The Captain pretended not to hear and said a lot of rococo things inside himself.
It was Madeleine who had got him in for this game. A beautiful healthy girl ought to get up in the mornings. Mornings and beautiful healthy girls are all the same thing really. She ought to be dewy—positively dewy.... There she must be lying, warm and beautiful in bed—like Catherine the Great or somebody of that sort. No. It wasn’t right. All very luxurious and so on but not right. She ought to have understood that he was bound to fall a prey to the Professor if she didn’t get up. Golf! Here he was, neglecting his career; hanging about on these beastly links, all the sound men away there in France—it didn’t do to think of it!—and he was playing this retired tradesman’s consolation!
(Beastly the Professor’s legs looked from behind. The uglier a man’s legs are the better he plays golf. It’s almost a law.)
That’s what it was, a retired tradesman’s consolation. A decent British soldier has no more business to be playing golf than he has to be dressing dolls. It’s a game at once worthless and exasperating. If a man isn’t perfectly fit he cannot play golf, and when he is perfectly fit he ought to be doing a man’s work in the world. If ever anything deserved the name of vice, if ever anything was pure, unforgivable dissipation, surely golf was that thing....
And meanwhile that boy was getting more and more start. Anyone with a ha’porth of sense would have been up at five and after that brat—might have had him bagged and safe and back to lunch. Ass one was at times!
“You’re here, sir,” said the caddie.
The captain perceived he was in a nasty place, open green ahead but with some tumbled country near at hand and to the left, a rusty old gravel pit, furze at the sides, water at the bottom. Nasty attractive hole of a place. Sort of thing one gets into. He must pull himself together for this. After all, having undertaken to play a game one must play the game. If he hit the infernal thing, that is to say the ball, if he hit the ball so that if it didn’t go straight it would go to the right rather—clear of the hedge it wouldn’t be so bad to the right. Difficult to manage. Best thing was to think hard of the green ahead, a long way ahead,—with just the slightest deflection to the right. Now then,—heels well down, club up, a good swing, keep your eye on the ball, keep your eye on the ball, keep your eye on the ball just where you mean to hit it—far below there and a little to the right—and don’t worry....
Rap.
“In the pond I think, sir.”
“The water would have splashed if it had gone in the pond,” said the Professor. “It must be over there in the wet sand. You hit it pretty hard, I thought.”