Attempts to remedy this, however, had come to nothing. Like so many young doctors with agreeable manners and frank blue eyes, Ambrose Gussett continued to be an iodoform-scented butterfly flitting from flower to flower but never resting on any individual bloom long enough to run the risk of having to sign on the dotted line.
And then Evangeline Tewkesbury arrived on a visit to her aunt, Miss Martha Tewkesbury, and he fell for her with a thud which you could have heard in the next county.
It generally happens around these parts that young men who fall in love look me up in my favourite chair on this terrace in order to obtain sympathy and advice as to how to act for the best. Ambrose Gussett was no exception. Waking from a light doze one evening, I perceived him standing before me, scratching his chin coyly with a number three iron.
“I love her, I love her, I love her, I love her,” said Ambrose Gussett, getting down to it without preamble. “When in her presence I note a marked cachexia. My temperature goes up, and a curious burning is accompanied by a well-marked yearning. There are floating spots before my eyes, and I am conscious of an overpowering urge to clasp her in my arms and cry ‘My mate!’”
“You are speaking of⎯?”
“Didn’t I mention that? Evangeline Tewkesbury.”
“Good God!”
“What do you mean?”
I felt it best to be frank.
“My dear Ambrose, I am sorry to give you pain, but Miss Tewkesbury is a tennis player. I have seen her with my own eyes leaping about the court shouting ‘Forty love,’ ‘Thirty all’ and similar obscenities.”
He astounded me by receiving my words with a careless nod.
“Yes, she told me she played tennis.”
“And you still love her?”
“Of course I still love her.”
“But, Ambrose, reflect. A golfer needs a wife, true. It is essential that he has a sympathetic listener always handy, to whom he can relate the details of the day’s play. But what sort of a life companion would a tennis player be?”
He sighed ecstatically.
“Just let me get this tennis player as a life companion, and you won’t find me beefing. I love her, I love her, I love her, I love her, I love her,” said Ambrose Gussett, summing up.
A few days later I found him beside my chair once more. His clean-cut face was grave.
“Say, listen,” he said. “You know that great love of mine?”
“Ah, yes. How is it coming along?”
“Not too well. Every time I call at her home, I find her festooned in tennis players.”
“Her natural mates. Female tennis players always marry male tennis players, poor souls. Abandon this mad enterprise, Ambrose,” I pleaded, “and seek for some sweet girl with a loving disposition and a low handicap.”
“I won’t. My stethoscope is still in the ring. I don’t care if these germs are her natural mates. I defy them. Whatever the odds, however sticky the going, I shall continue to do my stuff. But, as I say, the course is heavily trapped and one will need to be at the top of one’s form. Looking over the field, I think my most formidable rival is a pin-headed string bean of a fellow named Dwight Messmore. You know him?”
“By sight. She would naturally be attracted by him. I believe he is very expert at this outdoor ping-pong.”
“In the running for a place in the Davis Cup team, they tell me.”
“What is the Davis Cup team?”
“A team that plays for a sort of cup they have.”
“They have cups, do they, in the world—or sub-world—of tennis? And what are you proposing to do to foil this Davis Cup addict?”
“Ah, there you have me. I keep asking her to let me give her a golf lesson. I feel that in the pure surroundings of the practice tee her true self would come to the surface, causing her to recoil with loathing from men like Dwight Messmore. But she scoffs at the suggestion. She says golf is a footling game and she can’t understand how any except the half-witted can find pleasure in it.”
“And that appalling speech did not quench your love?”
“Of course it didn’t quench my love. A love like mine doesn’t go around getting itself quenched. But I admit that the situation is sticky, and I shall have to survey it from every angle and take steps.”
It was not until several weeks had elapsed, a period in which I had seen nothing of him, that I learned with a sickening qualm of horror how awful were the steps which he had decided to take.
He became a tennis player.
