The Golf Omnibus (14 page)

Mortimer shook his head.

“Alas, no!” he replied, gravely. “My game went right off for some reason or other, and I'm twenty-four, too.”

“For some reason or other!” She uttered a cry. “Oh, I know what the reason was! How can I ever forgive myself! I have ruined your game!”

The brightness came back to Mortimer's eyes. He embraced her fondly.

“Do not reproach yourself, dearest,” he murmured. “It is the best thing that could have happened. From now on, we start level, two hearts that beat as one, two drivers that drive as one. I could not wish it otherwise. By George! It's just like that thing of Tennyson's.”

He recited the lines softly:

She laid her hands in his.

“And now, Mortie, darling,” she said, “I want to tell you all about how I did the long twelfth at Auchtermuchtie in one under bogey.”

THE YOUNG MAN
came into the club-house. There was a frown on his usually cheerful face, and he ordered a ginger-ale in the sort of voice which an ancient Greek would have used when asking the executioner to bring on the hemlock.

Sunk in the recesses of his favourite settee the Oldest Member had watched him with silent sympathy.

“How did you get on?” he inquired.

“He beat me.”

The Oldest Member nodded his venerable head.

“You have had a trying time, if I am not mistaken. I feared as much when I saw you go out with Pobsley. How many a young man have I seen go out with Herbert Pobsley exulting in his youth, and crawl back at eventide looking like a toad under the harrow! He talked?”

“All the time, confound it! Put me right off my stroke.”

The Oldest Member sighed.

“The talking golfer is undeniably the most pronounced pest of our complex modern civilization,” he said, “and the most difficult to deal with. It is a melancholy thought that the noblest of games should have produced such a scourge. I have frequently marked Herbert Pobsley in action. As the crackling of thorns under a pot . . . He is almost as bad as poor George Mackintosh in his worst period. Did I ever tell you about George Mackintosh?”

“I don't think so.”

“His,” said the Sage, “is the only case of golfing garrulity I have ever known where a permanent cure was effected. If you would care to hear about it⎯?”

George Mackintosh (said the Oldest Member), when I first knew him, was one of the most admirable young fellows I have ever met. A handsome, well-set-up man, with no vices except a tendency to use the mashie for shots which should have been made with the light iron. And as for his positive virtues, they were too numerous to mention. He never swayed his body, moved his head, or pressed. He was always ready to utter a tactful grunt when his opponent foozled. And when he himself achieved a glaring fluke, his self-reproachful click of the tongue was music to his adversary's bruised soul. But of all his virtues the one that most endeared him to me and to all thinking men was the fact that, from the start of a round to the finish, he
never spoke a word except when absolutely compelled to do so by the exigencies of the game. And it was this man who subsequently, for a black period which lives in the memory of all his contemporaries, was known as Gabby George and became a shade less popular than the germ of Spanish Influenza. Truly,
corruptio optimi pessima!

One of the things that sadden a man as he grows older and reviews his life is the reflection that his most devastating deeds were generally the ones which he did with the best motives. The thought is disheartening. I can honestly say that, when George Mackintosh came to me and told me his troubles, my sole desire was to ameliorate his lot. That I might be starting on the downward path a man whom I liked and respected never once occurred to me.

One night after dinner when George Mackintosh came in, I could see at once that there was something on his mind, but what this could be I was at a loss to imagine, for I had been playing with him myself all the afternoon, and he had done an eighty-one and a seventy-nine. And, as I had not left the links till dusk was beginning to fall, it was practically impossible that he could have gone out again and done badly. The idea of financial trouble seemed equally out of the question. George had a good job with the old-established legal firm of Peabody, Peabody, Peabody, Peabody, Cootes, Toots, and Peabody. The third alternative, that he might be in love, I rejected at once. In all the time I had known him I had never seen a sign that George Mackintosh gave a thought to the opposite sex.

Yet this, bizarre as it seemed, was the true solution. Scarcely had he seated himself and lit a cigar when he blurted out his confession.

“What would you do in a case like this?” he said.

“Like what?”

“Well⎯” He choked, and a rich blush permeated his surface. “Well, it seems a silly thing to say and all that, but I'm in love with Miss Tennant, you know!”

“You are in love with Celia Tennant?”

“Of course I am. I've got eyes, haven't I? Who else is there that any sane man could possibly be in love with? That,” he went on, moodily, “is the whole trouble. There's a field of about twenty-nine, and I should think my place in the betting is about thirty-three to one.”

“I cannot agree with you there,” I said. “You have every advantage, it appears to me. You are young, amiable, good-looking, comfortably off, scratch⎯”

“But I can't talk, confound it!” he burst out. “And how is a man to get anywhere at this sort of game without talking?”

“You are talking perfectly fluently now.”

“Yes, to you. But put me in front of Celia Tennant, and I simply make a sort of gurgling noise like a sheep with the botts. It kills my chances stone dead. You know these other men. I can give Claude Mainwaring a third and beat him. I can give Eustace Brinkley a stroke or hole and simply trample on his corpse. But when it comes to talking to a girl, I'm not in their class.”

“You must not be diffident.”

“But I
am
diffident. What's the good of saying I mustn't be diffident when I'm the man who wrote the words and music, when Diffidence is my middle name and my telegraphic address? I can't help being diffident.”

“Surely you could overcome it?”

“But how? It was in the hope that you might be able to suggest something that I came round tonight.”

And this was where I did the fatal thing. It happened that, just before I took up “Braid on the Push-Shot,” I had been dipping into the current number of a magazine, and one of the advertisements, I chanced to remember, might have been framed with a special eye to George's unfortunate case. It was that one, which I have no doubt you have seen, which treats of “How to Become a Convincing Talker”. I picked up this magazine now and handed it to George.

