His was a curious and romantic tale. He was by profession a partner in a publishing house, and shortly before his arrival here he had gone to negotiate with John Rockett for the purchase of his Reminiscences.
The name John Rockett will, of course, be familiar to you. If you are a student of history, you will recall that he was twice British Amateur Champion and three times runner-up in the Open. He had long retired from competition golf and settled down to a life of leisured ease, and when Harold Pickering presented himself he found the great veteran celebrating his silver wedding. All the family were there - his grandmother, now ageing a little but in her day a demon with the gutty ball; his wife, at one time British Ladies Champion; his three sons, Sandwich, Hoylake and St. Andrew; and his two daughters, Troon and Prestwick. He called his children after the courses on which he had won renown, and they did not disgrace the honoured names. They were all scratch.
In a gathering so august, you might have supposed that a sense of what was fitting would have kept a fourteen-handicap man from getting above himself. But passion knows no class distinctions. Ten minutes after his arrival, Harold Pickering had fallen in love with Troon Rockett, with a fervour which could not have been more wholehearted if he had been playing to plus two. And a week later he put his fortune to the test, to win or lose it all.
"Of course, I was mad…mad," he said, moodily chewing the ham sandwich he had ordered, for he had had only a light lunch. "How could I suppose that a girl who was scratch - the sister of scratch men - the daughter of an amateur champion - would stoop to a fellow like me? Even as I started to speak, I saw the horror and amazement on her face. Well, when I say speak, I didn't exactly speak, I sort of gargled. But it was enough. She rose quickly and left the room. And I came here…"
"To forget her?"
"Talk sense," said Harold Pickering shortly. "I came to try to make myself worthy of her. I intended to get myself down to scratch, if it choked me. I heard that your pro here was the best instructor in the country, so I signed the lease for a cottage, seized my clubs and raced round to his shop…only to discover what?"
"That he has broken his leg?"
"Exactly. What a sensible, level-headed pro wants to break his leg for is more than I can imagine. But there it was. No chance of any lessons from him."
"It must have been a shock for you."
"I was stunned. It seemed to me that this was the end. But now things have brightened considerably. Do you know a Miss Flack?"
I did indeed. Agnes Flack was one of the recognized sights of the place. One pointed her out to visitors together with the Lovers Leap, the waterfall and the curious rock formation near the twelfth tee. Built rather on the lines of the village blacksmith, she had for many seasons been the undisputed female champion of the club. She had the shoulders of an all-in wrestler, the breezy self-confidence of a sergeant-major and a voice like a toastmaster's. I had often seen the Wrecking Crew, that quartette of spavined septuagenarians whose pride it was that they never let anyone through, scatter like leaves in an autumn gale at the sound of her stentorian "Fore!" A dynamic and interesting personality.
"She is going to coach me," said Harold Pickering. "I saw her practising chip shots my first morning here, and I was amazed at her virtuosity. She seemed just to give a flick of the wrist and the ball fell a foot from the pin and flopped there like a poached egg. It struck me immediately that here was someone whose methods I could study to my great advantage. The chip is my weak spot. For the last ten days or so, accordingly, I have been following her about the course, watching her every movement, and yesterday we happened to fall into conversation and I confided my ambition to her. With a hearty laugh, she told me that if I wanted to become scratch I had come to the right shop. She said that she could make a scratch player out of a cheese mite, provided it had not lost the use of its limbs, and gave as evidence of her tuitionary skill the fact that she had turned a man named Sidney McMurdo from a mere blot on the local scene into something which in a dim light might be mistaken for a golfer. I haven't met McMurdo."
"He is away at the moment. He has gone to attend the sickbed of an uncle. He will be back to play for the club championship."
"As hot as that, is he?"
"Yes, I suppose he would be about the best man we have." "Scratch?"
"Plus one, I believe, actually."
"And what was he before Miss Flack took him in hand?"
"His handicap, if I remember rightly, was fifteen."
