“Rollo!” she cried. “You smell of tobacco-smoke.”
Rollo looked embarrassed.
“Well, the fact is, mother—”
A hard protuberance in his coat-pocket attracted Mrs. Podmarsh’s notice. She swooped and drew out a big-bowled pipe.
“Rollo!” she exclaimed, aghast.
“Well, the fact is, mother—”
“Don’t you know,” cried Mrs. Podmarsh, “that smoking is poisonous, and injurious to health?”
“Yes. But the fact is, mother—”
“It causes nervous dyspepsia, sleeplessness, gnawing of the stomach, headache, weak eyes, red spots on the skin, throat irritation, asthma, bronchitis, heart failure, lung trouble, catarrh, melancholy, neurasthenia, loss of memory, impaired willpower, rheumatism, lumbago, sciatica, neuritis, heartburn, torpid liver, loss of appetite, enervation, lassitude, lack of ambition, and falling out of hair.”
“Yes, I know, mother. But the fact is, Ted Ray smokes all the time he’s playing, and I thought it might improve my game.”
And it was at these splendid words that Mary Kent felt for the first time that something might be made of Rollo Podmarsh. That she experienced one-millionth of the fervour which was gnawing at his vitals I will not say. A woman does not fall in love in a flash like a man. But at least she no longer regarded him with loathing. On the contrary, she found herself liking him. There was, she considered, the right stuff in Rollo. And if, as seemed probable from his mother’s conversation, it would take a bit of digging to bring it up, well—she liked rescue-work and had plenty of time.
Mr. Arnold Bennett, in a recent essay, advises young bachelors to proceed with a certain caution in matters of the heart. They should, he asserts, first decide whether or not they are ready for love; then, whether it is better to marry earlier or later; thirdly, whether their ambitions are such that a wife will prove a hindrance to their career. These romantic preliminaries concluded, they may grab a girl and go to it. Rollo Podmarsh would have made a tough audience for these precepts. Since the days of Antony and Cleopatra probably no one had ever got more swiftly off the mark. One may say that he was in love before he had come within two yards of the girl. And each day that passed found him more nearly up to his eyebrows in the tender emotion.
He thought of Mary when he was changing his wet shoes; he dreamed of her while putting flannel next his skin; he yearned for her over the evening arrowroot. Why, the man was such a slave to his devotion that he actually went to the length of purloining small articles belonging to her. Two days after Mary’s arrival Rollo Podmarsh was driving off the first tee with one of her handkerchiefs, a powder-puff, and a dozen hairpins secreted in his left breast-pocket. When dressing for dinner he used to take them out and look at them, and at night he slept with them under his pillow. Heavens, how he loved that girl!
One evening, when they had gone out into the garden together to look at the new moon—Rollo, by his mother’s advice, wearing a woollen scarf to protect his throat—he endeavoured to bring the conversation round to the important subject. Mary’s last remark had been about earwigs. Considered as a cue, it lacked a subtle something; but Rollo was not the man to be discouraged by that.
“Talking of earwigs, Miss Kent,” he said, in a low, musical voice, “have you ever been in love?”
Mary was silent for a moment before replying.
“Yes, once. When I was eleven. With a conjurer who came to perform at my birthday-party. He took a rabbit and two eggs out of my hair, and life seemed one grand sweet song.”
“Never since then?”
“Never.”
“Suppose—just for the sake of argument—suppose you ever did love anyone—er—what sort of man would it be?”
“A hero,” said Mary, promptly.
“A hero?” said Rollo, somewhat taken aback. “What sort of hero?”
“Any sort. I could only love a really brave man—a man who had done some wonderful heroic action.”
“Shall we go in?” said Rollo, hoarsely. “The air is a little chilly.”
We have now, therefore, arrived at a period in Rollo Podmarsh’s career which might have inspired those lines of Henley’s about “the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole.” What with one thing and another, he was in an almost Job-like condition of despondency. I say “one thing and another,” for it was not only hopeless love that weighed him down. In addition to being hopelessly in love, he was greatly depressed about his golf.
On Rollo in his capacity of golfer I have so far not dwelt. You have probably allowed yourself, in spite of the significant episode of the pipe, to dismiss him as one of those placid, contented—shall I say dilettante?—golfers who are so frequent in these degenerate days. Such was not the case. Outwardly placid, Rollo was consumed inwardly by an ever-burning fever of ambition. His aims were not extravagant. He did not want to become amateur champion, nor even to win a monthly medal; but he did, with his whole soul, desire one of these days to go round the course in under a hundred. This feat accomplished, it was his intention to set the seal on his golfing career by playing a real money-match; and already he had selected his opponent, a certain Colonel Bodger, a tottery performer of advanced years who for the last decade had been a martyr to lumbago.
But it began to look as if even the modest goal he had marked out for himself were beyond his powers. Day after day he would step on to the first tee, glowing with zeal and hope, only to crawl home in the quiet evenfall with another hundred and twenty on his card. Little wonder, then, that he began to lose his appetite and would moan feebly at the sight of a poached egg.
With Mrs. Podmarsh sedulously watching over her son’s health, you might have supposed that this inability on his part to teach the
