His mood, therefore, as he sat in his Louis Quinze library on the evening on which this story opens, was perfectly contented. And when there was a knock at the door and Vosper entered, no foreboding came to warn him that the quiet peace of his life was about to be shattered.
“Might I have a word, sir?” said the butler.
“Certainly, Vosper. What is it?”
Bradbury Fisher beamed upon the man. For the hundredth time, as he eyed him, he reflected how immeasurably superior he was to the departed Blizzard. Blizzard had been fifteen years with an earl, and no one disputes that earls are all very well in their way. But they are not dukes. About a butler who has served in a ducal household there is something which cannot be duplicated by one who has passed the formative years of his butlerhood in humbler surroundings.
“It has to do with Mr. Worple, sir.”
“What about him?”
“Mr. Worple,” said the butler, gravely, “must go. I do not like his laugh, sir.”
“Eh?”
“It is too hearty, sir. It would not have done for the Duke.”
Bradbury Fisher was an easy-going man, but he belonged to a free race. For freedom his fathers had fought, and if he had heard the story correctly, bled. His eyes flashed.
“Oh!” he cried. “Oh, indeed!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is zat so?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, let me tell you something, Bill⎯”
“My name is Hildebrand, sir.”
“Well, let me tell you, whatever your scarlet name is, that no butler is going to boss me in my own home. You can darned well go yourself.”
“Very good, sir.”
Vosper withdrew like an ambassador who has received his papers; and presently there was a noise without like hens going through a hedge, and Mrs. Fisher plunged in.
“Bradbury,” she cried, “are you mad? Of course, Mr. Worple must go if Vosper says so. Don’t you realize that Vosper will leave us if we don’t humour him?”
“I should worry about him leaving!”
A strange, set look came into Mrs. Fisher’s face.
“Bradbury,” she said, “if Vosper leaves us, I shall die. And, what is more, just before dying I shall get a divorce. Yes, I will.”
“But, darling,” gasped Bradbury, “Rupert Worple! Old Rupie Worple! We’ve been friends all our lives.”
“I don’t care.”
“We were freshers at Sing-Sing together.”
“I don’t care.”
“We were initiated into the same Frat, the dear old Cracka-Bitta-Rock, on the same day.”
“I don’t care. Heaven has sent me the perfect butler, and I’m not going to lose him.”
There was a tense silence.
“Ah, well!” said Bradbury Fisher with a deep sigh.
That night he broke the news to Rupert Worple.
“I never thought,” said Rupert Worple sadly, “when we sang together on the glee-club at the old Alma Mater, that it would ever come to this.”
“Nor I,” said Bradbury Fisher. “But so it must be. You wouldn’t have done for the Duke, Rupie, you wouldn’t have done for the Duke.”
“Good-bye, Number 8,097,564,” said Rupert Worple in a low voice.
“Good-bye, Number 8,097,565,” whispered Bradbury Fisher.
And with a silent hand-clasp the two friends parted.
With the going of Rupert Worple a grey cloud seemed to settle upon the glowing radiance of Bradbury Fisher’s life. Mrs. Lora Smith Maplebury duly arrived; and, having given a series of penetrating sniffs as he greeted her in the entrance-hall, dug herself in and settled down to what looked like the visit of a life-time. And then, just as Bradbury’s cup seemed to be full to over-flowing, Mrs. Fisher drew him aside one evening.
“Bradbury,” said Mrs. Fisher. “I have some good news for you.”
“Is your mother leaving?” asked Bradbury eagerly.
“Of course not. I said good news. I am taking up golf again.”
Bradbury Fisher clutched at the arms of his chair, and an ashen pallor spread itself over his clean-cut face.
“What did you say?” he muttered.
“I’m taking up golf again. Won’t it be nice? We’ll be able to play together every day.”
Bradbury Fisher shuddered strongly. It was many years since he had played with his wife, but, like an old wound, the memory of it still troubled him occasionally.
“It was Vosper’s idea.”
