[adapted]

by
P. G. Wodehouse

The young man came into the smoking room of the clubhouse, and threw his bag with a loud noise on the floor. He sat down sadly in an armchair and pressed the bell.

“Waiter!”

“Sir?”

The young man pointed at the bag, clearly showing he did not like it.

“You can have these clubs,” he said. “Take them away. If you do not want them yourself, give them to one of the caddies.”

Across the room, the Oldest Member looked at him with deep sadness through the smoke from his pipe. His eye was deep and dreamy — the eye of a man who, as the poet says, has watched Golf calmly and has seen it all.

“Are you giving up golf?” he said.

He was not completely surprised at such an attitude from the young man, for from his high place on the terrace above the ninth green he had watched him start out on the afternoon round and had seen him lose a couple of balls in the lake at the second hole after taking seven shots at the first.

“Yes!” cried the young man angrily. “For ever, dammit! Silly game! Awful, stupid, silly game! Nothing but a waste of time.”

The Sage made a face.

“Do not say that, my boy.”

But I will say it. What good is golf? Life is serious and life is hard. We live in a practical time. All around us we see foreign competition making things hard. And we spend our time playing golf! What do we get out of it? Is golf useful at all? That’s what I’m asking you. Can you give me one example where spending so much time on this terrible game has done a man any real good?

The wise man smiled gently.

“I could name a thousand of them.”

“One is enough.”

“I will choose,” said the wise man, “from the many memories that quickly come to my mind, the story of Cuthbert Banks.”

I have never heard of him.

“Do not worry,” said the Oldest Member. “You are going to hear about him now.”

It was in the pretty little town of Wood Hills (said the Oldest Member) that the things happened which I am going to tell you about. Even if you have never been in Wood Hills, that very nice place in the suburbs is probably known to you by name. It is at a good distance from the city, and it brings together, in a nice way, the good parts of town life with the nice country around it and the clean, healthy air of the country.

Its people live in large and comfortable houses, standing in their own gardens, and enjoy so many good things and comforts, such as gravel soil, main drains, electric lights, telephones, baths (hot and cold), and the company’s own water, that you could be forgiven for thinking life is so perfect for them that nothing could be added to make their lives better.

Mrs. Willoughby Smethurst did not have such a wrong idea. She realized that what Wood Hills needed to make it perfect was Culture. Material comforts are very good, but, if the best goal is to be reached, the Soul also needs a chance too, and it was Mrs. Smethurst’s firm decision that never, while she had her strength, should the Soul be given the losing end. It was her plan to make Wood Hills a centre of all that was most cultured and polite, and, golly! how she had succeeded. Under her leadership the Wood Hills Literary and Debating Society had three times as many members.

But there is always a small problem, a worm in the salad. The local golf club, a group that Mrs. Smethurst strongly disliked, had also made the number of members three times bigger; and the split in the community into two rival sides, the Golfers and the Cultured, had become more clear than ever. This division, always serious, had now grown into a big split. The rival groups treated each other in a cold and unfriendly way.

Unlucky events came and made the gap wider. Mrs. Smethurst’s house was next to the golf course, standing to the right of the fourth tee; and, because the Literary Society often had visiting speakers, many a golfer hit his drive badly because of sudden loud clapping that started at the same time as he was swinging down.

And not long before this story begins a sliced golf ball, flying fast in through the open window, had come very near to stopping Raymond Parsloe Devine, a young writer who was becoming famous (who at that moment jumped a whole foot and a half) from any further work at his writing. Two inches, indeed, to the right, and Raymond would surely have died.

To make things worse, the front-door bell rang right away, and the maid showed in a nice-looking young man in a sweater and baggy shorts who, saying sorry but speaking firmly, said he must play his ball where it was; and, with the shock that the lecturer had just escaped danger, and with the sight of the stranger standing on the table and hitting away with a golf club, the afternoon’s session had to be called a complete failure. Mr. Devine’s decision, from which no argument could move him, to give the rest of his lecture in the coal cellar gave the meeting such a shock that it never got back to normal.

I have talked about this event for a while, because it was the way to introduce Cuthbert Banks to Mrs. Smethurst’s niece, Adeline. As Cuthbert, for he was the one who had almost reduced the list of young novelists by one, jumped down from the table after his shot, he suddenly noticed that a beautiful girl was looking at him closely.

In fact, everyone in the room was looking at him carefully, no one more than Raymond Parsloe Devine, but none of the others were beautiful girls. Although the members of the Wood Hills Literary Society were very clever, they were not good-looking, and, to Cuthbert’s excited eyes, Adeline Smethurst stood out like a jewel in a pile of coal.

He had never seen her before, because she had only arrived at her aunt’s house the day before, but he was quite sure that life, even when living in the middle of gravel soil, main drainage, and the company’s own water, was going to be a very poor thing if he did not see her again. Yes, Cuthbert was in love; and it is interesting to record, to show what this tender feeling does to a man’s game, that twenty minutes after he met Adeline he got the short eleventh hole in one, and very nearly got a three on the four-hundred-yard twelfth.

I will quickly skip over the middle parts of Cuthbert’s trying to win Adeline’s love and come to the moment when — at the yearly ball to help the local Cottage Hospital, the only time in the year when, so to speak, the lion lay down with the lamb, and the Golfers and the Cultured met as easy friends, their differences put aside for a while — he asked Adeline to marry him and was badly stopped.

That pretty, serious girl could not see him with a telescope.

“Mr. Banks,” she said, “I will speak honestly.”

“Go right ahead,” agreed Cuthbert.

“As I am very sure of — ”

“I know. About the honour and the nice words and all that. But, skipping over all that nonsense, what seems to be the problem? I love you so much — ”

Love is not everything.

“You are wrong,” said Cuthbert, seriously. “You are quite wrong about it. Love—” And he was about to talk more about the subject when she stopped him.

I am a girl with big dreams.

“And it is very nice, too,” said Cuthbert.

“I am a girl with big dreams,” said Adeline again, “and I know that the coming true of my dreams must come through my husband. I am very ordinary myself — ”

“What!” cried Cuthbert. “You ordinary? Why, you are a pearl among women, the queen of women. You can’t have looked in a mirror lately. You stand alone. Simply alone. You make the rest look old and worn.”

“Well,” said Adeline, becoming a little kinder, “I think I am quite pretty — ”

Anybody who would only say you are quite good-looking would describe the Taj Mahal as a very nice tomb.

“But that is not the main point. What I mean is, if I marry a nobody, I will be a nobody myself forever. And I would rather die than be a nobody.”

“And, if I understand your thinking, you think that that lets me out?”

“Well, really, Mr. Banks, have you done anything, or will you ever do anything that is useful at all?”

Cuthbert paused.

“It’s true,” he said, “I didn’t finish in the first ten in the Open, and I lost in the semi-final of the Amateur, but I won the French Open last year.”

“The what?”

“The French Open Championship. It is golf, you know.”

“Golf! You waste all your time playing golf. I like a man who is more spiritual and more clever.”

A sudden feeling of jealousy hurt Cuthbert’s heart.

“Like that man Devine?” he said, in an angry voice.

“Mr. Devine,” said Adeline, blushing a little, “will be a great man. Already he has done a lot. The critics say that he is more like a Russian than any other young English writer.”

“And is that good?”