So I said nothing, and presently Harold Pickering resumed his moody putting and I left him.
The contest for the club championship opened unsensationally. There are never very many entrants for this of course non-handicap event, and this year there were only four. Harold Pickering won his match against Rupert Watchett comfortably, and Sidney McMurdo, who had returned on the previous night, had no difficulty in disposing of George Bunting. The final, Pickering versus McMurdo, was to be played in the afternoon.
Agnes Flack had walked round with Harold Pickering in the morning, and they lunched together after the game. But an appointment with her lawyer in the metropolis made it impossible for her to stay and watch the final, and she had to be content with giving him some parting words of advice.
“The great thing,” she said, as he accompanied her to her car, “is not to lose your nerve. Forget that it’s a final and play your ordinary game, and you can trim the pants off him. This statement carries my personal guarantee.”
“You know his game pretty well?”
“Backwards. We used to do our three rounds a day together, when we were engaged.”
“Engaged?”
“Yes. Didn’t I tell you? We were heading straight for the altar, apparently with no bunkers in sight, when one afternoon he took a Number Three iron when I had told him to take a Number Four. I scratched the fixture immediately. ‘No man,’ I said to him, ‘is going to walk up the aisle with me who takes a Number Three iron for a Number Four iron shot. Pop off, Sidney McMurdo,’ I said, and he gnashed his teeth and popped. I shall get the laugh of a lifetime, seeing his face when I tell him I’m engaged to you. The big lummox.”
Harold Pickering started.
“Did you say big lummox?”
“That was the expression I used.”
“He is robust, then?”
“Oh, he’s robust enough. He could fell an ox with a single blow, if he wasn’t fond of oxen.”
“And is he—er—at all inclined to be jealous?”
“Othello took his correspondence course.”
“I see,” said Harold Pickering. “I see.”
He fell into a reverie, from which he was aroused a moment later by a deafening bellow from his companion.
“Hey, Sidney!”
The person she addressed was in Harold Pickering’s rear. He turned, and perceived a vast man who gazed yearningly at Agnes Flack from beneath beetling eyebrows.
“Sidney,” said Agnes Flack, “I want you to meet Mr. Pickering, who is playing you in the final this afternoon, Mr. McMurdo, Mr. Pickering, my fiancé. Well, goodbye, Harold darling, I’ve got to rush.”
She folded him in a long lingering embrace, the car bowled off, and Harold Pickering found himself alone with this oversized plug-ugly in what seemed to his fevered fancy a great empty space, like one of those ones in the movies where two strong men stand face to face and Might is the only law.
Sidney McMurdo was staring at him with a peculiar intensity. There was a disturbing gleam in his eyes, and his hands, each the size of a largish ham, were clenching and unclenching as if flexing themselves for some grim work in the not too distant future.
“Did she,” he asked in an odd, hoarse voice, “say—fiancé?”
“Why, yes,” said Harold Pickering, with a nonchalance which it cost him a strong effort to assume. “Yes, that’s right, I believe she did.”
“You are going to marry Agnes Flack?”
“There is some idea of it, I understand.”
“Ah!” said Sidney McMurdo, and the intensity of his stare was now more marked than ever.
Harold Pickering quailed beneath it. His heart, as he gazed at this patently steamed-up colossus, missed not one beat but several. Nor, I think, can we blame him. All publishers are sensitive, highly strung men. Gollancz is. So is Hamish Hamilton. So are Chapman and Hall, Heinemann and Herbert Jenkins, Ltd. And even when in sunny mood, Sidney McMurdo was always a rather intimidating spectacle. Tall, broad, deep-chested and superbly muscled, he looked like the worthy descendant of a long line of heavyweight gorillas, and nervous people and invalids were generally warned if there was any likelihood of their meeting him unexpectedly. Harold Pickering could not but feel that an uncle who would want anything like that at his sickbed must be eccentric to the last degree.
