JANE GETS OFF THE FAIRWAY
The side-door leading into the smoking-room opened, and the golf-club’s
popular and energetic secretary came trotting down the steps on to the
terrace above the ninth green. As he reached the gravel, a wandering
puff of wind blew the door to with a sharp report, and the Oldest
Member, who had been dozing in a chair over his _Wodehouse on the
Niblick_, unclosed his eyes, blinking in the strong light. He perceived
the secretary skimming to and fro like a questing dog.
“You have lost something?” he inquired, courteously.
“Yes, a book. I wish,” said the secretary, annoyed, “that people would
leave things alone. You haven’t seen a novel called _The Man with the
Missing Eyeball_ anywhere about, have you? I’ll swear I left it on one
of these seats when I went in to lunch.”
“You are better without it,” said the Sage, with a touch of austerity.
“I do not approve of these trashy works of fiction. How much more
profitably would your time be spent in mastering the contents of such a
volume as I hold in my hand. This is the real literature.”
The secretary drew nearer, peering discontentedly about him; and as he
approached the Oldest Member sniffed inquiringly.
“What,” he said, “is that odour of--? Ah, I see that you are wearing
them in your buttonhole. White violets,” he murmured. “White violets.
Dear me!”
The secretary smirked.
“A girl gave them to me,” he said, coyly. “Nice, aren’t they?” He
squinted down complacently at the flowers, thus missing a sudden
sinister gleam in the Oldest Member’s eye--a gleam which, had he been
on his guard, would have sent him scudding over the horizon; for it was
the gleam which told that the Sage had been reminded of a story.
“White violets,” said the Oldest Member, in a meditative voice. “A
curious coincidence that you should be wearing white violets and
looking for a work of fiction. The combination brings irresistibly to
my mind--”
Realising his peril too late, the secretary started violently. A gentle
hand urged him into the adjoining chair.
“--the story,” proceeded the Oldest Member, “of William Bates, Jane
Packard, and Rodney Spelvin.”
The secretary drew a deep breath of relief and the careworn look left
his face.
“It’s all right,” he said, briskly. “You told me that one only the
other day. I remember every word of it. Jane Packard got engaged to
Rodney Spelvin, the poet, but her better feelings prevailed in time,
and she broke it off and married Bates, who was a golfer. I recall the
whole thing distinctly. This man Bates was an unromantic sort of chap,
but he loved Jane Packard devotedly. Bless my soul, how it all comes
back to me! No need to tell it me at all!”
“What I am about to relate now,” said the sage, tightening his grip on
the other’s coat-sleeve, “is another story about William Bates, Jane
Packard, and Rodney Spelvin.”
* * * * *
Inasmuch (said the Oldest Member) as you have not forgotten the events
leading up to the marriage of William Bates and Jane Packard, I will
not repeat them. All I need say is that that curious spasm of romantic
sentiment which had caused Jane to fall temporarily under the spell of
a man who was not only a poet but actually a non-golfer, appeared to
have passed completely away, leaving no trace behind. From the day she
broke off her engagement to Spelvin and plighted her troth to young
Bates, nothing could have been more eminently sane and satisfactory
than her behaviour.
She seemed entirely her old self once more. Two hours after William had
led her down the aisle, she and he were out on the links, playing off
the final of the Mixed Foursomes which--and we all thought it the best
of omens for their married happiness--they won hands down. A deputation
of all that was best and fairest in the village then escorted them to
the station to see them off on their honeymoon, which was to be spent
in a series of visits to well-known courses throughout the country.
Before the train left, I took young William aside for a moment. I had
known both him and Jane since childhood, and the success of their union
was very near my heart.
“William,” I said, “a word with you.”
“Make it snappy,” said William.
“You have learned by this time,” I said, “that there is a strong
romantic streak in Jane. It may not appear on the surface, but it is
there. And this romantic streak will cause her, like so many wives,
to attach an exaggerated importance to what may seem to you trivial
things. She will expect from her husband not only love and a constant
tender solicitude--”
“Speed it up,” urged William.
“What I am trying to say is that, after the habit of wives, she will
expect you to remember each year the anniversary of your wedding day,
and will be madder than a wet hen if you forget it.”
“That’s all right. I thought of that myself.”
“It is not all right,” I insisted. “Unless you take the most earnest
precautions, you are absolutely certain to forget. A year from now you
will come down to breakfast and Jane will say to you, ‘Do you know
what day it is to-day?’ and you will answer ‘Tuesday’ and reach for the
ham and eggs, thus inflicting on her gentle heart a wound from which it
will not readily recover.”
“Nothing like it,” said William, with extraordinary confidence. “I’ve
got a system calculated to beat the game every time. You know how fond
Jane is of white violets?”
“Is she?”
“She loves ’em. The bloke Spelvin used to give her a bunch every day.
