The Last Drive

by Rex Stout

  “Get it, Nibbie,” he commanded.

  The dog looked up at his master with an expression of amazed reproach. “Good heavens,” his eyes seemed to say, “didn’t you get over this?” Then he scurried down the bank, nosed about among the bushes at the water’s edge, and presently set up a plaintive whine. Mr. Jellie took his niblick from the caddie and scrambled down. There the ball lay, buried in the weeds. The next few seconds were full of action. Mr. Jellie swung savagely with the niblick once, twice, three times; the caddie held his hand tightly over his mouth; the dog let loose a series of fearful howls. Finally the ball, gouged from its nesting-­place, came to rest at the top of the further bank.

  From there it was an easy mashie approach to the green, on which Mr. Innes’s ball was already lying eight feet from the pin. Mr. Jellie holed out in two putts, and his opponent did the same.

  “Eight,” said Mr. Jellie.

  “Four,” said Mr. Innes.

  “That’s the match,” the other returned. “Better than I did with Tom Hudson yesterday. He ended it on the twelfth green. Come on, Nibbie.”

  Fifteen minutes later, as the two golfers passed down the piazza of the Grassview Country Club house on their way to the nineteenth hole, Mr. Jellie called out to Mac Donaldson, the club professional, who was loitering about:

  “Oh, Mac! Give Mr. Innes a box of balls and charge it to me.”

  Which explains why so poor a golfer as Aloysius Jellie never experienced any difficulty in getting a match. There was every reason why he should have been the most unpopular member of the Grassview Country Club. His average score for the eighteen holes was 121; he had once made a 98 and had framed the score card and hung it in the room which he kept at the club house the year round. He cut up turf frightfully; he was a strong man and his divots always flew so far away that no caddie could ever find them again. He refused to play in foursomes, and he was outspoken in his criticism of a bad shot, whenever and by whomsoever made.

  Worst of all, he was the owner of Nibbie. Where the dog got the name of Nibbie was Mr. Jellie’s secret, but it was openly asserted by other members of the club that it was a nickname, or term of endearment, derived from “niblick.” Whoever took Mr. Jellie on for a match was forced to deduct beforehand a considerable amount of the pleasure and profit of the encounter by discounting the presence of Nibbie. He was always at his master’s heels, and he was the only serious critic of his master’s play. If Mr. Jellie topped his drive or missed a two-footer Nibbie howled his disapproval and dismay. A long iron or brassie over a hazard, or a soaring recovery from a sandpit, or the holing of a 30 foot putt, was the signal for joyous barks and caperings. But he was always careful to indulge in none of these noisy demonstrations while his master’s opponent was addressing the ball; he appeared to know the etiquette as well as the science of the game. It was wonderful the way his actions and feelings responded to the movements of the little white sphere.

  “That dog,” said Mac Donaldson, the club pro, one day, “is Scotch. I don’t know what kinds of a dog it is, but it’s Scotch for sure. I never saw such an understanding of the game in any animal whatever, unless it was Tom Ferguson’s cow who lay down on Sandy MacRae’s ball so he couldn’t find it, and Tom won the hole. It’s a great dog, and I could name some humans he could give lessons to.”

  But it is certain that the other club members would never have stood for the ubiquitous Nibbie, with his eternal howlings and barkings, if they had not been so desirous to avoid offending Mr. Jellie; for Mr. Jellie, score 121, was always willing to play anyone on even terms for a box of balls or a set of clubs or a ten spot. He never won. The numbers of balls and mashies and drivers and putters he paid for every month was appalling. But he always refused to take a handicap.

  “I am a strong and fairly intelligent man,” he would say, “and I ought to be able to play golf as well as anyone. I refuse to baby myself with a handicap. Make it a ball a hole.”

  Then he would make the first in 9, and would probably be 61 at the turn. He usually took his defeats gracefully, but now and then after an unusually bad round he would become morose and refuse absolutely to utter a word. He was also known to lose his temper occasionally; once he had taken his bag of clubs and thrown them into the lake—the water hazard on the eleventh hole—and was prevented just in time from throwing his caddie in after them. It was truly pitiful, the earnest and determined manner in which he strove day after day to improve his game, and the sustained horror of his score.

