The Golf Omnibus (15 page)

Those were his words. A man who had once done the lake-hole in one. A man whom the committee were grooming for the amateur championship. I am no weakling, but I confess they sent a chill shiver down my spine.

George Mackintosh did not, I am glad to say, carry out his mad project to the letter. He did not altogether sever himself from golf. He was still to be seen occasionally on the links. But now—and I know of nothing more tragic that can befall a man—he found himself gradually shunned, he who in the days of his sanity had been besieged with more offers of games than he could manage to accept. Men simply would not stand his incessant flow of talk. One by one they dropped off, until the only person he could find to go round with him was old Major Moseby, whose hearing completely petered out as long ago as the year '98. And, of course, Celia
Tennant would play with him occasionally; but it seemed to me that even she, greatly as no doubt she loved him, was beginning to crack under the strain.

So surely had I read the pallor of her face and the wild look of dumb agony in her eyes that I was not surprised when, as I sat one morning in my garden reading Ray on Taking Turf, my man announced her name. I had been half expecting her to come to me for advice and consolation, for I had known her ever since she was a child. It was I who had given her her first driver and taught her infant lips to lisp “Fore!” It is not easy to lisp the word “Fore!” but I had taught her to do it, and this constituted a bond between us which had been strengthened rather than weakened by the passage of time.

She sat down on the grass beside my chair, and looked up at my face in silent pain. We had known each other so long that I know that it was not my face that pained her, but rather some unspoken
malaise
of the soul. I waited for her to speak, and suddenly she burst out impetuously as though she could hold back her sorrow no longer.

“Oh, I can't stand it! I can't stand it!”

“You mean . . .?” I said, though I knew only too well.

“This horrible obsession of poor George's,” she cried passionately. “I don't think he has stopped talking once since we have been engaged.”

“He
is
chatty,” I agreed. “Has he told you the story about the Irishman?”

“Half a dozen times. And the one about the Swede oftener than that. But I would not mind an occasional anecdote. Women have to learn to bear anecdotes from the men they love. It is the curse of Eve. It is his incessant easy flow of chatter on all topics that is undermining even my devotion.”

“But surely, when he proposed to you, he must have given you an inkling of the truth. He only hinted at it when he spoke to me, but I gather that he was eloquent.”

“When he proposed,” said Celia dreamily, “he was wonderful. He spoke for twenty minutes without stopping. He said I was the essence of his every hope, the tree on which the fruit of his life grew; his Present, his Future, his Past . . . oh, and all that sort of thing. If he would only confine his conversation now to remarks of a similar nature, I could listen to him all day long. But he doesn't. He talks politics and statistics and philosophy and . . . oh, and everything. He makes my head ache.”

“And your heart also, I fear,” I said gravely.

“I love him!” she replied simply. “In spite of everything, I love him dearly. But what to do? What to do? I have an awful fear that when we are getting married instead of answering ‘I will,' he will go into the pulpit and deliver an address on Marriage Ceremonies of All Ages. The world to him is a vast lecture-platform. He looks on life as one long after-dinner, with himself as the principal speaker of the evening. It is breaking my heart. I see him shunned by his former friends. Shunned! They run a mile when they see him coming. The mere sound of his voice outside the club-house is enough to send brave men diving for safety beneath the sofas. Can you
wonder that I am in despair? What have I to live for?”

“There is always golf.”

“Yes, there is always golf,” she whispered bravely.

“Come and have a round this afternoon.”

“I had promised to go for a walk . . .” She shuddered, then pulled herself together, “. . . for a walk with George.”

I hesitated for a moment.

“Bring him along,” I said, and patted her hand. “It may be that together we shall find an opportunity of reasoning with him.”

She shook her head.

“You can't reason with George. He never stops talking long enough to give you time.”

