“You are engaged?”
“And how!”
“Oh, Sidney!”
He stiffened.
“That will be all of that ‘Oh, Sidney!’ stuff,” he retorted with spirit. “I don’t see what you have to beef about. You were offered the opportunity of a merger, and when you failed to take up your option I was free, I presume, to open negotiations elsewhere. As might have been foreseen, I was snapped up the moment it got about that I was in the market.”
Agnes Flack bridled.
“I’m not jealous.”
“Then what’s your kick?”
“It’s just that I want to see you happy.”
“I am.”
“How can you be happy with a woman who looks like a snake with hips?”
“She has every right to look like a snake with hips. In a former incarnation she used to be Cleopatra. I,” said Sidney McMurdo, straightening his tie, “was Antony.”
“Who told you that?”
“She did. She has all the facts.”
“She must be crazy.”
“Not at all. I admit that for a while at our first meeting some such thought did cross my mind, but the matter is readily explained. She is a novelist. You may have heard of Cora McGuffy Spottsworth?”
Agnes uttered a cry.
“What? Oh, she can’t be.”
“She has documents to prove it.”
“But Sidney, she’s awful. At my school two girls were expelled because they were found with her books under their pillows. Her publisher’s slogan is ‘Spottsworth for Blushes’. You can’t intend to marry a woman who notoriously has to write her love scenes on asbestos.”
“Well, what price your intending to marry a prominent international plug-ugly who thinks nothing of shooting people with elephant guns?”
“Only African chiefs.”
“African chiefs are also God’s creatures.”
“Not when under the influence of trade gin, Jack says. He says you have to shoot them with elephant guns then, It means nothing more, he says, than if you drew their attention to some ruling by Emily Post. Besides, he knows Bobby Jones.”
“So does Bobby Jones’s grocer. Does he play golf himself? That’s the point.”
“He plays beautifully.”
“So does Cora. She expects to win the Women’s Singles.”
Agnes drew herself up haughtily. She was expecting to win the Women’s Singles herself.
“She does, does she?”
“Yes, she does.”
“Over my dead body.”
“That would be a mashie niblick shot,” said Sydney McMurdo thoughtfully. “She’s wonderful with her mashie niblick.”
With a powerful effort Agnes Flack choked down her choler.
“Well, I hope it will be all right,” she said.
“Of course it will be all right. I’m about the luckiest man alive.”
“In any case, it’s fortunate that we found out our mistake in time.”
“I’ll say so. A nice thing it would have been, if all this had happened after we were married. We should have had one of those situations authors have to use a row of dots for.”
“Yes. Even if we had been married, I should have flown to Jack.”
“And I should have flown to Cora.”
“He once killed a lion with a sardine opener.”
“Cora once danced with the Duke of Windsor,” said Sidney McMurdo, and with a proud tilt of the chin, went off to give his betrothed lunch.
As a close student of the game of golf in all its phases over a considerable number of years, I should say that Women’s Singles at fashionable seashore resorts nearly always follow the same general lines. The participants with a reasonable hope of bringing home the bacon seldom number more than three or four, the rest being the mere dregs of the golfing world who enter for the hell of the thing or because they know they look well in sports clothes. The preliminary rounds, accordingly, are never worth watching or describing. The rabbits eliminate each other with merry laughs and pretty squeals, and the tigresses massacre the surviving rabbits, till by the time the semi-final is reached, only grim-faced experts are left in.
It was so with the tourney this year at East Bampton. Agnes had no difficulty in murdering the four long handicap fluffies with whom she was confronted in the early stages, and entered the semi-final with the feeling that the competition proper was now about to begin.
Watching, when opportunity offered, the play of the future Mrs Sidney McMurdo, who also had won through to the penultimate round, she found herself feeling a little easier in her mind. Cora McGuffy Spottsworth still looked to her like one of those women who lure men’s souls to the shoals of sin, but there was no question that, as far as knowing what to do with a number four iron when you put it into her hands, was concerned, she would make a good wife. Her apprehensions regarding Sidney’s future were to a certain extent relieved.