  Then came Nibbie’s tragic end. Late one Saturday afternoon in May, there was gathered at the nineteenth hole a representative group of the members of the Grassview Country Club. Marsfield, the Egyptologist, was there, with his soft beard and sleepy, studious eyes; Innes and Fraser, lawyers; Huntington, Princeton professor; and several New York bankers and business men. They had just come in from the links; the day was hot and dry and they were emptying many tall glasses in which the cracked ice clinked.

  They were talking, of course, of Scores and Reasons Why, otherwise known as Alibis. Fraser was explaining that the bite of a mosquito while he was addressing the ball had cost him the fourteenth hole and probably the match (though he had finished four down); Marsfield, the Egyptologist, was telling of a 20 foot putt that went absolutely in the hole and then bounced out again; Innes was making sarcastic and pointed remarks concerning the incredible luck of Huntington, who had beaten him 2 and 1.

  “Ah,” exclaimed Marsfield suddenly, interrupting himself, “here comes Rogers. Lucky dog! He got Jellie today. He was out Wednesday too and had him then.”

  “A bit thick, I call it,” observed Penfield, who had once spent a month in England.

  “He takes poor old Jellie for too much of a good thing,” put in Huntington, glancing at the two men as they approached down the corridor.

  “But I say, look at Jellie’s face,” went on Penfield. “Must be one of his bad days. Just look at him.”

  It was indeed evident from the expression on Mr. Jellie’s face that he was far from happy. His eyes were drawn half shut, as if in pain, his lips were quivering with emotion and his face was very white. Mr. Rogers, his companion, appeared on the contrary to be making an attempt to conceal some secret inner pleasure. A scarcely repressed smile twisted his lips and a twinkle of delight shone from his eyes. As he reached the corner where the others were seated he greeted them with familiar heartiness and beckoned to the waiter for a glass of something. Mr. Jellie sank into a chair with the briefest of nods in reply to the others’ greetings, thrust his hands deep in his pockets and gazed straight ahead at nothing with his eyes still half closed as though to shut out some painful sight.

  It was Huntington who noticed at once an unusual vacancy in the atmosphere. He turned to Rogers to ask:

  “Where’s Nibbie?”

  Rogers grinned, glanced apprehensively at Mr. Jellie, and replied in one word:

  “Dead.”

  There was a chorus of astonished inquiry.

  “Yes, dead,” Rogers reiterated.

  “Dead as a dead dog. Jellie killed him.”

  “What!” There was unbelief in ten voices.

  Another broke in, Mr. Jellie himself.

  They all turned to him.

  “I suppose you’re glad of it,” he observed in a voice of mingled grief and indignation. “Well I’m not. I didn’t mean to do it. It was at the tenth hole. Rogers had me four down. Nibbie—” Mr. Jellie hesitated and gulped a little—“Nibbie had been very demonstrative all the way. I was 64 at the turn. I’d made a lot of rotten shots, and Nibbie was right after me all the time. You know how he feels—how he felt when I made a bad shot. Well, on the tenth I got a beauty from the tee, right down the aisle about 220 yards. On the second I took a brassie and carried the brook. It sure was a fine shot, I’ll leave it to Rogers.”

  Mr. Rogers nodded in confirmation. “I always have to play short there
myself,” he confessed.

  “But Nibbie must have thought I didn’t carry it,” Mr. Jellie went on. “He must have thought I made the brook. Anyway, he evidenced disapproval. It made me mad, that’s all there is to it. He’d been howling at me all day for my rotten shots, which he had a right to do, but that was the best brassie I’ve had for a month, and when he set up that yelp I turned before I thought and threw the club at him. Of course I didn’t mean to hit him, or at least didn’t mean to hurt him—”

  Mr. Jellie paused to control the tremble in his voice.

  “It must have caught him right in the temple,” he finished.

  It is not surprising that this recital of Nibbie’s death caused no demonstration of grief on the part of those who heard it. Call it heartlessness if you will; the reply is that these men were golfers with golfers’ nerves and that Nibbie had more than once made them miss a stroke. They did not even feign regret. They grinned openly; their remarks were for the most part facetious and satirical; one or two were openly exultant. There were ironic expressions of sympathy and advice.

  “One trouble is,” observed Rogers to the grief-stricken Jellie, “that now you’ll have no way of knowing when you make a bad shot.”

