The eighteenth was one of those objectionable freak holes, which, in my opinion, deface a golf course. Ten yards from the tee the hill rose almost sheer to the tableland where the green had been constructed. I suppose that from tee to pin was a distance of not more than fifty yards. A certain three if you were on, anything if you were not.
It was essentially a hole unsuited to Poskitt’s particular style. What Poskitt required, if he was to give of his best, was a great wide level prairie stretching out before him into the purple distance. Conditions like those of the eighteenth hole put him very much in the position of a house-painter who is suddenly called upon to execute a miniature. I could see that he was ill at ease as he teed his ball up, and I was saddened, but not surprised, when he topped it into the long grass at the foot of the hill.
But the unnerving experience of seeing his opponent hole out from bunkers had taken its toll of Hemmingway. He, too, was plainly not himself. He swung with his usual care, but must have swerved from the policy of a lifetime and lifted his head. He finished his stroke with a nice, workmanlike follow through, but this did him no good, for he had omitted to hit the ball. When he had disentangled himself, there it was, still standing up on its little mountain of sand.
“You missed it,” said Poskitt.
“I am aware of the fact,” said Hemmingway.
“What made you do that? Silly. You can’t expect to get anywhere if you don’t hit the ball.”
“If you will kindly refrain from talking, I will play my second.”
“Well, don’t miss this one.”
“Please.”
“You’ll never win at golf if you do things in this slipshod way. The very first thing is to hit the ball. If you don’t you cannot make real progress. I should have thought you would have realized that.”
Hemmingway appealed to me.
“Umpire, I should be glad if you would instruct my opponent to be quiet. Otherwise, I shall claim the hole and match.”
“There is nothing in the rules,” I said, “against the opponent offering genial sympathy and advice.”
“Exactly,” said Poskitt. “You don’t want to miss it again, do you? Very well. All I’m doing is telling you not to.”
I pursed my lips. I was apprehensive. I knew Hemmingway. Another man in his position might have been distracted by these cracks, but I could see that they had but solidified his determination to put his second up to the pin. I had seen wrath and resentment work a magic improvement in Poskitt’s game, and I felt sure that they were about to do so in Wadsworth Hemmingway.
Nor was I mistaken. Concentration was written in every line of the man’s face as he swung back. The next moment, the ball was soaring through the air, to fall three feet from the hole. And there was Poskitt faced with the task of playing two from the interior of a sort of jungle. Long grass twined itself about his ball, wild flowers draped it, a beetle was sitting on it. His caddie handed him a niblick, but I could not but feel that what was really required was a steam shovel. It was not a golf shot at all. The whole contract should have been handed to some capable excavation company.
But I had not realized to what lengths an ex-hammer-thrower can go, when armed with a niblick and really up against it. Just as film stars are happiest among their books, so was Joseph Poskitt happiest among the flowering shrubs with his niblick. His was a game into which the niblick had always entered very largely. It was the one club with which he really felt confident of expressing his personality. It removed all finicky science from the proceedings and put the issue squarely up to the bulging biceps and the will to win.
Even though the sight of his starting eyes and the knotted veins on his forehead had prepared me for an effort on the major scale, I gave an involuntary leap as the club came down. It was as if a shell had burst in my immediate neighbourhood. Nor were the effects so very dissimilar to those which a shell would have produced. A gaping chasm opened in the hillside. The air became full of a sort of macedoine of grass, dirt, flowers and beetles. And dimly, in the centre of this moving hash, one perceived the ball, travelling well. Accompanied by about a pound of mixed solids, it cleared the brow and vanished from our sight.
But when we had climbed the steep ascent and reached the green, my heart bled for Poskitt. He had made a gallant effort as ever man made and had reduced the lower slopes to what amounted to a devastated area, but he was lying a full ten feet from the hole and Hemmingway, an unerring putter over the short distance, was safe for three. Unless he could sink this ten-footer and secure a half, it seemed to me inevitable that my old friend must lose the match.
He did not sink it. He tried superbly, but when the ball stopped rolling three inches separated it from the hole.
One could see from Hemmingway’s bearing as he poised his club that he had no doubts or qualms. A sinister smile curved his thin lips.
“This for it,” he said, with sickening complacency.
He drew back the clubhead, paused for an instant, and brought it down.
And, as he did so, Poskitt coughed.
I have heard much coughing in my time. I am a regular theatre-goer, and I was once at a luncheon where an operatic basso got a crumb in his windpipe. But never have I heard a cough so stupendous as that which Joseph Poskitt emitted at this juncture. It was as if he had put a strong man’s whole soul into the thing.
The effect on Wadsworth Hemmingway was disintegrating. Not even his cold self-control could stand up against it. A convulsive start passed through his whole frame. His club jerked forward, and the ball, leaping past the hole, skimmed across the green, took the edge in its stride and shot into the far bunker.
“Sorry,” said Poskitt. “Swallowed a fly or something.”
There was a moment when all Nature seemed to pause, breathless.
“Umpire,” said Hemmingway.
“It’s no good appealing to the umpire,” said Poskitt. “I know the rules. They covered your bronchial catarrh, and they cover my fly or something. You. had better concede the hole and match.”
