And darn that ball! And darned old thing!" insisted the witness, imitatively.
"Oh, dear!" sighed Winona.
She wondered if Patricia could be getting in with a fast set. She was further worried about Patricia, because Miss Murtree, over the ice cream, had confided to her that the girl was a brainless coquette; that her highest ambition, freely stated, was to have a black velvet evening gown, a black picture hat, and a rope of pearls. Winona did not impart this item to Wilbur. He was already too little impressed with the Whipple state. Nor did she confide to him the singular remark of Sharon Whipple, delivered to her in hoarsely whispered confidence as Merle spoke at length to the group about his new horse.
"Ain't he the most languageous critter!" had been Sharon's words.
And Winona had thought Merle spoke so prettily and with such easy confidence. Instead of regaling Wilbur with this gossip she insinuated his need for flannel trousers, sport shirts with rolling collars, tennis shoes of white. She found him adamant in his resolve to buy no further clothes which could have but a spectacular value.
To no one that day, except to Wilbur Cowan himself, had it occurred that Merle Whipple's birthday would also be the birthday of his twin brother.
Winona hoped that some trace of the day's new elegance would survive into Wilbur's professional life, but in this she suffered disappointment. He refused to wear, save on state occasions, any of the beautiful new garments, and again went forth in the cap and dingy sneakers, the trousers without character, and the indeterminate sweater which would persist in looking soiled even after relentless washing.
Not even for golf with Patricia Whipple would he sound a higher note in apparel. Patricia came to the course, accompanied by the dark girl, who said she was mad about golf, and over the eighteen holes each strove for his exclusive attention. They bored him vastly. He became mad about golf himself, because they talked noisily of other subjects and forgot his directions, especially the dark girl, who was mad about a great many things. She proved to be a trial. She was still so hopeless at the sport that at each shot she had to have her hands placed for her in the correct grip. The other two were glad when she was called home, so that Patricia could enjoy the undivided attention of the coach. The coach was glad, but only because his boredom was diminished by half; and Patricia, after two mornings alone with him, decided that she knew all of golf that was desirable.
The coach was too stubbornly businesslike; regarded her, she detected, merely as someone who had a lot to learn about the game. And the going of her little friend had taken a zest from the pursuit of this determinedly golfing and unresponsive male. He was relieved when she abandoned the sport and when he knew she had gone back to school. Sometimes on the course when he watched her wild swings a trick of memory brought her back to him as the bony little girl in his own clothes—she was still bony, though longer—with her chopped-off hair and boyish swagger. Then for a moment he would feel friendly, and smile at her in comradeship, but she always spoiled this when she spoke in her grand new manner of a grown-up lady.
Only Winona grieved when these golf sessions were no more. She wondered if Patricia had not been shocked by some unguarded expression from Wilbur. She had heard that speech becomes regrettably loose in the heat of this sport. He sought to reassure her.
"I never said the least wrong thing," he insisted. "But she did, you bet! 'Darn' and 'gosh' and everything like that, and you ought to have heard her once when she missed an easy putt. She said worse than 'darn!' She blazed out and said—"
"Don't tell me!" protested shuddering Winona. She wondered if Patricia's people shouldn't be warned. She was now persuaded that golf endangered the morals of the young. It had been bad enough when it seemed merely to encourage the wearing of nondescript clothes. But if it led to language—?
Yet she was fated to discover that the world offered worse than golf, for Wilbur Cowan had not yet completed, in the process of his desultory education, the out-of-doors curriculum offered by even the little world of Newbern. He was to take up an entirely new study, with the whole-hearted enthusiasm that had made him an adept at linotypes, gas engines, and the sport of kings. Not yet, in Winona's view, had he actually gone down into the depths of social obliquity; but she soon knew he had made the joyous descent.
The dreadful secret was revealed when he appeared for his supper one evening with a black eye. That is, it would have been known technically as a black eye—even Winona knew what to call it. Actually it was an eye of many colours, shading delicately from pale yellow at the edge to richest variegated purple at the centre. The eye itself—it was the right—was all but closed by the gorgeously puffed tissue surrounding it, and of no practical use to its owner. The still capable left eye, instead of revealing concern for this ignominy, gleamed a lively pride in its overwhelming completeness. The malign eye was worn proudly as a badge of honour, so proudly that the wearer, after Winona's first outcry of horror, bubbled vaingloriously of how he had achieved the stigma by stepping into one of Spike Brennon's straight lefts. Nothing less than that!
