Fine weather jeeves, p.9
Fine Weather, Jeeves, page 9
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Ferdinand. ‘Er – do you always drive like that?’
‘Well, I generally get a bit longer ball, but I’m off my drive this morning. It’s lucky I came out and got this practice. I’m playing a match tomorrow with a fellow named Dibble, who’s a local champion, or something.’
‘Me,’ said Ferdinand, humbly.
‘Eh? Oh, you?’ Mr Parsloe eyed him appraisingly. ‘Well, may the best man win.’
As this was precisely what Ferdinand was afraid was going to happen, he nodded in a sickly manner and tottered off to his bathe. The magic had gone out of the morning. The sun still shone, but in a silly, feeble way; and a cold and depressing wind had sprung up. For Ferdinand’s inferiority complex, which had seemed cured for ever, was back again, doing business at the old stand.
How sad it is in this life that the moment to which we have looked forward with the most glowing anticipation so often turns out on arrival, flat, cold, and disappointing. For ten days Barbara Medway had been living for that meeting with Ferdinand, when, getting out of the train, she would see him popping about on the horizon with the love-light sparkling in his eyes and words of devotion trembling on his lips. The poor girl never doubted for an instant that he would unleash his pent-up emotions inside the first five minutes, and her only worry was lest he should give an embarrassing publicity to the sacred scene by falling on his knees on the station platform.
‘Well, here I am at last,’ she cried gaily.
‘Hullo!’ said Ferdinand, with a twisted smile.
The girl looked at him, chilled. How could she know that his peculiar manner was due entirely to the severe attack of cold feet resultant upon his meeting with George Parsloe that morning? The interpretation which she placed upon it was that he was not glad to see her. If he had behaved like this before, she would, of course, have put it down to ingrowing goofery, but now she had his written statements to prove that for the last ten days his golf had been one long series of triumphs.
‘I got your letters,’ she said, persevering bravely.
‘I thought you would,’ said Ferdinand, absently.
‘You seem to have been doing wonders.’
‘Yes.’
There was a silence.
‘Have a nice journey?’ said Ferdinand.
‘Very,’ said Barbara.
She spoke coldly, for she was madder than a wet hen. She saw it all now. In the ten days since they had parted, his love, she realised, had waned. Some other girl, met in the romantic surroundings of this picturesque resort, had supplanted her in his affections. She knew how quickly Cupid gets off the mark at a summer hotel, and for an instant she blamed herself for ever having been so ivory-skulled as to let him come to this place alone. Then regret was swallowed up in wrath, and she became so glacial that Ferdinand, who had been on the point of telling her the secret of his gloom, retired into his shell and conversation during the drive to the hotel never soared above a certain level. Ferdinand said the sunshine was nice and Barbara said yes, it was nice, and Ferdinand said it looked pretty on the water, and Barbara said yes, it did look pretty on the water, and Ferdinand said he hoped it was not going to rain, and Barbara said yes, it would be a pity if it rained. And then there was another lengthy silence.
‘How is my uncle?’ asked Barbara at last.
I omitted to mention that the individual to whom I have referred as the Cat-Stroker was Barbara’s mother’s brother, and her host at Marvis Bay.
‘Your uncle?’
‘His name is Tuttle. Have you met him?’
‘Oh yes. I’ve seen a good deal of him. He has got a friend staying with him,’ said Ferdinand, his mind returning to the matter nearest his heart. ‘A fellow named Parsloe.’
‘Oh, is George Parsloe here? How jolly!’
‘Do you know him?’ barked Ferdinand, hollowly. He would not have supposed that anything could have added to his existing depression, but he was conscious now of having slipped a few rungs farther down the ladder of gloom. There had been a horribly joyful ring in her voice. Ah, well, he reflected morosely, how like life it all was! We never know what the morrow may bring forth. We strike a good patch and are beginning to think pretty well of ourselves, and along comes a George Parsloe.
‘Of course I do,’ said Barbara. ‘Why, there he is.’