"You don't say?" said Harold Pickering, his face lighting up. "Was it, by Jove? Then this begins to look like something. If she could turn him into such a tiger, there's a chance for me. We start the lessons tomorrow."
I did not see Harold Pickering for some little time after this, an attack of lumbago confining me to my bed, but stories of his prowess filtered through to my sickroom, and from these it was abundantly evident that his confidence in Agnes Flack's skill as an instructress had not been misplaced. He won a minor competition with such ease that his handicap was instantly reduced to eight. Then he turned in a series of cards which brought him down to four. And the first thing I saw on entering the clubhouse on my restoration to health was his name on the list of entrants for the club championship. Against it was the word "scratch".
I can remember few things that have pleased me more. We are all sentimentalists at heart, and the boy's story had touched me deeply. I hastened to seek him out and congratulate him. I found him practising approach putts on the ninth green, but when I gripped his hand it was like squeezing a wet fish. His whole manner was that of one who has not quite shaken off the effects of being struck on the back of the head by a thunderbolt. It surprised me for a moment, but then I remembered that the achievement of a great ambition often causes a man to feel for a while somewhat filleted. The historian Gibbon, if you recall, had that experience on finishing his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and I saw the same thing once in a friend of mine who had just won a Littlewood's pool.
"Well," I said cheerily, "I suppose you will now be leaving us? You will want to hurry off to Miss Rockett with the great news.'
He winced and topped a putt.
"No," he said, "I'm staying on here. My fiancée seems to wish it."
"Your fiancée?"
"I am engaged to Agnes Flack."
I was astounded. I had always understood that Agnes Flack was betrothed to Sidney McMurdo. I was also more than a little shocked. It was only a few weeks since he had poured out his soul to me on the subject of Troon Rockett, and this abrupt switching of his affections to another seemed to argue a sad lack of character and stability. When young fellows are enamoured of a member of the other sex, I like them to stay enamoured.
"Well, I hope you will be very happy," I said.
"You needn't try to be funny," he rejoined bitterly.
There was a sombre light in his eyes, and he foozled another putt.
"The whole thing," he said, "is due to one of those unfortunate misunderstandings. When they made me scratch, my first move was to thank Miss Flack warmly for all she had done for me."
"Naturally."
"I let myself go rather."
"You would, of course."
"Then, feeling that after all the trouble she had taken to raise me to the heights she was entitled to be let in on the inside story, I told her my reason for being so anxious to get down to scratch was that I loved a scratch girl and wanted to be worthy of her. Upon which, chuckling like a train going through a tunnel, she gave me a slap on the back which nearly drove my spine through the front of my pullover and said she had guessed it from the very start, from the moment when she first saw me dogging her footsteps with that look of dumb devotion in my eyes. You could have knocked me down with a putter."
"She then said she would marry you?"
"Yes. And what could I do? A girl," said Harold Pickering fretfully, "who can't distinguish between the way a man looks when he's admiring a chip shot thirty feet from the green and the way he l
ooks when he's in love ought not to be allowed at large."
There seemed nothing to say. The idea of suggesting that he should break off the engagement presented itself to me, but I dismissed it. Women are divided broadly into two classes - those who, when jilted, merely drop a silent tear and those who take a niblick from their bag and chase the faithless swain across country with it. It was to this latter section that Agnes Flack belonged. Attila the Hun might have broken off his engagement to her, but nobody except Attila the Hun, and he only on one of his best mornings.
So I said nothing, and presently Harold Pickering resumed his moody putting and I left him.
The contest for the club championship opened unsensationally. There are never very many entrants for this of course non-handicap event, and this year there were only four. Harold Pickering won his match against Rupert Watchett comfortably, and Sidney McMurdo, who had returned on the previous night, had no difficulty in disposing of George Bunting. The final, Pickering versus McMurdo, was to be played in the afternoon.
