Murder in the Rough

by Otto Penzler

  “So a wealthy gentleman, like your papa, can afford now to use a new ball for each hole.”

  Miss Unwin did, however, persuade Mr. McMurdo to allow himself to be watched by his daughter while in the early evening he tested balls he had just bought by bouncing them time and again on the tiled floor of the hallway of the tall house, though when little Margaret had tried the effect of dropping one of them from the top of the stairs to bounce all the way to the bottom, she almost forfeited that privilege. And, of course, she received as well a stern lecture from Miss Unwin about the danger of playing on those unusually steep stairs.

  “You might even be hurt so badly that you would have to go to the hospital, or even die.”

  “Oh, Miss Unwin, I don’t think I would like that.”

  “Then just remember, it is dangerous to play on the stairs.”

  But eventually Margaret was restored to favor and admitted to the library to watch her father, with his own hands, rubbing emery paper across the surfaces of the iron heads of such of his clubs that were equipped with that metal instead of applewood or tough heartwood into which molten lead had been poured to give extra weight. Mr. McMurdo was so keen a golfer, however, that he would not allow Margaret, though she begged and begged, actually to touch any of the precious clubs while he oiled their long wooden shafts after making sure no fleck of rust would affect the accuracy of the iron-headed club he called his putter.

  Miss Unwin had explained to little Margaret that “putter” was pronounced to rhyme with “mutter”—perhaps because of the way the verb “to put” was pronounced in Scotland—since this was the club that finally put the ball into the hole. So for days afterward Margaret went about putting her dolls back into their cupboard and asking if the nurserymaid was putting her newly ironed dresses into her wardrobe.

  But Margaret also learned from her father the names of all his clubs—though it was Miss Unwin who taught her how to spell them—the driver for sending the ball the greater part of the distance to the hole, the cleek for lofting it over any obstacles that lay in its path, the brassie, with the strip of yellow metal under its head that made it so useful for getting out of the sandpits that were a prized hazard on the Scottish links which Mr. McMurdo visited on holiday. Then there was the driving iron with its metal head and beautifully whippy hickory shaft, the spoonlike baffy, much liked in Scotland for short approach work, the small-headed niblick, wonderfully helpful when a ball happened to land in a rut made by a cart wheel or in a deep sheep track.

  “But, Miss Unwin,” Margaret asked, pondering this new piece of knowledge, “if the wee ball gets stuck somewhere like that, wouldn’t it be better just to pick it up and put it down where it would be easier to hit?”

  It was then that Margaret learned about rules. That there were rules for the game of golf—one of which was that you could not, except in certain laid-down circumstances, improve the lie of your ball—and that there were, too, rules for the game of life.

  “Some of those you know already,” Miss Unwin told Margaret.

  “Do I, Miss Unwin? I don’t think I do. At least I can’t remember any.”

  “But, of course, you can. What is the rule about the road outside?”

  “Well, I know I must never go across from one pavement to the other without a grown-up being there. Is that a rule?”

  “Yes, it is. And it is one you must never break.”

  “Never, Miss Unwin? Not even when I’m very old? Not even when I’m thirteen?”

  “Well, yes, when your father thinks you are sensible enough, you will be able to cross the road on your own. But that may not be when you’re thirteen. It may be sooner, or it may be later.”

  “So rules can change, Miss Unwin? You don’t have to obey them always?”

  “Some rules do change, and there are even times when a rule may be broken. But, remember, if a rule is made up for a special purpose like the rules for golf, then it has to be kept to all the time, or otherwise the game stops being a game where everyone playing it knows what is to be done. But the rules of the real world have to be obeyed only while they make sense. Circumstances alter cases. You should remember that. So, go now and find your copybook. I’ll write those words out for you, and you can copy them three times, as neatly as you can. Circumstances alter cases.”