The cab had drawn up at the door of the hotel, and on the porch George Parsloe was airing his graceful person. To Ferdinand’s fevered eye he looked like a Greek god, and his inferiority complex began to exhibit symptoms of elephantiasis. How could he compete at love or golf with a fellow who looked as if he had stepped out of the movies and considered himself off his drive when he did a hundred and eighty yards?
‘Geor-gee!’ cried Barbara, blithely. ‘Hullo, George!’
‘Why, hullo, Barbara!’
They fell into pleasant conversation, while Ferdinand hung miserably about in the offing. And presently, feeling that his society was not essential to their happiness, he slunk away.
George Parsloe dined at the Cat-Stroker’s table that night, and it was with George Parsloe that Barbara roamed in the moonlight after dinner. Ferdinand, after a profitless hour at the billiard table, went early to his room. But not even the rays of the moon, glinting on his cup, could soothe the fever in his soul. He practised putting sombrely into his tooth-glass for a while; then, going to bed, fell at last into a troubled sleep.
Barbara slept late the next morning and breakfasted in her room. Coming down towards noon, she found a strange emptiness in the hotel. It was her experience of summer hotels that a really fine day like this one was the cue for half the inhabitants to collect in the lounge, shut all the windows, and talk about conditions in the jute industry. To her surprise, though the sun was streaming down from a cloudless sky, the only occupant of the lounge was the octogenarian with the ear-trumpet. She observed that he was chuckling to himself in a senile manner.
‘Good morning,’ she said, politely, for she had made his acquaintance on the previous evening.
‘Hey?’ said the octogenarian, suspending his chuckling and getting his trumpet into position.
‘I said “Good morning!”’ roared Barbara into the receiver.
‘Hey?’
‘Good morning!’
‘Ah! Yes, it’s a very fine morning, a very fine morning. If it wasn’t for missing my bun and glass of milk at twelve sharp,’ said the octogenarian, ‘I’d be down on the links. That’s where I’d be, down on the links. If it wasn’t for missing my bun and glass of milk.’
This refreshment arriving at this moment, he dismantled the radio outfit and began to restore his tissues.
‘Watching the match,’ he explained, pausing for a moment in his bun-mangling.
‘What match?’
The octogenarian sipped his milk.
‘What match?’ repeated Barbara.
‘Hey?’
‘What match?’
The octogenarian began to chuckle again and nearly swallowed a crumb the wrong way.
‘Take some of the conceit out of him,’ he gurgled.
‘Out of who?’ asked Barbara, knowing perfectly well that she should have said ‘whom.’
‘Yes,’ said the octogenarian.
‘Who is conceited?’
‘Ah! This young fellow, Dibble. Very conceited. I saw it in his eye from the first, but nobody would listen to me. Mark my words, I said, that boy needs taking down a peg or two. Well, he’s going to be this morning. Your uncle wired to young Parsloe to come down, and he’s arranged a match between them. Dibble—’ Here the octogenarian choked again and had to rinse himself out with milk, ‘Dibble doesn’t know that Parsloe once went round in ninety-four!’
‘What?’
Everything seemed to go black to Barbara. Through a murky mist she appeared to be looking at a negro octogenarian, sipping ink. Then her eyes cleared, and she found herself clutching for support at the back of a chair. She understood now. She realised why Ferdinand had been so distrait, and her whole heart went out to him in a spasm of maternal pity. How she had wronged him!
‘Take some of the conceit out of him,’ the octogenarian was mumbling, and Barbara felt a sudden sharp loathing for the old man. For two pins she could have dropped a beetle in his milk. Then the need for action roused her. What action? She did not know. All she knew was that she must act.
‘Oh!’ she cried.
‘Hey?’ said the octogenarian, bringing his trumpet to the ready.
But Barbara had gone.
It was not far to the links, and Barbara covered the distance on flying feet. She reached the clubhouse, but the course was empty except for the Scooper, who was preparing to drive off the first tee. In spite of the fact that something seemed to tell her subconsciously that this was one of the sights she ought not to miss, the girl did not wait to watch. Assuming that the match had started soon after breakfast, it must by now have reached one of the holes on the second nine. She ran down the hill, looking to left and right, and was presently aware of a group of spectators clustered about a green in the distance. As she hurried towards them they moved away, and now she could see Ferdinand advancing to the next tee. With a thrill that shook her whole body she realised that he had the honour. So he must have won one hole, at any rate. Then she saw her uncle.
