Golf Stories quotes

Archibald Mealing was one of those golfers in whom desire outruns performance.

Nobody could have been more willing than Archibald. He tried, and tried hard. Every morning before he took his bath he would stand in front of his mirror and practise swings.

At country houses, where they lingered in the porch after dinner to watch the moonlight flooding the quiet garden, it was McCay and his colleague who lingered longest.

McCay knew Ella Wheeler Wilcox by heart, and could take Browning without anaesthetics.

It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that Archibald’s remark about his fiancée coming to live at Cape Pleasant should give him food for thought. It appealed to him.

But a chance like this could never come again.

What is Love compared with holing out before your opponent?

The excitement now had become so intense that a small boy, following with the crowd, swallowed his chewing-gum;

As a matter of fact, everyone in the room was looking at him intently, none more so than Raymond Parsloe Devine, but none of the others were beautiful girls.

Long as the members of Wood Hills Literary Society were on brain, they were short on looks, and, to Cuthbert’s excited eye, Adeline Smethurst stood out like a jewel in a pile of coke.

He had never seen her before, for she had only arrived at her aunt’s house on the previous day, but he was perfectly certain that life, even when lived in the midst of gravel soil, main drainage, and company’s own water, was going to be …

… local Cottage Hospital, the only occasion during the year on which the lion, so to speak, lay down with the lamb, and the Golfers and the Cultured met on terms of easy comradeship, their differences temporarily laid aside—he proposed to Adeline and was badly stymied.

That fair, soulful girl could not see him with a spyglass.

“Mr. Banks,” she said, “I will speak frankly.”

“

Anybody who was content to call you fairly good-looking would describe the Taj Mahal as a pretty nifty tomb.

”

And when he happened to take the next seat to her, she leaned sideways and looked at him. One glance at Mr. Devine would have been more than enough for Cuthbert; but Adeline found him a spectacle that never palled.

She could not have gazed at him with a more rapturous intensity if she had been a small child and he a saucer of ice-cream.

All this Cuthbert had to witness while still endeavouring to retain the possession of his faculties sufficiently to enable him to duck and back away if somebody suddenly asked him what he thought of the sombre realism of Vladimir Brusiloff.

It is one of those problems where debate is futile.

Few things draw two men together more surely than a mutual inability to master golf, coupled with an intense and ever-increasing love for the game.

At the end of the first few months, when a series of costly experiments had convinced both Peter and James that there was not a tottering greybeard nor a toddling infant in the neighbourhood whose downfall they could encompass, the two became inseparable.

And then James, with a pang, knew that he had a rival, for he had not mentioned Miss Forrester’s name, and yet Peter had divined that it was to her that he had referred.

Love is a fever which, so to speak, drives off without wasting time on the address.

On the very next morning after the conversation which I have related, James Todd rang Peter Willard up on the phone and cancelled their golf engagements for the day, on the plea of a sprained wrist.

Moreover, with amateur knitters there must always be allowed a margin for involuntary error. There were many cases during the war where our girls sent sweaters to their sweethearts which would have induced strangulation in their young brothers.

The amateur sweater of those days was, in fact, practically tantamount to German propaganda.

Peter and James were accordingly baffled. One evening the sweater would look small, and James would come away jubilant; the next it would have swollen over a vast area, and Peter would walk home singing. The suspense of the two men can readily be imagined.

Peter, realizing from experience the futility of searching for his ball in the woods, drove a second, which also disappeared into the jungle, as did his third. By the time he had joined James in the bunker he had played his sixth.

It is the glorious uncertainty of golf that makes it the game it is.

The fact that James and Peter, lying side by side in the same bunker, had played respectively one and six shots, might have induced an unthinking observer to fancy the chances of the former.

Love has had a lot of press-agenting from the oldest times; but there are higher, nobler things than love.

A woman is only a woman, but a hefty drive is a slosh.

but, personally, I confess, it pleases me to see my fellow human beings—and into this category golf-children, though at the moment you may not be broad-minded enough to admit it, undoubtedly fall—taking to the noblest of games at an early age.

Golf, like measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious.