That’s how I got the idea. Nothing like learning the shots from your
opponent. I’ve arranged with a florist that a bunch of white violets
is to be shipped to Jane every year on this day. I paid five years in
advance. I am therefore, speaking in the most conservative spirit, on
velvet. Even if I forget the day, the violets will be there to remind
me. I’ve looked at it from every angle, and I don’t see how it can
fail. Tell me frankly, is the scheme a wam or is it not?”
“A most excellent plan,” I said, relieved. And the next moment the
train came in. I left the station with my mind at rest. It seemed to me
that the only possible obstacle to the complete felicity of the young
couple had been removed.
* * * * *
Jane and William returned in due season from their honeymoon, and
settled down to the normal life of a healthy young couple. Each
day they did their round in the morning and their two rounds in the
afternoon, and after dinner they would sit hand in hand in the peaceful
dusk, reminding one another of the best shots they had brought off
at the various holes. Jane would describe to William how she got out
of the bunker on the fifth, and William would describe to Jane the
low raking wind-cheater he did on the seventh, and then for a moment
they would fall into that blissful silence which only true lovers
know, until William, illustrating his remarks with a walking-stick,
would show Jane how he did that pin-splitter with the mashie on the
sixteenth. An ideally happy union, one would have said.
But all the while a little cloud was gathering. As the anniversary of
their wedding day approached, a fear began to creep into Jane’s heart
that William was going to forget it. The perfect husband does not wait
till the dawning of the actual day to introduce the anniversary _motif_
into his conversation. As long as a week in advance he is apt to say,
dreamily, “About this time a year ago I was getting the old silk hat
polished up for the wedding,” or “Just about now, a year ago, they sent
home the sponge-bag trousers, as worn, and I tried them on in front of
the looking-glass.” But William said none of these things. Not even on
the night before the all-important date did he make any allusion to
it, and it was with a dull feeling of foreboding that Jane came down to
breakfast next morning.
She was first at the table, and was pouring out the coffee when William
entered. He opened the morning paper and started to peruse its contents
in silence. Not a yip did he let out of him to the effect that this was
the maddest, merriest day of all the glad new year.
“William,” said Jane.
“Hullo?”
“William,” said Jane, and her voice trembled a little, “what day is it
to-day?”
William looked at her over the paper surprised.
“Wednesday, old girl,” he replied. “Don’t you remember that yesterday
was Tuesday? Shocking memory you’ve got.”
He then reached out for the sausages and bacon and resumed his reading.
“Jane,” he said, suddenly. “Jane, old girl, there’s something I want to
tell you.”
“Yes?” said Jane, her heart beginning to flutter.
“Something important.”
“Yes?”
“It’s about these sausages. They are the very best,” said William,
earnestly, “that I have ever bitten. Where did you get them?”
“From Brownlow.”
“Stick to him,” said William.
Jane rose from the table and wandered out into the garden. The sun
shone gaily, but for her the day was bleak and cold. That William
loved her she did not doubt. But that streak of romance in her
demanded something more than mere placid love. And when she realised
that the poor mutt with whom she had linked her lot had forgotten
the anniversary of their wedding-day first crack out of the box, her
woman’s heart was so wounded that for two pins she could have beaned
him with a brick.
It was while she was still brooding in this hostile fashion that she
perceived the postman coming up the garden. She went to meet him, and
was handed a couple of circulars and a mysterious parcel. She broke the
string, and behold! a cardboard box containing white violets.
Jane was surprised. Who could be sending her white violets? No message
accompanied them. There was no clue whatever to their origin. Even the
name of the florist had been omitted.
“Now, who--?” mused Jane, and suddenly started as if she had received
a blow. Rodney Spelvin! Yes, it must be he. How many a bunch of white
violets had he given her in the brief course of their engagement! This
was his poetic way of showing her that he had not forgotten. All was
over between them, she had handed him his hat and given him the air,
but he still remembered.
Jane was a good and dutiful wife. She loved her William, and no
others need apply. Nevertheless, she was a woman. She looked about her
cautiously. There was nobody in sight. She streaked up to her room and
put the violets in water. And that night, before she went to bed, she
gazed at them for several minutes with eyes that were a little moist.
Poor Rodney! He could be nothing to her now, of course, but a dear lost
friend; but he had been a good old scout in his day.
* * * * *
It is not my purpose to weary you with repetitious detail in this
narrative. I will, therefore, merely state that the next year and
the next year and the year after that precisely the same thing took
place in the Bates’s home. Punctually every September the seventh
William placidly forgot, and punctually every September the seventh
the sender of the violets remembered. It was about a month after the
fifth anniversary, when William had got his handicap down to nine and
little Braid Vardon Bates, their only child, had celebrated his fourth
birthday, that Rodney Spelvin, who had hitherto confined himself to
poetry, broke out in a new place and inflicted upon the citizenry a
novel entitled _The Purple Fan_.
I saw the announcement of the publication in the papers; but beyond
a passing resolve that nothing would induce me to read the thing I
thought no more of the matter. It is always thus with life’s really
significant happenings. Fate sneaks its deadliest wallops in on us
with such seeming nonchalance. How could I guess what that book was to
do to the married happiness of Jane and William Bates?
