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 any one 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 bra.s.sey.
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 second shot. "All hope abandon ye who enter here" might be written on a notice board over it.
The professor entered there. The unhappy man sent his second, as nice and clean a bra.s.sey shot as he had made all day, into its very jaws.
And then madness seized him. A merciful local rule, framed by kindly men who have been in that ditch themselves, enacts that in such a case the player may take his ball and throw it over his shoulder, losing a stroke. But once, so the legend runs, a scratch man who found himself trapped, scorning to avail himself of this rule at the expense of its accompanying penalty, wrought so shrewdly with his niblick that he not only got out but actually laid his ball dead: and now optimists sometimes imitate his gallantry, though no one yet has been able to imitate his success.
The professor decided to take a chance: and he failed miserably. As I was on the green with my third, and, unless I putted extremely poorly, was morally certain to be down in five, which is bogey for the hole, there was not much practical use in his continuing to struggle. But he did in a spirit of pure vindictiveness, as if he were trying to take it out of the ball. It was a grisly sight to see him, head and shoulders above the ditch, hewing at his obstinate colonel. It was a similar spectacle that once induced a lay spectator of a golf match to observe that he considered hockey a silly game.
"_Sixteen!_" said the professor between his teeth. Then he picked up his ball.
I won the seventh hole.
I won the eighth hole.
The ninth we halved, for in the black depths of my soul I had formed a plan of fiendish subtlety. I intended to allow him to win--with extreme labour--eight holes in succession.
Then, when hope was once more strong in him, I would win the last, and he would go mad.
I watched him carefully as we trudged on. Emotions chased one another across his face. When he won the tenth hole he merely refrained from oaths. When he won the eleventh a sort of sullen pleasure showed in his face. It was at the thirteenth that I detected the first dawning of hope. From then onward it grew.
When, with a sequence of shocking shots, he took the seventeenth hole in seven, he was in a parlous condition. His run of success had engendered within him a desire for conversation. He wanted, as it were, to flap his wings and crow. I could see Dignity wrestling with Talkativeness. I gave him the lead.
"You have got your form now," I said.
Talkativeness had it. Dignity retired hurt. Speech came from him in a rush. When he brought off an excellent drive from the eighteenth tee, he seemed to forget everything.
"Me dear boy,"--he began; and stopped abruptly in some confusion.
Silence once more brooded over us as we played ourselves up the fairway and on to the green.
He was on the green in four. I reached it in three. His sixth stroke took him out.
I putted carefully to the very mouth of the hole.
I walked up to my ball and paused. I looked at the professor. He looked at me.
"Go on," he said hoa.r.s.ely.
Suddenly a wave of compa.s.sion flooded over me. What right had I to torture the man like this?
"Professor," I said.
"Go on," he repeated.
"That looks a simple shot," I said, eyeing him steadily, "but I might miss it."
He started.
"And then you would win the Championship."
He dabbed at his forehead with a wet ball of a handkerchief.
"It would be very pleasant for you after getting so near it the last two years."
"Go on," he said for the third time. But there was a note of hesitation in his voice.
"Sudden joy," I said, "would almost certainly make me miss it."
We looked at each other. He had the golf fever in his eyes.
"If," I said slowly, lifting my putter, "you were to give your consent to my marriage with Phyllis----"
He looked from me to the ball, from the ball to me, and back to the ball. It was very, very near the hole.
"Why not?" I said.
He looked up, and burst into a roar of laughter.