“By Jove, what a long ball!” he would say, as David’s drive started on its insane career. “I wish I could drive like that. Oh, the wind’s catching it; bad luck. Look where it’s going, miles away! It’ll be rotten bad luck if it’s on the road.”
Or, again, David would make an astonishingly feeble putt, and Joynes again showed sympathy.
“Pity it wasn’t a little harder; it was dead on the line. I wish I could putt as straight as that. Hullo, you’ve missed the second one, too. That leaves me three for it. You’d much better make me putt them out. I can miss anything. Hullo, it’s gone in. Sorry.”
This sort of thing goaded David to madness, and presently he could bear it no longer.
“I say, would you mind not talking quite so much,” he said politely. “It’s awfully rotten of me, but I think it puts me off.”
Upon which Joynes hermetically sealed his lips, till they came to the fourteenth hole, where the match came to an abject end. . . .
All this was sufficiently depressing, and there was no quietly sympathetic Bags to be a comfort. Nor was there Bags to get tea ready, and it struck David really for the first time to-day how invariably Bags did that. And he could not find his milk-jug, and when he did it smelled sour, for it had not been washed up . . . and there was nothing to eat, and he would have to go up to school-shop to get a cake. It was all deplorable, and on the way he met Gregson, his victim in the third round.
“Suppose you disposed of Joynes all right, Blazes?” he asked.
“No, he disposed of me. Easily as anything,” said David.
“Hurrah!—I mean sorry. But you see I bet a shilling he would.”
The wind had turned bitterly cold, and spikes of sleet half frozen had begun to fall as he came back from the shop. That, again, seemed to David part of the conspiracy to make his life as disagreeable and uncomfortable as possible: Nature herself had joined in. He did not want to be unreasonable, but if, on the top of all these things, it was going to snow, he felt that even Job’s patience would break down. Snow ruined everything; it was incompatible with any form of exercise, and mournfully he went back to his solitary study.
But when he had drawn the curtains, and pulled his chair up to the hot-water pipes, so that he could rest his feet on them, and divided his attention between “Ravenshoe” held in one hand (he had got to where Gus and Flora were naughty in church), and tea in the other, things seemed to cheer up a little. Outside evidently the weather had got worse, for the wind squealed round the corner of the house, and on his panes, behind the thick red curtains he could hear the muffled patter of the driven snow. And, after all, there was a bright side to snow, for it would mean that there would be prayers in the house to-night, and he would not have to turn out to go to chapel. And Maddox would be back on Saturday, and it was Thursday evening already. Also Bags had written to him from the sick-room, saying that he was better, and expected to be out again by Sunday. David’s spirits began to improve, and he kicked off his shoes, in order to enjoy a greater intimacy with the hot-water pipes, and burst into a shout of laughter as Flora announced that she had left her purse on the piano. . . .