“Well, he wasn’t. He was talking into it. He said it was a fairy telephone and he was calling up the Fairy Queen to invite her to a party on his teddy bear’s birthday. Rodney stood by, taking notes and that evening wrote a poem about it.”
“Does Timothy often do that sort of thing?”
“All the time. The child has become a ham. He never ceases putting on an act. He can’t eat his breakfast cereal without looking out of the corner of his eye to see how it’s going with the audience. And when he says his prayers at night his eyes are ostensibly closed, but all the while he is peering through his fingers and counting the house. And that’s not the worst of it. A wife and mother can put up with having an infant ham in the home, constantly popping out at her and being cute, provided that she is able to pay the household bills, but now Rodney says he is going to give up writing thrillers and devote himself entirely to poetry.”
“But his contracts?”
“He says he doesn’t give a darn for any contracts. He says he wants to get away from it all and give his soul a chance. The way he talks about his soul and the raw deal it has had all these years, you would think it had been doing a stretch in Wormwood Scrubs. He says he is fed up with bloodstains and that the mere thought of bodies in the library with daggers of Oriental design in their backs make him sick. He broke the news to his agent on the telephone last night, and I could hear the man’s screams as plainly as if he had been in the next room.”
“But is he going to stop eating?”
“Practically. So is Anastatia. He says they can get along quite nicely on wholesome and inexpensive vegetables. He thinks it will help his poetry. He says look at Rabindranath Tagore. Never wrapped himself around a T-bone steak in his life, and look where he fetched up. All done on rice, he said, with an occasional draft of cold water from the spring. I tell you my heart bleeds for Anastatia. A lunatic husband and a son who talks into bluebells, and she’ll have to cope with them on Brussels sprouts. She certainly drew the short straw when she married that bard.”
She paused in order to snort, and suddenly, without warning, as so often happens, the solution came to me.
“Jane!” I said, “I believe I see the way out.”
“You do?”
There flashed into her face a look which I had only once seen there before, on the occasion when the opponent who had fought her all the way to the twentieth hole in the final of the Ladies’ Championship of the club was stung by a wasp while making the crucial putt. She kissed me between the whiskers and was good enough to say that she had known all along that I had it in me.
“When do you expect your son Braid back?”
“Some time to-morrow afternoon.”
“When he arrives, send him to me. I will outline the position of affairs to him, and I think we can be safe in assuming that he will immediately take over.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You know what Braid is like. He has no reticences.”
I spoke feelingly. Braid Bates was one of those frank, uninhibited children who are not afraid to speak their minds, and there had been certain passages between us in the not distant past in the course of which I had learned more about my personal appearance from two minutes of his conversation than I could have done from years of introspective study. At the time, I confess, I had been chagrined and had tried fruitlessly to get at him with a niblick, but now I found myself approving whole-heartedly of this trait in his character.
“Reflect. What will Braid’s reaction be to the news that these poems are being written about Timothy? He will be revolted, and will say so, not mincing his words. Briefly, he will kid the pants off the young Spelvin, and it should not be long before the latter, instead of gloating obscenely, will be writhing in an agony of shame at the mention of Timothy Bobbin and begging Rodney to lay off. And surely even a poet cannot be deaf to the pleadings of the child he loves. Leave it to Braid. He will put everything right.”
Jane had grasped it now, and her face was aglow with the light of mother love.
“Why, of course!” she cried, clasping her hands in a sort of ecstasy. “I ought to have thought of it myself. People may say what they like about my sweet Braid, but they can’t deny that he is the rudest child this side of the Atlantic Ocean. I’ll send him to you the moment he clocks in.”
Braid Bates at that time was a young plug-ugly of some nine summers, in appearance a miniature edition of William and in soul and temperament a combination of Dead End Kid and army mule; a freckled hard-boiled character with a sardonic eye and a mouth which, when not occupied in eating, had a cynical twist to it. He spoke little as a general thing, but when he did speak seldom failed to find a chink in the armour. The impact of such a personality on little Timothy must, I felt, be tremendous, and I was confident that we could not have placed the child in better hands.
