"Vincent, dear?"
"Mr. Jopp's secretary speaking."
"Oh, will you say that Mrs. Jane Jukes Jopp called up to wish him luck?
I shall be there tomorrow to see him play."
I resumed my work. I had hardly started when the telephone rang for the
third time.
"Mr. Jopp?"
"Mr. Jopp's secretary speaking."
"This is Mrs. Agnes Parsons Jopp. I just called up to wish him luck. I
shall be looking on tomorrow."
I shifted my work nearer to the telephone-table so as to be ready for
the next call. I had heard that Vincent Jopp had only been married
three times, but you never knew.
Presently Jopp came in.
"Anybody called up?" he asked.
"Nobody on business. An assortment of your wives were on the wire
wishing you luck. They asked me to say that they will be on the course
tomorrow."
For a moment it seemed to me that the man's iron repose was shaken.
"Luella?" he asked.
"She was the first."
"Jane?"
"And Jane."
"And Agnes?"
"Agnes," I said, "is right."
"H'm!" said Vincent Jopp. And for the first time since I had known him
I thought that he was ill at ease.
* * * * *
The day of the final dawned bright and clear. At least, I was not awake
at the time to see, but I suppose it did; for at nine o'clock, when I
came down to breakfast, the sun was shining brightly. The first
eighteen holes were to be played before lunch, starting at eleven.
Until twenty minutes before the hour Vincent Jopp kept me busy taking
dictation, partly on matters connected with his wheat deal and partly
on a signed article dealing with the Final, entitled "How I Won." At
eleven sharp we were out on the first tee.
Jopp's opponent was a nice-looking young man, but obviously nervous. He
giggled in a distraught sort of way as he shook hands with my employer.
"Well, may the best man win," he said.
"I have arranged to do so," replied Jopp, curtly, and started to
address his ball.
There was a large crowd at the tee, and, as Jopp started his
down-swing, from somewhere on the outskirts of this crowd there came
suddenly a musical "Boo!" It rang out in the clear morning air like a
bugle.
I had been right in my estimate of Vincent Jopp. His forceful stroke
never wavered. The head of his club struck the ball, despatching it a
good two hundred yards down the middle of the fairway. As we left the
tee I saw Amelia Merridew being led away with bowed head by two members
of the Greens Committee. Poor girl! My heart bled for her. And yet,
after all, Fate had been kind in removing her from the scene, even in
custody, for she could hardly have borne to watch the proceedings.
Vincent Jopp made rings round his antagonist. Hole after hole he won in
his remorseless, machine-like way, until when lunch-time came at the
end of the eighteenth he was ten up. All the other holes had been
halved.
It was after lunch, as we made our way to the first tee, that the
advance-guard of the Mrs. Jopps appeared in the person of Luella
Mainprice Jopp, a kittenish little woman with blond hair and a
Pekingese dog. I remembered reading in the papers that she had divorced
my employer for persistent and aggravated mental cruelty, calling
witnesses to bear out her statement that he had said he did not like
her in pink, and that on two separate occasions had insisted on her dog
eating the leg of a chicken instead of the breast; but Time, the great
healer, seemed to have removed all bitterness, and she greeted him
affectionately.
"Wassums going to win great big championship against nasty rough strong
man?" she said.
"Such," said Vincent Jopp, "is my intention. It was kind of you,
Luella, to trouble to come and watch me. I wonder if you know Mrs.
Agnes Parsons Jopp?" he said, courteously, indicating a kind-looking,
motherly woman who had just come up. "How are you, Agnes?"
"If you had asked me that question this morning, Vincent," replied Mrs.
Agnes Parsons Jopp, "I should have been obliged to say that I felt far
from well. I had an odd throbbing feeling in the left elbow, and I am
sure my temperature was above the normal. But this afternoon I am a
little better. How are you, Vincent?"
Although she had, as I recalled from the reports of the case, been
compelled some years earlier to request the Court to sever her marital
relations with Vincent Jopp on the ground of calculated and inhuman
brutality, in that he had callously refused, in spite of her pleadings,
to take old Dr. Bennett's Tonic Swamp-Juice three times a day, her
voice, as she spoke, was kind and even anxious. Badly as this man had
treated her--and I remember hearing that several of the jury had been
unable to restrain their tears when she was in the witness-box giving
her evidence--there still seemed to linger some remnants of the old
affection.
"I am quite well, thank you, Agnes," said Vincent Jopp.
"Are you wearing your liver-pad?"
A frown flitted across my employer's strong face.
"I am not wearing my liver-pad," he replied, brusquely.
"Oh, Vincent, how rash of you!"
He was about to speak, when a sudden exclamation from his rear checked
him. A genial-looking woman in a sports coat was standing there, eyeing
him with a sort of humorous horror.
"Well, Jane," he said.
I gathered that this was Mrs. Jane Jukes Jopp, the wife who had
divorced him for systematic and ingrowing fiendishness on the ground
that he had repeatedly outraged her feelings by wearing a white
waistcoat with a dinner-jacket. She continued to look at him dumbly,
and then uttered a sort of strangled, hysterical laugh.
