“Hoy!” said Sidney.
“Yes?” said Bessemer.
“You know that advice you gave me?”
“You took it, I hope?”
“Yes,” said Sidney. “And a rather unfortunate thing has occurred. How it happened, I can’t say, but I’ve gone and got engaged.”
“Too bad,” said Bessemer sympathetically. “There was always that risk, of course. The danger on these occasions is that one may overdo the thing and become too fascinating. I ought to have warned you to hold yourself in. Who is the girl?”
“A frightful pie-faced little squirt named Celia Todd,” said Sidney and hung up with a hollow groan.
To say that this information stunned Smallwood Bessemer would scarcely be to overstate the facts. For some moments after the line had gone dead, he sat motionless, his soul seething within him like a welsh rabbit at the height of its fever. He burned with rage and resentment, and all the manhood in him called to him to make a virile gesture and show Celia Todd who was who and what was what.
An idea struck him. He called up Agnes Flack.
“Miss Flack?”
“Hello?”
“Sorry to disturb you at this hour, but will you marry me?”
“Certainly. Who is that?”
“Smallwood Bessemer.”
“I don’t get the second name.”
“Bessemer. B. for banana, e for erysipelas—”
“Oh, Bessemer? Yes, delighted. Good night, Mr Bessemer.”
“Good night, Miss Flack.”
Sometimes it happens that after a restorative sleep a man finds that his views on what seemed in the small hours a pretty good idea have undergone a change. It was so with Bessemer. He woke next morning oppressed by a nebulous feeling that in some way, which for the moment eluded his memory, he had made rather a chump of himself overnight. And then, as he was brushing his teeth, he was able to put his finger on the seat of the trouble. Like a tidal wave, the events of the previous evening came flooding back into his mmd, and he groaned in spirit.
Why in this dark hour he should have thought of me, I cannot say, for we were the merest acquaintances. But he must have felt that I was the sort of man who would lend a sympathetic ear, for he called me up on the telephone and explained the situation, begging me to step round and see Agnes and sound her regarding her views on the matter. An hour later, I was able to put him abreast.
“She says she loves you devotedly.”
“But how can she? I scarcely know the girl.”
“That is what she says. No doubt you are one of those men who give a woman a single glance and—big!—all is over.”
There was a silence at the other end of the wire. When he spoke again, there was an anxious tremor in his voice.
“What would you say chances were,” he asked, “for explaining that it was all a little joke, at which I had expected that no one would laugh more heartily than herself?”
“Virtually nil. As a matter of fact, that point happened to come up, and she stated specifically that if there was any rannygazoo— if, in other words, it should prove that you had been pulling her leg and trying to make her the plaything of an idle moment—she would know what to do about it.”
“Know what to do about it.”
“That was the expression she employed.”
“Know what to do about it,” repeated Smallwood Bessemer thoughtfully. “‘Myes. I see what you mean. Know what to do about it. Yes. But why on earth does this ghastly girl love me? She must be cuckoo.”
“For your intellect, she tells me. She says she finds you a refreshing change after her late fiancée, Sidney McMurdo.”
“Was she engaged to Sidney McMurdo?”
“Yes.”
“H’m!” said Bessemer.
He told me subsequently that his first action after he had hung up was to go to his cupboard and take from it a bottle of tonic port which he kept handy in case he required a restorative or stimulant. He had fallen into the habit of drinking a little of this whenever he felt low, and Reason told him that he was never going to feel lower than he did at that moment. To dash off a glass and fill another was with him the work of an instant.
Generally, the effect of this tonic port was to send the blood coursing through his veins like liquid fire and make him feel that he was walking on the tip of his toes with his hat on the side of his head. But now its magic seemed to have failed. Spiritually, he remained a total loss.
Nor, I think, can we be surprised at this. It is not every day that a young fellow loses the girl he worships and finds that he has accumulated another whom he not only does not love but knows that he can never love. Smallwood Bessemer respected Agnes Flack. He would always feel for her that impersonal admiration which is inspired by anything very large, like the Empire State Building or the Grand Canyon of Arizona. But the thought of being married to her frankly appalled him.
