“Good morning, Miss Tewkesbury,” cried Ambrose gaily. Good morning, good morning, good morning. Many happy returns of the day. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, in short. I have a little present here which I hope you will accept. Just a trivial parrot, but you may be able to fit it in somewhere.”
And, encouraged by the sudden softening of her eyes, he parked the car, stood on one leg and asked her to be his wife.
When he had finished, she stood silent for a space, and a close observer would have seen that a struggle was proceeding in her mind. She was weighing the pros and cons.
She had always liked Ambrose and admired his clean-cut good looks. And the fact that he had remembered her birthday argued that he was kind, courteous and considerate; of the stuff, in short, of which good husbands are made. For a while the word “Yes” seemed to be trembling on her lips.
And then, chillingly, there came into her mind the picture of this man as he had appeared on the tennis court. Could she, she asked herself, link her lot with that of such a super-rabbit? There rose before her a vision of that awful moment when Ambrose had got his left foot entangled with his right elbow.
“No, no, a thousand times no,” she told herself. Then aloud, with a remorseful sweetness which she hoped would rob the words of their sting: “I’m sorry . . . I’m afraid . . . In fact . . . Well, you know what I mean.”
Ambrose, disjointed through her utterance was, knew but too well what she meant, and his eager face fell as if it, too, had got its left foot entangled with its right elbow.
“I see,” he said. “Yes, I get your drift.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“But you know how it is.”
“Oh, quite.”
There was a silence, broken only by the parrot, asking one or both of them—it was impossible to say to whom the question was addressed—if they had seen by the dawn’s early light. Despite his efforts to keep a stiff upper lip, Ambrose Gussett was showing plainly how deeply this stymie had gashed his soul. His aspect caused the girl’s tender heart to bleed for him. She yearned for some means of softening the blow which she had been compelled to deliver.
And then she saw how this might be done.
“You used to speak,” she said, “of giving me a golf lesson.”
Ambrose raised his bowed head.
“So I did.”
“Would you like to give me one now?”
Ambrose’s sombre face lit up.
“May I really?”
“Do. I’ll go and fetch my racquet.”
“You don’t use a racquet.”
“Then how do you get the ball over the net?”
“There isn’t a net.”
“No net. What a peculiar game.”
She was still sniggering a little to herself, for she was a girl with a strong sense of the ridiculous, when they came on to the practice tee.
“Now,” said Ambrose, having teed up the ball and placed the driver in her hands and adjusted her stance and enjoined upon her to come back slowly, “let’s see you paste it into the next county.”
Years of tennis playing (which, however bad for the soul, does, I admit, strengthen the thews and sinews) had given Evangeline Tewkesbury a fine physique, and Ambrose tells me that it was an inspiring sight to see her put every ounce of wrist and muscle into her shot. The only criticism which could have been made of her performance was that she missed the ball by about three inches.
It was her salvation. Evangeline Tewkesbury’s was an arrogant mind, and I think there can be no question that had she succeeded at her first effort in accomplishing an outstanding drive, she would have abandoned the game on the plea that it was too easy. For this, Ambrose had shocked me by telling me, was one of the things she had said about golf when urged to take a lesson.
But she had failed, and now it was but a question of time before the golf bug ran up her leg and bit her to the bone. Suddenly Ambrose saw come into her face that strange yearning look, composite of eagerness and humility, which is the infallible first symptom.
“Let me show you,” he said, seizing his opportunity with subtle skill. And taking the club from her he waggled briefly and sent a screamer down the fairway. “That—roughly—is the idea,” he said.
She was staring at him, in her gaze awe, admiration, respect, homage and devotion nicely blended.
“You must be terribly good at golf,” she said.
“Oh, fairish.”
“Could you teach me to play?”
“In a few lessons. Unfortunately I shall be leaving almost immediately for the Rocky Mountains, to shoot grizzly bears.”
“Oh, must you?”
“Surely it is the usual procedure for a man in my position.”
There was a silence. Her foot made arabesques on the turf.
“It seems rather tough on the grizzlies,” she said at length.
“Into each life some rain must fall.”
“Look,” said Evangeline. “I think I see a way out.”
“There is only one way out.”
“That is the way I mean.”
Ambrose quivered from the top of his head to the soles of his sure-grip shoes, as worn by all the leading professionals.
“You mean⎯?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
“You really—?”
“Yes, really. I can’t imagine what I was thinking of when I said No just now. One makes these foolish mistakes.”
Ambrose dropped the club and folded her in a long, lingering embrace.
“My mate!” he cried. “Now,” he added, picking up the driver and placing it in her hands. “Slow back, don’t press, and keep your’ee on the ba’.”
26
FEET OF CLAY
WITH THE COMING of dusk the blizzard which had been blowing all the afternoon had gained in force, and the trees outside the club-house swayed beneath it. The falling snow rendered the visibility poor, but the Oldest Member, standing at the smoking-room window, was able to recognize the familiar gleam of Cyril Jukes’s heather-mixture plus-fours as he crossed the icebound terrace from the direction of the caddie shed, and he gave a little nod of approval. No fair weather golfer himself when still a player, he liked to see the younger generation doing its round in the teeth of November gales.
