The Golf Omnibus (64 page)

I could see that he was sorely shaken. He topped a shot into the bunker.

“Weedy little brute, did she say?”

“That's right. Weedy little brute.”

“And she wouldn't marry me to please a dying uncle?”

“Grandfather.”

“Well, I'll tell you,” said Ernest Plinlimmon. “The way it looks to me is that I haven't much chance.”

“Not a great deal. Of course, if you could bring yourself to hit her over the head with your number three iron⎯”

He frowned petulantly.

“I won't,” he said sharply. “Once and for all, I will not hit her over the head with my number three iron. No, I shall try to forget.”

“It seems the only thing to do.”

“I shall thrust her image from my mind. Immerse myself in my work. Stay longer at the office. Adjust more averages. And,” he said, forcing a brave smile, “there is always golf.”

“Well spoken, Ernest Plinlimmon!” I cried. “Yes, there is always golf. And from the way you're hitting them these days it seems to me that, receiving seven, you might quite easily win the summer medal.”

A gleam that I liked to see shone through the young fellow's spectacles.

“You think so?”

“Quite easily, if you practise hard.”

“You bet I'll practise hard. It has always been the dream of my life to win a medal competition. The only trouble is, I've always felt that half the fun would be telling one's grandchildren about it. And now, apparently, there aren't going to be any grandchildren.”

“There will be other people's grandchildren.”

“That's right too. Very well, then. From now on, I stifle my love and buckle down to it.”

I must confess, however, that, though speaking in airy fashion about winning summer medals, I had done so rather with the idea of giving the unfortunate young man an interest in life than because I actually fancied his chances. It was true that, receiving seven strokes, he might come quite near the top of the list, but there were at least three men in the club who were capable of giving him ten and beating him. Alfred Jukes, for one. Wilberforce Bream, for another. And, for a third, George Peabody.

Still, when I watched him practising, I felt that I had been justified in falsifying the facts. There is something about practice at golf, about the steady self-discipline of playing shot after shot with the same club at the same objective, that gives strength to the soul, and it seemed to me that, as the days went by, Ernest Plinlimmon was becoming a stronger, finer man. And an incident that occurred the day before the competition gave proof of this. I was enjoying a quiet smoke on the terrace, when Clarice Fitch came out of the club-house. It was plain that something had upset her, for there was a frown on her lovely forehead and she was breathing through the nose with a low, whistling sound, like an escape of steam.

“Little worm!” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Miserable undersized microbe!”

“You allude to⎯?”

“That bacillus in the goggles. The germ with the headlights. The tree crooner. Ernest Plinlimmon, in short. The nerve of the little glass-eyed insect!”

“What has Ernest Plinlimmon been doing to incur your displeasure?”

“Why, I told him to take my aunt to a matinée tomorrow, and he had the crust to say he couldn't.”

“But, my dear child, tomorrow is the day of the summer medal competition.”

“What in the name of the eight bearded gods of the Isisi is a summer medal competition?”

I explained.

“What!” cried Clarice Fitch. “You mean that he refused to do what I asked him

simply because he wanted to stay here and fool about with golf balls? Well, I'm⎯! Of all the⎯! Can you beat it! I never heard of such a thing.”

She strode off, fuming like an Oriental queen who has been having trouble with the domestic staff, and I resumed my cigar with an uplifted heart. I was proud of Ernest Plinlimmon. This incident showed that he had at last remembered that he was
a golfer and a man. I felt that all he needed now was to do well in this medal competition, and the thrall in which Clarice Fitch held him would be broken for ever. I have seen it happen so many times. Golfers go off their drive or their approaches or, it may be, their putting, and while in the enfeebled state induced by this loss of form fall in love. Then one day they try a new stance and get back on their game and do not give the girl another thought. My knowledge of human nature told me that, should Ernest Plinlimmon by some miracle win the summer medal competition, he would have no time for mooning about and pining for Clarice Fitch. His whole being would be absorbed by the effort to bring himself down to scratch.

I was delighted, therefore, when I woke next morning, to see that the weather was fine and the breeze mild, for this meant that play would take place under conditions most favourable to Ernest's game. He was one of those golfers whom rain or a high wind upset. It looked as if this might be the young fellow's day.

And so it proved. Confidence gleamed from his spectacles as he strode on to his first tee, and his opening drive sent the ball sweetly down the middle of the course. He holed out in a nice four.

It was an auspicious start, and had I been younger and more lissom I would have liked to follow him round. Nowadays, however, I find that I enjoy these contests more from a chair on the terrace, relying for my information on those who drop in from time to time from the Front. It was thus that I learned that Ernest's most dangerous rivals were decidedly off their game. Their tee shots at the third had been weak, and at the lake hole Wilberforce Bream had put two into the water. And an hour or so later there came another bulletin. Wilberforce Bream had torn up his card, George Peabody had got into a casual sardine tin in the rough on the eleventh and had taken ten, and Alfred Jukes would be lucky if he did a ninety.

“Right off it, all three of them,” said Alexander Bassett, who was my informant.

“Strange.”

“Not so very. I happen to know,” said Alexander Bassett, who knows everything, “that that Fitch girl turned them down, one after the other, at intervals during yesterday evening. This has naturally affected them—off the tee mostly. You know how it is. If you have a broken heart, it's bound to give you a twinge every now and then, and if this happens when you are starting your down swing you neglect to let the clubhead lead.”

Well, I was sorry, of course, in a way, for one does not like to think of tragedy entering the lives of scratch men, but my commiseration waned as I reflected what this would mean to Ernest Plinlimmon. There is always, in these medal competitions, the danger of a long-handicap man striking his big day and turning in a net sixty-eight, but apart from such a contingency it seemed to me that, if he had kept his early form, he ought now to win. And Alexander's next words encouraged this hope.

“Plinlimmon's playing a nice game,” he said. “Nice and steady. Now that the tigers are off the map, I'm backing him. Though there is one of the submerged tenth,
they tell me—twenty-four handicap man named Perkins—who seems in the money.”

Alexander Bassett left me, to resume his inspection of the contest, and I think that shortly afterwards I must have fallen into a doze, for when I opened my eyes, which I had closed for a moment in order to meditate, I found that the sun was perceptibly lower. The cool of the evening was in the air, and I realized that by this time the competition must be drawing to a close. I was about to rise and cross the green to see if there was anything of interest happening on the eighteenth fairway, when Clarice Fitch came over the brow of the hill.

I gave you a description of her aspect on the occasion when she had been telling me how Ernest Plinlimmon, with splendid firmness, had refused to take her aunt to the matinée. She was looking very much like that now. There was the same frown, the same outraged glitter in her imperious eyes, the same escape-of-steam effects through the delicately chiselled nostrils. In addition, she appeared to be walking with some difficulty.

“Has something happened?” I asked, concerned. “You are limping.”

She uttered a sharp, staccato howl, not unlike the battle-cry of the West African wild cat.

“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 stooped to tie my shoe-lace, 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 lift 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's nobody behind me, so that when I finish the returns will be all in. I have just played a net seventy-one. I shall be on with a net 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.

“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 lie 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.