Part 8

"It was nobody who is here now. It was a Colonel Jervis. He has not come to Lyme Regis this year. That is why father is hopeful."

"Logically," I said, "he ought to be certain to win."

"Yes; but, you see, you were not playing last year, Mr. Garnet."

"Oh, the professor can make rings round me," I said.

"What did you go round in to-day?"

"We were playing match play, and only did the first dozen holes; but my average round is somewhere in the late eighties."

"The best father has ever done is ninety, and that was only once. So you see, Mr. Garnet, there's going to be another tragedy this year."

"You make me feel a perfect brute. But it's more than likely, you must remember, that I shall fail miserably if I ever do play your father in the final. There are days when I play golf very badly."

Phyllis smiled. "Do you really have your off days?"

"Nearly always. There are days when I slice with my driver as if it were a bread knife."

"Really?"

"And when I couldn't putt to hit a haystack."

"Then I hope it will be on one of those days that you play father."

"I hope so, too," I said.

"You hope so?"

"Yes."

"But don't you want to win?"

"I should prefer to please you."

Mr. Lewis Waller could not have said it better.

"Really, how very unselfish of you, Mr. Garnet," she replied with a laugh. "I had no idea that such chivalry existed. I thought a golfer would sacrifice anything to win a game."

"Most things."

"And trample on the feelings of anybody."

"Not everybody," I said.

At this point the professor joined us.

XV

THE ARRIVAL OF NEMESIS

Some people do not believe in presentiments. They attribute that curious feeling that something unpleasant is going to happen to such mundane causes as liver or a chill or the weather. For my own part, I think there is more in the matter than the casual observer might imagine.

I awoke three days after my meeting with the professor at the clubhouse filled with a dull foreboding. Somehow I seemed to know that that day was going to turn out badly for me. It may have been liver or a chill, but it was certainly not the weather. The morning was perfect, the most glorious of a glorious summer. There was a haze over the valley and out to sea which suggested a warm noon, when the sun should have begun the serious duties of the day. The birds were singing in the trees and breakfasting on the lawn, while Edwin, seated on one of the flower beds, watched them with the eye of a connoisseur. Occasionally, when a sparrow hopped in his direction, he would make a sudden spring, and the bird would fly away to the other side of the lawn. I had never seen Edwin catch a sparrow. I believe they looked on him as a bit of a crank, and humored him by coming within springing distance, just to keep him amused. Dashing young cock sparrows would show off before their particular hen sparrows, and earn a cheap reputation for dare-deviltry by going within so many yards of Edwin's lair and then darting away.

Bob was in his favorite place on the gravel. I took him with me down to the Cob to watch me bathe.

"What's the matter with me to-day, Robert, old man?" I asked him as I dried myself.

He blinked lazily, but contributed no suggestion.

"It's no good looking bored," I went on, "because I'm going to talk about myself, however much it bores you. Here am I, as fit as a prize fighter; living in the open air for I don't know how long; eating good, plain food; bathing every morning--sea bathing, mind you; and yet what's the result? I feel beastly."

Bob yawned and gave a little whine.

"Yes," I said, "I know I'm in love. But that can't be it, because I was in love just as much a week ago, and I felt all right then. But isn't she an angel, Bob? Eh? Isn't she? But how about Tom Chase? Don't you think he's a dangerous man? He calls her by her Christian name, you know, and behaves generally as if she belonged to him. And then he sees her every day, while I have to trust to meeting her at odd times, and then I generally feel like such a fool I can't think of anything to talk about except golf and the weather. He probably sings duets with her after dinner. And you know what comes of duets after dinner."

Here Bob, who had been trying for some time to find a decent excuse for getting away, pretended to see something of importance at the other end of the Cob, and trotted off to investigate it, leaving me to finish dressing by myself.

"Of course," I said to myself, "it may be merely hunger. I may be all right after breakfast, but at present I seem to be working up for a really fine fit of the blues."

I whistled for Bob and started for home. On the beach I saw the professor some little distance away and waved my towel in a friendly manner. He made no reply.