“Vosper!”
A sudden seething fury gripped Bradbury. This pestilent butler was an absolute home-wrecker. He toyed with the idea of poisoning Vosper’s port. Surely, if he were to do so, a capable lawyer could smooth things over and get him off with, at the worst, a nominal fine.
“Vosper says I need exercise. He says he does not like my wheezing.”
“Your what?”
“My wheezing. I do wheeze, you know.”
“Well, so does he.”
“Yes, but a good butler is expected to wheeze. A wheezing woman is quite a different thing. My wheezing would never have done for the Duke, Vosper says.”
Bradbury Fisher breathed tensely.
“Ha!” he said.
“I think it’s so nice of him, Bradbury. It shows he has our interests at heart, just like a faithful old retainer. He says wheezing is an indication of heightened blood-pressure and can be remedied by gentle exercise. So we’ll have our first round tomorrow morning, shall we?”
“Just as you say,” said Bradbury dully. “I had a sort of date to make one of a foursome with three men at the club, but⎯”
“Oh, you don’t want to play with those silly men any more. It will be much nicer, just you and I playing together.”
It has always seemed to me a strange and unaccountable thing that nowadays, when gloom is at such a premium in the world’s literature and all around us stern young pessimists are bringing home the bacon with their studies in the greyly grim, no writer has thought of turning his pen to a realistic portrayal of the golfing wife. No subject could be more poignant, and yet it has been completely neglected. One can only suppose that even modern novelists feel that the line should be drawn somewhere.
Bradbury Fisher’s emotions, as he stood by the first tee watching his wife prepare to drive off, were far beyond my poor power to describe. Compared with him at that moment, the hero of a novel of the Middle West would have seemed almost offensively chirpy. This was the woman he loved, and she was behaving in a manner that made the iron sink deep into his soul.
Most women golfers are elaborate wagglers, but none that Bradbury had ever seen had made quite such a set of Swedish exercises out of the simple act of laying the clubhead behind the ball and raising it over the right shoulder. For fully a minute, it seemed to him, Mrs. Fisher fiddled and pawed at the ball; while Bradbury, realizing that there are eighteen tees on a course and that this Russian Ballet stuff was consequently going to happen at least seventeen times more, quivered in agony and clenched his hands till the knuckles stood out white under the strain. Then she drove, and the ball trickled down the hill into a patch of rough some five yards distant.
“Tee-hee!” said Mrs. Fisher.
Bradbury uttered a sharp cry. He was married to a golfing giggler.
“What did I do then?”
“God help you, woman,” said Bradbury, “you jerked your head up till I wonder it didn’t come off at the neck.”
It was at the fourth hole that further evidence was afforded the wretched man of how utterly a good, pure woman may change her nature when once she gets out on the links. Mrs. Fisher had played her eleventh, and, having walked the intervening three yards, was about to play her twelfth when behind them, grouped upon the tee, Bradbury perceived two of his fellow-members of the club. Remorse and shame pierced him.
“One minute, honey,” he said, as his life’s partner took a stranglehold on her mashie and was about to begin the movements. “We’d better let these me
n through.”
“What men?”
“We’re holding up a couple of fellows. I’ll wave to them.”
“You will do nothing of the sort,” cried Mrs. Fisher. “The idea!”
“But, darling⎯”
“Why should they go through us? We started before them.”
“But, pettie⎯”
“They shall not pass!” said Mrs. Fisher. And, raising her mashie, she dug a grim divot out of the shrinking turf. With bowed head, Bradbury followed her on the long, long trail.
The sun was sinking as they came at last to journey’s end.
“How right Vosper is!” said Mrs. Fisher, nestling into the cushions of the automobile. “I feel ever so much better already.”
“Do you?” said Bradbury wanly. “Do you?”
“We’ll play again tomorrow afternoon,” said his wife.