However, he did his best to keep the conversation on a note of easy cordiality.
“Nice weather,” he said.
“Bah!” said Sidney McMurdo.
“How’s your uncle?”
“Never mind my uncle. Are you busy at the moment, Mr. Pickering?”
“No.”
“Good,” said Sidney McMurdo. “Because I want to break your neck.”
There was a pause. Harold Pickering backed a step. Sidney McMurdo advanced a step. Harold Pickering backed another step. Sidney McMurdo advanced again. Harold Pickering sprang sideways. Sidney McMurdo also sprang sideways. If it had not been for the fact that the latter was gnashing his teeth and filling the air with a sound similar to that produced by an inexperienced Spanish dancer learning to play the castanets, one might have supposed them to be practising the opening movements of some graceful, old-world gavotte.
“Or, rather,” said Sidney McMurdo, correcting his previous statement, “tear you limb from limb.”
“Why?” asked Harold Pickering who liked to go into things.
“You know why,” said Sidney McMurdo, moving eastwards as his vis-à-vis moved westwards. “Because you steal girls’ hearts behind people’s backs, like a snake.”
Harold Pickering, who happened to know something about snakes, might have challenged this description of their habits, but he was afforded no opportunity of doing so. His companion had suddenly reached out a clutching hand, and only by coyly drawing it back was he enabled to preserve his neck intact.
“Here, just a moment,” he said.
I have mentioned that publishers are sensitive and highly strung. They are also quickwitted. They think on their feet. Harold Pickering had done so now. Hodder and Stoughton could not have reacted more nimbly.
“You are proposing to tear me limb from limb, are you?”
“And also to dance on the fragments.”
It was not easy for Harold Pickering to sneer, for his lower jaw kept dropping, but he contrived to do so.
“I see,” he said, just managing to curl his lip before the jaw got away from him again. “Thus ensuring that you shall be this year’s club champion. Ingenious, McMurdo. It’s one way of winning, of course. But I should not call it very sporting.”
He had struck the right note. The blush of shame mantled Sidney McMurdo’s cheek. His hands fell to his sides, and he stood chewing his lip, plainly disconcerted.
“I hadn’t looked at it like that,” he confessed.
“Posterity will,”’ said Harold Pickering.
“Yes, I see what you mean. Postpone it, then, you think, eh?”
“Indefinitely.”
“Oh, not indefinitely. We’ll get together after the match. After all,” said Sidney McMurdo, looking on the bright side, “it isn’t long to wait.”
It was at this point that I joined them. As generally happened in those days, I had been given the honour of refereeing the final. I asked if they were ready to start.
“Not only ready,” said Sidney McMurdo. “Impatient.”
Harold Pickering said nothing. He merely moistened the lips with the tip of the tongue.
My friends (proceeded the Oldest Member) have sometimes been kind enough to say that if there is one thing at which I excel, it is at describing in meticulous detail a desperately closely fought golf match—taking my audience stroke by stroke from tee one to hole eighteen and showing fortune fluctuating now to one side, now to the other, before finally placing the laurel wreath on the perspiring brow of the ultimate winner. And it is this treat that I should like to be able to give you now.
Unfortunately, the contest for that particular club championship final
does not lend itself to such a description. From the very outset it was hopelessly one-sided.
Even as we walked to the first tee, it seemed to me that Harold Pickering was not looking his best and brightest. But I put this down to a nervous man’s natural anxiety before an important match, and even when he lost the first two holes by the weakest type of play, I assumed that he would soon pull himself together and give of his best.
At that time, of course, I was not aware of the emotions surging in his bosom. It was only some years later that I ran into him and he told me his story and its sequel. That afternoon, what struck me most was the charming spirit of courtesy in which he played the match. He was losing every hole with monotonous regularity, and in such circumstances even the most amiable are apt to be gloomy and sullen, but he never lost his affability. He seemed to be straining every nerve to ingratiate himself with Sidney McMurdo and win the latter’s affection.
