The Golf Omnibus (72 page)

Their conversation was not an extended one. R. P. Crumbles spoke rapidly and authoritatively for some moments, emphasising his remarks with swift, captain-of-industry prods at Horace's breast-bone, and then he turned on his heel and strode off in a strong, economic royalist sort of way, and Horace came back to where I stood.

Now, I had noticed once or twice during the interview that the young fellow had seemed to totter on his axis, and as he drew nearer, his pallid face, with its staring eyes and drooping jaw, told me that all was not well.

“That was my boss,” he said, in a low, faint voice.

“So I had guessed. Why did he call the conference?”

Horace Bewstridge beat his breast.

“It's about Sir George Copstone.”

“What about him?”

Horace Bewstridge clutched his hair.

“Apparently this Copstone runs a vast system of chain stores throughout the British Isles, and old Crumbles has been fawning on him ever since his arrival in the hope of getting him to take on the Silver Sardine and propagate it over there. He says that this is a big opportunity for the dear old firm and that it behoves all of us to do our bit and push it along. So⎯”

“So⎯?”

Horace Bewstridge rent his pullover.

“So,” he whispered hoarsely, “I've got to play Customer's Golf to-morrow and let
the man win that cup.”

“Horace!” I cried.

I would have seized his hand and pressed it, but it was not there. Horace Bewstridge had left me. All that my eye encountered was a swirl of dust and his flying form disappearing in the direction of the bar. I understood and sympathized. There are moments in the life of every man when human consolation cannot avail and only two or three quick ones will meet the case.

I did not see him again until we met next afternoon on the first tee for the start of the final.

You, being a newcomer here (said the Oldest Member) may possibly have formed an erroneous impression regarding this President's Cup of which I have been speaking. Its name, I admit, is misleading, suggesting as it does the guerdon of some terrific tourney battled for by the cream of the local golfing talent. One pictures perspiring scratch men straining every nerve and history being made by amateur champions.

As a matter of fact, it is open for competition only to those whose handicap is not lower than twenty-four, and excites little interest outside the ranks of the submerged tenth who play for it. As a sporting event on our fixture list, as I often have to explain, it may be classed somewhere between the Grandmothers' Umbrella and the All day Sucker competed for by children who have not passed their seventh year.

The final, accordingly, did not attract a large gate. In fact, I think I was the only spectator. I was thus enabled to obtain an excellent view of the contestants and to follow their play to the best advantage. And, as on the previous occasions when I had watched him perform, I found myself speculating with no little bewilderment as to how Horace's opponent had got that way.

Sir George Copstone was one of those tall, thin, bony Englishmen who seem to have been left over from the eighteen-sixties. He did not actually wear long side-whiskers of the type known as Piccadilly Weepers, nor did he really flaunt a fore-and-aft deer-stalker cap of the type affected by Sherlock Holmes, but you got the illusion that this was so, and it was partly the unnerving effect of his appearance on his opponents that had facilitated his making his way into the final. But what had been the basic factor in his success was his method of play.

A deliberate man, this Copstone. Before making a shot, he would inspect his enormous bag of clubs and take out one after another, slowly, as if he were playing spillikens. Having at length made his selection, he would stand motionless beside his ball, staring at it for what seemed an eternity. Only after one had begun to give up hope that life would ever again animate the rigid limbs, would he start his stroke. He was affectionately known on our links as The Frozen Horror.

Even in normal circumstances, a sensitive, highly-strung young man like Horace Bewstridge might well have found himself hard put to it to cope with such an antagonist. And when you take into consideration the fact that he had received those
special instructions from the front office, it is not surprising that he should have failed in the opening stages of the encounter to give of his best. The fourth hole found him four down, and one had the feeling that he was lucky not to be five.

At this point, however, there occurred one of those remarkable changes of fortune which are so common in golf and which make it the undisputed king of games. Teeing up at the fifth, Sir George Copstone appeared suddenly to have become afflicted with some form of shaking palsy. Where before he had stood addressing his ball like Lot's wife just after she had been turned into a pillar of salt, he now wriggled like an Ouled Nail dancer in the throes of colic. Nor did his condition improve as the match progressed. His movements took on an ever freerer abandon. To cut a long story short, which I am told is a thing I seldom do, he lost four holes in a row, and they came to the ninth all square.

