Her eyes must have given him his answer, for he sprang forward and clasped her to his bosom, using the interlocking grip. She nestled in his arms.
“I misjudged you, Horace,” she whispered. “I thought you were a sap. I mistrusted anyone who could be as fond as you seemed to be of Aunt Lavender, Uncle Ponsford, little Irwin and Alphonse. And I had always yearned for one of those engagements where my man, like Romeo, would run fearful risks to come near me, and I would have to communicate with him by means of notes in hollow trees.”
“Romantic,” explained Sir George. “Many girls are.”
Into the ecstasy of Horace Bewstridge’s mood there crept a chilling thought. He had won her love. He had won the President’s Cup. But, unless he had quite misinterpreted the recent exchange of remarks between Mrs. Botts and R. P. Crumbles at the chasm side, he had lost his job and so far from being able to support a wife, would now presumably have to starve in the gutter.
He explained this, and Sir George Copstone pooh-poohed vehemently.
“Starve in the gutter? Never heard such bally rot. What do you want to go starving in gutters for? Join me, what? Come over to England, I mean to say, and accept a prominent position in my chain of dashed stores. Name your own salary, of course.”
Horace reeled.
“You don’t mean that?”
“Of course I mean it. What do you think I meant? What other possible construction could you have put on my words?”
“But you don’t know what I can do.”
Sir George stared.
“Not know what you can do? Why, I’ve seen you in action, dash it. If what you have just done isn’t enough to give a discerning man an idea of your capabilities, I’d like to know what is. Ever since I went to stay at that house, I’ve wanted to find someone capable of kicking that dog, kicking that boy, kicking old Botts and giving Ma Botts a juicy one right on the good old spot. I’m not merely grateful to you, my dear chap, profoundly grateful, I’m overcome with admiration. Enormously impressed, I am. Never saw anything so adroit. What I need in my business is a man who thinks on his feet and does it now. Ginger up some of my branch managers a bit. Of course, you must join me, dear old thing, and don’t forget about making the salary big. And now that’s settled, how about trickling off to the bar and having a few? Yoicks!”
“Yoicks!” said Horace.
“Yoicks!” said Vera Witherby.
“Tallo-ho!” said Sir George.
“Tallo-ho!” said Horace.
“Tally-ho!” said Vera Witherby.
“Tally-bally-ho!” said Sir George, driving the thing home beyond any possibility of misunderstanding. “Come on, let’s go.”
28
RODNEY HAS A RELAPSE
THE OLDEST MEMBER, who had been in a reverie, came out of it abruptly and began to speak with the practised ease of a raconteur who does not require a cue to start him off on a story.
When William Bates came to me that afternoon with his tragic story (said the Oldest Member, as smoothly as if we had been discussing William Bates, whoever he might be, for hours), I felt no surprise that he should have selected me as a confidant. I have been sitting on the terrace of this golf club long enough to know that that is what I am there for. Everybody with a bit of bad news always brings it to me.
“I say,” said William Bates.
This William was a substantial young man constructed rather on the lines of a lorry, and as a rule he shared that vehicle’s placid and unruffled outlook on life. He lived mainly on chops and beer, and few things were able to disturb him. Yet, as he stood before me now, I could see that he was all of a twitter, as far as a fourteen-stone-six man full of beer and chops can be all of a twitter.
“I say,” said William. “You know Rodney?”
“Your brother-in-law, Rodney Spelvin?”
“Yes. I believe he’s gone cuckoo.”
“What gives you that impression?”
“Well, look. Listen to this. We were playing our usual foursome this morning, Rodney and Anastatia and me and Jane, a bob a corner, nip and tuck all the way around, and at the eighteenth Jane and I were lying dead in four and Rodney had a simple chip to reach the green in three. You get the set-up?”
I said I got the set-up.