"Those legs!" she cried. "Those legs!"
Vincent Jopp flushed darkly. Even the strongest and most silent of us
have our weaknesses, and my employer's was the rooted idea that he
looked well in knickerbockers. It was not my place to try to dissuade
him, but there was no doubt that they did not suit him. Nature, in
bestowing upon him a massive head and a jutting chin, had forgotten to
finish him off at the other end. Vincent Jopp's legs were skinny.
"You poor dear man!" went on Mrs. Jane Jukes Jopp. "What practical
joker ever lured you into appearing in public in knickerbockers?"
"I don't object to the knickerbockers," said Mrs. Agnes Parsons Jopp,
"but when he foolishly comes out in quite a strong east wind without
his liver-pad----"
"Little Tinky-Ting don't need no liver-pad, he don't," said Mrs. Luella
Mainprice Jopp, addressing the animal in her arms, "because he was his
muzzer's pet, he was."
I was standing quite near to Vincent Jopp, and at this moment I saw a
bead of perspiration spring out on his forehead, and into his steely
eyes there came a positively hunted look. I could understand and
sympathize. Napoleon himself would have wilted if he had found himself
in the midst of a trio of females, one talking baby-talk, another
fussing about his health, and the third making derogatory observations
on his lower limbs. Vincent Jopp was becoming unstrung.
"May as well be starting, shall we?"
It was Jopp's opponent who spoke. There was a strange, set look on his
face--the look of a man whose back is against the wall. Ten down on the
morning's round, he had drawn on his reserves of courage and was
determined to meet the inevitable bravely.
Vincent Jopp nodded absently, then turned to me.
"Keep those women away from me," he whispered tensely. "They'll put me
off my stroke!"
"Put _you_ off your stroke!" I exclaimed, incredulously.
"Yes, me! How the deuce can I concentrate, with people babbling about
liver-pads, and--and knickerbockers all round me? Keep them away!"
He started to address his ball, and there was a weak uncertainty in the
way he did it that prepared me for what was to come. His club rose,
wavered, fell; and the ball, badly topped, trickled two feet and sank
into a cuppy lie.
"Is that good or bad?" inquired Mrs. Luella Mainprice Jopp.
A sort of desperate hope gleamed in the eye of the other competitor in
the final. He swung with renewed vigour. His ball sang through the air,
and lay within chip-shot distance of the green.
"At the very least," said Mrs. Agnes Parsons Jopp, "I hope, Vincent,
that you are wearing flannel next your skin."
I heard Jopp give a stifled groan as he took his spoon from the bag. He
made a gallant effort to retrieve the lost ground, but the ball struck
a stone and bounded away into the long grass to the side of the green.
His opponent won the hole.
We moved to the second tee.
"Now, that young man," said Mrs. Jane Jukes Jopp, indicating her late
husband's blushing antagonist, "is quite right to wear knickerbockers.
He can carry them off. But a glance in the mirror must have shown you
that you----"
"I'm sure you're feverish, Vincent," said Mrs. Agnes Parsons Jopp,
solicitously. "You are quite flushed. There is a wild gleam in your
eyes."
"Muzzer's pet got little buttons of eyes, that don't never have no wild
gleam in zem because he's muzzer's own darling, he was!" said Mrs.
Luella Mainprice Jopp.
A hollow groan escaped Vincent Jopp's ashen lips.
I need not recount the play hole by hole, I think. There are some
subjects that are too painful. It was pitiful to watch Vincent Jopp in
his downfall. By the end of the first nine his lead had been reduced to
one, and his antagonist, rendered a new man by success, was playing
magnificent golf. On the next hole he drew level. Then with a
superhuman effort Jopp contrived to halve the eleventh, twelfth, and
thirteenth. It seemed as though his iron will might still assert
itself, but on the fourteenth the end came.
He had driven a superb ball, outdistancing his opponent by a full fifty
yards. The latter played a good second to within a few feet of the
green. And then, as Vincent Jopp was shaping for his stroke, Luella
Mainprice gave tongue.
"Vincent!"
"Well?"
"Vincent, that other man--bad man--not playing fair. When your back was
turned just now, he gave his ball a great bang. _I_ was watching
him."
"At any rate," said Mrs. Agnes Parsons Jopp, "I do hope, when the game
is over, Vincent, that you will remember to cool slowly."
"Flesho!" cried Mrs. Jane Jukes Jopp triumphantly. "I've been trying to
remember the name all the afternoon. I saw about it in one of the
papers. The advertisements speak most highly of it. You take it before
breakfast and again before retiring, and they guarantee it to produce
firm, healthy flesh on the most sparsely-covered limbs in next to no
time. Now, _will_ you remember to get a bottle tonight? It comes
in two sizes, the five-shilling (or large size) and the smaller at
half-a-crown. G. K. Chesterton writes that he used it regularly for
years."
Vincent Jopp uttered a quavering moan, and his hand, as he took the
mashie from his bag, was trembling like an aspen.