  It was only some three weeks later, just after Christmas, that little Margaret learned that in some situations no amount of mentioning circumstances could alter in any way a case that confronted golf-obsessed Mr. McMurdo. It happened when, coming home unexpectedly early one horribly stormy afternoon, his rain-wetted plus-four trousers, baggy though they were, clinging with desperate dampness to his legs and the long stockings below almost pulled down by the weight of water soaked into them, he overheard John, his own valet, and wee Margaret’s favorite among all the servants, loudly lamenting.

  The words complained of were these: He’ll come back in with his clothes soaked through and through, I know he will. And all because he’s so set on that daft game of his.

  “I heard you, John,” came the resounding voice of his master. “You dared to call golf a daft game. Golf! You said it was daft. Leave this house within the hour. You are discharged. Dismissed. Never let me see your face again.”

  Mr. McMurdo, of course, could not be brought ever to acknowledge that he had been unduly impulsive in turning away his valet. He even declined, with angry vigor, to send to the employment agency for a replacement. It was not that he was not given opportunities enough to admit he had been overhasty. But wee Margaret, of whom he was insofar as his nature allowed fond, was told when she kept asking when “poor John” was coming back to “mind your own business, miss.” Nor did Mrs. McMurdo’s faint pleas from the sofa where she lay feebly reclining have any more effect.

  “But, Mungo, John was the only man in the house, since last Easter, when you sent the butler away because he told the maids to clean your golf things after you had come back from Scotland.”

  “Am I not a man, my dear? And a better man a thousand times than that English rascal who had no more idea of the game of golf than—than—than—whom I deservedly dismissed. Why are you moaning and puling about the lack of a man on the premises? In the drawer in my desk, as you very well know, I have always kept a stout life preserver. I can deal fast enough with any rogue who dares enter my home. I tell you that.”

  “But—but, Mungo, you are not always at home to beat down those men with that life preserver or one of your golf sticks.”

  “Golf sticks! Golf sticks! Have you gone mad, woman? First, they are not sticks: they are clubs. Golf clubs. And, second, I would no more use the least of my clubs, not even that old-fashioned baffy, to strike at any intruder, even if it were a black Hottentot.”

  And off he stormed. To Blackheath and its seven holes, stretching across the common where the hazards were as much nursemaids wheeling their charges in perambulators as gorse bushes, footballers, cart ruts or the treacherous shallow pit just before the first hole where many extra strokes were often needed before a gutty could be got within putter range of its ultimate destination.

  Trouble enough. But there was worse trouble, much worse, shortly to come. It arrived just before Easter. Easter was the time when Mr. McMurdo, year upon year, took a holiday in his native Scotland. To play golf. And, more than just to go out onto the links morning and afternoon, weekdays and Sabbath, he went at Easter to Scotland to trounce, over twice nine holes, his cousin, Ian McMurdo.

  Ian had been his opponent, on the links and off them, for as long as either of them—Ian was a few days the elder—had been able to wield a club and sink a putt. He had been Mungo’s rival, and enemy, because owing to those few days of seniority, he had inherited all the McMurdo family wealth and was able to live a fine, prosperous life without having to spend a single day in a factory down in London making marmalade. A bachelor, he could go out onto the links in any one of the daylight hours to play a match against his neighbor, aged Mr. Angus Todd, writer to
the Signet, whom he was sure to beat, so slow was the old retired lawyer. When Angus Todd was safely back in his armchair by the fire, Ian McMurdo could go out again and again to practice his distance-carrying strokes with his driver, his approaches with the cleek, his final shots with his putter across the smooth turf round the hole, even the trick of using his niblick to get cleanly out of the waiting natural sandpits that were a special hazard of the Scottish links. And, worse, he could teach himself to lay a wicked stymie blocking the way to the hole when an opponent, such as his cousin Mungo, had got his gutty to within a yard or two of success.

  The first signs of things being amiss down in London came when Mungo McMurdo announced he was going to stay, as he usually did, at cousin Ian’s house but that he intended to go there, a thing unprecedented, without a manservant.