“Well, knowing my sister Anastatia’s uncanny ability to hole out from anywhere within fifteen yards of the pin, I naturally thought the thing was in the bag for them. I said as much to Jane. ‘Jane,’ I said, ‘be ready with the stiff upper lip. They’ve dished us.’ And I had already started to feel in my pocket for my bob, when I suddenly saw that Rodney was picking up his ball.”
“Picking up his ball?”
“And what do you think his explanation was? His explanation was that in order to make his shot he would have had to crush a daisy. ‘I couldn’t crush a daisy,’ he said. ‘The pixies would never forgive me.’ What do you make of it?”
I knew what I made of it, but I had not the heart to tell him. I passed it off by saying that Rodney was one of those genial clowns who will do anything for a laugh and, William being a simple soul, my efforts to soothe him were successful. But his story had left me uneasy and apprehensive. It seemed to me only too certain that Rodney Spelvin was in for another attack of poetry.
I have generally found, as I have gone through the world, that people are tolerant and ready to forgive, and in our little community it was never held against Rodney Spelvin that he had once been a poet and a very virulent one, too; the sort of man who would produce a slim volume of verse bound in squashy mauve leather at the drop of the hat, mostly on the subject of sunsets and pixies. He sad said good-bye to all that directly he took up golf and announced his betrothal to William’s sister Anastatia.
It was golf and the love of a good woman that saved Rodney Spelvin. The moment he had bought his bag of clubs and signed up Anastatia Bates as a partner for life’s medal round, he was a different man. He now wrote mystery thrillers, and with such success that he and Anastatia and their child Timothy were enabled to live like fighting cocks. It was impossible not to be thrilled by Rodney Spelvin, and so skilful was the technique which he had developed that he was soon able to push out his couple of thousand words of wholesome blood-stained fiction each morning before breakfast, leaving the rest of the day for the normal fifty-four holes of golf.
At golf, too, he made steady progress. His wife, a scratch player who had once won the Ladies’ Championship, guided him with loving care, and it was not long before he became a skilful twenty-one and was regarded in several knowledgeable quarters as a man to keep your eye on for the Rabbits Umbrella, a local competition open to those with a handicap of eighteen or over.
But smooth though the putting green of Anastatia Spelvin’s happiness was to the casual glance, there lurked on it, I knew, a secret worm-cast. She could never forget that the man she loved was a man with a past. Deep down in her soul there was always the corroding fear lest at any moment a particularly fine sunset or the sight of a rose in bud might undo all the work she had done, sending Rodney hot-foot once more to this Thesaurus and rhyming dictionary. It was for this reason that she always hurried him indoors when the sun began to go down and refused to have rose trees in her garden. She was in the same position as a wife who has married a once heavy drinker and, though tolerably certain that he has reformed, nevertheless feels it prudent to tear out the whisky advertisements before giving him his Tatler.
And now, after seven years, the blow was about to fall. Or so I felt justified in supposing. And I could see that Anastatia thought the same. There was a drawn look on her face, and she was watching her husband closely. Once when I was dining at her house and a tactless guest spoke of the June moon, she changed the subject hurriedly, but not before I had seen Rodney Spelvin start and throw his head up like a war horse at the sound of the bugle. He recovered himself quickly, but for an instant he had looked like a man who has suddenly awakened to the fact that “June” rhymes with “moon” and feels that steps of s
ome sort ought to be taken.
A week later suspicion became certainty. I had strolled over to William’s cottage after dinner, as I often did, and I found him and Anastatia in the morning-room. At a glance I could see that something was wrong. William was practising distrait swings with a number three iron, a moody frown on his face, while Anastatia in what seemed to me a feverish way sat knitting a sweater for her little nephew, Braid Bates, the son of William and Jane, at the moment away from home undergoing intensive instruction from a leading professional in preparation for the forthcoming contest for the Children’s Cup. Both William and Jane rightly felt that the child could not start getting the competition spirit too soon.