Of course it was possible that he had not seen me, but for some reason his attitude struck me as ominous. As far as I could see, he was looking straight at me, and he was not a shortsighted man. I could think of no reason why he should cut me. We had met on the links on the previous morning, and he had been friendliness itself. He had called me "me dear boy," supplied me with ginger beer at the clubhouse, and generally behaved as if he had been David and I Jonathan. Yet in certain moods we are inclined to make mountains out of mole-hills, and I went on my way, puzzled and uneasy, with a distinct impression that I had received the cut direct.

I felt hurt. What had I done that Providence should make things so unpleasant for me? It would be a little hard, as Ukridge would have said, if, after all my trouble, the professor had discovered some fresh crow to pluck with me. Perhaps Ukridge had been irritating him again. I wished he would not identify me so completely with Ukridge. I could not be expected to control the man. Then I reflected that they could hardly have met in the few hours between my parting from the professor at the clubhouse and my meeting with him on the beach. Ukridge rarely left the farm. When he was not working among the fowls, he was lying on his back in the paddock, resting his massive mind.

I came to the conclusion that, after all, the professor had not seen me.

"I'm an idiot, Bob," I said, as we turned in at the farm gate, "and I let my imagination run away with me."

Bob wagged his tail in approval of the sentiment.

Breakfast was ready when I got in. There was a cold chicken on the sideboard, deviled chicken on the table, and a trio of boiled eggs, and a dish of scrambled eggs. I helped myself to the latter and sat down.

Ukridge was sorting the letters.

"Morning, Garny," he said. "One for you, Millie."

"It's from Aunt Elizabeth," said Mrs. Ukridge, looking at the envelope.

"Wish she'd inclose a check. She could spare it."

"I think she would, dear, if she knew how much it was needed. But I don't like to ask her. She's so curious and says such horrid things."

"She does," said Ukridge gloomily. He probably spoke from experience. "Two for you, Sebastian. All the rest for me. Eighteen of them, and all bills."

He spread them out on the table like a pack of cards, and drew one at a venture.

"Whiteley's," he said. "Getting jumpy. Are in receipt of my favor of the 7th inst, and are at a loss to understand--all sorts of things. Would like something on account."

"Grasping of them," I said.

"They seem to think I'm doing it for fun. How can I let them have their money when there isn't any?"

"Sounds difficult."

"Here's one from Dorchester--Smith, the man I got the gramophone from. Wants to know when I'm going to settle up for sixteen records."

"Sordid man!"

I wanted to get on with my own correspondence, but Ukridge was one of those men who compel one's attention when they are talking.

"The chicken men, the dealer people, you know, want me to pay up for the first lot of hens. Considering that they all died of roop, and that I was going to send them back, anyhow, after I'd got them to hatch out a few chickens, I call that cool. I can't afford to pay heavy sums for birds which die off quicker than I can get them in. It isn't business."

It was not my business, at any rate, so I switched off my attention from Ukridge's troubles and was opening the first of my two letters when an exclamation from Mrs. Ukridge made me look up.

She had dropped the letter she had been reading and was staring indignantly in front of her. There were two little red spots on her cheeks.

"I shall never speak to Aunt Elizabeth again," she said.

"What's the matter, old chap?" inquired Ukridge affectionately, glancing up from his pile of bills. "Aunt Elizabeth been getting on your nerves again? What's she been saying this time?"

Mrs. Ukridge left the room with a sob.

Ukridge sprang at the letter.

"If that demon doesn't stop writing letters and upsetting Millie I shall lynch her," he said. I had never seen him so genuinely angry. He turned over the pages till he came to the passage which had caused the trouble. "Listen to this, Garnet. 'I'm sorry, but not surprised, to hear that the chicken farm is not proving a great success. I think you know my opinion of your husband. He is perfectly helpless in any matter requiring the exercise of a little common sense and business capability.' I like that! 'Pon my soul, I like that! You've known me longer than she has, Garny, and you know that it's just in matters requiring common sense that I come out strong. What?"

"Of course, old man," I replied dutifully. "The woman must be a fool."

"That's what she calls me two lines farther on. No wonder Millie was upset. Why can't these cats leave people alone?"

"O woman, woman!" I threw in helpfully.

