The Golf Omnibus

by P. G. Wodehouse

  Just at that moment he happened to look at his watch, and the sight was like a douche of cold water. The hands stood at five minutes to one.

  Let us pause and ponder on this point for a while. Let us not dismiss it as if it were some mere trivial, everyday difficulty. You, dear reader, play an accurate, scientific game and beat your opponent with ease every time you go to the links, and so do I; but Archibald was not like us. This was the first occasion on which he had ever felt that he was playing well enough to give him a chance of defeating a really good man. True, he had beaten McCay, Sigsbee and Butler in the earlier rounds; but they were ignoble rivals compared with Gossett. To defeat Gossett, however, meant the championship. On the other hand, he was passionately devoted to Margaret Milsom, whom he was due to meet at the end of the board-walk at one sharp. It was now five minutes to one, and the end of the board-walk still a mile away.

  The mental struggle was brief but keen. A sharp pang, and his mind was made up. Cost what it might, he must stay on the links. If Margaret broke off the engagement—well, it might be that Time would heal the wound, and that after many years he would find some other girl for whom he might come to care in a wrecked, broken sort of way. But a chance like this could never come again. What is Love compared with holing out before your opponent?

  The excitement now became so intense that a small boy, following with the crowd, swallowed his chewing-gum; for a slight improvement had become noticeable in Gossett’s play, and a slight improvement in the play of almost anyone meant that it became vastly superior to Archibald’s. At the next hole the improvement was not marked enough to have its full effect, and Archibald contrived to halve. This made him two up and three to play. What an average golfer would consider a commanding lead. But Archibald was no average golfer. A commanding lead for him would have been two up and one to play.

  To give the public of his best, your golfer should have his mind cool and intent upon the game. Inasmuch as Gossett was worrying about the telegrams, while Archibald, strive as he might to dismiss it, was haunted by a vision of Margaret standing alone and deserted on the board-walk, play became, as it were, ragged. Fine putting enabled Gossett to do the sixteenth hole in twelve, and when, winning the seventeenth in nine, he brought his score level with Archibald’s the match seemed over. But just then—

  “Mr. Gossett!” said a familiar voice.

  Once more was the much-enduring telegraph boy among those present.

  “T’ree dis time!” he observed.

  Gossett sprang, but again the watchful Sigsbee was too swift.

  “Be brave, Gossett—be brave,” he said. “This is a crisis in the game. Keep your nerve. Play just as if nothing existed outside the links. To look at these telegrams now would be fatal.”

  Eye-witnesses of that great encounter will tell the story of the last hole to their dying day. It was one of those Titanic struggles which Time cannot efface from the memory. Archibald was fortunate in getting a good start. He only missed twice before he struck his ball on the tee. Gossett had four strokes ere he achieved the feat. Nor did Archibald’s luck desert him in the journey to the green. He was out of the bunker in eleven. Gossett emerged only after sixteen. Finally, when Archibald’s twenty-first stroke sent the ball trickling into the hole, Gossett had played his thirtieth.

  The ball had hardly rested on the bottom of the hole before Gossett had begun to tear the telegrams from their envelopes. As he read, his eyes bulged in their sockets.

  “Not bad news, I hope,” said a sympathetic bystander.

  Sigsbee took the sheaf of telegrams.

  The first ran: “Good luck. Hope you win. McCay.” The second also ran: “Good luck, Hope you win. McCay.” So, singularly enough, did the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh.

  “Great Scott!” said Sigsbee. “He seems to have been pretty anxious not to run any risk of missing you, Gossett.”

  As he spoke, Archibald, close behind him, was looking at his watch. The hands stood at a quarter to two.

  Margaret and her mother were seated in the parlour when Archibald arrived. Mrs. Milsom, who had elicited the fact that Archibald had not kept his appointment, had been saying “I told you so” for some time, and this had not improved Margaret’s temper. When, therefore, Archibald, damp and dishevelled, was shown in, the chill in the air nearly gave him frost-bite. Mrs. Milsom did her celebrated imitation of the Gorgon, while Margaret, lightly humming an air, picked up a weekly paper and became absorbed in it.