Ten minutes later, he was on his way back to the club-house, a beaten
man.
* * * * *
And so (concluded the Oldest Member) you see that in golf there is no
such thing as a soft snap. You can never be certain of the finest
player. Anything may happen to the greatest expert at any stage of the
game. In a recent competition George Duncan took eleven shots over a
hole which eighteen-handicap men generally do in five. No! Back horses
or go down to Throgmorton Street and try to take it away from the
Rothschilds, and I will applaud you as a shrewd and cautious financier.
But to bet at golf is pure gambling.
9
_The Rough Stuff_
Into the basking warmth of the day there had crept, with the approach
of evening, that heartening crispness which heralds the advent of
autumn. Already, in the valley by the ninth tee, some of the trees had
begun to try on strange colours, in tentative experiment against the
coming of nature's annual fancy dress ball, when the soberest tree
casts off its workaday suit of green and plunges into a riot of reds
and yellows. On the terrace in front of the club-house an occasional
withered leaf fluttered down on the table where the Oldest Member sat,
sipping a thoughtful seltzer and lemon and listening with courteous
gravity to a young man in a sweater and golf breeches who occupied the
neighbouring chair.
"She is a dear girl," said the young man a little moodily, "a dear girl
in every respect. But somehow--I don't know--when I see her playing
golf I can't help thinking that woman's place is in the home."
The Oldest Member inclined his frosted head.
"You think," he said, "that lovely woman loses in queenly dignity when
she fails to slam the ball squarely on the meat?"
"I don't mind her missing the pill," said the young man. "But I think
her attitude toward the game is too light-hearted."
"Perhaps it cloaks a deeper feeling. One of the noblest women I ever
knew used to laugh merrily when she foozled a short putt. It was only
later, when I learned that in the privacy of her home she would weep
bitterly and bite holes in the sofa cushions, that I realized that she
did but wear the mask. Continue to encourage your _fiancee_ to
play the game, my boy. Much happiness will reward you. I could tell you
a story----"
A young woman of singular beauty and rather statuesque appearance came
out of the club-house carrying a baby swaddled in flannel. As she drew
near the table she said to the baby:
"Chicketty wicketty wicketty wipsey pop!"
In other respects her intelligence appeared to be above the ordinary.
"Isn't he a darling!" she said, addressing the Oldest Member.
The Sage cast a meditative eye upon the infant. Except to the eye of
love, it looked like a skinned poached egg.
"Unquestionably so," he replied.
"Don't you think he looks more like his father every day?"
For a brief instant the Oldest Member seemed to hesitate.
"Assuredly!" he said. "Is your husband out on the links today?"
"Not today. He had to see Wilberforce off on the train to Scotland."
"Your brother is going to Scotland?"
"Yes. Ramsden has such a high opinion of the schools up there. I did
say that Scotland was a long way off, and he said yes, that had
occurred to him, but that we must make sacrifices for Willie's good. He
was very brave and cheerful about it. Well, I mustn't stay. There's
quite a nip in the air, and Rammikins will get a nasty cold in his
precious little button of a nose if I don't walk him about. Say
'Bye-bye' to the gentleman, Rammy!"
The Oldest Member watched her go thoughtfully.
"There is a nip in the air," he said, "and, unlike our late
acquaintance in the flannel, I am not in my first youth. Come with me,
I want to show you something."
He led the way into the club-house, and paused before the wall of the
smoking-room. This was decorated from top to bottom with bold
caricatures of members of the club.
"These," he said, "are the work of a young newspaper artist who belongs
here. A clever fellow. He has caught the expressions of these men
wonderfully. His only failure, indeed, is that picture of myself." He
regarded it with distaste, and a touch of asperity crept into his
manner. "I don't know why the committee lets it stay there," he said,
irritably. "It isn't a bit like." He recovered himself. "But all the
others are excellent, excellent, though I believe many of the subjects
are under the erroneous impression that they bear no resemblance to the
originals. Here is the picture I wished to show you. That is Ramsden
Waters, the husband of the lady who has just left us."
The portrait which he indicated was that of a man in the early
thirties. Pale saffron hair surmounted a receding forehead. Pale blue
eyes looked out over a mouth which wore a pale, weak smile, from the
centre of which protruded two teeth of a rabbit-like character.
"Golly! What a map!" exclaimed the young man at his side.
"Precisely!" said the Oldest Member. "You now understand my momentary
hesitation in agreeing with Mrs. Waters that the baby was like its
father. I was torn by conflicting emotions. On the one hand, politeness
demanded that I confirm any statement made by a lady. Common humanity,
on the other hand, made it repugnant to me to knock an innocent child.
Yes, that is Ramsden Waters. Sit down and take the weight off your
feet, and I will tell you about him. The story illustrates a favourite
theory of mine, that it is an excellent thing that women should be
encouraged to take up golf. There are, I admit, certain drawbacks
attendant on their presence on the links. I shall not readily forget
the occasion on which a low, raking drive of mine at the eleventh
struck the ladies' tee box squarely and came back and stunned my
caddie, causing me to lose stroke and distance. Nevertheless, I hold
that the advantages outnumber the drawbacks. Golf humanizes women,
humbles their haughty natures, tends, in short, to knock out of their
systems a certain modicum of that superciliousness, that swank, which
makes wooing a tough proposition for the diffident male. You may have
found this yourself?"