"Always interfering--"

"Beastly!"

"--and backbiting--"

"Awful!"

"I shan't stand it!"

"I shouldn't."

"Look here! On the next page she calls me a gaby!"

"It's time you took a strong hand."

"And in the very next sentence refers to me as a perfect guffin. What's a guffin, Garny, old boy?"

"It sounds indecent."

"I believe it's actionable."

"I shouldn't wonder."

Ukridge rushed to the door.

"Millie!" he shouted.

No answer.

He slammed the door, and I heard him dashing upstairs.

I turned with a sense of relief to my letters. One was from Lickford. It bore a Cornish postmark. I glanced through it, and laid it aside for a more exhaustive perusal later on.

The other was in a strange handwriting. I looked at the signature. Patrick Derrick. This was queer. What had the professor to say to me?

The next moment my heart seemed to spring to my throat.

"Sir," the letter began.

A pleasant, cheery beginning!

Then it got off the mark, so to speak, like lightning. There was no sparring for an opening, no dignified parade of set phrases leading up to the main point. It was the letter of a man who was almost too furious to write. It gave me the impression that, if he had not written it, he would have been obliged to have taken some very violent form of exercise by way of relief to his soul.

"You will be good enough," he wrote, "to look on our acquaintance as closed. I have no wish to associate with persons of your stamp. If we should happen to meet, you will be good enough to treat me as a total stranger, as I shall treat you. And, if I may be allowed to give you a word of advice, I should recommend you in future, when you wish to exercise your humor, to do so in some less practical manner than by bribing boatmen to upset your" (_friends_ crossed out thickly, and _acquaintances_ substituted). "If you require further enlightenment in this matter, the inclosed letter may be of service to you."

With which he remained mine faithfully, Patrick Derrick.

The inclosed letter was from one Jane Muspratt. It was bright and interesting.

DEAR SIR: My Harry, Mr. Hawk, sas to me how it was him upseting the boat and you, not because he is not steddy in a boat which he is no man more so in Lyme Regis but because one of the gentmen what keeps chikkens up the hill, the little one, Mr. Garnick his name is, says to him Hawk, I'll give you a sovrin to upset Mr. Derrick in your boat, and my Harry being esily led was took in and did but he's sory now and wishes he hadn't, and he sas he'll niver do a prackticle joke again for anyone even for a bank note.

Yours obedly

JANE MUSPRATT.

O woman, woman!

At the bottom of everything! History is full of cruel tragedies caused by the lethal sex.

Who lost Mark Antony the world? A woman. Who let Samson in so atrociously? Woman again. Why did Bill Bailey leave home? Once more, because of a woman. And here was I, Jerry Garnet, harmless, well-meaning writer of minor novels, going through the same old mill.

I cursed Jane Muspratt. What chance had I with Phyllis now? Could I hope to win over the professor again? I cursed Jane Muspratt for the second time.

My thoughts wandered to Mr. Harry Hawk. The villain! The scoundrel! What business had he to betray me? Well, I could settle with him. The man who lays a hand upon a woman, save in the way of kindness, is justly disliked by society; so the woman Muspratt, culpable as she was, was safe from me. But what of the man Hawk? There no such considerations swayed me. I would interview the man Hawk. I would give him the most hectic ten minutes of his career. I would say things to him the recollection of which would make him start up shrieking in his bed in the small hours of the night. I would arise, and be a man and slay him--take him grossly, full of bread, with all his crimes, broad-blown, as flush as May; at gaming, swearing, or about some act that had no relish of salvation in it.

The demon!

My life--ruined. My future--gray and blank. My heart--shattered. And why? Because of the scoundrel--Hawk.

Phyllis would meet me in the village, on the Cob, on the links, and pass by as if I were the invisible man. And why? Because of the reptile--Hawk. The worm--Hawk. The varlet--Hawk.

I crammed my hat on and hurried out of the house toward the village.

A CHANCE MEETING

XVI

I roamed the place in search of the varlet for the space of half an hour, and, after having drawn all his familiar haunts, found him at length leaning over the sea wall near the church, gazing thoughtfully into the waters below.

I confronted him.

"Well," I said, "you're a beauty, aren't you?"