On Cyril Jukes’s normally cheerful face, as he entered the room some moments later, there was the sort of look which might have been worn by a survivor of the last days of Pompeii. What had been happening to Cyril Jukes in the recent past it was impossible to say, but the dullest eye could discern that it had been plenty, and the Oldest Member regarded him sympathetically.
“Something on your mind, my boy?”
“A slight tiff with the helpmeet.”
“I am sorry. What caused it?”
“Well, you know her little brother, and you will agree with me, I think that his long game wants polishing up.”
“Quite.”
“This can be done only by means of unremitting practice.”
“Very true.”
“So I took him out for a couple of rounds after lunch. We’ve just got back. We found the little woman waiting for us. She seemed rather stirred. Directing my attention to the fact that the child was bright blue and that icicles had formed on him, she said that if he expired his blood would be on my head. She then took him off to thaw him out with hot-water bottles. Life can be very difficult.”
“Very.”
“I suppose there was a sort of nip in the air, though I hadn’t noticed it myself, but I had meant so well. Do you think that when a man’s wife calls him a fatheaded sadist, she implies that married happiness is dead and the home in the melting pot?”
The Sage patted him on the shoulder.
“Courage,” he said. “She may be a little annoyed for the moment, but the mood will pass and she will understand and forgive. Your wife is a golfer and, when calmer, cannot fail to realize how lucky she is to have marri
ed a man with the true golfing spirit. For that is what matters in this life. That is what counts. I mean the spirit that animated Horace Bewstridge, causing him to spank his loved one’s mother on the eighteenth green when she interfered with his putting; the inner fire that drove Rollo Podmarsh on to finish his round, though he thought he had been poisoned, because he had a chance of breaking a hundred for the first time; the spirit which saved Agnes Flack and Sidney McMurdo, bringing them at last to peace and happiness. I think I may have mentioned Agnes Flack and Sidney McMurdo to you before. They were engaged to be married.”
“She was a large girl, wasn’t she?”
“Very large. And Sidney was large, also. That was what made the thing so satisfactory to their friends and well-wishers. Too often in this world you find the six-foot-three man teaming up with the four-foot-ten girl and the five-foot-eleven girl linking her lot with something which she would seem to have dug out of Singer’s troupe of midgets: but in the union of Agnes Flack and Sidney McMurdo there was none of this discrepancy. Sidney weighed two hundred pounds and was all muscle, and Agnes weighed a hundred and sixty pounds and was all muscle, too. And, more important still, both had been assiduous golfers since childhood. Theirs was a love based on mutual respect. Sidney’s habit of always getting two hundred and fifty yards from the tee fascinated Agnes, and he in his turn was enthralled by her short game, which was exceptionally accurate.”
It was in warmer weather than this (the Sage proceeded, having accepted his companion’s offer of a hot toddy) that the story began which I am about to relate. The month was August, and from a cloudless sky the sun blazed down on the popular sea-shore resort of East Bampton, illuminating with its rays the beach, the pier, the boardwalk, the ice-cream stands, the hot doggeries and the shimmering ocean. In the last-named, about fifty yards from shore, Agnes Flack was taking her customary cooler after the day’s golf and thinking how much she loved Sidney McMurdo.
Sidney himself was not present. He was still in the city, working for the insurance company which had bespoken his services, counting the days to his vacation and thinking how much he loved Agnes Flack.
When girls are floating in warm water, dreaming of the man they adore, it sometimes happens that there comes to them a sort of exaltation of the soul which demands physical expression. It came now to Agnes Flack. God, the way she looked at it, was in His heaven and all right with the world, and it seemed to her that something ought to be done about it. And as practically the only thing you can do in the way of physical expression in the water is to splash, she splashed. With arms and feet she churned up great fountains of foam, at the same time singing a wordless song of ecstasy.
The trouble about doing that sort of thing when swimming is that people are apt to be misled. Agnes Flack’s was one of those penetrating voices which sound like the down express letting off steam at a level crossing, and in the number which she had selected for rendition there occurred a series of high notes which she held with determination and vigour. It is not surprising, therefore, that a passing stranger who was cleaving the waves in her vicinity should have got his facts twisted.
A moment later Agnes, in the middle of a high note, was surprised to find herself gripped firmly beneath the arms and towed rapidly shorewards.
Her annoyance was extreme, and it increased during the trip, most of which was made with her head under water. By the time she arrived at the beach, she had swallowed perhaps a pint and a half, and her initial impulse was to tell her assailant what she thought of his officiousness. But just as she was about to do so friendly hands, seizing her from behind, pulled her backwards and started rolling her over a barrel. And when she fought herself free the man had vanished.
Her mood was still ruffled and resentful when she stepped out of the elevator that night on her way down to dinner, for the feeling that she was full of salt water had not wholly disappeared. And it was as she was crossing the lounge with a moody frown on her brow that a voice at her side said “Oh, hullo, there you are, what?” and she turned to see a tall, slender, willowy man with keen blue eyes and a suntanned face.
“Feeling all right again?” asked the handsome stranger.