  “Margaret, let me explain,” panted Archibald. Mrs. Milsom was understood to remark that she dared say. Margaret’s attention was riveted by a fashion plate.

  “Driving in a taximeter to the ferry this morning,” resumed Archibald, “I had an accident.”

  This was the net result of some rather feverish brainwork on the way from the links to the cottage.

  The periodical flapped to the floor.

  “Oh, Archie, are you hurt?”

  “A few scratches, nothing more; but it made me miss my train.”

  “What train did you catch?” asked Mrs. Milsom sepulchrally.

  “The one o’clock. I came straight on here from the station.”

  “Why,” said Margaret, “Stuyvesant was coming home on the one o’clock train. Did you see him?”

  Archibald’s jaw dropped slightly.

  “Er—no,” he said.

  “How curious,” said Margaret.

  “Very curious,” said Archibald.

  “Most curious,” said Mrs. Milsom.

  They were still reflecting on the singularity of this fact when the door opened, and the son of the house entered in person.

  “Thought I should find you here, Mealing,” he said. “They gave me this at the station to give to you; you dropped it this morning when you got out of the train.”

  He handed Archibald the missing pouch.

  “Thanks,” said the latter huskily. “When you say this morning, of course you mean this afternoon, but thanks all the same—thanks—thanks.”

  “No, Archibald Mealing, he does not mean this afternoon,” said Mrs. Milsom. “Stuyvesant, speak! From what train did that guf—did Mr. Mealing alight when he dropped the tobacco-pouch?”

  “The ten o’clock, the fellow told me. Said he would have given it back to him then only he sprinted off in the deuce of a hurry.”

  Six eyes focused themselves upon Archibald.

  “Margaret,” he said, “I will not try to deceive you—”

  “You may try,” observed Mrs. Milsom, “but you will not succeed.”

  “Well, Archibald?”

  Archibald fingered his collar.

  “There was no taximeter accident.”

  “Ah!” said Mrs. Milsom.

  “The fact is, I have been playing in a golf tournament.”

  Margaret uttered an exclamation of surprise.

  “Playing golf!”

  Archibald bowed his head with manly resignation.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you arrange for us to meet on the links? I should have loved it.”

  Archibald was amazed.

  “You take an interest in golf, Margaret? You! I thought you scorned it, considered it an unintellectual game. I thought you considered all games unintellectual.”

  “Why, I play golf myself. Not very well.”

  “Margaret! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I thought you might not like it. You were so spiritual, so poetic. I feared you would despise me.”

  Archibald took a step forward. His voice was tense and trembling.

  “Margaret,” he said, “this is no time for misunderstandings. We must be open with one another. Our happiness is at stake. Tell me honestly, do you like poetry really?”

  Margaret hesitated, then answered bravely:

  “No, Archibald,” she said, “it is as you suspect. I am not worthy of you. I do not like poetry. Ah, you shudder! You turn away! Your face grows hard and scornful!”

  “I don’t!” yel
led Archibald. “It doesn’t! It doesn’t do anything of the sort! You’ve made me another man!”

  She stared, wild-eyed, astonished.

  “What! Do you mean that you, too⎯”

  “I should just say I do. I tell you I hate the beastly stuff. I only pretended to like it because I thought you did. The hours I’ve spent learning it up! I wonder I’ve not got brain fever.”

  “Archie! Used you to read it up, too? Oh, if I’d only known!”

  “And you forgive me—this morning, I mean?”

  “Of course. You couldn’t leave a golf tournament. By the way, how did you get on?”

  Archibald coughed.

  “Rather well,” he said modestly. “Pretty decently. In fact, not badly. As a matter of fact, I won the championship.”

  “The championship!” whispered Margaret. “Of America?”

  “Well, not absolutely of America,” said Archibald. “But all the same a championship.”

  “My hero.”

  “You won’t be wanting me for a while, I guess?” said Stuyvesant nonchalantly. “Think I’ll smoke a cigarette on the porch.”

