The Golf Omnibus

by P. G. Wodehouse

  On the way to the second tee George discoursed on the beauties of Nature, pointing out at considerable length how exquisitely the silver glitter of the lake harmonized with the vivid emerald turf near the hole and the duller green of the rough beyond it. As Celia teed up her ball, he directed her attention to the golden glory of the sand-pit to the left of the flag. It was not the spirit in which to approach the lake-hole, and I was not surprised when the unfortunate girl’s ball fell with a sickening plop half-way across the water.

  “Where you went wrong there,” said George, “was that you made the stroke a sudden heave instead of a smooth, snappy flick of the wrists. Pressing is always bad, but with the mashie⎯”

  “I think I will give you this hole,” said Celia to me, for my shot had cleared the water and was lying on the edge of the green. “I wish I hadn’t used a new ball.”

  “The price of golf-balls,” said George, as we started to round the lake, “is a matter to which economists should give some attention. I am credibly informed that rubber at the present time is exceptionally cheap. Yet we see no decrease in the price of golf-balls, which, as I need scarcely inform you, are rubber-cored. Why should this be so? You will say that the wages of skilled labour have gone up. True. But⎯”

  “One moment, George, while I drive,” I said. For we had now arrived at the third tee.

  “A curious thing, concentration,” said George, “and why certain phenomena should prevent us from focusing our attention⎯ This brings me to the vexed question of sleep. Why is it that we are able to sleep through some vast convulsion of Nature when a dripping tap is enough to keep us awake? I am told that there were people who slumbered peacefully through the San Francisco earthquake, merely stirring drowsily from time to time to tell an imaginary person to leave it on the mat. Yet these same people⎯”

  Celia’s drive bounded into the deep ravine which yawns some fifty yards from the tee. A low moan escaped her.

  “Where you went wrong there⎯” said George.

  “I know,” said Celia. “I lifted my head.”

  I had never heard her speak so abruptly before. Her manner, in a girl less noticeably pretty, might almost have been called snappish. George, however, did not appear to have noticed anything amiss. He filled his pipe and followed her into the ravine.

  “Remarkable,” he said, “how fundamental a principle of golf is this keeping the head still. You will hear professionals tell their pupils to keep their eye on the ball. Keeping the eye on the ball is only a secondary matter. What they really mean is that the head should be kept rigid, as otherwise it is impossible to⎯”

  His voice died away. I had sliced my drive into the woods on the right, and after playing another had gone off to try to find my ball, leaving Celia and George in the ravine behind me. My last glimpse of them showed me that her ball had fallen into a stone-studded cavity in the side of the hill, and she was drawing her niblick from her bag as I passed out of sight. George’s voice, blurred by distance to a monotonous murmur, followed me until I was out of earshot.

  I was just about to give up the hunt for my ball in despair, when I heard Celia’s voice calling to me from the edge of the undergrowth. There was a sharp note in it which startled me.

  I came out, trailing a portion of some unknown shrub which had twined itself about my ankle.

  “Yes?” I said, picking twigs out of my hair.

  “I want your advice,” said Celia.

  “Certainly. What is the trouble? By the way,” I said, looking round, “where is your fiancé?”

  “I have no fiancé,” she said, in a dull, hard voice.

  “You have broken off the engagement?”

  “Not exactly. And yet—well, I suppose it amounts to that.”

  “I don’t quite understand.”

  “Well, the fact is,” said Celia, in a burst of girlish frankness, “I rather think I’ve killed George.”

  “Killed him, eh?”

  It was a solution that had not occurred to me, but now that it was presented for my inspection I could see its merits. In these days of national effort, when we are all working together to try to make our beloved land fit for heroes to live in, it was astonishing that nobody before had thought of a simple, obvious thing like killing George Mackintosh. George Mackintosh was undoubtedly better dead, but it had taken a woman’s intuition to see it.

  “I killed him with my niblick,” said Celia.