I lost no time in showing him the poem about the Fairy Queen and the bluebell. He read it in silence, and when he had finished drew a deep breath.
“Is Timothy Bobbin Timothy?”
“He is.”
“This poem’s all about Timothy?”
“Precisely.”
“Will it be printed in a book?”
“In a slim volume, yes. Together with others of the same type.”
I could see that he was deeply stirred, and felt that I had sown the good seed.
“You will probably have quite a good deal to say about this to Timothy at one time and another,” I said. “Don’t be afraid to speak out for fear of wounding his feelings. Remind yourself that it is all for his good. The expression ‘cruel to be kind’ occurs to one.”
His manner, as I spoke, seemed absent, as if he were turning over in his mind a selection of good things to be said to his little cousin when they met, and shortly afterwards he left me, so moved that on my offering him a ginger ale and a slice of cake he appeared not to have heard me. I retired to rest that night with the gratifying feeling that I had done my day’s good deed, and was on the verge of falling asleep when the telephone bell rang.
It was Jane Bates. Her voice was agitated.
“You and your schemes!” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Do you know what has happened?”
“What?”
“William is writing poetry.”
It seemed to me that I could not have heard her correctly.
“William?”
“William.”
“You mean Rodney⎯”
“I don’t mean Rodney. Let me tell you in a few simple words what has happened. Braid returned from your house like one in a dream.”
“Yes, I thought he seemed impressed.”
“Please do not interrupt. It makes it difficult for me to control myself, and I have already bitten a semi-circle out of the mouthpiece. Like one in a dream, I was saying. For the rest of the evening he sat apart, brooding and not answering when spoken to. At bedtime he came out of the silence. And how!”
“And what?”
“I said ‘And how!’ He announced that that poem of Rodney’s about the Fairy Queen was the snappiest thing he had ever read and he didn’t see why, if Rodney could write poems about Timothy, William couldn’t write poems about him. And when we told him not to talk nonsense, he delivered his ultimatum. He said that if William did not immediately come through, he would remove his name from the list of entrants for the Children’s Cup. What did you say?”
“I mean nothing. I was gasping.”
“You may well gasp. In fact, it will be all right with me if you choke. It was you who started all this. Of course, he had got us cold. It has been our dearest wish that he should win the Children’s Cup, and we have spent money lavishly to have his short game polished up. Naturally, when he put it like that, we had no alternative. I kissed William, shook him by the hand, tied a wet towel around his head, gave him pencil and paper and locked him up in the morning-room with lots of hot coffee. When I asked him just now how he was making out, he sa
id that he had had no inspiration so far but would keep on swinging. His voice sounded very hollow. I can picture the poor darling’s agony. The only thing he has ever written before in his life was a stiff letter to the Greens Committee beefing about the new bunker on the fifth, and that took him four days and left him as limp as a rag.”
She then turned the conversation to what she described as my mischief-making meddling, and I thought it advisable to hang up.
A thing I have noticed frequently in the course of a long life, and it is one that makes for optimism, is that tragedy, while of course rife in this world of ours, is seldom universal. To give an instance of what I mean, while the barometer of William and Jane Bates pointed to “Further Outlook Unsettled”, with Anastatia Spelvin the weather conditions showed signs of improvement.
That William and his wife were in the depths there could be no question. I did not meet Jane, for after the trend of her telephone conversation I felt it more prudent not to, but I saw William a couple of times at luncheon at the club. He looked weary and haggard and was sticking cheese straws in his hair. I heard him ask the waiter if he knew any good rhymes, and when the waiter said “To what?” William replied “To anything”. He refused a second chop, and sighed a good deal.