Anastatia was looking pale, and William would have been, too, no doubt, if it had been possible for him to look pale. Years of incessant golf in all weathers had converted his cheeks into a substance resembling red leather.
‘Lovely evening,” I said.
“Beautiful,” replied Anastatia wildly.
“Good weather for the crops.”
“Splendid,” gasped Anastatia.
“And where is Rodney?”
Anastatia quivered all over and dropped a stitch.
“He’s out, I think,” she said in a strange, strangled voice.
William’s frown deepened. A plain, blunt man, he dislikes evasions.
“He is not out,” he said curtly. “He is at his home, writing poetry. Much better to tell him,” he added to Anastasia, who had uttered a wordless sound of protest. “You can’t keep the thing dark, and he will be able to handle it. He has white whiskers. A fellow with white whiskers is bound to be able to handle things better than a couple of birds like us who haven’t white whiskers. Stands to reason.”
I assured them that they could rely on my secrecy and discretion and that I would do anything that lay in the power of myself and my whiskers to assist them in their distress.
“So Rodney is writing poetry?” I said. “I feared that this might happen. Yes, I think I may say I saw it coming. About pixies, I suppose?”
Anastatia gave a quick sob and William a quick snort.
“About pixies, you suppose, do you?” he cried. “Well, you’re wrong. If pixies were all the trouble, I wouldn’t have a word to say. Let Rodney Spelvin come in at the door and tell me he has written a poem about pixies, and I will clasp him in my arms. Yes,” said William, “to my bosom. The thing has gone far, far beyond the pixie stage. Do you know where Rodney is at this moment? Up in the nursery, bending over his son Timothy’s cot, gathering material for a poem about the unfortunate little rat when asleep. Some bolony, no doubt, about how he hugs his teddy bear and dreams of angels. Yes, that is what he is doing, writing poetry about Timothy. Horrible whimsical stuff that . . . Well, when I tell you that he refers to him throughout as ‘Timothy Bobbin’, you will appreciate what we are up against.”
I am not a weak man, but I confess that I shuddered.
“Timothy Bobbin?”
“Timothy by golly Bobbin. No less.”
I shuddered again. This was worse than I had feared. And yet, when you examined it, how inevitable it was. The poetry virus always seeks out the weak spot. Rodney Spelvin was a devoted father. It had long been his practice to converse with his offspring in baby talk, though hitherto always in prose. It was only to be expected that when he found verse welling up in him, the object on which he would decant it would be his unfortunate son.
“What it comes to,” said William, “is that he is wantonly laying up a lifetime of shame and misery for the wretched little moppet. In the years to come, when he is playing in the National Amateur, the papers will print photographs of him with captions underneath explaining that he is the Timothy Bobbin of the well-known poems⎯”
“Rodney says he expects soon to have sufficient material for a slim volume,” put in Anastatia in a low voice.
“—and he will be put clean off his stroke. Misery, desolation and despair,” said William. “That is the programme, as I see it.”
“Are these poems so very raw?”
“Read these and judge for yourself. I swiped them off his desk.”
The documents which he thrust upon me appeared to be in the nature of experimental drafts, intended at a later stage to be developed more fully; what one might perhaps describe as practice swings.
The first ran:
Timothy Bobbin has a puppy,
A dear little puppy that goes Bow-wow. . . .
Beneath this were the words:
Whoa! Wait a minute!
followed, as though the writer had realized in time that this “uppy” rhyming scheme was going to present difficulties, by some scattered notes:
Safer to change to rabbit?
(Habit . . . Grab it . . . Stab it . . . Babbitt)
Rabbit looks tough, too. How about canary?
(Airy, dairy, fairy, hairy Mary, contrary, vary)
Note: Canaries go tweet-tweet.
(Beat, seat, feet, heat, meet, neat, repeat, sheet, complete, discreet).
Yes, canary looks like goods.
Timothy Bobbin has a canary.
Gosh, this is pie.
Timothy Bobbin has a canary.