Let me tell you the story of Mortimer Sturgis, which illustrates what I mean rather aptly.

In a large country like Africa, for instance, I should imagine that it was almost impossible for a man not to get somewhere if he goes on long enough.

Give me the fellow who can plunge into the bowels of the earth at Piccadilly Circus and find the right Tube train with nothing but a lot of misleading signs to guide him.

However, we are not all constituted alike in this world, and it was apparent from the flush on her cheek and the light in her eyes that Betty admired explorers.

He looked what he was, the man of action and enterprise. He had the wiry frame and strong jaw without which no explorer is complete, and Mortimer, beside him, seemed but a poor, soft product of our hothouse civilization.

Mortimer, I forgot to say, wore glasses; and, if there is one time more than another when a man should not wear glasses, it is while a strong-faced, keen-eyed wanderer in the wilds is telling a beautiful girl the story of his adventures.

For this was what Denton was doing. My arrival seemed to have interrupted him in the middle of narrative. He shook my hand in a strong, silent sort of way, and resumed:

“Well, the natives seemed fairly friendly, so I decided to stay the night.”

I made a mental note never to seem fairly friendly to an explorer. If you do, he always decides to stay the night.

“In the morning they took me down to the river.

From this point onward Mortimer Sturgis proved the truth of what I said to you about the perils of taking up golf at an advanced age.

A lifetime of observing my fellow-creatures has convinced me that Nature intended us all to be golfers.

In every human being the germ of golf is implanted at birth, and suppression causes it to grow and grow till—it may be at forty, fifty, sixty—it suddenly bursts its bonds and sweeps over the victim like a tidal wave.

But a man like Mortimer Sturgis, with thirty-eight golfless years behind him, is swept off his feet. He is carried away. He loses all sense of proportion.

He is like the fly that happens to be sitting on the wall of the dam just when the crack comes.

Mortimer Sturgis gave himself up without a struggle to an orgy of golf such as I have never witnessed in any man.

“Don’t throw me over, Betty,” pleaded Mortimer, and there was that in his voice which cut me to the heart. “

You’ll make me so miserable. And, when I’m miserable, I always slice my approach shots.

”

Mortimer sank into a chair, and stared blankly before him.

She had scratched the match.

I am not a married man myself, so have had no experience of how it feels to have one’s wife whizz off silently into the unknown;

but gradually it began to impress itself on me that his eye was brighter, his jaw squarer, his carriage a trifle more upright than it had been. But it was his eye that struck me most forcibly.

The George Mackintosh I had known had had a pleasing gaze, but, though frank and agreeable, it had never been more dynamic than a fried egg.

This new George had an eye that was a combination of a gimlet and a searchlight. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, I imagine, must have been somewhat similarly equipped. The Ancient Mariner stopped a wedding guest on his way to a wedding;

But what to do? What to do? I have an awful fear that when we are getting married instead of answering ‘I will,’ he will go into the pulpit and deliver an address on Marriage Ceremonies of All Ages.

The world to him is a vast lecture-platform. He looks on life as one long after-dinner, with himself as the principal speaker of the evening.

It is breaking my heart. I see him shunned by his former friends. Shunned! They run a mile when they see him coming. The mere sound of his voice outside the clubhouse is enough to send brave men diving for safety beneath the sofas.

In these days of national effort, when we are all working together to try to make our beloved land fit for heroes to live in, it was astonishing that nobody before had thought of a simple, obvious thing like killing George Mackintosh.

George Mackintosh was undoubtedly better dead, but it had taken a woman’s intuition to see it.

“I killed him with my niblick,” said Celia.

Nobody who had not had a short putt stop on the edge of the hole could possibly have written the words: “That which makes the man no worse than he was makes life no worse. It has no power to harm, without or within.”

Yes, Marcus Aurelius undoubtedly played golf, and all the evidence seems to indicate that he rarely went round in under a hundred and twenty. The niblick was his club.

Speaking of Marcus Aurelius and the golfing temperament recalls to my mind the case of young Mitchell Holmes.

He was the sort of player who does the first two holes in one under bogey and then takes an eleven at the third. The least thing upset him on the links.

He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.

