The Golf Omnibus (77 page)

And then suddenly he turned to her with a kindly smile.

“I'd like to give you a bit of advice,” he said. “What's wrong with your dancing is that you give a sort of jump at the turn, like a trout leaping at a fly. Now, the way to cure this is very simple. Try to imagine that the ceiling is very low and made of very thin glass, and that your head just touches it and you mustn't break it. You've dropped your engagement ring,” he said, as something small and hard struck him on the side
of the face.

“No, I haven't,” said Celia. “I threw it at you.”

And she strode haughtily out on to the terrace. And Smallwood Bessemer, having watched her disappear, went to the bar to get a quick one.

There was only one man in the bar, and yet it looked well filled. This was because Sidney McMurdo, its occupant, is one of those vast, muscled individuals who bulge in every direction. He was sitting slumped in a chair, scowling beneath beetling brows, his whole aspect that of one whose soul has just got the sleeve across the windpipe.

Sidney was not in any sense an intimate of Smallwood Bessemer. They had met for the first time on the previous afternoon, when Bessemer had advised Sidney always to cool off slowly after playing golf, as otherwise he might contract pneumonia and cease to be with us, and Sidney, who is a second vice-president of a large insurance company, had taken advantage of this all-flesh-is-as-grass note which had been introduced into the conversation to try to sell Bessemer his firm's all-accident policy.

No business had resulted, but the episode had served to make them acquainted, and they now split a bottle. The influence of his share on Sidney McMurdo was mellowing enough to make him confidential.

“I've just had a hell of a row with my
fiancée
,” he said.

“I've just had a hell of a row with
my fiancée
,” said Smallwood Bessemer, struck by the coincidence.

“She told me I ought to putt off the right foot. I said I was darned well going to keep right along putting off the left foot, as I had been taught at my mother's knee. She then broke off the engagement.”

Smallwood Bessemer was not a golfer, but manlike he sympathized with the male, and he was in a mood to be impatient of exhibitions of temperament in women.

“Women,” he said, “are all alike. They need to be brought to heel. You have to teach them where they get off and show them that they can't go about the place casting away a good man's love as if it were a used tube of toothpaste. Let me give you a bit of advice. Don't sit brooding in bars. Do as I intend to do. Go out and start making vigorous passes at some other girl.”

“To make her jealous?”

“Exactly.”

“So that she will come legging it back, pleading to be forgiven?”

“Precisely.”

Sidney brightened.

“That sounds pretty good to me. Because I mean to say there's always the chance that the other girl will let you kiss her, and then you're that much ahead of the game.”

“Quite,” said Smallwood Bessemer.

He returned to the dance room, glad to have been able to be of assistance to a fellow man in his hour of distress. Celia was nowhere to be seen, and he presumed
that she was still cooling off on the terrace. He saw Sidney, who had stayed behind for a moment to finish the bottle, flash past in a purposeful way, and then he looked about him to decide who should be his assistant in the little psychological experiment which he proposed to undertake. His eyes fell on Agnes Flack, sitting in a corner, rapping her substantial foot on the floor.

Have you met Agnes Flack? You don't remember? Then you have not, for once seen she is not forgotten. She is our female club champion, a position which she owes not only to her skill at golf but to her remarkable physique. She is a fine, large, handsome girl, built rather on the lines of Pop-Eye the Sailor, and Smallwood Bessemer, who was on the slender side, had always admired her.

He caught her eye, and she smiled brightly. He went over to where she sat, and presently they were out on the floor. He saw Celia appear at the French windows and stand looking in, and intensified the silent passion of his dancing, trying to convey the idea of being something South American, which ought to be chained up and muzzled in the interests of pure womanhood. Celia sniffed with a violence that caused the lights to flicker, and an hour or so later Smallwood Bessemer went home, well pleased with the start he had made.

He was climbing into bed, feeling that all would soon be well once more, when the telephone rang and Sidney McMurdo's voice boomed over the wire.

“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 mind, 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—bing!—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. “'M yes. 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
fiancé
, 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.