  And sobs from the stairs told that Mrs. Milsom was already on her way to her room.

  2

  THE CLICKING OF CUTHBERT

  THE YOUNG MAN came into the smoking-room of the club-house, and flung his bag with a clatter on the floor. He sank moodily into an arm-chair and pressed the bell.

  “Waiter!”

  “Sir?”

  The young man pointed at the bag with every evidence of distaste.

  “You may have these clubs,” he said. “Take them away. If you don’t want them yourself, give them to one of the caddies.”

  Across the room the Oldest Member gazed at him with a grave sadness through the smoke of his pipe. His eye was deep and dreamy—the eye of a man who, as the poet says, has seen Golf steadily and seen it whole.

  “You are giving up golf?” he said.

  He was not altogether unprepared for such an attitude on the young man’s part: for from his eyrie on the terrace above the ninth green he had observed him start out on the afternoon’s round and had seen him lose a couple of balls in the lake at the second hole after taking seven strokes at the first.

  “Yes!” cried the young man fiercely. “For ever, dammit! Footling game! Blanked infernal fat-headed silly ass of a game! Nothing but a waste of time.”

  The Sage winced.

  “Don’t say that, my boy.”

  “But I do say it. What earthly good is golf? Life is stern and life is earnest. We live in a practical age. All round us we see foreign competition making itself unpleasant. And we spend our time playing golf! What do we get out of it? Is golf any use? That’s what I’m asking you. Can you name me a single case where devotion to this pestilential pastime has done a man any practical good?”

  The Sage smiled gently.

  “I could name a thousand.”

  “One will do.”

  “I will select,” said the Sage, “from the innumerable memories that rush to my mind, the story of Cuthbert Banks.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Be of good cheer,” said the Oldest Member. “You are going to hear of him now.”

  It was in the picturesque little settlement of Wood Hills (said the Oldest Member) that the incidents occurred which I am about to relate. Even if you have never been in Wood Hills, that suburban paradise is probably familiar to you by name. Situated at a convenient distance from the city, it combines in a notable manner the advantages of town life with the pleasant surroundings and healthful air of the country. Its inhabitants live in commodious houses, standing in their own grounds, and enjoy so many luxuries—such as gravel soil, main drainage, electric light, telephone, baths (h. and c.), and company’s own water, that you might be pardoned for imagining life to be so ideal for them that no possible improvement could be added to their lot. Mrs. Willoughby Smethurst was under no such delusion. What Wood Hills needed to make it perfect, she realized, was Culture. Material comforts are all very well, but, if the summum bonum is to be achieved, the Soul also demands a look in, and it was Mrs. Smethurst’s unfaltering resolve that never while she had her strength should the Soul be handed the loser’s end. It was her intention to make Wood Hills a centre of all that was most cultivated and refined, and, golly! how she had succeeded. Under her presidency the Wood Hills Literary and Debating Society had tripled its membership.

  But there is always a fly in the ointment, a caterpillar in the salad. The local golf club, an institution to which Mrs. Smethurst strongly objected, had also tripled its membership; and the division of the community into two rival camps, the Golfers and the Cultured, had become more marked than ever. This division, always acute, had attained now to the dimensions of a Schism. The rival sects treated one another with a cold hostility.

  Unfortunate episodes came to widen the breach. Mrs. Smethurst’s house adjoined the links, standing to the right of the fourth tee: and, as the Literary Society was in the habit of entertaining visiting lecturers, many a golfer had foozled his drive owing to sudden loud outbursts of applause coinciding with his down-swing. And not long before this story opens a sliced ball, whizzing in at the open window, had come within an ace of incapacitating Raymond Parslow Devine, the rising young novelist (who rose at that moment a clear foot and a half) from any further exercise of his art. Two inches, indeed, to the right and Raymond must inevitably have handed in his dinner-pail.

