Nothing Serious

  “Very.”

  “I suppose there was a sort of nip in the air, though I hadn’t noticed it myself, but I had meant so well. Do you think that when a man’s wife calls him a fatheaded sadist, she implies that married happiness is dead and the home in the melting pot?”

  The Sage patted him on the shoulder.

  “Courage,” he said. “She may be a little annoyed for the moment, but the mood will pass and she will understand and forgive. Your wife is a golfer and, when calmer, cannot fail to realize how lucky she is to have married a man with the true golfing spirit. For that is what matters in this life. That is what counts. I mean the spirit that animated Horace Bewstridge, causing him to spank his loved one’s mother on the eighteenth green when she interfered with his putting; the inner fire that drove Rollo Podmarsh on to finish his round, though he thought he had been poisoned, because he had a chance of breaking a hundred for the first time; the spirit which saved Agnes Flack and Sidney McMurdo, bringing them at last to peace and happiness. I think I may have mentioned Agnes Flack and Sidney McMurdo to you before. They were engaged to be married.”

  “She was a large girl, wasn’t she?”

  “Very large. And Sidney was large, also. That was what made the thing so satisfactory to their friends and well-wishers. Too often in this world you find the six-foot-three man teaming up with the four-foot-ten girl and the five-foot-eleven girl linking her lot with something which she would seem to have dug out of Singer’s troupe of midgets: but in the union of Agnes Flack and Sidney McMurdo there was none of this discrepancy. Sidney weighed two hundred pounds and was all muscle, and Agnes weighed a hundred and sixty pounds and was all muscle, too. And, more important still, both had been assiduous golfers since childhood. Their’s was a love based on mutual respect. Sidney’s habit of always getting two hundred and fifty yards from the tee fascinated Agnes, and he in his turn was enthralled by her short game, which was exceptionally accurate.”

  It was in warmer weather than this (the Sage proceeded, having accepted his companion’s offer of a hot toddy) that the story began which I am about to relate. The month was August, and from a cloudless sky the sun blazed down on the popular sea-shore resort of East Bampton, illuminating with its rays the beach, the pier, the boardwalk, the ice-cream stands, the hot doggeries and the simmering ocean. In the last-named, about fifty yards from shore, Agnes Flack was taking her customary cooler after the day’s golf and thinking how much she loved Sidney McMurdo.

  Sidney himself was not present. He was still in the city, working for the insurance company which had bespoken his services, counting the days to his vacation and thinking how much he loved Agnes Flack.

  When girls are floating in warm water, dreaming of the man they adore, it sometimes happens that there comes to them a sort of exaltation of the soul which demands physical expression. It came now to Agnes Flack. God, the way she looked at it, was in His heaven and all right with the world, and it seemed to her that something ought to be done about it. And as practically the only thing you can do in the way of physical expression in the water is to splash, she splashed. With arms and feet she churned up great fountains of foam, at the same time singing a wordless song of ecstasy.

  The trouble about doing that sort of thing when swimming is that people are apt to be misled. Agnes Flack’s was one of those penetrating voices which sound like the down express letting off steam at a level crossing, and in the number which she had selected for rendition there occurred a series of high notes which she held with determination and vigour. It is not surprising, therefore, that a passing stranger who was cleaving the waves in her vicinity should have got his facts twisted.

  A moment later Agnes, in the middle of a high note, was surprised to find herself gripped firmly beneath the arms and towed rapidly shorewards.

  Her annoyance was extreme, and it increased during the trip, most of which was made with her head under water. By the time she arrived at the beach, she had swallowed perhaps a pint and a half, and her initial impulse was to tell her assailant what she thought of his officiousness. But just as she was about to do so friendly hands, seizing her from behind, pulled her backwards and started rolling her over a barrel. And when she fought herself free the man had vanished.

  Her mood was still ruffled and resentful when she stepped out of the elevator that night on her way down to dinner, for the feeling that she was full of salt water had not wholly disappeared.