It was, of course, as I learned subsequently, not without prolonged and earnest wrestling with his conscience that a man like Ambrose Gussett, playing even then to a handicap of two and destined in the near future to be scratch, had been able to bring himself to jettison all the principles of a lifetime and plunge into the abyss. Later, when the madness had passed and he was once more hitting them sweetly off the tee, he told me that the struggle had been terrific. But in the end infatuation had proved too strong. If, he said to himself, it was necessary in order to win Evangeline Tewkesbury to become a tennis player, a tennis player he would be.
And, inquiries having informed him that the quickest way of accomplishing this degradation was to put himself in the hands of a professional, he turned up his coat collar, pulled down the brim of his hat, and snaked off to the lair where the man plied his dark trade. And presently he found himself facing a net with a racquet in his hand. Or rather, hands, for naturally he had assumed the orthodox interlocking grip.
This led the professional to make his first criticism.
“You hold the racquet in one hand only,” he said.
Ambrose was astounded, but he was here to learn, so he followed out the instruction, and having done so peered about him, puzzled.
“Where,” he asked, “is the flag?”
“Flag?” said the professional. “But it isn’t the fourth of July.”
“I can’t shoot unless I see the flag.”
The professional was now betraying open bewilderment. He came up to the net and peered at Ambrose over it like someone inspecting a new arrival at the Zoo.
“I don’t get this about flags. We don’t use flags in tennis. Have you never played tennis? Never? Most extraordinary. Are there other games?”
“I play golf.”
“Golf? Golf? Ah, yes, of course. What they call cow-pasture pool.”
Ambrose stiffened.
“What who call cow-pasture pool?”
“All right-thinking men. Well, well, well! Well, listen,” said the professional. “It looks to me as if our best plan would be to start right at the beginning. This is a racquet. This is the net. That is what we call a ball . . .”
It was toward the end of the lesson that a string-bean-like young man sauntered on to the court, and the professional turned to him with the air of one seeking sympathy.
“Gentleman’s never played tennis before, Mr. Messmore.”
“Well, he certainly isn’t playing it now,” replied Dwight Messmore. “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,” he added, with scarcely veiled derision.
Ambrose felt the hot blood coursing in his cheeks, but all he could find to say was “Is that so?” and the lesson proceeded to its end.
It was followed by others, every morning without respite, and at long last the professional declared him competent to appear in—if one may use the term—a serious game, at the same time counselling him not to begin too ambitiously. There was a cripple he knew, said the professional, a poor fellow who had lost both legs in a motor accident, who would be about Ambrose’s form, always provided that the latter waited his opportunity and caught him on one of his off days.
But it was with no cripple that Ambrose Gussett made his first appearance. With incredible audacity he sought out Evangeline Tewkesbury and asked her for a game.
The fixture came off next day before an audience consisting of Dwight Messmore, who, though Ambrose gave him every opportunity of remembering another engagement elsewhere, remained on the
side lines throughout, convulsed with merriment and uttering, in Ambrose’s opinion, far more catcalls than were necessary. Having learned that morning that he had been selected to play in the Davis Cup team, whatever that may be, the man was thoroughly above himself. As early as the middle of the first set he was drawing audible comparisons between Ambrose and a cat on hot bricks, seeming to feel that the palm for gracefulness should be awarded to the latter.
When the game was over—6–0, 6–0—Ambrose inquired of Evangeline if she thought he would ever be a good tennis player. The girl gave him a curious look and asked if he had read any nice books lately. Ambrose mentioned a few, and she said that she had enjoyed them, too, and wondered how authors managed to think up these things. She was starting to touch on the new plays, when Ambrose, bluntly bringing up once more a subject which he had a feeling that she was evading, repeated his question.
Again the girl seemed to hesitate, and it was Dwight Messmore who took upon himself the onus of reply, sticking his oar in with insufferable heartiness.
