“Am I to congratulate you?”
James breathed a deep breath.
“You are!” he said. “On an escape!”
“She refused you?”
“She didn’t get the chance. Old man, have you ever sent one right up the edge of that bunker in front of the seventh and just not gone in?”
“Very rarely.”
“I did once. It was my second shot, from a good lie, with the light iron, and I followed well through and thought I had gone just too far, and, when I walked up, there was my ball on the edge of the bunker, nicely teed up on a chunk of grass, so that I was able to lay it dead with my mashie-niblick, holing out in six. Well, what I mean to say is, I feel now as I felt then—as if some unseen power had withheld me in time from some frightful disaster.”
“I know just how you feel,” said Peter, gravely.
“Peter, old man, that girl said golf bored her pallid. She said she thought it was the silliest game ever invented.” He paused to mark the effect of his words. Peter merely smiled a faint, wan smile. “You don’t seem revolted,” said James.
“I am revolted, but not surprised. You see, she said the same thing to me only a few minutes before.”
“She did!”
“It amounted to the same thing. I had just been telling her how I did the lake-hole today in two, and she said that in her opinion golf was a game for children with water on the brain who weren’t athletic enough to play Animal Grab.”
The two men shivered in sympathy.
“There must be insanity in the family,” said James at last.
“That,” said Peter, “is the charitable explanation.”
“We were fortunate to find it out in time.”
“We were!”
“We mustn’t run a risk like that again.”
“Never again!”
“I think we had better take up golf really seriously. It will keep us out of mischief.”
“You’re quite right. We ought to do our four rounds a day regularly.”
“In spring, summer, and autumn. And in winter it would be rash not to practise most of the day at one of those indoor schools.”
“We ought to be safe that way.”
“Peter, old man,” said James, “I’ve been meaning to speak to you about it for some time. l’ve got Sandy MacBean’s new book, and I think you ought to read it. It is full of helpful hints.”
“James!”
“Peter!”
Silently the two men clasped hands. James Todd and Peter Willard were themselves again.
And so (said the Oldest Member) we come back to our original starting-point—to wit, that, while there is nothing to be said definitely against love, your golfer should be extremely careful how he indulges in it. It may improve his game or it may not. But, if he finds that there is any danger that it may not—if the object of his affections is not the kind of girl who will listen to him with cheerful sympathy through the long evenings, while he tells her, illustrating stance and grip and swing with the kitchen poker, each detail of the day’s round—then, I say unhesitatingly, he had better leave it alone. Love has had a lot of press-agenting from the oldest times; but there are higher, nobler things than love. A woman is only a woman, but a hefty drive is a slosh.
4
A MIXED THREESOME
IT WAS THE holiday season, and during the holidays the Greens Committees have decided that the payment of twenty guineas shall entitle fathers of families not only to infest the course themselves, but also to decant their nearest and dearest upon it in whatever quantity they please. All over the links, in consequence, happy, laughing groups of children had broken out like a rash. A wan-faced adult, who had been held up for ten minutes while a drove of issue quarrelled over whether little Claude had taken two hundred or two hundred and twenty approach shots to reach the ninth green sank into a seat beside the Oldest Member.
“What luck?” inquired the Sage.
“None to speak of,” returned the other, moodily. “I thought I had bagged a small boy in a Lord Fauntleroy suit on the sixth, but he ducked. These children make me tired. They should be bowling their hoops in the road. Golf is a game for grown-ups. How can a fellow play, with a platoon of progeny blocking him at every hole?”
The Oldest Member shook his head. He could not subscribe to these sentiments.
No doubt (said the Oldest Member) the summer golf-child is, from the point of view of the player who likes to get round the course in a single afternoon, something of a trial; but, personally, I confess, it pleases me to see my fellow human beings—and into this category golf-children, though at the moment you may not be broadminded enough to admit it, undoubtedly fall—taking to the noblest of games at an early age. Golf, like measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious. Let me tell you the story of Mortimer Sturgis, which illustrates what I mean rather aptly.
Mortimer Sturgis, when I first knew him, was a care-free man of thirty-eight, of amiable character and independent means, which he increased from time to time by judicious ventures on the Stock Exchange. Although he had never played golf, his had not been altogether an ill-spent life. He swung a creditable racket at tennis, was always ready to contribute a baritone solo to charity concerts, and gave freely to the poor. He was what you might call a golden-mean man, good-hearted rather than magnetic, with no serious vices and no heroic virtues. For a hobby, he had taken up the collecting of porcelain vases, and he was engaged to Betty Weston, a charming girl of twenty-five, a lifelong friend of mine.
I like Mortimer. Everybody liked him. But, at the same time, I was a little surprised that a girl like Betty should have become engaged to him. As I said before, he was not magnetic; and magnetism, I thought, was the chief quality she would have demanded in a man. Betty was one of those ardent, vivid girls, with an intense capacity for hero-worship, and I would have supposed that something more in the nature of a plumed knight or a corsair of the deep would have been her ideal. But, of course, if there is a branch of modern industry where the demand is greater than the supply, it is the manufacture of knights and corsairs; and nowadays a girl, however flaming her aspirations, has to take the best she can get. I must admit that Betty seemed perfectly content with Mortimer.