  “And probably,” added Huntington, “your game will suffer in consequence.”

  “Why not have the body stuffed and set it up on wheels?” suggested another. “The caddie could pull it around for you.”

  “Or have the hide cured and have a caddie bag made of it.”

  “Or use the hide for leather grips on your clubs.”

  “Anyway, you’re safe for awhile,” put in Marshfield, the Orientalist. “According to the old Egyptians, a dog’s soul roams the earth for three moons after his death. For that long, at least, Nibbie will be with you in spirit if not in body.”

  Mr. Jellie got up abruptly and removed his hands from his pockets.

  “You fellows think you’re funny,” he said quietly, looking from one to the other, “ but it’s no joke to me. Nibbie was the best friend I’ve ever had. He always found my ball in the rough, and he was a good sound critic.”

  “He was sound alright,” observed Tom Innes, “if you mean noisy.”

  “Oh, I know he was a nuisance to the rest of you,” Mr. Jellie agreed. “I don’t blame you any, but I can’t sit here and have a good time with Nibbie dead. I’m going up to my room.”

  And he did so.

  He remained in his room all evening without eating any dinner. He was in fact a very unhappy man. A bachelor without home ties, the possessor of an inherited fortune and therefore spared the worries of the business of making a living, golf had for three years been the absorbing interest of his life. And what, he asked himself, what would golf be without Nibbie? What—for instance—what if he did carry the bunker from the eighth tee? There would be no joyful bark from Nibbie to acclaim the performance. What if a thousand things? Nibbie was gone.

  His thoughts were dreary and melancholy as he crept between the sheets, and it was an hour before he slept.

  Perhaps it was during that hour that a certain fantastic idea first entered his brain. He had thought during the evening of many ways of paying tribute to Nibbie’s memory. He would give up golf. He would ask the club governors for permission to bury his dead at some appropriate spot on the links, say under the first tee. He would have the body stuffed and set up in his room. But finally he rejected all these plans in favor of one that had been suggested in a spirit of jocosity by someone downstairs. The more he considered it the better he liked it as a fitting and poetic method of expressing his sentiment for poor dead Nibbie.

  About noon of the following Monday accordingly, Mr. Jellie took a train to Jersey City, accompanied by two men carrying a large wooden box with rope handles. At the Jersey terminus they took a taxi and were driven to a remote part of the town where the streets were dirty, the dwellings poor and dingy, and the atmosphere tainted with the smoke odors of numerous factories.

  Before a door of one of the latter, marked “Office of the Darnton Tanning Company,” the taxi halted and Mr. Jellie sprang out, followed by the two men with the wooden box. Five minutes later they were ushered, box and all, into the office of the president of the company. This was a dapper little man with eyeglasses and an engaging smile who got up from his chair to greet Mr. Jellie with outstretched hand in an enthusiastic welcome.

  “Ah, Jellie, my boy,” said he, “what a surprise! Glad to see you again.”

  The visitor returned the greeting, then turned to the two men, who had deposited the box in the middle of the floor, gave them each a five dollar bill and dismissed them.

  “It’s been four years since we’ve met,” observed the president when they were alone.

  “All of that,” agreed Mr. Jellie, and there followed thirty minutes of reminiscences. After which Mr. Jellie came to the point of his visit. He first asked for a hammer, and when it arrived he removed the lid of the wooden box, disclosing to the other’s astonished view the carcass of a white dog.

  “There he is, Bill,” said Mr. Jellie sadly.

  “But what—what is it?” gasped Bill.

  “Nibbie,” replied Mr. Jellie. “My dog Nibbie. He died—he was killed Saturday on the links. I tell you what, Bill, he was an intelligent dog. He knew more about golf than I do. I want to pay proper respect to his memory. What I want to know is this, could you have the body skinned and cure the hide?”

  “Why—I suppose so—”

  “Then do so as a favor to me. I want the hide made as soft as possible. I want to use it for a particular purpose. I know it will be a lot of trouble, but I’ll pay well for it. You’ll do it, won’t you, Bill?”

  It appeared that Bill would. The details were discussed and it was decided that after being skinned Nibbie’s body should be sent to a nearby crematory. Then Bill wanted his old friend Jellie to go home with him to dinner, but Jellie managed somehow to get out of that, and by four o’clock he was again on a train headed for the Jersey hills and the Grassview Country Club.