It seemed hardly likely that this one kink in an otherwise admirable character would ever seriously affect his working or professional life, but it did. One evening, as I was sitting in my garden, Alexander Paterson was announced.

I removed my business from his charge next morning. He has not yet run off with any trust-funds, but there is a nasty gleam in his eye, and I am convinced that it is only a question of time.

Golf, my dear fellow, is the infallible test.

The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well.

“They are sure to.

Statisticians estimate that the average of crime among good golfers is lower than in any class of the community except possibly bishops.

Since Willie Park won the first championship at Prestwick in the year 1860 there has, I believe, been no instance of an Open Champion spending a day in prison.

Rupert Dixon smirked.

A smirking man, wrapped in a bath towel, with a wisp of wet hair over one eye, is a repellent sight.

“Oh, pretty well. I won by six and five. In spite of having poisonous luck.”

Mitchell cleared the ravine by a hundred and twenty yards. He strolled back to me, and watched Alexander go through his ritual with an indulgent smile. I knew just how he was feeling.

Never does the world seem so sweet and fair and the foibles of our fellow human beings so little irritating as when we have just swatted the pill right on the spot.

“I can’t see why he does it,” said Mitchell, eyeing Alexander with a toleration that almost amounted to affection. “If I did all those Swedish exercises before I drove, I should forget what I had come out for and go home.”

Mitchell won the hole comfortably. There was a jauntiness about his stance on the fourth tee which made me a little uneasy.

Overconfidence at golf is almost as bad as timidity.

My apprehensions were justified. Mitchell topped his ball. It rolled twenty yards into the rough, and nestled under a dock-leaf. His mouth opened, then closed with a snap. He came over to where Millicent and I were standing.

“That’s all very well,” said Mitchell, watching narrowly in a clump of weeds but seeming unconvinced. “

I believe the Greens Committee run this bally club purely in the interests of the caddies.

I believe they encourage lost balls, and go halves with the little beasts when they find them and sell them!”

“Napoleon! What’s Napoleon got to do with it?

Napoleon never was expected to drive through a primeval forest.

Besides, what did Napoleon ever do? Where did Napoleon get off, swanking round as if he amounted to something? Poor fish! All he ever did was to get hammered at Waterloo!”

There are few more picturesque spots in the whole of the countryside than the neighbourhood of the fourteenth tee. It is a sight to charm the nature-lover’s heart.

But, if golf has a defect, it is that it prevents a man being a wholehearted lover of nature.

Where the layman sees waving grass and romantic tangles of undergrowth, your golfer beholds nothing but a nasty patch of rough from which he must divert his ball.

Where the layman sees waving grass and romantic tangles of undergrowth, your golfer beholds nothing but a nasty patch of rough from which he must divert his ball.

The cry of the birds, wheeling against the sky, is to the golfer merely something that may put him off his putt.

As a spectator, I am fond of the ravine at the bottom of the slope. It pleases the eye. But, as a golfer, I have frequently found it the very devil.

Mitchell tottered. He grasped my arm for support. Everything was very still.

Nothing broke the stillness but the humming of the bees, the murmur of the distant wavelets, and the sound of Mitchell’s caddie going on with his apple.

“The position,” said Alexander, “will be falling vacant very shortly, as no doubt you know. It is yours, if you care to accept it.”

three times during the round at moments selected by himself. There had been many more of these degrading travesties on the sacred game, and I had writhed to see them.

Playing freak golf-matches is to my mind like ragging a great classical melody.

But of the whole collection this one, considering the sentimental interest and the magnitude of the stakes, seemed to me the most terrible. My face, I imagine, betrayed my disgust, for Bingham attempted extenuation.

I do not know what the sweater-clad young man’s engagements for the morning had been originally, but nothing could have been more obliging than the ready way in which he consented to revise them at a moment’s notice.

I dare say you have noticed that the sturdy peasantry of our beloved land respond to an offer of five pounds as to a bugle-call.

“You’re on,” said the youth.

“What! Then how the deuce am I to get it out?”

“That,” I said, gravely, “is a question between you and your Maker.”

It was here that Arthur Jukes forfeited the sympathy which I had begun to feel for him. A crafty, sinister look came into his eyes.

