“That was the expression she employed.”
“Know what to do about it,” repeated Smallwood Bessemer thoughtfully. “’M yes. I see what you mean. Know what to do about it. Yes. But why on earth does this ghastly girl love me? She must be cuckoo.”
“For your intellect, she tells me. She says she finds you a refreshing change after her late fiancé, Sidney McMurdo.”
“Was she engaged to Sidney McMurdo?”
“Yes.”
“H’m!” said Bessemer.
He told me subsequently that his first action after he had hung up was to go to his cupboard and take from it a bottle of tonic port which he kept handy in case he required a restorative or stimulant. He had fallen into the habit of drinking a little of this whenever he felt low, and Reason told him that he was never going to feel lower than he did at that moment. To dash off a glass and fill another was with him the work of an instant.
Generally, the effect of this tonic port was to send the blood coursing through his veins like liquid fire and make him feel that he was walking on the tip of his toes with his hat on the side of his head. But now its magic seemed to have failed. Spiritually, he remained a total loss.
Nor, I think, can we be surprised at this. It is not every day that a young fellow loses the girl he worships and finds that he has accumulated another whom he not only does not love but knows that he can never love. Smallwood Bessemer respected Agnes Flack. He would always feel for her that impersonal admiration which is inspired by anything very large, like the Empire State Building or the Grand Canyon of Arizona. But the thought of being married to her frankly appalled him.
And in addition to this there was the Sidney McMurdo angle.
Smallwood Bessemer, as I say, did not know Sidney McMurdo well. But he knew him well enough to be aware that his reactions on finding that another man had become engaged to his temporarily ex-fiancée would be of a marked nature. And as the picture rose before his eyes of that vast frame of his and those almost varicose muscles that rippled like dangerous snakes beneath his pullover, his soul sickened and he had to have a third glass of tonic port.
It was while he was draining it that Sidney McMurdo came lumbering over the threshold, and so vivid was the impression he created of being eight foot high and broad in proportion that Smallwood Bessemer nearly swooned. Recovering himself, he greeted him with almost effusive cordiality.
“Come in, McMurdo, come in,” he cried buoyantly. “Just the fellow I wanted to see. I wonder, McMurdo, if you remember what you were saying to me the other day about the advisability of my taking out an all-accident insurance with your firm? I have been thinking it over, and am strongly inclined to do so.”
“It’s the sensible thing,” said Sidney McMurdo. “A man ought to look to the future.”
“Precisely.”
“You never know when you may not get badly smashed up.”
“Never. Shall we go round to your place and get a form?”
“I have one with me.”
“Then I will sign it at once,” said Bessemer.
And he had just done so and had written out a cheque for the first year’s premium, when the telephone bell rang.
“Yoo-hoo, darling,” bellowed a voice genially, and he recognized it as Agnes Flack’s. A quick glance out of the corner of his eye told him that his companion had recognized it, too. Sidney McMurdo had stiffened. His face was flushed. He sat clenching and unclenching his hands. When Agnes Flack spoke on the telephone, there was never any need for extensions to enable the bystander to follow her remarks.
Smallwood Bessemer swallowed once or twice.
“Oh, good morning, Miss Flack,” he said formally.
“What do you mean—Miss Flack? Call me Aggie. Listen, I’m at the club-house. Come on out. I want to give you a golf lesson.”
“Very well.”
“You mean ‘Very well, darling’.”
“Er—yes. Er—very well, darling.”
“Right,” said Agnes Flack.
Smallwood Bessemer hung up the receiver, and turned to find his companion scrutinizing him narrowly. Sidney McMurdo had turned a rather pretty mauve, and his eyes had an incandescent appearance. It seemed to Bessemer that with a few minor changes he could have stepped straight into the Book of Revelations and no questions asked.
“That was Agnes Flack!” said McMurdo hoarsely.
“Er—yes,” said Bessemer. “Yes, I believe it was.”
“She called you ‘darling’.”
“Er—yes. Yes, I believe she did.”