Winona, conceiving that this talk was meant to describe an accident of the most innocent character, demanded further details; wishing to be told what a straight left was; why a person named Spike Brennon kept such things about; and how Wilbur had been so careless as to step into one. She instinctively pictured a straight left to be something like an open door into which the victim had stepped in the dark. Her enlightenment was appalling. When the boy had zestfully pictured with pantomime of the most informing sort she not only knew what a straight left was, but she knew that Wilbur Cowan, in stepping into one—in placing himself where by any chance he could step into one—had flung off the ultimate restraint of decency.
It amounted to nothing less, she gathered, than that her charge had formed a sinister alliance with a degraded prize-fighter, a low bully who for hire and amid the foulest surroundings pandered to the basest instincts of his fellowmen by disgusting exhibitions of brute force. As if that were not enough, this low creature had fallen lower in the social scale, if that were possible, by tending bar in the unspeakable den of Pegleg McCarron. It was of no use for Wilbur to explain to her that his new hero chose this humble avocation because it afforded him leisure for training between his fights; that he didn't drink or smoke, but kept himself in good condition; that it was a fine chance to learn how to box, because Spike needed sparring partners.
"Oh, it's terrible!" cried Winona. "A debased creature like that!"
"You ought to see him stripped!" rejoined the boy in quick pride.
This closed the interview. Later she refused more than a swift glance of dismay at the photograph of the bully proudly displayed to her by the recipient. With one eye widened in admiration, he thrust it without warning full into her gaze, whereupon she had gaspingly fled, not even noting the inscription of which the boy was especially proud: "To my friend, Mr. Wilbur Cowan, from his friend, Eddie—Spike—Brennon, 133 lbs. ringside." It was a spirited likeness of the hero, though taken some years before, when he was in the prime of a ring career now, alas, tapering to obscurity.
Spike stood with the left shoulder slightly raised, the left foot advanced, the slightly bent left arm with its clenched fist suggestively extended. His head was slanted to bring his chin down and in. The right shoulder was depressed, and the praiseworthy right arm lay in watchful repose across his chest. The tense gaze expressed absolute singleness of purpose—a hostile purpose. These details were lost upon Winona. She had noted only that the creature's costume consisted of the flags of the United States and Ireland tastefully combined to form a simple loin cloth. Had she raised the boy for this?
The deplored intimacy had begun on a morning when Wilbur was early abroad salvaging golf balls from certain obscure nooks of the course where Newbern's minor players were too likely to abandon the search for them on account of tall grass, snakes, poison ivy, and other deterrents. Along the course at a brisk trot had come a sweatered figure, with cap pulled low, a man of lined and battered visage, who seemed to trot with a purpose, and yet with a purpose not to be discerned, for none pursued him and he appeared to pursue no one.
He had stopped amiably to chat with the boy. He was sweating profusely, and chewed gum. It may be said that he was not the proud young Spike Brennon of the photograph. He was all of twenty-five, and his later years had told. Where once had been the bridge of his nose was now a sharp indentation. One ear was weirdly enlarged; and his mouth, though he spoke through narrowly opened lips, glittered in the morning sun with the sheen of purest gold. Wilbur Cowan was instantly enmeshed by this new personality.
The runner wished to know what he was looking for. Being told golf balls, he demanded "What for?" It seemed never to have occurred to him that there would be an object in looking for golf balls. He curiously handled and weighed a ball in his brown and hairy hand.
"So that's the little joker, is it? I often seen 'em knockin' up flies with it, but I ain't never been close to one. Say, that pill could hurt you if it come right!"
He was instructed briefly in the capacity of moving balls to inflict pain, and more particularly as to their market value. As the boy talked the sweating man looked him over with shrewd, half-shut eyes.
"Ever had the gloves on, kid?" he demanded at last.
It appeared in a moment that he meant boxing gloves; not gloves in which to play golf.
"No, sir," said Wilbur.
