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The Golf Omnibus

P. G. Wodehouse




  CONTENTS

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY P. G. WODEHOUSE

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PREFACE

  1 ARCHIBALD’S BENEFIT

  2 THE CLICKING OF CUTHBERT

  3 A WOMAN IS ONLY A WOMAN

  4 A MIXED THREESOME

  5 SUNDERED HEARTS

  6 THE SALVATION OF GEORGE MACKINTOSH

  7 ORDEAL BY GOLF

  8 THE LONG HOLE

  9 THE HEEL OF ACHILLES

  10 THE ROUGH STUFF

  11 THE COMING OF GOWF

  12 THE HEART OF A GOOF

  13 HIGH STAKES

  14 KEEPING IN WITH VOSPER

  15 CHESTER FORGETS HIMSELF

  16 THE MAGIC PLUS FOURS

  17 THE AWAKENING OF ROLLO PODMARSH

  18 RODNEY FAILS TO QUALIFY

  19 JANE GETS OFF THE FAIRWAY

  20 THE PURIFICATION OF RODNEY SPELVIN

  21 THOSE IN PERIL ON THE TEE

  22 THE LETTER OF THE LAW

  23 FAREWELL TO LEGS

  24 THERE’S ALWAYS GOLF

  25 UP FROM THE DEPTHS

  26 FEET OF CLAY

  27 EXCELSIOR

  28 RODNEY HAS A RELAPSE

  29 TANGLED HEARTS

  30 SCRATCH MAN

  31 SLEEPY TIME

  COPYRIGHT

  About the Book

  ‘I attribute the insane arrogance of the later Roman emperors almost entirely to the fact that, never having played golf, they never knew that strangely chastening humility which is engendered by a topped chip-shot. If Cleopatra had been ousted in the first round of the Ladies Singles, we would have heard a lot less of her proud imperiousness.’

  The Oldest Member’s reverence for golf does not cramp his style in telling some of the funniest, tallest and most joyful stories in the whole Wodehouse canon. In this splendid Omnibus, introduced by Wodehouse himself, love and the links are inextricably intertwined, and the reader can click with Cuthbert, thrill to the feats of the Magic Plus Fours and even leap cleanly into The Purification of Rodney Spelvin.

  About the Author

  Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (always known as ‘Plum’) wrote more than ninety novels and some three hundred short stories over 73 years. He is widely recognised as the greatest 20th century writer of humour in the English language.

  Wodehouse mixed the high culture of his classical education with the popular slang of the suburbs in both England and America, becoming a ‘cartoonist of words’. Drawing on the antics of a near-contemporary world, he placed his Drones, Earls, Ladies (including draconian aunts and eligible girls) and Valets, in a recently vanished society, whose reality is transformed by his remarkable imagination into something timeless and enduring.

  Perhaps best known for the escapades of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, Wodehouse also created the world of Blandings Castle, home to Lord Emsworth and his cherished pig, the Empress of Blandings. His stories include gems concerning the irrepressible and disreputable Ukridge; Psmith, the elegant socialist; the ever-so-slightly-unscrupulous Fifth Earl of Ickenham, better known as Uncle Fred; and those related by Mr Mulliner, the charming raconteur of The Angler’s Rest, and the Oldest Member at the Golf Club.

  Wodehouse collaborated with a variety of partners on straight plays and worked principally alongside Guy Bolton on providing the lyrics and script for musical comedies with such composers as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. He liked to say that the royalties for ‘Just My Bill’, which Jerome Kern incorporated into Showboat, were enough to keep him in tobacco and whisky for the rest of his life.

  In 1936 he was awarded The Mark Twain Medal for ‘having made an outstanding and lasting contribution to the happiness of the world’. He was made a Doctor of Letters by Oxford University in 1939 and in 1975, aged 93, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He died shortly afterwards, on St Valentine’s Day.

  To have created so many characters that require no introduction places him in a very select group of writers, lead by Shakespeare and Dickens.

