"Pip" Part 40

"Why did you ask me to play with _you_, then?"

"I didn't think you ought to play with him," said Pip coolly. "He's an utter outsider."

"I shall play with whom I like," said Elsie hotly.

"All right," said Pip; "I'll tell him. What time do you want him to be down at the tee?"

Elsie, though not inexperienced in the management of young men, fairly gasped for breath. This slow-speaking, serious youth would, unless she could speedily extricate herself, either compel her to acknowledge herself defeated or else force her into an unpremeditated golf-match with a comparative stranger.

"I--I tell you I don't want to play with Mr. Gaythorne," she said.

"Oh, sorry!" replied Pip; "I thought you said you did. Very well, I'll tell him not to come, and you can play me instead."

Now, it is obviously unwise to continue to a.s.sert to a second party that you have a previous engagement with a third party when you have not, especially when your knowledge is shared by the second party. So Elsie did the only possible thing, and laughed.

"All right, Pip," she said; "I'll play you. Be down at the tee early and we'll get off before the rush begins. As it is, I shall be driven into all the time, playing with a duffer!"

Pip, quite unmoved, parried this insult with another.

"Right-o," he said. "What shall I give you--a half?"

Elsie smiled indulgently.

"As a favour," she replied, "and to preserve your masculine pride, I will play you level. Otherwise----"

Pip interrupted. He was not looking quite so serene as usual, and he puffed almost nervously at his pipe.

"What shall we play for?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"In a match," he explained, "it is usual to play for some small stake--a ball, or a bottle of----"

"Nonsense!" said Elsie decidedly.

"Not a bit; it's often done," said Pip. "What shall we play for?"

"We shall play for love."

"Love? Right!"

There was an awkward pause. Technical terms lead one into such pitfalls.

Elsie felt herself beginning to turn pink. Pip, who might have smoothed the situation over, made it worse by saying,--

"So it's to be a love-match?"

There was no mistaking Elsie's colour now. A blush ran flaming over her face in a great scarlet wave. But Pip proceeded quite calmly,--

"That's just what I want it to be. I'm glad you said that, though of course you didn't mean it in that way. You are a good golfer. On your day you can get round in, say, ninety. I am a rotter. I have only twice got round under a hundred. If I play you level to-morrow and beat you, will you--marry me?"

"_Pip!_"

Elsie was sincere enough now. She was genuinely astounded. She knew Pip for a man of blunt speech and direct methods, but she had hardly been prepared for this. She merely turned from red to white, and repeated her astonished cry,--

"_Pip!_"

Pip continued, quite coolly now,--

"Yes, I mean it. I have been in love with you from the first moment I saw you, the afternoon that I took you to the Blanes' garden-party. You remember?" The girl nodded gravely. "I was bowled over then, and I've wors.h.i.+pped you ever since. I suppose you knew that? Women are always said to know these things. Did you know?"

This was a long speech for Pip, but it drew no answer from Elsie.

"Did you know?" he repeated gently.

Elsie plucked a few bents from the sand around her and began to plait them with great care.

"Did you know?" asked Pip for the third time.

Elsie answered, without raising her eyes--

"Yes--at least, lately. But you never gave yourself away, Pip."

"I know that. I rather prided myself on it. I should have asked you long ago, only after the Governor's death I had to--work for a living. It's only recently I have become a man with money. Besides, I think these things ought to be kept sacred, just between--between the two, you know.

I haven't a very high opinion of myself, but I do think I can keep a secret. I wasn't going to have you talked about, even by friends.

However"--he brought his gaze back from the distant horizon with an effort--"we are wandering from the point. Will you play me a match, Elsie,--a love-match?"

Elsie raised her eyes for the first time.

"Pip, don't be absurd!"

"Absurd? Not a bit. I think it's a jolly sensible notion. I simply can't talk the sort of rot that men in love are supposed to talk--it isn't in me. All I can do is to make you a fair offer like this--a sort of challenge to single combat, you know. If I win, you give in to me; if you win, well, I shall have to chuck it, that's all."

"But Pip," said Elsie, "supposing I...."

Then she checked herself suddenly, leaving Pip to wonder what she had meant to say. He himself could see no flaw in the scheme. His own natural modesty prevented him from believing that Elsie, glorious creature, could ever desire to take him of her own free will, and consequently his simple mind had reverted to the primitive notion, inherent in most men, of marriage by conquest. His challenge to a golf-match struck him as an eminently sporting offer.

"I figured it out this way," he went on after a pause. "I said to myself, 'She will never marry me simply for the asking, of course'; so--what did you say?"

"Nothing." Elsie had suddenly ceased plaiting and parted her lips.

"So," continued Pip, "I said, 'The only way to make her give in will be to get the better of her in something--to show superiority over her in some way. It will be no use my trying to persuade her by arguments. I'm slow of speech, especially with women, and Elsie would simply talk me downstairs and into the street in about two minutes. A girl like her won't surrender without a struggle. Quite right too. I shall have to try something else. It mustn't be too one-sided either way, for if it's in her favour I shall lose, and if it's in mine she won't accept. It must be a fair match.'"

And so he continued, simply, honestly, laying bare to her all the mighty scheme whereby he proposed to overcome her stubborn resistance. He had first thought, he told her, of a single-wicket cricket-match, but had abandoned the project as being too greatly in his favour. "You keep a very straight bat for a girl," he said, "but you can never resist my slow curly one, that looks as if it were going to pitch outside the off stump, and doesn't. I know your weaknesses, you see," he added with a friendly smile.

"Yes, Pip," said Elsie, in a rather subdued tone, "some of them."

Pip then proceeded to enumerate the other tests of skill that had occurred to him. "I thought of croquet," he said, "but really croquet is such d--Well, anyhow, I don't think croquet would have done. Billiards is too fluky. Chess is piffle. There are lots of other games, but you are so--so weak!" (Elsie's slight frame stiffened indignantly at this.) "Then I thought of the golf-match, and I saw at once that that was the ticket. So I packed up my bag and wired for rooms at the hotel here, and have been waiting for you to arrive ever since the first of August."