It might be that his bride at some future date would put arsenic in his coffee or elope with the leader of a band, but before she did so, she would in all essential respects be a worthy mate. He would never have to suffer that greatest of all spiritual agonies, the misery of the husband whose wife insists on his playing with her daily because the doctor thinks she ought to have fresh air and exercise. Cora McGuffy Spottsworth might, and probably would, recline on tiger skins in the nude and expect Sidney to drink champagne out of her shoe, but she would never wear high heels on the links or say Tee-hee when she missed a putt. On the previous day, while eliminating her most recent opponent, she had done the long hole in four, and Agnes, who had just taken a rather smelly six, was impressed.
The afternoon of the semi-final was one of those heavy, baking afternoons which cause people to crawl about saying that it is not the heat they mind, but the humidity. After weeks of sunshine the weather was about to break. Thunder was in the air, and once sprightly caddies seemed to droop beneath the weight of their bags. To Agnes, who was impervious to weather conditions, this testing warmth was welcome. It might, she felt, affect her adversary’s game.
Cora McGuffy Spottsworth and her antagonist drove off first, and once again Agnes was impressed by the lissom fluidity of the other’s swing. Sidney, who was hovering lovingly in the offing, watched her effort with obvious approval.
“You won’t want that one back, old girl,” he said, and a curious pang shot through Agnes, as if she had bitten into a bad oyster. How often had she heard him say the same thing to her! For an instant she was aware of a sorrowful sense of loss. Then her eye fell on Captain Jack Fosdyke, smoking a debonair cigarette, and the anguish abated. If Captain Jack Fosdyke was not a king among men, she told herself, she didn’t know a king among men when she saw one.
When the couple ahead were out of distance, she drove off and achieved her usual faultless shot. Captain Jack Fosdyke said it reminded him of one he had made when playing a friendly round with Harry Hopkins, and they moved off.
From the moment when her adversary had driven off the first tee, Agnes Flack had realized that she had no easy task before her, but one that would test her skill to the utmost. The woman in question looked like a schoolmistress, and she hit her ball as if it had been a refractory pupil. And to increase the severity of Agnes’s ordeal, she seldom failed to hit it straight.
Agnes, too, being at the top of her form, the result was that for ten holes the struggle proceeded with but slight advantage to either. At the sixth, Agnes, putting superbly, contrived to be one up, only to lose her lead on the seventh, where the schoolmistress holed out an iron shot for a birdie. They were all square at the turn, and still all square on the eleventh tee. It was as Agnes was addressing her ball here that there came a roll of thunder, and the rain which had been threatening all the afternoon began to descend in liberal streams.
It seemed to Agnes Flack that Providence was at last intervening on behalf of a good woman. She was always at her best in dirty weather. Give her a tropical deluge accompanied by thunderbolts, a
nd other Acts of God, and she took on a new vigour. And she just had begun to be filled with a stern joy, the joy of an earnest golfer who after a gruelling struggle feels that the thing is in the bag, when she was chagrined to observe that her adversary appeared to be of precisely the same mind. So far from being discouraged by the warring elements, the schoolmistress plainly welcomed the new conditions. Taking in the rain at every pore with obvious relish, she smote her ball as if it had been writing rude things about her on the blackboard, and it was as much as Agnes could do to halve the eleventh and twelfth.
All this while Captain Fosdyke had been striding round with them, chatting between the strokes of cannibals he had met and lions which had regretted meeting him, but during these last two holes a strange silence had fallen upon him. And it was as Agnes uncoiled herself on the thirteenth tee after another of her powerful drives that she was aware of him at her elbow, endeavouring to secure her attention. His coat collar was turned up, and he looked moist and unhappy.
“I say,” he said, “what about this?”
“What?”
“This bally rain.”
“Just a Scotch mist.”
“Don’t you think you had better chuck it?” Agnes stared.
