Mr. Arnold Bennett, in a recent essay, advises young bachelors to proceed with a certain caution in matters of the heart. They should, he asserts, first decide whether or not they are ready for love; then, whether it is better to marry earlier or later; thirdly, whether their ambitions are such that a wife will prove a hindrance to their career. These romantic preliminaries concluded, they may grab a girl and go to it. Rollo Podmarsh would have made a tough audience for these precepts. Since the days of Antony and Cleopatra probably no one had ever got more swiftly off the mark. One may say that he was in love before he had come within two yards of the girl. And each day that passed found him more nearly up to his eyebrows in the tender emotion.
He thought of Mary when he was changing his wet shoes; he dreamed of her while putting flannel next his skin; he yearned for her over the evening arrowroot. Why, the man was such a slave to his devotion that he actually went to the length of purloining small articles belonging to her. Two days after Mary’s arrival Rollo Podmarsh was driving off the first tee with one of her handkerchiefs, a powder-puff, and a dozen hairpins secreted in his left breast-pocket. When dressing for dinner he used to take them out and look at them, and at night he slept with them under his pillow. Heavens, how he loved that girl!
One evening when they had gone out into the garden together to look at the new moon—Rollo, by his mother’s advice, wearing a woollen scarf to protect his throat—he endeavoured to bring the conversation round to the important subject. Mary’s last remark had been about carwigs. Considered as a cue, it lacked a subtle something; but Rollo was not the man to be discouraged by that.
“Talking of earwigs, Miss Kent,” he said, in a low musical voice, “have you ever been in love?”
Mary was silent for a moment before replying.
“Yes, once. When I was eleven. With a conjurer who came to perform at my birthday-party. He took a rabbit and two eggs out of my hair, and life seemed one grand sweet song.”
“Never since then?”
“Never.”
“Suppose—just for the sake of argument—suppose you ever did love anyone—er—what sort of man would it be?”
“A hero,” said Mary, promptly.
“A hero?” said Rollo, somewhat taken aback. “What sort of hero?”
“Any sort. I could only love a really brave man—a man who had done some wonderful heroic action.”
“Shall we go in?” said Rollo, hoarsely. “The air is a little chilly.”
We have now, therefore, arrived at a period in Rollo Podmarsh’s career which might have inspired those lines of Henley’s about “the night that covers me, black as the Pit from pole to pole”. What with one thing and another, he was in an almost Job-like condition of despondency. I say “one thing and another”, for it was not only hopeless love that weighed him down. In addition to being hopelessly in love, he was greatly depressed about his golf.
On Rollo in his capacity of golfer I have so far not dwelt. You have probably allowed yourself, in spite of the significant episode of the pipe, to dismiss him as one of those placid, contented—shall I say dilettante?—golfers who are so frequent in these degenerate days. Such was not the case. Outwardly placid, Rollo was consumed inwardly by an ever-burning fever of ambition. His aims were not extravagant. He did not want to become amateur champion, nor even to win a monthly medal; but he did, with his whole soul, desire one of these days to go round the course in under a hundred. This feat accomplished, it was his intention to set the seal on his golfing career by playing a real money-match; and already he had selected his opponent, a certain Colonel Bodger, a tottery performer of advanced years who for the last decade had been a martyr to lumbago.
But it began to look as if even the modest goal he had marked out for himself were beyond his powers. Day after day he would step on to the first tee, glowing with zeal and hope, only to crawl home in the quiet evenfall with another hundred and twenty on his card. Little wonder, then, that he began to lose his appetite and would moan feebly at the sight of a poached egg.
