The Golf Omnibus

by P. G. Wodehouse

  “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.

  31

  SLEEPY TIME

  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.”

  “Much snappier.”

  “Shall I send him in?”

  “Do so, queen of my soul.”

  “And Popgood says Be sure not to go above two hundred dollars for the advance,” said Patricia, and a few moments later the visitor made his appearance.

  It
was an appearance, as Patricia had hinted, of a nature to chill the spine. Sinister was the adjective that automatically sprang to the lips of those who met Professor Pepperidge Farmer for the first time. His face was gaunt and lined and grim, and as his burning eyes bored into Cyril’s the young publisher was conscious of a feeling of relief that this encounter was not taking place down a dark alley or in some lonely spot in the country. But a man used to mingling with American authors, few of whom look like anything on earth, is not readily intimidated and he greeted him with his customary easy courtesy.

  “Come right in,” he said. “You’ve caught me just in time. I’m off to Paradise Valley this afternoon.”

  “A golfing holiday?” said the Professor, eyeing the putter.

  “Yes, I’m looking forward to getting some golf.”

  “How is your game?”

  “Horrible,” Cyril was obliged to confess. “Mine is a sad and peculiar case. I have the theory of golf at my fingertips, but once out in the middle I do nothing but foozle.”

  “You should keep your head down.”

  “So Tommy Armour tells me, but up it comes.”

  “That’s Life.”

  “Or shall we say hell?”

  “If you prefer it.”

  “It seems the mot juste. But now to business. Miss Binstead tells me you have come to sign your contract. I have it here. It all appears to be in order except that the amount of the advance has not been decided on.”

  “And what are your views on that?”

  “I was thinking of a hundred dollars. You see,” said Cyril, falling smoothly into his stride, “a book like yours always involves a serious risk for the publisher owing to the absence of the Sex Motif, which renders it impossible for him to put a nude female of impressive vital statistics on the jacket and no hope of getting banned in Boston. Add the growing cost of paper and the ever-increasing demands of printers, compositors, binders and . . . why are you waving your hands like that?”

  “I have French blood in me. On the mother’s side.”

  “Well, I wish you wouldn’t. You’re making me sleepy.”

  “Oh, am I? How very interesting. Yes, I can see that your eyes are closing. You are becoming drowsy. You are falling asleep . . . you are falling asleep . . . asleep . . . asleep . . . asleep . . .”

  It was getting on for lunch time when Cyril awoke. When he did so, he found that the recent gargoyle was no longer with him. Odd, he felt, that the fellow should have gone before they had settled the amount of his advance, but no doubt he had remembered some appointment elsewhere. Dismissing him from his mind, Cyril resumed his putting, and soon after lunch he left for Paradise Valley.

  On the subject of Paradise Valley the public relations representative of the Paradise Hotel has expressed himself very frankly. It is, he says in his illustrated booklet, a dream world of breath-taking beauty, and its noble scenery, its wide open spaces, its soft mountain breezes and its sun-drenched pleasances impart to the jaded city worker a new vim and vigour and fill him so full of red corpuscles that before a day has elapsed in these delightful surroundings he is conscious of a je ne sais quoi and a bien être and goes about with his chin up and both feet on the ground, feeling as if he had just come back from the cleaner’s. And, what is more, only a step from the hotel lies the Squashy Hollow golf course, of whose amenities residents can avail themselves on payment of a green fee.

  What, however, the booklet omits to mention is that the Squashy Hollow course is one of the most difficult in the country. It was constructed by an exiled Scot who, probably from some deep-seated grudge against the human race, has modelled the eighteen holes on the nastiest and most repellent of his native land, so that after negotiating—say—the Alps at Prestwick the pleasure-seeker finds himself confronted by the Stationmaster’s Garden at St. Andrew’s, with the Eden and the Redan just around the corner.

  The type of golfer it attracts, therefore, is the one with high ideals and an implicit confidence in his ability to overcome the toughest obstacles; the sort who plays in amateur championships and mutters to himself “Why this strange weakness?” if he shoots worse than a seventy-five, and one look at it gave Cyril that uncomfortable feeling known to scientists as the heeby-jeebies. He had entered for the medal contest which was to take place tomorrow, for he always entered for medal contests, never being able to forget that he had once shot a ninety-eight and that this, if repeated, would with his handicap give him a sporting chance of success. But the prospect of performing in front of all these hardened experts created in him the illusion that caterpillars to the number of about fifty-seven were parading up and down his spinal cord. He shrank from exposing himself to their bleak contemptuous stares. His emotions when he did would, he knew, be similar in almost every respect to those of a mongrel which has been rash enough to wander into some fashionable Kennel Show.