“Are you suggesting that I give up the match?”
“That’s the idea.”
Agnes stared again.
“Give up my chance of getting into the final just because of a drop of ram?”
“Well, we’re getting dashed wet, what? And golf’s only a game, I mean, if you know what I mean.”
Agnes’s eyes flashed like the lightning which had just struck a tree not far off.
“I would not dream of forfeiting the match,” she cried. “And if you leave me now, I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Oh, right ho,” said Captain Jack Fosdyke. “Merely a suggestion.”
He turned his collar up a little higher, and the game proceeded. Agnes was rudely shaken. Those frightful words about golf being only a game kept ringing in her head. This thing had come upon her like one of the thunderbolts which she liked to have around her when playing an important match. In the brief period of time during which she had known him, Captain Jack Fosdyke’s game had appealed to her depths. He had shown himself a skilful and meritorious performer, at times brilliant. But what is golfing skill, if the golfing spirit is absent?
Then a healing thought came to her. He had but jested. In the circles in which he moved, the gay world of African chiefs and English dukes in which he had so long had his being, light-hearted badinage of this kind was no doubt de rigueur. To hold his place in that world, a man had to be a merry kidder, a light josher and a mad wag. It was probably because he thought she needed cheering up that he had exercised his flashing wit.
Her doubts vanished. Her faith in him was once more firm. It was as if a heavy load had rolled off her heart. Playing her second, a brassie shot, she uncorked such a snorter that a few moments later she found herself one up again.
As for Captain Jack Fosdyke, he was fully occupied with trying to keep the rain from going down the back of his neck and reminding himself that Agnes was the only niece of Josiah Flack, a man who had a deep sense of family obligations, more money than you could shake a stick at and one foot in the grave.
Whether or not Agnes’s opponent was actually a schoolmistress, I do not know. But if she was, the juvenile education of this country is in good hands. In a crisis where a weaker woman might have wilted—one down and five to play—she remained firm and undaunted. Her hat was a frightful object, but it was still in the ring. She fought Agnes, hole after hole, with indomitable tenacity. The fourteenth and fifteenth she halved, but at the sixteenth she produced another of those inspired iron shots and the match was squared. And, going from strength to strength, she won the seventeenth with a twenty-foot putt.
“Dormy one,” she said, speaking for the first time.
It is always a mistake to chatter on the links. It disturbs the concentration. To this burst of speech I attribute the fact that the schoolmistress’s tee shot at the eighteenth was so markedly inferior to its predecessors. The eighteenth was a short hole ending just outside the club-house and even rabbits seldom failed to make the green. But she fell short by some yards, and Agnes, judging the distance perfectly, was on and near the pin. The schoolmistress chipped so successfully with her second that it seemed for an instant that she was about to hole out. But the ball stopped a few inches from its destination, and Agnes, with a three-foot putt for a two, felt her heart leap up like that of the poet Wordsworth when he saw a rainbow. She had not missed more than one three-foot putt a year since her kindergarten days.
It was at this moment that there emerged from the chub-house where it had been having a saucer of tea and a slice of cake, a Pekinese dog of hard-boiled aspect. It strolled on to the green, and approaching Agnes’s ball subjected it to a pop-eyed scrutiny.
There is a vein of eccentricity in all Pekes. Here, one would have said, was a ball with little about it to arrest the attention of a thoughtful dog. It was just a regulation blue dot, slightly battered. Yet it was obvious immediately that it had touched a chord. The animal sniffed at it with every evidence of interest and pleasure. It patted it with its paw. It smelled it. Then, lying down, it took it in its mouth and began to chew meditatively.
To Agnes the mere spectacle of a dog on a green had been a thing of horror. Brought up from childhood to reverence the rules of Greens Committees, she had shuddered violently from head to foot. Recovering herself with a powerful effort, she advanced and said ‘Shoo!’ The Peke rolled its eyes sideways, inspected her, dismissed her as of no importance or entertainment value, and resumed its fletcherizing. Agnes advanced another step, and the schoolmistress for the second time broke her Trappist vows.
