Nothing Serious (18 page)

I lost
no time in showing him the poem about the Fairy Queen and the bluebell. He read
it in silence, and when he had finished drew a deep breath.

“Is
Timothy Bobbin Timothy?”

“He is.”

“This
poem’s all about Timothy?”

“Precisely.”

“Will
it be printed in a book?”

“In a
slim volume, yes. Together with others of the same type.”

I could
see that he was deeply stirred, and felt that I had sown the good seed.

“You
will probably have quite a good deal to say about this to Timothy at one time
and another,” I said. “Don’t be afraid to speak out for fear of wounding his
feelings. Remind yourself that it is all for his good. The expression ‘cruel to
be kind’ occurs to one.”

His
manner, as I spoke, seemed absent, as if he were turning over in his mind a
selection of good things to be said to his little cousin when they met, and
shortly afterwards he left me, so moved that on my offering him a ginger ale
and a slice of cake he appeared not to have heard me. I retired to rest that
night with the gratifying feeling that I had done my day’s good deed, and was
on the verge of falling asleep when the telephone bell rang.

It was
Jane Bates. Her voice was agitated.

“You
and your schemes!” she said. “I beg your pardon?”

“Do you
know what has happened?”

“What?”

“William
is writing poetry.”

It
seemed to me that I could not have heard her correctly.

“William?”

“William.”

“You
mean Rodney—”

“I don’t
mean Rodney. Let me tell you in a few simple words what has happened. Braid
returned from your house like one in a dream.”

“Yes, I
thought he seemed impressed.”

“Please
do not interrupt. It makes it difficult for me to control myself, and I have
already bitten a semi-circle out of the mouthpiece. Like one in a dream, I was
saying. For the rest of the evening he sat apart, brooding and not answering
when spoken to. At bedtime he came out of the silence. And how!”

“And
what?”

“I said
‘And how!’ He announced that that poem of Rodney’s about the Fairy Queen was
the snappiest thing he had ever read and he didn’t see why, if Rodney could
write poems about Timothy, William couldn’t write poems about
him.
And
when we told him not to talk nonsense, he delivered his ultimatum. He said that
if William did not immediately come through, he would remove his name from the
list of entrants for the Children’s Cup. What did you say?”

“I said
nothing. I was gasping.”

“You
may well gasp. In fact, it will be all right with me if you choke. It was you
who started all this. Of course, he had got us cold. It has been our dearest
wish that he should win the Children’s Cup, and we have spent money lavishly to
have his short game polished up. Naturally, when he put it like that, we had no
alternative. I kissed William, shook him by the hand, tied a wet towel around
his head, gave him pencil and paper and locked him up in the morning-room with
lots of hot coffee. When I asked him just now how he was making out, he said
that he had had no inspiration so far but would keep on swinging. His voice
sounded very hollow. I can picture the poor darling’s agony. The only thing he
has ever written before in his life was a stiff letter to the Greens Committee
beefing about the new bunker on the fifth, and that took him four days and left
him as limp as a rag.”

She
then turned the conversation to what she described as my mischief-making
meddling, and I thought it advisable to hang up.

A thing
I have noticed frequently in the course of a long life, and it is one that
makes for optimism, is that tragedy, while of course rife in this world of
ours, is seldom universal. To give an instance of what I mean, while the
barometer of William and Jane Bates pointed to “Further Outlook Unsettled”,
with Anastatia Spelvin the weather conditions showed signs of improvement.

That
William and his wife were in the depths there could be no question. I did not
meet Jane, for after the trend of her telephone conversation I felt it more
prudent not to, but I saw William a couple of times at luncheon at the club. He
looked weary and haggard and was sticking cheese straws in his hair. I heard
him ask the waiter if he knew any good rhymes, and when the waiter said “To
what?”, William replied “To anything”. He refused a second chop, and sighed a
good deal.