“I will not concede the hole and match.”
“Well, then, hurry up and shoot,” said Poskitt, looking at his watch, “because my wife’s got a big luncheon party today, and I shall get hell if I’m late.”
“Ah!” said Hemmingway.
“Well, snap into it,” said Poskitt.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said, ‘Snap into it’.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to go home.”
Hemmingway pulled up the knees of his trousers and sat down.
“Your domestic arrangements have nothing to do with me,” he said. “The rules allow me five minutes between strokes. I propose to take them.”
I could see that Poskitt was shaken. He looked at his watch again.
“All right,” he said. “I can manage another five minutes.”
“You will have to manage a little more than that,” said Hemmingway. “With my next stroke I shall miss the ball. I shall then rest for another five minutes. I shall then miss the ball again. . . .”
“But we can’t go on all day.”
“Why not?”
“I must be at that lunch.”
“Then what I would suggest is that you pick up and concede the hole and match.”
“Caddie,” said Poskitt.
“Sir?” said the caddie.
“Go to the club and get my house on the phone and tell my wife that I am unavoidably detained and shall not be able to attend that luncheon party.”
He turned to me.
“Is this five minutes business really right?”
“Would you care to look at my book of the rules?” said Hemmingway. “I have it here in my bag.”
“Five minutes,” mused Poskitt.
“And as four and a half have now elapsed,” said Hemmingway, “I will now go and play my third.”
He disappeared.
“Missed it,” he said, returning and sitting down again. The caddie cam
e back.
“Well?”
“The lady said ‘Oh, yeah?’”
“She said what?”
“‘Oh, yeah?’ I tell her what you tell me to tell her and she said ‘Oh, yeah?’”
I saw Poskitt’s face pale. Nor was I surprised. Any husband would pale if his wife, in response to his telephone message that he proposed to absent himself from her important luncheon party, replied “Oh, yeah?” And of all such husbands, Joseph Poskitt was the one who might be expected to pale most. Like so many of these big, muscle-bound men, he was a mere serf in the home. His wife ruled him with an unremitting firmness from the day they had stepped across the threshold of St. Peter’s, Eaton Square.
He chewed his lower lip thoughtfully.
“You’re sure it wasn’t ‘Oh, yes’—like that—without the mark of interrogation—as much as to say that she quite understood and that it would be perfectly all right?”
“She said, ‘Oh, yeah?’”
“H’m,” said Poskitt.
I walked away. I could not bear the spectacle of this old friend of mine in travail. What wives do to their husbands who at the eleventh hour edge out of important luncheon parties I am not able, as a bachelor, to say, but a mere glance was enough to tell me that in the Poskitt home, at least, it was something special. And yet to pick up and lose the first cup he had ever had a chance of winning. . . . No wonder Joseph Poskitt clutched his hair and rolled his eyes.
And so, as I say, I strolled off, and my wandering footsteps took me in the direction of the practice tee. Wilmot Byng was there, with an iron and a dozen balls.
He looked up, as I approached, with a pitiful eagerness.
“Is it over?”
Not yet.”
“They haven’t holed out?”
“Not yet.”
“But they must have done,” said Wilmot, amazed. “I saw them both land on the green.”
“Poskitt has played three and is lying dead.”
“Well, where’s Hemmingway?”
I peered round the bush which hides the eighteenth green from the practice tee.
“Just about to play five from the far bunker.”
“And Poskitt is dead in three?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then . . .”
I explained the circumstances. Wilmot was aghast.
“But what’s going to happen?”
I shook my head sadly.
“I fear that Poskitt has no alternative but to pick up. His wife, informed over the telephone that he would not be back to lunch, said ‘Oh, yeah?’”
For a space Wilmot Byng stood brooding.
“You’d better be getting along,” he advised. “From what you tell me, this seems to be one of those matches where an umpire on the spot is rather required.”
I did so, for I could see that there was much in what he said. I found Poskitt pacing the green. Hemmingway climbed out of the bunker a moment later to announce that he had once more been unsuccessful in striking the ball.
He seemed disposed to conversation.
“A lot of wasps there are about this summer,” he said. “One sang right past my ear just then.”
“I wish it had bitten you,” said Poskitt.
“Wasps,” replied Hemmingway, who dabbled in Natural History, “do not bite They sting. You are thinking of snakes.”
“Your society would make anyone think of snakes.”
“Gentlemen,” I said. “Gentlemen!”
Saddened, I strolled away again. Golf to me is a sacred thing, and it pained me to see it played in this spirit. Moreover, I was beginning to want my lunch. It was partly the desire to converse with a rational human being and partly the reflection that he could pop into the clubhouse and bring me out a couple of ham sandwiches that led me to seek Wilmot Byng again. I made my way to the practice tee, and as I came in sight of it I stopped dead.
Wilmot Byng, facing the bunker, was addressing a ball with his iron. And standing in the bunker, his club languidly raised for his sixth, or it may have been his seventh. was Wadsworth Hemmingway.
