Ford Madox Ford - The Parade's End Tetralogy - Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up & Last Post

‘Save the country . . . Damn it . . . ’ He stood on his feet. ‘I and Campion . . . Look at what the country’s come to . . . What with swine like these two in our club houses! And policemen to go round the links with Ministers to protect them from the wild women . . . By God! I’d like to have the flaying of the skin off some of their backs I would. My God I would.’

He added:

‘That fellow Waterslops is a bit of a sportsman. I haven’t been able to tell you about our bet, you’ve been making such a noise . . . Is your friend really plus one at North Berwick? What are you like?’

‘Macmaster is a good plus two anywhere when he’s in practice.’

Sandbach said:

‘Good Lord . . . A stout fellow . . . ’

‘As for me,’ Tietjens said, ‘I loathe the beastly game.’ ‘So do I,’ Sandbach answered. ‘We’ll just lollop along behind them.’

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They came out into the bright open where all the distances under the tall sky showed with distinct prismatic outlines. They made a little group of seven—for Tietjens would not have a caddy—waiting on the flat, first teeing ground. Macmaster walked up to Tietjens and said under his voice:

‘You’ve really sent that wire? . . . ’

Tietjens said:

‘It’ll be in Germany by now!’

Mr Sandbach hobbled from one to the other explaining the terms of his wager with Mr Waterhouse. Mr Waterhouse had backed one of the young men playing with him to drive into and hit twice in the eighteen holes the two city men who would be playing ahead of them. As the Minister had taken rather short odds, Mr Sandbach considered him a good sport.

A long way down the first hole Mr Waterhouse and his two companions were approaching the first green. They had high sandhills to the right and, to their left, a road that was fringed with rushes and a narrow dyke. Ahead of the Cabinet Minister the two city men and their two caddies stood on the edge of the dyke or poked downwards into the rushes. Two girls appeared and disappeared on the tops of the sandhills. The policeman was strolling along the road, level with Mr Waterhouse. The General said:

‘I think we could go now.’

Sandbach said:

‘Waterslops will get a hit at them from the next tee. They’re in the dyke.’

The General drove a straight, goodish ball. Just as Macmaster was in his swing Sandbach shouted:

‘By God! He nearly did it. See that fellow jump!’ Macmaster looked round over his shoulder and hissed with vexation between his teeth:

‘Don’t you know that you don’t shout while a man is driving? Or haven’t you played golf?’ He hurried fussily after his ball.

Sandbach said to Tietjens:

‘Golly! That chap’s got a temper!’

Tietjens said:

‘Only over this game. You deserved what you got.’ Sandbach said:

‘I did . . . But I didn’t spoil his shot. He’s outdriven the General twenty yards.’

Tietjens said:

‘It would have been sixty but for you.’

They loitered about on the tee waiting for the others to get their distance. Sandbach said:

‘By Jove, your friend is on with his second . . . You wouldn’t believe it of such a little beggar!’ He added: ‘He’s not much class, is he?’

Tietjens looked down his nose.

‘Oh, about our class!’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t take a bet about driving into the couple ahead.’

Sandbach hated Tietjens for being a Tietjens of Groby: Tietjens was enraged by the existence of Sandbach, who was the son of an ennobled mayor of Middlesbrough, seven miles or so from Groby. The feuds between the Cleveland landowners and the Cleveland plutocrats are very bitter. Sandbach said:

‘Ah, I suppose he gets you out of scrapes with girls and the Treasury, and you take him about in return. It’s a practical combination.’

‘Like Pottle Mills and Stanton,’ Tietjens said. The financial operations connected with the amalgamating of these two steelworks had earned Sandbach’s father a good deal of odium in the Cleveland district . . . Sandbach said:

‘Look here, Tietjens . . . ’ But he changed his mind and said:

‘We’d better go now.’ He drove off with an awkward action but not without skill. He certainly outplayed Tietjens.

Playing very slowly, for both were desultory and Sandbach very lame, they lost sight of the others behind some coastguard cottages and dunes before they had left the third tee. Because of his game leg Sandbach sliced a good deal. On this occasion he sliced right into the gardens of the cottages and went with his boy to look for his ball among potato-haulms, beyond a low wall. Tietjens patted his own ball lazily up the fairway and, dragging his bag behind him by the strap, he sauntered on.

Although Tietjens hated golf as he hated any occupation that was of a competitive nature, he could engross himself in the mathematics of trajectories when he accompanied Macmaster in one of his expeditions for practice. He accompanied Macmaster because he liked there to be one pursuit at which his friend undisputably excelled himself, for it was a bore always brow-beating the fellow. But he stipulated that they should visit three different and, if possible, unknown courses every week-end when they golfed. He interested himself then in the way the courses were laid out, acquiring thus an extraordinary connoisseurship in golf architecture, and he made abstruse calculations as to the flight of balls off sloped club-faces, as to the foot-poundals of energy exercised by one muscle or the other, and as to theories of spin. As often as not he palmed Macmaster off as a fair, average player on some other unfortunate fair, average stranger. Then he passed the afternoon in the club-house studying the pedigrees and forms of racehorses, for every club-house contained a copy of Ruff’s Guide. In the spring he would hunt for and examine the nests of soft-billed birds, for he was interested in the domestic affairs of the cuckoo, though he hated natural history and field botany.

On this occasion he had just examined some notes of other mashie shots, had put the notebook back in his pocket, and had addressed his ball with a niblick that had an unusually roughened face and a head like a hatchet. Meticulously, when he had taken his grip he removed his little and third fingers from the leather of the shaft. He was thanking heaven that Sandbach seemed to be accounted for for ten minutes at least, for Sandbach was miserly over lost balls and, very slowly, he was raising his mashie to half cock for a sighting shot.

He was aware that someone, breathing a little heavily from small lungs, was standing close to him and watching him: he could indeed, beneath his cap-rim, perceive the tips of a pair of boy’s white sand-shoes. It in no way perturbed him to be watched, since he was avid of no personal glory when making his shots. A voice said:

‘I say . . . ’ He continued to look at his ball.

‘Sorry to spoil your shot,’ the voice said. ‘But . . . ’

Tietjens dropped his club altogether and straightened his back. A fair young woman with a fixed scowl was looking at him intently. She had a short skirt and was panting a little.