“Nevertheless, there is no harm in trying. I have an idea that this malady of his is not permanent and incurable. The very violence with which the germ of loquacity has attacked him gives me hope. You must remember that before this seizure he was rather a noticeably silent man. Sometimes I think that it is just Nature's way of restoring the average, and that soon the fever may burn itself out. Or it may be that a sudden shock . . . At any rate, have courage.”

“I will try to be brave.”

“Capital! At half-past two on the first tee, then.”

“You will have to give me a stroke on the third, ninth, twelfth, fifteenth, sixteenth and eighteenth,” she said, with a quaver in her voice. “My golf has fallen off rather lately.”

I patted her hand again.

“I understand,” I said gently. “I understand.”

The steady drone of a baritone voice as I alighted from my car and approached the first tee told me that George had not forgotten the tryst. He was sitting on the stone seat under the chestnut-tree, speaking a few well-chosen words on the Labour Movement

“To what conclusion, then, do we come?” he was saying. “We come to the foregone and inevitable conclusion that . . .”

“Good afternoon, George,” I said.

He nodded briefly, but without verbal salutation. He seemed to regard my remark as he would have regarded the unmannerly heckling of someone at the back of the hall. He proceeded evenly with his speech, and was still talking when Celia addressed her ball and drove off. Her drive, coinciding with a sharp rhetorical question from George, wavered in mid-air, and the ball trickled off into the rough half-way down the hill. I can see the poor girl's tortured face even now. But she breathed no word of reproach. Such is the miracle of women's love.

“Where you went wrong there,” said George, breaking off his remarks on Labour, “was that you have not studied the dynamics of golf sufficiently. You did not pivot
properly. You allowed your left heel to point down the course when you were at the top of your swing. This makes for instability and loss of distance. The fundamental law of the dynamics of golf is that the left foot shall be solidly on the ground at the moment of impact. If you allow your heel to point down the course, it is almost impossible to bring it back in time to make the foot a solid fulcrum.”

I drove, and managed to clear the rough and reach the fairway. But it was not one of my best drives. George Mackintosh, I confess, had unnerved me. The feeling he gave me resembled the self-conscious panic which I used to experience in my childhood when informed that there was One Awful Eye that watched my every movement and saw my every act. It was only the fact that poor Celia appeared even more affected by his espionage that enabled me to win the first hole in seven.

On the way to the second tee George discoursed on the beauties of Nature, pointing out at considerable length how exquisitely the silver glitter of the lake harmonized with the vivid emerald turf near the hole and the duller green of the rough beyond it. As Celia teed up her ball, he directed her attention to the golden glory of the sand-pit to the left of the flag. It was not the spirit in which to approach the lake-hole, and I was not surprised when the unfortunate girl's ball fell with a sickening plop half-way across the water.

“Where you went wrong there,” said George, “was that you made the stroke a sudden heave instead of a smooth, snappy flick of the wrists. Pressing is always bad, but with the mashie⎯”

“I think I will give you this hole,” said Celia to me, for my shot had cleared the water and was lying on the edge of the green. “I wish I hadn't used a new ball.”

“The price of golf-balls,” said George, as we started to round the lake, “is a matter to which economists should give some attention. I am credibly informed that rubber at the present time is exceptionally cheap. Yet we see no decrease in the price of golf-balls, which, as I need scarcely inform you, are rubber-cored. Why should this be so? You will say that the wages of skilled labour have gone up. True. But⎯”

“One moment, George, while I drive,” I said. For we had now arrived at the third tee.

“A curious thing, concentration,” said George, “and why certain phenomena should prevent us from focusing our attention⎯ This brings me to the vexed question of sleep. Why is it that we are able to sleep through some vast convulsion of Nature when a dripping tap is enough to keep us awake? I am told that there were people who slumbered peacefully through the San Francisco earthquake, merely stirring drowsily from time to time to tell an imaginary person to leave it on the mat. Yet these same people⎯”

Celia's drive bounded into the deep ravine which yawns some fifty yards from the tee. A low moan escaped her.