Agnes, who had been about to draw herself to her full height and say “Sir!” suddenly divined who this must be.
“Was it you⎯?” she began.
He raised a deprecating hand.
“Don’t thank me, dear lady, don’t thank me. I’m always saving people’s lives, and they will try to thank me. It was nothing, nothing. Different, of course, if there had been sharks.”
Agnes was staring like a child at a saucer of ice-cream. She had revised her intention of telling this man what she thought of him. His eyes, his clean-cut face, his perfect figure and his clothes had made a profound and instantaneous impression on her, giving her the sort of sensation which she had experienced on the occasion when she had done the short third at Squashy Hollow in one, a sort of dizzy feeling that life had nothing more to offer.
“Sharks get in the way and hamper a man. The time I saved the Princess della Raviogli in the Indian Ocean there were half a dozen of them, horsing about and behaving as if the place belonged to them. I had to teach one of two of them a sharp lesson with my Boy Scout pocket knife. The curse of the average shark is that if you give it the slightest encouragement it gets above itself and starts putting on airs.”
Agnes felt that she must speak, but there seemed so little that she could say.
“You’re English, aren’t you?” she asked.
He raised a deprecating hand.
“Call me rather a cosmopolite, dear lady. I was born in the old country and have resided there from time to time and even served my sovereigns in various positions of trust such as Deputy Master of the Royal Buckhounds, but all my life I have been a rover. I flit. I move to and fro. They say of me: ‘Last week he was in Pernambuco, but goodness knows where he is now. China, possibly, or Africa or the North Pole.’ Until recently I was in Hollywood. They were doing a film of life in the jungle, where might is right and the strong man comes into his own, and they roped me in as adviser. By the way, introduce myself, what? Fosdyke is the name. Captain Jack Fosdyke.
Agnes’s emotion was now such that she was unable for a moment to recall hers. Then it came back to her.
“Mine is Flack,” she said, and the statement seemed to interest her companion.
“No, really? I’ve just been spending the week-end with an old boy named Flack, down at Sands Point.”
“Josiah Flack?”
“That’s right. Amazing place he has. Absolute palace. They tell me he’s one of the richest men in America. Rather pathetic. This lonely old man, rolling in the stuff, but with no chick or child.”
“He is my uncle. How was he?”
“Very frail. Very, very frail. Not long for this world, it seemed to me.” A sharp tremor ran through Captain Jack Fosdyke. It was as if for the first time her words had penetrated to his consciousness. “Your uncle, did you say?”
“Yes.”
“Are you his only niece?”
“Yes.”
“God bless my soul!” cried Captain Jack Fosdyke with extraordinary animation. “Here, come and have a cocktail. Come and have some dinner. Well, well, well, well, well!”
At the dinner table the spell which her companion was casting on Agnes Flack deepened in intensity. There seemed no limits to the powers of this wonder man. He met the head waiter’s eye and made him wilt. He spoke with polished knowledge of food and wine, comparing the hospitality of princes of his acquaintance with that of African chiefs he had known. Between the courses he danced like something dark and slithery from the Argentine. Little wonder that ere long he had Agnes Flack fanning herself with her napkin.
A girl who could, had she seen good reason to do so, have felled an ox with a single blow, in the presence of Captain Jack Fosdyke she felt timid and fluttering. He was turning on the charm as if through the nozzle of a hose-pipe, and it was going all over h
er and she liked it. She was conscious of a dreamlike sensation, as if she were floating on a pink cloud over an ocean of joy. For the first time in weeks the image of Sidney McMurdo had passed completely from her mind. There was still, presumably, a McMurdo, Sidney, in the telephone book, but in the thoughts of Agnes Flack, no.
The conversation turned to sports and athleticism.
“You swim wonderfully,” she said, for that salt water had long since ceased to rankle.
“Yes, I’ve always been a pretty decent swimmer. I learned in the lake at Wapshott.”
“Wapshott?”
“Wapshott Castle, Wapshott-on-the-Wap, Hants., the family seat. I don’t go there often nowadays—too busy—but when I do I have a good time. Plenty of ridin’, shootin’, fishin’ and all that.”
“Are you fond of riding?”
“I like steeplechasin’. The spice of danger, don’t you know, what? Ever seen the Grand National?”
“Not yet.”
“I won it a couple of times. I remember on the second occasion Lady Astor saying to me that I ought to saw off a leg and give the other fellows a chance. Lord Beaverbrook, who overheard the remark, was much amused.”
“You seem to be marvellous at everything.”
“I am.”
“Do you play golf?”
“Oh, rather. Scratch.”
“We might have a game tomorrow.”
“Not tomorrow. Lunching in Washington. A bore, but I can’t get out of it. Harry insisted.”
“Harry?”
“Truman. We’ll have a game when I get back. I may be able to give you a pointer or two. Bobby Jones said to me once that he would never have won the British and American Amateur and Open, if he hadn’t studied my swing.”
Agnes gasped.
“You don’t know Bobby Jones?”
“We’re like brothers.”
“I once got his autograph.”
“Say the word, dear lady, and I’ll get you a signed photograph.”