Oddly, as it appeared to me then, it was McMurdo who was sullen and gloomy. On three occasions he declined the offer of a cigarette from his opponent, and was short in his manner—one might almost say surly—when Harold Pickering, nine down at the ninth, said that is was well worth anyone’s while being beaten by Sidney McMurdo because, apart from the fresh air and exercise, it was such an artistic treat to watch his putting.
It was as he paid this graceful tribute that the crowd, which had been melting away pretty steadily for the last quarter of an hour, finally disappeared. By the time Sidney McMurdo had holed out at the tenth for a four that gave him the match, we were alone except for the caddies. These having been paid off, we started to walk back.
To lose a championship match by ten and eight is an experience calculated to induce in a man an introspective silence, and I had not expected Harold Pickering to contribute much to any feast of reason and flow of soul which might enliven the homeward journey. To my surprise, however, as we started to cross the bridge which spans the water at the eleventh, he burst into animated speech, complimenting his conqueror in a graceful way which I thought very sporting.
“I wonder if you will allow me to say, Mr. McMurdo,” he began, “how greatly impressed I have been by your performance this afternoon. It has been a genuine revelation to me. It is so seldom that one meets a man who, while long off the tee, also plays an impeccable short game. I don’t want to appear fulsome, but it seems to me that you have everything.”
Words like these should have been music to Sidney McMurdo’s ears, but he merely scowled darkly and uttered a short grunt like a bulldog choking on a piece of steak.
“In fact, I don’t mind telling you, McMurdo,” proceeded Harold Pickering, still in that genial and ingratiating manner, “that I shall watch your future career with considerable interest. It is a sad pity that this year’s Walker Cup matches are over, for our team might have been greatly strengthened. Well, I venture to assert that next season the selection of at least one member will give the authorities little trouble.”
Sidney McMurdo uttered another grunt, and I saw what seemed like a look of discouragement come into Harold Pickering’s face. But after gulping a couple of times he continued brightly.
“Tell me, Sidney,” he said, “have you ever thought of writing a golf book? You know the sort of thing, old man. Something light and chatty, describing your methods and giving advice to the novice. If so, I should be delighted to publish it, and we should not quarrel about the terms. If I were you, I’d go straight home and start on it now.”
Sidney McMurdo spoke for the first time. His voice was deep and rumbling.
“I have something to do before I go home.”
“Oh, yes?”
“I am going to pound the stuffing out of a snake.”
“Ah, then in that case you will doubtless want to be alone, to concentrate. I will leave you.”
“No, you won’t. Let us step behind those bushes for a moment, Mr. Pickering,” said Sidney McMurdo.
I have always been good at putting two and two together, and listening to these exchanges I now sensed how matters stood. In a word, I saw all, and my heart bled for Harold Pickering. Unnecessarily, as it turned out, for even as my heart started to bleed, Harold Pickering acted.
I have said that we were crossing the bridge over the water at the eleventh, and no doubt you have been picturing that bridge as it is today—a stout steel structure. At the time of which I am speaking it was a mere plank with a rickety wooden rail along it, a rail ill adapted to withstand the impact of a heavy body.
Sidney McMurdo’s was about as heavy a body as there was in the neighbourhood, and when Harold Pickering, with a resource and ingenuity which it would be difficult to overpraise, suddenly butted him in the stomach with his head and sent him reeling against it, it gave way without a moment’s hesitation. There was a splintering crash, followed by a splash and a scurry of feet, and the next thing I saw was Harold Pickering disappearing over the horizon while Sidney McMurdo, up to his waist in water, petulantly detaching an eel from his hair. It was a striking proof of the old saying that a publisher is never so dangerous as when apparently beaten. You may drive a publisher into a corner, but you do so at your own peril.