He eyed me owlishly. Even at this early hour, I was grieved to see, he showed signs of having looked on the bitter while it was brown.

"Beauty?" he echoed.

"What have you got to say for yourself?"

It was plain that he was engaged in pulling his faculties together by some laborious process known only to himself. At present my words conveyed no meaning to him. He was trying to identify me. He had seen me before somewhere, he was certain, but he could not say where, or who I was.

"I want to know," I said, "what induced you to be such an abject idiot as to let our arrangement get known?"

I spoke quietly. I was not going to waste the choicer flowers of speech on a man who was incapable of understanding them. Later on, when he had awakened to a sense of his position, I would begin really to talk to him.

He continued to stare at me. Then a sudden flash of intelligence lit up his features.

"Mr. Garnick," he said.

"You've got it at last."

He stretched out a huge hand.

"I want to know," I said distinctly, "what you've got to say for yourself after letting our affair with the professor become public property?"

He paused a while in thought.

"Dear sir," he said at last, as if he were dictating a letter, "dear sir, I owe you--ex--exp--"

"You do," said I grimly. "I should like to hear it."

"Dear sir, listen me."

"Go on, then."

"You came me. You said, 'Hawk, Hawk, ol' fren', listen me. You tip this ol' bufflehead into sea,' you said, 'an' gormed if I don't give 'ee a gould savrin.' That's what you said me. Isn't that what you said me?"

I did not deny it.

"Ve' well. I said you, 'Right,' I said. I tipped the ol' soul into sea, and I got the gould savrin."

"Yes, you took care of that. All this is quite true, but it's beside the point. We are not disputing about what happened. What I want to know for the third time--is what made you let the cat out of the bag? Why couldn't you keep quiet about it?"

He waved his hand.

"Dear sir," he replied. "This way. Listen me."

It was a tragic story that he unfolded. My wrath ebbed as I listened. After all, the fellow was not so greatly to blame. I felt that in his place I should have acted as he had done. Fate was culpable, and fate alone.

It appeared that he had not come well out of the matter of the accident. I had not looked at it hitherto from his point of view. While the rescue had left me the popular hero, it had had quite the opposite result for him. He had upset his boat and would have drowned his passenger, said public opinion, if the young hero from London--myself--had not plunged in, and at the risk of his life brought the professor to shore. Consequently, he was despised by all as an inefficient boatman. He became a laughing stock. The local wags made laborious jests when he passed. They offered him fabulous sums to take their worst enemies out for a row with him. They wanted to know when he was going to school to learn his business. In fact, they behaved as wags do and always have done at all times all the world over.

Now, all this Mr. Hawk, it seemed, would have borne cheerfully and patiently for my sake, or, at any rate, for the sake of the good golden sovereign I had given him. But a fresh factor appeared in the problem, complicating it grievously. To wit, Miss Jane Muspratt.

"She said me," explained Mr. Hawk with pathos, "'Harry 'Awk,' she said, 'yeou'm a girt fule, an' I don't marry noone as is ain't to be trusted in a boat by hisself, and what has jokes made about him by that Tom Leigh.' I punched Tom Leigh," observed Mr. Hawk parenthetically. "'So,' she said me, 'yeou can go away, an' I don't want to see yeou again.'"

This heartless conduct on the part of Miss Muspratt had had the natural result of making him confess all in self-defense, and she had written to the professor the same night.

I forgave Mr. Hawk. I think he was hardly sober enough to understand, for he betrayed no emotion.

"It is fate, Hawk," I said, "simply fate. There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will, and it's no good grumbling."

"Yiss," said Mr. Hawk, after chewing this sentiment for a while in silence, "so she said me, 'Hawk,' she said--like that--'you're a girt fule--'"

"That's all right," I replied. "I quite understand. As I say, it's simply fate. Good-by."

And I left him.

As I was going back, I met the professor and Phyllis.

They passed me without a look.

