Sidney McMurdo stared.
“Your Celia? You weren’t engaged to that Todd pipsqueak?”
“She is not a pipsqueak.”
“She is, too, a pipsqueak, and I can prove it. She reads poetry.”
“Naturally. I have made it my loving task to train her eager mind to appreciate all that is best and most beautiful.”
“She says I’ve got to do it, too.”
“It will be the making of you. And now,” said Smallwood Bessemer, “I really must be going.”
‘Just a moment,” said Sidney McMurdo. He reached out and took the insurance policy, studying it intently for a while. But it was as he feared. It covered everything. “All right,” he said sombrely, “pop off.”
I suppose there is nothing (proceeded the Oldest Member) more painful to the man of sensibility than the spectacle of tangled hearts. Here were four hearts as tangled as spaghetti, and I grieved for them. The female members of the quartette did not confide in me, but I was in constant demand by both McMurdo and Bessemer, and it is not too much to say that these men were passing through the furnace. Indeed, I cannot say which moved me the more—Bessemer’s analysis of his emotions when jerked out of bed at daybreak by a telephone call from Agnes, summoning him to the links before breakfast, or McMurdo’s description of how it felt to read W. H. Auden. Suffice it that each wrung my heart to the uttermost.
And so the matter stood at the opening of the contest for the Ladies’ Vase.
This was one of our handicap events, embracing in its comprehensive scope almost the entire female personnel of the club, from the fire-breathing tigresses to the rabbits who had taken up golf because it gave them an opportunity of appearing in sports clothes. It was expected to be a gift once more for Agnes Flack, though she would be playing from scratch and several of the contestants were receiving as much as forty-eight. She had won the Vase the last two years, and if she scooped it in again, it would become her permanent possession. I mention this to show you what the competition meant to her.
For a while, all proceeded according to the form book. Playing in her usual bold, resolute style, she blasted her opponents off the links one by one, and came safely through into the final without disarranging her hair.
But as the tournament progressed, it became evident that a platinum blonde of the name of Julia Prebble, receiving twenty-seven, had been grossly underhandicapped. Whether through some natural skill at concealing the merits of her game, or because she was engaged to a member of the handicapping committee, one cannot tell, but she had, as I say, contrived to scrounge a twenty-seven when ten would have been more suitable. The result was that she passed into the final bracket with consummate ease, and the betting among the wilder spirits was that for the first time in three years Agnes Flack’s mantelpiece would have to be looking about it for some other ornament than the handsome silver vase presented by the club for annual competition among its female members.
And when at the end of the first half of the thirty-six hole final Agnes was two down after a gruelling struggle, it seemed as though their prognostications were about to be fulfilled.
It was in the cool of a lovely summer evening that play was resumed. I had been asked to referee the match, and I was crossing the terrace on my way to the first tee when I encountered Smallwood Bessemer. And we were pausing to exchange a word or two, when Sidney McMurdo came along.
To my surprise, for I had supposed relations between the two men to be strained, Bessemer waved a cordial hand.
“Hyah, Sidney,” he called.
“Hyah, Smallwood,” replied the other.
“Did you get that tonic?”
“Yes. Good stuff, you think?”
“You can’t beat it,” said Bessemer, and Sidney McMurdo passed along towards the first tee.
I was astonished.
“You seem on excellent terms with McMurdo,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” said Bessemer. “He drops in at my place a good deal. We smoke a pipe and roast each other’s girls. It draws us very close together. I was able to do him a good turn this morning. He was very anxious to watch the match, and Celia wanted him to go into town to fetch a specialist for her Peke, who is off colour to-day. I told him to give it a shot of that tonic port I drink. Put it right in no time. Well I’ll, be seeing you.”
“You are not coming round?”
“I may look in toward the finish. What do you think of Agnes’s chances?”