“You called her ‘darling’.”
“Ee—yes. That’s right. She seemed to wish it.”
“Why?” asked Sidney McMurdo, who was one of those simple, direct men who like to come straight to the point.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you about that,” said Smallwood Bessemer. “We’re engaged. It happened last night after the dance.”
Sidney McMurdo gave a hitch to his shoulder muscles, which were leaping about under his pullover like adagio dancers. His scrutiny, already narrow, became narrower.
“So it was all a vile plot, was it?”
“No, no.”
“Of course it was a vile plot,” said Sidney McMurdo petulantly, breaking off a corner of the mantelpiece and shredding it through his fingers. “You gave me that advice about going out and making passes purely in order that you should be left free to steal Agnes from me. If that wasn’t a vile plot, then I don’t know a vile plot when I see one. Well, well, we must see what we can do about it.”
It was the fact that Smallwood Bessemer at this moment sprang nimbly behind the table that temporarily eased the strain of the situation. For as Sidney McMurdo started to remove the obstacle, his eye fell on the insurance policy. He stopped as if spellbound, staring at it, his lower jaw sagging.
Bessemer, scanning him anxiously, could read what was passing through his mind. Sidney McMurdo was a lover, but he was also a second vice-president of the Jersey City and All Points West Mutual and Co-operative Life and Accident Insurance Company, an organization which had an almost morbid distaste for parting with its money. If as the result of any impulsive action on his part the Co. were compelled to pay over a large sum to Smallwood Bessemer almost before they had trousered his first cheque, there would be harsh words and raised eyebrows. He might even be stripped of his second vice-president’s desk in the middle of a hollow square. And next to Agnes Flack and his steel-shafted driver, he loved his second vice-presidency more than anything in the world.
For what seemed an eternity, Smallwood Bessemer gazed at a strong man wrestling with himself. Then the crisis passed. Sidney McMurdo flung himself into a chair, and sat moodily gnashing his teeth.
“Well,” said Bessemer, feeling like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, “I suppose I must be leaving you. I am having my first golf lesson.”
Sidney McMurdo started.
“Your first golf lesson? Haven’t you ever played?”
“Net yet.”
A hollow groan escaped Sidney McMurdo.
“To think of my Agnes marrying a man who doesn’t know the difference between a brassie and a niblick!”
“Well, if it comes to that,” retorted Bessemer, with some spirit, “what price my Celia marrying a man who doesn’t know the difference between Edna St. Vincent Millay and Bugs Baer?”
Sidney McMurdo stared.
“Your Celia? You weren’t engaged to that Todd pipsqueak?”
“She is not a pipsqueak.”
“She is too, a pipsqueak, and I can prove it. She reads poetry.”
“Naturally. I have made it my loving task to train her eager mind to appreciate all that is best and most beautiful.”
“She says I’ve got to do it, too.”
“It will be the making of you. And now,” said Smallwood Bessemer, “I really must be going.”
“Just a moment,” said Sidney McMurdo. He reached out and took the insurance policy, studying it intently for a whil
e. But it was as he feared. It covered everything. “All right,” he said sombrely, “pop off.”
I suppose there is nothing (proceeded the Oldest Member) more painful to the man of sensibility that the spectacle of tangled hearts. Here were four hearts as tangled as spaghetti, and I grieved for them. The female members of the quartette did not confide in me, but I was in constant demand by both McMurdo and Bessemer, and it is not too much to say that these men were passing through the furnace. Indeed, I cannot say which moved me the more—Bessemer’s analysis of his emotions when jerked out of bed at daybreak by a telephone call from Agnes, summoning him to the links before breakfast, or McMurdo’s description of how it felt to read W. H. Auden. Suffice it that each wrung my heart to the uttermost.
And so the matter stood at the opening of the contest for the Ladies’ Vase.
