Major ​Pettigrew's Last Stand 0 csillagozás

The thirteenth hole was famous for Dame Eunice, a huge Romney Marsh ewe who kept the grass cropped to the limit of her rusty chain. Visitors, especially the occasional American, might be told that it was customary to take practice swings at the large blobs of sheep droppings. A rusty shovel for cleaning up was kept in the small box on a post that also contained a manual ball-washer. Some of the newest members had been heard to complain about Eunice; in the new era of world-class golf resorts and corporate golf outings, they were worried that she made their club look like some kind of miniature golf outfit. The Major was part of the group who defended Eunice and who thought the new members’ attitude reflected poor standards by the club’s nomination committee. He also enjoyed referring to Eunice as “environmentally friendly.”

“Plant burglary?”
“Yes, there was quite a rash of it,” he said. “Part of a larger crisis in the culture, of course. My mother always blamed it on decimalization.”
“Yes. It almost invites disaster, doesn’t it, when people are asked to count by ten instead of twelve?” she said, smiling at him before turning to examine the rough-skinned fruit on one of the twisted apple trees at the foot of the lawn.
“You know, my wife used to laugh at me in just the same manner,” he said. “She said if I maintained my aversion to change I risked being reincarnated as a granite post.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said the Major, leaning with difficulty across the wide table to shake hands. The Rasools bobbed their heads and mumbled a greeting. The Major thought they resembled two halves of a walnut, charming in their wrinkled symmetry.

The Major wished young men wouldn’t think so much. It always seemed to result in absurd revolutionary movements or, as in the case of several of his former pupils, the production of very bad poetry.

He allowed himself to imagine striding into her shop at the end of the day, smelling of gunpowder and rain-misted leather, a magnificent rainbow-hued drake spilling from his game bag. It would be a primal offering of food from man to woman and a satisfyingly primitive declaration of intent. However, he mused, one could never be sure these days who would be offended by being handed a dead mallard bleeding from a breast full of tooth-breaking shot and sticky about the neck with dog saliva.

“Do you like it?” she said, turning her eyes down to the fabric. “I lent Grace an outfit and she insisted that I borrow something of hers in fair trade.”
“Very beautiful,” he said.
“It belonged to Grace’s great-aunt, who was considered quite fast and who lived alone in Baden Baden, she says, with two blind terriers and a succession of lovers.”

“I think you’re rather convincing,” said the Major. “You’re sort of Fu Manchu on an exotic holiday.”
“I told Alma the beard was all wrong,” said Alec. “But she’s been saving it ever since they did The Mikado and she glued it on so tight I may have to shave it off.”
“Perhaps if you soak it in a large glass of gin, the glue will soften,” said Mrs. Ali.

“That’s it,” said the Major, stamping his way back into the living room. “I am done with that young man. He is no longer my son.”
“Oh, dear,” said Grace. “I expect he is very unhappy and not thinking straight. Don’t be too hard on him.”
“That boy hasn’t thought straight since puberty. I should never have allowed him to resign from the Boy Scouts.”