"You look good. Come down to the store at three o'clock. Mebbe you can give me a work-out."
Quite astonishingly it appeared then that when he said the store he was meaning the low saloon of Pegleg McCarron; that he did road work every morning and wanted quick young lads to give him a work-out with the gloves in the afternoon, because even dubs was better than shadow boxing or just punching the bag all the time. If they couldn't box-fight they could wrestle.
So Wilbur had gone to the store that afternoon, and for many succeeding afternoons, to learn the fascinating new game in a shed that served McCarron as storeroom. The new hero had here certain paraphernalia of his delightful calling—a punching bag, small dumb-bells, a skipping rope, boxing gloves. Here the neophyte had been taught the niceties of feint and guard and lead, of the right cross, the uppercut, the straight left, to duck, to side-step, to shift lightly on his feet, to stop protruding his jaw in cordial invitation, to keep his stomach covered. He proved attentive and willing and quick. He was soon chewing gum as Spike Brennon chewed it, and had his hair clipped in Brennon manner. He lived his days and his nights in dreams of delivering or evading blows. Often while dressing of a morning he would stop to punish an invisible opponent, doing an elaborate dance the while. It was better than linotypes or motor busses.
In the early days of this new study he had been fearful of hurting Spike Brennon. He felt that his blows were too powerful, especially that from the right fist when it should curve over Spike's left shoulder to stop on his jaw. But he learned that when his glove reached the right place Spike's jaw had for some time not been there. Spike scorned his efforts.
"Stop it, kid! You might as well send me a pitcher postcard that it's comin'. You got to hit from where you are—you can't stop to draw back. Use your left more. G'wan now, mix it! Mix it!"
They would mix it until the boy was panting. Then while he sat on a beer keg until he should be in breath again the unwinded Spike would skip the rope—a girl's skipping rope—or shadow-box about the room with intricate dance steps, raining quick blows upon a ghostly boxer who was invariably beaten; or with smaller gloves he would cause the inflated bag to play lively tunes upon the ceiling of its support. After an hour of this, when both were sweating, they would go to a sheltered spot beyond the shed to play cold water upon each other's soaped forms.
There had been six weeks of this before the boy's dreadful secret was revealed to Winona; six weeks before he appeared to startle her with one eye radiating the rich hues of a ripened eggplant. It had been simple enough. He had seen his chance to step in and punish Spike, and he had stepped—and Spike's straight left had been there.
"You handed yourself that one, kid," Spike had said, applying raw beef to it after their rubdown.
Wilbur had removed the beef after leaving the store. He didn't want the thing to go down too soon. It was an honourable mark, wasn't it? Nothing to make the fuss about that Winona had made. Of course you had to go to Pegleg McCarron's to do the boxing, but Spike had warned him never to drink if he expected to get anywhere in this particular trade; not even to smoke. That he had entirely abandoned the use of tobacco at Spike's command should—he considered—have commended his hero to Winona's favourable notice. He wore the eye proudly in the public gaze; regretted its passing as it began to pale into merely rainbow tints.
But Winona took steps. She was not going to see him die, perish morally, without an effort to save him. She decided that Sharon Whipple would be the one to consult. Sharon liked the boy—had taken an interest in him. Perhaps words in time from him might avert the calamity, especially after her father had refused to be concerned.
"Prize fighting!" said the judge, scornfully. "What'll he be doing next? Never settles down to anything. Jack-of-all-trades and good at none."
It was no use hoping for help from a man who thought fighting was foolish for the boy merely because he would not earnestly apply himself to it.
She went to Sharon Whipple, and Sharon listened even more sympathetically than she had hoped he would. He seemed genuinely shocked that such things had been secretly going on in the life of his young friend. He clicked deprecatingly with his tongue as Winona became detailed in her narrative.
"My great glory!" he exclaimed at last. "You mean to say they mix it down there every afternoon?"
"Every single day," confirmed Winona. "He's been going to that low dive for weeks and weeks. Think of the debasing associations!"
"Just think of it!" said Sharon, impatiently. "Every afternoon—and me not hearing a word of it!"
"If you could only say a word to him," besought Winona. "Coming from you it might have an influence for good."