  To make matters worse, a ring at the front-door bell followed almost immediately, and the maid ushered in a young man of pleasing appearance in a sweater and baggy knickerbockers who apologetically but firmly insisted on playing his ball where it lay, and, what with the shock of the lecturer’s narrow escape and the spectacle of the intruder standing on the table and working away with a niblick, the afternoon’s session had to be classed as a complete frost. Mr. Devine’s determination, from which no argument could swerve him, to deliver the rest of his lecture in the coal-cellar gave the meeting a jolt from which it never recovered.

  I have dwelt upon this incident, because it was the means of introducing Cuthbert Banks to Mrs. Smethurst’s niece, Adeline. As Cuthbert, for it was he who had so nearly reduced the muster-roll of rising novelists by one, hopped down from the table after his stroke, he was suddenly aware that a beautiful girl was looking at him intently. As a matter of fact, everyone in the room was looking at him intently, none more so than Raymond Parsloe Devine, but none of the others were beautiful girls. Long as the members of Wood Hills Literary Society were on brain, they were short on looks, and, to Cuthbert’s excited eye, Adeline Smethurst stood out like a jewel in a pile of coke.

  He had never seen her before, for she had only arrived at her aunt’s house on the previous day, but he was perfectly certain that life, even when lived in the midst of gravel soil, main drainage, and company’s own water, was going to be a pretty poor affair if he did not see her again. Yes, Cuthbert was in love: and it is interesting to record, as showing the effect of the tender emotion on a man’s game that twenty minutes after he had met Adeline he did the short eleventh in one, and as near as a toucher got a three on the four-hundred-yard twelfth.

  I will skip lightly over the intermediate stages of Cuthbert’s courtship and come to the moment when—at the annual ball in aid of the local Cottage Hospital, the only occasion during the year on which the lion, so to speak, lay down with the lamb, and the Golfers and the Cultured met on terms of easy comradeship, their differences temporarily laid aside—he proposed to Adeline and was badly stymied.

  That fair, soulful girl could not see him with a spy-glass.

  “Mr. Banks,” she said, “I will speak frankly.”

  “Charge right ahead,” assented Cuthbert.

  “Deeply sensible as I am of—”

  “I know. Of the honour and the compliment and all that. But, passing lightly over all that guff, what seems to be the trouble? I love you to distraction—”

&nb
sp; “Love is not everything.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Cuthbert earnestly. “You’re right off it. Love—” And he was about to dilate on the theme when she interrupted him.

  “I am a girl of ambition.”

  “And very nice, too,” said Cuthbert.

  “I am a girl of ambition,” repeated Adeline, “and I realize that the fulfilment of my ambitions must come through my husband. I am very ordinary myself—”

  “What!” cried Cuthbert. “You ordinary? Why, you are a pearl among women, the queen of your sex. You can’t have been looking in a glass lately. You stand alone. Simply alone. You make the rest look like battered repaints.”

  “Well,” said Adeline, softening a trifle, “I believe I am fairly good-looking⎯”

  “Anybody who was content to call you fairly good-looking would describe the Taj Mahal as a pretty nifty tomb.”

  “But that is not the point. What I mean is, if I marry a nonentity I shall be a nonentity myself for ever. And I would sooner die than be a nonentity.”

  “And, if I follow your reasoning, you think that that lets me out?”

  “Well, really, Mr. Banks, have you done anything, or are you likely ever to do anything worth while?”

  Cuthbert hesitated.

  “It’s true,” he said, “I didn’t finish in the first ten in the Open, and I was knocked out in the semi-final of the Amateur, but I won the French Open last year.”

  “The—what?”

  “The French Open Championship. Golf, you know.”

  “Golf! You waste all your time playing golf. I admire a man who is more spiritual, more intellectual.”

  A pang of jealousy rent Cuthbert’s bosom.

  “Like What’s-his-name Devine?” he said, sullenly.

  “Mr. Devine,” replied Adeline, blushing faintly, “is going to be a great man. Already he has achieved much. The critics say that he is more Russian than any other young English writer.”

  “And is that good?”

  “Of course it’s good.”

  “I should have thought the wheeze would be to be more English than any other young English writer.”