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.
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