The Golf Omnibus

  “You don’t tell him. I will tell him. I will inform him tomorrow that you called on me this afternoon and stole my watch and”—I glanced about the room—“my silver matchbox.”

  “I’d rather have that little vinaigrette.”

  “You don’t get either. I merely say you stole it. What will happen?”

  “Mortimer will hit you with a cleek.”

  “Not at all. I am an old man. My white hairs protect me. What he will do is to insist on confronting me with you and asking you to deny the foul charge.”

  “And then?”

  “Then you admit it and release him from his engagement.”

  She sat for a while in silence. I could see that my words had made an impression.

  “I think it’s a splendid idea. Thank you very much.” She rose and moved to the door. “I knew you would suggest something wonderful.” She hesitated. “You don’t think it would make it sound more plausible if I really took the vinaigrette?” she added, a little wistfully.

  “It would spoil everything,” I replied, firmly, as I reached for the vinaigrette and locked it carefully in my desk.

  She was silent for a moment, and her glance fell on the carpet. That, however, did not worry me. It was nailed down.

  “Well, good-bye,” she said.

  “Au revoir,” I replied. “I am meeting Mortimer at six-thirty tomorrow. You may expect us round at your house at about eight.”

  Mortimer was punctual at the tryst next morning. When I reached the tenth tee he was already there. We exchanged a brief greeting and I handed him a driver, outlined the essentials of grip and swing, and bade him go to it.

  “It seems a simple game,” he said, as he took his stance. “You’re sure it’s fair to have the ball sitting up on top of a young sand-hill like this?”

  “Perfectly fair.”

  “I mean, I don’t want to be coddled because I’m a beginner.”

  “The ball is always teed up for the drive,” I assured him.

  “Oh, well, if you say so. But it seems to me to take all the element of sport out of the game. Where do I hit it?”

  “Oh, straight ahead.”

  “But isn’t it dangerous? I mean, suppose I smash a window in that house over there?”

  He indicated a charming bijou residence some five hundred yards down the fairway.

  “In that case,” I replied, “the owner comes out in his pyjamas and offers you the choice between some nuts and a cigar.”

  He seemed reassured, and began to address the ball. Then he paused again.

  “Isn’t there something you say before you start?” he asked. “‘Five’, or something?”

  “You may say ‘Fore!’ if it makes you feel any easier. But it isn’t necessary.”

  “If I am going to learn this silly game,” said Mortimer, firmly, “I am going to learn it right. Fore!”

  I watched him curiously. I never put a club into the hand of a beginner without something of the feeling of the sculptor who surveys a mass of shapeless clay. I experience the emotions of a creator. Here, I say to myself, is a semi-sentient being into whose soulless carcass I am breathing life. A moment before, he was, though technically living, a mere clod. A moment hence he will be a golfer.

  While I was still occupied with these meditations Mortimer swung at the ball. The club, whizzing down, brushed the surface of the rubber sphere, toppling it off the tee and propelling it six inches with a slight slice on it.

  “Damnation!” said Mortimer, unravelling himself.

  I nodded approvingly. His drive had not been anything to write to the golfing journals about, but he was picking up the technique of the game.

  “What happened then?”

  I told him in a word.

  “Your stance was wrong, and your grip was wrong, and you moved your head, and swayed your body, and took your eye off the ball, and pressed, and forgot to use your wrists, and swung back too fast, and let the hands get ahead of the club, and lost your balance, and omitted to pivot on the ball of the left foot, and bent your right knee.”

  He was silent for a moment.

  “There is more in this pastime,” he said, “than the casual observer would suspect.”

  I have noticed, and I suppose other people have noticed, that in the golf education of every man there is a definite point at which he may be said to have crossed the dividing line—the Rubicon, as it were—that separates the golfer from the non-golfer. This moment comes immediately after his first good drive. In the ninety minutes in which I instructed Mortimer Sturgis that morning in the rudiments of the game, he made every variety of drive known to science; but it was not till we were about to leave that he made a good one.

  A moment before he had surveyed his blistered hands with sombre disgust.

