The Golf Omnibus (63 page)

And now a new low level had been hit. A man—or, rather, a creature bearing the outward semblance of a man—had teed up one of the dreadful things for a girl, a fragile, sensitive girl, to drive—not, which would have been bad enough, in some casual morning round, but at the very crisis of the Ladies' Spring Medal Competition.

“I came down on it like a thousand of bricks,” proceeded Evangeline, quivering at the memory, “with every ounce of weight and muscle behind the shot. I thought for a moment I had broken in half. And talking,” she went on, a more cheerful note creeping into her voice, “of breaking things in half, if you wouldn't mind, darling, just climbing that tree and handing me down its contents, I will see what can be done with this driver.”

But Angus McTavish, who had been scanning the tree closely, shook his head. It was as if he deprecated the violence at which she hinted. Gently he led her from the spot, and it was not until they were the distance of a good iron shot away that he released her and replied to the protestations which she had been uttering.

“It is quite all right, dear,” he said. “Everything is in order.”

“Everything in order?” she faced him passionately. “What do you mean?”

Angus patted her hand.

“You were a little too overwrought to observe it, no doubt,” he said, “but there was a hornets' nest two inches above his head. I think we cannot be accused of being unduly sanguine if we assume that when he starts to . . . Ah!” said Angus, “Hark!”

Unmusical cries were ruining the peace of the spring evening.

“And look,” added Angus.

As he spoke, a form came sliding hastily down out of the tree. At a rapid pace it moved across the turf to the water beyond the eighteenth tee. It dived in and, having done so, seemed anxious to remain below the surface, for each time a head emerged from those smelly depths it went under again.

“Nature's remedy,” said Angus.

For a long minute Evangeline Brackett stood gazing silently, with parted lips. Then she threw her head back and from those parted lips there proceeded a silvery laugh so piercing in its timbre that an old gentleman practising approach shots at the seventeenth jerked his mashie sharply and holed out from eighty yards.

Angus McTavish patted her hand fondly. He was broad-minded, and felt that there were moments when laughter on the links was permissible.

IT WAS THE
day of the annual contest for the Mixed Foursomes Cup, and the Oldest Member, accompanied by the friend who was visiting him for the week-end, had strolled to the edge of the terrace to watch the first of the competitors drive off. As they came in sight of the tee the friend uttered an exclamation of astonishment, almost of awe.

“What an extraordinarily handsome woman,” he whispered.

He was alluding to the girl who had just teed up her ball and was now inspecting, with a sort of queenly dignity, the bag of clubs offered to her by her caddie—who, one felt, had he any sense of the fitness of things, not that caddies ever have, would have dropped on one knee like a medieval page in the presence of royalty.

The Oldest Member nodded.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Mrs. Plinlimmon is much admired in our little circle.”

“Her face seems oddly familiar. I have seen it before somewhere.”

“No doubt in the newspapers. As Clarice Fitch she was a good deal in the public eye.”

“Clarice Fitch? The girl who used to fly oceans and things and cross Africa on foot and what not?”

“Precisely. She is now Mrs. Ernest Plinlimmon.”

The Oldest Member's friend eyed her thoughtfully as she took a driver from the bag.

“So that is Clarice Fitch. It must require a good deal of nerve to marry a girl like that. She reminds me of Cleopatra. What sort of fellow is her husband?”

“You see him now, going up to speak to her. The smallish man with the spectacles.”

“What! The little chap who looks like the second vice-president of something?”

“Darling,” said the small man in the spectacles.

“Yes, darling?”

“Not the driver, darling.”

“Oh, darling!”

“No, darling, You know how shaky you are with the wood, darling. Take your iron, darling.”

“Must I, darling?”

“Yes, darling.”

“Very well. You know best, darling.”

On the face of the Oldest Member's friend, as the Sage led him back to their table, there was a look of profound amazement.