In deciding not to read _The Purple Fan_ I had, I was to discover,
over-estimated my powers of resistance. Rodney Spelvin’s novel turned
out to be one of those things which it is impossible not to read.
Within a week of its appearance it had begun to go through the country
like Spanish influenza; and, much as I desired to avoid it, a perusal
was forced on me by sheer weight of mass-thinking. Every paper that
I picked up contained reviews of the book, references to it, letters
from the clergy denouncing it; and when I read that three hundred and
sixteen mothers had signed a petition to the authorities to have it
suppressed, I was reluctantly compelled to spring the necessary cash
and purchase a copy.
I had not expected to enjoy it, and I did not. Written in the
neodecadent style, which is so popular nowadays, its preciosity
offended me; and I particularly objected to its heroine, a young woman
of a type which, if met in real life, only ingrained chivalry could
have prevented a normal man from kicking extremely hard. Having skimmed
through it, I gave my copy to the man who came to inspect the drains.
If I had any feeling about the thing, it was a reflection that, if
Rodney Spelvin had had to get a novel out of his system, this was just
the sort of novel he was bound to write. I remember experiencing a
thankfulness that he had gone so entirely out of Jane’s life. How
little I knew!
* * * * *
Jane, like every other woman in the village, had bought her copy of
_The Purple Fan_. She read it surreptitiously, keeping it concealed,
when not in use, beneath a cushion on the Chesterfield. It was not its
general tone that caused her to do this, but rather the subconscious
feeling that she, a good wife, ought not to be deriving quite so much
enjoyment from the work of a man who had occupied for a time such a
romantic place in her life.
For Jane, unlike myself, adored the book. Eulalie French, its heroine,
whose appeal I had so missed, seemed to her the most fascinating
creature she had ever encountered.
She had read the thing through six times when, going up to town one day
to do some shopping, she ran into Rodney Spelvin. They found themselves
standing side by side on the pavement, waiting for the traffic to pass.
“Rodney!” gasped Jane.
It was a difficult moment for Rodney Spelvin. Five years had passed
since he had last seen Jane, and in those five years so many delightful
creatures had made a fuss of him that the memory of the girl to whom
he had once been engaged for a few weeks had become a little blurred.
In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he had forgotten Jane
altogether. The fact that she had addressed him by his first name
seemed to argue that they must have met at some time somewhere; but,
though he strained his brain, absolutely nothing stirred.
The situation was one that might have embarrassed another man, but
Rodney Spelvin was a quick thinker. He saw at a glance that Jane was an
extremely pretty girl, and it was his guiding rule in life never to let
anything like that get past him. So he clasped her hand warmly, allowed
an expression of amazed delight to sweep over his face, and gazed
tensely into her eyes.
“You!” he murmured, playing it safe. “You, little one!”
Jane stood five feet seven in her stockings and had a fore-arm like the
village blacksmith’s, but she liked being called “little one.”
“How strange that we should meet like this!” she said, blushing
brightly.
“After all these years,” said Rodney Spelvin, taking a chance. It would
be a nuisance if it turned out that they had met at a studio-party
the day before yesterday, but something seemed to tell him that she
dated back a goodish way. Besides, even if they had met the day before
yesterday, he could get out of it by saying that the hours had seemed
like years. For you cannot stymie these modern poets. The boys are
there.
“More than five,” murmured Jane.
“Now where the deuce was I five years ago?” Rodney Spelvin asked
himself.
Jane looked down at the pavement and shuffled her left shoe nervously.
“I got the violets, Rodney,” she said.
Rodney Spelvin was considerably fogged, but he came back strongly.
“That’s good!” he said. “You got the violets? That’s capital. I was
wondering if you would get the violets.”
“It was like you to send them.”
Rodney blinked, but recovered himself immediately. He waved his hand
with a careless gesture, indicative of restrained nobility.
“Oh, as to that--!”
“Especially as I’m afraid I treated you rather badly. But it really was
for the happiness of both of us that I broke off the engagement. You do
understand that, don’t you?”
A light broke upon Rodney Spelvin. He had been confident that it would
if he only stalled along for a while. Now he placed this girl. She was
Jane something, the girl he had been engaged to. By Jove, yes. He knew
where he was now.
“Do not let us speak of it,” he said, registering pain. It was quite
easy for him to do this. All there was to it was tightening the lips
and drawing up the left eyebrow. He had practised it in front of his
mirror, for a fellow never knew when it might not come in useful.
“So you didn’t forget me, Rodney?”
“Forget you!”
There was a short pause.
“I read your novel,” said Jane. “I loved it.”
She blushed again, and the colour in her cheeks made her look so
remarkably pretty that Rodney began to feel some of the emotions which
had stirred him five years ago. He decided that this was a good thing
and wanted pushing along.
