The Clicking of Cuthbert | Page 3

with the
shock of the lecturer's narrow escape and the spectacle of the intruder
standing on the table and working away with a niblick, the afternoon's
session had to be classed as a complete frost. Mr. Devine's
determination, from which no argument could swerve him, to deliver
the rest of his lecture in the coal-cellar gave the meeting a jolt from
which it never recovered.
I have dwelt upon this incident, because it was the means of
introducing Cuthbert Banks to Mrs. Smethurst's niece, Adeline. As
Cuthbert, for it was he who had so nearly reduced the muster-roll of
rising novelists by one, hopped down from the table after his stroke, he
was suddenly aware that a beautiful girl was looking at him intently. As
a matter of fact, everyone in the room was looking at him intently, none
more so than Raymond Parsloe Devine, but none of the others were

beautiful girls. Long as the members of Wood Hills Literary Society
were on brain, they were short on looks, and, to Cuthbert's excited eye,
Adeline Smethurst stood out like a jewel in a pile of coke.
He had never seen her before, for she had only arrived at her aunt's
house on the previous day, but he was perfectly certain that life, even
when lived in the midst of gravel soil, main drainage, and company's
own water, was going to be a pretty poor affair if he did not see her
again. Yes, Cuthbert was in love: and it is interesting to record, as
showing the effect of the tender emotion on a man's game, that twenty
minutes after he had met Adeline he did the short eleventh in one, and
as near as a toucher got a three on the four-hundred-yard twelfth.
I will skip lightly over the intermediate stages of Cuthbert's courtship
and come to the moment when--at the annual ball in aid of the local
Cottage Hospital, the only occasion during the year on which the lion,
so to speak, lay down with the lamb, and the Golfers and the Cultured
met on terms of easy comradeship, their differences temporarily laid
aside--he proposed to Adeline and was badly stymied.
That fair, soulful girl could not see him with a spy-glass.
"Mr. Banks," she said, "I will speak frankly."
"Charge right ahead," assented Cuthbert.
"Deeply sensible as I am of----"
"I know. Of the honour and the compliment and all that. But, passing
lightly over all that guff, what seems to be the trouble? I love you to
distraction----"
"Love is not everything."
"You're wrong," said Cuthbert, earnestly. "You're right off it. Love----"
And he was about to dilate on the theme when she interrupted him.
"I am a girl of ambition."

"And very nice, too," said Cuthbert.
"I am a girl of ambition," repeated Adeline, "and I realize that the
fulfilment of my ambitions 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 your sex. You can't have been looking in a glass
lately. You stand alone. Simply alone. You make the rest look like
battered repaints."
"Well," said Adeline, softening a trifle, "I believe I am fairly
good-looking----"
"Anybody who was content to call you fairly good-looking would
describe the Taj Mahal as a pretty nifty tomb."
"But that is not the point. What I mean is, if I marry a nonentity I shall
be a nonentity myself for ever. And I would sooner die than be a
nonentity."
"And, if I follow your reasoning, you think that that lets me out?"
"Well, really, Mr. Banks, have you done anything, or are you likely
ever to do anything worth while?"
Cuthbert hesitated.
"It's true," he said, "I didn't finish in the first ten in the Open, and I was
knocked out in the semi-final of the Amateur, but I won the French
Open last year."
"The--what?"
"The French Open Championship. Golf, you know."
"Golf! You waste all your time playing golf. I admire a man who is
more spiritual, more intellectual."

A pang of jealousy rent Cuthbert's bosom.
"Like What's-his-name Devine?" he said, sullenly.
"Mr. Devine," replied Adeline, blushing faintly, "is going to be a great
man. Already he has achieved much. The critics say that he is more
Russian than any other young English writer."
"And is that good?"
"Of course it's good."
"I should have thought the wheeze would be to be more English than
any other young English writer."
"Nonsense! Who wants an English writer to be English? You've got to
be Russian or Spanish or something to be a real success. The mantle of
the great Russians has descended on Mr. Devine."
"From what I've heard of Russians, I should hate to have that happen to
me."
"There