To our most glorious King!
It fairly makes you stutter
To see him start his swing!
Success attend his putter!
And luck be with his drive!
And may he do each hole in two,
Although the bogey’s five!”
The voices died away. There was a silence.
“If I hadn’t missed a two-foot putt, I’d have done the long fifteenth in four yesterday,” said the King.
“I won the Ladies’ Open Championship of the Outer Isles last week,” said the Princess.
They looked into each other’s eyes for a long moment. And then, hand in hand, they walked slowly into the palace.
EPILOGUE
“Well?” we said, anxiously.
“I like it,” said the editor.
“Good egg!” we murmured.
The editor pressed a bell, a single ruby set in a fold of the tapestry upon the wall.
The major-domo appeared.
“Give this man a purse of gold,” said the editor, “and throw him out.”
12
THE HEART OF A GOOF
IT WAS A morning when all nature shouted “Fore!” The breeze, as it blew gently up from the valley, seemed to bring a message of hope and cheer, whispering of chip-shots holed and brassies landing squarely on the meat. The fairway, as yet unscarred by the irons of a hundred dubs, smiled greenly up at the azure sky; and the sun, peeping above the trees, looked like a giant golf-ball perfectly lofted by the mashie of some unseen god and about to drop dead by the pin of the eighteenth. It was the day of the opening of the course after the long winter, and a crowd of considerable dimensions had collected at the first tee. Plus fours gleamed in the sunshine, and the air was charged with happy anticipation.
In all that gay throng there was but one sad face. It belonged to the man who was waggling his driver over the new ball perched on its little hill of sand. This man seemed careworn, hopeless. He gazed down the fairway, shifted his feet, waggled, gazed down the fairway again, shifted the dogs once more, and waggled afresh. He waggled as Hamlet might have waggled, moodily, irresolutely. Then, at last, he swung, and, taking from his caddie the niblick which the intelligent lad had been holding in readiness from the moment when he had walked on to the tee, trudged wearily off to play his second.
The Oldest Member, who had been observing the scene with a benevolent eye from his favourite chair on the terrace, sighed.
“Poor Jenkinson,” he said, “does not improve.”
“No,” agreed his companion, a young man with open features and a handicap of six. “And yet I happen to know that he has been taking lessons all the winter at one of those indoor places.”
“Futile, quite futile,” said the Sage with a shake of his snowy head. “There is no wizard living who could make that man go round in an average of sevens. I keep advising him to give up the game.”
“You!” cried the young man, raising a shocked and startled face from the driver with which he was toying. “You told him to give up golf! Why I thought⎯”
“I understand and approve of your horror,” said the Oldest Member, gently. “But you must bear in mind that Jenkinson’s is not an ordinary case. You know and I know scores of men who have never broken a hundred and twenty in their lives, and yet contrive to be happy, useful members of society. However badly they may play, they are able to forget. But with Jenkinson it is different. He is not one of those who can take it or leave it alone. His only chance of happiness lies in complete abstinence. Jenkinson is a goof.”
“A what?”
“A goof,” repeated the Sage. “One of those unfortunate beings who have allowed this noblest of sports to get too great a grip upon them, who have permitted it to eat into their souls, like some malignant growth. The goof, you must understand, is not like you and me. He broods. He becomes morbid. His goofery unfits him for the battles of life. Jenkinson, for example, was once a man with a glowing future in the hay, corn, and feed business, but a constant stream of hooks, tops, and slices gradually made him so diffident and mistrustful of himself, that he let opportunity after opportunity slip, with the result that other, sterner, hay, corn, and feed merchants passed him in the race. Every time he had the chance to carry through some big deal in hay, or to execute some flashing coup in corn and feed, the fatal diffidence generated by a hundred rotten rounds would undo him. I understand his bankruptcy may be expected at any moment.”
“My golly!” said the young man, deeply impressed. “I hope I never become a goof. Do you mean to say there is really no cure except giving up the game?”