"Well, as a matter of fact," admitted the young man, "now I come to
think of it I have noticed that Genevieve has shown me a bit more
respect since she took up the game. When I drive 230 yards after she
had taken six sloshes to cover fifty, I sometimes think that a new
light comes into her eyes."
"Exactly," said the Sage.
* * * * *
From earliest youth (said the Oldest Member) Ramsden Waters had always
been of a shrinking nature. He seemed permanently scared. Possibly his
nurse had frightened him with tales of horror in his babyhood. If so,
she must have been the Edgar Allan Poe of her sex, for, by the time he
reached men's estate, Ramsden Waters had about as much ferocity and
self-assertion as a blanc mange. Even with other men he was noticeably
timid, and with women he comported himself in a manner that roused
their immediate scorn and antagonism. He was one of those men who fall
over their feet and start apologizing for themselves the moment they
see a woman. His idea of conversing with a girl was to perspire and tie
himself into knots, making the while a strange gurgling sound like the
language of some primitive tribe. If ever a remark of any coherence
emerged from his tangled vocal cords it dealt with the weather, and he
immediately apologized and qualified it. To such a man women are
merciless, and it speedily became an article of faith with the feminine
population of this locality that Ramsden Waters was an unfortunate
incident and did not belong. Finally, after struggling for a time to
keep up a connection in social circles, he gave it up and became a sort
of hermit.
I think that caricature I just showed you weighed rather heavily on the
poor fellow. Just as he was nerving himself to make another attempt to
enter society, he would catch sight of it and say to himself, "What
hope is there for a man with a face like that?" These caricaturists are
too ready to wound people simply in order to raise a laugh. Personally
I am broad-minded enough to smile at that portrait of myself. It has
given me great enjoyment, though why the committee permits it to--But
then, of course, it isn't a bit like, whereas that of Ramsden Waters
not only gave the man's exact appearance, very little exaggerated, but
laid bare his very soul. That portrait is the portrait of a chump, and
such Ramsden Waters undeniably was.
By the end of the first year in the neighbourhood, Ramsden, as I say,
had become practically a hermit. He lived all by himself in a house
near the fifteenth green, seeing nobody, going nowhere. His only solace
was golf. His late father had given him an excellent education, and,
even as early as his seventeenth year, I believe, he was going round
difficult courses in par. Yet even this admirable gift, which might
have done him social service, was rendered negligible by the fact that
he was too shy and shrinking to play often with other men. As a rule,
he confined himself to golfing by himself in the mornings and late
evenings when the links were more or less deserted. Yes, in his
twenty-ninth year, Ramsden Waters had sunk to the depth of becoming a
secret golfer.
One lovely morning in summer, a scented morning of green and blue and
gold, when the birds sang in the trees and the air had that limpid
clearness which makes the first hole look about 100 yards long instead
of 345, Ramsden Waters, alone as ever, stood on the first tee
addressing his ball. For a space he waggled masterfully, then, drawing
his club back with a crisp swish, brought it down. And, as he did so, a
voice behind him cried:
"Bing!"
Ramsden's driver wabbled at the last moment. The ball flopped weakly
among the trees on the right of the course. Ramsden turned to perceive,
standing close beside him, a small fat boy in a sailor suit. There was
a pause.
"Rotten!" said the boy austerely.
Ramsden gulped. And then suddenly he saw that the boy was not alone.
About a medium approach-putt distance, moving gracefully and languidly
towards him, was a girl of such pronounced beauty that Ramsden Waters's
heart looped the loop twice in rapid succession. It was the first time
that he had seen Eunice Bray, and, like most men who saw her for the
first time, he experienced the sensations of one in an express lift at
the tenth floor going down who has left the majority of his internal
organs up on the twenty-second. He felt a dazed emptiness. The world
swam before his eyes.
You yourself saw Eunice just now: and, though you are in a sense
immune, being engaged to a charming girl of your own, I noticed that
you unconsciously braced yourself up and tried to look twice as
handsome as nature ever intended you to. You smirked and, if you had a
moustache, you would have twiddled it. You can imagine, then, the
effect which this vision of loveliness had on lonely, diffident Ramsden
Waters. It got right in amongst him.
"I'm afraid my little brother spoiled your stroke," said Eunice. She
did not speak at all apologetically, but rather as a goddess might have
spoken to a swineherd.
Ramsden yammered noiselessly. As always in the presence of the opposite
sex, and more than ever now, his vocal cords appeared to have tied
themselves in a knot which would have baffled a sailor and might have
perplexed Houdini. He could not even gargle.
"He is very fond of watching golf," said the girl.
She took the boy by the hand, and was about to lead him off, when
Ramsden miraculously recovered speech.