Agnes Flack had walked round with Harold Pickering in the morning, and they lunched together after the game. But an appointment with her lawyer in the metropolis made it impossible for her to stay and watch the final, and she had to be content with giving him some parting words of advice.
"The great thing," she said, as he accompanied her to her car, "is not to lose your nerve. Forget that it's a final and play your ordinary game, and you can trim the pants off him. This statement carries my personal guarantee."
"You know his game pretty well?"
"Backwards. We used to do our three rounds a day together, when we were engaged."
"Engaged?"
"Yes. Didn't I tell you? We were heading straight for the altar, apparently with no bunkers in sight, when one afternoon he took a Number Three iron when I had told him to take a Number Four. I scratched the fixture immediately. 'No man,' I said to him, 'is going to walk up the aisle with me who takes a Number Three iron for a Number Four iron shot. Pop off, Sidney McMurdo,' I said, and he gnashed his teeth and popped. I shall get the laugh of a lifetime, seeing his face when I tell him I'm engaged to you. The big lummox."
Harold Pickering started.
"Did you say big lummox?"
"That was the expression I used."
"He is robust, then?"
"Oh, he's robust enough. He could fell an ox with a single blow, if he wasn't fond of oxen."
"And is he - er - at all inclined to be jealous?"
"Othello took his correspondence course."
"I see," said Harold Pickering. "I see."
He fell into a reverie, from which he was aroused a moment later by a deafening bellow from his companion.
"Hey, Sidney!"
The person she addressed was in Harold Pickering's rear. He turned, and perceived a vast man who gazed yearningly at Agnes Flack from beneath beetling eyebrows.
"Sidney," said Agnes Flack, "I want you to meet Mr. Pickering, who is playing you in the final this afternoon, Mr. McMurdo, Mr. Pickering, my fiancé. Well, goodbye, Harold darling, I've got to rush."
She folded him in a long lingering embrace, the car bowled off, and Harold Pickering found himself alone with this oversized plugugly in what seemed to his fevered fancy a great empty space, like one of those ones in the movies where two strong men stand face to face and Might is the only law.
Sidney McMurdo was staring at him with a peculiar intensity. There was a disturbing gleam in his eyes, and his hands, each the size of a largish ham, were clenching and unclenching as if flexing themselves for some grim work in the not too distant future.
"Did she", he asked in an odd, hoarse voice, "say - fiancé?"
"Why, yes," said Harold Pickering, with a nonchalance which it cost him a strong effort to assume. "Yes, that's right, I believe she did."
"You are going to marry Agnes Flack?"
"There is some idea of it, I understand."
"Ah!" said Sidney McMurdo, and the intensity of his stare was now more marked than ever.
Harold Pickering quailed beneath it. His heart, as he gazed at this patently steamed-up colossus, missed not one beat but several. Nor, I think, can we blame him. All publishers are sensitive, highly strung men. Gollancz is. So is Hamish Hamilton. So are Chapman and Hall, Heinemann and Herbert Jenkins, Ltd. And even when in sunny mood, Sidney McMurdo was always a rather intimidating spectacle. Tall, broad, deep-chested and superbly muscled, he looked like the worthy descendant of a long line of heavyweight gorillas, and nervous people and invalids were generally warned if there was any likelihood of their meeting him unexpectedly. Harold Pickering could not but feel that an uncle who would want anything like that at his sickbed must be eccentric to the last degree.
However, he did his best to keep the conversation on a note of easy cordiality.
"Nice weather," he said.
"Bah!" said Sidney McMurdo.
"How's your uncle?"
"Never mind my uncle. Are you busy at the moment, Mr. Pickering?"
"No."
"Good, said Sidney McMurdo. "Because I want to break your neck."
There was a pause. Harold Pickering backed a step. Sidney McMurdo advanced a step. Harold Pickering backed another step. Sidney McMurdo advanced again. Harold Pickering sprang sideways. Sidney McMurdo also sprang sideways. If it had not been for the fact that the latter was gnashing his teeth and filling the air with a sound similar to that produced by an inexperienced Spanish dancer learning to play the castanets, one might have supposed them to be practising the opening movements of some graceful, old-world gavotte.