Presently, Sidney McMurdo waded ashore and started to slosh sullenly up the hillside towards the club-house. From the irritable manner in which he was striking himself between the shoulder blades I received the impression that he had got some sort of a water beetle down his back.
As I think I mentioned earlier, I did not see Harold Pickering again for some years, and it was only then that I was enabled to fill in the gaps, in what has always seemed to me a singularly poignant human drama.
At first, he told me, he was actuated by the desire, which one can understand and sympathize with, to put as great a distance as possible between Sidney McMurdo and himself in the shortest possible time. With this end in view, he hastened to his car, which he had left standing outside the club-house, and placing a firm foot on the accelerator drove about seventy miles in the general direction of Scotland. Only when he paused for a sandwich at a wayside tavern after completing this preliminary burst did he discover that all the money he had on his person was five shillings and a little bronze.
Now, a less agitated man would, of course, have seen that the policy to pursue was to take a room at a hotel, explain to the management that his luggage would be following shortly, and write to his bank to telegraph him such funds as he might require. But this obvious solution did not even occur to Harold Pickering. The only way out of the difficulty that suggested itself to him was to drive back to his cottage, secure the few pounds which he knew to be on the premises, throw into a suitcase some articles of clothing and his cheque book and then drive off again into the sunset.
As it happened, however, he would not have been able to drive into the sunset, for it was quite dark when he arrived at his destination. He alighted from his car, and was about to enter the house, when he suddenly observed that there was a light in the sitting-room. And creeping to the window and peering cautiously through a chink in the curtains, he saw that it was precisely as he had feared. There on a settee, scowling up at the ceiling, was Sidney McMurdo. He had the air of a man who was waiting for somebody.
And scarcely had Harold Pickering, appalled by this spectacle, withdrawn into a near-by bush to think the situation over in all of its aspects and try to find a formula, when heavy footsteps sounded on the gravel path and, dark though it was, he had no difficulty in identifying the newcomer as Agnes Flack. Only she could have clumped like that.
The next moment, she had delivered a resounding buffet on the front door, and Sidney McMurdo was opening it to her.
There was a silence as they gazed at one another. Except for that brief instant when she had introduced Harold Pickering to Sidney McMurdo outside the clubhouse, these sundered hearts had not met since the severance of their relations, and even a fifteen-stone man and an eleven-stone girl are not immune from embarrassment.
Agnes was the first to speak.
“Hullo,” she said. “You here?”
“Yes,” said Sidney McMurdo, “I’m here all right. I am waiting for the snake Pickering.”
“I’ve come to see him myself.”
“Oh? Well, nothing that you can do will save him from my wrath.”
“Who wants to save him from your wrath?”
“Don’t you?”
“Certainly not. All I looked in for was to break our engagement.”
Sidney McMurdo staggered.
“Break your engagement?”
“That’s right.”
“But I thought you loved him.”
“No more. The scales have fallen from my eyes. I don’t marry men who are as hot as pistols in a friendly round with nothing depending on it, but blow up like geysers in competition golf. Why are you wrathful with him, Sidney?”
Sidney McMurdo gnashed his teeth.
“He stole you from me,” he said hoarsely.
If Agnes Flack had been about a foot shorter and had weighed about thirty pounds less, the sound which proceeded from her might have been described as a giggle. She stretched out the toe of her substantial shoe and made a squiggle with it on the gravel.
“And did you mind that so much?” she said softly—or as softly as it was in her power to speak.
“Yes, I jolly well did,” said Sidney McMurdo. “I love you, old girl, and I shall continue to love you till the cows come home. When I was demolishing the reptile Pickering this afternoon, your face seemed to float before me all the way round, even when I was putting. And I’ll tell you something. I’ve been thinking it over, and I see now that I was all wrong that time and should unquestionably have used a Number Four iron. Too late, of course,” said Sidney McMurdo moodily, thinking of what might have been.
Agnes Flack drew a second arabesque on the gravel, using the toe of the other shoe this time.