“Well, she has been battling nobly against heavy odds, but—”
“The trouble with Agnes is that she believes all she reads in the golf books. If she would only listen to me… Ah, well,” said Smallwood Bessemer, and moved off.
It did not take me long after I had reached the first tee to see that Agnes Flack was not blind to the possibility of being deprived of her Vase. Her lips were tight, and there was a furrow in her forehead. I endeavoured to ease her tension with a kindly word or two.
“Lovely evening,” I said.
“It will be,” she replied, directing a somewhat acid glance at her antagonist, who was straightening the tie of the member of the handicapping committee to whom she was betrothed, “if I can trim that ginger-headed Delilah and foil the criminal skulduggery of a bunch of yeggmen who ought to be blushing themselves purple. Twenty-seven, forsooth!”
Her warmth was not unjustified. After watching the morning’s round, I, too, felt that that twenty-seven handicap of Julia Prebble’s had been dictated by the voice of love rather than by a rigid sense of justice. I changed the subject.
“Bessemer is not watching the match, he tells me.”
“I wouldn’t let him. He makes me nervous.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes. I started teaching him golf a little while ago, and now he’s teaching me. He knows it all.”
“He is a columnist,” I reminded her.
“At lunch to-day he said he was going to skim through Alex Morrison’s book again, because he had a feeling that Alex hadn’t got the right angle on the game.”
I shuddered strongly, and at this moment Julia Prebble detached herself from her loved one, and the contest began.
I confess that, as I watched the opening stages of the play, I found a change taking place in my attitude towards Agnes Flack.
I had always respected her, as one must respect any woman capable of pasting a ball two hundred and forty yards, but it was only now that respect burgeoned into something like affection. The way she hitched up her sleeves and started to wipe off her opponent’s lead invited sympathy and support.
At the outset, she was assisted by the fact that success had rendered Julia Prebble a little overconfident. She did not concentrate. The eye which should have been riveted on her ball had a tendency to smirk sideways at her affianced, causing her to top, with the result that only three holes had been played before the match was all square again.
However, as was inevitable, these reverses had the effect of tightening up Julia Prebble’s game. Her mouth hardened, and she showed a disposition to bite at the man she loved, whom she appeared to consider responsible. On the fifth, she told him not to stand in front of her, on the sixth not to stand behind her, on the seventh she asked him not to move while she was putting. On the eighth she suggested that if he had really got St. Vitus Dance he ought to go and put himself in the hands of some good doctor. On the ninth she formally broke off the engagement.
Naturally, all this helped her a good deal, and at the tenth she recovered the lead she had lost. Agnes drew level at the eleventh, and after that things settled down to the grim struggle which one generally sees in finals. A casual observer would have said that it was anybody’s game.
But the strain of baffling against that handicap was telling on Agnes Flack. Once or twice, her iron resolution seemed to waver.
And on the seventeenth Nature took its toll. She missed a short putt for the half, and they came to the eighteenth tee with Julia Prebble dormy one.
The eighteenth hole
takes you over the water. A sort of small lake lies just beyond that tee, spanned by a rustic bridge. Across the bridge I now beheld Smallwood Bessemer approaching.
“How’s it going?” he asked, as he came to where I stood.
I told him the state of the game, and he shook his head.
“Looks bad,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t like Agnes Flack, and never shall, but one has one’s human feelings. It will cut her to the heart to lose that Vase. And when you reflect that if she had only let me come along, she would have been all right, it all seems such a pity, doesn’t it? I could have given her a pointer from time to time, which would have made all the difference. But she doesn’t seem to want my advice. Prefers to trust to Alex Morrison. Sad. Very sad. Ah,” said Smallwood Bessemer, “She didn’t relax.”
He was alluding to Julia Prebble, who had just driven off. Her ball had cleared the water nicely, but it was plain to the seeing eye that it had a nasty slice on it. It came to rest in a patch of rough at the side of the fairway, and I saw her look sharply round, as if instinctively about to tell her betrothed that she wished he wouldn’t shuffle his feet just as she was shooting. But he was not there. He had withdrawn to the clubhouse, where I was informed later, he drank six Scotches in quick succession, subsequently crying on the barman’s shoulder and telling him what was wrong with women.