  As, then, he sat on the porch of the Paradise Hotel on the morning before the contest, he was so far from being filled with bien être that he could not even achieve je ne sais quoi, and at this moment the seal was set on his despondency by the sight of Agnes Flack.

  Agnes Flack was a large young woman who on the first day of his arrival had discovered that he was a partner in a publishing firm and had immediately begun to speak of a novel which she had written and would be glad to have his opinion of when he had a little time to spare. And experience had taught him that when large young women wrote novels they were either squashily sentimental or so Chatterleyesque that it would be necessary to print them on asbestos, and he had spent much of his leisure avoiding her. She seemed now to be coming in his direction, so rising hastily he made on winged feet for the bar. Entering it at a rapid gallop, he collided with a solid body, and this proved on inspection to be none other than Professor Pepperidge Farmer, looking more sinister than ever in Bermuda shorts, a shirt like a Turner sunset and a Panama hat with a pink ribbon round it.

  He stood amazed. There was, of course, no reason why the other should not have been there, for the hotel was open to all whose purses were equal to the tariff, but somehow he seemed out of place, like a ghoul at a garden party or a vampire bat at a picnic.

  “You!” he exclaimed. “What ever became of you that morning?”

  “You allude to our previous meeting?” said the Professor. “I saw you had dozed off, so I tiptoed out without disturbing you. I thought it would be better to resume our acquaintance in these more agreeable surroundings. For if you are thinking that my presence here is due to one of those coincidences which are so strained and inartistic, you are wrong. I came in the hope that I might be able to do something to improve your golf game. I feel I owe you a great deal.”

  “You do? Why?”

  “We can go into that some other time. Tell me, how is the golf going? Any improvement?”

  If he had hoped to receive confidences, he could not have put the question at a better moment. Cyril did not habitually bare his soul to comparative strangers, but now he found himself unable to resist the urge. It was as though the Professor’s query had drawn a cork and brought all his doubts and fears and inhibitions foaming out like ginger pop from a ginger pop bottle. As far as reticence was concerned, he might have been on a psychoanalyst’s couch at twenty-five dollars the half hour. In burning words he spoke of the coming medal contest, stressing his qualms and the growing coldness of his feet, and the Professor listened attentively, clicking a sympathetic tongue from time to time. It was plain that though he looked like something Charles Addams might have thought up when in the throes of a hangover, if Mr. Addams does ever have hangovers, he had a feeling heart.

  “I’m paired with a fellow called Sidney McMurdo, who they tell me is the club champion, and I fear his scorn. It’s going to take me at least a hundred and fifteen shots for the round, and on each of those hundred and fifteen shots Sidney McMurdo will look at me as if I were something slimy and obscene that had crawled out from under a flat stone. I shall feel like a crippled leper, and so,” said Cyri
l, concluding his remarks, “I have decided to take my name off the list of entrants. Call me weak if you will, but I can’t face it.”

  The Professor patted him on the shoulder in a fatherly manner and was about to speak, but before he could do so Cyril heard his name paged and was told that he was wanted on the telephone. It was some little time before he returned, and when he did the dullest eye could see that something had occurred to ruffle him. He found Professor Farmer sipping a lemon squash, and when the Professor asked him if he would care for one of the same, he thundered out a violent No.

  “Blast and damn all lemon squashes!” he cried vehemently. “Do you know who that was on the phone? It was Popgood, my senior partner. And do you know what he said? He wanted to know what had got into me to make me sign a contract giving you five thousand dollars advance on that book of yours. He said you must have hypnotized me.”

  A smile, probably intended to be gentle, but conveying the impression that he was suffering from some internal disorder, played over the Professor’s face.

  “Of course I did, my dear fellow. It was one of the ordinary business precautions an author has to take. The only way to get a decent advance from a publisher is to hypnotize him. That was what I was referring to when I said I owed you a great deal. But for you I should never have been able to afford a holiday at a place like Paradise Valley where even the simplest lemon squash sets you back a prince’s ransom. Was Popgood annoyed?”

  “He was.”

  “Too bad. He should have been rejoicing to think that his money had been instrumental in bringing a little sunshine into a fellow creature’s life. But let us forget him and return to this matter of your golfing problems.”

  He had said the one thing capable of diverting Cyril’s thoughts from his incandescent partner. No twenty-four handicap man is ever deaf to such an appeal.

  “You told me you had all the theory of the game at your finger-tips. Is that so? Your reading has been wide?”

  “I’ve read every golf book that has been written.”