"Would he like to come round with me?" he croaked. How he had managed
to acquire the nerve to make the suggestion he could never understand.
I suppose that in certain supreme moments a sort of desperate
recklessness descends on nervous men.
"How very kind of you!" said the girl indifferently. "But I'm afraid----"
"I want to go!" shrilled the boy. "I want to go!"
Fond as Eunice Bray was of her little brother, I imagine that the
prospect of having him taken off her hands on a fine summer morning,
when all nature urged her to sit in the shade on the terrace and read a
book, was not unwelcome.
"It would be very kind of you if you would let him," said Eunice. "He
wasn't able to go to the circus last week, and it was a great
disappointment; this will do instead."
She turned toward the terrace, and Ramsden, his head buzzing, tottered
into the jungle to find his ball, followed by the boy.
I have never been able to extract full particulars of that morning's
round from Ramsden. If you speak of it to him, he will wince and change
the subject. Yet he seems to have had the presence of mind to pump
Wilberforce as to the details of his home life, and by the end of the
round he had learned that Eunice and her brother had just come to visit
an aunt who lived in the neighbourhood. Their house was not far from
the links; Eunice was not engaged to be married; and the aunt made a
hobby of collecting dry seaweed, which she pressed and pasted in an
album. One sometimes thinks that aunts live entirely for pleasure.
At the end of the round Ramsden staggered on to the terrace, tripping
over his feet, and handed Wilberforce back in good condition. Eunice,
who had just reached the chapter where the hero decides to give up all
for love, thanked him perfunctorily without looking up from her book;
and so ended the first spasm of Ramsden Waters's life romance.
* * * * *
There are few things more tragic than the desire of the moth for the
star; and it is a curious fact that the spectacle of a star almost
invariably fills the most sensible moth with thoughts above his
station. No doubt, if Ramsden Waters had stuck around and waited long
enough there might have come his way in the fullness of time some nice,
homely girl with a squint and a good disposition who would have been
about his form. In his modest day dreams he had aspired to nothing
higher. But the sight of Eunice Bray seemed to have knocked all the
sense out of the man. He must have known that he stood no chance of
becoming anything to her other than a handy means of getting rid of
little Wilberforce now and again. Why, the very instant that Eunice
appeared in the place, every eligible bachelor for miles around her
tossed his head with a loud, snorting sound, and galloped madly in her
direction. Dashing young devils they were, handsome, well-knit fellows
with the figures of Greek gods and the faces of movie heroes. Any one
of them could have named his own price from the advertisers of collars.
They were the sort of young men you see standing grandly beside the
full-page picture of the seven-seater Magnifico car in the magazines.
And it was against this field that Ramsden Waters, the man with the
unshuffled face, dared to pit his feeble personality. One weeps.
Something of the magnitude of the task he had undertaken must have come
home to Ramsden at a very early point in the proceedings. At Eunice's
home, at the hour when women receive callers, he was from the start a
mere unconsidered unit in the mob scene. While his rivals clustered
thickly about the girl, he was invariably somewhere on the outskirts
listening limply to the aunt. I imagine that seldom has any young man
had such golden opportunities of learning all about dried seaweed.
Indeed, by the end of the month Ramsden Waters could not have known
more about seaweed if he had been a deep sea fish. And yet he was not
happy. He was in a position, if he had been at a dinner party and
things had got a bit slow, to have held the table spellbound with the
first hand information about dried seaweed, straight from the stable;
yet nevertheless he chafed. His soul writhed and sickened within him.
He lost weight and went right off his approach shots. I confess that my
heart bled for the man.
His only consolation was that nobody else, not even the fellows who
worked their way right through the jam and got seats in the front row
where they could glare into her eyes and hang on her lips and all that
sort of thing, seemed to be making any better progress.
And so matters went on till one day Eunice decided to take up golf. Her
motive for doing this was, I believe, simply because Kitty Manders, who
had won a small silver cup at a monthly handicap, receiving thirty-six,
was always dragging the conversation round to this trophy, and if there
was one firm article in Eunice Bray's simple creed it was that she
would be hanged if she let Kitty, who was by way of being a rival on a
small scale, put anything over on her. I do not defend Eunice, but
women are women, and I doubt if any of them really take up golf in that
holy, quest-of-the-grail spirit which animates men. I have known girls
to become golfers as an excuse for wearing pink jumpers, and one at
least who did it because she had read in the beauty hints in the
evening paper that it made you lissome. Girls will be girls.
Her first lessons Eunice received from the professional, but after that
she saved money by distributing herself among her hordes of admirers,
who were only too willing to give up good matches to devote themselves
to her tuition. By degrees she acquired a fair skill and a confidence
in her game which was not altogether borne out by results. From Ramsden
Waters she did not demand a lesson. For one thing it never occurred to
her that so poor-spirited a man could be of any use at the game, and
for another Ramsden was always busy tooling round with little
Wilberforce.
Yet it was with Ramsden that she was paired in the first competition
for which she entered, the annual mixed foursomes. And it was on the
same evening that the list of the draw went up on the notice board that
Ramsden proposed.