This was one of our handicap events, embracing in its comprehensive scope almost the entire female personnel of the club, from the fire-breathing tigresses to the rabbits who had taken up golf because it gave them an opportunity of appearing in sports clothes. It was expected to be a gift once more for Agnes Flack, though she would be playing from scratch and several of the contestants were receiving as much as forty-eight. She had won the Vase the last two years, and if she scooped it in again, it would become her permanent possession. I mention this to show you what the competition meant to her.
For a while, all proceeded according to the form book. Playing in her usual bold, resolute style, she blasted her opponents off the links one by one, and came safely through into the final without disarranging her hair.
But as the tournament progressed, it became evident that a platinum blonde of the name of Julia Prebble, receiving twenty-seven, had been grossly under-handicapped. Whether through some natural skill at concealing the merits of her game, or because she was engaged to a member of the handicapping committee, one cannot tell, but she had, as I say, contrived to scrounge a twenty-seven when ten would have been more suitable. The result was that she passed into the final bracket with consummate ease, and the betting among the wilder spirits was that for the first time in three years Agnes Flack’s mantelpiece would have to be looking about it for some other ornament than the handsome silver vase presented by the club for annual competition among its female members.
And when at the end of the first half of the thirty-six hole final Agnes was two down after a gruelling struggle, it seemed as though their prognostications were about to be fulfilled.
It was in the cool of a lovely summer evening that play was resumed. I had been asked to referee the match, and I was crossing the terrace on my way to the first tee when I encountered Smallwood Bessemer. And we were pausing to exchange a word or two, when Sidney McMurdo came along.
To my surprise, for I had supposed relations between the two men to be strained, Bessemer waved a cordial hand.
“Hyah, Sidney,” he called.
“Hyah, Smallwood,” replied the other.
“Did you get that tonic?”
“Yes. Good stuff, you think?”
“You can’t beat it,” said Bessemer, and Sidney McMurdo passed along towards the first tee.
I was astonished.
“You seem on excellent terms with McMurdo,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” said Bessemer. “He drops in at my place a good deal. We smoke a pipe and roast each other’s girls. It draws us very close together. I was able to do him a good turn this morning. He was very anxious to watch the match, and Celia wanted him to go into town to fetch a specialist for her Peke, who is off colour to-day. I told him to give it a shot of that tonic port I drink. Put it right in no time. Well, I’ll be seeing you.”
“You are not coming round?”
“I may look in toward the finish. What do you think of Agnes’s chances?”
“Well, she had been battling nobly against heavy odds, but—”
“The trouble with Agnes is that she believes all she reads in the golf books. If she would only listen to me . . . Ah, well,” said Smallwood Bessemer, and moved off.
It did not take me long after I had reached the first tee to see that Agnes Flack was not blind to the possibility of being deprived of her Vase. Her lips were tight, and there was a furrow in her forehead. I endeavoured to ease her tension with a kindly word or two.
“Lovely evening,” I said.
“It will be,” she replied, directing a somewhat acid glance at her antagonist, who was straightening the tie of the member of the handicapping committee to whom she was betrothed “if I can trim that ginger-headed Delilah and foil the criminal skulduggery of a bunch of yeggmen who ought to be blushing themselves purple. Twenty-seven, forsooth!”
Her warmth was not unjustified. After watching the morning’s round, I, too, felt that that twenty-seven handicap of Julia Prebble’s had been dictated by the voice of love rather than by a rigid sense of justice. I changed the subject.
“Bessemer is not watching the match, he tells me.”
“I wouldn’t let him. He makes me nervous.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes. I started teaching him golf a little while ago, and now he’s teaching me. He knows it all.”
“He is a columnist,” I reminded her.
“At lunch to-day he said he was going to skim through Alex Morrison’s book again, because he had a feeling that Alex hadn’t got the right angle on the game.”
I shuddered strongly, and at this moment Julia Prebble detached herself from her loved one, and the contest began.
I confess that, as I watched the opening stages of the play, I found a change taking place in my attitude towards Agnes Flack. I had always respected her, as one must respect any woman capable of pasting a ball two hundred and forty yards, but it was only now that respect burgeoned into something like affection. The way she hitched up her sleeves and started to wipe off her opponent’s lead invited sympathy and support.
