“I learned last night that she loved me. But she will not marry me without your consent. Stretch your arms out straight from the shoulders and fill your lungs well and you can’t sink. So I have come this morning to ask for your consent.”

“Give it!” advised Ukridge. “Couldn’t do better. A very sound fellow. Pots of money, too. At least he will have when he marries.”

“I know we have not been on the best of terms lately. For Heaven’s sake don’t try to talk, or you’ll sink. The fault,” I said, generously, “was mine …”

“Well put,” said Ukridge.

“But when you have heard my explanation, I am sure you will forgive me. There, I told you so.”

He reappeared some few feet to the left. I swam up, and resumed.

“When you left us so abruptly after our little dinner-party—”

“Come again some night,” said Ukridge cordially. “Any time you’re passing.”

“ … you put me in a very awkward position. I was desperately in love with your daughter, and as long as you were in the frame of mind in which you left I could not hope to find an opportunity of revealing my feelings to her.”

“Revealing feelings is good,” said Ukridge approvingly. “Neat.”

“You see what a fix I was in, don’t you? Keep your arms well out. I thought for hours and hours, to try and find some means of bringing about a reconciliation. You wouldn’t believe how hard I thought.”

“Got as thin as a corkscrew,” said Ukridge.

“At last, seeing you fishing one morning when I was on the Cob, it struck me all of a sudden …”

“You know how it is,” said Ukridge.

“ … all of a sudden that the very best way would be to arrange a little boating accident. I was confident that I could rescue you all right.”

Here I paused, and he seized the opportunity to curse me—briefly, with a wary eye on an incoming wavelet.

“If it hadn’t been for the inscrutable workings of Providence, which has a mania for upsetting everything, all would have been well. In fact, all was well till you found out.”

“Always the way,” said Ukridge sadly. “Always the way.”

“You young blackguard!”

He managed to slip past me, and made for the shore.

“Look at the thing from the standpoint of a philosopher, old horse,” urged Ukridge, splashing after him. “The fact that the rescue was arranged oughtn’t to matter. I mean to say, you didn’t know it at the time, so, relatively, it was not, and you were genuinely saved from a watery grave and all that sort of thing.”

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.

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.

“Mr. Garnet, sir?” said the foe.

I recognised him. He was Professor Derrick’s gardener.

I opened the envelope. No. Father’s blessings were absent. The letter was in the third person. Professor Derrick begged to inform Mr. Garnet that, by defeating Mr. Saul Potter, he had qualified for the final round of the Combe Regis Golf Tournament, in which, he understood, Mr. Garnet was to be his opponent. If it would be convenient for Mr. Garnet to play off the match on the present afternoon, Professor Derrick would be obliged if he would be at the Club House at half-past two. If this hour and day were unsuitable, would he kindly arrange others. The bearer would wait.

The bearer did wait. He waited for half-an-hour, as I found it impossible to shift him, not caring to use violence on a man well stricken in years, without first plying him with drink. He absorbed more of our diminishing cask of beer than we could conveniently spare, and then trudged off with a note, beautifully written in the third person, in which Mr. Garnet, after numerous compliments and thanks, begged to inform Professor Derrick that he would be at the Club House at the hour mentioned.

“And,” I added—to myself, not in the note—”I will give him such a licking that he’ll brain himself with a cleek.”

For I was not pleased with the professor. I was conscious of a malicious joy at the prospect of snatching the prize from him. I knew he had set his heart on winning the tournament this year. To be runner-up two years in succession stimulates the desire for first place. It would be doubly bitter to him to be beaten by a newcomer, after the absence of his rival, the colonel, had awakened hope in him. And I knew I could do it. Even allowing for bad luck—and I am never a very unlucky golfer—I could rely almost with certainty on crushing the man.