  Also by P.G. Wodehouse

  Fiction

  Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen

  The Adventures of Sally

  Bachelors Anonymous

  Barmy in Wonderland

  Big Money

  Bill the Conqueror

  Blandings Castle and Elsewhere

  Carry On, Jeeves

  The Clicking of Cuthbert

  Cocktail Time

  The Code of the Woosters

  The Coming of Bill

  Company for Henry

  A Damsel in Distress

  Do Butlers Burgle Banks

  Doctor Sally

  Eggs, Beans and Crumpets

  A Few Quick Ones

  French Leave

  Frozen Assets

  Full Moon

  Galahad at Blandings

  A Gentleman of Leisure

  The Girl in Blue

  The Girl on the Boat

  The Gold Bat

  The Head of Kay’s

  The Heart of a Goof

  Heavy Weather

  Hot Water

  Ice in the Bedroom

  If I Were You

  Indiscretions of Archie

  The Inimitable Jeeves

  Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

  Jeeves in the Offing

  Jill the Reckless

  Joy in the Morning

  Laughing Gas

  Leave it to Psmith

  The Little Nugget

  Lord Emsworth and Others

  Louder and Funnier

  Love Among the Chickens

  The Luck of Bodkins

  The Man Upstairs

  The Man with Two Left Feet

  The Mating Season

  Meet Mr Mulliner

  Mike and Psmith

  Mike at Wrykyn

  Money for Nothing

  Money in the Bank

  Mr Mulliner Speaking

  Much Obliged, Jeeves

  Mulliner Nights

  Not George Washington

  Nothing Serious

  The Old Reliable

  Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin

  Piccadilly Jim

  Pigs Have Wings

  Plum Pie

  The Pothunters

  A Prefect’s Uncle

  The Prince and Betty

  Psmith, Journalist

  Psmith in the City

  Quick Service

  Right Ho, Jeeves

  Ring for Jeeves

  Sam me Sudden

  Service with a Smile

  The Small Bachelor

  Something Fishy

  Something Fresh

  Spring Fever

  Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

  Summer Lightning

  Summer Moonshine

  Sunset at Blandings

  The Swoop

  Tales of St Austin’s

  Thank You, Jeeves

  Ukridge

  Uncle Dynamite

  Uncle Fred in the Springtime

  Uneasy Money

  Very Good, Jeeves

  The White Feather

  William Tell Told Again

  Young Men in Spats

  Omnibuses

  The World of Blandings

  The World of Jeeves

  The World of Mr Mulliner

  The World of Psmith

  The World of Ukridge

  The World of Uncle Fred

  Wodehouse Nuggets (edited by Richard Usborne)

  The World of Wodehouse Clergy

  The Hollywood Omnibus

  Weekend Wodehouse

  Paperback Omnibuses

  The Aunts Omnibus

  The Drones Omnibus

  The
Jeeves Omnibus 1

  The Jeeves Omnibus 3

  Poems

  The Parrot and Other Poems

  Autobiographical

  Wodehouse on Wodehouse (comprising Bring on the Girls, Over Seventy, Performing Flea)

  Letters

  Yours, Plum

  The Golf Omnibus

  P. G. Wodehouse

  DEDICATION

  TO THE

  IMMORTAL MEMORY

  OF

  JOHN HENRIE AND PAT ROGIE

  WHO

  AT EDINBURGH IN THE YEAR 1593 A.D.

  WERE IMPRISONED FOR

  “PLAYING OF THE GOWFF ON THE LINKS OF

  LEITH EVERY SABBATH THE TIME OF THE

  SERMONSES”,

  ALSO OF

  ROBERT ROBERTSON

  WHO GOT IT IN THE NECK IN 1604 A.D.

  FOR THE SAME REASON

  PREFACE

  As I start to write this Preface, I am brooding a bit. My brow is furrowed, sort of, and I can’t help sighing a good deal.