Bradbury Fisher was a man of steel. He endured for a week. But on the last day of the week Mrs. Fisher insisted on taking as a companion on the round Alfred, her pet Airedale. In vain Bradbury spoke of the Greens Committee and their prejudice against dogs on the links. Mrs. Fisher—and Bradbury, as he heard the ghastly words, glanced involuntarily up at the summer sky, as if preparing to dodge the lightning-bolt which could scarcely fail to punish such blasphemy—said that the Greens Committee were a lot of silly, fussy old men, and she had no patience with them.
So Alfred came along—barking at Bradbury as he endeavoured to concentrate on the smooth pronation of the wrists, pounding ahead to frolic round distant players who were shaping for delicate chip-shots, and getting a deep toe-hold on the turf of each successive green. Hell, felt Bradbury, must be something like this; and he wished that he had led a better life.
But that retribution which waits on all, both small and great, who defy Greens Committees had marked Alfred down. Taking up a position just behind Mrs. Fisher as she began her down swing on the seventh, he received so shrewd a blow on his right foreleg that with a sharp yelp he broke into a gallop, raced through a foursome on the sixth green, and, charging across country, dived headlong into the water-hazard on the second; where he remained until Bradbury, who had been sent in pursuit, waded in and fished him out.
Mrs. Fisher came panting up, full of concern.
“What shall we do? The poor little fellow is quite lame. I know, you can carry him, Bradbury.”
Bradbury Fisher uttered a low, bleating sound. The water had had the worst effect on the animal. Even when dry, Alfred was always a dog of powerful scent. Wet, he had become definitely one of the six best-smellers. His aroma had what the advertisement-writers call “strong memory value”.
“Carry him? To the car, do you mean?”
“Of course not. Round the links. I don’t want to miss a day’s golf. You can put him down when you play your shots.”
For a long instant Bradbury hesitated. The words “Is zat so?” trembled on his lips.
“Very well,” he said, swallowing twice.
That night, in his du Barri bedroom, Bradbury Fisher lay sleepless far into the dawn. A crisis, he realized, had come in his domestic affairs. Things, he saw clearly, could not go on like this. It was not merely the awful spiritual agony of playing these daily rounds of golf with his wife that was so hard to endure. The real trouble was that the spectacle of her on the links was destroying his ideals, sapping away that love and respect which should have been as imperishable as steel.
To a good man his wife should be a goddess, a being far above him to whom he can offer worship and reverence, a beacon-star guiding him over the tossing seas of life. She should be ever on a pedestal and in a shrine. And when she waggles for a minute and a half and then jerks her head and tops the ball, she ceases to be so. And Mrs. Fisher was not merely a head-lifter and a super-waggler; she was a scoffer at Golf’s most sacred things. She held up scratchmen. She omitted to replace divots. She spoke lightly of Green Committees.
The sun was gilding Goldenville in its morning glory when Bradbury made up his mind. He would play with her no more. To do so would be fair neither to himself nor to her. At any moment, he felt, she might come out on the links in high heels or stop to powder her nose on the green while frenzied foursomes waited to play their approach-shots. And then love would turn to hate, and he and she would go through life estranged. Better to end it now, while he still retained some broken remains of the old esteem.
He had got everything neatly arranged. He would plead business in the City and sneak off each day to play on another course five miles away.
“Darling,” he said at breakfast, “I’m afraid we shan’t be able to have our game for a week or so. I shall have to be at the office early and late.”
“Oh, what a shame!” said Mrs. Fisher.
“You will, no doubt, be able to get a game with the pro. or somebody. You know how bitterly this disappoints me. I had come to look on our daily round as the bright spot of the day. But business is business.”
“I thought you had retired from business,” said Mrs. Lora Smith Maplebury, with a sniff that cracked a coffee-cup.
Bradbury Fisher looked at her coldly. She was a lean, pale-eyed woman with high cheek-bones, and for the hundredth time since she had come into his life he felt how intensely she needed a punch on the nose.