The mind of a man in love works in strange ways. To you and to me there
would seem to be no reason why the fact that Eunice's name and his own
had been drawn out of a hat together should so impress Ramsden, but he
looked on it as an act of God. It seemed to him to draw them close
together, to set up a sort of spiritual affinity. In a word, it acted
on the poor fellow like a tonic, and that very night he went around to
her house, and having, after a long and extremely interesting
conversation with her aunt, contrived to get her alone, coughed eleven
times in a strangled sort of way, and suggested that the wedding bells
should ring out.
Eunice was more startled than angry.
"Of course, I'm tremendously complimented, Mr.----" She had to pause to
recall the name. "Mr.----"
"Waters," said Ramsden, humbly.
"Of course, yes. Mr. Waters. As I say, it's a great compliment----"
"Not at all!"
"A great compliment----"
"No, no!" murmured Ramsden obsequiously.
"I wish you wouldn't interrupt!" snapped Eunice with irritation. No
girl likes to have to keep going back and trying over her speeches.
"It's a great compliment, but it is quite impossible."
"Just as you say, of course," agreed Ramsden.
"What," demanded Eunice, "have you to offer me? I don't mean money. I
mean something more spiritual. What is there in you, Mr. Walter----"
"Waters."
"Mr. Waters. What is there in you that would repay a girl for giving up
the priceless boon of freedom?"
"I know a lot about dried seaweed," suggested Ramsden hopefully.
Eunice shook her head.
"No," she said, "it is quite impossible. You have paid me the greatest
compliment a man can pay a woman, Mr. Waterson----"
"Waters," said Ramsden. "I'll write it down for you."
"Please don't trouble. I am afraid we shall never meet again----"
"But we are partners in the mixed foursomes tomorrow."
"Oh, yes, so we are!" said Eunice. "Well, mind you play up. I want to
win a cup more than anything on earth."
"Ah!" said Ramsden, "if only I could win what I want to win more than
anything else on earth! You, I mean," he added, to make his meaning
clear. "If I could win you----" His tongue tied itself in a bow knot
round his uvula, and he could say no more. He moved slowly to the door,
paused with his fingers on the handle for one last look over his
shoulder, and walked silently into the cupboard where Eunice's aunt
kept her collection of dried seaweed.
His second start was favoured with greater luck, and he found himself
out in the hall, and presently in the cool air of the night, with the
stars shining down on him. Had those silent stars ever shone down on a
more broken-hearted man? Had the cool air of the night ever fanned a
more fevered brow? Ah, yes! Or, rather, ah no!
There was not a very large entry for the mixed foursomes competition.
In my experience there seldom is. Men are as a rule idealists, and wish
to keep their illusions regarding women intact, and it is difficult for
the most broad-minded man to preserve a chivalrous veneration for the
sex after a woman has repeatedly sliced into the rough and left him a
difficult recovery. Women, too--I am not speaking of the occasional
champions, but of the average woman, the one with the handicap of 33,
who plays in high-heeled shoes--are apt to giggle when they foozle out
of a perfect lie, and this makes for misogyny. Only eight couples
assembled on the tenth tee (where our foursomes matches start) on the
morning after Ramsden Waters had proposed to Eunice. Six of these were
negligible, consisting of males of average skill and young women who
played golf because it kept them out in the fresh air. Looking over the
field, Ramsden felt that the only serious rivalry was to be feared from
Marcella Bingley and her colleague, a 16-handicap youth named George
Perkins, with whom they were paired for the opening round. George was a
pretty indifferent performer, but Marcella, a weather-beaten female
with bobbed hair and the wrists of a welterweight pugilist, had once
appeared in the women's open championship and swung a nasty iron.
Ramsden watched her drive a nice, clean shot down the middle of the
fairway, and spoke earnestly to Eunice. His heart was in this
competition, for, though the first prize in the mixed foursomes does
not perhaps entitle the winners to a place in the hall of fame, Ramsden
had the soul of the true golfer. And the true golfer wants to win
whenever he starts, whether he is playing in a friendly round or in the
open championship.
"What we've got to do is to play steadily," he said. "Don't try any
fancy shots. Go for safety. Miss Bingley is a tough proposition, but
George Perkins is sure to foozle a few, and if we play safe we've got
'em cold. The others don't count."
You notice something odd about this speech. Something in it strikes you
as curious. Precisely. It affected Eunice Bray in the same fashion. In
the first place, it contains forty-four words, some of them of two
syllables, others of even greater length. In the second place, it was
spoken crisply, almost commandingly, without any of that hesitation and
stammering which usually characterized Ramsden Waters's utterances.
Eunice was puzzled. She was also faintly resentful. True, there was not
a word in what he had said that was calculated to bring the blush of
shame to the cheek of modesty; nevertheless, she felt vaguely that
Ramsden Waters had exceeded the limits. She had been prepared for a
gurgling Ramsden Waters, a Ramsden Waters who fell over his large feet
and perspired; but here was a Ramsden Waters who addressed her not
merely as an equal, but with more than a touch of superiority. She eyed
him coldly, but he had turned to speak to little Wilberforce, who was
to accompany them on the round.