“You can’t move that dog,” she said. “It’s a hazard.”
“Nonsense.”
“I beg your pardon, it is. If you get into casual water, you don’t mop it up with a brush and pail, do you? Certainly you don’t. You play out of it. Same thing when you get into a casual dog.”
They train these schoolmistresses to reason clearly. Agnes halted, baffled. Then her eye fell on Captain Jack Fosdyke, and she saw the way out.
“There’s nothing in the rules to prevent a spectator, meeting a dog on the course, from picking it up and fondling it.”
It was the schoolmistress’ turn to be baffled. She bit her lip in chagrined silence.
“Jack, dear,” said Agnes, “pick up that dog and fondle it. And,” she added, for she was a quick-thinking girl, “when doing so, hold its head over the hole.”
It was a behest which one might have supposed that any knight, eager to win his lady’s favour, would have leaped to fulfil. But Captain Jack Fosdyke did not leap. There was a dubious look on his handsome face, and he scratched his chin pensively.
“Just a moment,” he said. “This is a thing you want to look at from every angle. Pekes are awfully nippy, you know. They make sudden darts at your ankles.”
“Well, you like a spice of danger.”
“Within reason, dear lady, within reason.”
“You once killed a lion with a sardine opener.”
“Ah, but I first quelled him with the power of the human eye. The trouble with Pekes is, they’re so short-sighted, they can’t see the human eye, so you can’t quell them with it.”
“You could if you put your face right down close.”
“If,” said Captain Jack Fosdyke thoughtfully.
Agnes gasped. Already this afternoon she had had occasion to stare at this man. She now stared again.
“Are you afraid of a dog?”
He gave a light laugh.
“Afraid of dogs? That would amuse the boys at Buckingham Palace, if they could hear it. They know what a daredevil I was in the old days when I was Deputy Master of the Royal Buck-hounds. I remember one morning coming down to the kennels with my whistle and my bag of dog biscuits and finding one of the pers
onnel in rather an edgy mood. I spoke to it soothingly— ‘Fido, Fido, good boy, Fido!’—but it merely bared its teeth and snarled, and I saw that it was about to spring. There wasn’t a moment to lose. By a bit of luck the Bluemantle Pursuivant at Arms had happened to leave his blue mantle hanging over the back of a chair. I snatched it up and flung it over the animal’s head, after which it was a simple task to secure it with stout cords and put on its muzzle. There was a good deal of comment on my adroitness. Lord Slythe and Sayle, who was present, I remember, said to Lord Knubble of Knopp, who was also present, that he hadn’t seen anything so resourceful since the day when the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster rang in a bad half-crown on the First Gold Stick in Waiting.”
It was the sort of story which in happier days had held Agnes Flack enthralled, but now it merely added to her depression and disillusionment. She made a last appeal to his better feelings.
“But, Jack, if you don’t shift this beastly little object, I shall lose the match.”
“Well, what does that matter, dear child? A mere tiddly seaside competition.”
Agnes had heard enough. Her eyes were stony.
“You refuse? Then our engagement is at an end.”
“Oh, don’t say that.”
“I do say that.”
It was plain that a struggle was proceeding in Captain Jack Fosdyke’s soul, or what one may loosely call his soul. He was thinking how rich Josiah Flack was, how fond of his niece, and how frail. On the other hand, the Peke, now suspecting a plot against its well-being, had bared a small but serviceable tooth at the corner of its mouth. The whole situation was very difficult.
As he stood there at a man’s cross-roads, there came out of the club—house, smoking a cigarette in a sixteen—inch holder, an expensively upholstered girl with platinum hair and vermilion finger-nails. She bent and picked the Peke up.
“My little angel would appear to be interfering with your hockey-knocking,” she said. “Why, hello, Captain Fosdyke. You here? Come along in and give me a cocktail.”
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