“The problem which you have propounded, my dear fellow,” he said, “is one which it is not easy to answer. A ‘good’ tennis player, you say. Well, I feel sure that you will always be a moral tennis player, a virtuous, upright tennis player, but if you wish to know whether I think you will ever be able to make a game of it with a child of six, I reply No. Abandon all hope of reaching such heights. Console yourself with the reflection that you have great entertainment value. You are what I should call an amusing tennis player, a tennis player who will always be good for a laugh from the most discriminating audience. I can vouch for this, for I have been filming you from time to time with my ciné-kodak, and whenever I have run the result off at parties it has been the success of the evening. My friends are hard critics, not easy to please, but you have won them. ‘Show us Ambrose Gussett playing tennis,’ is their cry, and when I do so they guffaw till their eyes bubble.”
And scooping Evangeline up he led her off, leaving Ambrose, as you may well imagine, a prey to the most violent and disturbing emotions. If a patient had described to him the symptoms which he was experiencing, he would have ordered him cold compresses and a milk diet.
You will have no difficulty in guessing for yourself the trend his thoughts were taking. He was a doctor, and a doctor is peculiarly situated. He must be a dignified, venerable figure, to whom patients can show their tongues without secret misgivings as to his ability to read their message. And Ambrose, recalling some of his recent activities, could not but feel that a ciné-kodak record of these must lower, if not absolutely destroy, his prestige.
One moment in particular stood out in his memory, when in a fruitless effort to reach and return one of Evangeline’s testing drives he had got his left foot entangled with his right elbow and had rolled over and over like a shot rabbit, eventually coming to rest with his head between his legs. Such a picture, exhibited to anything like a wide audience, might well ruin his practice irretrievably.
He woke from a troubled sleep next morning filled with a stern resolve. He had decided to confront Dwight Messmore and demand that film from him. So after a light breakfast he got in his car and drove to the other’s residence. Alighting at the door with tight lip and a set face, he beat a sharp tattoo on it with the knocker. And simultaneously there came from within a loud cry, almost a scream, if not a shriek. The next moment the door opened and Dwight Messmore stood before him.
“Holy smoke!” said Dwight Messmore. “I thought it was an atom bomb.”
It was plain to Ambrose’s experienced eye that the man was not in his customary vigorous health. He was wearing about his forehead a towel which appeared to have ice in it, and his complexion was a curious greenish-yellow.
“Come in,” said Dwight Messmore, speaking in a hollow, husky voice, like a spirit at a séance. “I was just going to send for you. Walk on tip-toe, do you mind, and speak very softly. I am on the point of expiring.”
As he led the way into the living-room, shuffling along like a Volga boatman, a genial voice with a rather nasal intonation cried “Hello!” and Ambrose perceived a handsome parrot in a cage on the table.
“I didn’t know you had a parrot,” he said.
“I didn’t know it myself till this morning,” said Dwight Messmore. “It suddenly arrived out of the unknown. A man in a sweater came in a van and left it. He insisted that I had ordered it. Damn fool. Do I look like a man who orders parrots?”
“Ko-ko,” observed the bird, which for some moments had taken no part in the conversation.
“Cocoa!” whispered Dwight Messmore with a powerful shudder. “At a moment like this!”
He lowered himself into a chair, and Ambrose gently placed a thermometer in his mouth.
“Can we think of anything that can have caused this little indisposition?” he asked.
“Charcoal poisoning,” said Dwight Messmore promptly. “I gave a little party last night to a few fellows to celebrate my making the Davis Cup team⎯”
“Did we drink anything?”
“Not a thing. Well, just a bottle or two of champagne, and liqueurs . . . brandy, chartreuse, benedictine, curaçao, créme de menthe, kummel and so forth . . . and, of course, whisky. But nothing more. It was practically a teetotal evening. No, what did the trick was that charcoal. As you are probably aware, the stuff they sell you as caviare in this country isn’t caviare. It’s whitefish roe, and they colour it with powdered charcoal. Well, you can’t sit up half the night eating powdered charcoal without paying the penalty.”
“Quite,” said Ambrose. “Well, I think our best plan will be to remain perfectly quiet with our eyes closed, and presently I will send us a little sedative.”
“Have a nut,” suggested the parrot.
“No nuts, of course,” said Ambrose.