You would be a good fellow and keep your mouth shut, yes? You might even see your way to go so far as to back me up in a statement to the effect that I hooked it out with my—?”

“I am a golfer,” I said, coldly, “and I obey the rules.”

“Those rules were drawn up by—”—I bared my head reverently—“by the Committee of the Royal and Ancient at St. Andrews. I have always respected them, and I shall not deviate on this occasion from the policy of a lifetime.”

while in March of the following year he had arranged to have his firstborn christened Thomas Reginald. Later on, the short-coating of Thomas Reginald was arranged for, and there was a note about sending him to school.

Many hard things have been said of Vincent Jopp, but nobody has ever accused him of not being a man who looked ahead.

On the morning of May 4th Jopp came into the office, looking, I fancied, a little thoughtful. He sat for some moments staring before him with his brow a trifle furrowed; then he seemed to come to himself. He rapped his desk.

Put a driver in his hands and he pastes the ball into the next county without a thought. It is only when he takes to the game in earnest that he becomes self-conscious and anxious, and tops his shots even as you and I.

A man who could retain through his golfing career the almost scornful confidence of the non-player would be unbeatable. Fortunately such an attitude of mind is beyond the scope of human nature.

It was not, however, beyond the scope of Vincent Jopp, the superman. Vincent Jopp, was, I am inclined to think, the only golfer who ever approached the game in a spirit of Pure Reason.

Gripping too tightly was a defect, so he did not grip too tightly. With that weird concentration which had served him so well in business he did precisely what he had set out to do—no less and no more.

Golf with Vincent Jopp was an exact science.

The annals of the game are studded with the names of those who have made rapid progress in their first season.

It was not, however, beyond the scope of Vincent Jopp, the superman.

Vincent Jopp, was, I am inclined to think, the only golfer who ever approached the game in a spirit of Pure Reason.

I have read of men who, never having swum in their lives, studied a textbook on their way down to the swimming bath, mastered its contents, and dived in and won the big race.

Even the strongest and most silent of us have our weaknesses, and my employer’s was the rooted idea that he looked well in knickerbockers. It was not my place to try to dissuade him, but there was no doubt that they did not suit him.

Nature, in bestowing upon him a massive head and a jutting chin, had forgotten to finish him off at the other end. Vincent Jopp’s legs were skinny.

“You poor dear man!” went on Mrs. Jane Jukes Jopp. “What practical joker ever lured you into appearing in public in knickerbockers?”

I was standing quite near to Vincent Jopp, and at this moment I saw a bead of perspiration spring out on his forehead, and into his steely eyes there came a positively hunted look. I could understand and sympathize.

Napoleon himself would have wilted if he had found himself in the midst of a trio of females, one talking babytalk, another fussing about his health, and the third making derogatory observations on his lower limbs.

Vincent Jopp was becoming unstrung.

No! Back horses or go down to Throgmorton Street and try to take it away from the Rothschilds, and I will applaud you as a shrewd and cautious financier.

But to bet at golf is pure gambling.

“Chicketty wicketty wicketty wipsey pop!”

In other respects her intelligence appeared to be above the ordinary.

“Isn’t he a darling!” she said, addressing the Oldest Member.

The Sage cast a meditative eye upon the infant.

Except to the eye of love, it looked like a skinned poached egg.

“Don’t you think he looks more like his father every day?”

Their house was not far from the links; Eunice was not engaged to be married; and the aunt made a hobby of collecting dry seaweed, which she pressed and pasted in an album.

One sometimes thinks that aunts live entirely for pleasure.

At the end of the round Ramsden staggered on to the terrace, tripping over his feet, and handed Wilberforce back in good condition.

Eunice, who had just reached the chapter where the hero decides to give up all for love, thanked him perfunctorily without looking up from her book; and so ended the first spasm of Ramsden Waters’s life romance.

There are few things more tragic than the desire of the moth for the star; and it is a curious fact that the spectacle of a star almost invariably fills the most sensible moth with thoughts above his station.

No doubt, if Ramsden Waters had stuck around and waited long enough there might have come his way in the fullness of time some nice, homely girl with a squint and a good disposition who would have been about his form.