“Where you went wrong there⎯” said George.

“I know,” said Celia. “I lifted my head.”

I had never heard her speak so abruptly before. Her manner, in a girl less
noticeably pretty, might almost have been called snappish. George, however, did not appear to have noticed anything amiss. He filled his pipe and followed her into the ravine.

“Remarkable,” he said, “how fundamental a principle of golf is this keeping the head still. You will hear professionals tell their pupils to keep their eye on the ball. Keeping the eye on the ball is only a secondary matter. What they really mean is that the head should be kept rigid, as otherwise it is impossible to⎯”

His voice died away. I had sliced my drive into the woods on the right, and after playing another had gone off to try to find my ball, leaving Celia and George in the ravine behind me. My last glimpse of them showed me that her ball had fallen into a stone-studded cavity in the side of the hill, and she was drawing her niblick from her bag as I passed out of sight. George's voice, blurred by distance to a monotonous murmur, followed me until I was out of earshot.

I was just about to give up the hunt for my ball in despair, when I heard Celia's voice calling to me from the edge of the undergrowth. There was a sharp note in it which startled me.

I came out, trailing a portion of some unknown shrub which had twined itself about my ankle.

“Yes?” I said, picking twigs out of my hair.

“I want your advice,” said Celia.

“Certainly. What is the trouble? By the way,” I said, looking round, “where is your
fiancé
?”

“I have no
fiancé
,” she said, in a dull, hard voice.

“You have broken off the engagement?”

“Not exactly. And yet—well, I suppose it amounts to that.”

“I don't quite understand.”

“Well, the fact is,” said Celia, in a burst of girlish frankness, “I rather think I've killed George.”

“Killed him, eh?”

It was a solution that had not occurred to me, but now that it was presented for my inspection I could see its merits. In these days of national effort, when we are all working together to try to make our beloved land fit for heroes to live in, it was astonishing that nobody before had thought of a simple, obvious thing like killing George Mackintosh. George Mackintosh was undoubtedly better dead, but it had taken a woman's intuition to see it.

“I killed him with my niblick,” said Celia.

I nodded. If the thing was to be done at all, it was unquestionably a niblick shot.

“I had just made my eleventh attempt to get out of that ravine,” the girl went on, “with George talking all the time about the recent excavations in Egypt, when suddenly—you know what it is when something seems to snap⎯”

“I had the experience with my shoe-lace only this morning.”

“Yes, it was like that. Sharp—sudden—happening all in a moment. I suppose I
must have said something, for George stopped talking about Egypt and said that he was reminded by a remark of the last speaker's of a certain Irishman⎯”

I pressed her hand.

“Don't go on if it hurts you,” I said, gently.

“Well, there is very little more to tell. He bent his head to light his pipe, and well—the temptation was too much for me. That's all.”

“You were quite right.”

“You really think so?”

“I certainly do. A rather similar action, under far less provocation, once made Jael the wife of Heber the most popular woman in Israel.”

“I wish I could think so too,” she murmured. “At the moment, you know, I was conscious of nothing but an awful elation. But—but—oh, he was such a darling before he got this dreadful affliction. I can't help thinking of G-George as he used to be.”

She burst into a torrent of sobs.

“Would you care for me to view the remains?” I said.

“Perhaps it would be as well.”

She led me silently into the ravine. George Mackintosh was lying on his back where he had fallen.

“There!” said Celia.

And, as she spoke, George Mackintosh gave a kind of snorting groan and sat up. Celia uttered a sharp shriek and sank on her knees before him. George blinked once or twice and looked about him dazedly.

“Save the women and children!” he cried. “I can swim.”

“Oh, George!” said Celia.

“Feeling a little better?” I asked.

“A little. How many people were hurt?”

“Hurt?”

“When the express ran into us.” He cast another glance around him. “Why, how did I get here?”

“You were here all the time,” I said.

“Do you mean after the roof fell in or before?”