In the demeanour of Agnes Flack, as she teed up, there was something that reminded me of Boadicea about to get in amongst a Roman legion. She looked dominant and conquering. I knew what she was thinking. Even if her opponent recovered from the moral shock of a drive like that, she could scarcely be down in less than six, and this was a hole which she, Agnes, always did in four. This meant that the match would go to the thirty-seventh, in which case she was confident that her stamina and the will to win would see her through.
She measured her distance. She waggled. Slowly and forcefully she swung back. And her club was just descending in a perfect arc, when Smallwood Bessemer spoke.
“Hey!” he said.
In the tense silence the word rang out like the crack of a gun. It affected Agnes Flack visibly. For the first time since she had been a slip of a child, she lifted her head in the middle of a stroke, and the ball, badly topped, trickled over the turf, gathered momentum as it reached the edge of the tee, bounded towards the water, hesitated on the brink for an instant like a timid diver on a cold morning and then plunged in.
“Too bad,” said Julia Prebble.
Agnes Flack did not reply. She was breathing heavily through her nostrils. She turned to Smallwood Bessemer.
“You were saying something?” she asked.
“I was only going to remind you to relax,” said Smallwood Bessemer. “Alex Morrison lays great stress on the importance of pointing the chin and rolling the feet. To my mind, however, the whole secret of golf consists in relaxing. At the top of the swing the muscles should be—”
“My niblick, please,” said Agnes Flack to her caddie.
She took the club, poised it for an instant as if judging its heft, then began to move forward swiftly and stealthily, like a tigress of the jungle.
Until that moment, I had always looked on Smallwood Bessemer as purely the man of intellect, what you would describe as the thoughtful reflective, type. But he now showed that he could, if the occasion demanded it, be the man of action. I do not think I have ever seen anything move quicker than the manner in which he dived head-foremost into the thick clump of bushes which borders the eighteenth tee. One moment, he was there; the next, he had vanished. Eels could have taken his correspondence course.
It was a move of the highest strategic quality. Strong woman though Agnes Flack was, she was afraid of spiders. For an instant, she stood looking wistfully at the bushes; then, hurling her niblick into them, she burst into tears and tottered into the arms of Sidney McMurdo, who came up at this juncture. He had been following the match at a cautious distance.
“Oh, Sidney!” she sobbed.
“There, there,” said Sidney McMurdo.
He folded her in his embrace, and they walked off together. From her passionate gestures, I could gather that she was explaining what had occurred and was urging him to plunge into the undergrowth and break Smallwood Bessemer’s neck, and the apologetic way in which he waved his hands told me that he was making clear his obligations to the Jersey City and All Points West Mutual and Co-operative Life and Accident Insurance Co.
Presently, they were lost in the gathering dusk, and I called to Bessemer and informed him that the All Clear had been blown.
“She’s gone?” he said.
“She has been gone some moments.”
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
There was a silence.
“No,” said Bessemer. “It may be a trap. I think I’ll stick on here a while.”
I shrugged my shoulder and left him.
The shades of night were falling fast before Smallwood Bessemer, weighing the pro’s and con’s, felt justified in emerging from his lair. As he started to cross the bridge that spans the water, it was almost dark. He leaned on the rail, giving himself up to thought.
The sweet was mingled with the bitter in his meditations. He could see that the future held much that must inevitably be distasteful to a man who liked a quiet life. As long as he remained in the neighbourhood, he would be compelled to exercise ceaseless vigilance and would have to hold himself in readiness, should the occasion arise, to pick up his feet and run like a rabbit.
This was not so good. On the other hand, it seemed reasonable to infer from Agnes Flack’s manner during the recent episode that their engagement was at an end. A substantial bit of velvet.