And in addition to this there was the Sidney McMurdo angle. Smallwood Bessemer, as I say, did not know Sidney McMurdo well. But he knew him well enough to be aware that his reactions on finding that another man had become engaged to his temporarily ex-fiancée would be of a marked nature. And as the picture rose before his eyes of that vast frame of his and those almost varicose muscles that rippled like dangerous snakes beneath his pullover, his soul sickened and he had to have a third glass of tonic port.
It was while he was draining it that Sidney McMurdo came lumbering over the threshold, and so vivid was the impression he created of being eight foot high and broad in proportion that Smallwood Bessemer nearly swooned. Recovering himself, he greeted him with almost effusive cordiality.
“Come in, McMurdo, come in,” he cried buoyantly. “Just the fellow I wanted to see. I wonder, McMurdo, if you remember what you were saying to me the other day about the advisability of my taking out an all-accident insurance with your firm? I have been thinking it over, and am strongly inclined to do so.”
“It’s the sensible thing,” said Sidney McMurdo. “A man ought to look to the future.”
“Precisely.”
“You never know when you may not get badly smashed up.”
“Never. Shall we go round to your place and get a form?”
“I have one with me.”
“Then I will sign it at once,” said Bessemer.
And he had just done so and had written out a cheque for the first year’s premium, when the telephone bell rang.
“Yoo-hoo, darling,” bellowed a voice genially, and he recognized it as Agnes Flack’s. A quick glance out of the corner of his eye told him that his companion had recognized it, too. Sidney McMurdo had stiffened. His face was flushed. He sat clenching and unclenching his hands. When Agnes Flack spoke on the telephone, there was never any need for extensions to enable the bystander to follow her remarks.
Smallwood Bessemer swallowed once or twice.
“Oh, good morning, Miss Flack,” he said formally.
“What do you mean—Miss Flack? Call me Aggie. Listen, I’m at the club-house. Come on out. I want to give you a golf lesson.”
“Very well.”
“You mean ‘Very well, darling’.”
“Er—yes. Er—very well, darling.”
“Right,” said Agnes Flack.
Smallwood Bessemer hung up the receiver, and turned to find his companion scrutinizing him narrowly. Sidney McMurdo had turned a rather pretty mauve, and his eyes had an incandescent appearance. It seemed to Bessemer that with a few minor changes he could have stepped straight into the Book of Revelations and no questions asked.
“That was Agnes Flack!” said McMurdo hoarsely.
“Er—yes,” said Bessemer. “Yes, I believe it was.”
“She called you ‘darling’.”
“Er—yes. Yes, I believe she did.”
“You called her ‘darling’.”
“Ee—yes. That’s right. She seemed to wish it.”
“Why?” asked Sidney McMurdo, who was one of those simple, direct men who like
to come straight to the point.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you about that,” said Smallwood Bessemer. “We’re engaged. It happened last night after the dance.”
Sidney McMurdo gave a hitch to his shoulder muscles, which were leaping about under his pullover like adagio dancers. His scrutiny, already narrow, became narrower.
“So it was all a vile plot, was it?”
“No, no.”
“Of course it was a vile plot,” said Sidney McMurdo petulantly, breaking off a corner of the mantelpiece and shredding it through his fingers. “You gave me that advice about going out and making passes purely in order that you should be left free to steal Agnes from me. If that wasn’t a vile plot, then I don’t know a vile plot when I see one. Well, well, we must see what we can do about it.”
It was the fact that Smallwood Bessemer at this moment sprang nimbly behind the table that temporarily eased the strain of the situation. For as Sidney McMurdo started to remove the obstacle, his eye fell on the insurance policy. He stopped as if spellbound, staring at it, his lower jaw sagging.