"And you, my lad," said Ramsden curtly, "you kindly remember that this
is a competition, and keep your merry flow of conversation as much as
possible to yourself. You've got a bad habit of breaking into small
talk when a man's addressing the ball."
"If you think that my brother will be in the way----" began Eunice
coldly.
"Oh, I don't mind him coming round," said Ramsden, "if he keeps quiet."
Eunice gasped. She had not played enough golf to understand how that
noblest of games changes a man's whole nature when on the links. She
was thinking of something crushing to say to him, when he advanced to
the tee to drive off.
He drove a perfect ball, hard and low with a lot of roll. Even Eunice
was impressed.
"Good shot, partner!" she said.
Ramsden was apparently unaware that she had spoken. He was gazing down
the fairway with his club over his left shoulder in an attitude almost
identical with that of Sandy McBean in the plate labelled "The
Drive--Correct Finish", to face page twenty-four of his monumental
work, "How to Become a Scratch Player Your First Season by Studying
Photographs". Eunice bit her lip. She was piqued. She felt as if she
had patted the head of a pet lamb, and the lamb had turned and bitten
her in the finger.
"I said, 'Good shot, partner!'" she repeated coldly.
"Yes," said Ramsden, "but don't talk. It prevents one concentrating."
He turned to Wilberforce. "And don't let me have to tell you that
again!" he said.
"Wilberforce has been like a mouse!"
"That is what I complain of," said Ramsden. "Mice make a beastly
scratching sound, and that's what he was doing when I drove that ball."
"He was only playing with the sand in the tee box."
"Well, if he does it again, I shall be reluctantly compelled to take
steps."
They walked in silence to where the ball had stopped. It was nicely
perched up on the grass, and to have plunked it on to the green with an
iron should have been for any reasonable golfer the work of a moment.
Eunice, however, only succeeded in slicing it feebly into the rough.
Ramsden reached for his niblick and plunged into the bushes. And,
presently, as if it had been shot up by some convulsion of nature, the
ball, accompanied on the early stages of its journey by about a pound
of mixed mud, grass, and pebbles, soared through the air and fell on
the green. But the mischief had been done. Miss Bingley, putting
forcefully, put the opposition ball down for a four and won the hole.
Eunice now began to play better, and, as Ramsden was on the top of his
game, a ding-dong race ensued for the remainder of the first nine
holes. The Bingley-Perkins combination, owing to some inspired work by
the female of the species, managed to keep their lead up to the tricky
ravine hole, but there George Perkins, as might have been expected of
him, deposited the ball right in among the rocks, and Ramsden and
Eunice drew level. The next four holes were halved and they reached the
club-house with no advantage to either side. Here there was a pause
while Miss Bingley went to the professional's shop to have a tack put
into the leather of her mashie, which had worked loose. George Perkins
and little Wilberforce, who believed in keeping up their strength,
melted silently away in the direction of the refreshment bar, and
Ramsden and Eunice were alone.
* * * * *
The pique which Eunice had felt at the beginning of the game had
vanished by now. She was feeling extremely pleased with her performance
on the last few holes, and would have been glad to go into the matter
fully. Also, she was conscious of a feeling not perhaps of respect so
much as condescending tolerance towards Ramsden. He might be a pretty
minus quantity in a drawing-room or at a dance, but in a bunker or out
in the open with a cleek, Eunice felt, you'd be surprised. She was just
about to address him in a spirit of kindliness, when he spoke.
"Better keep your brassey in the bag on the next nine," he said. "Stick
to the iron. The great thing is to keep 'em straight!"
Eunice gasped. Indeed, had she been of a less remarkable beauty one
would have said that she snorted. The sky turned black, and all her
amiability was swept away in a flood of fury. The blood left her face
and surged back in a rush of crimson. You are engaged to be married and
I take it that there exists between you and your _fiancee_ the
utmost love and trust and understanding; but would you have the nerve,
could you summon up the cold, callous gall to tell your Genevieve that
she wasn't capable of using her wooden clubs? I think not. Yet this was
what Ramsden Waters had told Eunice, and the delicately nurtured girl
staggered before the coarse insult. Her refined, sensitive nature was
all churned up.
Ever since she had made her first drive at golf, she had prided herself
on her use of the wood. Her brother and her brassey were the only
things she loved. And here was this man deliberately.... Eunice choked.
"Mr. Waters!"
Before they could have further speech George Perkins and little
Wilberforce ambled in a bloated way out of the clubhouse.
"I've had three ginger ales," observed the boy. "Where do we go from
here?"
"Our honour," said Ramsden. "Shoot!"
Eunice took out her driver without a word. Her little figure was tense
with emotion. She swung vigorously, and pulled the ball far out on to
the fairway of the ninth hole.
"Even off the tee," said Ramsden, "you had better use an iron. You must
keep 'em straight."
Their eyes met. Hers were glittering with the fury of a woman scorned.