With Mrs. Podmarsh sedulously watching over her son’s health, you might have supposed that this inability on his part to teach the foodstuffs to take a joke would have caused consternation in the home. But it so happened that Rollo’s mother had recently been reading a medical treatise in which an eminent physician stated that we all eat too much nowadays, and that the secret of a happy life is to lay off the carbohydrates to some extent. She was, therefore, delighted to observe the young man’s moderation in the matter of food, and frequently held him up as an example to be noted and followed by little Lettice Willoughby, her grand-daughter, who was a good and consistent trencherwoman, particularly rough on the puddings. Little Lettice, I should mention, was the daughter of Rollo’s sister Enid, who lived in the neighbourhood. Mrs. Willoughby had been compelled to go away on a visit a few days before and had left her child with Mrs. Podmarsh during her absence.
You can fool some of the people all the time, but Lettice Willoughby was not of the type that is easily deceived. A nice, old-fashioned child would no doubt have accepted without questioning her grandmother’s dictum that roly-poly pudding could not fail to hand a devastating wallop to the blood-pressure, and that to take two helpings of it was practically equivalent to walking right into the family vault. A child with less decided opinions of her own would have been impressed by the spectacle of her uncle refusing sustenance, and would have received without demur the statement that he did it because he felt that abstinence was good for his health. Lettice was a modern child and knew better. She had had experience of this loss of appetite and its significance. The first symptom which had preceded the demise of poor old Ponto, who had recently handed in his portfolio after holding office for ten years as the Willoughby family dog, had been this same disinclination to absorb nourishment. Besides, she was an observant child, and had not failed to note the haggard misery in her uncle’s eyes. She tackled him squarely on the subject one morning after breakfast. Rollo had retired into the more distant parts of the garden, and was leaning forward, when she found him, with his head buried in his hands.
“Hallo, uncle,” said Lettice.
Rollo looked up wanly.
“Ah, child!” he said. He was fond of his niece.
“Aren’t you feeling well, uncle?”
“Far, far from well.”
“It’s old age, I expect,” said Lettice.
“I feel old,” admitted Rollo. “Old and battered. Ah, Lettice, laugh and be gay while you can.”
“All right, uncle.”
“Make the most of your happy, careless, smiling halcyon childhood.”
“Right-o, uncle.”
“When you get to my age, dear, you will realize that it is a sad, hopeless world. A world where, if you keep your head down, you forget to let the club-head lead: where even if you do happen by a miracle to keep ’em straight with your brassie, you blow up on the green and foozle a six-inch putt.”
Lettice could not quite understand what Uncle Rollo was talking about, but she gathered broadly that she had been correct in supposing him to be in a bad state, and her warm, childish heart was filled with pity for him. She walked thoughtfully away, and Rollo resumed his reverie.
Into each life, as the poet says, some rain must fall. So much had recently been falling into Rollo’s that, when Fortune at last sent along a belated sunbeam, it exercised a cheering effect out of all proportion to its size. By this I mean that when, some four days after his conversation with Lettice, Mary Kent asked him to play golf with her, he read into the invitation a significance which only a lover could have seen in it. I will not go so far as to say that Rollo Podmarsh looked on Mary Kent’s suggestion that they should have a round together as actually tantamount to a revelation of undying love; but he certainly regarded it as a most encouraging sign. It seemed to him that things were beginning to move, that Rollo Preferred were on a rising market. Gone was the gloom of the past days. He forgot those sad, solitary wanderings
of his in the bushes at the bottom of the garden; he forgot that his mother had bought him a new set of winter woollies which felt like horsehair; he forgot that for the last few evenings his arrowroot had tasted rummy. His whole mind was occupied with the astounding fact that she had voluntarily offered to play golf with him, and he walked out on to the first tee filled with a yeasty exhilaration which nearly caused him to burst into song.
“How shall we play?” asked Mary. “I am a twelve. What is your handicap?”
Rollo was under the disadvantage of not actually possessing a handicap. He had a sort of private system of book-keeping of his own by which he took strokes over if they did not seem to him to be up to sample, and allowed himself five-foot putts at discretion. So he had never actually handed in the three cards necessary for handicapping purposes.