‘How are they?’ she gasped.
Mr Tuttle seemed moody. It was apparent that things were not going altogether to his liking.
‘All square at the fifteenth,’ he replied, gloomily.
‘All square!’
‘Yes. Young Parsloe,’ said Mr Tuttle with a sour look in the direction of that lissom athlete, ‘doesn’t seem to be able to do a thing right on the greens. He has been putting like a sheep with the botts.’
From the foregoing remark of Mr Tuttle you will, no doubt, have gleaned at least a clue to the mystery of how Ferdinand Dibble had managed to hold his long-driving adversary up to the fifteenth green, but for all that you will probably consider that some further explanation of this amazing state of affairs is required. Mere bad putting on the part of George Parsloe is not, you feel, sufficient to cover the matter entirely. You are right. There was another very important factor in the situation – to wit, that by some extraordinary chance Ferdinand Dibble had started right off from the first tee, playing the game of a lifetime. Never had he made such drives, never chipped his chips so shrewdly.
About Ferdinand’s driving there was as a general thing a fatal stiffness and over-caution which prevented success. And with his chip-shots he rarely achieved accuracy owing to his habit of rearing his head like the lion of the jungle just before the club struck the ball. But today he had been swinging with a careless freedom, and his chips had been true and clean. The thing had puzzled him all the way round. It had not elated him, for, owing to Barbara’s aloofness and the way in which she had gambolled about George Parsloe, like a young lamb in the springtime, he was in too deep a state of dejection to be elated by anything. And now, suddenly, in a flash of clear vision, he perceived the reason why he had been playing so well today. It was just because he was not elated. It was simply because he was so profoundly miserable.
That was what Ferdinand told himself as he stepped off the sixteenth, after hitting a screamer down the centre of the fairway, and I am convinced that he was right. Like so many indifferent golfers, Ferdinand Dibble had always made the game hard for himself by thinking too much. He was a deep student of the works of the masters, and whenever he prepared to play a stroke he had a complete mental list of all the mistakes which it was possible to make. He would remember how Taylor had warned against dipping the right shoulder, how Vardon had inveighed against any movement of the head; he would recall how Ray had mentioned the tendency to snatch back the club, how Braid had spoken sadly of those who sin against their better selves by stiffening the muscles and heaving.
The consequence was that when, after waggling in a frozen manner till mere shame urged him to take some definite course of action, he eventually swung, he invariably proceeded to dip his right shoulder, stiffen his muscles, heave, and snatch back the club, at the same time raising his head sharply as in the illustrated plate (‘Some Frequent Faults of Beginners – No. 3 – Lifting the Bean’) facing page thirty-four of James Braid’s Golf Without Tears. Today he had been so preoccupied with his broken heart that he had made his shots absently, almost carelessly, with the result that at least one in every three had been a lallapaloosa.
Meanwhile, George Parsloe had driven off and the match was progressing. George was feeling a little flustered by now. He had been given to understand that this bird Dibble was a hundred-at-his-best man, and all the way round the fellow had been reeling off fives in great profusion, and had once actually got a four. True, there had been an occasional six, and even a seven, but that did not alter the main fact that the man was making the dickens of a game of it. With the haughty spirit of one who had once done a ninety-four, George Parsloe had anticipated being at least three up at the turn. Instead of which he had been two down, and had had to fight strenuously to draw level.
Nevertheless, he drove steadily and well, and would certainly have won the hole had it not been for his weak and sinful putting. The same defect caused him to halve the seventeenth, after being on in two, with Ferdinand wandering in the desert and only reaching the green with his fourth. Then, however, Ferdinand holed out from a distance of seven yards, getting a five; which George’s three putts just enabled him to equal.
