A Few Quick Ones

  To lose a championship match by ten and eight is an experience calculated to induce in a man an introspective silence, and I had not expected Harold Pickering to contribute much to any feast of reason and flow of soul which might enliven the homeward journey. To my surprise, however, as we started to cross the bridge which spans the water at the eleventh, he burst into animated speech, complimenting his conqueror in a graceful way which I thought very sporting.

  "I wonder if you will allow me to say, Mr. McMurdo," he began, "how greatly impressed I have been by your performance this afternoon. It has been a genuine revelation to me. It is so seldom that one meets a man who, while long off the tee, also plays an impeccable short game. I don't want to appear fulsome, but it seems to me that you have everything."

  Words like these should have been music to Sidney McMurdo's ears, but he merely scowled darkly and uttered a short grunt like a bulldog choking on a piece of steak.

  "In fact, I don't mind telling you, McMurdo," proceeded Harold Pickering, still in that genial and ingratiating manner, "that I shall watch your future career with considerable interest. It is a sad pity that this year's Walker Cup matches are over, for our team might have been greatly strengthened. Well, I venture to assert that next season the selection of at least one member will give the authorities little trouble."

  Sidney McMurdo uttered another grunt, and I saw what seemed Like a look of discouragement come into Harold Pickering's face. But after gulping a couple of times he continued brightly.

  "Tell me, Sidney," he said, "have you ever thought of writing a golf book? You know the sort of thing, old man. Something light and chatty, describing your methods and giving advice to the novice. If so, I should be delighted to publish it, and we should not quarrel about the terms. If I were you, I'd go straight home and start on it now."

  Sidney McMurdo spoke for the first time. His voice was deep and rumbling. "I have something to do before I go home."

  "Oh, yes ?"

  "I am going to pound the stuffing out of a snake."

  "Ah, then in that case you will doubtless want to be alone, to concentrate. I will leave you."

  "No, you won't. Let us step behind those bushes for a moment, Mr. Pickering," said Sidney McMurdo.

  I have always been good at putting two and two together, and listening to these exchanges I now sensed how matters stood. In a word, I saw all, and my heart bled for Harold Pickering. Unnecessarily, as it turned out, for even as my heart started to bleed, Harold Pickering acted.

  I have said that we were crossing the bridge over the water at the eleventh, and no doubt you have been picturing that bridge as it is today - a stout steel structure. At the time of which I am speaking it was a mere plank with a rickety wooden rail along it, a rail ill adapted to withstand the impact of a heavy body.

  Sidney McMurdo's was about as heavy a body as there was in the neighbourhood, and when Harold Pickering, with a resource and ingenuity which it would be difficult to overpraise, suddenly butted him in the stomach with his head and sent him reeling against it, it gave way without a moment's hesitation. There was a splintering crash, followed by a splash and a scurry of feet, and the next thing I saw was Harold Pickering disappearing over the horizon while Sidney McMurdo, up to his waist in water, petulantly detached an eel from his hair. It was a striking proof of the old saying that a publisher is never so dangerous as when apparently beaten. You may drive a publisher into a corner, but you do so at your own peril.

  Presently, Sidney McMurdo waded ashore and started to slosh sullenly up the hillside towards the clubhouse. From the irritable manner in which he was striking himself between the shoulder blades I received the impression that he had got some sort of a water beetle down his back.

  As I think I mentioned earlier, I did not see Harold Pickering again for some years, and it was only then that I was enabled to fill in the gaps in what has always seemed to me a singularly poignant human drama.

  At first, he told me, he was actuated by the desire, which one can understand and sympathize with, to put as great a distance as possible between Sidney McMurdo and himself in the shortest possible time. With this end in view, he hastened to his car, which he had left standing outside the clubhouse, and placing a firm foot on the accelerator drove about seventy miles in the general direction of Scotland. Only when he paused for a sandwich at a wayside tavern after completing this preliminary burst did he discover that all the money he had on his person was five shillings and a little bronze.

