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.”
Angus drew his breath in sharply.
“So,” he said, “the man is not only a dangerous incendiary, but utterly lacking in respect for the Cloth. Faugh!”
“I wish you wouldn’t say ‘Faugh!’”
“Enough to make one say ‘Faugh!’” said Angus sombrely.
The joy had gone out of his world. A dark fog seemed to be spreading over the sunlit uplands of his bliss, and there was a marked shortage of blue birds.
He viewed the future with concern. And he had good reason to do so. Little by little, as the days went by, the conviction was forced upon him that Evangeline Brackett was becoming infatuated with this yodelling, trick-cigar merchant. That very first morning he had thought them a great deal too matey. A week later, he was compelled to recognize that matiness was a feeble and inadequate word. It was Legs this and Legs that and Oh, Legs, and Yoo-hoo, Legs, till he began to feel like a super standing in the wings watching Romeo and Juliet play their balcony scene. A great bitterness of spirit began to descend on Angus McTavish, and he twice took sixes at holes at which in happier days he had often got threes.
There is no question (said the Oldest Member) that these party lizards like Legs Mortimer are a terrible menace when they sneak out into the rural districts. In a great city their noxious influence is less marked. The rushing life of a metropolis seems to fortify girls against their meretricious spell. But in a peaceful hamlet like that in which Angus McTavish and Evangeline Brackett resided there are so few counter-attractions that the poison may be said to work without anything in the nature of an antidote.
Except, of course, golf. The one consolation which Angus had during this dark period was the fact that Evangeline had not yet faltered in her devotion to golf. She was practising diligently for the Ladies’ Spring Medal.
And yet, though, as I say, this consoled Angus, it did so only faintly. If Evangeline could still turn out with her bag of clubs and practise for the Spring Medal, it showed, of course, that her better self was not entirely dead. But of what avail was it to practise, he asked himself, if Legs Mortimer gave almost nightly parties and she persisted in attending them? Until the other’s arrival, Evangeline had been accustomed to go to bed at eleven after spending the evening with some good book such as Braid on Taking Turf. Now, it seemed a perpetual race between her and the milkman as to which should reach her door first, with the milkman winning three times out of four.
He tried to reason with her one morning when a sudden yawn had caused her to top a mashie niblick shot which a month before she would have laid dead to the pin.
“What can you expect,” he said, “if you stop up half the night at parties?”
She was plainly impressed.
“You don’t really think it’s hurting my game, do you?”
“It is ruining your game.”
“But everybody goes to parties.”
“Not when they have an important match in prospect.”
“And Legs’s parties are such fun. He makes them go so.”
“Oh yes?” said Angus coldly.
“He’s a perfect scream. You should have seen him last night. He told Jack Prescott he wanted him to help him with a trick, and he got him to lay his hands on the table, palms downward. Then he put a full glass of water on each hand . . .”
“And then⎯?” said Angus, with deepening gloom, for his whole soul was revolted at the thought of Jack Prescott, a four handicap man, lending himself to such childishness.
“Why, then he just walked away and left him, and Jack couldn’t get his hands free without drenching himself with water. We simply howled.”
“Well,” said Angus, when he had ceased shuddering, “if you will take my advice, you will cut out these orgies from now on.”
“I must go to the one next week.”
“Why?”
“I promised I would. It’s Legs’s birthday.”
“Then,” said Angus, “I shall come, too.”
“But you’ll only go to sleep. You ought to see Legs’s imitation of you going to sleep at a party. It’s a scream.”
“Possibly,” said Angus stiffly, “I may doze off for a while. But I shall wake up in time to take you home at a reasonable hour.”
“But I don’t want to go home at a reasonable hour.”
“You would prefer to finish about sixteenth in the Spring Medal?”
The girl paled.
“Don’t say that
.”
“I do say that.”
“Sixteenth?”
“Or seventeenth.”
She drew in her breath sharply.
“All right, then. You shall take me home before midnight.”
“Good,” said Angus.
Being of Scottish descent, he never smiled, but he came within an ace of smiling as he heard those words. For the first time in weeks he was conscious of something that might roughly be called a gleam of light on the darkness of his horizon.
