Love Among the Chickens, P. G. Wodehouse [top non fiction books of all time .TXT] 📗

are starting out of his head, and he’s praying⁠—if he ever does pray⁠—to the Gods of Golf that he may be allowed to win, I shall go ahead and beat him by a hole. I’ll teach him, Robert. He shall taste of my despair, and learn by proof in some wild hour how much the wretched dare. And when it’s all over, and he’s torn all his hair out and smashed all his clubs, I shall go and commit suicide off the Cob. Because, you see, if I can’t marry Phyllis, I shan’t have any use for life.”

Bob wagged his tail cheerfully.

“I mean it,” I said, rolling him on his back and punching him on the chest till his breathing became stertorous. “You don’t see the sense of it, I know. But then you’ve got none of the finer feelings. You’re a jolly good dog, Robert, but you’re a rank materialist. Bones and cheese and potatoes with gravy over them make you happy. You don’t know what it is to be in love. You’d better get right side up now, or you’ll have apoplexy.”

It has been my aim in the course of this narrative to extenuate nothing, nor set down aught in malice. Like the gentleman who played euchre with the Heathen Chinee, I state but facts. I do not, therefore, slur over my scheme for disturbing the professor’s peace of mind. I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.

I felt ruthless towards the professor. I cannot plead ignorance of the golfer’s point of view as an excuse for my plottings. I knew that to one whose soul is in the game as the professor’s was, the agony of being just beaten in an important match exceeds in bitterness all other agonies. I knew that, if I scraped through by the smallest possible margin, his appetite would be destroyed, his sleep o’ nights broken. He would wake from fitful slumber moaning that if he had only used his iron instead of his mashie at the tenth, all would have been well; that, if he had putted more carefully on the seventh green, life would not be drear and blank; that a more judicious manipulation of his brassey throughout might have given him something to live for. All these things I knew.

And they did not touch me. I was adamant. The professor was waiting for me at the Club House, and greeted me with a cold and stately inclination of the head.

“Beautiful day for golf,” I observed in my gay, chatty manner. He bowed in silence.

“Very well,” I thought. “Wait. Just wait.”

“Miss Derrick is well, I hope?” I added, aloud.

That drew him. He started. His aspect became doubly forbidding.

“Miss Derrick is perfectly well, sir, I thank you.”

“And you? No bad effect, I hope, from your dip yesterday?”

“Mr. Garnet, I came here for golf, not conversation,” he said.

We made it so. I drove off from the first tee. It was a splendid drive. I should not say so if there were anyone else to say so for me. Modesty would forbid. But, as there is no one, I must repeat the statement. It was one of the best drives of my experience. The ball flashed through the air, took the bunker with a dozen feet to spare, and rolled on to the green. I had felt all along that I should be in form. Unless my opponent was equally above himself, he was a lost man. I could toy with him.

The excellence of my drive had not been without its effect on the professor. I could see that he was not confident. He addressed his ball more strangely and at greater length than anyone I had ever seen. He waggled his club over it as if he were going to perform a conjuring trick. Then he struck, and topped it.

The ball rolled two yards.

He looked at it in silence. Then he looked at me⁠—also in silence.

I was gazing seawards.

When I looked round he was getting to work with a brassey.

This time he hit the bunker, and rolled back. He repeated this manoeuvre twice.

“Hard luck!” I murmured sympathetically on the third occasion, thereby going as near to being slain with a niblick as it has ever been my lot to go. Your true golfer is easily roused in times of misfortune; and there was a red gleam in the eye of the professor turned to me.

“I shall pick my ball up,” he growled.

We walked on in silence to the second tee. He did the second hole in four, which was good. I did it in three, which⁠—unfortunately for him⁠—was better.

I won the third hole.

I won the fourth hole.

I won the fifth hole.

I glanced at my opponent out of the corner of my eyes. The man was suffering. Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead.

His play had become wilder and wilder at each hole in arithmetical progression. If he had been a plough he could hardly have turned up more soil. The imagination recoiled from the thought of what he could be doing in another half-hour if he deteriorated at his present speed.

A feeling of calm and content stole over me. I was not sorry for him. All the viciousness of my nature was uppermost in me. Once, when he missed the ball clean at the fifth tee, his eye met mine, and we stood staring at each other for a full half-minute without moving. I believe, if I had smiled then, he would have attacked me without hesitation. There is a type of golfer who really almost ceases to be human under stress of the wild agony of a series of foozles.

The sixth hole involves the player in a somewhat tricky piece of cross-country work, owing to the fact that there is a nasty ditch to be negotiated some fifty yards from the green. It is a beast of a ditch, which, if you are out of luck, just catches your