'So would you be limping, if a human boll-weevil had just hit you with a hard ball.'
'What!'
'Yes. I was strolling along and I had stopped to tie my shoelace, when suddenly something came whizzing along like a bullet and struck me.'
'Good heavens! Where?'
'Never mind,' said Clarice Fitch austerely.
‘I mean,' I hastened to explain, 'where did this happen?'
'Down in that field there.'
'You mean the eighteenth fairway?'
‘I don't know what you call it.'
'Was the man driving off the tee?'
'He was standing on a sort of grass platform thing, if that is what you mean.'
'What did he say when he came up to you?’
'He hasn't come up to me yet. Wait till he does! Yes, by the sacred crocodile of the Zambesi, just give me two minutes to rub in arnica and another to powder my nose, and I'll be ready for him. Ready and waiting! I'll startle his weak intellect, the miserable little undersized microbe!'
I started at the familiar phrase.
'Was it Ernest Plinlimmon who did this?’
'It was. Well, wait till I meet him.'
She limped into the clubhouse, and I hurried down to the eighteenth fairway. I felt that Ernest Plinlimmon should be warned that there lurked against his coming an infuriated female explorer whose bite might well be fatal.
The course has been altered recently, but at the time of which I am speaking the eighteenth hole was the one which terminated below the terrace. It was a nice two-shotter - uphill, but with nothing to trouble the man who was steady off the tee. A good drive left you with a mashie-niblick chip for your second: after a drive that was merely moderate a full mashie or even an iron was required. As I came over the hill, I saw Ernest Plinlimmon and his partner, in whom I recognized a prominent local dub, emerging from the rough on the right. Apparently, the latter had sliced from the tee, and Ernest had been helping him find his ball. Ernest's own blue dot was lying well up the slope, some eighty yards short of the green. I eyed it with respect. Clarice Fitch's evidence had shown that it had been travelling with considerable speed when it encountered her person. But for that unfortunate incident, therefore, it would, presumably, have been good for at least another fifty yards. A superb drive.
The dub played a weak and sinful spoon shot out to the right, and I met Ernest where his ball lay. He blinked at me inquiringly, as he came up, and I saw with surprise that his face was totally bare of glass.
'Oh, it's you,' he said. ‘I didn't recognize you at first. I broke my spectacles at the fifteenth, and can't see a thing unless it's within a dozen yards or so.'
I clicked my tongue sympathetically.
‘Then you are out of the running, I suppose?"
'Out of the running?' cried Ernest Plinlimmon jubilantly. ‘I. should say not. I've been playing like a book. Not being able to see seems to help me to concentrate Knowing that I can't follow the ball, I don't loft my head. I've got this medal competition in the bag.
'You have?'
'Definitely in the good old sack. I've just been talking to Bassett, and he tells me that Perkins, leading the field by a matter of three strokes, has finished in a net seventy-five. There nobody behind me, so that when I finish the returns will be a in. I have just played a net seventy-one. I shall be on with a m seventy-two. Then lay it dead with my approach putt and stuff it in with my second, and there I shall be - net seventy-four. It's a walk-over. The thing that makes me a little sore, though, is that, if it hadn't been for the sheep, I might have chipped to the pin and needed only one putt. The animal must have lost me a full fifty yards.'
'Ernest,' I began. I 'My drive - an absolute pippin - was stopped by a sheep. It was standing in the middle of the fairway when I teed up just now. I should have waited, I suppose, but I hate waiting on the tee. So I took a chance, and, apparently, plugged it. Infernal nuisance. It was one of those low, skimming shots and would have run a mile but for that. Still, it doesn't really matter. I can get down in three more on my head.'
I reconsidered my intention of warning the young man of what awaited him at journey's end. Obviously, if the state of the score was as he had said, nothing would deter him from holing out. It might be, I felt, that he would be able to make a quick getaway after sinking the winning putt. After all, Clarice Fitch, though she had talked lightly of taking two minutes for the rubbing of arnica on her wounds, would probably not emerge once more into public life for much nearer ten. I said nothing, accordingly, and watched him play a nice mashie shot.
'Where did it go?' he asked.
'On,' I replied, 'but a little wide of the pin’
'How wide?'
'Possibly fifteen feet.'
'Easy,' said Ernest Plinlimmon. 'I've been laying fifteen-footers dead all the way round.'
I preserved a tactful silence, but I was disturbed in my mind. I had not liked the airy way in which he had spoken of being on with a net seventy-two, and I did not like the airy way in which he now spoke of laying fifteen-foot putts dead. Confidence, of course, is an admirable asset to a golfer, but it should be an unspoken confidence. It is perilous to put it into speech. The gods of golf he in wait to chasten the presumptuous.
Ernest Plinlimmon did not lay his approach putt dead. The green was one of those tricky ones. It undulated. Sometimes at the close of a tight match I have fancied that I have seen it heave, like a stage sea. Ernest putted well, but not well enough. A hummock for which he had not allowed caught the ball and deflected it, leaving him a yard and a half from the hole, that fatal distance which has caused championships to change hands.
He shaped for the shot, however, with undiminished confidence.