Bessemer, scanning him anxiously, could read what was passing through his mind. Sidney McMurdo was a lover, but he was also a second vice-president of the Jersey City and All Points West Mutual and Co-operative Life and Accident Insurance Company, an organization which had an almost morbid distaste for parting with its money. If as the result of any impulsive action on his part the Co. were compelled to pay over a large sum to Smallwood Bessemer almost before they had trousered his first cheque, there would be harsh words and raised eyebrows. He might even be stripped of his second vice-president’s desk in the middle of a hollow square. And next to Agnes Flack and his steel-shafted driver, he loved his second vice-presidency more than anything in the world.
For what seemed an eternity, Smallwood Bessemer gazed at a strong man wrestling with himself. Then the crisis passed. Sidney McMurdo flung himself into a chair, and sat moodily gnashing his teeth.
“Well,” said Bessemer, feeling like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, “I suppose I must be leaving you. I am having my first golf lesson.”
Sidney McMurdo started.
“Your first golf lesson? Haven’t you ever played?”
“Not yet.”
A hollow groan escaped Sidney McMurdo.
“To think of my Agnes marrying a man who doesn’t know the difference between a brassie and a niblick!”
“Well, if it comes to that,” retorted Bessemer, with some spirit, “what price my Celia marrying a man who doesn’t know the difference between Edna St. Vincent Millay and Bugs Baer?”
Sidney McMurdo stared.
“Your Celia? You weren’t engaged to that Todd pipsqueak?”
“She is not a pipsqueak.”
“She is, too, a pipsqueak, and I can prove it. She reads poetry.”
“Naturally. I have made it my loving task to train her eager mind to appreciate all that is best and most beautiful.”
“She says I’ve got to do it, too.”
“It will be the making of you. And now,” said Smallwood Bessemer, “I really must be going.”
‘Just a moment,” said Sidney McMurdo. He reached out and took the insurance policy, studying it intently for a while. But it was as he feared. It covered everything. “All right,” he said sombrely, “pop off.”
I suppose there is nothing (proceeded the Oldest Member) more painful to the man of sensibility than the spectacle of tangled hearts. Here were four hearts as tangled as spaghetti, and I grieved for them. The female members of the quartette did not confide in me, but I was in constant demand by both McMurdo and Bessemer, and it is not too much to say that these men were passing through the furnace. Indeed, I cannot say which moved me the more—Bessemer’s analysis of his emotions when jerked out of bed at daybreak by a telephone call from Agnes, summoning him to the links before breakfast, or McMurdo’s description of how it felt to read W. H. Auden. Suffice it that each wrung my heart to the uttermost.
And so the matter stood at the opening of the contest for the Ladies’ Vase.
This was one of our handicap events, embracing in its comprehensive scope almost the entire female personnel of the club, from the fire-breathing tigresses to the rabbits who had taken up golf because it gave them an opportunity of appearing in sports clothes. It was expected to be a gift once more for Agnes Flack, though she would be playing from scratch and several of the contestants were receiving as much as forty-eight. She had won the Vase the last two years, and if she scooped it in again, it would become her permanent possession. I mention this to show you what the competition meant to her.
For a while, all proceeded according to the form book. Playing in her usual bold, resolute style, she blasted her opponents off the links one by one, and came safely through into the final without disarranging her hair.
But as the tournament progressed, it became evident that a platinum blonde of the name of Julia Prebble, receiving twenty-seven, had been grossly underhandicapped. Whether through some natural skill at concealing the merits of her game, or because she was engaged to a member of the handicapping committee, one cannot tell, but she had, as I say, contrived to scrounge a twenty-seven when ten would have been more suitable. The result was that she passed into the final bracket with consummate ease, and the betting among the wilder spirits was that for the first time in three years Agnes Flack’s mantelpiece would have to be looking about it for some other ornament than the handsome silver vase presented by the club for annual competition among its female members.
And when at the end of the first half of the thirty-six hole final Agnes was two down after a gruelling struggle, it seemed as though their prognostications were about to be fulfilled.