“I hoped that you might,” he said in a low voice, massaging her
hand. He broke off and directed into her eyes a look of such squashy
sentimentality that Jane reeled where she stood. “I wrote it for you,”
he added, simply.
Jane gasped.
“For me?”
“I supposed you would have guessed,” said Rodney. “Surely you saw the
dedication?”
_The Purple Fan_ had been dedicated, after Rodney Spelvin’s eminently
prudent fashion, to “One Who Will Understand.” He had frequently been
grateful for the happy inspiration.
“The dedication?”
“‘To One Who Will Understand,’” said Rodney, softly. “Who would that be
but you?”
“Oh, Rodney!”
“And didn’t you recognise Eulalie, Jane? Surely you cannot have failed
to recognise Eulalie?”
“Recognise her?”
“I drew her from you,” said Rodney Spelvin.
* * * * *
Jane’s mind was in a whirl as she went home in the train. To have met
Rodney Spelvin again was enough in itself to stimulate into activity
that hidden pulse of romance in her. To discover that she had been in
his thoughts so continuously all these years and that she still held
such sway over his faithful heart that he had drawn the heroine of his
novel from her was simply devastating. Mechanically she got out at the
right station and mechanically made her way to the cottage. She was
relieved to find that William was still out on the links. She loved
William devotedly, of course, but just at the moment he would have
been in the way; for she wanted a quiet hour with _The Purple Fan_. It
was necessary for her to re-read in the light of this new knowledge
the more important of the scenes in which Eulalie French figured. She
knew them practically by heart already, but nevertheless she wished
to read them again. When William returned, warm and jubilant, she was
so absorbed that she only just had time to slide the book under the
sofa-cushion before the door opened.
Some guardian angel ought to have warned William Bates that he was
selecting a bad moment for his re-entry into the home, or at least to
have hinted that a preliminary wash and brush-up would be no bad thing.
There had been rain in the night, causing the links to become a trifle
soggy in spots, and William was one of those energetic golfers who do
not spare themselves. The result was that his pleasant features were
a good deal obscured by mud. An explosion-shot out of the bunker on
the fourteenth had filled his hair with damp sand, and his shoes were
a disgrace to any refined home. No, take him for all in all, William
did not look his best. He was fine if the sort of man you admired
was the brawny athlete straight from the dust of the arena; but on a
woman who was picturing herself the heroine of _The Purple Fan_ he
was bound to jar. Most of the scenes in which Eulalie French played
anything like a fat part took place either on moonlight terraces or in
beautifully furnished studios beneath the light of Oriental lamps with
pink silk shades, and all the men who came in contact with her--except
her husband, a clodhopping brute who spent most of his time in
riding-kit--were perfectly dressed and had dark, clean-cut, sensitive
faces.
William, accordingly, induced in Jane something closely approximating
to the heeby-jeebies.
“Hullo, old girl!” said William, affectionately. “You back? What have
you been doing with yourself?”
“Oh, shopping,” said Jane, listlessly.
“See any one you knew?”
For a moment Jane hesitated.
“Yes,” she said. “I met Rodney Spelvin.”
Jealousy and suspicion had been left entirely out of William Bates’s
make-up. He did not start and frown; he did not clutch the arm of his
chair; he merely threw back his head and laughed like a hyæna. And that
laugh wounded Jane more than the most violent exhibition of mistrust
could have done.
“Good Lord!” gurgled William, jovially. “You don’t mean to say that
bird is still going around loose? I should have thought he would have
been lynched years ago. Looks like negligence somewhere.”
There comes a moment in married life when every wife gazes squarely at
her husband and the scales seem to fall from her eyes and she sees him
as he is--one of Nature’s Class A fatheads. Fortunately for married
men, these times of clear vision do not last long, or there would be
few homes left unbroken. It was so that Jane gazed at William now, but
unhappily her conviction that he was an out-size in rough-neck chumps
did not pass. Indeed, all through that evening it deepened. That night
she went to bed feeling for the first time that, when the clergyman had
said, “Wilt thou, Jane?” and she had replied in the affirmative, a
mean trick had been played on an inexperienced girl.
* * * * *
And so began that black period in the married life of Jane and William
Bates, the mere recollection of which in after years was sufficient to
put them right off their short game and even to affect their driving
from the tee. To William, having no clue to the cause of the mysterious
change in his wife, her behaviour was inexplicable. Had not her perfect
robustness made such a theory absurd, he would have supposed that she
was sickening for something. She golfed now intermittently, and often
with positive reluctance. She was frequently listless and distrait. And
there were other things about her of which he disapproved.
“I say, old girl,” he said one evening, “I know you won’t mind my
mentioning it, and I don’t suppose you’re aware of it yourself, but
recently you’ve developed a sort of silvery laugh. A nasty thing to
have about the home. Try to switch it off, old bird, would you mind?”