And it was here that I observed an almost equally surprising change in the demeanour of Horace Bewstridge.

Until this moment, Horace had been going through the motions with something of the weary moodiness of a Volga boatman, his face drawn, his manner listless. But now he had become a different man. As he advanced to the ninth tee, his eyes gleamed, his ears wiggled and his lips were set. He looked like a Volga boatman who has just learned that Stalin has purged his employer.

I could see what had happened. Intoxicated with this unexpected success, he was beginning to rebel against those instructions from up top. The almost religious fervour which comes upon a twenty-four handicap man when he sees a chance of winning his first cup had him in its grip. Who, he was asking himself, was R. P. Crumbles? The man who paid him his salary and could fire him out on his ear, yes, but was money everything? Suppose he won this cup and starved in the gutter, I could almost hear him murmuring, would not that be better than losing the cup and getting his three square a day?

And when on the ninth green, by pure accident, he sank a thirty-foot putt, I saw his lips move and I knew what he was saying to himself. It was the word “Excelsior.”

It was as he stood gaping at the hole into which his ball had disappeared that Sir George Copstone spoke for the first time.

“Jolly good shot, what?” said Sir George, a gallant sportsman. “Right in the old crevasse, what, what? I say, look here,” he went on, jerking his shoulders in a convulsive gesture, “do you mind if I go and shake out the underlinen? Got a beetle or something down my back.”

“Certainly,” said Horace.

“Won't keep you long. I'll just strip off the next-the-skins and spring upon it unawares.”

He performed another complicated writhing movement, and was about to leave us, when along came R. P. Crumbles.

“How's it going?” asked R. P. Crumbles.

“Eh? What? Going? Oh, one down at the turn.”

“He is?”

“No, I am,” said Sir George. “He, in sharp contradistinction, is one up. Sank a dashed find putt on this green. Thirty feet, if an inch. Well, excuse me, I'll just buzz off and bash this beetle.”

He hastened away, twitching in every limb, and R. P. Crumbles turned to Horace. His face was suffused.

“Do I get no co-operation, Bewstridge?” he demanded. “What the devil do you mean by being one up? And what's all this nonsense about thirty-foot putts? How dare you sink thirty-foot putts?”

I could have told him that Horace was in no way responsible for what had occurred and that the thing must be looked on as an Act of God, but I hesitated to wound the young man's feelings, and R. P. Crumbles continued.

“Thirty-foot putts, indeed! Have you forgotten what I told you?”

Horace Bewstridge met his accusing glare without a tremor. His face was like granite. His eyes shone with a strange light.

“I have not forgotten the inter-office memo, to which you refer,” he said, in a firm, quiet voice. “But I am ignoring it. I intend to trim the pants off this stranger in our midst.”

“You do, and see what happens.”

“I don't care what happens.”

“Bewstridge,” said R. B. Crumbles, “nine more holes remain to be played. During these nine holes, think well. I shall be waiting on the eighteenth to see the finish. I shall hope to find,' he added significantly, “that the match has ended before then.

He walked away, and I think I have never seen the back of any head look more sinister. Horace, however, merely waved his putter defiantly, as if it had been a banner with a strange device and the other an old man recommending him not to try a pass.

“Nuts to you, R P. Crumbles!” he cried, with a strange dignity. “Fire me, if you will. This is the only chance I shall ever have of winning a cup, and I'm going to do it.”

I stood for a moment motionless. This revelation of the nobility of this young man's soul had stunned me. Then I hurried to where he stood, and gripped his hand. I was still shaking it, when an arch contralto voice spoke behind us.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Bewstridge.”

Mrs. Botts was in our midst. She was accompanied by her husband, Ponsford, her son Irwin, and her dog, Alphonse.

“How is the match going?” asked Mrs. Botts.

Horace explained the position of affairs.

“We shall all be on the eighteenth green, to see the finish,” said Mrs. Botts. “But you really must not beat Sir George. That would be very naughty. Where is Sir George?”