“Mr. Waters. What is there in you that would repay a girl for giving up the priceless boon of freedom?”

“I know a lot about dried seaweed,” suggested Ramsden hopefully.

“No,” she said, “it is quite impossible. You have paid me the greatest compliment a man can pay a woman, Mr. Waterson—”

“Ah!” said Ramsden, “if only I could win what I want to win more than anything else on earth! You, I mean,” he added, to make his meaning clear. “If I could win you—”

His tongue tied itself in a bow knot round his uvula, and he could say no more.

He moved slowly to the door, paused with his fingers on the handle for one last look over his shoulder, and walked silently into the cupboard where Eunice’s aunt kept her collection of dried seaweed.

Eunice bit her lip. She was piqued.

She felt as if she had patted the head of a pet lamb, and the lamb had turned and bitten her in the finger.

“I said, ‘Good shot, partner!’ ” she repeated coldly.

And when the ball, badly topped, bounded down the slope and entered the muddy water like a timid diver on a cold morning she realized that she had a full hand.

There are twenty-three things which it is possible to do wrong in the drive, and she had done them all.

Silently Ramsden Waters made a tee and placed thereon a new ball. He was a golfer who rarely despaired, but he was playing three, and his opponents’ ball would undoubtedly be on the green, possibly even dead, in two.

Ramsden faced her, stern and pale.

“Madam,” he said, “in similar circumstances I would have kicked the Archangel Gabriel!”

Then, stooping to his ball, he picked it up.

“We shall be quite alone,” said Eunice. “Little Wilberforce has gone to bed with a headache.”

Ramsden paused a moment to disentangle his tongue from the back of his neck.

“I’ll be right over!” he said huskily.

“The public does not want historical stories,” he said, frowning coldly.

“Ah, but the public hasn’t seen one of ours!” we replied.

The editor placed a cigarette in a holder presented to him by a reigning monarch, and lit it with a match from a golden box, the gift of the millionaire president of the Amalgamated League of Working Plumbers.

“What this magazine requires,” he said, “is red-blooded, one-hundred-percent dynamic stuff, palpitating with warm human interest and containing a strong, poignant love-motive.”

“That,” we replied, “is us all over, Mabel.”

“What I need at the moment, however, is a golf story.”

“Ha! say you so?” said the editor, a flicker of interest passing over his finely-chiselled features. “Then you may let me see it.”

He kicked us in the face, and we withdrew.

On the broad terrace outside his palace, overlooking the fair expanse of the Royal gardens, King Merolchazzar of Oom stood leaning on the low parapet, his chin in his hand and a frown on his noble face.

The day was fine, and a light breeze bore up to him from the garden below a fragrant scent of flowers.

But, for all the pleasure it seemed to give him, it might have been bone-fertilizer.

The fact is, King Merolchazzar was in love, and his suit was not prospering. Enough to upset any man.

… on a half-brick and a couple of paving-stones which have survived to this day, “it did indeed begin to appear as though our beloved monarch, the son of the sun and the nephew of the moon, had been handed the bitter fruit of the citron.”

The quaint old idiom is almost untranslatable, but one sees what he means.

As the King stood sombrely surveying the garden, his attention was attracted by a small, bearded man with bushy eyebrows and a face like a walnut, who stood not far away on a gravelled path flanked by rose bushes.

The minstrels melted away. The bearded man patted the fermenting monarch paternally on the shoulder.

“Ma mannie,” he said, “ye may no’ be a gowfer yet, but hoots! ye’re learning the language fine!”

King Merolchazzar’s fury died away. He simpered modestly at these words of commendation, the first his bearded preceptor had uttered. With exemplary patience he turned to address the stone for the twenty-seventh time.

… the present day, living in the midst of a million marvels of a complex civilization, have learned to adjust ourselves to conditions and to take for granted phenomena which in an earlier and less advanced age would have caused the profoundest excitement and even alarm.

We accept without comment the telephone, the automobile, and the wireless telegraph, and we are unmoved by the spectacle of our fellow human beings in the grip of the first stages of golf fever.