Nothing but love and his determination to save the girl he worshipped from crawling into bed at four in the morning could have forced Angus McTavish, when the appointed night arrived, to fish out the old stiff shirt and put on dress clothes and present himself at the club-house. The day had been unusually warm for the time of year and he had played three rounds and was feeling that desire for repose and solitude which comes to men who have done their fifty-four holes under a hot sun. But tomorrow was the day of the Ladies’ Spring Medal, and at whatever cost to himself it was imperative that Evangeline be withdrawn from the revels at an hour which would enable her to get a good night’s sleep. So he fought down the desire to put on pyjamas, and presently was mingling with Legs Mortimer’s guests, trying to stifle the yawns which nearly tore him asunder.
Equally hard to stifle was the austre disgust which swept over him as he surveyed his surroundings. Legs Mortimer was a man who prided himself on doing these things well, and the club-house had broken out into an eruption of roses, smilax, Chinese lanterns, gold-toothed saxophonists, giggling girls and light refreshments. An inhabitant of ancient Babylon would have beamed approvingly on the spectacle, but it made Angus McTavish sick. His idea of a club-house was a sort of cathedral filled with serious-minded men telling one another in quiet undertones how they got a four on the long fifteenth.
His rising nausea was in no way allayed by the sight of Evangeline treading the measure in the arms of his host. Angus had never learned to dance, fearing that it might spoil his game, and so knew nothing of the technicalities of the modern foxtrot. He was unable to say, accordingly, whether Legs Mortimer should or should not have been holding Evangeline like that. It might be all right. On the other hand, it might not be all right. All Angus knew was that he had seen melodramas on the stage in which heroines had told villains to unhand them on far less provocation.
Finally, he could endure the thing no longer. There was a sort of annexe, soothingly dark, at the end of the room, and into this he withdrew. He sank into a chair, and almost immediately fell into a restful slumber.
How long he slept, he could not have said. It seemed to him but a moment, but no doubt it was in reality a good deal longer. He was aroused by someone shaking his shoulder and, blinking up, perceived Legs Mortimer at his side. Legs Mortimer’s face was contorted with alarm, and he was shouting something which, after a brief interval of dazed misapprehension, Angus discovered was the word “Fire!”
The last mists of sleep rolled away from Angus McTavish. He was his keen, alert self once more. He had grasped the situation and realized what must be done.
His first thought was of Evangeline. He must start by saving her. Then he must save the trophies in the glass case on the smoking-room mantelpiece, including the ball used by Henry Cotton when breaking the course record. After that he must attend to the female guests, and after that rescue the man who mixed the club’s special cocktails, and finally, if there was still time, he must save himself.
It was a comprehensive programme, calling for prompt action and an early start, and he embarked upon it immediately. With a cry of “Evangeline!” he sprang to his feet, and the next moment had shot into the ball-room with incredible velocity and was skidding along the polished floor on one ear.
Only then did he observe that during his slumbers some hidden hand had fastened roller-skates to his feet with stout straps. Simultaneously with this discovery came the sound of musical mirth on every side, and looking up he found himself the centre of a ring of merry, laughing faces. The merriest of these faces, and the one that laughed most, was that of Evangeline Brackett.
It was a grim, moody Angus McTavish who, some five minutes later, after taking three more tosses in a manner which he distinctly heard Evangeline compare to the delivery of coals in sacks, withdrew on all fours to the kitchen, where a kindly waiter cut the straps with a knife. It was a stern, soured Angus McTavish who, having tipped his preserver, strode off through the night to his cottage. He had a nasty bruise on his right thigh, but it was in his soul that he suffered most.
His love, he told himself, was dead. He felt that he had been deceived in Evangeline. A girl capable of laughing like a hyena at her betrothed in the circumstances in which Evangeline Brackett had laughed like a hyena at him was not, he reasoned, worthy of a good man’s devotion. If this was the sort of girl she was, let her link her lot with that of Legs Mortimer. If her spiritual mate was a fellow who could outrage all the sacred laws of hospitality by fastening roller-skates to his guests’ feet and then shouting “Fire!” in their ears, let her have him.
He rubbed himself with liniment and went to bed.