  He played no golf that week. He had decided that so much was due to the memory of Nibbie. Those of the others who managed to get out for a day on the links tormented him without mercy, and when the Saturday weekend crowd arrived poor Jellie was forced to take to his room. Through the window he could see the smooth turf stretching away through the hills and woods, with here and there a spot of lighter hue that marked the putting greens, and he heard continually the sweet, seductive sound of the impact of wood on gutta percha. But he gritted his teeth and stuck to his decision, even throughout Sunday, when the putts trickle from dawn to dark and the tees grow hot.

  Tuesday morning a package arrived from Jersey City. Mr. Jellie opened it in feverish haste, and there in his hand lay the skin of poor Nibbie, dark, wrinkled, hairless, certainly unrecognizable. But it seemed to the bereft master that the thing was alive; he fancied that he felt in its soft texture a spirit, a sentient thrill, and he remembered what Marsfield had said of the old Egyptian belief concerning the soul of a dog.

  He took the skin down to the club professional, together with his bag of clubs, and said:

  “Mac, here’s a new kind of leather I got from a friend of mine. I think it ought to make a good grip. I’ve got eleven clubs here altogether. Do you think there’s enough in this piece to make grips for all of them?”

  The Scotchman took the skin and measured it, then made some calculations on a piece of paper.

  “Plenty, Mr. Jellie,” he replied. “What kind of leather is it?”

  “Why—why—” Mr. Jellie stammered. “It’s a sort of Egyptian leather,” he said finally. “I’d like to have the clubs tomorrow morning if possible.”

  The following day was Wednesday. Mr. Jellie was up early, as usual. After breakfast he went for a stroll in the woods back of the club house, but he was uncomfortable. He hadn’t swung at a ball for
ten days, and his hands itched. Any golfer can sympathize with him; who has not experienced that irresistible yearning to feel the ping of the wood, the sturdy impact of the iron? Mr. Jellie returned to the club house, and there, on the piazza, saw Monty Fraser gazing around him on every side as though in search of something.

  “Ah, how are you, Jellie,” exclaimed Fraser, his face suddenly brightening. “Thought I wouldn’t go in to the office today and ran over for a little fun. But I couldn’t find—”

  He stopped suddenly, his face falling.

  “But I forgot,” he continued. “You’re in mourning and won’t play.”

  “No; that’s all over,” returned Mr. Jellie, eagerly.

  “Then are you on for a match?”

  “Just waiting for one.”

  Whereupon Fraser repaired to the locker room and Mr. Jellie went upstairs to don their fighting clothes. On his way back down the latter stopped to get his clubs from the professional. They were all ready, with pieces of poor Nibbie’s skin wrapped neatly around the shafts.

  “That’s good leather, all right,” remarked Mac.

  “Want to put anything up?” asked Fraser as the other joined him at the caddie house.

  “Sure. Anything,” responded Mr. Jellie.

  “Box of balls?”

  “Sure.”

  “All right,” the other agreed; “but really, Jellie, you’ve got to take a handicap. It’s absurd. I go around in 85 to 90 and you average 115 or more. Take at least a stroke a hole. That’ll make the match interesting.”

  “No, I won’t,” said Mr. Jellie, stubbornly.

  And he wouldn’t, though Fraser argued with him clear to the tee. They tossed a coin and Fraser won the honor. He was a good driver, and he got a ball 220 yards down the center. Mr. Jellie teed up and took his driver from the caddie.

  It is amazing the number of extraneous and impertinent thoughts that can occupy a man’s mind when he is trying to hit a golf ball. Though skies tumble and the earth shakes on its foundations he is supposed to keep his eye and mind directed on the ball and nothing but the ball; but such is the perversity and levity of the human brain that at the most critical instant it is apt to be concerning itself with mere trifles, such as the latest quotation on C., A. & Q. or the price of your wife’s last hat. Mr. Jellie found himself considering the curious feel of the new grip on his driver. An inexplicable sensation seemed to communicate itself from the shaft into every part of his body, even to the tips of his toes; a sense of confidence, elation, mastery. Always before, when preparing to make a shot, he had been nervous, stiff, uncomfortable, and painfully doubtful of his ability to hit the ball at all; now he felt as though he could walk up carelessly and knock the thing a million miles.