"Or, rather," said Sidney McMurdo, correcting his previous statement, "tear you limb from limb."
"Why?" asked Harold Pickering, who liked to go into things.
"You know why," said Sidney McMurdo, moving eastwards as his vis-a-vis moved westwards. "Because you steal girls' hearts behind people's backs, like a snake."
Harold Pickering, who happened to know something about snakes, might have challenged this description of their habits, but he was afforded no opportunity of doing so. His companion had suddenly reached out a clutching hand, and only by coyly drawing it back was he enabled to preserve his neck intact.
"Here, just a moment," he said.
I have mentioned that publishers are sensitive and highly strung. They are also quickwitted. They think on their feet. Harold Pickering had done so now. Hodder and Stoughton could not have reacted more nimbly.
"You are proposing to tear me limb from limb, are you?"
"And also to dance on the fragments.”
It was not easy for Harold Pickering to sneer, for his lower jaw kept dropping, but he contrived to do so.
"I see," he said, just managing to curl his lip before the jaw got away from him again. "Thus ensuring that you shall be this year's club champion. Ingenious, McMurdo. It's one way of winning, of course. But I should not call it very sporting."
He had struck the right note. The blush of shame mantled Sidney McMurdo's cheek. His hands fell to his sides, and he stood chewing his lip, plainly disconcerted.
"I hadn't looked at it like that," he confessed.
"Posterity will," said Harold Pickering.
"Yes, I see what you mean. Postpone it, then, you think, eh?"
"Indefinitely."
"Oh, not indefinitely. We'll get together after the match. After all," said Sidney McMurdo, looking on the bright side, "it isn't long to wait."
It was at this point that I joined them. As generally happened in those days, I had been given the honour of refereeing the final. I asked if they were ready to start.
"Not only ready," said Sidney McMurdo. "Impatient."
Harold Pickering said nothing. He merely moistened the lips with the tip of the tongue.
My friends (proceeded the Oldest Member) have sometimes been kind enough to say that if there is one thing at which I excel, it is at describing in meticulous detail a desperately closely fought golf match - taking my audience stro
ke by stroke from tee one to hole eighteen and showing fortune fluctuating now to one side, now to the other, before finally placing the laurel wreath on the perspiring brow of the ultimate winner. And it is this treat that I should like to be able to give you now.
Unfortunately, the contest for that particular club championship final does not lend itself to such a description. From the very outset it was hopelessly one-sided. Even as we walked to the first tee, it seemed to me that Harold Pickering was not looking his best and brightest. But I put this down to a nervous man's natural anxiety before an important match, and even when he lost the first two holes by the weakest type of play, I assumed that he would soon pull himself together and give of his best.
At that time, of course, I was not aware of the emotions surging in his bosom. It was only some years later that I ran into him and he told me his story and its sequel. That afternoon, what struck me most was the charming spirit of courtesy in which he played the match. He was losing every hole with monotonous regularity, and in such circumstances even the most amiable are apt to be gloomy and sullen, but he never lost his affability. He seemed to be straining every nerve to ingratiate himself with Sidney McMurdo and win the latter's affection.
Oddly, as it appeared to me then, it was McMurdo who was sullen and gloomy. On three occasions he declined the offer of a cigarette from his opponent, and was short in his manner - one might almost say surly - when Harold Pickering, nine down at the ninth, said that it was well worth anyone's while being beaten by Sidney McMurdo because, apart from the fresh air and exercise, it was such an artistic treat to watch his putting.
It was as he paid this graceful tribute that the crowd, which had been melting away pretty steadily for the last quarter of an hour, finally disappeared. By the time Sidney McMurdo had holed out at the tenth for a four that gave him the match, we were alone except for the caddies. These having been paid off, we started to walk back.