“Well,” he said, “if I hadn't heard it with my own ears, I would never have believed it. If you had told me that a girl like that would merely coo meekly when informed that she was incapable of using her wooden clubs, I should have laughed derisively. If ever a wife had all the earmarks of being the dominant member of the firm⎯”

“Quite,” assented the Oldest Member. “I admit that that is the impression she conveys. But I can assure you that ever since they were united it is Ernest Plinlimmon who, kindly but with quiet decision, has ruled the home.”

“What is he? A lion tamer?”

“No. He is, and has been for many years, an average-adjuster.”

“Good at his job, I'll bet.”

“Very. I am told by those in a position to know that he adjusts a beautiful average. He is also a devout and quite skilful golfer, playing nowadays to a handicap of four. The inside story of his wooing is a curious one, and affords a striking illustration of a truth in which I have always been a firm believer—that there is a Providence which watches over all pious golfers. In the events which led up to the union of Ernest Plinlimmon and Clarice Fitch one sees the hand of this Providence clearly in operation.”

When Clarice Fitch, some two years ago, came to spend the summer with an aunt who resides in this neighbourhood, the effect of her advent upon the unattached males of the place was, as you can readily imagine (said the Oldest Member), stupendous. There was a sort of universal gasp, and men who had been playing for years in baggy flannel trousers with mud stains on them rushed off in a body to their tailors, bidding them work night and day on form-fitting suits of plus-fours. Moustaches were curled, ties straightened, and shoes cleaned that had not been cleaned for months.

And of all those stunned by the impact of her personality, none was more powerfully affected than Ernest Faraday Plinlimmon. Within half an hour of their first meeting, he had shaved twice, put on three clean collars, given all his hats to the odd-job man, and started reading Portuguese Love Sonnets. I met him later in the day at the chemist's. He was buying Stick-o, a preparation for smoothing the hair and imparting to it a brilliant gloss, and inquiring of the man behind the counter if he knew of anything that would be good for freckles.

But, like all the others, he made no progress in his wooing, and eventually, as nearly everybody does around these parts sooner or later, he came to consult me.

“It is killing me, this great love of mine,” he said. “I cannot eat, cannot sleep. It has begun to affect my work. Sometimes in my office, as I start to adjust an average, her face rises between me and it, so that I adjust it all crooked and have to start over again. What can I do to melt that proud, cold heart? There must be some method, if one only knew.”

One of the compensations of age is that it enables a man to stand aside from the seething cauldron of sex and note in a calm and dispassionate spirit what is going on inside the pot. In my capacity of oldest inhabitant of this hamlet I have often been privileged to see more than can the hot-blooded young principals involved. I had very clear ideas as to what Clarice Fitch found wrong with the attentions to which she had been subjected since her arrival, and these I imparted now to Ernest Plinlimmon.

“What none of you young fellows appear to realize,” I said, “is that Clarice Fitch is essentially a romantic girl. The fact that she crosses Africa on foot, when it would be both quicker and cheaper to take a train, proves this. And, being romantic, she demands a romantic lover. You, like all the rest, cringe before her. Naturally, she compares you to your disadvantage with such a man as 'Mgoopi 'Mgwumpi.”

Ernest Plinlimmon's eyes widened and his mouth fell open, causing him to look exactly like a fish I once caught off Brighton pier.

“Such a man as—what was that name again?”

“'Mgoopi 'Mgwumpi. He was the chief, if I remember rightly, of the Lesser 'Mgowpi. I gather that his personality made a deep impression upon Miss Fitch, and that, but for the fact that he was as black as the ace of spades and already had twenty-seven wives and a hundred spares, something might have come of it. At any rate, she as good as told me the other day that what she was looking for was someone who, while possessing the engaging spiritual qualities of this chief, was rather blonder and a bachelor.”

“H'm,” said Ernest Plinlimmon.

“I can give you another pointer,” I proceeded. “She was speaking to me yesterday in terms of admiration of the hero of a novel by a female writer, whose custom it was to wear riding-boots and to kick the girl of his heart with them.”

Ernest paled.

“You don't really think she wants a man like that?”

“I do.”

“You don't feel that if a fellow had a nice singing voice and was gentle and devoted—”

“I do not.”