Far otherwise was it with the courtiers and officials about the Palace of Oom. The obsession of the King was the sole topic of conversation.

The voices died away. There was a silence.

“If I hadn’t missed a two-foot putt, I’d have done the long fifteenth in four yesterday,” said the King.

“I won the Ladies’ Open Championship of the Outer Isles last week,” said the Princess.

“If I hadn’t missed a two-foot putt, I’d have done the long fifteenth in four yesterday,” said the King.

“I won the Ladies’ Open Championship of the Outer Isles last week,” said the Princess.

They looked into each other’s eyes for a long moment. And then, hand in hand, they walked slowly into the palace.

The editor pressed a bell, a single ruby set in a fold of the tapestry upon the wall. The majordomo appeared.

“Give this man a purse of gold,” said the editor, “and throw him out.”

He had the aspect of one who knows that he is shortly about to receive it in the gizzard from a remorseless Fate. He gazed down the fairway, shifted his feet, waggled, gazed down the fairway again, shifted the dogs once more, and waggled afresh.

He waggled as Hamlet might have waggled, moodily, irresolutely.

Then, at last, he swung, and, taking from his caddie the niblick which the intelligent lad had been holding in readiness from the moment when he had walked on to the tee, trudged wearily off to play his second.

“It is curious that you should have asked that question,” he said at last, “for only this morning I was thinking of the one case in my experience where a goof was enabled to overcome his deplorable malady.

It was owing to a girl, of course. The longer I live, the more I come to see that most things are.

But as you will no doubt wish to hear the story from the beginning—”

On every side we see big two-fisted he-men floundering round in three figures, stopping every few minutes to let through little shrimps with knock knees and hollow cheeks who are tearing off snappy seventy-fours.

Giants of finance have to accept a stroke per from their junior clerks.

Men capable of governing empires fail to control a small white ball which presents no difficulties whatever to others with one ounce more brain than a cuckoo-clock. Mysterious, but there it is.

“No, a goop.

A goop is a man who’s in love with a girl and won’t tell her so.

I am as certain as I am of anything that Ferdinand is fond of me.”

“Well, why doesn’t he confide in me, the poor fish?” cried the high-spirited girl, petulantly flicking a pebble at a passing grasshopper. “

I can’t be expected to fling myself into his arms unless he gives some sort of a hint that he’s ready to catch me.

”

By the end of the first week Ferdinand Dibble was the acknowledged champion of the place.

He had gone through the entire menagerie like a bullet through a cream puff.

First, scarcely daring to consider the possibility of success, he had taken on the man who tried to catch his ball off its guard and had beaten him five up and four to play.

He decided, therefore, to wait till she arrived, and meanwhile pursued his conquering course. The longer he waited the better, in one way, for every morning and afternoon that passed was adding new layers to his self-esteem.

Day by day in every way he grew chestier and chestier.

Meanwhile, however, dark clouds were gathering. Sullen mutterings were to be heard in corners of the hotel lounge and the spirit of revolt was abroad. For Ferdinand’s chestiness had not escaped the notice of his defeated rivals.

Meanwhile, however, dark clouds were gathering. Sullen mutterings were to be heard in corners of the hotel lounge and the spirit of revolt was abroad. For Ferdinand’s chestiness had not escaped the notice of his defeated rivals.

There is nobody so chesty as a normally unchesty man who suddenly becomes chesty, and I am sorry to say that the chestiness which had come to Ferdinand was the aggressive type of chestiness which breeds enemies.

He had developed a habit of holding the game up in order to give his opponent advice. The Whip-Cracker had not forgiven, and never would forgive, his well-meant but galling criticism of his backswing.

The magic had gone out of the morning. The sun still shone, but in a silly, feeble way; and a cold and depressing wind had sprung up.

For Ferdinand’s inferiority complex, which had seemed cured forever, was back again, doing business at the old stand.

How sad it is in this life that the moments to which we have looked forward with the most glowing anticipation so often turn out on arrival flat, cold, and disappointing!

The magic had gone out of the morning. The sun still shone, but in a silly, feeble way; and a cold and depressing wind had sprung up. For Ferdinand’s inferiority complex, which had seemed cured forever, was back again, doing business at the old stand.