  I nodded. If the thing was to be done at all, it was unquestionably a niblick shot.

  “I had just made my eleventh attempt to get out of that ravine,” the girl went on, “with George talking all the time about the recent excavations in Egypt, when suddenly—you know what it is when something seems to snap⎯”

  “I had the experience with my shoe-lace only this morning.”

  “Yes, it was like that. Sharp—sudden—happening all in a moment. I suppose I must have said something, for George stopped talking about Egypt and said that he was reminded by a remark of the last speaker’s of a certain Irishman⎯”

  I pressed her hand.

  “Don’t go on if it hurts you,” I said, gently.

  “Well, there is very little more to tell. He bent his head to light his pipe, and well—the temptation was too much for me. That’s all.”

  “You were quite right.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I certainly do. A rather similar action, under far less provocation, once made Jael the wife of Heber the most popular woman in Israel.”

  “I wish I could think so too,” she murmured. “At the moment, you know, I was conscious of nothing but an awful elation. But—but—oh, he was such a darling before he got this dreadful affliction. I can’t help thinking of G-George as he used to be.”

  She burst into a torrent of sobs.

  “Would you care for me to view the remains?” I said.

  “Perhaps it would be as well.”

  She led me silently into the ravine. George Mackintosh was lying on his back where he had fallen.

  “There!” said Celia.

  And, as she spoke, George Mackintosh gave a kind of snorting groan and sat up. Celia uttered a sharp shriek and sank on her knees before him. George blinked once or twice and looked about him dazedly.

  “Save the women and children!” he cried. “I can swim.”

  “Oh, George!” said Celia.

  “Feeling a little better?” I asked.

  “A little. How many people were hurt?”

  “Hurt?”

  “When the express ran into us.” He cast another glance around him. “Why, how did I get here?”

  “You were here all the time,” I said.

  “Do you mean after the roof fell in or before?”

  Celia was crying quietly down the back of his neck.

  “Oh, George!” she said, again.

  He groped out feebly for her hand and patted it.

  “Brave little woman!” he said. “Brave little woman! She stuck by me all through. Tell me—I am strong enough to bear it—what caused the explosion?”

  It seemed to me a case where much unpleasant explanation might be avoided by the exercise of a little tact.

  “Well, some say one thing and some another,” I said. “Whether it was a spark from a cigarette⎯”

  Celia interrupted me. The woman in her made her revolt against this well-intentioned subterfuge.

  “I hit you, George!”

  “Hit me?” he repeated, curiously. “What with? The Eiffel Tower?”

  “With my niblick.”

  “You hit me with your niblick? But why?”

  She hesitated. Then she faced him bravely.

  “Because you wouldn’t stop talking.”

  He gaped.

  “Me!” he said. “I wouldn’t stop talking! But I hardly talk at all. I’m noted for it.”

  Celia’s eyes met mine in agonized inquiry. But I saw what had happened. The blow, the sudden shock, had operated on George’s brain-cells in
such a way as to effect a complete cure. I have not the technical knowledge to be able to explain it, but the facts were plain.

  “Lately, my dear fellow,” I assured him, “you have dropped into the habit of talking rather a good deal. Ever since we started out this afternoon you have kept up an incessant flow of conversation!”

  “Me! On the links! It isn’t possible.”

  “It is only too true, I fear. And that is why this brave girl hit you with her niblick. You started to tell her a funny story just as she was making her eleventh shot to get her ball out of this ravine, and she took what she considered the necessary steps.”

  “Can you ever forgive me, George?” cried Celia.

  George Mackintosh stared at me. Then a crimson blush mantled his face.

  “So I did! It’s all beginning to come back to me. Oh, heavens!”

  “Can you forgive me, George?” cried Celia again.

  He took her hand in his.

  “Forgive you?” he muttered. “Can you forgive me? Me—a tee-talker, a green-gabbler, a prattler on the links, the lowest form of life known to science! I am unclean, unclean!”