When he woke on the morrow, however, his mood, as so often happens, had become softer and gentler. He still chafed at the thought that Evangeline could have lowered herself to behave like a hyena, and a mentally arrested hyena at that, but now he was charitably inclined to put her conduct down to cerebral excitement induced by the insidious atmosphere of Chinese lanterns and smilax. Briefly, what he felt was that the girl had been temporarily led astray, and that it must be his task to win her back to the straight and narrow fairway. When, therefore, the telephone rang and he heard her voice, he greeted her amiably.
“How’s the boy?” asked Evangeline. “All right?”
“Splendid,” said Angus.
“No ill effects after last night?”
“None.”
“You’re caddying for me in the Ladies’ Medal today, aren’t you?”
“Of course.”
“That’s good. I was afraid you might want to be off somewhere, roller-skating Ha, ha, ha,” said Evangeline, laughing a silvery laugh. “He, he, he,” she added, laughing another.
Now, against silvery laughs qua silvery laughs there is, of course, nothing to be said. But there are moments in a man’s life when he is ill-attuned to them, and it must be confessed that this particular couple, proceeding whence they did, stirred Angus McTavish up to no little extent. A good deal of the softness and gentleness was missing from his composition when he presented himself on the first tee. In fact, not to put too fine a point upon it, he was as sore as a gumboil. And as this showed plainly in his demeanour, and as Evangeline was noticeably off her game during the opening holes, they came to the ninth green with a certain constraint between them. Angus was still thinking of those silvery laughs and feeling that they had been, all things considered, in the most dubious taste, while Evangeline, on her side, was asking herself petulantly how on earth a girl could be expected to shoot to form in the society of a caddie who looked like a V-shaped depression off the coast of Ireland.
And at this crucial point in the affairs of the young couple, when it needed but a spark to precipitate an explosion, whom should they see leaning over the club-house veranda but Legs Mortimer.
“Greetings, fair gentles,” said Legs Mortimer. “And how is our bright and beautiful Evangeline this bright and beautiful morning?”
“Oh, Legs, you’re a scream,” said Evangeline. “Did you,” she inquired of her betrothed, “speak?”
“I did not,” said Angus, who had snorted.
“And the McTavish of McTavish,” proceeded Legs Mortimer. “How is the McTavish of McTavish? Listen,” he said, “I think it’s all right. I’ve been in communication with the management of an important circus this morning, and they tell me if that roller-skating act of yours is as good as I say it is they will book you solid.”
“Oh, yes?” said Angus.
He w
as well aware that it was not much of a retort, but then no mere verbal thrust would have satisfied him. What he would have liked to do was to take Legs Mortimer’s neck in his two hands, twist it, and continue twisting till it came unstuck. But he was slender of physique, and the other, like so many ski-iers and yodellers, was massive and well-proportioned, so he was compelled to confine himself to saying “Oh yes?” and adding, “Is that so?” His deportment, while making these observations, was that of an offended cobra.
“Well, boys and girls,” said Legs Mortimer, “I will now withdraw to the bar and take a short, quick one. I have a slight headache, and meseems a hair of the dog that bit me is indicated.”
Beaming in the insufferable manner that is so frequent with these party lizards, he walked away, and Evangeline, turning imperiously on Angus, said: “Oh, for goodness’ sake.” And when Angus said What did she mean by saying “Oh for goodness’ sake,” she said that he knew very well what she meant by saying “Oh, for goodness’ sake.”
“Behaving like that to poor Legs!”
“Like what?”
“Like a sulky schoolboy.”
“Faugh!”
“I was ashamed of you.”
“Faugh!”
“Don’t say ‘Faugh!’”
“Pshaw!”
“And don’t say ‘Pshaw,’ either.”
“Can’t I speak?”
“Not if you’re only going to say ‘Faugh!’ and ‘Pshaw!’”
Angus was half inclined to remark that he had also been going to say “Tchah!” and “Pah!” but he restrained himself and kicked moodily at the woodwork.
“I simply can’t understand you.”
“You can’t, can’t you?”
“Any man with a grain of humour would have laughed himself sick at what happened last night.”
“He would, would he?”
“Yes, he would. When Legs played that trick on the Prince of Schlossing-Lossing, the prince was fearfully amused.”
“He was, was he?”
“Yes, he was. He laughed heartily, looking bronzed and fit.”
“He did, did he?”
The Golf Omnibus Page 47
