The Wrong Twin Part 31

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 a.s.sertion 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, b.u.mping 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 bra.s.sy on that," he suggested, to drop the character of Sharon Whipple.

Merle tried the bra.s.sy, and they played out the hole. Merle made an eight.

"I should have had a six at most," he protested, "after that lovely long bra.s.sy 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."