Such, then, was the state of affairs when Eddie Denton arrived, and the trouble began.
I was escorting Betty home one evening after a tea-party at which we had been fellow-guests, when, walking down the road, we happened to espy Mortimer. He broke into a run when he saw us, and galloped up, waving a piece of paper in his hand. He was plainly excited, a thing which was unusual in this well-balanced man. His broad, good-humoured face was working violently.
“Good news!” he cried. “Good news! Dear old Eddie’s back!”
“Oh, how nice for you, dear!” said Betty. “Eddie Denton is Mortimer’s best friend,” she explained to me. “He has told me so much about him. I have been looking forward to his coming home. Mortie thinks the world of him.”
“So will you, when you know him,” cried Mortimer. “Dear old Eddie! He’s a wonder! The best fellow on earth! We were at school and the ‘Varsity together. There’s nobody like Eddie! He landed yesterday. Just home from Central Africa. He’s an explorer, you know,” he said to me. “Spends all his time in places where it’s death for a white man to go.”
“An explorer!” I heard Betty breathe, as if to herself. I was not so impressed, I fear, as she was. Explorers, as a matter of fact, leave me a trifle cold. It has always seemed to me that the difficulties of their life are greatly exaggerated—generally by themselves. In a large country like Africa, for instance, I should imagine that it was almost impossible for a man not to get somewhere if he goes on long enough. Give me the fellow who can plunge into the bowels of the earth at Piccadilly Circus and find the right Tube train with nothing but a lot of misleading signs to guide him. However, we are not all constituted alike in this world and it was apparent from the flush on her cheek an
d the light in her eyes that Betty admired explorers.
“I wired to him at once,” went on Mortimer, “and insisted on his coming down here. It’s two years since 1 saw him. You don’t know how I have looked forward, dear, to you and Eddie meeting. He is just your sort. I know how romantic you are and keen on adventure and all that. Well, you should hear Eddie tell the story of how he brought down the bull bongo with his last cartridge after all the pongos, or native bearers, had fled into the dongo, or undergrowth.”
“I should love to!” whispered Betty, her eyes glowing. I suppose to an impressionable girl these things really are of absorbing interest. For myself bongos intrigue me even less than pongos, while dongos frankly bore me. “When do you expect him?”
“He will get my wire tonight. I’m hoping we shall see the dear old fellow tomorrow afternoon some time. How surprised old Eddie will be to hear that I’m engaged. He’s such a confirmed bachelor himself. He told me once that he considered the wisest thing ever said by human tongue was the Swahili proverb—’Whoso taketh a woman into his kraal depositeth himself straightway in the wongo.’ Wongo, he tells me, is a sort of broth composed of herbs and meat-bones, corresponding to our soup. You must get Eddie to give it you in the original Swahili. It sounds even better.”
I saw the girl’s eyes flash, and there came into her face that peculiar set expression which married men know. It passed in an instant, but not before it had given me material for thought which lasted me all the way to my house and into the silent watches of the night. I was fond of Mortimer Sturgis, and I could see trouble ahead for him as plainly as though I had been a palmist reading his hand at two guineas a visit. There are other proverbs fully as wise as the one which Mortimer had translated from the Swahili, and one of the wisest is that quaint old East London saying, handed down from one generation of costermongers to another, and whispered at midnight in the wigwams of the whelk-seller! “Never introduce your donah to a pal.” In those seven words is contained the wisdom of the ages.
I could read the future so plainly. What but one thing could happen after Mortimer had influenced Betty’s imagination with his stories of his friend’s romantic career, and added the finishing touch by advertising him as a woman-hater? He might just as well have asked for his ring back at once. My heart bled for Mortimer.
I happened to call at his house on the second evening of the explorer’s visit, and already the mischief had been done.
Denton was one of those lean, hard-bitten men with smouldering eyes and a brick-red complexion. He looked what he was, the man of action and enterprise. He had the wiry frame and strong jaw without which no explorer is complete, and Mortimer, beside him, seemed but a poor, soft product of our hot-house civilization. Mortimer, I forgot to say, wore glasses; and, if there is one time more than another when a man should not wear glasses, it is while a strong-faced, keen-eyed wanderer in the wilds is telling a beautiful girl the story of his adventures.
For this was what Denton was doing. My arrival seemed to have interrupted him in the middle of his narrative. He shook my hand in a strong, silent sort of way, and resumed:
“Well, the natives seemed fairly friendly, so I decided to stay the night.”
I made a mental note never to seem fairly friendly to an explorer. If you do, he always decides to stay the night.
“In the morning they took me down to the river. At this point it widens into a kongo, or pool, and it was here, they told me, that the crocodile mostly lived, subsisting on the native oxen—the short-horned jongos—which, swept away by the current while crossing the ford above, were carried down on the longos, or rapids.
It was not, however, till the second evening that I managed to catch sight of his ugly snout above the surface. I waited around, and on the third day I saw him suddenly come out of the water and heave his whole length on to a sandbank in midstream and go to sleep in the sun. He was certainly a monster—fully thirty—you have never been in Central Africa, have you, Miss Weston? No? You ought to go there!—fully fifty feet from tip to tail. There he lay, glistening. I shall never forget the sight.”