  “It’s only a little mud, dearest,” said Celia, looking at the sleeve of his coat. “It will brush off when it’s dry.”

  “How can you link your lot with a man who talks when people are making their shots?”

  “You will never do it again.”

  “But I have done it. And you stuck to me all through! Oh, Celia!”

  “I loved you, George!”

  The man seemed to swell with a sudden emotion. His eye lit up, and he thrust one hand into the breast of his coat while he raised the other in a sweeping gesture. For an instant he appeared on the verge of a flood of eloquence. And then, as if he had been made sharply aware of what it was that he intended to do, he suddenly sagged. The gleam died out of his eyes. He lowered his hand.

  “Well, I must say that was rather decent of you,” he said.

  A lame speech, but one that brought an infinite joy to both his hearers. For it showed that George Mackintosh was cured beyond possibility of relapse.

  “Yes, I must say you are rather a corker,” he added.

  “George!” cried Celia.

  I said nothing, but I clasped his hand; and then, taking my clubs, I retired. When I looked round she was still in his arms. I left them there alone, alone together in the great silence.

  And so (concluded the Oldest Member) you see that a cure is possible, though it needs a woman’s gentle hand to bring it about. And how few women are capable of doing what Celia Tennant did. Apart from the difficulty of summoning up the necessary resolution, an act like hers requires a straight eye and a pair of strong and supple wrists. It seems to me that for the ordinary talking golfer there is no hope. And the race seems to be getting more numerous every day. Yet the finest golfers are always the least loquacious. It is related of the illustrious Sandy McHoots that when, on the occasion of his winning the British Open Championship, he was interviewed by reporters from the leading daily papers as to his views on Tariff Reform, Bimetallism, the Trial by Jury System, and the Modern Craze for Dancing, all they could extract from him was the single word “Mphm!” Having uttered which, he shouldered his bag and went home to tea. A great man. I wish there were more like him.

  7

  ORDEAL BY GOLF

  A PLEASANT BREEZE played among the trees on the terrace outside the Marvis Bay Golf and Country Club. It ruffled the leaves and cooled the forehead of the Oldest Member, who, as was his custom of a Saturday afternoon, sat in the shade on a rocking-chair, observing the younger generation as it hooked and sliced in the valley below. The eye of the Oldest Member was thoughtful and reflective. When it looked into yours you saw in it that perfect peace, that peace beyond understanding, which comes at its maximum only to the man who has given up golf.

  The Oldest Member has not played golf since the rubber-cored ball superseded the old dignified gutty. But as a spectator and philosopher he still finds pleasure in the pastime. He is watching it now with keen interest. His gaze, passing from the lemonade which he is sucking through a straw, rests upon the Saturday foursome which is struggling raggedly up the hill to the ninth green. Like all Saturday foursomes, it is in difficulties. One of the patients is zigzagging about the fairway like a liner pursued by submarines. Two others seem to be digging for buried treasure, unless—it is too far off to be certain—they are killing snakes. The remaining cripple, who has just foozled a mashie-shot, is blaming his caddie. His voice, as he upbraids the innocent child for breathing during his up-swing, comes clearly up the hill.

  The Oldest Member sighs. His lemonade gives a sympathetic gurgle. He puts it down on the table.

  How few men, says the Oldest Member, possess the proper golfing temperament! How few indeed, judging by the sights I see here on Saturday afternoons, possess any qualification at all for golf except a pair of baggy knickerbockers and enough money to enable them to pay for the drinks at the end of the round. The ideal golfer never loses his temper. When I played, I never lost my temper. Sometimes, it is true, I may, after missing a shot, have broken my club across my knees; but I did it in a calm and judicial spirit, because the club was obviously no good and I was going to get another one anyway. To lose one’s temper at golf is foolish. It gets you nothing, not even relief. Imitate the spirit of Marcus Aurelius. “Whatever may befall thee,” says that great man in his “Meditations”, “it was preordained for thee from everlasting. Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.” I like to think that this noble thought came to him after he had sliced a couple of new balls into the woods, and that he jotted it down on the back of his score-card. For there can be no doubt that the man was a golfer, and a bad golfer at that. Nobody who had not had a short putt stop on the edge of the hole could possibly have written the words: “That which makes the man no worse than he was makes life no worse. It has no power to harm, without or within.” Yes, Marcus Aurelius undoubtedly played golf, and all the evidence seems to indicate that he rarely went round in under a hundred and twenty. The niblick was his club.