  And it was as she was crossing the lounge with a moody frown on her brow that a voice at her side said “Oh, hullo, there you are, what?” and she turned to see a tall, slender, willowy man with keen blue eyes and a sun-tanned face.

  “Feeling all right again?” asked the handsome stranger.

  Agnes, who had been about to draw herself to her full height and say “Sir!” suddenly divined who this must be.

  “Was it you— ?” she began.

  He raised a deprecating hand.

  “Don’t thank me, dear lady, don’t thank me. I’m always saving people’s lives, and they will try to thank me. It was nothing, nothing. Different, of course, if there had been sharks.”

  Agnes was staring like a child at a saucer of ice cream. She had revised her intention of telling this man what she thought of him. His eyes, his clean-cut face, his perfect figure and his clothes had made a profound and instantaneous impression on her, giving her the sort of sensation which she had experienced on the occasion when she had done the short third at Squashy Hollow in one, a sort of dizzy feeling that life had nothing more to offer.

  “Sharks get in the way and hamper a man. The time I saved the Princess della Raviogli in the Indian Ocean there were half a dozen of them, horsing about and behaving as if the place belonged to them. I had to teach one or two of them a sharp lesson with my Boy Scout pocket knife. The curse of the average shark is that if you give it the slightest encouragement it gets above itself and starts putting on airs.”

  Agnes felt that she must speak, but there seemed so little that she could say.

  “You’re English, aren’t you?” she asked.

  He raised a deprecating hand.

  “Call me rather a cosmopolite, dear lady. I was born in the old country and have resided there from time to time and even served my sovereigns in various positions of trust such as Deputy Master of the Royal Buckhounds, but all my life I have been a rover. I flit. I move to and fro. They say of me: ‘Last week he was in Pernambuco, but goodness knows where he is now. China, possibly, or Africa or the North Pole.’ Until recently I was in Hollywood. They were doing a film of life in the jungle, where might is right and the strong man comes into his own, and they roped me in as adviser. By the way, introduce myself, what? Fosdyke is the name. Captain Jack Fosdyke.”

  Agnes’s emotion was now such that she was unable for a moment to recall hers. Then it came back to her.

  “Mine is Flack,” she said, and the statement seemed to interest her companion.

  “No, really? I’ve just been spending the week-end with an old boy named Flack, down at Sands Point.”

  “Josiah Flack?”

  “That’s right. Amazing place he has. Absolute palace. They tell me he’s one of the richest men in America. Rather pathetic. This lonely old man, rolling in the stuff, but with no chick or child.”

  “He is my uncle. How was he?”

  “Very frail. Very, very frail. Not long for this world, it seemed to me.” A sharp tremor ran through Captain Jack Fosdyke. It was as if for the first time her words had penetrated to his consciousness. “Your uncle, did you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you his only niece?”

  “Yes.”

  “God bless my soul!” cried Captain Jack Fosdyke with extraordinary animation. “Here, come and have a cocktail. Come and have some dinner. Well, well, well, well, well!”

  At the dinner table the spell which her companion was casting on Agnes Flack deepened in intensity. There seemed no limits to the powers of this wonder man. He met
the head waiter’s eye and made him wilt. He spoke with polished knowledge of food and wine, comparing the hospitality of princes of his acquaintance with that of African chiefs he had known. Between the courses he danced like something dark and slithery from the Argentine. Little wonder that ere long he had Agnes Flack fanning herself with her napkin.

  A girl who could, had she seen good reason to do so, have felled an ox with a single blow, in the presence of Captain Jack Fosdyke she felt timid and fluttering. He was turning on the charm as if through the nozzle of a hose-pipe, and it was going all over her and she liked it. She was conscious of a dreamlike sensation, as if she were floating on a pink cloud over an ocean of joy. For the first time in weeks the image of Sidney McMurdo had passed completely from her mind. There was still, presumably, a McMurdo, Sidney, in the telephone book, but in the thoughts of Agnes Flack, no.

  The conversation turned to sports and athleticism.