Barbara had watched the proceedings with a beating heart. At first she had looked on from afar; but now, drawn as by a magnet, she approached the tee. Ferdinand was driving off. She held her breath. Ferdinand held his breath. And all around one could see their respective breaths being held by George Parsloe, Mr Tuttle, and the enthralled crowd of spectators. It was a moment of the acutest tension, and it was broken by the crack of Ferdinand’s driver as it met the ball and sent it hopping along the ground for a mere thirty yards. At this supreme crisis in the match Ferdinand Dibble had topped.
George Parsloe teed up his ball. There was a smile of quiet satisfaction on his face. He snuggled the driver in his hands, and gave it a preliminary swish. This, felt George Parsloe, was where the happy ending came. He could drive as he had never driven before. He would so drive that it would take his opponent at least three shots to catch up with him. He drew back his club with infinite caution, poised it at the top of the swing—
‘I always wonder—’ said a clear, girlish voice, ripping the silence like the explosion of a bomb.
George Parsloe started. His club wobbled. It descended. The ball trickled into the long grass in front of the tee. There was a grim pause.
‘You were saying, Miss Medway—’ said George Parsloe, in a small, flat voice.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ said Barbara. ‘I’m afraid I put you off.’
‘A little, perhaps. Possibly the merest trifle. But you were saying you wondered about something. Can I be of any assistance?’
‘I was only saying,’ said Barbara, ‘that I always wonder why tees are called tees.’
George Parsloe swallowed once or twice. He also blinked a little feverishly. His eyes had a dazed, staring expression.
‘I am afraid I cannot tell you off-hand,’ he said, ‘but I will make a point of consulting some good encyclopædia at the earliest opportunity.’
‘Thank you so much.’
‘Not at all. It will be a pleasure. In case you were thinking of inquiring at the moment when I am putting why greens are called greens, may I venture the suggestion now that it is because they are green?’
And, so saying, George Parsloe stalked to his ball and found it nestling in the heart of some shrub of which, not being a botanist, I cannot give you the name. It was a close-knit, adhesive shrub, and it twined its tentacles so lovingly around George Parsloe’s niblick that he missed his first shot altogether. His second made the ball rock, and his third dislodged it. Playing a full swing with his brassie and being by now a mere cauldron of seething emotions he missed his fourth. His fifth came to within a few inches of Ferdinand’s drive, and he picked it up and hurled it from him into the rough as if it had been something venomous.
‘Your hole and match,’ said George Parsloe, thinly.
Ferdinand Dibble sat beside the glittering ocean. He had hurried off the course with swift strides the moment George Parsloe had spoken those bitter words. He wanted to be alone with his thoughts.
They were mixed thoughts. For a moment joy at the reflection that he had won a tough match came irresistibly to the surface, only to sink again as he remembered that life, whatever its triumphs, could hold nothing for him now that Barbara Medway loved another.
‘Mr Dibble!’
He looked up. She was standing at his side. He gulped and rose to his feet.
‘Yes?’
There was a silence.
‘Doesn’t the sun look pretty on the water?’ said Barbara.
Ferdinand groaned. This was too much.
‘Leave me,’ he said, hollowly. ‘Go back to your Parsloe, the man with whom you walked in the moonlight beside this same water.’
‘Well, why shouldn’t I walk with Mr Parsloe in the moonlight beside this same water?’ demanded Barbara, with spirit.
‘I never said,’ replied Ferdinand, for he was a fair man at heart, ‘that you shouldn’t walk with Mr Parsloe beside this same water. I simply said you did walk with Mr Parsloe beside this same water.’
‘I’ve a perfect right to walk with Mr Parsloe beside this same water,’ persisted Barbara. ‘He and I are old friends.’
Ferdinand groaned again.
‘Exactly! There you are! As I suspected. Old friends. Played together as children, and what not, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘No, we didn’t. I’ve only known him five years. But he is engaged to be married to my greatest chum, so that draws us together.’
Ferdinand uttered a strangled cry.
‘Parsloe engaged to be married!’
‘Yes. The wedding takes place next month.’
‘But look here.’ Ferdinand’s forehead was wrinkled. He was thinking tensely. ‘Look here,’ said Ferdinand, a close reasoner. ‘If Parsloe’s engaged to your greatest chum, he can’t be in love with you.’