  The trouble about reaching the age of ninety-two, which I did last October, is that regrets for a misspent life are bound to creep in, and whenever you see me with a furrowed brow you can be sure that what is on my mind is the thought that if only I had taken up golf earlier and devoted my whole time to it instead of fooling about writing stories and things, I might have got my handicap down to under eighteen. If only they had put a putter in my hands when I was four and taught me the use of the various clubs, who knows what heights I might not have reached. It is this reflection that has always made my writing so sombre, its whole aroma like that of muddy shoes in a Russian locker room.

  And yet I may have managed to get a few rays of sunshine into the stories which follow. If so, this is due to the fact that while I was writing them I won my first and only trophy, a striped umbrella in a hotel tournament at Aiken, South Carolina, where, hitting them squarely on the meat for once, I went through a field of some of the fattest retired business men in America like a devouring flame.

  I was never much of a golfer. Except for that glorious day at Aiken I was always one of the dregs, the sort of man whose tee shots, designed to go due north, invariably went nor-nor-east or in a westerly direction. But how I loved the game. I have sometimes wondered if we of the canaille don’t get more pleasure out of it than the top-notchers. For an untouchable like myself two perfect drives in a round would wipe out all memory of sliced approach shots and foozled putts, whereas if Jack Nicklaus does a sixty-four he goes home and thinks morosely that if he had not just missed that eagle on the seventh, he would have had a sixty-three.

  I have made no attempt to bring this book up to date, and many changes have taken place since I wrote “The Clicking of Cuthbert” in 1916. Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away, and with them have gone the names of most of the golf clubs so dear to me. I believe one still drives with a driver nowadays, though at any moment we may have to start calling it the Number One wood, but where is the mashie now, where the cleek, the spoon and the baffy?

  All Scottish names, those, dating back to the days (1593 A.D.) when we are told that John Henrie and Pat Rogie were imprisoned for “playing of the Gowff on the links of Leith every Sabbath the time of the sermonses”. It is very sad, the way the Scottish atmosphere has gone out of the game. In my youth, when the Badminton book was a comparatively new publication, one took it for granted that to be a good golfer you had to be Scottish, preferably with a name like Sandy McHoots or Jock Auchtermuchty. And how we reverenced them. “These,” we said, “are the men whose drives fly far, like bullets from a rifle, who when they do a hole in par regard it as a trifle. Of such as these the bard has said, ‘Hech thrawfu’ raltie rorkie, wi’ thecht ta’ croonie clapperhead and fash wi’ unco’ pawkie’.” And where are they now? How long is it since a native Scot won an Open? All Americans these days, except for an occasional Mexican.

  No stopping Progress, of course, but I do think it a pity to cast away lovely names like mashie and baffy in favour of numbers. I like to think that when I got into a bunker (isn’t it called a trap now?) I got out of it, if I ever did, with a niblick and not a wedge. I wonder what Tommy Morris, winner of the British Open four years in succession, would have had to say to all this number six iron, number twelve iron, number twenty-eight iron stuff. Probably he wouldn’t have said anything, just made one of those strange Scottish noises at the back of his throat like someone gargling.

  A FOOTNOTE. In one of these little opuses I allude to Stout Cortez staring at the Pacific. Shortly after the appearance of this narrative in the Saturday Evening Post I received a letter from a usually well-informed source which began

  Dear Sir

  Where do you get that Cortez stuff? It was Balboa.

  This, I believe, is historically accurate. On the other hand, if Cortez was good enough for Keats, he is good enough for me. Besides, even if it was Balboa, the Pacific was open for being stared at about that time, and I see no reason why Cortez should not have had a look at it as well.

  P. G. WODEHOUSE.

  1

  ARCHIBALD’S BENEFIT

  ARCHIBALD MEALING WAS one of those golfers in whom desire outruns performance. Nobody could have been more willing than Archibald. He tried, and tried hard. Every morning before he took his bath he would stand in front of his mirror and practise swings. Every night before he went to bed he would read the golden words of some master on the subject of putting, driving, or approaching. Yet on the links most of his time was spent in retrieving lost balls or replacing America. Whether it was that Archibald pressed too much or pressed too little, whether it was that his club deviated from the dotted line which joined the two points A and B in the illustrated plate of the man making the brassy shot in the Hints on Golf book, or whether it was that he was pursued by some malignant fate, I do not know. Archibald rather favoured the last theory.