'And now,' Ernest Plinlimmon, 'to stuff it in.'
His partner, who had picked up and joined us, caught my eye. He had pursed his lips gravely. He was thinking, I knew, as I was, that no good could come of this loose talk.
Ernest Plinlimmon addressed his ball. The line was quite straight and clear, and all that was needed was the right strength. But, alas, nothing is more difficult at the end of a tense round than to estimate strength. As the ball left the club head, it looked to me destined for the happy ending. It trickled straight for the hole, and I was just expecting the joyful rattle which would signify that all was well, when it seemed to falter. Two feet.. . one foot... six inches ... it was still moving Three inches... two inches.... I held my breath.
Would it? Could it?
No! Barely an inch from the cup it wavered, hesitated am stopped. He tapped it in, but it was too late. Ernest Plinlimmon had merely tied for the summer medal, and would have to undergo all the spiritual agonies of a play-off.
It was a moment when unthinking men would have said ‘Tough luck!' or some such banality. But-Ernest's partner and I were seasoned golfers and knew that on these occasions silence is best. We exchanged a mute glance of pity and terra and then our attention was diverted to the noticeable behavior of the young man himself.
I had always known Ernest Plinlimmon as a mild, reserve man, and the sight of his contorted face gave me, I must confess, a rather painful shock. His eyes were wild, and the veins stood out on his forehead. I waited with something like apprehension for his first words, but when he spoke it was to utter simple query.
'Where,' inquired Ernest Plinlimmon, 'is that sheep?’
'What sheep?' said his partner.
‘The sheep. The sheep I drove into.' His eyes rolled. 'The best drive I ever made in my life, a drive that would have put me within easy chip shot of the pin, ruined by a blasted sheep. I now wish to be led into the presence of that sheep so that I may strangle it with my bare hands.'
'It didn't look like a sheep to me,' said his partner. 'More like Miss Fitch, if you follow what I mean.'
'Miss Fitch?'
I gave a violent start. The excitement of watching those final putts had driven everything from my mind. I now remembered that the lad stood in imminent peril, and must b
e warned to fly while there was yet time. At any moment Clarice Fitch would be coming out of the clubhouse, breathing fire.
'Ernest,' I said rapidly, 'our friend here is quite correct. Miss Fitch was on the fairway, tying her shoelace...'
'What!'
Tying her shoelace.'
'What!'
Tying her ...'
My voice died away. Clarice Fitch was standing on the edge of the green, her arms folded, her eyes shooting out little sparks.
'Let us get this straight,' said Ernest Plinlimmon, in a strange quiet voice. 'You say that this infernal girl stopped in the middle of the eighteenth fairway, in the middle of a medal competition, in the middle of a man's drive who only needed a four to win, in order to tie her shoelace... her blasted shoelace ... her damned blanked ...'
A dark flood swept over the young man's face. His teeth came together with a click. For an instant, his mouth opened and his nose twitched and he seemed to be struggling for utterance: then, as if realizing the futility of trying to find words that would do justice to his feelings, he raised his putter and hurled it violently from him. And Clarice Fitch, who had unfolded her arms and was advancing with a slow, sinister stride, like the snow leopard of the Himalayas, got it squarely on the shin-bone.
It was a moment which I shall not readily forget. I have always ranked it, indeed, among the high spots of my life.
Looking back, I find each smallest detail of the scene rising before my eyes as if it had happened yesterday. I see the setting sun crimsoning the western sky. I see the long shadows creeping over the terrace. I see Clarice Fitch hopping about on one leg, while Ernest Plinlimmon, his wrath turned off as if with a tap, stands gaping at the sight of what he has done. And over all, after that first sharp, shrill, piercing cry of agony, there broods a strange, eerie silence.
How long this silence lasted I am not able to say, for at these supreme moments one cannot measure time. But presently Clarice Fitch ceased to hop and, coming to a halt with a hand pressed to her shin, began to speak.
One of the advantages enjoyed by a girl who gets about a bit is that in the crisis of life she is not confined to the poor resources of her native tongue. I doubt if Clarice Fitch would have been able to say a tithe of the things she wished to say, had she been compelled to say them in English. The fact that as the result of her travels she had at her command a round dozen or so of African dialects enabled her now to express herself with a rich breadth which could not but awe even one who, like myself, did not understand a single word. There was no need to understand words. Given the situation, one got the general sense, and as the address gathered speed and volume I found myself edging away from Ernest Plinlimmon, fearful lest the lightning playing about his head might include me in its activities. So might the children of Israel have edged away from one of their number who had been so unfortunate as to fall out with the prophet Jeremiah.
And Ernest, as I say, stood gaping. One can dimly picture the young man's feelings. There before him was the shin he loved to touch, and he had sloshed it with a putter. In a similar situation, no doubt, Sir Jasper Medallion-Carteret would merely have sneered. Or he might even have followed up the putter with the number four iron. But Ernest was no Sir Jasper. He had the air of one who is out on his feet.
Over the quiet green the stream of words flowed on without a break. There seemed to be no reason why it should not go on for ever. And then, suddenly, in the very midst of what appeared to be a particularly powerful passage, Clarice Fitch broke down. Bursting into tears, she buried her face in her hands and began hopping again.
