The Golf Omnibus (60 page)

He turned to me.

“Is this five minutes business really right?”

“Would you care to look at my book of the rules?” said Hemmingway. “I have it here in my bag.”

“Five minutes,” mused Poskitt.

“And as four and a half have now elapsed,” said Hemmingway, “I will now go and play my third.”

He disappeared.

“Missed it,” he said, returning and sitting down again. The caddie came back.

“Well?”

“The lady said ‘Oh, yeah?'”

“She said what?”

“‘Oh, yeah?' I tell her what you tell me to tell her and she said ‘Oh, yeah?'”

I saw Poskitt's face pale. Nor was I surprised. Any husband would pale if his wife, in response to his telephone message that he proposed to absent himself from her important luncheon party, replied “Oh, yeah?” And of all such husbands, Joseph Poskitt was the one who might be expected to pale most. Like so many of these big, muscle-bound men, he was a mere serf in the home. His wife ruled him with an unremitting firmness from the day they had stepped across the threshold of St. Peter's, Eaton Square.

He chewed his lower lip thoughtfully.

“You're sure it wasn't ‘Oh,
yes
'—like that—without the mark of interrogation—as much as to say that she quite understood and that it would be perfectly all right?”

“She said, ‘Oh, yeah?'”

“H'm,” said Poskitt.

I walked away. I could not bear the spectacle of this old friend of mine in travail. What wives do to their husbands who at the eleventh hour edge out of important luncheon parties I am not able, as a bachelor, to say, but a mere glance was enough to tell me that in the Poskitt home, at least, it was something special. And yet to pick up and lose the first cup he had ever had a chance of winning. . . . No wonder Joseph Poskitt clutched his hair and rolled his eyes.

And so, as I say, I strolled off, and my wandering footsteps took me in the direction
of the practice tee. Wilmot Byng was there, with an iron and a dozen balls.

He looked up, as I approached, with a pitiful eagerness.

“Is it over?”

Not yet.”

“They haven't holed out?”

“Not yet.”

“But they must have done,” said Wilmot, amazed. “I saw them both land on the green.”

“Poskitt has played three and is lying dead.”

“Well, where's Hemmingway?”

I peered round the bush which hides the eighteenth green from the practice tee.

“Just about to play five from the far bunker.”

“And Poskitt is dead in three?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then . . .”

I explained the circumstances. Wilmot was aghast.

“But what's going to happen?”

I shook my head sadly.

“I fear that Poskitt has no alternative but to pick up. His wife, informed over the telephone that he would not be back to lunch, said ‘Oh, yeah?'”

For a space Wilmot Byng stood brooding.

“You'd better be getting along,” he advised. “From what you tell me, this seems to be one of those matches where an umpire on the spot is rather required.”

I did so, for I could see that there was much in what he said. I found Poskitt pacing the green. Hemmingway climbed out of the bunker a moment later to announce that he had once more been unsuccessful in striking the ball.

He seemed disposed to conversation.

“A lot of wasps there are about this summer,” he said. “One sang right past my ear just then.”

“I wish it had bitten you,” said Poskitt.

“Wasps,” replied Hemmingway, who dabbled in Natural History, “do not bite They sting. You are thinking of snakes.”

“Your society would make anyone think of snakes.”

“Gentlemen,” I said. “Gentlemen!”

Saddened, I strolled away again. Golf to me is a sacred thing, and it pained me to see it played in this spirit. Moreover, I was beginning to want my lunch. It was partly the desire to converse with a rational human being and partly the reflection that he could pop into the clubhouse and bring me out a couple of ham sandwiches that led me to seek Wilmot Byng again. I made my way to the practice tee, and as I came in sight of it I stopped dead.

Wilmot Byng, facing the bunker, was addressing a ball with his iron. And standing in the bunker, his club languidly raised for his sixth, or it may have been his seventh.
was Wadsworth Hemmingway.

The next moment Wilmot had swung, and almost simultaneously a piercing cry of agony rang out over the countryside. A magnificent low, raking shot, with every ounce of wrist and weight behind it, had taken Hemmingway on the left leg.

Wilmot turned to me, and in his eyes there was the light which comes into the eyes of those who have set themselves a task and accomplished it.

“You'll have to disqualify that bird,” he said. “He has dropped his club in a bunker.”

Little (said the Oldest Member) remains to be told. When, accompanied by Wilmot, I returned to the green, I formally awarded the match and cup to Poskitt, at the same time condoling with his opponent on having had the bad luck to be in the line of flight of somebody's random practice drive. These things, I pointed out, were all in the game and must be accepted as rubs of the green. I added that Wilmot was prepared to apologize, and Wilmot said, Yes, fully prepared. Hemmingway was, however, none too well pleased, I fear, and shortly afterwards he left us, his last words being that he proposed to bring an action against Wilmot in the civil courts.

The young fellow appeared not to have heard the threat. He was gazing at Poskitt, pale but resolute.

“Mr. Poskitt,” he said. “May I have a word with you?”

“A thousand,” replied Poskitt, beaming on his benefactor, for whom it was plain that he had now taken a fancy amounting to adoration. “But later on, if you don't mind. I have to run like a . . .”

“Mr. Poskitt, I love your daughter.”

“So do I,” said Poskitt. “Very nice girl.”

“I want to marry her.”

“Well, why don't you?”

“You will give your consent?”

A kindly smile flickered over my old friend's face. He looked at his watch again, then patted Wilmot affectionately on the shoulder.

“I will do better than that, my boy,” he said. “I will formally refuse my consent. I will forbid the match
in toto
and oppose it root and branch. That will fix everything nicely. When you have been married as long as I have, you will know that what these things require is tact and the proper handling.”

And so it proved. Two minutes after Poskitt had announced that young Wilmot Byng wished to marry their daughter Gwendoline and that he, Poskitt, was resolved that this should be done only over his, Poskitt's, dead body, Mrs. Poskitt was sketching out the preliminary arrangements for the sacred ceremony. It took place a few weeks later at a fashionable church with full choral effects, and all were agreed that the Bishop had seldom been in finer voice. The bride, as one was able to see from the photographs in the illustrated weekly papers, looked charming.

SQUEALS OF FEMININE
merriment woke the Oldest Member from the doze into which he had fallen. The door of the cardroom, in which it was his custom to take refuge when there was Saturday-night revelry at the club-house, had opened to admit a gloomy young man.

“Not butting in, am I?” said the gloomy young man. “I can't stand it out there any longer.”

The Sage motioned him to a chair. He sank into it and for a while sat glowering darkly.

“Tricks with string!” he muttered at length.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Josh Hook is doing tricks with bits of string, and the girls are fawning on him as if he were Clark Gable. Makes me sick.”

The Oldest Member began to understand.

“Is your
fiancée
among them?”

“Yes, she is. She keeps saying, ‘Oh, Mr.
Hook
!' with a sort of rising inflection and giving him pats on the arm. Loving pats, or so it seemed to me.”

The Sage smiled sympathetically. In his hot youth he had been through this sort of thing himself. “Cheer up,” he said. “I know just how you feel, but rest assured that all will be well. Josh Hook's string tricks may be sweeping the girl off her feet for the moment, but his glamour will pass. She will wake tomorrow morning her true self again, thankful that she has the love of a good man who seldom shoots worse than eighty-three.”

His companion brightened. His face lost its drawn look.

“You think so?”

“I am convinced of it. I have seen so many of these party hounds. They dazzle for a while, but they never last. I have observed this Hook. His laughter is as the crackling of thorns under the pot and his handicap is twenty-four. Just another Legs Mortimer?”

“Who was Legs Mortimer?”

“That was precisely what Angus McTavish wanted to know when he saw him blowing kisses at Evangeline Brackett from the club-house veranda.”