  “But, Mungo,” Mrs. McMurdo wailed, “what will Ian think of you arriving at his grand house without your own man? As if you were a land agent or someone of that kind.”

  “If Ian doesna like it, he may lump it,” Mr. McMurdo answered, becoming more Scots by the moment.

  “But what about us? Are we going to have to lump being here without a man in the house at all?”

  “You are,” Mr. McMurdo replied.

  And he strode out of the drawing room.

  But Miss Unwin had been there all the while that this domestic spat had taken place, Mrs. McMurdo having exercised the privilege of an invalid to say in front of her daughter’s governess things that should have been said only within the privacy of the bedroom, or even behind the bed curtains.

  Miss Unwin, since she had heard every word of the dispute and was not going to pretend she had not, was quick, however, to do what she could to calm Mrs. McMurdo’s not-very-justifiable fears.

  “I do not think you need worry too much about burglars, ma’am,” she said. “I have heard nothing of any attempts in the neighborhood.”

  “But—but, my dear, there is always a first time. Why, oh why, did Mr. McMurdo dismiss that man John? He was a very good servant. No one had had a word to say against him until he made that silly remark about golf. What shall I do if—if when Mr. McMurdo is away, someone, some wicked man, should…”

  “Well,” Miss Unwin said with brisk cheerfulness, “if that should happen, I know where Mr. McMurdo keeps that life preserver he spoke of, and I shall be quite ready to use it myself.”

  “Oh, but—but, Miss Unwin, you are a lady, or—well, you are a woman, and how could you take up that horrible little bludgeon with the nasty rounded end that I saw once in Mr. McMurdo’s desk, and—and strike a man, even if he is a wicked burglar?”

  “Then let us hope the occasion never arises.”

  But Miss Unwin had other thoughts than wondering whether she would in fact, in those unlikely circumstances, use her employer’s life preserver. Mr. McMurdo’s unexpected decision to visit his wealthy cousin without taking with him a manservant to see to his personal needs had confirmed for her certain hints she had gathered over the past few weeks. She had heard, for instance, Mr. McMurdo telling little Margaret that he had played all seven holes at Blackheath “just using a single gutty.” He had seemed proud of the feat, but Miss Unwin already knew enough of the game of golf to realize that a gutty hacked at over not one but several holes would not, dents and scratches all over its painted surface, fly as true as one not used before. And gutties, she knew, cost no more than a shilling each, a sum that should have been well within Mr. McMurdo’s means. Then, something quite different but as telling, she had seen within the past month a number of advertisements painted on the side walls of houses in the shopping streets for Genuine Dundee Marmalade, and she knew that this was a clear threat to Mungo McMurdo’s Marmalade, made on the cheap in London’s East End.

  So the long and short of it is, she thought, that Mr. McMurdo may be dispensing soon with a governess for little Margaret. And the prospect of weeks without an income while she found another situation was not at all welcome. Let alone having to establish good relations with another small girl or smaller boy. She was well aware that in two, or perhaps three, of the houses where she had been employed her charges had stubbornly refused to accept the rules she thought it her duty to impose.

  Then came the day of Mr. McMurdo’s departure. And other mysteriously disquieting signs came to Miss Unwin’s attention. While Mr. McMurdo’s baggage was waiting unattended in the hallway for the carriage to come round, wee Margaret had been unable to resist giving her father’s long, many-pocketed leather golfing bag a rummaging inspection, and, as she later told Miss Unwin, “Papa went off with only one dozen of his little gutties. I wanted really to keep one for my own, but there were so few I thought I had better not, and, you know, even one of the ones he took he must have just picked up where it had been lost somewhere on the lanks—”

  “It is links, Margaret. Links. And I’m glad to hear you didn’t take a ball out of that bag’s side pocket. Did you go peeking into any of the other pockets? It would have been very wrong of you.”