“I don’t exactly know,” he said. “It’s my ambition to get round in under a hundred, but I’ve never managed it yet.”
“Never?”
“Never! It’s strange, but something always seems to go wrong.”
“Perhaps you’ll manage it today,” said Mary, encouragingly, so encouragingly that it was all that Rollo could do to refrain from flinging himself at her feet and barking like a dog. “Well, I’ll start you two holes up, and we’ll see how we get on. Shall I take the honour?”
She drove off one of those fair-to-medium balls which go with a twelve handicap. Not a great length, but nice and straight.
“Splendid!” cried Rollo, devoutly.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mary. “I wouldn’t call it anything special.”
Titanic emotions were surging in Rollo’s bosom as he addressed his ball. He had never felt like this before, especially on the first tee—where as a rule he found himself overcome with a nervous humility.
“Oh, Mary! Mary!” he breathed to himself as he swung.
You who squander your golden youth fooling about on a bowling-green will not understand the magic of those three words. But if you were a golfer, you would realize that in selecting just that invocation to breathe to himself Rollo Podmarsh had hit, by sheer accident, on the ideal method of achieving a fine drive. Let me explain. The first two words, tensely breathed, are just sufficient to take a man with the proper slowness to the top of his swing; the first syllable of the second “Mary” exactly coincides with the striking of the ball; and the final “ry!” takes care of the follow-through. The consequence was that Rollo’s ball, instead of hopping down the hill like an embarrassed duck, as was its usual practice, sang off the tee with a scream like a shell, nodded in passing Mary’s ball, where it lay some hundred and fifty yards down the course, and, carrying on from there, came to rest within easy distance of the green. For the first time in his golfing life Rollo Podmarsh had hit a nifty.
Mary followed the ball’s flight with astonished eyes.
“But this will never do!” she exclaimed. “I can’t possibly start you two up if you’re going to do this sort of thing.”
Rollo blushed.
“I shouldn’t think it would happen again,” he said. “I’ve never done a drive like that before.”
“But it must happen again,” said Mary, firmly. “This is evidently your day. If you don’t get round in under a hundred today, I shall never forgive you.”
Rollo shut his eyes, and his lips moved feverishly. He was registering a vow that, come what might, he would not fail her. A minute later he was holing out in three, one under bogey.
The second hole is the short lake-hole. Bogey is three, and Rollo generally did it in four; for it was his custom not to count any balls he might sink in the water, but to start afresh with one which happened to get over, and then take three putts. But today something seemed to tell him that he would not require the aid of this ingenious system. As he took his mashie from the bag, he knew that his first shot would soar successfully on to the green.
“Ah, Mary!” he breathed as he swung.
These subtleties are wasted on a worm, if you will pardon the expression, like yourself, who, possibly owing to a defective education, is content to spend life’s springtime rolling wooden balls across a lawn; but I will explain that in altering and shortening his soliloquy at this juncture Rollo had done the very thing any good pro. would have recommended. If he had murmured, “Oh, Mary! Mary!” as before he would have over-swung. “Ah, Mary!” was exactly right for a half-swing with the mashie. His ball shot up in a beautiful arc, and trickled to within six inches of the hole.
Mary was delighted. There was something about this big, diffident man which had appealed from the first to everything in her that was motherly.
“Marvellous!” she said. “You’ll get a two. Five for the first two holes! Why, you simply must get round in under a hundred now.” She swung, but too lightly; and her ball fell in the water. “I’ll give you this,” she said, without the slightest chagrin, for this girl had a beautiful nature. “Let’s go on to the third. Four up! Why, you’re wonderful!”
And not to weary you with too much detail, I will simply remark that, stimulated by her gentle encouragement, Rollo Podmarsh actually came off the ninth green with a medal score of forty-six for the half-round. A ten on the seventh had spoiled his card to some extent, and a nine on the eighth had not helped, but nevertheless here he was in forty-six, with the easier half of the course before him. He tingled all over—partly because he was wearing the new winter woollies to which I have alluded previously, but principally owing to triumph, elation, and love. He gazed at Mary as Dante might have gazed at Beatrice on one of his particularly sentimental mornings.