“Not altogether,” he said. “I still retain large interests in this and that, and I am at the moment occupied with affairs which I cannot mention without revealing secrets which might—which would—which are⎯ Well, anyway, I’ve got to go to the office.”
“Oh, quite,” said Mrs. Maplebury.
“What do you mean, quite?” demanded Bradbury.
“I mean just what I say. Quite!”
“Why quite?”
“Why not quite? I suppose I can say ‘Quite!’ can’t I?”
“Oh, quite,” said Bradbury.
He kissed his wife and left the room. He felt a little uneasy. There had been something in the woman’s manner which had caused him a vague foreboding.
Had he been able to hear the conversation that followed his departure, he would have been still more uneasy.
“Suspicious!” said Mrs. Maplebury.
“What is?” asked Mrs. Fisher.
“That man’s behaviour.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you observe him closely while he was speaking?”
“No.”
“The tip of his nose wiggled. Always distrust a man who wiggles the tip of his nose.”
“I am sure Bradbury would not deceive you.”
“So am I. But he might try to.”
“I don’t understand, mother. Do you mean you think Bradbury is not going to the office?”
“I am sure he is not.”
“You think⎯?”
“I do.”
“You are suggesting⎯?”
“I am.”
“You would imply⎯?”
“I would.”
A moan escaped Mrs. Fisher.
“Oh, mother, mother!” she cried. “If I thought Bradbury was untrue to me, what I wouldn’t do to that poor clam!”
“I certainly think that the least you can do, as a good womanly woman, is to have a capable lawyer watching your interests.”
“But we can easily find out if he is at the office. We can ring them up on the phone and ask.”
“And be told that he is in conference. He will not have neglected to arrange for that.”
“Then what shall I do?”
“Wait,” said Mrs. Maplebury. “Wait and be watchful.”
The shades of night were falling when Bradbury returned to his home. He was fatigued but jubilant. He had played forty-five holes in the society of his own sex. He had kept his head down and his eye on the ball. He had sung negro spirituals in the locker-room.
“I trust, Bradbury,” said Mrs. Maplebury, “that you are not tired after your long day?”
“A little,” said Bradbury. “Nothing to signify.” He turned radiantly to his wife
.
“Honey,” he said, “you remember the trouble I was having with my iron? Well, today⎯”
He stopped aghast. Like every good husband it had always been his practice hitherto to bring his golfing troubles to his wife, and in many a cosy after-dinner chat he had confided to her the difficulty he was having in keeping his iron-shots straight. And he had only just stopped himself now from telling her that today he had been hitting ’em sweetly on the meat right down the middle.
“Your iron?”
“Er—ah—yes. I have large interests in Iron—as also in Steel, Jute, Woollen Fabrics, and Consolidated Peanuts. A gang has been trying to hammer down my stock. Today I fixed them.”
“You did, did you?” said Mrs. Maplebury.
“I said I did,” retorted Bradbury defiantly.
“So did I. I said you did, did you?”
“What do you mean, did you?”
“Well, you did, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Exactly what I said. You did. Didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Yes, you did!” said Mrs. Maplebury.
Once again Bradbury felt vaguely uneasy. There was nothing in the actual dialogue which had just taken place to cause him alarm—indeed, considered purely as dialogue, it was bright and snappy and well calculated to make things gay about the home. But once more there had been a subtle something in his mother-in-law’s manner which had jarred upon him. He mumbled and went off to dress for dinner.
“Ha!” said Mrs. Maplebury, as the door closed.
Such, then, was the position of affairs in the Fisher home. And now that I have arrived thus far in my story and have shown you this man systematically deceiving the woman he had vowed—at one of the most exclusive altars in New York—to love and cherish, you—if you are the sort of husband I hope you are—must be saying to yourself: “But what of Bradbury Fisher’s conscience?” Remorse, you feel, must long since have begun to gnaw at his vitals; and the thought suggests itself to you that surely by this time the pangs of self-reproach must have interfered seriously with his short game, even if not as yet sufficiently severe to affect his driving off the tee.