“Very sound,” said Mr. Brown.
The two detectives concealed themselves in the alcove. William retired behind the curtains in front of the window. Jane dived behind the Chesterfield. A moment later the door opened.
Crouching in her corner, Jane could see nothing, but every word that was spoken came to her ears; and with every syllable her horror deepened.
“Give me your things,” she heard Rodney say, “and then we will go upstairs.”
Jane shivered. The curtains by the window shook. From the direction of the alcove there came a soft scratching sound, as the two detectives made an entry in their notebooks.
For a moment after this there was silence. Then Anastatia uttered a sharp, protesting cry.
“Ah, no, no! Please, please!”
“But why not?” came Rodney’s voice.
“It is wrong—wrong.”
“I can’t see why.”
“It is, it is! You must not do that. Oh, please, please don’t hold so tight.”
There was a swishing sound, and through the curtains before the window a large form burst. Jane raised her head above the Chesterfield.
William was standing there, a menacing figure. The two detectives had left the alcove and were moistening their pencils. And in the middle of the room stood Rodney Spelvin, stooping slightly and grasping Anastatia’s parasol in his hands.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Why is it wrong to hold the dam’ thing tight?” He looked up and perceived his visitors. “Ah, Bates,” he said, absently. He turned to Anastatia again. “I should have thought that the tighter you held it, the more force you would get into the shot.”
“But don’t you see, you poor zimp,” replied Anastatia, “that you’ve got to keep the ball straight. If you grip the shaft as if you were a drowning man clutching at a straw and keep your fingers under like that, you’ll pull like the dickens and probably land out of bounds or in the rough. What’s the good of getting force into the shot if the ball goes in the wrong direction, you cloth-headed goof?”
“I see now,” said Rodney, humbly. “How right you always are!”
“Look here,” interrupted William, folding his arms. “What is the meaning of this?”
“You want to grip firmly but lightly,” said Anastatia.
“Firmly but lightly,” echoed Rodney.
“What is the meaning of this?”
“And with the fingers. Not with the palms.”
“What is the meaning of this?” thundered William. “Anastatia, what are you doing in this man’s rooms?”
“Giving him a golf lesson, of course. And I wish you wouldn’t interrupt.”
“Yes, yes,” said Rodney, a little testily. “Don’t interrupt, Bates, there’s a good fellow. Surely you have things to occupy you elsewhere?”
“We’ll go upstairs,” said Anastatia, “where we can be alone.”
“You will not go upstairs,” barked William.
“We shall get on much better there,” explained Anastatia. “Rodney has fitted up the top-floor back as an indoor practising room.”
Jane darted forward with a maternal cry.
“My poor child, has the scoundrel dared to delude you by pretending to be a golfer? Darling, he is nothing of the kind.”
Mr. Reginald Brown coughed. For some moments he had been twitching restlessly.
“Talking of golf,” he said, “it might interest you to hear of a little experience I had the other day at Marshy Moor. I had got a nice drive off the tee, nothing record-breaking, you understand, but straight and sweet. And what was my astonishment on walking up to play my second to find⎯”
“A rather similar thing happened to me at Windy Waste last Tuesday,” interrupted Mr. Delancey. “I had hooked my drive the merest trifle, and my caddie said to me, ‘You’re out of bounds.’ ‘I am not out of bounds,’ I replied, perhaps a little tersely, for the lad had annoyed me by a persistent habit of sniffing. ‘Yes, you are out of bounds,’ he said. ‘No, I am not out of bounds,’ I retorted. Well, believe me or believe me not, when I got up to my ball⎯”
“Shut up!” said William.
“Just as you say, sir,” replied Mr. Delancey, courteously.
Rodney Spelvin drew himself up, and in spite of her loathing for his villainy Jane could not help feeling what a noble and romantic figure he made. His face was pale, but his voice did not falter.