He studied it for a few minutes in thoughtful silence. He looked at the picture of the Man who had taken the course being fawned upon by lovely women, while the man who had let this opportunity slip stood outside the group gazing with a wistful envy.

“They never do that to me,” said George.

“Do what, my boy?”

“Cluster round, clinging cooingly.”

“I gather from the letterpress that they will if you write for the booklet.”

“You think there is really something in it?”

“I see no reason why eloquence should not be taught by mail. One seems to be able to acquire every other desirable quality in that manner nowadays.”

“I might try it. After all, it's not expensive. There's no doubt about it,” he murmured, returning to his perusal, “that fellow does look popular. Of course, the evening dress may have something to do with it.”

“Not at all. The other man, you will notice, is also wearing evening dress, and yet he is merely among those on the outskirts. It is simply a question of writing for the booklet.”

“Sent post free.”

“Sent, as you say, post free.”

“I've a good mind to try it.”

“I see no reason why you should not.”

“I will, by Duncan!” He tore the page out of the magazine and put it in his pocket. “I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give this thing a trial for a week or two, and at the end of that time I'll go to the boss and see how he reacts when I ask for a rise of salary. If he crawls, it'll show there's something in this. If he flings me out, it will prove the thing's no good.”

We left it at that, and I am bound to say—owing, no doubt, to my not having written for the booklet of the Memory Training Course advertised on the adjoining page of the magazine—the matter slipped from my mind. When, therefore, a few
weeks later, I received a telegram from young Mackintosh which ran:

Worked like magic

I confess I was intensely puzzled. It was only a quarter of an hour before George himself arrived that I solved the problem of its meaning.

“So the boss crawled?” I said, as he came in.

He gave a light, confident laugh. I had not seen him, as I say, for some time, and I was struck by the alteration in his appearance. In what exactly this alteration consisted I could not at first have said; but gradually it began to impress itself on me that his eye was brighter, his jaw squarer, his carriage a trifle more upright than it had been. But it was his eye that struck me most forcibly. The George Mackintosh I had known had had a pleasing gaze, but, though frank and agreeable, it had never been more dynamic than a fried egg. This new George had an eye that was a combination of a gimlet and a searchlight. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, I imagine, must have been somewhat similarly equipped. The Ancient Mariner stopped a wedding guest on his way to a wedding; George Mackintosh gave me the impression that he could have stopped the Cornish Riviera express on its way to Penzance. Self-confidence—aye, and more than self-confidence—a sort of sinful, overbearing swank seemed to exude from his very pores.

“Crawled?” he said. “Well, he didn't actually lick my boots, because I saw him coming and side-stepped; but he did everything short of that. I hadn't been talking an hour when⎯”

“An hour!” I gasped. “Did you talk for an hour?”

“Certainly. You wouldn't have had me be abrupt, would you? I went into his private office and found him alone. I think at first he would have been just as well pleased if I had retired. In fact, he said as much. But I soon adjusted that outlook. I took a seat and a cigarette, and then I started to sketch out for him the history of my connection with the firm. He began to wilt before the end of the first ten minutes. At the quarter of an hour mark he was looking at me like a lost dog that's just found its owner. By the half-hour he was making little bleating noises and massaging my coat-sleeve. And when, after perhaps an hour and a half, I came to my peroration and suggested a rise, he choked back a sob, gave me double what I had asked, and invited me to dine at his club next Tuesday. I'm a little sorry now I cut the thing so short. A few minutes more, and I fancy he would have given me his sock-suspenders and made over his life-insurance in my favour.”

“Well,” I said, as soon as I could speak, for I was finding my young friend a trifle overpowering, “this is most satisfactory.”

“So-so,” said George. “Not un-so-so. A man wants an addition to his income when he is going to get married.”

“Ah!” I said. “That, of course, will be the real test.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, when you propose to Celia Tennant. You remember you were saying when we spoke of this before⎯”

“Oh, that!” said George, carelessly. “I've arranged all that.”

“What!”

“Oh, yes. On my way up from the station. I looked in on Celia about an hour ago, and it's all settled.”

“Amazing!”

“Well, I don't know. I just put the thing to her, and she seemed to see it.”

“I congratulate you. So now, like Alexander, you have no more worlds to conquer.”

“Well, I don't know so much about that,” said George. “The way it looks to me is that I'm just starting. This eloquence is a thing that rather grows on one. You didn't hear about my after-dinner speech at the anniversary banquet of the firm, I suppose? My dear fellow, a riot! A positive stampede. Had 'em laughing and then crying and then laughing again and then crying once more till six of 'em had to be led out and the rest down with hiccoughs. Napkins waving . . . three tables broken . . . waiters in hysterics. I tell you, I played on them as on a stringed instrument . . .”

“Can you play on a stringed instrument?”

“As it happens, no. But as I would have played on a stringed instrument if I could play on a stringed instrument. Wonderful sense of power it gives you. I mean to go in pretty largely for that sort of thing in future.”

“You must not let it interfere with your golf.”

He gave a laugh which turned my blood cold.

“Golf!” he said. “After all, what is golf? Just pushing a small ball into a hole. A child could do it. Indeed, children have done it with great success. I see an infant of fourteen has just won some sort of championship. Could that stripling convulse a roomful of banqueters? I think not! To sway your fellow-men with a word, to hold them with a gesture . . . that is the real salt of life. I don't suppose I shall play much more golf now. I'm making arrangements for a lecturing-tour, and I'm booked up for fifteen lunches already.”