Anastatia, on the other hand, whom I overtook on my way to the links to watch the final of the Rabbits Umbrella a few days later, I found her old cheerful self again. Rodney was one of the competitors in the struggle which was about to begin, and she took a rosy view of his chances. His opponent was Joe Stocker, and it appeared that Joe was suffering from one of his bouts of hay fever.
“Surely,” she said, “Rodney can trim a man with hay fever? Of course, Mr. Stocker is trying Sneezo, the sovereign remedy, but, after all, what is Sneezo?”
“A mere palliative.”
“They say he broke a large vase yesterday during one of his paroxysms. It flew across the room and was dashed to pieces against the wall.”
“That sounds promising.”
“Do you know,” said Anastatia, and I saw that her eyes were shining, “I can’t help feeling that if all goes well Rodney may turn the corner.”
“You mean that his better self will gain the upper hand, making him once again the Rodney we knew and loved?”
“Exactly. If he wins his final, I think he will be a changed man.”
I saw what she meant. A man who has won his first trophy, be it only a scarlet umbrella, has no room in his mind for anything but the improving of his game so that he can as soon as possible win another trophy. A Rodney Spelvin with the Rabbits Umbrella under his belt would have little leisure or inclination for writing poetry. Golf had been his salvation once. It might prove to be so again.
“You didn’t watch the preliminary rounds did, you?” Anastatia went on. “Well, at first Rodney was listless. The game plainly bored him. He had taken a note-book out with him, and he kept stopping to jot down ideas. And then suddenly, half-way through the semi-final, he seemed to change. His lips tightened. His face grew set. And on the tenth a particularly significant incident occurred. He was shaping for a brassie shot, when a wee little blue butterfly fluttered down and settled on his ball. And instead of faltering he clenched his teeth and swung at it with every ounce of weight and muscle. It had to make a quick jump to save its life. I have seldom seen a butterfly move more nippily. Don’t you think that was promising?”
“Highly promising. And this brighter state of things continued?”
“All through the semi-final. The butterfly came back on the seventeenth and seemed about to settle on his ball again. But it took a look at his face and moved off. I feel so happy.”
I patted her on the shoulder, and we made our way to the first tee, where Rodney was spinning a coin for Joe Stocker to call. And presently Joe, having won the honour, drove off.
A word about this Stocker. A famous amateur wrestler in his youth, and now in middle age completely muscle-bound, he made up for what he lacked in finesse by bringing to the links the rugged strength and directness of purpose which in other days had enabled him to pin one and all to the mat: and it had been well said of him as a golfer that you never knew what he was going to do next. It might be one thing, or it might be another. All you could say with certainty was that he would be in there, trying. I have seen him do the long fifteenth in two, and I have seen him do the shorter second in thirty-seven.
To-day he made history immediately by holing out his opening drive. It is true that he holed it out on the sixteenth green, which lies some three hundred yards away and a good deal to the left of the first tee, but he holed it out, and a gasp went up from the spectators who had assembled to watch the match. If this was what Joseph Stocker did on the first, they said to one another, the imagination reeled stunned at the prospect of the heights to which he might soar in the course of eighteen holes.
But golf is an uncertain game. Taking a line through that majestic opening drive, one would have supposed that Joe Stocker’s tee shot at the second would have beaned a lady, too far off to be identified, who was working in her garden about a quarter of a mile to the south-west. I had, indeed, shouted a warning “Fore!”
So far from doing this, however, it took him in a classic curve straight for the pin, and he had no difficulty in shooting a pretty three. And as Rodney had the misfortune to sink a ball in the lake, they came to the third all square.
The third, fourth and fifth they halved. Rodney won the sixth, Stocker the seventh. At the eighth I fancied that Rodney was about to take the lead again, for his opponent’s third had left his ball entangled in a bush of considerable size, from which it seemed that it could be removed only with a pair of tweezers.
