Read Online Nothing Serious by P.G. Wodehouse - Free Book Online

players, poor
souls. Abandon this mad enterprise, Ambrose,” I pleaded, “and seek for some
sweet girl with a loving disposition and a low handicap.”
    “I won’t.
My stethoscope is still in the ring. I don’t care if these germs are her
natural mates. I defy them. Whatever the odds, however sticky the going, I
shall continue to do my stuff. But, as I say, the course is heavily trapped and
one will need to be at the top of one’s form. Looking over the field, I think
my most formidable rival is a pin-headed string bean of a fellow named Dwight
Messmore. You know him?”
    “By
sight. She would naturally be attracted by him. I believe he is very expert at
this outdoor ping-pong.”
    “In the
running for a place in the Davis Cup team, they tell me.”
    “What
is the Davis Cup team?”
    “A team
that plays for a sort of cup they have.”
    “They
have cups, do they, in the world—or sub-world—of tennis? And what are you
proposing to do to foil this Davis Cup addict?”
    “Ah,
there you have me. I keep asking her to let me give her a golf lesson. I feel
that in the pure surroundings of the practice tee her true self would come to
the surface, causing her to recoil with loathing from men like Dwight Messmore.
But she scoffs at the suggestion. She says golf is a footing game and she can’t
understand how any except the half-witted can find pleasure in it.”
    “And
that appalling speech did not quench your love?”
    “Of
course it didn’t quench my love. A love like mine doesn’t go around getting
itself quenched. But I admit that the situation is sticky, and I shall have to
survey it from every angle and take steps.”
    It was
not until several weeks had elapsed, a period in which I had seen nothing of
him, that I learned with a sickening qualm of horror how awful were the steps
which he had decided to take.
    He
became a tennis player.
     
    It was,
of course, as I learned subsequently, not without prolonged and earnest
wrestling with his conscience that a man like Ambrose Gussett, playing even
then to a handicap of two and destined in the near future to be scratch, had
been able to bring himself to jettison all the principles of a lifetime and
plunge into the abyss. Later, when the madness had passed and he was once more
hitting them sweetly off the tee, he told me that the struggle had been
terrific. But in the end infatuation had proved too strong. If, he said to
himself, it was necessary in order to win Evangeline Tewkesbury to become a
tennis player, a tennis player he would be.
    And,
inquiries having informed him that the quickest way of accomplishing this
degradation was to put himself in the hands of a professional, he turned up his
coat collar, pulled down the brim of his hat, and snaked off to the lair where
the man plied his dark trade. And presently he found himself facing a net with
a racquet in his hand. Or, rather, hands, for naturally he had assumed the
orthodox interlocking grip.
    This
led the professional to make his first criticism.
    “You
hold the racquet in one hand only,” he said.
    Ambrose
was astounded, but he was here to learn, so he followed out the instruction,
and having done so peered about him, puzzled.
    “Where,”
he asked, “is the flag?”
    “Flag?”
said the professional. “But it isn’t the fourth of July.”
    “I can’t
shoot unless I see the flag.”
    The professional
was now betraying open bewilderment. He came up to the net and peered at
Ambrose over it like someone inspecting a new arrival at the Zoo.
    “I don’t
get this about flags. We don’t use flags in tennis. Have you never played
tennis? Never? Most extraordinary. Are there other games?”
    “I play
golf.”
    “Golf?
Golf? Ah, yes, of course. What they call cow-pasture pool.”
    Ambrose
stiffened.
    “What who call cow-pasture pool?”
    “All
right-thinking men. Well, well, well! Well, listen,” said the professional. “It
looks to me as if our best plan would be to start right at the beginning.