The Oldest Member was silent for a while.
“It is curious that you should have asked that question,” he said at last, “for only this morning I was thinking of the one case in my experience where a goof was enabled to overcome his deplorable malady. It was owing to a girl, of course. The longer I live, the more I come to see that most things are. But you will, no doubt, wish to hear the story from the beginning.”
The young man rose with the startled haste of some wild creature, which, wandering through the undergrowth, perceives the trap in his path.
“I should love to,” he mumbled, “only I shall be losing my place at the tee.”
“The goof in question,” said the Sage, attaching himself with quiet firmness to the youth’s coat-button, “was a man of about your age, by name Ferdinand Dibble. I knew him well. In fact, it was to me⎯”
“Some other time, eh?”
“It was to me,” proceeded the Sage, placidly, “that he came for sympathy in the great crisis of his life, and I am not ashamed to say that when he had finished laying bare his soul to me there were tears in my eyes. My heart bled for the boy.”
“I bet it did. But⎯”
The Oldest Member pushed him gently back into his seat.
“Golf,” he said, “is the Great Mystery. Like some capricious goddess⎯”
The young man, who had been exhibiting symptoms of feverishness, appeared to become resigned. He sighed softly.
“Did you ever read ‘The Ancient Mariner’?” he said.
“Many years ago,” said the Oldest Member. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said the young man. “It just occurred to me.”
Golf (resumed the Oldest Member) is the Great Mystery. Like some capricious goddess, it bestows its favours with what would appear an almost fat-headed lack of method and discrimination. On every side we see big two-fisted he-men floundering round in three figures, stopping every few minutes to let through little shrimps with knock-knees and hollow cheeks, who are tearing off snappy seventy-fours. Giants of finance have to accept a stroke per from their junior clerks. Men capable of governing empires fail to control a small, white ball, which presents no difficulties whatever to others with one ounce more brain than a cuckoo-clock. Mysterious, but there it is. There was no apparent reason why Ferdinand Dibble should not have been a competent golfer. He had strong wrists and a good eye. Nevertheless, the fact remains that he was a dub. And on a certain evening in June I realized that he was also a goof. I found it out quite suddenly as the result of a conversation which we had on this very terrace.
I was sitting here that evening thinking of this and that, when by the corner of the club-house I observed young Dibble in conversation with a girl in white. I could not see who she was, for her back was turned. Presently they parted and Ferdinand came slowly across to where I sat. His air was dejected. He had had the boots licked off him earlier in the afternoon by Jimmy Fothergill, and it was to this that I attributed his gloom. I was to find out in a few moments that I was partly but not entirely correct in this surmise. He took the next chair to mine, and for several minutes sat staring moodily down into the valley.
“I’ve just been talking to Barbara Medway,” he said, suddenly breaking the silence.
“Indeed?” I said. “A delightful girl.”
“She’s going away for the summer to Marvis Bay.�
�
“She will take the sunshine with her.”
“You bet she will!” said Ferdinand Dibble, with extraordinary warmth, and there was another long silence.
Presently Ferdinand uttered a hollow groan. “I love her, dammit!” he muttered brokenly. “Oh golly, how I love her!”
I was not surprised at his making me the recipient of his confidences like this. Most of the young folk in the place brought their troubles to me sooner or later.
“And does she return your love?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t asked her.”
“Why not? I should have thought the point not without its interest for you.”
Ferdinand gnawed the handle of his putter distractedly.
“I haven’t the nerve,” he burst out at length. “I simply can’t summon up the cold gall to ask a girl, least of all an angel like her, to marry me. You see, it’s like this. Every time I work myself up to the point of having a dash at it, I go out and get trimmed by someone giving me a stroke a hole. Every time I feel I’ve mustered up enough pep to propose, I take on a bogey three. Every time I’m in good mid-season form for putting my fate to the test, to win or lose it all, something goes all blooey with my swing, and I slice into the rough at every tee. And then my self-confidence leaves me. I become nervous, tongue-tied, diffident. I wish to goodness I knew the man who invented this infernal game. I’d strangle him. But I suppose he’s been dead for ages. Still, I could go and jump on his grave.”