  Speaking of Marcus Aurelius and the golfing temperament recalls to my mind the case of young Mitchell Holmes. Mitchell, when I knew him first, was a promising young man with a future before him in the Paterson Dyeing and Refining Company, of which my old friend, Alexander Paterson, was the president. He had many engaging qualities—among them an unquestioned ability to imitate a bulldog quarrelling with a Pekingese in a way which had to be heard to be believed. It was a gift which made him much in demand at social gatherings in the neighbourhood, marking him off from other young men who could only almost play the mandolin or recite bits of Gunga Din; and no doubt it was this talent of his which first sowed the seeds of love in the heart of Millicent Boyd. Women are essentially hero-worshippers, and when a warm-hearted girl like Millicent has heard a personable young man imitating a bulldog and a Pekingese to the applause of a crowded drawing-room, and has been able to detect the exact point at which the Pekingese leaves off and the bulldog begins, she can never feel quite the same to other men. In short, Mitchell and Millicent were engaged, and were only waiting to be married till the former could bite the Dyeing and Refining Company’s ear for a bit of extra salary.

  Mitchell Holmes had only one fault. He lost his temper when playing golf. He seldom played a round without becoming piqued, peeved, or—in many cases—chagrined. The caddies on our links, it was said, could always worst other small boys in verbal argument by calling them some of the things they had heard Mitchell call his ball on discovering it in a cuppy lie. He had a great gift of language, and he used it unsparingly. I will admit that there was some excuse for the man. He had the makings of a brilliant golfer, but a combination of bad luck and inconsistent play invariably robbed him of the fruits of his skill. He was the sort of player who does the first two holes in one under bogey and then takes an eleven at the third. The least thing upsets him on the links. He missed short
putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.

  It seemed hardly likely that this one kink in an otherwise admirable character would ever seriously affect his working or professional life, but it did. One evening, as I was sitting in my garden, Alexander Paterson was announced. A glance at his face told me that he had come to ask my advice. Rightly or wrongly, he regarded me as one capable of giving advice. It was I who had changed the whole current of his life by counselling him to leave the wood in his bag and take a driving-iron off the tee; and in one or two other matters, like the choice of a putter (so much more important than the choice of a wife), I had been of assistance to him.

  Alexander sat down and fanned himself with his hat, for the evening was warm. Perplexity was written upon his fine face.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

  “Keep the head still—slow back—don’t press,” I said, gravely. There is no better rule for a happy and successful life.

  “It’s nothing to do with golf this time,” he said. “It’s about the treasurership of my company. Old Smithers retires next week, and I’ve got to find a man to fill his place.”

  “That should be easy. You have simply to select the most deserving from among your other employees.”

  “But which is the most deserving? That’s the point. There are two men who are capable of holding the job quite adequately. But then I realize how little I know of their real characters. It is the treasurership, you understand, which has to be filled. Now, a man who was quite good at another job might easily get wrong ideas into his head when he became a treasurer. He would have the handling of large sums of money. In other words, a man who in ordinary circumstances had never been conscious of any desire to visit the more distant portions of South America might feel the urge, so to speak, shortly after he became a treasurer. That is my difficulty. Of course, one always takes a sporting chance with any treasurer; but how am I to find out which of these two men would give me the more reasonable opportunity of keeping some of my money?”

  I did not hesitate a moment. I held strong views on the subject of character-testing.