At the outset, she was assisted by the fact that success had rendered Julia Prebble a little overconfident. She did not concentrate. The eye which should have been riveted on her ball had a tendency to smirk sideways at her affianced, causing her to top, with the result that only three holes had been played before the match was all square again.
However, as was inevitable, these reverses had the effect of tightening up Julia Prebble’s game. Her mouth hardened, and she showed a disposition to bite at the man she loved, whom she appeared to consider responsible. On the fifth, she told him not to stand in front of her, on the sixth not to stand behind her, on the seventh she asked him not to move while she was putting. On the eighth she suggested that if he had really got St. Vitus Dance he ought to go and put himself in the hands of some good doctor. On the ninth she formally broke off the engagement.
Naturally, all this helped her a good deal, and at the tenth she recovered the lead she had lost. Agnes drew level at the eleventh, and after that things settled down to the grim struggle which one generally sees in finals. A casual observer would have said that it was anybody’s game.
But the strain of battling against that handicap was telling on Agnes Flack. Once or twice, her iron resolution seemed to waver. And on the seventeenth Nature took its toll. She missed a short putt for the half, and they came to the eighteenth tee with Julia Prebble dormy one.
The eighteenth hole takes you over the water. A sort of small lake lies just beyond that tee, spanned by a rustic bridge. Across the bridge I now beheld Smallwood Bessemer approaching.
“How’s it going?” he asked, as he came to where I stood.
I told him the state of the game, and he shook his head.
“Looks bad,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t like Agnes Flack, and never shall, but one has one’s human feelings. It will cut her to the heart to lose that Vase. And when you reflect that if she had only let me come along, she would have been all right, it all seems such a pity, doesn’t it? I could have given her a pointer from time to time, which would have made all the difference. But she doesn’t
seem to want my advice. Prefers to trust to Alex Morrison. Sad. Very sad. Ah,” said Smallwood Bessemer, “She didn’t relax.”
He was alluding to Julia Prebble, who had just driven off. Her ball had cleared the water nicely, but it was plain to the seeing eye that it had a nasty slice on it. It came to rest in a patch of rough at the side of the fairway, and I saw her look sharply round, as if instinctively about to tell her betrothed that she wished he wouldn’t shuffle his feet just as she was shooting. But he was not there. He had withdrawn to the club-house, where, I was informed later, he drank six Scotches in quick succession, subsequently crying on the barman’s shoulder and telling him what was wrong with women.
In the demeanour of Agnes Flack, as she teed up, there was something that reminded me of Boadicea about to get in amongst a Roman legion. She looked dominant and conquering. I knew what she was thinking. Even if her opponent recovered from the moral shock of a drive like that, she could scarcely be down in less than six, and this was a hole which she, Agnes, always did in four. This meant that the match would go to the thirty-seventh, in which case she was confident that her stamina and the will to win would see her through.
She measured her distance. She waggled. Slowly and forcefully she swung back. And her club was just descending in a perfect arc, when Smallwood Bessemer spoke.
“Hey!” he said.
In the tense silence the word rang out like the crack of a gun. It affected Agnes Flack visibly. For the first time since she had been a slip of a child, she lifted her head in the middle of a stroke, and the ball, badly topped, trickled over the turf, gathered momentum as it reached the edge of the tee, bounded towards the water, hesitated on the brink for an instant like a timid diver on a cold morning and then plunged in.
“Too bad,” said Julia Prebble.
Agnes Flack did not reply. She was breathing heavily through her nostrils. She turned to Smallwood Bessemer.
“You were saying something?” she asked.
“I was only going to remind you to relax,” said Smallwood Bessemer. “Alex Morrison lays great stress on the importance of pointing the chin and rolling the feet. To my mind, however, the whole secret of golf consists in relaxing. At the top of the swing the muscles should be⎯”
The Golf Omnibus Page 60