Jane said nothing. The man was not worth answering. All through the
pages of _The Purple Fan_, Eulalie French’s silvery laugh had been
highly spoken of and greatly appreciated by one and all. It was the
thing about her that the dark, clean-cut, sensitive-faced men most
admired. And the view Jane took of the matter was that if William did
not like it the poor fish could do the other thing.
But this brutal attack decided her to come out into the open with the
grievance which had been vexing her soul for weeks past.
“William,” she said, “I want to say something. William, I am feeling
stifled.”
“I’ll open the window.”
“Stifled in this beastly little village, I mean,” said Jane,
impatiently. “Nobody ever does anything here except play golf and
bridge, and you never meet an artist-soul from one year’s end to the
other. How can I express myself? How can I be myself? How can I fulfil
myself?”
“Do you want to?” asked William, somewhat out of his depth.
“Of course I want to. And I shan’t be happy unless we leave this
ghastly place and go to live in a studio in town.”
William sucked thoughtfully at his pipe. It was a tense moment for a
man who hated metropolitan life as much as he did. Nevertheless, if the
solution of Jane’s recent weirdness was simply that she had got tired
of the country and wanted to live in town, to the town they must go.
After a first involuntary recoil, he nerved himself to the martyrdom
like the fine fellow he was.
“We’ll pop off as soon as I can sell the house,” he said.
“I can’t wait as long as that. I want to go now.”
“All right,” said William, amiably. “We’ll go next week.”
* * * * *
William’s forebodings were quickly fulfilled. Before he had been in
the Metropolis ten days he had realised that he was up against it as
he had never been up against it before. He and Jane and little Braid
Vardon had established themselves in what the house-agent described
as an attractive bijou studio-apartment in the heart of the artistic
quarter. There was a nice bedroom for Jane, a delightful cupboard for
Braid Vardon, and a cosy corner behind a Japanese screen for William.
Most compact. The rest of the place consisted of a room with a large
skylight, handsomely furnished with cushions and samovars, where Jane
gave parties to the intelligentsia.
It was these parties that afflicted William as much as anything else.
He had not realised that Jane intended to run a _salon_. His idea of
a pleasant social evening was to have a couple of old friends in for
a rubber of bridge, and the almost nightly incursion of a horde of
extraordinary birds in floppy ties stunned him. He was unequal to the
situation from the first. While Jane sat enthroned on her cushion,
exchanging gay badinage with rising young poets and laughing that
silvery laugh of hers, William would have to stand squashed in a
corner, trying to hold off some bobbed-haired female who wanted his
opinion of Augustus John.
The strain was frightful, and, apart from the sheer discomfort of it,
he found to his consternation that it was beginning to affect his
golf. Whenever he struggled out from the artistic zone now to one of
the suburban courses, his jangled nerves unfitted him for decent play.
Bit by bit his game left him. First he found that he could not express
himself with the putter. Then he began to fail to be himself with the
mashie-niblick. And when at length he discovered that he was only
fulfilling himself about every fifth shot off the tee he felt that this
thing must stop.
* * * * *
The conscientious historian will always distinguish carefully between
the events leading up to a war and the actual occurrence resulting in
the outbreak of hostilities. The latter may be, and generally is, some
almost trivial matter, whose only importance is that it fulfils the
function of the last straw. In the case of Jane and William what caused
the definite rift was Jane’s refusal to tie a can to Rodney Spelvin.
The author of _The Purple Fan_ had been from the first a leading figure
in Jane’s _salon_. Most of those who attended these functions were
friends of his, introduced by him, and he had assumed almost from the
beginning the demeanour of a master of the revel. William, squashed
into his corner, had long gazed at the man with sullen dislike,
yearning to gather him up by the slack of his trousers and heave him
into outer darkness; but it is improbable that he would have overcome
his native amiability sufficiently to make any active move, had it not
been for the black mood caused by his rotten golf. But one evening,
when, coming home after doing the Mossy Heath course in five strokes
over the hundred, he found the studio congested with Rodney Spelvin and
his friends, many of them playing ukeleles, he decided that flesh and
blood could bear the strain no longer.
As soon as the last guest had gone he delivered his ultimatum.
“Listen, Jane,” he said. “Touching on this Spelvin bloke.”
“Well?” said Jane, coldly. She scented battle from afar.
“He gives me a pain in the neck.”
“Really?” said Jane, and laughed a silvery laugh.
“Don’t do it, old girl,” pleaded William, wincing.
“I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘old girl’.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t like it.”
“You used to like it.”
“Well, I don’t now.”
“Oh!” said William, and ruminated awhile. “Well, be that as it may,”
he went on, “I want to tell you just one thing. Either you throw the
bloke Spelvin out on his left ear and send for the police if he tries
to get in again, or I push off. I mean it! I absolutely push off.”
There was a tense silence.
“Indeed?” said Jane at last.
“Positively push off,” repeated William, firmly. “I can stand a lot,
but pie-faced Spelvin tries human endurance too high.”
“He is not pie-faced,” said Jane, warmly.