I wandered on in quite a fervor of self-pity. I was in one of those moods when life suddenly seems to become irksome, when the future stretches blank and gray in front of one. In such a mood it is imperative that one should seek distraction. The shining example of Mr. Harry Hawk did not lure me. Taking to drink would be a nuisance. Work was what I wanted. I would toil like a navvy all day among the fowls, separating them when they fought, gathering in the eggs when they laid, chasing them across country when they got away, and even, if necessity arose, painting their throats with turpentine when they were stricken with roop. Then, after dinner, when the lamps were lit, and Mrs. Ukridge petted Edwin and sewed, and Ukridge smoked cigars and incited the gramophone to murder "Mumbling Mose," I would steal away to my bedroom and write--and write--and _write_--and go on writing till my fingers were numb and my eyes refused to do their duty. And, when time had passed, I might come to feel that it was all for the best. A man must go through the fire before he can write his masterpiece. We learn in suffering what we teach in song. What we lose on the swings we make up on the roundabouts. Jerry Garnet, the man, might become a depressed, hopeless wreck, with the iron planted irremovably in his soul; but Jeremy Garnet, the author, should turn out such a novel of gloom that strong critics would weep and the public jostle for copies till Mudie's doorways became a shambles.

Thus might I some day feel that all this anguish was really a blessing--effectively disguised.

But I doubted it.

We were none of us very cheerful now at the farm. Even Ukridge's spirit was a little daunted by the bills which poured in by every post. It was as if the tradesmen of the neighborhood had formed a league and were working in concert. Or it may have been due to thought waves. Little accounts came not in single spies but in battalions. The popular demand for a sight of the color of his money grew daily. Every morning at breakfast he would give us fresh bulletins of the state of mind of each of our creditors, and thrill us with the announcement that Whiteley's were getting cross and Harrod's jumpy, or that the bearings of Dawlish, the grocer, were becoming over-heated. We lived in a continual atmosphere of worry. Chicken and nothing but chicken at meals, and chicken and nothing but chicken between meals, had frayed our nerves. An air of defeat hung over the place. We were a beaten side, and we realized it. We had been playing an uphill game for nearly two months, and the strain was beginning to tell. Ukridge became uncannily silent. Mrs. Ukridge, though she did not understand, I fancy, the details of the matter, was worried because Ukridge was. Mrs. Beale had long since been turned into a soured cynic by the lack of chances vouchsafed her for the exercise of her art. And as for me, I have never since spent so profoundly miserable a week. I was not even permitted the anodyne of work. There seemed to be nothing to do on the farm. The chickens were quite happy, and only asked to be let alone and allowed to have their meals at regular intervals. And every day one or more of their number would vanish into the kitchen, and Mrs. Beale would serve up the corpse in some cunning disguise, and we would try to delude ourselves into the idea that it was something altogether different.

There was one solitary gleam of variety in our menu. An editor sent me a check for a guinea for a set of verses. We cashed that check and trooped round the town in a body, laying out the money. We bought a leg of mutton and a tongue and sardines and pineapple chunks and potted meat and many other noble things, and had a perfect banquet.

After that we relapsed into routine again.

Deprived of physical labor, with the exception of golf and bathing--trivial sports compared with work in the fowl runs at its hardest--I tried to make up for it by working at my novel.

It refused to materialize.

I felt, like the man in the fable, as if some one had played a mean trick on me, and substituted for my brain a side order of cauliflower. By no manner of means could I get the plot to shape itself. I could not detach my mind from my own painful case. Instead of thinking of my characters, I sat in my chair and thought miserably of Phyllis.

The only progress I achieved was with my villain.

I drew him from the professor and made him a blackmailer. He had several other social defects, but that was his profession. That was the thing he did really well.

It was on one of the many occasions on which I had sat in my room, pen in hand, through the whole of a lovely afternoon, with no better result than a slight headache, that I bethought me of that little paradise on the Ware Cliff, hung over the sea and backed by green woods. I had not been there for sometime, owing principally to an entirely erroneous idea that I could do more solid work sitting in a straight, hard chair at a table than lying on soft turf with the sea wind in my eyes.

But now the desire to visit that little clearing again drove me from my room. In the drawing-room below, the gramophone was dealing brassily with "Mister Blackman." Outside, the sun was just thinking of setting. The Ware Cliff was the best medicine for me. What does Kipling say?