  “It’s no good,” he said. “I shall never learn this beast of a game. And I don’t want to either. It’s only fit for lunatics. Where’s the sense in it? Hitting a rotten little ball with a stick! If I want exercise, I’ll take a stick and go and rattle it along the railings. There’s something in that! Well, let’s be getting along. No good wasting the whole morning out here.”

  “Try one more drive, and then we’ll go.”

  “All right. If you like. No sense in it, though.”

  He teed up the ball, took a careless stance, and flicked moodily. There was a sharp crack, the ball shot off the tee, flew a hundred yards in a dead straight line never ten feet above the ground, soared another seventy yards in a graceful arc, struck the turf, rolled, and came to rest within easy mashie distance of the green.

  “Splendid!” I cried.

  The man seemed stunned.

  “How did that happen?”

  I told him very simply.

  “Your stance was right, and your grip was right, and you kept your head still, and didn’t sway your body, and never took your eye off the ball, and slowed back, and let the arms come well through, and rolled the wrists, and let the club-head lead, and kept your balance, and pivoted on the ball of the left foot, and didn’t duck the right knee.”

  “I see,” he said. “Yes, I thought that must be it.”

  “Now let’s go home.”

  “Wait a minute. I just want to remember what I did while it’s fresh in my mind. Let me see, this was the way I stood. Or was it more like this? No, like this.” He turned to me, beaming. “What a great idea it was, my taking up golf! It’s all nonsense what you read in the comic papers about people foozling all over the place and breaking clubs and all that. You’ve only to exercise a little reasonable care. And what a corking game it is! Nothing like it in the world! I wonder if Betty is up yet. I must go round and show her how I did that drive. A perfect swing, with every ounce of weight, wrist, and muscle behind it. I meant to keep it a secret from the dear girl till I had really learned, but of course I have learned now. Let’s go round and rout her out.”

  He had given me my cue. I put my hand on his shoulder and spoke sorrowfully.

  “Mortimer, my boy, I fear I have bad news for you.”

  “Slow back—keep the head⎯ What’s that? Bad news?”

  “About Betty.”

  “About Betty? What about her? Don’t sway the body—keep the eye on the—”

  “Prepare yourself for a shock, my boy. Yesterday afternoon Betty called to see me. When she had gone I found that she had stolen my silver matchbox.”

  “Stolen your matchbox?”

  “Stolen my matchbox.”

  “Oh, well, I dare say there were faults on both sides,” said Mortimer. “Tell me if I sway my body this time.”

  “You don’t grasp what I have said! Do you realize that Betty, the girl you are going to marry, is a kleptomaniac?”

  “A kleptomaniac!”

  “That is the only possible explanation. Think what this means, my boy. Think how you will feel every time your wife says she is going out to do a little shopping! Think of yourself, left alone at home, watching the clock, saying to yourself, ‘Now she is l
ifting a pair of silk stockings!’ ‘Now she is hiding gloves in her umbrella!’ ‘Just about this moment she is getting away with a pearl necklace!’”

  “Would she do that?”

  “She would! She could not help herself. Or, rather, she could not refrain from helping herself. How about it, my boy?”

  “It only draws us closer together,” he said.

  I was touched, I own. My scheme had failed, but it had proved Mortimer Sturgis to be of pure gold. He stood gazing down the fairway, wrapped in thought.

  “By the way,” he said, meditatively, “I wonder if the dear girl ever goes to any of those sales—those auction-sales, you know, where you’re allowed to inspect the things the day before? They often have some pretty decent vases.”

  He broke off and fell into a reverie.

  From this point onward Mortimer Sturgis proved the truth of what I said to you about the perils of taking up golf at an advanced age. A lifetime of observing my fellow-creatures has convinced me that Nature intended us all to be golfers. In every human being the germ of golf is implanted at birth, and suppression causes it to grow and grow till—it may be at forty, fifty, sixty—it suddenly bursts its bonds and sweeps over the victim like a tidal wave. The wise man, who begins to play in childhood, is enabled to let the poison exude gradually from his system, with no harmful results. But a man like Mortimer Sturgis, with thirty-eight golfless years behind him, is swept off his feet. He is carried away. He loses all sense of proportion. He is like the fly that happens to be sitting on the wall of the dam just when the crack comes.