  Now, a less agitated man would, of course, have seen that the policy to pursue was to take a room at a hotel, explain to the management that his luggage would be following shortly, and write to his bank to telegraph him such funds as he might require. But this obvious solution did not even occur to Harold Pickering. The only way out of the difficulty that suggested itself to him was to drive back to his cottage, secure the few pounds which he knew to be on the premises, throw into a suitcase some articles of clothing and his cheque book and then drive off again into the sunset.

  As it happened, however, he would not have been able to drive into the sunset, for it was quite dark when he arrived at his destination. He alighted from his car, and was about to enter the house, when he suddenly observed that there was a light in the sitting-room. And creeping to the window and peering cautiously through a chink in the curtains, he saw that it was precisely as he had feared. There on a settee, scowling up at the ceiling, was Sidney McMurdo. He had the air of a man who was waiting for somebody.

  And scarcely had Harold Pickering, appalled by this spectacle, withdrawn into a near-by bush to think the situation over in all of its aspects and try to find a formula, when heavy footsteps sounded on the gravel path and, dark though it was, he had no difficulty in identifying the newcomer as Agnes Flack. Only she could have clumped like that.

  The next moment, she had delivered a resounding buffet on the front door, and Sidney McMurdo was opening it to her.

  There was a silence as they gazed at one another. Except for that brief instant when she had introduced Harold Pickering to Sidney McMurdo outside the clubhouse, these sundered hearts had not met since the severance of their relations, and even a fifteen-stone man and an eleven-stone girl are not immune from embarrassment.

  Agnes was the first to speak.

  "Hullo," she said. "You here?"

  "Yes," said Sidney McMurdo, "I’m here all right. I am waiting for the snake Pickering."

  "I've come to see him myself."

  "Oh? Well, nothing that you can do will save him from my wrath."

  "Who wants to save him from your wrath?"

  "Don't you?"

  "Certainly not. All I looked in for was to break our engagement."

  Sidney McMurdo staggered. "Break your engagement?"

  "That's right."

  "But I thought you loved him."

  "No more. The scales have fallen from my eyes. I don't marry men who are as hot as pistols in a friendly round with nothing depending on it, but blow up like geysers in competition golf. Why are you wrathful with him, Sidney?"

  Sidney McMurdo gnashed his teeth.

  "He stole you from me," he said hoarsely.

  If Agnes Flack had been about a foot shorter and had weighed about thirty pounds less, the sound which proceeded from her might have been described as a giggle. She stretched out the toe of her substantial shoe and made a squiggle with it on the gravel.

  "And did you mind that so much?" she said softly, - or as softly as it was in her power to speak.

  "Yes, I jolly well did," said Sidney McMurdo. "I love you, old girl, and I shall continue to love you till the cows come home. When I was demolishing the reptile Pickering this afternoon, your face seemed to float before me all the way round, even when I was putting. And I'll tell you something. I've been thinking it over, and I see now that I was all wrong that time and should unquestionably have used a Number Four iron. Too late, of course," said Sidney McMurdo moodily, thinking of what might have been.

>   Agnes Flack drew a second arabesque on the gravel, using the toe of the other shoe this time.

  "How do you mean, too late?" she asked reasonably softly.

  "Well, isn't it too late?"

  "Certainly not."

  "You can't mean you love me still?"

  "Yes, I jolly well can mean I love you still."

  "Well, I'll be blowed! And here was I, thinking that all was over and life empty and all that sort of thing. My mate!" cried Sidney McMurdo.

  They fell into an embrace like a couple of mastodons clashing in a primeval swamp, and the earth had scarcely ceased to shake when a voice spoke.

  "Excuse me."

  In his hiding-place in the bush Harold Pickering leaped as if somebody had touched off a land mine under his feet and came to rest quivering in every limb. He had recognized that voice.

  "Excuse me," said Troon Rockett. "Does Mr. Pickering live here?"

  "Yes," said Sidney McMurdo.

