Simultaneously with these propitious events, came the early rounds of the house handicap golf competition. David had adopted a wise policy over this. For ten days before the links had been practically unplayable owing to floods, but he had remembered a word of Frank’s. “If you want to improve, go out with half a dozen balls and practise mashie shots on to a green. When you’ve got them all there, putt them all out.”
So for the last week David had “slacked out” with a mashie and a putter, found a green that was not under water, and had put this hint into practice. It was dull, but then there was nothing else to do, and the reward looked within reach. He had been entered with a handicap of fifteen, but, thanks to his practice, he was already a stroke or two better than that. He had met Maddox in the second round, and receiving eleven strokes had beaten him. Then he encountered Gregson, whom he played on level terms, and, emerging by the skin of his teeth from that, had wiped up the floor with Cruikshank, who gave him six. This brought him to the semi-final.
Then from behind the clouds out popped the baleful star again, and shed its dreadful beams on him with peculiar effulgence. First of all Maddox went up to Cambridge for his scholarship examination, and David, who had never known what school was like without the sense of his being there, who was the first person he saw when he woke in the morning, and the last before he went to sleep at night, felt lost and rudderless. Next him in dormitory was the empty bed, and all day long he knew there was no chance of Frank’s dropping in, or calling him to his study. Then Bags got influenza and disappeared also, leaving David bereft of his two great friends, to find out for the first time how solid and comfortable a pal Bags was. Then came the semi-final of the golf-handicap, in which he was completely off his game, and got beaten on level terms by the mild and spotty Joynes, to whom David felt competent to give four strokes in the round. But such proved, on this fatal afternoon, not to be the case.
It was a gusty, boisterous day, and David, liable at all times to be rather wild and given to exuberant slicing, sliced in a manner probably without parallel. With his loose arms he could drive a very long ball, but to-day that was a disadvantage rather than otherwise, since he sent it to remote cover-point. This was exasperating, and Joynes, who usually had the honour, exasperated him further, for, having himself gone not far, but straight up the middle of the course, he overwhelmed David with a sort of envious condolence.