  “You swim wonderfully,” she said, for that salt water had long since ceased to rankle.

  “Yes, I’ve always been a pretty decent swimmer. I learned in the lake at Wapshott.”

  “Wapshott?”

  “Wapshott Castle, Wapshott-on-the-Wap, Hants., the family seat. I don’t go there often nowadays—too busy—but when I do I have a good time. Plenty of ridin’, shootin’, fishin’ and all that.”

  “Are you fond of riding?”

  “I like steeplechasin’. The spice of danger, don’t you know, what? Ever seen the Grand National?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I won it a couple of times. I remember on the second occasion Lady Astor saying to me that I ought to saw off a leg and give the other fellows a chance. Lord Beaverbrook, who overheard the remark, was much amused.”

  “You seem to be marvellous at everything.”

  “I am.”

  “Do you play golf?”

  “Oh, rather. Scratch.”

  “We might have a game tomorrow.”

  “Not tomorrow. Lunching in Washington. A bore, but I can’t get out of it. Harry insisted.”

  “Harry?”

  “Truman. We’ll have a game when I get back. I may be able to give you a pointer or two. Bobby Jones said to me once that he would never have won the British and American Amateur and Open, if he had’t studied my swing.”

  Agnes gasped.

  “You don’t know Bobby Jones?”

  “We’re like brothers.”

  “I once got his autograph.”

  “Say the word, dear lady, and I’ll get you a signed photograph.” Agnes clutched at the table. She had thought for a moment that she was going to faint. And so the long evening wore on.

  Mark you, I do not altogether blame Agnes Flack. Hers had been a sheltered life, and nothing like Captain Jack Fosdyke had ever happened to her before. Here was a man who, while looking like something out of a full page coloured advertisement in a slick paper magazine, seemed to have been everywhere and to know everybody.

  When he took her out in the moonlight and spoke nonchalantly of Lady Astor, Lord Beaverbrook, Borneo head hunters, Mervyn Leroy and the brothers Schubert one can appreciate her attitude and understand how inevitable it was that Sidney McMurdo should have gone right back in the betting. In accepting the addresses of Sidney McMurdo, she realized that she had fallen into the error of making her selection before walking the length of the counter.

  In short, to hurry on this painful part of my story, when Sidney McMurdo eventually arrived with his suitcase and bag of clubs and was about to clasp Agnes Flack to his forty-four-inch bosom, he was surprised and distressed to observe her step back and raise a deprecating hand. A moment later she was informing him that she had made a mistake and that the photograph on her dressing-table at even date was not his but that of Captain Jack Fosdyke, to whom she was now betrothed.

  This, of course, was a nice bit of news for a devoted fiancé to get after a four-hour journey on a hot day in a train without a dining-car, and it is not too much to say that for an instant Sidney McMurdo tottered beneath it like a preliminary bout heavyweight who has been incautious enough to place his jaw en rapport with the fist of a fellow member of the Truck Drivers’ Union. Dimly he heard Agnes Flack saying that she would be a sister to him, and this threat, for he was a man already loaded up with sisters almost beyond capacity, brought him out of what had promised to be a lasting coma.

  His eyes flashed, his torso swelled, the muscles leaped about all over him under his pullover, and with a muttered “Is zat so?” he turned on his heel and left her, but not before he had asked for and obtained his supplanter’s address. It was his intention to visit the latter and begin by picking him up by the scruff of the neck and shaking him like a rat. After that he would carry on as the inspiration of the moment dictated.

  My efforts up to the present having been directed towards liming the personalities of Agnes Flack and Captain Jack Fosdyke, I have not as yet given you anything in the nature of a comprehensive character study of Sidney McMurdo. I should now reveal that he was as fiercely jealous a man as ever swung an aluminium putter. Othello might have had a slight edge on him in that respect, but it would have been a very near thing. Rob him of the girl he loved, and you roused the lion in Sidney McMurdo.