It was only after Ambrose had returned to his car and was driving off to the Tewkesbury home in the hope of seeing Evangeline that it occurred to him that he had forgotten all about that film. Feeling, however, that there would be plenty of time to collect that later, he fetched up at chez Tewkesbury and was informed by Miss Martha that Evangeline was out.
“She’s upset to-day,” said the adored object’s aunt. “Not ill, just in a temper. She’s gone for a walk. She said it might make her feel better. She is very angry because nobody has remembered her birthday.”
Ambrose reeled. He had not remembered it himself. How he had come to allow so vital a date to slip his mind, he was at a loss to understand. He could only suppose that the strain of learning tennis had sapped his intellect.
“She is particularly annoyed,” proceeded Miss Tewkesbury, “with Mr. Messmore. She is passionately fond of birds, and Mr. Messmore faithfully promised her a parrot for her birthday. Her birthday arrives, and what happens? No parrot.”
She was going on to speak further, but Ambrose was no longer there. With a brief “Excuse me” he had shot from her presence as if Walter Hagen in his prime had driven him off the tee. His alert mind had seen the way.
Once again his knock on Dwight Messmore’s door produced that loud cry that was almost a scream, if not a shriek. And once again the invalid presented himself, looking like a full-page illustration from a medical treatise on bubonic plague.
“Ye gods!” he moaned. “Must you? Rap, rap, rap. Tap, tap, tap. Are you a doctor or a woodpecker?”
“Listen,” said Ambrose. He had no time for these unmanly complaints. “It just occurred to me. We need perfect relaxation and repose, and we cannot enjoy perfect relaxation and repose if we are consistently hampered by parrots. I will take the bird off our hands.”
Although one would have said that such a thing was impossible, the look that came into Dwight Messmore’s pea-green face made it seem almost beautiful.
“You will? You really will? Then heaven bless you, you Boy Scout of a physician! Take this bird, Gussett, and my blessing with it. Maybe in the days to come when acquaintance has ripened into friendship and it feels justified in becom
ing confidential, it will reveal to you what it is that it expects people to have seen by the dawn’s early light. So far it has maintained a complete reserve on the point. It just says ‘Oh, say have you seen by the dawn’s early light?’ and then stops and makes a noise like someone drawing a cork. After a brief interval for mental refreshment it then starts all over again at the beginning. Gosh!” said Dwight Messmore, having struggled with his emotion for a while. “It’s lucky you came along, you United States marine! I was very near the breaking point, very near. And, by the way,” he proceeded, “as a fitting expression of my gratitude I am going to destroy those films I took of you playing—I use the word loosely—tennis. I feel that it is the least I can do. ‘Oh, say have you seen by the dawn’s early light?’ it says, and then the popping noise. Be prepared for this. Well, I will now take a short and, I anticipate, refreshing nap. Good-bye, Gussett. Don’t forget your parrot.”
It was with a light heart that Ambrose returned to his car, dangling the cage on a carefree finger. And it was with a still lighter heart that, as he rounded a corner, he saw Evangeline coming along at a quick heel-and-toe. Her brow, he noticed, was overcast and her lips tightly set, but these were symptoms which he hoped very shortly to treat and correct.
Evangeline Tewkesbury was, indeed, in no sunny frame of mind. A queen accustomed to the homage of her little court, she could have betted her Sunday camiknickers that her birthday would have found her snowed under with parcels and flowers, the gift of adoring males of her entourage, and she had imagined that on this important morning her telephone would never have stopped ringing. Instead of which, no parcels, no flowers, and out of the telephone not a yip. She might have been celebrating her birthday on some lonely atoll in the South Seas.
Could she have known that every male friend on her list was suffering, like Dwight Messmore, from too lavish indulgence in whitefish roe powdered with charcoal, she might have understood and forgiven. But she did not know, and so missed understanding and forgiveness by several parasangs. Her only feeling towards these faithless wooers was a well-marked urge to skin them all with a blunt knife and dance on the remains.