How sad it is in this life that the moments to which we have looked forward with the most glowing anticipation so often turn out on arrival flat, cold, and disappointing!

For ten days Barbara Medway had been living for that meeting with Ferdinand, when getting out of the train she would see him popping about on the horizon with the lovelight sparkling in his eyes and words of devotion trembling on his lips.

“Quite, quite sure, dearest,” said Barbara.

He folded her in his arms, using the interlocking grip.

The summer day was drawing to a close.

Over the terrace outside the clubhouse the chestnut trees threw long shadows, and such bees as still lingered in the flowerbeds had the air of tired business men who are about ready to shut up the office and go off to dinner and a musical comedy.

The Oldest Member, stirring in his favourite chair, glanced at his watch and yawned.

“It is a curious thing,” said the Oldest Member, “that men whose golf is of a kind that makes hardened caddies wince always do.

The more competent a player, the smaller the stake that contents him.

It is only when you get down into the submerged tenth of the golfing world that you find the big gambling. However, I would not call fifty pounds anything sensational in the case of two men like Perkins and Broster.

Once, finding him crooning over the trousers in which Ouimet had won his historic replay against Vardon and Ray in the American Open, she had asked him why he did not collect something worthwhile like Old Masters or first editions.

Worth while! Bradbury had forgiven, for he loved the woman, but he could not forget.

For Bradbury Fisher, like so many men who have taken to the game in middle age, after a youth misspent in the pursuits of commerce, was no halfhearted enthusiast.

It was so with Bradbury Fisher and J. Gladstone Bott. Born in the same town within a few days of one another, they had come to New York in the same week; and from that moment their careers had run side by side.

Fisher had made his first million two days before Bott, but Bott’s first divorce had got half a column and two sticks more publicity than Fisher’s.

At Sing-Sing, where each had spent several happy years of early manhood, they had run neck and neck for the prizes which that institution has to offer.

“You’re sure?” he cried. “You’re positive it’s genuine?”

“I have a written guarantee from Mr. Jones, Mrs. Jones, and the nurse.”

“How much, Bott, old man?” stammered Bradbury. “How much do you want for it, Gladstone, old top? I’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars.”

If that is so, I erred. It is true that in a general way, whatever one had, the other had something equally good to counterbalance it; but in just one matter Bradbury Fisher had triumphed completely over Gladstone Bott.

Bradbury Fisher had the finest English butler on Long Island.

From the first, Bradbury had been perfectly aware that Bott coveted Blizzard, and the knowledge had sweetened his life. But this was the first time he had come out into the open and admitted it.

It seemed to him that his troubles were over.

Like all twenty-four handicap men, he had the most perfect confidence in his ability to beat all other twenty-four handicap men.

As for Gladstone Bott, he knew that he could disembowel him any time he was able to lure him out of the clubhouse.

“I am jumpy today, Blizzard,” he said, forcing a laugh.

“Yes, sir. You do, indeed, appear to have the willies.”

“Yes. I am playing a very important golf-match this morning.”

The great thing to remember was to hold the breath on the backswing and not to release it before the moment of impact. Also, the eyes should not be closed until late in the downswing.

All great golfers have their little secrets, and that was Bradbury’s.

With these aids to success firmly fixed in his mind, Bradbury Fisher prepared to give the ball the nastiest bang that a golf ball had ever had since Edward Blackwell was in his prime.

Dully Bradbury looked round to see how Bott was getting on. And then suddenly, as he found that Bott was completely invisible behind the belt of bushes through which he had just passed, a voice seemed to whisper to him, “Why not?”

Bradbury Fisher, remember, had spent thirty years in Wall Street.

It was at this moment that he realized that he was not alone. His caddie was standing at his side.

With a good deal of peevishness he wished that Providence had never endowed women with this sixth sense.

A woman with merely five took quite enough handling.

“Sweet suffering soupspoons!” groaned Bradbury.

For a man with anything on his mind, any little trouble calculated to affect the joie de vivre, there are few spots less cheering than the Customs sheds of New York. Draughts whistle dismally there—now to, now fro. Strange noises are heard.