  Mortimer Sturgis gave himself up without a struggle to an orgy of golf such as I have never witnessed in any man. Within two days of that first lesson he had accumulated a collection of clubs large enough to have enabled him to open a shop; and he went on buying them at the rate of two and three a day. On Sundays, when it was impossible to buy clubs, he was like a lost spirit. True, he would do his regular four rounds on the day of rest, but he never felt happy. The thought, as he sliced into the rough, that the patent wooden-faced cleek which he intended to purchase next morning might have made all the difference, completely spoiled his enjoyment.

  I remember him calling me up on the telephone at three o’clock one morning to tell me that he had solved the problem of putting. He intended in future, he said, to use a croquet mallet, and he wondered that no one had ever thought of it before. The sound of his broken groan when I informed him that croquet mallets were against the rules haunted me for days.

  His golf library kept pace with his collection of clubs. He bought all the standard works, subscribed to all the golfing papers, and, when he came across a paragraph in a magazine to the effect that Mr. Hutchings, an ex-amateur champion, did not begin to play till he was past forty, and that his opponent in the final, Mr. S. H. Fry, had never held a club till his thirty-fifth year, he had it engraved on vellum and framed and hung up beside his shaving-mirror.

  And Betty, meanwhile? She, poor child, stared down the years into a bleak future, in which she saw herself parted for ever from the man she loved, and the golf-widow of another for whom—even when he won a medal for lowest net at a weekly handicap with a score of a hundred and three minus twenty-four—she could feel nothing warmer than respect. Those were dreary days for Betty. We three—she and I and Eddie Denton—often talked over Mortimer’s strange obsession. Denton said that, except that Mortimer had not come out in pink spots, his symptoms were almost identical with those of the dreaded mongo-mongo, the scourge of the West African hinterland. Poor Denton! He had already booked his passage for Africa, and spent hours looking in the atlas for good deserts.

  In every fever of human affairs there comes at last the crisis. We may emerge from it healed or we may plunge into still deeper depths of soul-sickness; but always the crisis comes. I was privileged to be present when it came in the affairs of Mortimer Sturgis and Betty Weston.

  I had gone into the club-house one afternoon at an hour when it is usually empty, and the first thing I saw, as I entered the main room, which looks out on the ninth green, was Mortimer. He was grovelling on the floor, and I confess that, when I caught sight of him, my heart stood still. I feared that his reason, sapped by dissipation, had given way. I knew that for weeks, day in and day out, the niblick had hardly ever been out of his hand, and no constitution can stand that.

  He looked up as he heard my footstep.

  “Hallo,” he said. “Can you see a ball anywhere?”

  “A ball?” I backed away, reaching for the door-handle. “My dear boy,” I said soothingly, “you have made a mistake. Quite a natural mistake. One anybody would have made. But, as a matter of fact, this is the club-house. The links are outside there. Why not come away with me very quietly and let us see if we can’t find some balls on the links? If you will wait here a moment, I will call up Doctor Smithson. He was telling me only this morning that he wanted a good spell of ball-hunting to put him in shape. You don’t mind if he joins us?”

  “It was a Silver King with my initials on it,” Mortimer went on, not heeding me. “I got on the ninth green in eleven with a nice mashie-niblick, but my approach-putt was a little too strong. It came in through that window.”

  I perceived for the first time that one of the windows facing the course was broken, and my relief was great. I went down on my knees and helped him in his search. We ran the ball to earth finally inside the piano.

  “What’s the local rule?” inquired Mortimer. “Must I play it where it lies, or may I tee up and lose a stroke? If I have to play it where it lies, I suppose a niblick would be the club?”

  It was at this moment that Betty came in. One glance at her pale, set face told me that there was to be a scene, and I would have retired, but that she was between me and the door.