“But this kicking business . . . I mean, to start with, I haven't any riding-boots . . .”

“Sir Jasper Medallion-Carteret would also on occasion drag the girl round the room by her hair.”

“He would?”

“He would.”

And Miss Fitch appeared to approve?”

“She did.”

“I see,” said Ernest Plinlimmon. “I see. Yes. Yes, I see. We', good night.”

He withdrew with bent head, and I watched him go with a pang of pity. It all seemed so hopeless, and I knew it would be futile to try to console him with any idle
talk about time effecting a cure. Ernest Plinlimmon was not one of your butterflies who flit from flower to flower. He was an average-adjuster, and average-adjusters are like chartered accountants. When they love, they give their hearts for ever.

Nor did it seem likely that any words of mine to Clarice would bring about an improvement in the general conditions. Still, I supposed I had better try what I could do. My advanced years had enabled me to form an easy friendship with the girl, so it was not difficult for me to bring the conversation round to her intimate affairs. What in a younger man would be impertinence becomes, when the hair has whitened, mere kindly interest.

Taking advantage, accordingly, of a statement on her part to the effect that she was bored, that life seemed to stretch before her, arid and monotonous, like the Gobi Desert, I ventured to suggest that she ought to get married.

She raised her shapely eyebrows.

“To one of these local stiffs, do you mean?”

I sighed. I could not feel that this was promising.

“You are not attracted by the young bloods of our little community?”

A laugh like the screech of a parakeet in the jungles of Peru broke from her lips.

“Young what? Of all the human rabbits I ever encountered, of all the corpses that had plainly been some little time in the water . . .” She paused for an instant, and seemed to muse. “Listen,” she went on, her voice soft with a kind of wistfulness, “do you think that novelists draw their characters from real people?”

I sighed again.

“I was reading Chapter Twenty-six of that book last night. There's a meet, and Lady Pamela rides over hounds, and Sir Jasper catches her a juicy one with his hunting crop just on the spot where it would make her think a bit. What a man!”

I sighed for the third time. It seemed so useless to try to give my unhappy young friend a build-up. When a woman is to all intents and purposes wailing for a demon lover, it requires super-salesmanship to induce her to accept on the this-is-just-as-good principle an Ernest Plinlimmon.

However, I made the attempt.

“I know a man living in this vicinity who loves you fondly.”

“I know fifty, the poor jellyfish. To which of the prawns in aspic do you refer?”

“Ernest Plinlimmon.”

She laughed again, jovially this time.

“Oh, golly! The ‘Trees' bird.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He was round at our house last night, and my aunt dragged him to the piano, and he sang ‘Only God Can Make A Tree'.”

My heart sank. I was stunned that Ernest Plinlimmon could have been guilty of such a piece of mad folly. I could have warned him, had I known that he was a man who had it in his system, that there is something about that particular song which seems to take all the virility out of the singer and leave him spiritually filleted.
Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun, singing that passage about “A nest of robins in her hair,” or whatever it is, would have seemed mild and spineless.

“You have mentioned,” said Clarice Fitch, sneering visibly, “the one man on this earth whom I wouldn't marry to please a dying grandfather.”

“He has a handicap of seven,” I urged.

“What at?”

“I refer to the game of golf.”

“Well, I don't play golf, so that's wasted on me. All I know is that he's the worst yesser in a neighbourhood congested with yes-men and looks like a shrimp with dyspepsia. Weedy little brute. Wears spectacles. Sort of fellow who couldn't say Bo to a cassowary. What do you imagine this Plinlimmon pimple would do if he had to face a leaping lion?”

“I have no doubt that he would conduct himself like a perfect gentleman,” I said, a little coldly, for the girl's hard arrogance had annoyed me.

“Well, you can tell him from me,” said Clarice Fitch, “that if he was the last man in the world, I wouldn't give him a second look. Nothing could be fairer than that.”

I broke the news to Ernest that evening. It seemed to me kinder to acquaint him with the true position of affairs than to allow him to go on eating his heart out in empty hope. I found him practising chip shots near the seventh green and put the thing to him squarely.