Page:Punch (Volume 147).pdf/142

138 

As a matter of fact she was my gardener's chauffeur-son's girl. The junior parent having been living chiefly on my garden or in my kitchen, now being at the end of his resources, it was suggested that I should give his Amy a job. The proposal came from my wife, who had been victualling Amy's mother and Amy's baby sister for some weeks. An illuminating correspondence in the Press had done the rest.

For her first appointment at the tee Amy was nearly twenty minutes late, and when she arrived it was in a mauve skirt, green stockings, an ochre sporting coat and a hat which had once been my wife's. Seen against the background of the native boy caddies, Amy might have been described as picturesque.

"Mother says," said Amy, as we introduced ourselves—"Mother says she's sorry you should be kep', but baby's used to going off, me rocking 'im, and she was that busy, it being the day what she mostly washes."

Very well, Amy," I said, realising the situation, "we must do better next time. The gentleman I was to play would not wait; but perhaps, if we just went round together, you could get an idea of your—your duties."

Amy accepted my suggestion and my bag of clubs with an abstracted sniff. She seemed to be more closely engaged in retorting by manual signals to the distant provocations of her male rivals.

"Now, Amy," I reminded her gently, "you must learn how to make a tee."

Amy turned reluctantly and stared over my bent back at the Miss Galbraiths, who were just starting for the ladies' course.

"First of all," I began more firmly, "you take a pinch of sand from this box—so." Tee-making is not my forte, and I was painfully conscious that I worked under the critical gaze of fully twenty expert eyes.

"If you please," said Amy in a brighter mood, "mother says I'll want some things to clean up the sticks with."

I rose from my knees with a cricked back, but I had my Purple Spot neatly balanced on a really creditable mound.

"We shall come to that presently, Amy." I explained. "When I have finished playing you can take the clubs and make them nice and bright with emery-paper."

Amy did not take this proposal encouragingly.

"Mother says I should want some turps," she informed me, "and brickdus' and some whitin' to finish, and some mothelay. She says she don't 'old with the way Jimmy Baines and the rest of 'em does it. Mother says the sticks should be cleaned proper, as they oughter be. She says she'd 'ave give me the things, only she ain't got any, and I was to ask if it was convenience to you to spare me the money to go to the village and get 'em. Then she'd show me 'ow."

I had discovered my driver behind Amy's back and was preparing to get away, but these views of Amy's mother were so complete an innovation that I paused. On the verge of a first drive I had never in my life stopped to consider the ethics of golf-club cleaning. Why had not Amy a pocket and a rag of sand-paper like resourceful Jimmy Baines? I don't remember to have ever read anything on the niceties of the art of scouring clubs. It is a subject on which the writers of golfing articles—prolific enough, as Heaven knows, about other and more negligible aspects of the game—seem to have adopted an attitude of studied reticence.

"Look here, Amy," I said rather severely, "you really must not talk. You must remember you are here to carry my clubs, not to tell me about your mother. My iron clubs must be cleaned precisely as they always have been cleaned. That is entirely your department of the game, and you must stand at least three yards further away or I shall probably kill you." Then I drove, sliced hideously, and landed in long grass a hundred yards to the right.

Some premonition feminine detachment prompted me to keep my eyes rigidly on the tuft which concealed my ball, as I strode forward. But half-way I turned. I felt Amy was not with me. She was standing precisely where I had left her, her hat off, her pink tongue stuck out in the direction of the caddies' shed.

"Amy!" I shouted, and the sound of my voice had an indescribably incongruous and humiliating echo. "Amy, come here at once; how dare—"

Amy came ambling across the fairway, hat in hand, my bag of clubs left where she had deposited them upside down in the tee-box for greater freedom in responding with gestures of defiance to the chaff of the enemy.

"Now look here," I said as Amy stood wonderingly before me; "I am very, very disappointed in you—very, very angry. You wanted to earn your living, I understood?"

Amy's brows darkened but her lips were slightly tremulous.

"Mother won't let me go into the laundry," she said sulkily, "cos father says I'm not sperienced enough, and Jimmy Baines give me 'is cheek, so I give it 'im back."

Thus we stood surveying the situation, my girl-caddie and I. There seemed at the moment only one sane way of ending it.

"Very well, Amy," I said dispassionately, "you had better run home and tell your mother—tell your mother to come up to the house after dinner, if there's anything she needs."

Amy resigned her position without a murmur; but before she went she extracted two paintless, weary-looking golf-balls from the pocket of her mauve skirt and offered me them for sixpence.

 

I know a wood on the top of a hill,
 * Hyacinth-carpeted March till May,

Where nights are wonderful, soft and still,
 * And a deep-sea twilight hangs all day;

The loving labour of fairy hands
 * Has made it heavenly fine to see

And just outside it the cottage stands,
 * The cottage that doesn't belong to me.
 * A cottage, mind,
 * And I'm sure you'd find
 * It was damp and dirty and very confined;

Oh, quite an ordinary keeper's cottage
 * That doesn't belong to me.

Creatures people the wood at night;
 * Peaceable animals come and play;

Pan's own pipes, if you hear aright,
 * Charm you on as you go your way;

And all the Arcady folk of yore
 * Make songs of the days that used to be,

Which carry perhaps to the cottage door,
 * The cottage that doesn't belong to me.
 * But it's miles from town
 * And it's tumble-down
 * And the woodwork's done and the slates are brown;

No one could really live in the cottage
 * That doesn't belong to me.

Fair be the towns by the river-side,
 * Maidenhead, Richmond, Henley, Kew,

Crammed with cottages far and wide,
 * The thing for people like me and you;

But I think of the haunting forest-lights
 * And a path that wanders from tree to tree,

Where the man of the cottage might walk o' nights,
 * The cottage that doesn't belong to me.
 * And it may be wrong,
 * But it won't be long
 * Before the feeling becomes too strong

And I'll go and jolly well get that cottage 
 * That doesn't belong to me.