But it was at moments like this that you caught Joseph Stocker at his best. In some of the more scientific aspects of the game he might be forced to yield the palm to more skilful performers, but when it came to a straight issue of muscle and the will to win he stood alone. Here was where he could use his niblick, and Joe Stocker, armed with his niblick, was like King Arthur wielding his sword Excalibur. The next instant the ball, the bush, a last year’s bird’s nest and a family of caterpillars which had taken out squatter’s rights were hurtling toward the green, and shortly after that, Rodney was one down again.
And as they halved the ninth, it was in this unpleasant position that he came to the turn. Here Stocker, a chivalrous antagonist, courteously suggested a quick one at the bar before proceeding, and we repaired thither.
All through these nine gruelling holes, with their dramatic mutations of fortune, I had been watching Rodney carefully, and I had been well pleased with what I saw. There could be no doubt whatever that Anastatia had been right and that the game had gripped this backslider with all its old force. Here was no poet, pausing between shots to enter stray throughts in a note-book, but something that looked like a Scotch pro in the last round of the National Open. What he had said to his caddie on the occasion of the lad cracking a nut just as he was putting had been music to my ears. It was plain that the stern struggle had brought out all that was best in Rodney Spelvin.
It seemed to me, too, an excellent sign that he was all impatience to renew the contest. He asked Stocker with some brusqueness if he proposed to spend the rest of the day in the bar, and Stocker hastily drained his second ginger ale and Sneezo and we went out.
As we were making our way to the tenth tee, little Timothy suddenly appeared from nowhere, gambolling up in an arch way like a miniature chorus-boy, and I saw at once what Jane had meant when she had spoken of him putting on an act. There was a sort of ghastly sprightliness about the child. He exuded whimsicality at every pore.
“Daddee,” he called, and Rodney looked round a little irritably, it seemed to me, like one interrupted while thinking of higher things.
“Daddee, I’ve made friends with such a nice beetle.”
It was a remark which a few days earlier would have had Rodney reaching for his note-book with a gleaming eye, but now he was plainly distr
ait. There was an absent look on his face, and watching him swing his driver one was reminded of a tiger of the jungle lashing its tail.
“Quite,” was all he said.
“It’s green. I call it Mister Green Beetle.”
This idiotic statement—good, one would have thought, for at least a couple of stanzas—seemed to arouse little or no enthusiasm in Rodney. He merely nodded curtly and said “Yes, yes, very sensible”.
“Run away and have a long talk with it,” he added.
“What about?”
“Why—er—other beetles.”
“Do you think Mister Green Beetle has some dear little brothers and sisters, Daddee?”
“Extremely likely. Good-bye. No doubt we shall meet later.”
“I wonder if the Fairy Queen uses beetles as horses, Daddee?”
“Very possibly, very possibly. Go and make inquiries. And you,” said Rodney, addressing his cowering caddie, “if I hear one more hiccough out of you while I am shooting—just one—I shall give you two minutes to put your affairs in order and then I shall act. Come on, Stocker, come on, come on, come on. You have the honour.”
He looked at his opponent sourly, like one with a grievance, and I knew what was in his mind. He was wondering where this hay fever of Stocker’s was, of which he had heard so much.
I could not blame him. A finalist in a golf tournament, playing against an antagonist who has been widely publicized as a victim of hay fever, is entitled to expect that the latter will give at least occasional evidence of his infirmity, and so far Joseph Stocker had done nothing of the kind. From the start of the proceedings he had failed to foozle a single shot owing to a sudden sneeze, and what Rodney was feeling was that while this could not perhaps actually be described as sharp practice, it was sailing very near the wind.
The fact of the matter was that the inventor of Sneezo knew his stuff. A quick-working and harmless specific highly recommended by the medical fraternity and containing no deleterious drugs, it brought instant relief. Joe Stocker had been lowering it by the pailful since breakfast, and it was standing him in good stead. I have fairly keen ears, but up to now I had not heard him even sniffle. He played his shots dry-eyed and without convulsions, and whatever holes Rodney had won he had had to win by sheer unassisted merit.