  The important point is that, in his thirty-first year, after six seasons of untiring effort, Archibald went in for a championship, and won it.

  Archibald, mark you, whose golf was a kind of blend of hockey, Swedish drill, and buck-and-wing dancing.

  I know the ordeal I must face when I make such a statement. I see clearly before me the solid phalanx of men from Missouri, some urging me to tell it to the King of Denmark, others insisting that I produce my Eskimoes. Nevertheless, I do not shrink. I state once more that in his thirty-first year Archibald Mealing went in for a golf championship, and won it.

  Archibald belonged to a select little golf club, the members of which lived and worked in New York, but played in Jersey. Men of substance, financially as well as physically, they had combined their superfious cash and with it purchased a strip of land close to the sea. This land had been drained—to the huge discomfort of a colony of mosquitoes which had come to look on the place as their private property—and converted into links, which had become a sort of refuge for incompetent golfers. The members of the Cape Pleasant Club were easy-going refugees from other and more exacting clubs, men who pottered rather than raced round the links; men, in short, who had grown tired of having to stop their game and stand aside in order to allow perspiring experts to whiz past them. The Cape Pleasant golfers did not make themselves slaves to the game. Their language, when they foozled, was gently regretful rather than sulphurous. The moment in the day’s play which they enjoyed most was when they were saying: “Well, here’s luck!” in the club-house.

  It will, therefore, be readily understood that Archibald’s inability to do a hole in single figures did not handicap him at Cape Pleasant as it might have done at St. Andrews. His kindly clubmates took him to their bosoms to a man, and looked on him as a brother. Archibald’s was one of those admirable natures which prompt their possessor frequently to remark: “These are on me!” and his fellow golfers were not slow to appreciate the fact. They all loved Archibald.

  Archibald was on the floor of his bedroom one afternoon, picking up the fragments of his mir
ror—a friend had advised him to practise the Walter J. Travis lofting shot—when the telephone bell rang. He took up the receiver, and was hailed by the comfortable voice of McCay, the club secretary.

  “Is that Mealing?” asked McCay. “Say, Archie, I’m putting your name down for our championship competition. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Sure,” said Archibald. “When does it start?”

  “Next Saturday.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Good for you. Oh, Archie.”

  “Hello?”

  “A man I met to-day told me you were engaged. Is that a fact?”

  “Sure,” murmured Archibald, blushfully.

  The wire hummed with McCay’s congratulations.

  “Thanks,” said Archibald. “Thanks, old man. What? Oh, yes. Milsom’s her name. By the way, her family have taken a cottage at Cape Pleasant for the summer. Some distance from the links. Yes, very convenient, isn’t it? Good-bye.”

  He hung up the receiver and resumed his task of gathering up the fragments.

  Now McCay happened to be of a romantic and sentimental nature. He was by profession a chartered accountant, and inclined to be stout; and all rather stout chartered accountants are sentimental. McCay was the sort of man who keeps old ball programmes and bundles of letters tied round with lilac ribbon. At country houses, where they lingered in the porch after dinner to watch the moonlight flooding the quiet garden, it was McCay and his colleague who lingered longest. McCay knew Ella Wheeler Wilcox by heart, and could take Browning without anaesthetics. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that Archibald’s remark about his fiancée coming to live at Cape Pleasant should give him food for thought. It appealed to him.

  He reflected on it a good deal during the day, and, running across Sigsbee, a fellow Cape Pleasanter, after dinner that night at the Sybarites’ Club, he spoke of the matter to him. It so happened that both had dined excellently, and were looking on the world with a sort of cosy benevolence. They were in the mood when men pat small boys on the head and ask them if they mean to be President when they grow up.

  “I called up Archie Mealing to-day,” said McCay. “Did you know he was engaged?”

  “I did hear something about it. Girl of the name of Wilson, or⎯”

  “Milsom. She’s going to spend the summer at Cape Pleasant, Archie tells me.”