The Daughter of the Hawk by C. S. Forester

Author:C. S. Forester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter XIV

Mr. Dawkins teed up his ball, took his stance, waited the split second he allowed himself for addressing the ball and then swung his driver in the powerful flat swing which the club professional had neatly substituted for his original pickax-like stroke. Those vast wrists of his took hold of the swing half-way through, and snapped the club through the top of the swing and the moment of impact, and carried it on over the follow-through, while the ball, cleanly hit with tremendous force, sailed up the fairway, pitched, ran and finally came to rest a useful ten yards on the hither side of the bunker which was designed for trapping weak second shots. It was a perfect drive, and the distance was extraordinarily good for a sodden course.

The Reverend Mr. Henry Gray raised his eyebrows a little.

“D’you do that often?” he asked. “You were introduced to me as a twelve handicap man, you know.”

Dawkins would have shrugged his shoulders if such a gesture had been natural to him; as it was he merely looked awkward.

“Oh, well,” said Gray, “let’s see what I can do in reply.”

Gray and Dawkins were beginning their first round together, on a week-day morning when the course was nearly empty. They had known each other by sight for some time, for Gray, being a clergyman, played his golf in mid-week, and had often noticed Dawkins toiling away in the practise nets or practising approach shots. Gray teed up his repainted ball, waggled carefully and drove his usual distance, comfortably on the fairway and fifty yards behind Dawkins. But his iron shot landed on the green, while Dawkins, who took his mashie, misjudged the strength slightly so that his ball rolled callously across and vanished into the pot bunker on the farther side. Dawkins’ mashie brought it out again on the green, but the situation called for two putts, and as Gray took two as well, the hole was Gray’s in bogey figures.

“Your honor,” said Dawkins imperturbably, at the second tee.

It was a situation Gray had known often enough before. He was used to being outdriven on occasions, but he could always rely on his approaching and putting to get him out of his difficulties, and his drives, although short, were consistently straight—which was more than could be said of those of most of the men he met. There was nothing spectacular about Gray’s play; no mammoth drives, no holing of thirty-foot putts. But he was always down in two from thirty feet from the hole, and there were few opponents whom he met who were not worn down and heart-broken in the end by the machine-like regularity of his approaching and putting. Everybody knows the kind of golfer Gray was—it seems to be a specialty of clergymen.

It seemed, this time, however, as though the game were not to proceed on the lines to which Gray had grown accustomed. Lots of men would be upset at losing the first hole in that fashion after such a beautiful drive, and after only taking five for a hole with a difficult bogey of four.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.