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Given exactly the right conditions, there are few pleasanter things than a day in bed. We must not be rank imposters; we must be just ill enough to be sure that we shall be nearly well next day or, indeed, quite well so long as we have not come down to take breakfast. We must feel equal not to gross roast beef but to a whiting sympathetically eating its own tail and to a rice pudding, not forgetting the brown sugar. Tobacco, though sparingly indulged in, must not take on the flavor of hay, and though wholly incapable of answering a newly arrived letter, we must be well able to read an old book.
It is best, if possible, to feel some warning symptoms the night before, so that we may be assured that it would be very unwise to get up next morning. Thus we have the joys both of anticipation and of fruition. That such joys are selfish it cannot be denied. The telephone bell rings in the distance and we cannot answer it. The bell rings for luncheon, and there are sounds of scurrying feet as of those late in washing; we are taking holiday in that respect and our lunch comes up on a tray. With what heavenly malice do we hear a strange motorcar crunching the gravel under the window.
Callers—ha, ha! The new neighbors—ho, ho! We shall be told later that they proved to be very agreeable people and we are perfectly ready to take it on trust. With a last thought of them sitting ranged around the drawing room, we drift away into a beautiful halfway house between sleep and waking without fearing any of the misery that ensues if we do the same thing in a chair. We shall come to ourselves as bright as a button and ready for another go of David Copperfield.
This was my admirable choice last week, and I was so drowsily happy that I found even Agnes “pointing upward” not even unendurable. Only one thing disturbed my serenity. In my warped mind’s eye I continually saw golf holes designed on the “land of counterpane” before me. It is not an uninteresting one, this links of eiderdown, and is laid out on what an ingratiating prospectus would call fine, undulating country. Moreover, by undulating himself in bed the patient can in a moment change the contour of his course. In the ordinary way there is a broad hog’s-back ridge extending down the middle of the course. It is doubtless possible to use it several ways, but I always saw a long plain hole running nearly the whole length of it, slightly downhill with a fall to perdition on either side for the slicer or the hooker. It seemed to me, if I remembered the number aright, rather like the 13th hole at Liphook. There were no bunkers on it of any kind: no “lighthouses,” as the more ferocious of architects scorn fully term them, to guide the eye of the tiger and make superfluously wretched the rabbit’s life; nothing but a wide expanse on which it would clearly be very difficult to judge distance.
When my eyes dropped to either side of this ridge I felt that I was in another country. Was I at Formby or Birkdale, or perhaps at the 6th hole at Prince’s, Sandwich? Here, at any rate, was one of the holes that run along a narrow valley with slopes on either hand—on one side, to be precise, the patient’s leg, and on the other the outside edge of eiderdown. I have always had rather a romantic affection for such holes. I have heard with pain from those same “highbrow” architects that they are not really good holes, because the mere fact of the banks (which will kick the ball to the middle) give the player confidence, whereas the architect’s duty is to make him hesitating and uncomfortable. I began to think that these irritating views were right ; the valley might be narrow, but I felt as if I could drive straight down it, whereas when I looked at the ridge I did not feel nearly so happy.
There were other holes on the course, but they were hardly so satisfactory. There was, to be sure, a big, blind tee shot, to a one-shot hole as I imagined it, over a comparatively noble hill, made by my toes, but somehow it lacked subtlety; and when by a swift piece of engineering I moved the hill to see what the green was like on the far side, it proved flat and featureless. By separating and then adroitly manipulating my two sets of toes it was possible to make a crater green. with visions of the ball running round the side wall and back wall to lie dead at least for an unmerited three. That brought back sentimental memories. I knew a beloved course once that  had three such greens, and many years ago I had three threes running there and won a medal thereby. Still, the sweetness of such threes has a cloying quality. No doubt it is all for the best in the most testing of all possible worlds that there should be no more greens like that nowadays.
To roll over on my side had a disappointing effect on the links. In fact it was obviously not a links any longer, but a mere course: one of those courses on downland which I have the misfortune to dislike, with long, steep slopes, equally tedious to play up or down, and too often adorned with “gun-platform” greens. When tea came, however, the course took on a new aspect, for the tea tray was on a bed table and the bed table had four legs. The course was now one cut out of wood, on which the architect had wisely allowed a solitary sentinel tree or two to remain standing in the middle of the fairway. The valley holes instantly became far more interesting, for each of them had one tree, acting in some sort as a Principal’s Nose, for the tee shot, and another, like that capital tree at the first hole at Frilford, bang in front of the green. I spent some time trying to resolve on which side of those trees to go. At one hole it seemed best to try the right-hand line, because if I went to the left I might hook on the floor, which was clearly out of bounds. At the other hole an exactly converse policy was indicated, but even with the banks to help me the shot was far from easy.
Now I am, as Mr. Littimer would say, “tolerably well” again , and David Copperfield is finished. I have no reasonable pretext for not getting up for breakfast. and indeed it is rumored that there are to be sausages tomorrow morning. The links of eiderdown are fast becoming of the fabric of a dream. I have tried to fix the holes before they elude the frantic clutches of memory and fade away into one another.
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