at the start, would have given up the contest in despair; but Arthur
Jukes, for all his defects, had the soul of a true golfer. He declined
to give up. In grim silence he hacked his ball through the rough till
he reached the high road; and then, having played twenty-seven, set
himself resolutely to propel it on its long journey.
It was a lovely morning, and, as I bicycled along, keeping a fatherly
eye on Arthur's activities, I realized for the first time in my life
the full meaning of that exquisite phrase of Coleridge:
'Clothing the palpable and familiar
With golden exhalations of the dawn,'
for in the pellucid air everything seemed weirdly beautiful, even
Arthur Juke's heather-mixture knickerbockers, of which hitherto I had
never approved. The sun gleamed on their seat, as he bent to make his
shots, in a cheerful and almost a poetic way. The birds were singing
gaily in the hedgerows, and such was my uplifted state that I, too,
burst into song, until Arthur petulantly desired me to refrain, on the
plea that, though he yielded to no man in his enjoyment of farmyard
imitations in their proper place, I put him off his stroke. And so we
passed through Bayside in silence and started to cover that long
stretch of road which ends in the railway bridge and the gentle descent
into Woodfield.
Arthur was not doing badly. He was at least keeping them straight. And
in the circumstances straightness was to be preferred to distance. Soon
after leaving Little Hadley he had become ambitious and had used his
brassey with disastrous results, slicing his fifty-third into the rough
on the right of the road. It had taken him ten with the niblick to get
back on to the car tracks, and this had taught him prudence.
He was now using his putter for every shot, and, except when he got
trapped in the cross-lines at the top of the hill just before reaching
Bayside, he had been in no serious difficulties. He was playing a nice
easy game, getting the full face of the putter on to each shot.
At the top of the slope that drops down into Woodfield High Street he
paused.
'I think I might try my brassey again here,' he said. 'I have a nice
lie.'
'Is it wise?' I said.
He looked down the hill.
'What I was thinking,' he said, 'was that with it I might wing that man
Bingham. I see he is standing right out in the middle of the fairway.'
I followed his gaze. It was perfectly true. Ralph Bingham was leaning
on his bicycle in the roadway, smoking a cigarette. Even at this
distance one could detect the man's disgustingly complacent expression.
Rupert Bailey was sitting with his back against the door of the
Woodfield Garage, looking rather used up. He was a man who liked to
keep himself clean and tidy, and it was plain that the cross-country
trip had done him no good. He seemed to be scraping mud off his face. I
learned later that he had had the misfortune to fall into a ditch just
beyond Bayside.
'No,' said Arthur. 'On second thoughts, the safe game is the one to