“You are right,” he said. “I am not a golfer. But with the help of this splendid girl here, I hope humbly to be one some day. Ah, I know what you are going to say,” he went on, raising a hand. “You are about to ask how a man who has wasted his life as I have done can dare to entertain the mad dream of ever acquiring a decent handicap. But never forget,” proceeded Rodney, in a low, quivering voice, “that Walter J. Travis was nearly forty before he touched a club, and a few years later he won the British Amateur.”
“True,” murmured William.
“True, true,” said Mr. Delancey and Mr. Brown. They lifted their bowler hats reverently.
“I am thirty-three years old,” continued Rodney, “and for fourteen of these thirty-three years I have been writing poetry—aye, and novels with a poignant sex-appeal, and if ever I gave a thought to this divine game it was but to sneer at it. But last summer I saw the light.”
“Glory! Glory!” cried Mr. Brown.
“One afternoon I was persuaded to try a drive. I took the club with a mocking, contemptuous laugh.” He paused, and a wild light came into his eyes. “I brought off a perfect pip,” he said, emotionally. “Two hundred yards and as straight as a whistle. And, as I stood there gazing after the ball, something seemed to run up my spine and bite me in the neck. It was the golf-germ.”
“Always the way,” said Mr. Brown. “I remember the first drive I ever made. I took a nice easy stance⎯”
“The first drive I made,” said Mr. Delancey, “you won’t believe this, but it’s a fact, was a full⎯”
“From that moment,” continued Rodney Spelvin, “I have had but one ambition—to somehow or other, cost what it might, get down into single figures.” He laughed bitterly. “You see,” he said, “I cannot even speak of this thing without splitting my infinitives. And even as I split my infinitives, so did I split my drivers. After that first heavenly slosh I didn’t seem able to do anything right.”
He broke off, his face working. William cleared his throat awkwardly.
“Yes, but dash it,” he said, “all this doesn’t explain why I find you alone with my sister in what I might call your lair.”
“The explanation is simple,” said Rodney Spelvin. “This sweet girl is the only person in the world who seems able to simply and intelligently and in a few easily understood words make clear the knack of the thing. There is none like her, none. I have been to pro. after pro. but not one has been any good to me. I am a temperamental man, and there is a lack of sympathy and human understanding about these professionals which jars on my artist soul. They look at you as if you were a half-witted child. They click their tongues. They make odd Scotch noises. I could not endure the strain. And then this wonderful girl, to whom in a burst of emotion I had confided my unhappy case, offered to give me private lessons. So I went with her to some of those indoor practising places. But here, too, my sensibilities were racked by the fact that unsympathetic eyes observed me. So I fixed up a room here where we could be alone.”
“And instead of going there,” said Anastatia, “we are wasting half the afternoon talking.”
William brooded for a while. He was not a quick thinker.
“Well, look here,” he said at length, “this is the point. This is the nub of the thing. This is where I want you to follow me very closely. Have you asked Anastatia to marry you?”
“Marry me?” Rodney gazed at him, shocked. “Have I asked her to marry me? I, who am not worthy to polish the blade of her niblick! I, who have not even a thirty handicap, ask a girl to marry me who was in the semi-final of last year’s Ladies’ Open! No,
no, Bates, I may be a vers-libre poet, but I have some sense of what is fitting. I love her, yes. I love her with a fervour which causes me to frequently and for hours at a time lie tossing sleeplessly upon my pillow. But I would not dare to ask her to marry me.”
Anastatia burst into a peal of girlish laughter.
“You poor chump!” she cried. “Is that what has been the matter all this time? I couldn’t make out what the trouble was. Why, I’m crazy about you. I’ll marry you any time you give the word.”
Rodney reeled.
“What!”
“Of course I will.”
“Anastatia!”
“Rodney!”
He folded her in his arms.
“Well, I’m dashed,” said William. “It looks to me as if I had been making rather a lot of silly fuss about nothing. Jane, I wronged you.”
“It was my fault.”
“No, no!”
“Yes, yes!”
“Jane!”
“William!”
He folded her in his arms. The two detectives, having entered the circumstances in their notebooks, looked at one another with moist eyes.
“Cyril!” said Mr. Brown.