"I will, I will!" promised Sharon, fervently, and there was a gleam of honest determination in his quick old eyes.
That very afternoon, in Pegleg McCarron's shed, he said words to Wilbur that might have an influence for good.
"Quit sticking your jaw out that way or he'll knock it off!" had been his first advice. And again: "Cover up that stomach—you want to get killed?" He was sitting at one end of the arena, on a plank supported by the ends of two beer kegs, and he held open a large, thick, respectable gold watch. "Time!" he called.
Beside him sat the red-eyed and disreputable Pegleg McCarron, who whacked the floor with the end of his crutch from time to time in testimony of his low pleasure.
The round closed with one of Wilbur Cowan's right crosses—started from not too far back—landing upon the jaw of Spike Brennon with what seemed to be a shattering impact. Sharon Whipple yelled and Pegleg McCarron pounded the floor in applause. Spike merely shook his head once.
"The kid's showing speed," he admitted, cordially. "If he just had something back of them punches!"
"It was a daisy!" exclaimed Sharon. "My suffering stars, what a daisy!"
"'Twas neatly placed!" said Pegleg.
"I'm surprised at you!" said Sharon later to the panting apprentice. "I'm surprised and grieved! You boys mixing it here every day for weeks and never letting on!"
"I never thought you'd like it," said Wilbur.
"Like it!" said Sharon. He said it unctuously. "And say, don't you let on to Miss Penniman that I set here and held the watch for you. I ain't wanting that to get out on me."
"No, sir," said Wilbur.
Later Sharon tried to avoid Winona one day on River Street, but when he saw that she would not be avoided he met her like a man.
"I've reasoned with the boy from time to time," he confessed, gloomily, "but he's self-headed, talking huge high about being a good lightweight and all that. I don't know—mebbe I haven't taken just the right tack with him yet."
Winona thought him curiously evasive in manner. She believed that he feared the worst for the boy, but was concealing it from her.
"His eye is almost well where that cowardly bully struck him," she told Sharon. "If only we could get him into something where he could hold his head up."
"He does that too much now," began Sharon, impulsively, but stopped, floundering. "I mean he ain't enough ashamed," he concluded feebly, and feigned that someone had called him imperatively from the door of the First National Bank.
From time to time Spike's boxing manner grew tense for a period of days. He tightened up, as Sharon put it, and left a sore and battered apprentice while he went off to some distant larger town to fight, stepping nonchalantly aboard the six-fifty-eight with his fighting trunks and shoes wrapped in a copy of the Newbern Advance, and shifting his gum as he said good-bye to Wilbur, who would come down to see him off.
Sometimes Spike returned from these sorties unscathed and with money. Oftener he came back without money and with a face—from abrasive thrusts—looking as if a careless golfer had gone over him and neglected to replace the divots. After these times there were likely to follow complicated episodes of dentistry at the office of Doctor Patten. These would render the invincible smile of Spike more refulgent than ever.
The next birthday of Merle Whipple was celebrated at a time when Spike had been particularly painstaking in view of an approaching combat. Not only did he leave his young friend with an eye that compelled the notice, an eye lavishly displaying all the tints yet revealed by spectroscopic analysis, and which by itself would have rendered him socially undesirable, but he bore a swollen nose and a split and puffy lip; bore them proudly, it should be said, and was not enough cast down, in Winona's opinion, that his shameful wounds would deter him from mingling with decent folk. Indeed, Winona had to be outspoken before she convinced him that a birthday party was now no place for him. He would have gone without misgiving, and would have pridefully recounted the sickening details of that last round in which Spike Brennon had permitted himself to fancy he faced a veritable antagonist. Still he cared little for the festivity.
He saw Patricia from a distance in River Street, but pulled the dingy cap lower and avoided her notice. She was still bony and animated and looked quite capable of commanding his attendance over eighteen holes of the most utterly futile golf in all the world. His only real regret in the matter of his facial blemishes was that Spike came back with the mere loser's end of an inconsiderable purse, and had to suffer another infliction of the most intricate bridge work at the hands of Doctor Patten before he could properly enjoy at the board of T-bone Tommy that diet so essential to active men of affairs.
CHAPTER XII
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."