As she spoke, Sir George Copstone appeared, looking quite his old self again.

“Bashed him!” he said. “Whopping big chap. Put up the dickens of a struggle. But I settled him in the end. He'll think twice before he tackles a Sussex Copstone again.”

Mrs. Botts uttered a girlish scream.

“Somebody attacked you, Sir George?”

“I should say so. Whacking great brute of a beetle. But I fixed him.”

“You killed a beetle?”

“Well, stunned him, at any rate. Technical knockout.”

“But, Sir George, don't you remember what Coleridge said—He prayeth best who loveth best all things both great and small?”

“Not beetles?”

“Of course. Some of my closest chums are beetles.”

The other seemed amazed.

“This friend of yours, this Coleridge, really says—he positively asserts that we ought to love beetles?”

“Of course.”

“Even when they get under the vest and start doing buck and wing dances along the spine?”

“Of course.”

“Sounds a bit of a silly ass to me. Not the sort of chap one would care to know. Well, come on, Bewstridge, let's be moving, what? I say,” went on Sir George, as they passed out of earshot, “do you know that old geezer? Potty, what? Over in England, we'd have her in a padded cell before she could say ‘Pip, pip'. Beetles, egad! Coleridge, forsooth! And do you know what she said to me this morning? Told me to be careful where I stepped on the front lawn, because it was full of pixies. Can't stand that husband of hers, either. Always talking rot about Irishmen. And what price the son and heir? There's a young blister for you. And as for that flea storage depot she calls a dog . . . Well, I'll tell you If I'd known what I was letting myself in for, staying at her house, I'd have gone to a hotel. Carry on, Bewstridge. It's your honour.”

It was perhaps the exhilaration due to hearing these frank criticisms of a quartette whom he had never liked, though he had striven to love them for Vera Witherby's sake, that lent zip to Horace's drive from the tenth tee. Normally, he was a man who alternated between a weak slice and a robust hook, but on this occasion his ball looked neither to right nor left. He pasted it straight down the middle, and with such vehemence that he had no difficulty in winning the hole and putting himself two up.

But now the tide of fortune began to change again. His recent victory over the beetle had put Sir George Copstone right back into the old mid-season form. Once more he had become the formidable Frozen Horror whose deliberate methods of play had caused three stout men to succumb before his onslaught in the preliminary rounds. With infinite caution, like one suspecting a trap of some kind, he selected clubs from his bulging bag; with unremitting concentration he addressed and struck
his ball. And for a while there took place as stem a struggle as I have ever witnessed on the links.

But gradually Sir George secured the upper hand. Little by little he recovered the ground he had lost. He kept turning in steady sevens, and came a time when Horace began to take nines. The strain had uncovered his weak spot. His putting touch had left him.

I could see what was wrong, of course. He was being much too scientific. He was remembering the illustrated plates in the golf books and trying to make the club head move from Spot A. through Line B. to ball C. and that is always a fatal thing for a high handicap man to do. I have talked to a great many of our most successful high handicap men, and they all assured me that the only way in which it was possible to obtain results was to shut the eyes, breathe a short prayer and loose off into the unknown.

Still, there it was, and there was nothing that could be done about it. Horace went on studying the line and taking the Bobby Jones stance and all the rest of it, and gradually, as I say, Sir George recovered the ground he had lost. One down on the thirteenth, he squared the match at the fifteenth, and it was only by holing out a fortunate brassie shot to win on the seventeenth that Horace was enabled to avoid defeat by two and one. As it was, they came to the eighteenth on level terms, and everything, therefore, depended on what Fate held in store for them there.

I had a melancholy feeling that the odds were all in favour of the older man. At the time of which I am speaking, the eighteenth was not the long hole which we are looking at as we sit here, but that short, tricky one which is now the ninth—the one where you stand at the foot of the hill and pop the ball up vertically with a mashie, trusting that you will not overdrive and run across the green into the deep chasm on the other side. At such a hole, a cautious, calculating player like Sir George Copstone inevitably has the advantage over a younger and more ardent antagonist, who is apt to put too much beef behind his tee shot.