As regards its sex opinions vary.
If it just goes tweet-tweet,
We shall call it Pete,
But if it lays an egg, we shall switch to Mary.
(Query: Sex motif too strongly stressed)
That was all about canaries. The next was on a different theme:
Timothy Bobbin has ten little toes.
He takes them out walking wherever he goes.
And if Timothy gets a cold in the head,
His ten little toes stay with him in bed.
William saw me wince, and asked if that was the toes one. I said it was and hurried on to the third and last.
It ran:
With this Rodney appeared to have been dissatisfied, for beneath it he had written the word
Reminiscent?
as though he feared that he might have been forestalled by some other poet, and there was a suggestion in the margin that instead of going Hoppity-hoppity-hop his hero might go Boppity-Boppity-bop. The alternative seemed to me equally melancholy, and it was with a grave face that I handed the papers back to William.
“Bad,” I said gravely.
“Bad is right.”
“Has this been going on long?”
“For days the fountain pen has hardly been out of his hand.”
I put the question which had been uppermost in my mind from the first.
“Has it affected his golf?”
“He says he is going to give up golf.”
“What! But the Rabbits Umbrella?”
“He intends to scratch.”
There seemed to be nothing more to be said. I left them. I wanted to be alone, to give this sad affair my undivided attention. As I made for the door, I saw that Anastatia had buried her face in her hands, while William, with brotherly solicitude, stood scratching the top of her head with the number three iron, no doubt in a well-meant effort to comfort and console.
For several days I brooded tensely on the problem, but it was all too soon borne in upon me that William had over-estimated the results-producing qualities of white whiskers. I think I may say with all modesty that mine are as white as the next man’s, but they got me nowhere. If I had been a clean-shaven juvenile in the early twenties, I could not have made less progress towards a satisfactory settlement.
It was all very well, I felt rather bitterly at times, for William to tell me to “handle it”, but what could I do? What can any man do when he is confronted by these great natural forces? For years, it was evident, poetry had been banking up inside Rodney Spelvin, accumulating like steam in a boiler on the safety valve of which someone is sitting. And now that the explosion had come, its violence was such as to defy all ordinary methods of treatment. Does one argue with an erupting crater? Does one reason with a waterspout? When William in his airy way to
ld me to “handle it”, it was as if someone had said to the young man who bore ’mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device Excelsior—”Block that avalanche.”
I could see only one gleam of light in the whole murky affair. Rodney Spelvin had not given up golf. Yielding to his wife’s prayers, he had entered for the competition for the Rabbits Umbrella, and had shown good form in the early rounds. Three of the local cripples had fallen victims to his prowess, leaving him a popular semi-finalist. It might be then, that golf would work a cure.
It was as I was taking an afternoon nap a few days later that I was aroused by a sharp prod in the ribs and saw William’s wife Jane standing beside me.
“Well?” she was saying.
I blinked, and sat up.
“Ah, Jane,” I said.
“Sleeping at a time like this,” she exclaimed, and I saw that she was regarding me censoriously. If Jane Bates has a fault, it is that she does not readily make allowances. “But perhaps you are just taking a well-earned rest after doping out the scheme of a lifetime?”
I could not deceive her.
“I am sorry. No.”
“No scheme?”
“None.”
Jane Bates’s face, like that of her husband, had been much worked upon by an open-air life, so she did not pale. But her nose twitched with sudden emotion, and she looked as if she had foozled a short putt for hole and match in an important contest. I saw her glance questioningly at my whiskers.
“Yes,” I said, interpreting her look, “I know they are white, but I repeat: No scheme. I have no more ideas than a rabbit; indeed not so many.”
“But William said you would handle the thing.”
“It can’t be handled.”
“It must be. Anastatia is going into a decline. Have you seen Timothy lately?”
“I saw him yesterday in the woods with his father. He was plucking a bluebell.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“He certainly had the air of one who is plucking a bluebell.”