“He _is_ pie-faced,” insisted William. “Come round to the Vienna
Bon-Ton Bakery to-morrow and I will show you an individual custard-pie
that might be his brother.”
“Well, I am certainly not going to be bullied into giving up an old
friend just because--”
William stared.
“You mean you won’t hand him the mitten?”
“I will not.”
“Think what you are saying, Jane. You positively decline to give this
false-alarm the quick exit?”
“I do.”
“Then,” said William, “all is over. I pop off.”
Jane stalked without a word into her bedroom. With a mist before his
eyes William began to pack. After a few moments he tapped at her door.
“Jane.”
“Well?”
“I’m packing.”
“Indeed?”
“But I can’t find my spare mashie.”
“I don’t care.”
William returned to his packing. When it was finished, he stole to her
door again. Already a faint stab of remorse was becoming blended with
his just indignation.
“Jane.”
“Well?”
“I’ve packed.”
“Really?”
“And now I’m popping.”
There was silence behind the door.
“I’m popping, Jane,” said William. And in his voice, though he tried to
make it cold and crisp, there was a note of wistfulness.
Through the door there came a sound. It was the sound of a silvery
laugh. And as he heard it William’s face hardened. Without another word
he picked up his suit-case and golf-bag, and with set jaw strode out
into the night.
* * * * *
One of the things that tend to keep the home together in these days
of modern unrest is the fact that exalted moods of indignation do
not last. William, released from the uncongenial atmosphere of the
studio, proceeded at once to plunge into an orgy of golf that for a
while precluded regret. Each day he indulged his starved soul with
fifty-four holes, and each night he sat smoking in bed, pleasantly
fatigued, reviewing the events of the past twelve hours with complete
satisfaction. It seemed to him that he had done the good and sensible
thing.
And then, slowly at first, but day by day more rapidly, his mood began
to change. That delightful feeling of jolly freedom ebbed away.
It was on the morning of the tenth day that he first became definitely
aware that all was not well. He had strolled out on the links after
breakfast with a brassie and a dozen balls for a bit of practice, and,
putting every ounce of weight and muscle into the stroke, brought off a
snifter with his very first shot. Straight and true the ball sped for
the distant green, and William, forgetting everything in the ecstasy of
the moment, uttered a gladsome cry.
“How about that one, old girl?” he exclaimed.
And then, with a sudden sinking of the heart, he realised that he was
alone.
An acute spasm of regret shot through William’s massive bosom. In that
instant of clear thinking he understood that golf is not all. What
shall it profit a man that he do the long hole in four, if there is no
loving wife at his elbow to squeak congratulations? A dull sensation of
forlorn emptiness afflicted William Bates. It passed, but it had been.
And he knew it would come again.
It did. It came that same afternoon. It came next morning. Gradually
it settled like a cloud on his happiness. He did his best to fight it
down. He increased his day’s output to sixty-three holes, but found no
relief. When he reflected that he had had the stupendous luck to be
married to a girl like Jane and had chucked the thing up, he could have
kicked himself round the house. He was in exactly the position of the
hero of the movie when the subtitle is flashed on the screen: “Came a
Day When Remorse Bit Like an Adder Into Roland Spenlow’s Soul.” Of all
the chumps who had ever tripped over themselves and lost a good thing,
from Adam downwards, he, he told himself, was the woollen-headedest.
On the fifteenth morning it began to rain.
* * * * *
Now, William Bates was not one of your fair-weather golfers. It took
more than a shower to discourage him. But this was real rain, with
which not even the stoutest enthusiast could cope. It poured down all
day in a solid sheet and set the seal on his melancholy. He pottered
about the house, sinking deeper and deeper into the slough of despond,
and was trying to derive a little faint distraction from practising
putts into a tooth-glass when the afternoon post arrived.
There was only one letter. He opened it listlessly. It was from Jukes,
Enderby, and Miller, florists, and what the firm wished to ascertain
was whether, his deposit on white violets to be despatched annually
to Mrs. William Bates being now exhausted, he desired to renew his
esteemed order. If so, on receipt of the money they would spring to the
task of sending same.
William stared at the letter dully. His first impression was that
Jukes, Enderby, and Miller were talking through their collective hats.
White violets? What was all this drivel about white violets? Jukes was
an ass. He knew nothing about white violets. Enderby was a fool. What
had he got to do with white violets? Miller was a pin-head. He had
never deposited any money to have white violets despatched.
William gasped. Yes, by George, he had, though, he remembered with a
sudden start. So he had, by golly! Good gosh! It all came back to him.
He recalled the whole thing, by Jove! Crikey, yes!
The letter swam before William’s eyes. A wave of tenderness engulfed
him. All that had passed recently between Jane and himself was
forgotten--her weirdness, her wish to live in the Metropolis, her
silvery laugh--everything. With one long, loving gulp, William Bates
dashed a not unmanly tear from his eye and, grabbing a hat and
raincoat, rushed out of the house and sprinted for the station.