  "If," added Agnes Flack, "you can call it living when a man enters for an important competition and gets beaten ten and eight. He's out at the moment. Better go in and stick around."

  "Thank you," said the girl. "I will."

  She vanished into the cottage. Sidney McMurdo took advantage of her departure to embrace Agnes Flack again.

  "Old blighter," he said tenderly, "let's get married right away, before there can be any more misunderstandings and rifts and what not. How about Tuesday?"

  "Can't Tuesday. Mixed foursomes."

  "Wednesday?"

  "Can't Wednesday. Bogey competition."

  "And Thursday I'm playing in the invitation tournament at Squashy Heath," said Sidney McMurdo. "Oh, well, I daresay we shall manage to find a day when we're both free. Let's stroll along and talk it over."

  They crashed off, and as the echoes of their clumping feet died away in the distance Harold Pickering left the form in which he had been crouching and walked dizzily to the cottage. And the first thing he saw as he entered the sitting-room was Troon Rockett kissing a cabinet photograph of himself which she had taken from place on the mantelpiece. The spectacle drew from him a sharp, staccato bark of amazement, and she turned, her eyes wide.

  "Harold!" she cried, and flung herself into his arms.

  To say that Harold Pickering was surprised, bewildered, startled and astounded would be merely to state the facts. He could not remember having been so genuinely taken aback since the evening when, sauntering in his garden in the dusk, he had trodden on the teeth of a rake and had the handle jump up and hit him on the nose.

  But, as I have had occasion to observe before, he was a publisher, and I doubt if there is a publisher on the list who would not know what to do if a charming girl flung herself into his arms. I have told this story to one or two publishers of my acquaintance, and they all assured me that the correct procedure would come instinctively to them. Harold Pickering kissed Troon Rockett sixteen times in quick succession, and Macmillan and Faber and Faber say they would have done just the same.

  At length, he paused. He was, as I have said, a man who liked to go into things.

  "But I don't understand."

  "What don't you understand?'

  "Well, don't think for a moment that I'm complaining, but this flinging-into-arms sequence strikes me as odd,"

  "I can't imagine why. I love you."

  "But when I asked you to be my wife, you rose and walked haughtily from the room."

  "I didn't."

  "You did. I was there."

  "I mean, I didn't walk haughtily. I hurried out because I was alarmed and agitated. You sat there gasping and gurgling, and I thought you were having a fit of some kind. So I rushed off to phone the doctor, and when I got back you had gone. And then a day or two later another man proposed to me, and he, too, started gasping and gurgling, and I realized the truth. They told me at your office that you were living here, so I came along to let you know that I loved you."

  "You really do?"

  "Of course I do. I loved you the first moment I saw you. You remember? You were explaining to father that thirteen copies count as twelve, and I came in and our eyes met. In that instant I knew that you were the only man in the world for me."

  For a moment Harold Pickering was conscious only of a wild exhilaration. He felt as if his firm had brought out Gone With the Wind, Then a dull, hopeless look came into his sensitive face.

  "It can never be," he said.

  "Why not?"

  "You heard what that large girl was saying outside there, but probably you did not take it in. It was the truth. I was beaten this afternoon ten and eight."

  "Everybody has an off day."

  He shook his head.

  "It was not an off day. That was my true form. I haven't the nerve to be a scratch man. When the acid test comes, I blow up. I suppose I'm about ten, really. You can't marry a ten-handicap man."

  "Why not?"

  "You! The daughter of John Rockett and his British Ladies Champion wife. The great-grand-daughter of old Ma Rockett. The sister of Prestwick, Sandwich, Hoylake and St. Andrew Rockett."

  "But that's just why. It has always been my dream to marry a man with a handicap of about ten, so that we could go through life together side by side, twin souls. I should be ten, if the family didn't make me practise five hours a day all the year round. I'm not a natural scratch. I have made myself scratch by ceaseless, unremitting toil, and if there's one thing in the world I loathe it is ceaseless, unremitting toil. The relief of being able to let myself slip back to ten is indescribable. Oh, Harold, we shall be so happy. Just to think of taking three putts on a green! It will be heaven!"

