I had not imagined Ukridge capable of such an excursion into metaphysics. I saw the truth of his line of argument so clearly that it seemed to me impossible for anyone else to get confused over it. I had certainly pulled the professor out of the water, and the fact that I had first caused him to be pushed in had nothing to do with the case. Either a man is a gallant rescuer or he is not a gallant rescuer. There is no middle course. I had saved his life–for he would certainly have drowned if left to himself–and I was entitled to his gratitude. That was all there was to be said about it.
These things both Ukridge and I tried to make plain as we swam along. But whether it was that the salt water he had swallowed had dulled the professor’s normally keen intelligence or that our power of stating a case was too weak, the fact remains that he reached the beach an unconvinced man.
“Then may I consider,” I said, “that your objections are removed? I have your consent?”
He stamped angrily, and his bare foot came down on a small, sharp pebble. With a brief exclamation he seized his foot in one hand and hopped up the beach. While hopping, he delivered his ultimatum. Probably the only instance on record of a father adopting this attitude in dismissing a suitor.
“You may not!” he cried. “You may consider no such thing. My objections were never more absolute. You detain me in the water, sir, till I am blue, sir, blue with cold, in order to listen to the most preposterous and impudent nonsense I ever heard.”
This was unjust. If he had listened attentively from the first and avoided interruptions and had not behaved like a submarine we should have got through the business in half the time.
I said so.
“Don’t talk to me, sir,” he replied, hobbling off to his dressing- tent. “I will not listen to you. I will have nothing to do with you. I consider you impudent, sir.”
“I assure you it was unintentional.”
“Isch!” he said–being the first occasion and the last on which I have ever heard that remarkable monosyllable proceed from the mouth of a man. And he vanished into his tent.
“Laddie,” said Ukridge solemnly, “do you know what I think?”
“Well?”
“You haven’t clicked, old horse!” said Ukridge.
CHAPTER XX
SCIENTIFIC GOLF
People are continually writing to the papers–or it may be one solitary enthusiast who writes under a number of pseudonyms–on the subject of sport, and the over-doing of the same by the modern young man. I recall one letter in which “Efficiency” gave it as his opinion that if the Young Man played less golf and did more drill, he would be all the better for it. I propose to report my doings with the professor on the links at some length, in order to refute this absurd view. Everybody ought to play golf, and nobody can begin it too soon. There ought not to be a single able-bodied infant in the British Isles who has not foozled a drive. To take my case. Suppose I had employed in drilling the hours I had spent in learning to handle my clubs. I might have drilled before the professor by the week without softening his heart. I might have ported arms and grounded arms and presented arms, and generally behaved in the manner advocated by “Efficiency,” and what would have been the result? Indifference on his part, or–and if I overdid the thing–irritation. Whereas, by devoting a reasonable portion of my youth to learning the intricacies of golf I was enabled…
It happened in this way.
To me, as I stood with Ukridge in the fowl-run in the morning following my maritime conversation with the professor, regarding a hen that had posed before us, obviously with a view to inspection, there appeared a man carrying an envelope. Ukridge, who by this time saw, as Calverley almost said, “under every hat a dun,” and imagined that no envelope could contain anything but a small account, softly and silently vanished away, leaving me to interview the enemy.