Mary uttered an exclamation.
“Oh, I’ve just remembered,” she exclaimed. “I promised to write last night to Jane Simpson and give her that new formula for knitting jumpers. I think I’ll phone her now from the club-house and then it’ll be off my mind. You go on to the tenth, and I’ll join you there.”
Rollo proceeded over the brow of the hill to the tenth tee, and was filling in the time with practice-swings when he heard his name spoken.
“Good gracious, Rollo! I couldn’t believe it was you at first.”
He turned to see his sister, Mrs. Willoughby, the mother of the child Lettice.
“Hallo!” he said. “When did you get back?”
“Late last night. Why, it’s extraordinary!”
“Hope you had a good time. What’s extraordinary? Listen, Enid. Do you know what I’ve done? Forty-six for the first nine! Forty-six! And holing out every putt.”
“Oh, then that accounts for it.”
“Accounts for what?”
“Why, your looking so pleased with life. I got an idea from Letty, when she wrote to me, that you were at death’s door. Your gloom seems to have made a deep impression on the child. Her letter was full of it.”
Rollo was moved.
“Dear little Letty! She is wonderfully sympathetic.”
“Well, I must be off now,” said Enid Willoughby. “I’m late. Oh, talking of Letty. Don’t children say the funniest things! She wrote in her letter that you were very old and wretched and that she was going to put you out of your misery.”
“Ha ha ha!” laughed Rollo.
“We had to poison poor old Ponto the other day, you know, and poor little Letty was inconsolable till we explained to her that it was really the kindest thing to do, because he was so old and ill. But just imagine her thinking of wanting to end your sufferings!”
“Ha ha!” laughed Rollo. “Ha ha h⎯!”
His voice trailed off into a broken gurgle. Quite suddenly a sinister thought had come to him.
The arrowroot had tasted rummy!
“Why, what on earth is the matter?” asked Mrs. Willoughby, regarding his ashen face.
Rollo could find no words. He yammered speechlessly. Yes, for several nights the arrowroot had tasted very rummy. Rummy! There was no other adjective. Even as he plied the spoon he had said to himself: “This arrowroot tastes rummy!” And—he uttered a sharp yelp as he remembe
red—it had been little Lettice who had brought it to him. He recollected being touched at the time by the kindly act.
“What is the matter, Rollo?” demanded Mrs. Willoughby, sharply. “Don’t stand there looking like a dying duck.”
“I am a dying duck,” responded Rollo, hoarsely. “A dying man, I mean. Enid, that infernal child has poisoned me!”
“Don’t be ridiculous! And kindly don’t speak of her like that!”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t blame her, I suppose. No doubt her motives were good. But the fact remains.”
“Rollo, you’re too absurd.”
“But the arrowroot tasted rummy.”
“I never knew you could be such an idiot,” said his exasperated sister with sisterly outspokenness. “I thought you would think it quaint. I thought you would roar with laughter.”
“I did—till I remembered about the rumminess of the arrowroot.”
Mrs. Willoughby uttered an impatient exclamation and walked away.
Rollo Podmarsh stood on the tenth tee, a volcano of mixed emotions. Mechanically he pulled out his pipe and lit it. But he found that he could not smoke. In this supreme crisis of his life tobacco seemed to have lost its magic. He put the pipe back in his pocket and gave himself up to his thoughts. Now terror gripped him; anon a sort of gentle melancholy. It was so hard that he should be compelled to leave the world just as he had begun to hit ’em right.
And then in the welter of his thoughts there came one of practical value. To wit, that by hurrying to the doctor’s without delay he might yet be saved. There might be antidotes.
He turned to go and there was Mary Kent standing beside him with her bright, encouraging smile.