It was at this point that I understood all, and the heart within me sank like lead. The truth was out. Ferdinand Dibble was a goof.
“Come, come, my boy,” I said, though feeling the uselessness of any words. “Master this weakness.”
“I can’t.”
“Try!”
“I have tried.”
He gnawed his putter again.
“She was asking me just now if I couldn’t manage to come to Marvis Bay, too,” he said.
“That surely is encouraging? It suggests that she is not entirely indifferent to your society.”
“Yes, but what’s the use? Do you know,” a gleam coming into his eyes for a moment, “I have a feeling that if I could ever beat some really fairly good player—just once—I could bring the thing off.” The gleam faded. “But what chance is there of that?”
It was a question which I did not care to answer. I merely patted his shoulder sympathetically, and after a little while he left me and walked away. I was still sitting there, thinking over his hard case, when Barbara Medway came out of the club-house.
She, too, seemed grave and preoccupied, as if there was something on her mind. She took the chair which Ferdinand had vacated, and sighed wearily.
“Have you ever felt,” she asked, “that you would like to bang a man on the head with something hard and heavy? With knobs on?”
I said I had sometimes experienced such a desire, and asked if she had any particular man in mind. She seemed to hesitate for a moment before replying, then, apparently, made up her mind to confide in me. My advanced years carry with them certain pleasant compensations, one of which is that nice girls often confide in me. I frequently find myself enrolled as a father-confessor on the most intimate matters by beautiful creatures from whom many a younger man would give his eye-teeth to get a friendly word. Besides, I had known Barbara since she was a child. Frequently—though not recently—I had given her her evening bath. These things form a bond.
“Why are men such chumps?” she exclaimed.
“You still have not told me who it is that has caused these harsh words. Do I know him?”
“Of course you do. You’ve just been talking to him.”
“Ferdinand Dibble? But why should you wish to bang Ferdinand Dibble on the head with something hard and heavy with knobs on?”
“Because he’s such a goop.”
“You mean a goof?” I queried, wondering how she could have penetrated the unhappy man’s secret.
“No, a goop. A goop is a man who’s in love with a girl and won’t tell her so. I am as certain as I am of anything that Ferdinand is fond of me.”
“Your instinct is unerring. He has just been confiding in me on that very point.”
“Well, why doesn’t he confide in me, the poor fish?” cried the high-spirited girl, petulantly flicking a pebble at a passing grasshopper. “I can’t be expected to fling myself into his arms unless he gives some sort of a hint that he’s ready to catch me.”
“Would it help if I were to repeat to him the substance of this conversation of ours?”
“If you breathe a word of it, I’ll never speak to you again,” she cried. “I’d rather die an awful death than have any man think I wanted him so badly that I had to send relays of messengers begging him to marry me.”
I saw her point.
“Then I fear,” I said, gravely, “that there is nothing to be done. One can only wait and hope. It may be that in the years to come Ferdinand Dibble will acquire a nice lissom, wristy swing, with the head kept rigid and the right leg firmly braced and⎯”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was toying with the hope that some sunny day Ferdinand Dibble would cease to be a goof.”
“You mean a goop?”
“No, a goof. A goof is a man who⎯” And I went on to explain the peculiar psychological difficulties which lay in the way of any declaration of affection on Ferdinand’s part.
“But I have never heard of anything so ridiculous in my life,” she ejaculated. “Do you mean to say that he is waiting till he is good at golf before he asks me to marry him?”
