Nothing Serious (12 page)

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, and 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 personnel 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.