At about the hour when William flung himself into the train, Jane
was sitting in her studio-apartment, pensively watching little Braid
Vardon as he sported on the floor. An odd melancholy had gripped her.
At first she had supposed that this was due to the rain, but now she
was beginning to realise that the thing went much deeper than that.
Reluctant though she was to confess it, she had to admit that what she
was suffering from was a genuine soul-sadness, due entirely to the fact
that she wanted William.
It was strange what a difference his going had made. William was the
sort of fellow you shoved into a corner and forgot about, but when he
was not there the whole scheme of things seemed to go blooey. Little
by little, since his departure, she had found the fascination of her
surroundings tending to wane, and the glamour of her new friends had
dwindled noticeably. Unless you were in the right vein for them,
Jane felt, they could be an irritating crowd. They smoked too many
cigarettes and talked too much. And not far from being the worst of
them, she decided, was Rodney Spelvin. It was with a sudden feeling
of despair that she remembered that she had invited him to tea this
afternoon and had got in a special seed-cake for the occasion. The last
thing in the world that she wanted to do was to watch Rodney Spelvin
eating cake.
It is a curious thing about men of the Spelvin type, how seldom they
really last. They get off to a flashy start and for a while convince
impressionable girls that the search for a soul-mate may be considered
formally over; but in a very short while reaction always sets in. There
had been a time when Jane could have sat and listened to Rodney Spelvin
for hours on end. Then she began to feel that from fifteen to twenty
minutes was about sufficient. And now the mere thought of having to
listen to him at all was crushing her like a heavy burden.
She had got thus far in her meditations when her attention was
attracted to little Braid Vardon, who was playing energetically in a
corner with some object which Jane could not distinguish in the dim
light.
“What have you got there, dear?” she asked.
“Wah,” said little Braid, a child of few words, proceeding with his
activities.
Jane rose and walked across the room. A sudden feeling had come to her,
the remorseful feeling that for some time now she had been neglecting
the child. How seldom nowadays did she trouble to join in his pastimes!
“Let mother play too,” she said, gently. “What are you playing? Trains?”
“Golf.”
Jane uttered a sharp exclamation. With a keen pang she saw that what
the child had got hold of was William’s spare mashie. So he had left it
behind after all! Since the night of his departure it must have been
lying unnoticed behind some chair or sofa.
For a moment the only sensation Jane felt was an accentuation of
that desolate feeling which had been with her all day. How many a
time had she stood by William and watched him foozle with this club!
Inextricably associated with him it was, and her eyes filled with
sudden tears. And then she was abruptly conscious of a new, a more
violent emotion, something akin to panic fear. She blinked, hoping
against hope that she had been mistaken. But no. When she opened her
eyes and looked again she saw what she had seen before.
_The child was holding the mashie all wrong._
“Braid!” gasped Jane in an agony.
All the mother-love in her was shrieking at her, reproaching her.
She realised now how paltry, how greedily self-centred she had been.
Thinking only of her own pleasures, how sorely she had neglected her
duty as a mother! Long ere this, had she been worthy of that sacred
relation, she would have been brooding over her child, teaching him at
her knee the correct Vardon grip, shielding him from bad habits, seeing
to it that he did not get his hands in front of the ball, putting him
on the right path as regarded the slow back-swing. But, absorbed in
herself, she had sacrificed him to her shallow ambitions. And now there
he was, grasping the club as if it had been a spade and scooping with
it like one of those twenty-four handicap men whom the hot weather
brings out on seaside links.
She shuddered to the very depths of her soul. Before her eyes there
rose a vision of her son, grown to manhood, reproaching her. “If you
had but taught me the facts of life when I was a child, mother,” she
seemed to hear him say, “I would not now be going round in a hundred
and twenty, rising to a hundred and forty in anything like a high wind.”
She snatched the club from his hands with a passionate cry. And at this
precise moment in came Rodney Spelvin, all ready for tea.
“Ah, little one!” said Rodney Spelvin, gaily.
Something in her appearance must have startled him, for he stopped and
looked at her with concern.
“Are you ill?” he asked.
Jane pulled herself together with an effort.
“No, quite well. Ha, ha!” she replied, hysterically.
She stared at him wildly, as she might have stared at a caterpillar in
her salad. If it had not been for this man, she felt, she would have
been with William in their snug little cottage, a happy wife. If it
had not been for this man, her only child would have been laying the
foundations of a correct swing under the eyes of a conscientious pro.
If it had not been for this man--She waved him distractedly to the door.
“Good-bye,” she said. “Thank you so much for calling.”
Rodney Spelvin gaped. This had been the quickest and most tealess
tea-party he had ever assisted at.
“You want me to go?” he said, incredulously.
“Yes, go! go!”
Rodney Spelvin cast a wistful glance at the gate-leg table. He had had
a light lunch, and the sight of the seed-cake affected him deeply. But
there seemed nothing to be done. He moved reluctantly to the door.
“Well, good-bye,” he said. “Thanks for a very pleasant afternoon.”