  He was flexing his muscles and snorting ominously when he reached the cosy bungalow which Captain Jack Fosdyke had rented for the summer season. The Captain, who was humming one of the song hits from last year’s war dance of the ‘Mgubo Mgompis and cleaning an elephant gun, looked up inquiringly as he entered, and Sidney glowered down at him, his muscles still doing the shimmy.

  “Captain Fosdyke?”

  “The same.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Could I have a word with you?”

  “A thousand.”

  “It is with reference to your sneaking my girl.”

  “Oh, that? Are you this McMurdo bird of whom I have heard Agnes speak?”

  “I am.”

  “You were engaged, I understand, till I came along?”

  “We were.”

  “Too bad. Well, that’s how it goes. Will you be seeing her shortly?”

  “I may decide to confront her again.”

  “Then you might tell her I’ve found that elephant gun I mentioned to her. She was anxious to see the notches on it.”

  Sidney, who had been about to call his companion a sneaking, slinking serpent and bid him rise and put his hands up, decided that later on would do. He did not at all like this talk of notches and elephant guns.

  “Are there notches on your elephant gun?”

  “There are notches on all my guns. I use them in rotation. This is the one I shot the chief of the ‘Mgopo-Mgumpis with.”

  The chill which had begun to creep over Sidney McMurdo from the feet upwards became more marked. His clenched fists relaxed, and his muscles paused in their rhythmic dance.

  “You shot him?”

  “Quite.”

  “Er—do you often do that sort of thing?”

  “Invariably, when chaps smirch the honour of the Fosdykes. If a bally bounder smirches the honour of the Fosdykes, I shoot him like a dog.”

  “Like a dog?”

  “Like a dog.”

  “What sort of dog?”

  “Any sort of dog.”

  “I see.”

  There was a pause.

  “Would you consider that being plugged in the eye, smirched the honour of the Fosdykes?”

  “Unquestionably. I was once plugged in the eye by the chief of the ‘Mgeebo-Mgoopies. And when they buried him the little port had seldom seen a costlier funeral.”

  ‘I see,” said Sidney McMurdo thoughtfully. “I see. Well, goodbye. It’s been nice meeting you.”

  “It always is,” said Captain Jack Fosdyke. “Drop in again. I’ll show you my tommy gun.”

  Sidney McMurdo had not much forehead, being one of those rugged men whose front hair finishes a scant inch or so above the
eyebrows, but there was just room on it for a ruminative frown, and he was wearing this as he left the bungalow and set out for a walk along the shore. He was fully alive to the fact that in the recent interview he had cut a poorish figure, failing entirely to express himself and fulfil himself.

  But how else, he asked himself, could he have acted? His was a simple nature, easily baffled by the unusual, and he frankly did not see how he could have coped with a rival who appeared to be a combination of mass murderer and United States Armoury. His customary routine of picking rivals up by the scruff of the neck and shaking them like rats plainly would not have answered here.

  He walked on, brooding, and so distrait was he that anyone watching him would have given attractive odds that before long he would bump into something. This occurred after he had proceeded some hundred yards, the object into which he bumped being a slender, streamlined, serpentine female who looked like one of those intense young women who used to wreck good men’s lives in the silent films but seem rather to have died out since the talkies came in. She was dark and subtle and exotic, and she appeared to be weeping.

  Sidney, however, who was a close observer, saw that the trouble was that she had got a fly in her eye, and to whip out his pocket handkerchief and tilt her head back and apply first aid was with him the work of an instant. She thanked him brokenly, blinking as she did so. Then, for the first time seeming to see him steadily and see him whole, she gave a little gasp, and said:

  “You!”

  Her eyes, which were large and dark and lustrous, like those of some inscrutable priestess of a strange old religion, focused themselves on him, as she spoke, and seemed to go through him in much the same way as a couple of red hot bullets would go through a pound of butter. He rocked back on his heels, feeling as if someone had stirred up his interior organs with an egg beater.

  “I have been waiting for you—oh, so long.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Sidney. “Am I late?”

  “My man!”

  “I beg your pardon?”