His were cold and hard. And, suddenly, as she looked at his awful,
pale, set golf face, something seemed to snap in Eunice. A strange
sensation of weakness and humility swept over her. So might the cave
woman have felt when, with her back against a cliff and unable to
dodge, she watched her suitor take his club in the interlocking grip,
and, after a preliminary waggle, start his back swing.
The fact was that, all her life, Eunice had been accustomed to the
homage of men. From the time she had put her hair up every man she had
met had grovelled before her, and she had acquired a mental attitude
toward the other sex which was a blend of indifference and contempt.
For the cringing specimens who curled up and died all over the
hearthrug if she spoke a cold word to them she had nothing but scorn.
She dreamed wistfully of those brusque cavemen of whom she read in the
novels which she took out of the village circulating library. The
female novelist who was at that time her favourite always supplied with
each chunk of wholesome and invigorating fiction one beetle-browed hero
with a grouch and a scowl, who rode wild horses over the countryside
till they foamed at the mouth, and treated women like dirt. That,
Eunice had thought yearningly, as she talked to youths whose spines
turned to gelatine at one glance from her bright eyes, was the sort of
man she wanted to meet and never seemed to come across.
Of all the men whose acquaintance she had made recently she had
despised Ramsden Waters most. Where others had grovelled he had tied
himself into knots. Where others had gazed at her like sheep he had
goggled at her like a kicked spaniel. She had only permitted him to
hang round because he seemed so fond of little Wilberforce. And here he
was, ordering her about and piercing her with gimlet eyes, for all the
world as if he were Claude Delamere, in the thirty-second chapter of
"The Man of Chilled Steel", the one where Claude drags Lady Matilda
around the smoking-room by her hair because she gave the rose from her
bouquet to the Italian count.
She was half-cowed, half-resentful.
"Mr Winklethorpe told me I was very good with the wooden clubs," she
said defiantly.
"He's a great kidder," said Ramsden.
He went down the hill to where his ball lay. Eunice proceeded direct
for the green. Much as she told herself that she hated this man, she
never questioned his ability to get there with his next shot.
George Perkins, who had long since forfeited any confidence which his
partner might have reposed in him, had topped his drive, leaving Miss
Bingley a difficult second out of a sandy ditch. The hole was halved.
The match went on. Ramsden won the short hole, laying his ball dead
with a perfect iron shot, but at the next, the long dog-leg hole, Miss
Bingley regained the honour. They came to the last all square.
As the match had started on the tenth tee, the last hole to be
negotiated was, of course, what in the ordinary run of human affairs is
the ninth, possibly the trickiest on the course. As you know, it is
necessary to carry with one's initial wallop that combination of stream
and lake into which so many well meant drives have flopped. This done,
the player proceeds up the face of a steep slope, to find himself
ultimately on a green which looks like the sea in the storm scene of a
melodrama. It heaves and undulates, and is altogether a nasty thing to
have happen to one at the end of a gruelling match. But it is the first
shot, the drive, which is the real test, for the water and the trees
form a mental hazard of unquestionable toughness.
George Perkins, as he addressed his ball for the vital stroke,
manifestly wabbled. He was scared to the depths of his craven soul. He
tried to pray, but all he could remember was the hymn for those in
peril on the deep, into which category, he feared, his ball would
shortly fall. Breathing a few bars of this, he swung. There was a
musical click, and the ball, singing over the water like a bird,
breasted the hill like a homing aeroplane and fell in the centre of the
fairway within easy distance of the plateau green.
"Nice work, partner," said Miss Bingley, speaking for the first and
last time in the course of the proceedings.
George unravelled himself with a modest simper. He felt like a gambler
who has placed his all on a number at roulette and sees the white ball
tumble into the correct compartment.
Eunice moved to the tee. In the course of the last eight holes the
girl's haughty soul had been rudely harrowed. She had foozled two
drives and three approach shots and had missed a short putt on the last
green but three. She had that consciousness of sin which afflicts the
golfer off his game, that curious self-loathing which humbles the
proudest. Her knees felt weak and all nature seemed to bellow at her
that this was where she was going to blow up with a loud report.
Even as her driver rose above her shoulder she was acutely aware that
she was making eighteen out of the twenty-three errors which complicate
the drive at golf. She knew that her head had swayed like some
beautiful flower in a stiff breeze. The heel of her left foot was
pointing down the course. Her grip had shifted, and her wrists felt
like sticks of boiled asparagus. As the club began to descend she
perceived that she had underestimated the total of her errors. And when
the ball, badly topped, bounded down the slope and entered the muddy
water like a timid diver on a cold morning she realized that she had a
full hand. There are twenty-three things which it is possible to do
wrong in the drive, and she had done them all.
Silently Ramsden Waters made a tee and placed thereon a new ball. He
was a golfer who rarely despaired, but he was playing three, and his
opponents' ball would undoubtedly be on the green, possibly even dead,
in two. Nevertheless, perhaps, by a supreme drive, and one or two
miracles later on, the game might be saved. He concentrated his whole
soul on the ball.