“So glad to have seen you,” said Jane, mechanically.
The door closed. Jane returned to her thoughts. But she was not alone
for long. A few minutes later there entered the female cubist painter
from downstairs, a manly young woman with whom she had become fairly
intimate.
“Oh, Bates, old chap!” said the cubist painter.
Jane looked up.
“Yes, Osbaldistone?”
“Just came in to borrow a cigarette. Used up all mine.”
“So have I, I’m afraid.”
“Too bad. Oh, well,” said Miss Osbaldistone, resignedly, “I suppose
I’ll have to go out and get wet. I wish I had had the sense to stop
Rodney Spelvin and send him. I met him on the stairs.”
“Yes, he was in here just now,” said Jane.
Miss Osbaldistone laughed in her hearty manly way.
“Good boy, Rodney,” she said, “but too smooth for my taste. A little
too ready with the salve.”
“Yes?” said Jane, absently.
“Has he pulled that one on you yet about your being the original of the
heroine of _The Purple Fan_?”
“Why, yes,” said Jane, surprised. “He did tell me that he had drawn
Eulalie from me.”
Her visitor emitted another laugh that shook the samovars.
“He tells every girl he meets the same thing.”
“What!”
“Oh yes. It’s his first move. He actually had the nerve to try to
spring it on me. Mind you, I’m not saying it’s a bad stunt. Most girls
like it. You’re sure you’ve no cigarettes? No? Well, how about a shot
of cocaine? Out of that too? Oh, well, I’ll be going, then. Pip-pip,
Bates.”
“Toodle-oo, Osbaldistone,” said Jane, dizzily. Her brain was reeling.
She groped her way to the table, and in a sort of trance cut herself a
slice of cake.
“Wah!” said little Braid Vardon. He toddled forward, anxious to count
himself in on the share-out.
Jane gave him some cake. Having ruined his life, it was, she felt,
the least she could do. In a spasm of belated maternal love she also
slipped him a jam-sandwich. But how trivial and useless these things
seemed now.
“Braid!” she cried, suddenly.
“What?”
“Come here.”
“Why?”
“Let mother show you how to hold that mashie.”
“What’s a mashie?”
A new gash opened in Jane’s heart. Four years old, and he didn’t know
what a mashie was. And at only a slightly advanced age Bobby Jones had
been playing in the American Open Championship.
“This is a mashie,” she said, controlling her voice with difficulty.
“Why?”
“It is called a mashie.”
“What is?”
“This club.”
“Why?”
The conversation was becoming too metaphysical for Jane. She took the
club from him and closed her hands over it.
“Now, look, dear,” she said, tenderly. “Watch how mother does it. She
puts the fingers--”
A voice spoke, a voice that had been absent all too long from Jane’s
life.
“You’ll pardon me, old girl, but you’ve got the right hand much too far
over. You’ll hook for a certainty.”
In the doorway, large and dripping, stood William. Jane stared at him
dumbly.
“William!” she gasped at length.
“Hullo, Jane!” said William. “Hullo, Braid! Thought I’d look in.”
There was a long silence.
“Beastly weather,” said William.
“Yes,” said Jane.
“Wet and all that,” said William.
“Yes,” said Jane.
There was another silence.
“Oh, by the way, Jane,” said William. “Knew there was something I
wanted to say. You know those violets?”
“Violets?”
“White violets. You remember those white violets I’ve been sending you
every year on our wedding anniversary? Well, what I mean to say, our
lives are parted and all that sort of thing, but you won’t mind if I
go on sending them--what? Won’t hurt you, what I’m driving at, and’ll
please me, see what I mean? So, well, to put the thing in a nutshell,
if you haven’t any objection, that’s that.”
Jane reeled against the gate-leg table.
“William! Was it you who sent those violets?”
“Absolutely. Who did you think it was?”
“William!” cried Jane, and flung herself into his arms.
William scooped her up gratefully. This was the sort of thing he
had been wanting for weeks past. He could do with a lot of this. He
wouldn’t have suggested it himself, but, seeing that she felt that way,
he was all for it.
“William,” said Jane, “can you ever forgive me?”
“Oh, rather,” said William. “Like a shot. Though, I mean to say,
nothing to forgive, and all that sort of thing.”
“We’ll go back right away to our dear little cottage.”
“Fine!”
“We’ll never leave it again.”
“Topping!”
“I love you,” said Jane, “more than life itself.”
“Good egg!” said William.
Jane turned with shining eyes to little Braid Vardon.
“Braid, we’re going home with daddy!”
“Where?”
“Home. To our little cottage.”
“What’s a cottage?”
“The house where we used to be before we came here.”
“What’s here?”
“This is.”
“Which?”
“Where we are now.”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you what, old girl,” said William. “Just shove a green-baize
cloth over that kid, and then start in and brew me about five pints
of tea as strong and hot as you can jolly well make it. Otherwise I’m
going to get the cold of a lifetime.”