But of course we, too, are going to be as good as Vardon one day.  We are only postponing the day because meanwhile it is so pleasant to be bad.  And it is part of the charm of being bad at golf that in a moment, in a single night, we may become good.  If the bad cricketer said to a good cricketer, “What am I doing wrong?” the only possible answer would be, “Nothing particular, except that you can’t play cricket.”  But if you or I were to say to our scratch friend, “What am I doing wrong?” he would reply at once, “Moving the head” or “Dropping the right knee” or “Not getting the wrists in soon enough,” and by to-morrow we should be different players.  Upon such a little depends, or seems to the eighteen-handicap to depend, excellence in golf.

And so, perfectly happy in our present badness and perfectly confident of our future goodness, we long-handicap men remain.  Perhaps it would be pleasanter to be a little more certain of getting the ball safely off the first tee; perhaps at the fourteenth hole, where there is a right of way and the public encroach, we should like to feel that we have done with topping; perhaps—–­

Well, perhaps we might get our handicap down to fifteen this summer.  But no lower; certainly no lower.

Goldfish

Let us talk about—­well, anything you will.  Goldfish, for instance.

Goldfish are a symbol of old-world tranquillity or mid-Victorian futility according to their position in the home.  Outside the home, in that wild state from which civilization has dragged them, they may have stood for dare-devil courage or constancy or devotion; I cannot tell.  I may only speak of them now as I find them, which is in the garden or in the drawing-room.  In their lily-leaved pool, sunk deep in the old flagged terrace, upon whose borders the blackbird whistles his early-morning song, they remind me of sundials and lavender and old delightful things.  But in their cheap glass bowl upon the three- legged table, above which the cloth-covered canary maintains a stolid silence, they remind me of antimacassars and horsehair sofas and all that is depressing.  It is hard that the goldfish himself should have so little choice in the matter.  Goldfish look pretty in the terrace pond, yet I doubt if it was the need for prettiness which brought them there.  Rather the need for some thing to throw things to.  No one of the initiate can sit in front of Nature’s most wonderful effect, the sea, without wishing to throw stones into it, the physical pleasure of the effort and the aesthetic pleasure of the splash combining to produce perfect contentment.  So by the margin of the pool the same desires stir within one, and because ants’ eggs do not splash, and look untidy on the surface of the water, there must be a gleam of gold and silver to put the crown upon one’s pleasure.

Perhaps when you have been feeding the goldfish you have not thought of it like that.  But at least you must have wondered why, of all diets, they should prefer ants’ eggs.  Ants’ eggs are, I should say, the very last thing which one would take to without argument.  It must be an acquired taste, and, this being so, one naturally asks oneself how goldfish came to acquire it.