The Heel of Achilles
by
On the young man’s face, as he sat sipping his ginger-ale in the club-house smoking-room, there was a look of disillusionment. “Never again!” he said.
The Oldest Member glanced up from his paper.
“You are proposing to give up golf once more?” he queried.
“Not golf. Betting on golf.” The Young Man frowned. “I’ve just been let down badly. Wouldn’t you have thought I had a good thing, laying seven to one on McTavish against Robinson?”
“Undoubtedly,” said the Sage. “The odds, indeed, generous as they are, scarcely indicate the former’s superiority. Do you mean to tell me that the thing came unstitched?”
“Robinson won in a walk, after being three down at the turn.
“Strange! What happened?”
“Why, they looked in at the bar to have a refresher before starting for the tenth,” said the young man, his voice quivering, “and McTavish suddenly discovered that there was a hole in his trouser-pocket and sixpence had dropped out. He worried so frightfully about it that on the second nine he couldn’t do a thing right. Went completely off his game and didn’t win a hole.”
The Sage shook his head gravely.
“If this is really going to be a lesson to you, my boy, never to bet on the result of a golf-match, it will be a blessing in disguise. There is no such thing as a certainty in golf. I wonder if I ever told you a rather curious episode in the career of Vincent Jopp?”
“The Vincent Jopp? The American multi-millionaire?”
“The same. You never knew he once came within an ace of winning the American Amateur Championship, did you?”
“I never heard of his playing golf.”
“He played for one season. After that he gave it up and has not touched a club since. Ring the bell and get me a small lime-juice, and I will tell you all.”
* * * * *
It was long before your time (said the Oldest Member) that the events which I am about to relate took place. I had just come down from Cambridge, and was feeling particularly pleased with myself because I had secured the job of private and confidential secretary to Vincent Jopp, then a man in the early thirties, busy in laying the foundations of his present remarkable fortune. He engaged me, and took me with him to Chicago.
Jopp was, I think, the most extraordinary personality I have encountered in a long and many-sided life. He was admirably equipped for success in finance, having the steely eye and square jaw without which it is hopeless for a man to enter that line of business. He possessed also an overwhelming confidence in himself, and the ability to switch a cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other without wiggling his ears, which, as you know, is the stamp of the true Monarch of the Money Market. He was the nearest approach to the financier on the films, the fellow who makes his jaw-muscles jump when he is telephoning, that I have ever seen.
Like all successful men, he was a man of method. He kept a pad on his desk on which he would scribble down his appointments, and it was my duty on entering the office each morning to take this pad and type its contents neatly in a loose-leaved ledger. Usually, of course, these entries referred to business appointments and deals which he was contemplating, but one day I was interested to note, against the date May 3rd, the entry:
“Propose to Amelia”
I was interested, as I say, but not surprised. Though a man of steel and iron, there was nothing of the celibate about Vincent Jopp. He was one of those men who marry early and often. On three separate occasions before I joined his service he had jumped off the dock, to scramble back to shore again later by means of the Divorce Court lifebelt. Scattered here and there about the country there were three ex-Mrs. Jopps, drawing their monthly envelope, and now, it seemed, he contemplated the addition of a fourth to the platoon.