Golf stories, English; Golfers -- Fiction; Humorous stories, English
Wallace looked in the glass. For a moment, as he eyed his reflection,
sheer horror gripped him. Then suddenly, as he gazed, he became aware
that his first feelings were changing. The initial shock over, he was
becoming calmer. He waggled his right leg with a certain sang-froid.
There is a certain passage in the works of the poet Pope with which you
may be familiar. It runs as follows:
“_Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As to be hated needs but to be seen:
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace._”
Even so was it with Wallace Chesney and these Plus Fours. At first he
had recoiled from them as any decent-minded man would have done. Then,
after a while, almost abruptly he found himself in the grip of a new
emotion. After an unsuccessful attempt to analyse this, he suddenly
got it. Amazing as it may seem, it was pleasure that he felt. He
caught his eye in the mirror, and it was smirking. Now that the things
were actually on, by Hutchinson, they didn’t look half bad. By Braid,
they didn’t. There was a sort of something about them. Take away that
expanse of bare leg with its unsightly sock-suspender and substitute a
woolly stocking, and you would have the lower section of a golfer. For
the first time in his life, he thought, he looked like a man who could
play golf.
There came to him an odd sensation of masterfulness. He was still
holding the putter, and now he swung it up above his shoulder. A fine
swing, all lissomness and supple grace, quite different from any swing
he had ever done before.
Wallace Chesney gasped. He knew that at last he had discovered that
prime grand secret of golf for which he had searched so long. It was
the costume that did it. All you had to do was wear Plus Fours. He had
always hitherto played in grey flannel trousers. Naturally he had not
been able to do himself justice. Golf required an easy dash, and how
could you be easily dashing in concertina-shaped trousers with a patch
on the knee? He saw now--what he had never seen before--that it was not
because they were crack players that crack players wore Plus Fours:
it was because they wore Plus Fours that they were crack players. And
these Plus Fours had been the property of an Open Champion. Wallace
Chesney’s bosom swelled, and he was filled, as by some strange gas,
with joy--with excitement--with confidence. Yes, for the first time in
his golfing life, he felt really confident.
True, the things might have been a shade less gaudy: they might perhaps
have hit the eye with a slightly less violent punch: but what of
that? True, again, he could scarcely hope to avoid the censure of his
club-mates when he appeared like this on the links: but what of _that_?
His club-mates must set their teeth and learn to bear these Plus Fours
like men. That was what Wallace Chesney thought about it. If they did
not like his Plus Fours, let them go and play golf somewhere else.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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