  “Well, yes, I know that really, I suppose. But would that have been one of the rules that it’s all right not to obey sometimes?”

  “No, my dear, it would not. Stealing is stealing and is never right.”

  “Well, it was a good thing, then, that I thought I heard Papa coming downstairs and stopped looking in the pockets of that bag.”

  “I think we had better say that Providence intervened and saved you from punishment.”

  Miss Unwin turned to lead the way back up to her sole pupil’s schoolroom. And then a thought at the back of her mind came abruptly to the fore. A tiny unanswered question.

  “But tell me, dear, how was it that you thought your papa had picked up a ball on the links at Blackheath. You know, that is not the sort of thing a gentleman does.”

  “Is that another rule, Miss Unwin?”

  “Well, yes. Yes, I suppose it is. Finders keepers may be a saying the poor can follow, but it isn’t a rule that should be observed by a gentleman who does not need more than he already possesses.”

  “Well, Papa must have felt he was a poor person when he saw that gutty, because it cannot have been his. It had two letters written on it, and Papa never writes letters on his gutties.”

  “No, he does not, though I suppose if he played golf with another gentleman more often, he would need to do that, so that they would know whose ball was whose if they had hit them out of sight. But I think, young lady, you had after all better pay for the sin you did not quite commit. So go to your desk and write out fifty times the letters you saw on that gutty.”

  Little Margaret did not cry as she wrote out time and again A T, A T, A T. But once or twice Miss Unwin heard a suppressed sniff.

  The family in London had no news from Mr. McMurdo in Scotland. But this they expected. He was never one to waste a bawbee on what he thought of as unnecessary correspondence. In his continuing absence Miss Unwin went on with little Margaret’s lessons, all the more important to her mind now because of her fears that Mr. McMurdo, back at home, would claim that his daughter no longer needed someone devoted to nothing but her education. She foresaw Margaret being left to the care of some poor relation of her mother’s, who would do nothing to see that she learned what was worthwhile. And Mrs. McMurdo continued to move, late in the morning, from her bed to her sofa and early in the evening from her sofa to her bed, and did little else but repeat over and over again that the house was not safe without a man in it.

  Then something happened which puzzled and alarmed Miss Unwin to no small extent. Early one evening, driven by Mrs. McMurdo once more expressing her fear of burglary, although there had been nothing to indicate there was any reason to expect an attempt, she repeated her somewhat rash claim that, if necessary, she would possess herself of the little knob-headed life preserver kept in Mr. McMurdo’s desk, and, in extremis, bring herself to use it.

  “Oh, but no,” Mrs. McMurdo exclaimed. “No, you could not. A woman to—to—to use violence. No, no
. You could not do it. You could not. We shall be attacked. We shall be robbed. And then what will Mr. McMurdo say when he returns?”

  Well, what he ought to say, Miss Unwin murmured to herself, is, I am the one to blame. I should never have dismissed John and the butler in the way that I did. But she knew that, even in the unlikely event that a burglar might defy the presence of the patrolling constable outside, bull’s-eye lantern casting a steady light where the street lamps were far apart, she would at least arm herself with the life preserver.

  But will I in the end have the courage to use it? she asked herself. The courage to bring that heavy little bludgeon down on some intruder’s head and knock him unconscious, perhaps kill him?

  Mrs. McMurdo believes it is impossible that I, a mere woman, would be able to use such a formidable weapon. But I know at least that there are many women in London, and all over the country, who are capable of violence. So much violence, on occasion, that murder is committed. There is something still to be thankful for that I was left an orphan in the workhouse, and learned there what the wretched will do if provoked enough, will do even without provocation.

  So, as soon as she had seen Mrs. McMurdo trail off, accompanied by her maid, to her lonely bedroom, she went boldly, candle in hand, to the library. If I once have that little weapon in my hand, she told herself, I will know whether I can use it or not.