He broke off to light a cigarette. I heard Betty draw in her breath sharply. Mortimer was beaming through his glasses with the air of the owner of a dog which is astonishing a drawing-room with its clever tricks.
“And what did you do then, Mr. Denton?” asked Betty, breathlessly.
“Yes, what did you do then, old chap?” said Mortimer.
Denton blew out the match and dropped it on the ash-tray.
“Eh? Oh,” he said, carelessly, “I swam across and shot him.”
“Swam across and shot him!”
“Yes. It seemed to me that the chance was too good to be missed. Of course, I might have had a pot at him from the bank, but the chances were I wouldn’t have hit him in a vital place. So I swam across to the sandbank, put the muzzle of my gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. I have rarely seen a crocodile so taken aback.”
“But how dreadfully dangerous!”
“Oh, danger!” Eddie Denton laughed lightly. “One drops into the habit of taking a few risks out there, you know. Talking of danger, the time when things really did look a little nasty was when the wounded gongo cornered me in a narrow tongo and I only had a pocket-knife with everything in it broken except the corkscrew and the thing for taking stones out of horses’ hoofs. It was like this⎯”
I could bear no more. I am a tender-hearted man, and I made some excuse and got away. From the expression on the girl’s face I could see that it was only a question of days before she gave her heart to this romantic newcomer.
As a matter of fact, it was on the following afternoon that she called on me and told me that the worst had happened. I had known her from a child, you understand, and she always confided her troubles to me.
“I want your advice,” she began. “I’m so wretched!”
She burst into tears. I could see the poor girl was in a highly nervous condition, so I did my best to calm her by describing how I had once done the long hole in four. My friends tell me that there is no finer soporific, and it seemed as though they may be right, for presently, just as I had reached the point where I laid my approach-putt dead from a distance of fifteen feet, she became quieter. She dried her eyes, yawned once or twice, and looked at me bravely.
“I love Eddie Denton!” she said.
“I feared as much. When did you feel this coming on?”
“It crashed on me like a thunderbolt last night after dinner. We were walking in the garden, and he was just telling me how he had been bitten by a poisonous zongo, when I seemed to go all giddy. When I came to myself I was in Eddie’s arms. His face was pressed against mine, and he was gargling.”
“Gargling?”
“I thought so at first. But he reassured me. He was merely speaking in one of the lesser-known dialects of the Walla-Walla natives of Eastern Uganda, into which he always drops in moments of great emotion. He soon recovered sufficiently to give me a rough translation, and then I knew that he loved me. He kissed me. I kissed him. We kissed each other.”
“And where was Mortimer all this while?”
“Indoors, cataloguing his collection of vases.”
For a moment, I confess, I was inclined to abandon Mortimer’s cause. A man, I felt, who could stay indoors cataloguing vases while his fiancée wandered in the moonlight with explorers deserved all that was coming to him. I overcame the feeling.
“Have you told him?”
“Of course not.”
“You don’t think it might be of interest to him?”
“How can I tell him? It would break his heart. I am awfully fond of Mortimer. So is Eddie. We would both die rather than do anything to hurt him. Eddie is the soul of honour. He agrees with me that Mortimer must never know.”
“Then you aren’t going to break off your engagement?”
“I couldn’t. Eddie feels the same. He says that, unless something can be done, he will say good-bye to me and creep fa
r, far away to some distant desert, and there, in the great stillness, broken only by the cry of the prowling yongo, try to forget.”
“When you say ‘unless something can be done,’ what do you mean? What can be done?”
“I thought you might have something to suggest. Don’t you think it possible that somehow Mortimer might take it into his head to break the engagement himself?”
“Absurd! He loves you devotedly.”
“I’m afraid so. Only the other day I dropped one of his best vases, and he just smiled and said it didn’t matter.”
“I can give you even better proof than that. This morning Mortimer came to me and asked me to give him secret lessons in golf.”
“Golf! But he despises golf.”
“Exactly. But he is going to learn it for your sake.”
“But why secret lessons?”
“Because he wants to keep it a surprise for your birthday. Now can you doubt his love?”
“I am not worthy of him!” she whispered.
The words gave me an idea.
“Suppose,” I said, “we could convince Mortimer of that!”
“I don’t understand.”
“Suppose, for instance, he could be made to believe that you were, let us say, a dipsomaniac.”
She shook her head. “He knows that already.”
“What!”
“Yes; I told him I sometimes walked in my sleep.”
“I mean a secret drinker.”
“Nothing will induce me to pretend to be a secret drinker.”
“Then a drug-fiend?” I suggested, hopefully.
“I hate medicine.”
“I have it!” I said. “A kleptomaniac.”
“What is that?”
“A person who steals things.”
“Oh, that’s horrid.”
“Not at all. It’s a perfectly ladylike thing to do. You don’t know you do it.”
“But, if I don’t know I do it, how do I know I do it?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I mean, how can I tell Mortimer I do it if I don’t know?”
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