Nothing Serious (21 page)

“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?”

“Not
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 while. 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 than 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 underhandicapped.
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 has 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 baffling 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 clubhouse, 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—”

“My
niblick, please,” said Agnes Flack to her caddie.

She
took the club, poised it for an instant as if judging its heft, then began to
move forward swiftly and stealthily, like a tigress of the jungle.

Until
that moment, I had always looked on Smallwood Bessemer as purely the man of
intellect, what you would describe as the thoughtful reflective, type. But he
now showed that he could, if the occasion demanded it, be the man of action. I
do not think I have ever seen anything move quicker than the manner in which he
dived head-foremost into the thick clump of bushes which borders the eighteenth
tee. One moment, he was there; the next, he had vanished. Eels could have taken
his correspondence course.

It was
a move of the highest strategic quality. Strong woman though Agnes Flack was,
she was afraid of spiders. For an instant, she stood looking wistfully at the
bushes; then, hurling her niblick into them, she burst into tears and tottered
into the arms of Sidney McMurdo, who came up at this juncture. He had been
following the match at a cautious distance.