Against this, however, must be set the fact that he had lost Celia Todd. There was no getting away from that, and it was this thought that caused him to moan softly as he gazed at the dark water beneath him. And he was still moaning, when there came to his ears the sound of a footstep. A woman’s form loomed up in the dusk. She was crossing the bridge towards him. And then suddenly a cry rent the air.
Smallwood Bessemer was to discover shortly that he had placed an erroneous interpretation upon this cry, which had really been one of agitation and alarm. To his sensitive ear it had sounded like the animal yowl of an angry woman sighting her prey, and he had concluded that this must be Agnes Flack, returned to the chase. Acting upon this assumption, he stood not on the order of going but immediately sored over the rail and plunged into the water below. Rising quickly to the surface and clutching out for support, he found himself grasping something wet and furry.
For an instant, he was at a loss to decide what this could be. It had some of the properties of a sponge and some of a damp hearthrug. Then it bit him in the fleshy part of the thumb and he identified it as Celia Todd’s Pekinese, Pirbright. In happier days he had been bitten from once to three times a week by this animal, and he recognized its technique.
The discovery removed a great weight from his mind. If Pirbright came, he reasoned, could Celia Todd be far behind. He saw that it must be she, and not Agnes Flack, who stood on the bridge. Greatly relieved, he sloshed to the shore, endeavouring as best he might to elude the creature’s snapping jaws.
In this he was not wholly successful. Twice more he had to endure nips, and juicy ones. But the physical anguish soon passed away as he came to land and found himself gazing into Celia’s eyes. They were large and round, and shone with an adoring light.
“Oh, Smallwood!” she cried. “Thank heaven you were there! If you had not acted so promptly, the poor little mite would have been drowned.”
“It was nothing,” protested Bessemer modestly.
“Nothing? To have the reckless courage to plunge in like that? It was the sort of thing people get expensive medals for.”
“Just presence of mind,” said Bessemer. “Some fellows have it, some haven’t. How did it happen?”
She caught her breath.
“It was Sidney McMurdo’s
doing.”
“Sidney McMurdo’s?”
“Yes. Pirbright was not well to-day, and I told him to fetch the vet. And he talked me into trying some sort of tonic port, which he said was highly recommended. We gave Pirbright a saucer full, and he seemed to enjoy it. And then he suddenly uttered a piercing bark and ran up the side of the wall. Finally he dashed out of the house. When he returned, his manner was lethargic, and I thought a walk would do him good. And as he came on to the bridge, he staggered and fell. He must have had some form of vertigo.”
Smallwood Bessemer scrutinized the animal. The visibility was not good, but he was able to discern in its bearing all the symptoms of an advanced hangover.
“Well, I broke off the engagement right away,” proceeded Celia Todd. “I can respect a practical joker. I can admire a man who is cruel to animals. But I cannot pass as fit for human consumption a blend of the two. The mixture is too rich.”
Bessemer started.
“You are not going to marry Sidney McMurdo?”
“I am not.”
“What an extraordinary coincidence. I am not going to marry Agnes Flack.”
“You aren’t?”
“No. So it almost looks—”
“Yes, doesn’t it?”
“I mean, both of us being at a loose end, as it were…”
“Exactly.”
“Celia!”
“Smallwood!”
Hand in hand they made their way across the bridge. Celia uttered a sudden cry causing the dog Pirbright to wince as if somebody had driven a red hot spike into his head.
“I haven’t told you the worst,” she said. “He had the effrontery to assert that you had advised the tonic port.”
“The low blister!”
“I knew it could not be true. Your advice is always so good. You remember telling me I ought to have let Pirbright fight Agnes Flack’s wolfhound? Well, you were quite right. He met it when he dashed out of the house after drinking that tonic port, and cleaned it up in under a minute. They are now the best of friends. After this, I shall always take your advice and ask for more.”