It was in the cool of a lovely summer evening that play was resumed. I had been asked to referee the match, and I was crossing the terrace on my way to the first tee when I encountered Smallwood Bessemer. And we were pausing to exchange a word or two, when Sidney McMurdo came along.
To my surprise, for I had supposed relations between the two men to be strained, Bessemer waved a cordial hand.
“Hyah, Sidney,” he called.
“Hyah, Smallwood,” replied the other.
“Did you get that tonic?”
“Yes. Good stuff, you think?”
“You can’t beat it,” said Bessemer, and Sidney McMurdo passed along towards the first tee.
I was astonished.
“You seem on excellent terms with McMurdo,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” said Bessemer. “He drops in at my place a good deal. We smoke a pipe and roast each other’s girls. It draws us very close together. I was able to do him a good turn this morning. He was very anxious to watch the match, and Celia wanted him to go into town to fetch a specialist for her Peke, who is off colour to-day. I told him to give it a shot of that tonic port I drink. Put it right in no time. Well I’ll, be seeing you.”
“You are not coming round?”
“I may look in toward the finish. What do you think of Agnes’s chances?”
“Well, she has been battling nobly against heavy odds, but—”
“The trouble with Agnes is that she believes all she reads in the golf books. If she would only listen to me… Ah, well,” said Smallwood Bessemer, and moved off.
It did not take me long after I had reached the first tee to see that Agnes Flack was not blind to the possibility of being deprived of her Vase. Her lips were tight, and there was a furrow in her forehead. I endeavoured to ease her tension with a kindly word or two.
“Lovely evening,” I said.
“It will be,” she replied, directing a somewhat acid glance at her antagonist, who was straightening the tie of the member of the handicapping committee to whom she was betrothed, “if I can trim that ginger-headed Delilah and foil the criminal skulduggery of a bunch of yeggmen who ought to be blushing themselves purple. Twenty-seven, forsooth!”
Her warmth was not unjustified. After watching the morning’s round
, I, too, felt that that twenty-seven handicap of Julia Prebble’s had been dictated by the voice of love rather than by a rigid sense of justice. I changed the subject.
“Bessemer is not watching the match, he tells me.”
“I wouldn’t let him. He makes me nervous.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes. I started teaching him golf a little while ago, and now he’s teaching me. He knows it all.”
“He is a columnist,” I reminded her.
“At lunch to-day he said he was going to skim through Alex Morrison’s book again, because he had a feeling that Alex hadn’t got the right angle on the game.”
I shuddered strongly, and at this moment Julia Prebble detached herself from her loved one, and the contest began.
I confess that, as I watched the opening stages of the play, I found a change taking place in my attitude towards Agnes Flack.
I had always respected her, as one must respect any woman capable of pasting a ball two hundred and forty yards, but it was only now that respect burgeoned into something like affection. The way she hitched up her sleeves and started to wipe off her opponent’s lead invited sympathy and support.
At the outset, she was assisted by the fact that success had rendered Julia Prebble a little overconfident. She did not concentrate. The eye which should have been riveted on her ball had a tendency to smirk sideways at her affianced, causing her to top, with the result that only three holes had been played before the match was all square again.
However, as was inevitable, these reverses had the effect of tightening up Julia Prebble’s game. Her mouth hardened, and she showed a disposition to bite at the man she loved, whom she appeared to consider responsible. On the fifth, she told him not to stand in front of her, on the sixth not to stand behind her, on the seventh she asked him not to move while she was putting. On the eighth she suggested that if he had really got St. Vitus Dance he ought to go and put himself in the hands of some good doctor. On the ninth she formally broke off the engagement.
Naturally, all this helped her a good deal, and at the tenth she recovered the lead she had lost. Agnes drew level at the eleventh, and after that things settled down to the grim struggle which one generally sees in finals. A casual observer would have said that it was anybody’s game.
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