“It was Vosper’s idea.”
“Vosper!”
A sudden seething fury gripped Bradbury. This pestilent butler was an absolute home-wrecker. He toyed with the idea of poisoning Vosper’s port. Surely, if he were to do so, a capable lawyer could smooth things over and get him off with at the worst a nominal fine.
“Vosper says I need exercise. He says he does not like my wheezing.”
“Your what?”
“My wheezing. I do wheeze, you know.”
“Well, so does he.”
“Yes, but a good butler is expected to wheeze. A wheezing woman is quite a different thing. My wheezing would never have done for the Duke, Vosper says.”
Bradbury Fisher breathed tensely.
“Ha!” he said.
“I think it’s so nice of him, Bradbury. It shows he has our interests at heart, just like a faithful old retainer. He says wheezing is an indication of heightened blood-pressure and can be remedied by gentle exercise. So we’ll have our first round tomorrow morning, shall we?”
“Just as you say,” said Bradbury dully. “I had a sort of date to make one of a foursome with three men at the club, but—”
“Oh, you don’t want to play with those silly men any more. It will be much nicer, just you and I playing together.”
It has always seemed to me a strange and unaccountable thing that nowadays, when gloom is at such a premium in the world’s literature and all around us stern young pessimists are bringing home the bacon with their studies in the greyly grim, no writer has thought of turning his pen to a realistic portrayal of the golfing wife. No subject could be more poignant, and yet it has been completely neglected. One can only suppose that even modern novelists feel that the line should be drawn somewhere.
Bradbury Fisher’s emotions, as he stood by the first tee watching his wife prepare to drive off, were far beyond my poor powers to describe. Compared with him at that moment, the hero of a novel of the Middle West would have seemed almost offensively chirpy. This was the woman he loved, and she was behaving in a manner that made the iron sink deep into his soul.
Most women golfers are elaborate wagglers, but none that Bradbury had ever seen had made quite such a set of Swedish exercises out of the simple act of laying the club-head behind the ball and raising it over the right shoulder. For fully a minute, it seemed to him, Mrs. Fisher fiddled and pawed at the ball; while Bradbury, realizing that there are eighteen tees on a course and that this Russian Ballet stuff was consequently going to happen at least seventeen times more, quivered in agony and clenched his hands till the knuckles stood out white under the strain. Then she drove, and the ball trickled down the hill into a patch of rough some five yards distant.
“Tee-hee!” said Mrs. Fisher.
Bradbury uttered a sharp cry. He was married to a golfing giggler.
“What did I do then?”
“God help you, woman,” said Bradbury, “you jerked your head up till I wonder it didn’t come off at the neck.”
It was at the fourth hole that further evidence was afforded the wretched man of how utterly a good, pure woman may change her nature when once she gets out on the links. Mrs. Fisher had played her eleventh, and, having walked the intervening three yards, was about to play her twelfth when behind them, grouped upon the tee, Bradbury perceived two of his fellow-members of the club. Remorse and shame pierced him.
“One minute, honey,” he said, as his life’s partner took a strangelhold on her mashie and was about to begin the movements. “We’d better let these men through.”
“What men?”
“We’re holding up a couple of fellows. I’ll wave to them.”
“You will do nothing of the sort,” cried Mrs. Fisher. “The idea!”
“But, darling—”
“Why should they go through us? We started before them.”
“But, pettie—”
“They shall not pass!” said Mrs. Fisher. And, raising her mashie, she dug a grim divot out of the shrinking turf. With bowed head, Bradbury followed her on the long, long trail.
The sun was sinking as they came at last to journey’s end.
“How right Vosper is!” said Mrs. Fisher, nestling into the cushions of the car. “I feel ever so much better already.”
“Do you?” said Bradbury wanly. “Do you?”
“We’ll play again tomorrow afternoon,” said his wife.
Bradbury Fisher was a man of steel. He endured for a week. But on the last day of the week Mrs. Fisher insisted on taking as a companion on the round Alfred, her pet Airedale. In vain Bradbury spoke of the Green Committee and their prejudice against dogs on the links. Mrs. Fisher—and Bradbury, as he heard the ghastly words, glanced involuntarily up at the summer sky, as if preparing to dodge lightening bolt which could scarcely fail to punish such blasphemy—said that the Green Committee were a lot of silly, fussy old men, and she had no patience with them.
So Alfred came along—barking at Bradbury as he endeavoured to concentrate on the smooth pronation of the wrists, bounding ahead to frolic round distant players who were shaping for delicate chip-shots, and getting a deep toehold on the turf of each successive green. Hell, felt Bradbury, must be something like this; and he wished that he had led a better life.
But that retribution which waits on all, both small and great, who defy Green Committees had marked Alfred down. Taking up a position just behind Mrs. Fisher as she began her down swing on the seventh, he received so shrewd a blow on his right foreleg that with a sharp yelp he broke into a gallop, raced through a foursome on the sixth green, and, charging across country, dived headlong into the water-hazard on the second; where he remained until Bradbury, who had been sent in pursuit, waded in and fished him out.
Mrs. Fisher came panting up, full of concern.
“What shall we do? The poor little