  “Hallo, dear,” said Mortimer, greeting her with a friendly waggle of his niblick. “I’m bunkered in the piano. My approach-putt was a little strong, and I over-ran the green.”

  “Mortimer,” said the girl, tensely, “I want to ask you one question.”

  “Yes, dear? I wish, darling, you could have seen my drive at the eighth just now. It was a pip!”

  Betty looked at him steadily.

  “Are we engaged,” she said, “or are we not?”

  “Engaged? Oh, to be married? Why, of course. I tried the open stance for a change, and⎯”

  “This morning you promised to take me for a ride. You never appeared. Where were you?”

  “Just playing golf.”

  “Golf! I’m sick of the very name!”

  A spasm shook Mortimer.

  “You mustn’t let people hear you saying things like that!” he said. “I somehow felt, the moment I began my up-swing, that everything was going to be all right. I⎯”

  “I’ll give you one more chance. Will you take me for a drive in your car this evening?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not? What are you doing?”

  “Just playing golf!”

  “I’m tired of being neglected like this!” cried Betty, stamping her foot. Poor girl, I saw her point of view. It was bad enough for her being engaged to the wrong man, without having him treat her as a mere acquaintance. Her conscience fighting with her love for Eddie Denton had kept her true to Mortimer, and Mortimer accepted the sacrifice with an absent-minded carelessness which would have been galling to any girl. “We might just as well not be engaged at all. You never take me anywhere.”

  “I asked you to come with me to watch the Open Championship.”

  “Why don’t you ever take me to dances?”

  “I can’t dance.”

  “You could learn.”

  “But I’m not sure if dancing is a good thing for a fellow’s game. You never hear of any first-class pro dancing. James Braid doesn’t dance.”

  “Well, my mind’s made up. Mortimer, you must choose between golf and me.”

  “But, darling, I went round in a hundred and one yesterday. You can’t expect a fellow
to give up golf when he’s at the top of his game.”

  “Very well. I have nothing more to say. Our engagement is at an end.”

  “Don’t throw me over, Betty,” pleaded Mortimer, and there was that in his voice which cut me to the heart. “You’ll make me so miserable. And, when I’m miserable, I always slice my approach shots.”

  Betty Weston drew herself up. Her face was hard.

  “Here is your ring!” she said, and swept from the room.

  For a moment after she had gone Mortimer remained very still, looking at the glistening circle in his hand. I stole across the room and patted his shoulder.

  “Bear up, my boy, bear up!” I said.

  He looked at me piteously.

  “Stymied!” he muttered.

  “Be brave!”

  He went on, speaking as if to himself.

  “I had pictured—ah, how often I had pictured!—our little home! Hers and mine. She sewing in her arm-chair, I practising putts on the hearth-rug⎯” He choked.

  “While in the corner, little Harry Vardon Sturgis played with little J. H. Taylor Sturgis. And round the room—reading, busy with their childish tasks—little George Duncan Sturgis, Abe Mitchell Sturgis, Harold Hilton Sturgis, Edward Ray Sturgis, Horace Hutchinson Sturgis, and little James Braid Sturgis.”

  “My boy! My boy!” I cried.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Weren’t you giving yourself rather a large family?”

  He shook his head moodily.

  “Was I?” he said, dully. “I don’t know. What’s bogey?”

  There was a silence.

  “And yet⎯” he said, at last, in a low voice. He paused. An odd, bright look had come into his eyes. He seemed suddenly to be himself again, the old happy Mortimer Sturgis I had known so well. “And yet,” he said, “who knows? Perhaps it is all for the best. They might all have turned out tennis-players!” He raised his niblick again, his face aglow. “Playing thirteen!” he said. “I think the game here would be to chip out through the door and work round the club-house to the green, don’t you?”

  Little remains to be told. Betty and Eddie have been happily married for years. Mortimer’s handicap is now down to eighteen, and he is improving all the time. He was not present at the wedding, being unavoidably detained by a medal tournament; but, if you turn up the files and look at the list of presents, which were both numerous and costly, you will see—somewhere in the middle of the column, the words: