The Golf Omnibus (81 page)

“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.

“How do you mean, too late?” she asked reasonably softly.

“Well, isn't it too late?”

“Certainly not.”

“You can't mean you love me still?”

“Yes, I jolly well can mean I love you still.”

“Well, I'll be blowed! And here was I, thinking that all was over and life empty and all that sort of thing. My mate!” cried Sidney McMurdo.

They fell into an embrace like a couple of mastodons clashing in a primaeval swamp, and the earth had scarcely ceased to shake when a voice spoke.

“Excuse me.”

In his hiding-place in the bush Harold Pickering leaped as if somebody had touched off a land mine under his feet and came to rest quivering in every limb. He had recognized that voice.

“Excuse me,” said Troon Rockett. “Does Mr. Pickering live here?”

“Yes,” said Sidney McMurdo.

“If,” added Agnes Flack, “you can call it living when a man enters for an
important competition and gets beaten ten and eight. He's out at the moment. Better go in and stick around.”

“Thank you,” said the girl. “I will.”

She vanished into the cottage. Sidney McMurdo took advantage of her departure to embrace Agnes Flack again.

“Old blighter,” he said tenderly, “let's get married right away, before there can be any more misunderstandings and rifts and what not. How about Tuesday?”

“Can't Tuesday. Mixed foursomes.”

“Wednesday?”

“Can't Wednesday. Bogey competition.”

“And Thursday I'm playing in the invitation tournament at Squashy Heath,” said Sidney McMurdo. “Oh, well, I daresay we shall manage to find a day when we're both free. Let's stroll along and talk it over.”

They crashed off, and as the echoes of their clumping feet died away in the distance Harold Pickering left the form in which he had been crouching and walked dizzily to the cottage. And the first thing he saw as he entered the sitting-room was Troon Rockett kissing a cabinet photograph of himself which she had taken from place on the mantelpiece. The spectacle drew from him a sharp, staccato bark of amazement, and she turned, her eyes wide.

“Harold!” she cried, and flung herself into his arms.

To say that Harold Pickering was surprised, bewildered, startled and astounded would be merely to state the facts. He could not remember having been so genuinely taken aback since the evening when, sauntering in his garden in the dusk, he had trodden on the teeth of a rake and had the handle jump up and hit him on the nose.

But, as I have had occasion to observe before, he was a publisher, and I doubt if there is a publisher on the list who would not know what to do if a charming girl flung herself into his arms. I have told this story to one or two publishers of my acquaintance, and they all assured me that the correct procedure would come instinctively to them. Harold Pickering kissed Troon Rockett sixteen times in quick succession, and Macmillan and Faber and Faber say they would have done just the same.

At length, he paused. He was, as I have said, a man who liked to go into things.

“But I don't understand.”

“What don't you understand?”

“Well, don't think for a moment that I'm complaining, but this flinging-into-arms sequence strikes me as odd.”

“I can't imagine why. I love you.”

“But when I asked you to be my wife, you rose and walked haughtily from the room.”

“I didn't.”

“You did. I was there.”

“I mean, I didn't walk haughtily. I hurried out because I was alarmed and
agitated. You sat there gasping and gurgling, and I thought you were having a fit of some kind. So I rushed off to phone the doctor, and when I got back you had gone. And then a day or two later another man proposed to me, and he, too, started gasping and gurgling, and I realized the truth. They told me at your office that you were living here, so I came along to let you know that I loved you.”

“You really do?”

“Of course I do. I loved you the first moment I saw you. You remember? You were explaining to father that thirteen copies count as twelve, and I came in and our eyes met. In that instant I knew that you were the only man in the world for me.”

For a moment Harold Pickering was conscious only of a wild exhilaration. He felt as if his firm had brought out
Gone With the Wind
. Then a dull, hopeless look came into his sensitive face.

“It can never be,” he said.

“Why not?”

“You heard what that large girl was saying outside there, but probably you did not take it in. It was the truth. I was beaten this afternoon ten and eight.”

“Everybody has an off day.”

He shook his head.

“It was not an off day. That was my true form. I haven't the nerve to be a scratch man. When the acid test comes, I blow up. I suppose I'm about ten, really. You can't marry a ten-handicap man.”

“Why not?”

“You! The daughter of John Rockett and his British Ladies Champion wife. The great-grand-daughter of old Ma Rockett. The sister of Prestwick, Sandwich, Hoylake and St. Andrew Rockett.”

“But that's just why. It has always been my dream to marry a man with a handicap of about ten, so that we could go through life together side by side, twin souls. I should be ten, if the family didn't make me practise five hours a day all the year round. I'm not a natural scratch. I have made myself scratch by ceaseless, unremitting toil, and if there's one thing in the world I loathe it is ceaseless, unremitting toil. The relief of being able to let myself slip back to ten is indescribable. Oh, Harold, we shall be so happy. Just to think of taking three putts on a green! It will be heaven!”

Harold Pickering had been reeling a good deal during these remarks. He now ceased to do so. There is a time for reeling and a time for not reeling.

“You mean that?”

“I certainly do.”

“You will really marry me?”

“How long does it take to get a licence?”

For an instant Harold Pickering sought for words, but found none. Then a rather
neat thing that Sidney McMurdo had said came back to him. Sidney McMurdo was a man he could never really like, but his dialogue was excellent.

“My mate!” he said.

IN HIS OFFICE
on the premises of Popgood and Grooly, publishers of the Book Beautiful, Madison Avenue, New York, Cyril Grooly, the firm's junior partner, was practising putts into a tooth glass and doing rather badly even for one with a twenty-four handicap, when Patricia Binstead, Mr. Popgood's secretary, entered, and dropping his putter he folded her in a close embrace. This was not because all American publishers are warmhearted impulsive men and she a very attractive girl, but because they had recently become betrothed. On his return from his summer vacation at Paradise Valley, due to begin this afternoon, they would step along to some convenient church and become man, if you can call someone with a twenty-four handicap a man, and wife.

“A social visit?” he asked, the embrace concluded. “Or business?”

“Business. Popgood had to go out to see a man about subsidiary rights, and Count Dracula has blown in. Well, when I say Count Dracula, I speak loosely. He just looks like him. His name is Professor Pepperidge Farmer, and he's come to sign his contract.

“He writes books?”

“He's written one. He calls it Hypnotism As A Device To Uncover The Unconscious Drives and Mechanism In An Effort To Analyse The Functions Involved Which Gives Rise To Emotional Conflicts In The Waking State, but the title's going to be changed to Sleepy Time. Popgood thinks it's snappier.”