I cannot explain this. An instant before, one would have said she was incapable of such a feminine weakness. The only theory I can advance is that, having reached this point in her remarks, she had suddenly become aware once more of the agony which oratory had for the time enabled her to forget. At any rate, be that as it may, she now burst into tears and buried her face in her hands.
The effect on Ernest Plinlimmon was as if some magic spell had been removed, bringing life again to his congealed frame. He had been standing transfixed, incapable of movement. He now gave a convulsive start, like a somnambulist rudely awakened, and bounded forward – unless I am mistaken in my conjecture – with the idea of grovelling at her feet and beating his head upon the ground. His eyes were glaring. His lips were twisted. He waved his arms in frantic appeal. And just as he reached the girl she raised her head, and his fist, shooting out in a passionate gesture of remorse, caught her on the right eye.
The result was extraordinary. If he had been practising for weeks with a punching bag he could not have brought off a sweeter left hook jab. It travelled about eight inches with all his weight behind it, and it sent Clarice Fitch over the side of the green as if she had been shot from a gun. One moment she was among those present; the next, she had disappeared and a fountain of sand showed that she had found the pot bunker which stands at the base of the slope to catch a hooked second.
Ernest Plinlimmon congealed once more, and again time stood still.
As before, one could, in a dim way, picture his feelings. Plainly, he was running over in his mind the recent series of events. He loved this girl and yearned for her to be his. And, in addition to singing ‘Only God Can Make A Tree’ in her presence, he had – in the course of some fifteen minutes – biffed her with a golf-ball, cracked her over the shin with a putter and pasted her in the right eye with his fist. Not so good, he was evidently thinking. I saw him put a hand up to straighten his spectacles, only to lower it again when he found no spectacles there. The action was that of a man in a trance.
And he was still standing there, when there was a scrambling sound and Clarice's head appeared over the edge of the green. And at the sight of it I uttered an involuntary cry of joy, for in her left eye - the other was closed and already assuming a blackish tint -1 saw the light of love.
A moment ago, I said that I had been able to read Ernest Plinlimmon's mind. Now, even more clearly, I could read that of Clarice Fitch. It did not need words to tell me that she had been thinking things over in the bunker and had arrived at an arresting conclusion.
That drive that had struck her amidships she had attributed to carelessness. That hurled putter had seemed to her a putter hurled at random. But this punch in the eye had put an entirely different complexion on the matter. That, she knew, had been deliberate and calculated, the violent attempt at self-expression of a man who, though mild of aspect and intensely spectacled, possessed the soul of an infuriated rhinoceros and did not intend to allow girls to abuse him in Swahili without lodging a protest. And if that blow had been deliberate, so must the assault with the driver and putter have been deliberate. In other words, this man, crazed with love, had been wooing her just as she had hoped some day some man would come and woo her. Even the chief of the Lesser 'Mgowpi had not been so rough as this, and, as for Sir Jasper Medallion-Carteret, he became, in comparison with Ernest Plinlimmon, mere small-town stuff.
For an instant, she stood there, rubbing her shin and her eye alternately. Then with outstretched hands she advanced towards young Plinlimmon.
‘My man!' she said.
Ernest Plinlimmon did not appear to get it. 'Eh?’ he said, blinking. 'Your what?'
‘My great, strong, wonderful man!'
Once more, he blinked. 'Who, me?'
She flung her arms about his neck in an ecstasy of devotion, so that even Ernest Plinlimmon was able, though still somewhat fogged, to get the general idea. He was bewildered, yes, but he retained sufficient intelligence to do his bit. I saw him stand on tiptoe, for she was considerably the taller, and kiss her. Then with a little sigh of happiness he adjusted himself to her embrace as if he had been an average, and I turned to his partner who, during the recent events, had been practising short putts.
'Come,' I said. 'Let us leave them together.’
Chapter Six
The Masked Troubadour
A young man came out of the Drones Club and paused on
the steps to light a cigarette. As he did so, there popped up -apparently through the pavement, for there had been no sign of him in the street a moment before - a seedy individual who touched his hat and smiled ingratiatingly. The young man seemed to undergo a brief struggle - then he felt in his pocket, pressed a coin into the outstretched palm, and passed on.
It was a pretty, heart-warming little scene, the sort of thing you see in full-page pictures in the Christmas numbers, but the only emotion it excited in the bosoms of the two Beans who had witnessed it from the window of the smoking-room was amazement.
'Well, stap my vitals,' said the first Bean. 'If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I wouldn't have believed it.' 'Nor me,' said the second Bean.
'Believed what?' asked a Crumpet, who had come up behind them.
The two Beans turned to him as one Bean and spoke in alternate lines, like a Greek chorus. 'Freddie Widgeon -'
was outside there a moment ago -' ‘- and a chap came up and touched his hat -' ‘- and then he touched Freddie.'
'And Freddie, though he was on the steps at the time -' '- and so had only to leap backwards in order to win to safety -'
'- stood there and let the deal go through.' The Crumpet clicked his tongue.
'What sort of a looking chap was he? Small and a bit greasy?'
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