The next moment Wilmot had swung, and almost simultaneously a piercing cry of agony rang out over the countryside. A magnificent low, raking shot, with every ounce of wrist and weight behind it, had taken Hemmingway on the left leg.
Wilmot turned to me, and in his eyes there was the light which comes into the eyes of those who have set themselves a task and accomplished it.
“You’ll have to disqualify that bird,” he said. “He has dropped his club in a bunker.”
Little (said the Oldest Member) remains to be told. When, accompanied by Wilmot, I returned to the green, I formally awarded the match and cup to Poskitt, at the same time condoling with his opponent on having had the bad luck to be in the line of flight of somebody’s random practice drive. These things, I pointed out, were all in the game and must be accepted as rubs of the green. I added that Wilmot was prepared to apologize, and Wilmot said, Yes, fully prepared. Hemmingway was, however, none too well pleased, I fear, and shortly afterwards he left us, his last words being that he proposed to bring an action against Wilmot in the civil courts.
The young fellow appeared not to have heard the threat. He was gazing at Poskitt, pale but resolute.
“Mr. Poskitt,” he said. “May I have a word with you?”
“A thousand,” replied Poskitt, beaming on his benefactor, for whom it was plain that he had now taken a fancy amounting to adoration. “But later on, if you don’t mind. I have to run like a . . .”
“Mr. Poskitt, I love your daughter.”
“So do I,” said Poskitt. “Very nice girl.”
“I want to marry her.”
“Well, why don’t you?”
“You will give your consent?”
A kindly smile flickered over my old friend’s face. He looked at his watch again, then patted Wilmot affectionately on the shoulder.
“I will do better than that, my boy,” he said. “I will formally refuse my consent. I will forbid the match in toto and oppose it root and branch. That will fix everything nicely. When you have been married as long as I have, you will know that what these things require is tact and the proper handling.”
And so it proved. Two minutes after Poskitt had announced that young Wilmot Byng wished to marry their daughter Gwendoline and that he, Poskitt, was resolved that this should be done only over his, Poskitt’s, dead body, Mrs. Poskitt was sketching out the preliminary arrangements for the sacred ceremony. It took place a few weeks later at a fashionable church with full choral effects, and all were agreed that the Bishop had seldom been in finer voice. The bride, as one was able to see from the photographs in the illustrated weekly papers, looked charming.
23
FAREWELL TO LEGS
SQUEALS OF FEMININE merriment woke the Oldest Member from the doze into which he had fallen. The door of the cardroom, in which it was his custom to take refuge when there was Saturday-night revelry at the club-house, had opened to admit a gloomy young man.
“Not butting in, am I?” said the gloomy young man. “I can’t stand it out there any longer.”
The Sage motioned him to a chair. He sank into it and for a while sat glowering darkly.
“Tricks with string!” he muttered at length.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Josh Hook is doing tricks with bits of string, and the girls are fawning on him as if he were Clark Gable. Makes me sick.”
The Oldest Member began to understand.
“Is your fiancée among them?”
“Yes, she is. She keeps saying, ‘Oh, Mr. Hook!’ with a sort of rising inflection and giving him pats on the arm. Loving pats, or so it seemed to me.”
The Sage smiled sympathetically. In his hot youth he had been through this sort of thing himself. “Cheer up,” he said. “I know just how you feel, but rest assured that all will be well. Josh Hook’s string tricks may be sweeping the girl off her feet for the moment, but his glamour will pass. She
will wake tomorrow morning her true self again, thankful that she has the love of a good man who seldom shoots worse than eighty-three.”
His companion brightened. His face lost its drawn look.
“You think so?”
“I am convinced of it. I have seen so many of these party hounds. They dazzle for a while, but they never last. I have observed this Hook. His laughter is as the crackling of thorns under the pot and his handicap is twenty-four. Just another Legs Mortimer?”
“Who was Legs Mortimer?”
“That was precisely what Angus McTavish wanted to know when he saw him blowing kisses at Evangeline Brackett from the club-house veranda.”
Angus McTavish (said the Oldest Member), as one might infer from his name, was a man who all his life had taken golf with a proper seriousness, and in Evangeline Brackett he seemed to have found his female counterpart. She was not one of those girls who titter “tee-hee” when they top a drive. It was, indeed, her habit of biting her lips and rolling her eyes on such occasions which had first drawn Angus to her. On her side, respect for a man who, though slight of build and weighing ten stone two, could paste the ball two hundred yards from the tee, had speedily ripened into passion, and at the time of which I speak they had just become engaged; and the only cloud on Angus’s happiness, until the series of events began which I am about to describe, was the fact that his great love occasionally caused him to fluff a chip shot. He would be swinging and he would suddenly think of Evangeline and jerk his head towards the sky, as if asking Heaven to make him worthy of her, thus shanking. He told me he had lost several holes that way.
However, the iron self-control of the McTavishes was rendering these lapses less frequent, and, as I say, there was virtually no flaw in his happiness until the spring morning when, coming up from the eighteenth green with the girl of his dreams, to whom he had been giving a third, he was shocked to observe that there was a young man on the club-house veranda, leaning over the rail and blowing kisses at her.