Angus McTavish (said the Oldest Member), as one might infer from his name,
was a man who all his life had taken golf with a proper seriousness, and in Evangeline Brackett he seemed to have found his female counterpart. She was not one of those girls who titter “tee-hee” when they top a drive. It was, indeed, her habit of biting her lips and rolling her eyes on such occasions which had first drawn Angus to her. On her side, respect for a man who, though slight of build and weighing ten stone two, could paste the ball two hundred yards from the tee, had speedily ripened into passion, and at the time of which I speak they had just become engaged; and the only cloud on Angus's happiness, until the series of events began which I am about to describe, was the fact that his great love occasionally caused him to fluff a chip shot. He would be swinging and he would suddenly think of Evangeline and jerk his head towards the sky, as if asking Heaven to make him worthy of her, thus shanking. He told me he had lost several holes that way.

However, the iron self-control of the McTavishes was rendering these lapses less frequent, and, as I say, there was virtually no flaw in his happiness until the spring morning when, coming up from the eighteenth green with the girl of his dreams, to whom he had been giving a third, he was shocked to observe that there was a young man on the club-house veranda, leaning over the rail and blowing kisses at her.

Now, no recently betrothed lover likes this sort of thing, and it jars him all the more sharply when, as in the present case, the blower is a man of extraordinary physical attractions, with large brown eyes and a natural wave in his hair. There was a certain coldness in Angus's voice as he spoke.

“Who,” he asked, “is that bird?”

“Eh?” said Evangeline. She was polishing her ball with a sponge and her head was bent.

“Fellow on the veranda. Seems to know you.”

Evangeline looked up. She stared for a moment, then uttered a delightful yowl.

“Why, it's Legs! Yoo-hoo!”

“Yoo-hoo!”

“Yoo-hoo!”

“Yoo-hoo!”

As, at the beginning of the episode, they had not been more than four Yoo-hoos' length from the veranda, they were now standing beside the handsome stranger.

“Why, Legs Mortimer!” said Evangeline. “Whatever are you doing here?”

The young man explained—in a manner which may have been merely brotherly, but which seemed to Angus McTavish rather fresher than an April breeze—that he had come to settle in the neighbourhood and that while his bungalow was being made ready he was temporarily established at the clubhouse. In making this statement, he addressed Evangeline once as “sweetness”, twice as “kid”, and three times as “darling”.

“Splendid!” said Evangeline. “You'll wake the place up.”

“Trust me, beautiful. Trust old Legs, kid. There will be many a jocund party thrown in yonder club-house.”

“Well, mind you invite me. By the way, this is my
fiancé
, Angus McTavish.”

“Angus McTavish,” cried Legs Mortimer. “Hoots, mon! Scots wha hae! Hoo's a' wi' ye the morn's morn?”

And Angus, hearing these words and watching their speaker break into what appeared to be a Highland fling, became aware with a sinking heart that here, as he had already begun to suspect, was a life-and-soul-of-the-party man, a perfect scream, and an absolutely priceless fellow who simply makes you die with the things he says

He was thoughtful as he accompanied Evangeline to her home.

“This Mortimer,” he said dubiously.

“What about him?”

“Well, what about him? Who is he? Where did you meet him? What is his handicap?”

“I met him when I was over in Switzerland last winter. He was staying at the hotel. I believe he has a lot of money of his own. He doesn't play golf.”

“Doesn't play golf?” said Angus incredulously.

“No. But he's wonderful at ski-ing.”

“Faugh!”

“What?”

“I said ‘Faugh!' Ski-ing, indeed! What on earth does the fellow want to ski for? Isn't there enough sadness in life without going out of your way to fasten long planks to your feet and jump off mountains? And don't forget this—from ski-ing to yodelling is but a short step. Do we want a world full of people going about the place singing, ‘Ti-ra-ra-la-i-te,' or something amounting to very much the same thing? I'll bet this Mortimer man of yours is a confirmed yodeller.”

“He did yodel a good deal,” admitted Evangeline. “He yodelled to the waiters.”

“Why to the waiters?”

“They were Swiss, you see. So he yodelled to them. He made us all scream. And he was always playing jokes on people.”

“Jokes?”

“Like giving them trick cigars, you know. There was a Bishop staying at the hotel, and Legs gave him a cigar and the Bishop went off with a bang. We all expired with mirth.”