“Reggie!” said Mr. Delancey.
Their hands met in a brotherly clasp.
“And so,” concluded the Oldest Member, “all ended happily. The storm-tossed lives of William Bates, Jane Packard, and Rodney Spelvin came safely at long last into harbour. At the subsequent wedding William and Jane’s present of a complete golfing outfit, including eight dozen new balls, a cloth cap, and a pair of spiked shoes, was generally admired by all who inspected the gifts during the reception.
“From that time forward the four of them have been inseparable. Rodney and Anastatia took a cottage close to that of William and Jane, and rarely does a day pass without a close foursome between the two couples. William and Jane being steady tens and Anastatia scratch and Rodney a persevering eighteen, it makes an ideal match.”
“What does?” asked the secretary, waking from his reverie.
“This one.”
“Which?”
“I see,” said the Oldest Member, sympathetically, “that your troubles, weighing on your mind, have caused you to follow my little narrative less closely than you might have done. Never mind, I will tell it again.”
“The story” (said the Oldest Member) “which I am about to relate begins at a time when—”
21
THOSE IN PERIL ON THE TEE
I THINK THE two young men in the chess-board knickerbockers were a little surprised when they looked up and perceived Mr. Mulliner brooding over their table like an affable Slave of the Lamp. Absorbed in their conversation, they had not noticed his approach. It was their first visit to the Anglers’ Rest, and their first meeting with the Sage of its bar-parlour: and they were not yet aware that to Mr. Mulliner any assemblage of his fellow-men over and above the number of one constitutes an audience.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” said Mr. Mulliner. “You have been playing golf, I see.”
They said they had.
“You enjoy the game?”
They said they did.
“Perhaps you will allow me to request Miss Postlethwaite, princess of barmaids, to re-fill your glasses?”
They said they would.
“Golf,” said Mr. Mulliner, drawing up a chair and sinking smoothly into it, “is a game which I myself have not played for some years. I was always an indifferent performer, and I gradually gave it up for the simpler and more straightforward pastime of fishing. It is a curious fact that, gifted though the Mulliners have been in virtually every branch of life and sport, few of us have ever taken kindly to golf. Indeed, the only member of the family I can think of who attained to any real proficiency with the clubs was the daughter of a distant cousin of mine—one of the Devonshire Mulliners who married a man named Flack. Agnes was the girl’s name. Perhaps you have run across her? She is always playing in tournaments and competitions, I believe.”
The young men said No, they didn’t seem to know the name.
“Ah?” said Mr. Mulliner. “A pity. It would have made the story more interesting to you.”
The two young men exchanged glances.
“Story?” said the one in the slightly more prismatic knickerbockers, speaking in a voice that betrayed agitation.
“Story?” said his companion, blenching a little.
“The story,” said Mr. Mulliner, “of John Gooch, Frederick Pilcher, Sidney McMurdo and Agnes Flack.”
The first young man said he didn’t know it was so late. The second young man said it was extraordinary how time went. They began to talk confusedly about trains.
“The story,” repeated Mr. Mulliner, holding them with the effortless ease which makes this sort of thing such child’s play to him, “of Agnes Flack, Sidney McMurdo, Frederick Pilcher and John Gooch.”
It is an odd thing (said Mr. Mulliner) how often one finds that those who practise the Arts are quiet, timid little men, shy in company and unable to express themselves except through the medium of the pencil or the pen. I have noticed it again and again. John Gooch was like that. So was Frederick Pilcher. Gooch was a writer and Pilcher was an artist, and they used to meet a good deal at Agnes Flack’s house, where they were constant callers. And every time they met John Gooch would say to himself as he watched Pilcher balancing a cup of tea and smiling his weak, propitiatory smile, “I am fond of Frederick, but his best friend could not deny that he is a pretty dumb brick.” And Pilcher, as he saw Gooch sitting on the edge of his chair and fingering his tie, would reflect, “Nice fellow as John is, he is certainly a total loss in mixed society.”