Anastatia,
on the other hand, whom I overtook on my way to the links to watch the final of
the Rabbits Umbrella a few days later, I found her old cheerful self again.
Rodney was one of the competitors in the struggle which was about to begin,
and she took a rosy view of his chances. His opponent was Joe Stocker, and it
appeared that Joe was suffering from one of his bouts of hay fever.

“Surely,”
she said, “Rodney can trim a man with hay fever? Of course, Mr Stocker is
trying Sneezo, the sovereign remedy, but, after all, what is Sneezo?”

“A mere
palliative.”

“They
say he broke a large vase yesterday during one of his paroxysms. It flew across
the room and was dashed to pieces against the wall.”

“That
sounds promising.”

“Do you
know,” said Anastatia, and I saw that her eyes were shining, “I can’t help feeling
that if all goes well Rodney may turn the corner.”

“You
mean that his better self will gain the upper hand, making him once again the
Rodney we knew and loved?”

“Exactly.
If he wins his final, I think he will be a changed man.” I saw what she meant.
A man who has won his first trophy, be it only a scarlet umbrella, has no room
in his mind for anything but the improving of his game so that he can as soon
as possible win another trophy. A Rodney Spelvin with the Rabbits Umbrella
under his belt would have little leisure or inclination for writing poetry.
Golf had been his salvation once. It might prove to be so again.

“You
didn’t watch the preliminary rounds did, you?” Anastatia went on. “Well, at
first Rodney was listless. The game plainly bored him. He had taken a notebook
out with him, and he kept stopping to jot down ideas. And then suddenly,
half-way through the semi-final, he seemed to change. His lips tightened. His
face grew set. And on the tenth a particularly significant incident occurred.
He was shaping for a brassie shot, when a wee little blue butterfly fluttered
down and settled on his ball. And instead of faltering he clenched his teeth
and swung at it with every ounce of weight and muscle. It had to make a quick
jump to save its life. I have seldom seen a butterfly move more nippily. Don’t
you think that was promising?”

“Highly
promising. And this brighter state of things continued?”

“All
through the semi-final. The butterfly came back on the seventeenth and seemed
about to settle on his ball again. But it took a look at his face and moved
off. I feel so happy.”

I
patted her on the shoulder, and we made our way to the first tee, where Rodney
was spinning a coin for Joe Stocker to call. And presently Joe, having won the
honour, drove off.

A word
about this Stocker. A famous amateur wrestler in his youth, and now in middle
age completely muscle bound, he made up for what he lacked in finesse by
bringing to the links the rugged strength and directness of purpose which in
other days had enabled him to pin one and all to the mat: and it had been well
said of him as a golfer that you never knew what he was going to do next. It
might be one thing, or it might be another. All you could say with certainty
was that he would be in there, trying. I have seen him do the long fifteenth in
two, and I have seen him do the short second in thirty-seven.

To-day
he made history immediately by holing out his opening drive. It is true that he
holed it out on the sixteenth green, which lies some three hundred yards away
and a good deal to the left of the first tee, but he holed it out, and a gasp
went up from the spectators who had assembled to watch the match. If this was
what Joseph Stocker did on the first, they said to one another, the imagination
reeled stunned at the prospect of the heights to which he might soar in the
course of eighteen holes.

But
golf is an uncertain game. Taking a line through that majestic opening drive,
one would have supposed that Joe Stocker’s tee shot at the second would have
beaned a lady, too far off to be identified, who was working in her garden
about a quarter of a mile to the south-west. I had, indeed, shouted a warning “Fore!”

So far
from doing this, however, it took him in a classical curve straight for the
pin, and he had no difficulty in shooting a pretty three. And as Rodney had the
misfortune to sink a ball in the lake, they came to the third all square.

The
third, fourth and fifth they halved. Rodney won the sixth, Stocker the seventh.
At the eighth I fancied that Rodney was about to take the lead again, for his
opponent’s third had left his ball entangled in a bush of considerable size,
from which it seemed that it could be removed only with a pair of tweezers.