“It is not quite so simple as that,” I said sadly. “Many bad golfers marry, feeling that a wife’s loving solicitude may improve their game. But they are rugged, thick-skinned men, not sensitive and introspective, like Ferdinand. Ferdinand has allowed himself to become morbid. It is one of the chief merits of golf that non-success at the game induces a certain amount of decent humility, which keeps a man from pluming himself too much on any petty triumphs he may achieve in other walks of life; but in all things there is a happy mean, and with Ferdinand this humility has gone too far. It has taken all the spirit out of him. He feels crushed and worthless. He is grateful to caddies when they accept a tip instead of drawing themselves up to their full height and flinging the money in his face.”
“Then do you mean that things have got to go on like this for ever?”
I thought for a moment.
“It is a pity,” I said, “that you could not have induced Ferdinand to go to Marvis Bay for a month or two.”
“Why?”
“Because it seems to me, thinking the thing over, that it is just possible that Marvis Bay might cure him. At the hotel there he would find collected a mob of golfers—I used the term in its broadest sense, to embrace the paralytics and the men who play left-handed—whom even he would be able to beat. When I was last at Marvis Bay, the hotel links were a sort of Sargasso Sea into which had drifted all the pitiful flotsam and jetsam of golf. I have seen things done on that course at which I shuddered and averted my eyes—and I am not a weak man. If Ferdinand can polish up his game so as to go round in a fairly steady hundred and five, I fancy there is hope. But I understand he is not going to Marvis Bay.”
“Oh yes he is,” said the girl.
“Indeed! He did not tell me that when we were talking just now.”
“He didn’t know it then. He will when I have had a few words with him.”
And she walked with firm steps back into the club-house.
It has been well said that there are many kinds of golf, beginning at the top with the golf of professionals and the best amateurs and working down through the golf of ossified men to that of Scotch University professors. Until recently this last was looked upon as the lowest possible depth; but nowadays, with the growing popularity of summer hotels, we are able to add a brand still lower, the golf you find at places like Marvis Bay.
To Ferdinand Dibble, coming fr
om a club where the standard of play was rather unusually high, Marvis Bay was a revelation, and for some days after his arrival there he went about dazed, like a man who cannot believe it is really true. To go out on the links at this summer resort was like entering a new world. The hotel was full of stout, middle-aged men, who, after a misspent youth devoted to making money, had taken to a game at which real proficiency can only be acquired by those who start playing in their cradles and keep their weight down. Out on the course each morning you could see representatives of every nightmare style that was ever invented. There was the man who seemed to be attempting to deceive his ball and lull it into a false security by looking away from it and then making a lightning slash in the apparent hope of catching it off its guard. There was the man who wielded his mid-iron like one killing snakes. There was the man who addressed his ball as if he were stroking a cat, the man who drove as if he were cracking a whip, the man who brooded over each shot like one whose heart is bowed down by bad news from home, and the man who scooped with his mashie as if he were ladling soup. By the end of the first week Ferdinand Dibble was the acknowledged champion of the place. He had gone through the entire menagerie like a bullet through a cream puff.
First, scarcely daring to consider the possibility of success, he had taken on the man who tried to catch his ball off its guard and had beaten him five up and four to play. Then, with gradually growing confidence, he tackled in turn the Cat-Stroker, the Whip-Cracker, the Heart Bowed Down, and the Soup-Scooper, and walked all over their faces with spiked shoes. And as these were the leading local amateurs, whose prowess the octogenarians and the men who went round in bathchairs vainly strove to emulate, Ferdinand Dibble was faced on the eighth morning of his visit by the startling fact that he had no more worlds to conquer. He was monarch of all he surveyed, and, what is more, had won his first trophy, the prize in the great medal-play handicap tournament, in which he had nosed in ahead of the field by two strokes, edging out his nearest rival, a venerable old gentleman, by means of a brilliant and unexpected four on the last hole. The prize was a handsome pewter mug, about the size of the old oaken bucket, and Ferdinand used to go to his room immediately after dinner to croon over it like a mother over her child.
The Golf Omnibus Page 22