Mark you, if ever men had an excuse for being ill at ease in the presence of the opposite sex, these two had. They were both eighteen-handicap men, and Agnes was exuberantly and dynamically scratch. Her physique was an asset to her, especially at the long game. She stood about five feet ten in her stockings, and had shoulders and forearms which would have excited the envious admiration of one of those muscular women on the music-halls, who good-naturedly allow six brothers, three sisters, and a cousin by marriage to pile themselves on her collar-bone while the orchestra plays a long-drawn chord and the audience hurries out to the bar. Her eye resembled the eye of one of the more imperious queens of history: and when she laughed, strong men clutched at their temples to keep the tops of their heads from breaking loose.
Even Sidney McMurdo was as a piece of damp blotting-paper in her presence. And he was a man who weighed two hundred and eleven pounds and had once been a semi-finalist in the Amateur Championship. He loved Agnes Flack with an ox-like devotion. And yet—and this will show you what life is—when she laughed, it was nearly always at him. I am told by those in a position to know that, on the occasion when he first proposed to her—on the sixth green—distant rumblings of her mirth were plainly heard in the club-house locker-room, causing two men who were afraid of thunderstorms to scratch their match.
Such, then, was Agnes Flack. Such, also, was Sidney McMurdo. And such were Frederick Pilcher and John Gooch.
Now John Gooch, though, of course, they had exchanged a word from time to time, was in no sense an intimate of Sidney McMurdo. It was consequently a surprise to him when one night, as he sat polishing up the rough draft of a detective story—for his was the talent that found expression largely in blood, shots in the night, and millionaires who are found murdered in locked rooms with no possible means of access except a window forty feet above the ground—the vast bulk of McMurdo lumbered across his threshold and deposited itself in a chair.
The chair creaked. Gooch stared. McMurdo groaned.
“Are you ill?” said John Gooch.
“Ha!” said Sidney McMurdo.
He had been sitting with his face buried in his hands, but now he looked up; and there was a red glare in his eyes which sent a thrill of horror through John Gooch. The visitor reminded him of the Human Gorilla in his novel, The Mystery of the S
evered Ear.
“For two pins,” said Sidney McMurdo, displaying a more mercenary spirit than the Human Gorilla, who had required no cash payment for his crimes, “I would tear you into shreds.”
“Me?” said John Gooch, blankly.
“Yes, you. And that fellow Pilcher, too.” He rose; and, striding to the mantelpiece, broke off a corner of it and crumbled it in his fingers. “You have stolen her from me.”
“Stolen? Whom?”
“My Agnes.”
John Gooch stared at him, thoroughly bewildered. The idea of stealing Agnes Flack was rather like the notion of sneaking off with the Albert Hall. He could make nothing of it.
“She is going to marry you.”
“What!” cried John Gooch, aghast.
“Either you or Pilcher.” McMurdo paused. “Shall I tear you into little strips and tread you into the carpet?” he murmured, meditatively.
“No,” said John Gooch. His mind was blurred, but he was clear on that point.
“Why did you come butting in?” groaned Sidney McMurdo, absently taking up the poker and tying it into a lover’s knot. “I was getting along splendidly until you two pimples broke out. Slowly but surely I was teaching her to love me, and now it can never be. I have a message for you. From her. I proposed to her for the eleventh time to-night; and when she had finished laughing she told me that she could never marry a mere mass of brawn. She said she wanted brain. And she told me to tell you and the pest Pilcher that she had watched you closely and realized that you both loved her, but were too shy to speak, and that she understood and would marry one of you.”
There was a long silence.
“Pilcher is a splendid fellow,” said John Gooch. “She must marry Pilcher.”
“She will, if he wins the match.”
“What match?”
“The golf match. She read a story in a magazine the other day where two men played a match at golf to decide which was to win the heroine; and about a week later she read another story in another magazine where two men played a match at golf to decide which was to win the heroine. And a couple of days ago she read three more stories in three more magazines where exactly the same thing happened; and she has decided to accept it as an omen. So you and the hound Pilcher are to play eighteen holes, and the winner marries Agnes.”