But it
was at moments like this that you caught Joseph Stocker at his best. In some of
the more scientific aspects of the game he might be forced to yield the palm to
more skilful performers, but when it came to a straight issue of muscle and the
will to win he stood alone. Here was where he could use his niblick, and Joe
Stocker, armed with his niblick, was like King Arthur wielding his sword
Excalibur. The next instant the ball, the bush, a last year’s bird’s nest and a
family of caterpillars which had taken out squatter’s rights were hurtling
toward the green, and shortly after that, Rodney was one down again.

And as
they halved the ninth, it was in this unpleasant position that he came to the
turn. Here Stocker, a chivalrous antagonist, courteously suggested a quick one
at the bar before proceeding, and we repaired thither.

All
through these nine gruelling holes, with their dramatic mutations of fortune, I
had been watching Rodney carefully, and I had been well pleased with what I
saw. There could be no doubt whatever that Anastatia had been right and that
the game had gripped this backslider with all its old force. Here was no poet,
pausing between shots to enter stray thoughts in a note-book, but something
that looked like a Scotch pro in the last round of the National Open. What he
had said to his caddy on the occasion of the lad cracking a nut just as he was
putting had been music to my ears. It was plain that the stern struggle had
brought out all that was best in Rodney Spelvin.

It
seemed to me, too, an excellent sign that he was all impatience to renew the
contest. He asked Stocker with some brusqueness if he proposed to spend the
rest of the day in the bar, and Stocker hastily drained his second ginger ale
and Sneezo and we went out.

As we
were making our way to the tenth tee, little Timothy suddenly appeared from
nowhere, gambolling up in an arch way like a miniature chorus-boy, and I saw at
once what Jane had meant when she had spoken of him putting on an act. There
was a sort of ghastly sprightliness about the child. He exuded whimsicality at
every pore.

“Daddee,”
he called, and Rodney looked round a little irritably, it seemed to me, like
one interrupted while thinking of higher things.

“Daddee,
I’ve made friends with such a nice beetle.”

It was
a remark which a few days earlier would have had Rodney reaching for his
note-book with a gleaming eye, but now he was plainly distrait. There was an
absent look on his face, and watching him swing his driver one was reminded of
a tiger of the jungle lashing its tail.

“Quite,”
was all he said.

“It’s
green. I call it Mister Green Beetle.”

This
idiotic statement—good, one would have thought, for at least a couple of
stanzas—seemed to arouse little or no enthusiasm in Rodney. He merely nodded
curtly and said “Yes, yes, very sensible”.

“Run
away and have a long talk with it,” he added.

“What
about?”

“Why—er—other
beetles.”

“Do you
think Mister Green Beetle has some dear little brothers and sisters, Daddee?”

“Extremely
likely. Good-bye. No doubt we shall meet later.”

“I
wonder if the Fairy Queen uses beetles as horses, Daddee?”

“Very
possibly, very possibly. Go and make inquiries. And you,” said Rodney,
addressing his cowering caddy, “if I hear one more hiccough out of you while I
am shooting—just one—I shall give you two minutes to put your affairs in order
and then I shall act. Come on, Stocker, come on, come on, come on. You have the
honour.”

He
looked at his opponent sourly, like one with a grievance, and I knew what was
in his mind. He was wondering where this hay fever of Stocker’s was, of which
he had heard so much.

I could
not blame him. A finalist in a golf tournament, playing against an antagonist
who has been widely publicized as a victim to hay fever, is entitled to expect
that the latter will give at least occasional evidence of his infirmity, and so
far Joseph Stocker had done nothing of the kind. From the start of the
proceedings he had failed to foozle a single shot owing to a sudden sneeze, and
what Rodney was feeling was that while this could not perhaps actually be
described as sharp practice, it was sailing very near the wind.