  Harold Pickering had been reeling a good deal during these remarks. He now ceased to do so. There is a time for reeling and a time for not reeling.

  "You mean that?"

  "I certainly do."

  "You will really marry me?"

  "How long does it take to get a licence?"

  For an instant Harold Pickering sought for words, but found none. Then a rather neat thing that Sidney McMurdo had said came back to him. Sidney McMurdo was a man he could never really like, but his dialogue was excellent.

  "My mate!" he said.

  3

  The Right Approach

  THE subject of magazine stories came up quite suddenly in the bar parlour of the Angler's Rest, as subjects are wont to do there, for in the way the minds of our little group flit from this top to that there is always a suggestion of the chamois of the Alps springing from crag to crag. We were, if I remember rightly, discussing supralapsarianism, when a Whisky-and- Splash, who had been turning the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, the property of our courteous and popular barmaid Miss Postlethwaite, uttered a snort.

  "Gesundheit," said a Draught Ale.

  "I wasn't sneezing, I was snorting," said the Whisky-and-Splash. Disgustedly, he added. "Why do they publish these things?"

  "What things would that be?"

  "These stories, illustrated in glorious technicolour, where the fellow meets the girl on the beach, and they start kidding back and forth, and twenty minutes after they've seen each other for the first time, they're engaged to be married."

  Mr. Mulliner took a sip from his hot Scotch and lemon.

  "You find that unconvincing?"

  "Yes, I do. I am a married man, and it took me two years and more boxes of chocolates than I care to think of to persuade the lady who is now my wife to sign on the dotted line. And though it is not for me to say so, I was a pretty fascinating chap in those days. Ask anybody."

  Mr. Mulliner nodded.

  "Your point is well taken. But you must make allowances for the editor of the Saturday Evening Post. He lives in a world of his own, and really does think that two complete strangers can meet in bathing suits on the beach and conclude their initial conversation by becoming betrothed. However, as you say, it seldom happens in ordinary life. Even the Mulliners, most of whom have fallen in love at first sight, have not found the going
quite so smooth and simple as that. They have been compelled to pull up their socks and put in not a little preliminary spadework. The case of my nephew Augustus is one that springs to the mind."

  "Did he meet girls in bathing suits on beaches?"

  "Frequently. But it was at a charity bazaar at a house called Balmoral on Wimbledon Common that love came to him, for it was there that he saw Hermione Brimble and fell with a thud that could have been heard as far off as Putney Hill."

  It was owing to his godmother's fondness for bazaars (said Mr. Mulliner) that Augustus found himself in the garden of Balmoral, and it is ironical to reflect that when she ordered him to escort her there, he was considerably annoyed, for he had been planning to go to Kempton Park and with word and gesture encourage in the two-thirty race a horse in whose fortunes he was interested. But his chagrin was not long-lasting. What caused it to vanish was the sight of a girl so divine that, as his gaze rested upon her, the top hat rocked on his head and only a sudden snatch at the last moment prevented his umbrella from falling from his grip.

  "Well, well," he said to himself, as he drank her in, "This certainly opens up a new line of thought."

  She was presiding over a stall in the shade of a large cedar at the edge of the lawn, and as soon as he could get his limbs to function he hastened up and began buying everything in sight. And when a tea-cosy, two Teddy bears, a penwiper, a bowl of wax flowers and a fretwork pipe-rack had changed hands he felt that he was entitled to regard himself as a member of the club and get friendly.

  "Lovely day," he said.

  "Beautiful," said the girl.

  "The sun," said Augustus, pointing it out with his umbrella.

  The girl said Yes, she had noticed the sun.

  "I always think it seems to make everything so much brighter, if you know what I mean, when the sun's shining," said Augustus. "Well, it's been awfully jolly, meeting you. My name, in case you're interested, is Mulliner."