Customs officials chew gum and lurk grimly in the shadows like tigers awaiting the luncheon-gong.

It is not surprising that Bradbury’s spirits, low when he reached the place, should have sunk to zero long before the gangplank was lowered and the passengers began to stream down it.

“Until this is done,” he agreed, “the millennium cannot but be set back indefinitely.

Although we are told nothing about it, there can be little doubt that one of Job’s chief trials was that his wife insisted on playing golf with him.

And, as we are on this topic, it may interest you to hear a story.”

The only thing, in fact, that militated against Bradbury’s complete tranquillity was the information he had just received from his wife that her mother, Mrs. Lora Smith Maplebury, was about to infest the home for an indeterminate stay.

Bradbury had never liked his wives’ mothers.

His first wife, he recalled, had had a particularly objectionable mother. So had his second, third, and fourth. And the present holder of the title appeared to him to be scratch.

“It is too hearty, sir. It would not have done for the Duke.”

Bradbury Fisher was an easygoing man, but he belonged to a free race.

For freedom his fathers had fought and, if he had heard the story correctly, bled. His eyes flashed.

So Alfred came along—barking at Bradbury as he endeavoured to concentrate on the smooth pronation of the wrists, bounding ahead to frolic round distant players who were shaping for delicate chip-shots, and getting a deep toehold on the turf of each successive green.

Hell, felt Bradbury, must be something like this; and he wished that he had led a better life.

But that retribution which waits on all, both small and great, who defy Green Committees had marked Alfred down. Taking up a position just behind Mrs.

Bradbury Fisher uttered a low, bleating sound. The water had had the worst effect on the animal. Even when dry, Alfred was always a dog of powerful scent.

Wet, he had become definitely one of the six best smellers.

His aroma had what the advertisement-writers call “strong memory-value.”

The real trouble was that the spectacle of her on the links was destroying his ideals, sapping away that love and respect which should have been as imperishable as steel.

To a good man his wife should be a goddess, a being far above him to whom he can offer worship and reverence, a beacon-star guiding him over the tossing seas of life.

She should be ever on a pedestal and in a shrine. And when she waggles for a minute and a half and then jerks her head and tops the ball, she ceases to be so. And Mrs.

“The tip of his nose wiggled.

Always distrust a man who wiggles the tip of his nose.

”

Many a time in the past, when an active operator on the Street, he had done things to the small investor which would have caused raised eyebrows in the fo’c’sle of a pirate sloop—and done them without a blush.

He was not the man, therefore, to suffer torment merely because he was slipping one over on the Little Woman.

Occasionally he would wince a trifle at the thought of what would happen if she ever found out; but apart from that, I am doing no more than state the plain truth when I say that Bradbury Fisher did not care a whoop.

Two weeks after he had started on his campaign of deception he amazed himself and all who witnessed the performance by cracking a hundred for the first time in his career.

And every golfer knows that in the soul of the man who does that there is no room for remorse.

Conscience may sting the player who is going round in a hundred and ten, but when it tries to make itself unpleasant to the man who is doing ninety-sevens and ninety-eights, it is simply wasting its time.

And every golfer knows that in the soul of the man who does that there is no room for remorse.

Conscience may sting the player who is going round in a hundred and ten, but when it tries to make itself unpleasant to the man who is doing ninety-sevens and ninety-eights, it is simply wasting its time.

I will do Bradbury Fisher justice. He did regret that he was not in a position to tell his wife all about that first ninety-nine of his.

and it was monstrous and impossible that he should not be there. He must be there. He had done a ninety-six, and the next best medal score in his sixteen was a hundred and one.

For the first time in his life he had before him the prospect of winning a cup; and, highly though the poets have spoken of love, that emotion is not to be compared with the frenzy which grips a twenty-four handicap man who sees himself within reach of a cup.

Blindly he tottered from the room and sought his study. He wanted to be alone. He had to think, think.

“They are all respectable men,” I said, “and were, I believe, highly thought of in their respective businesses. But on the links I admit that they are a trial.”

“They are the direct lineal descendants of the Gadarene swine,” said Chester, firmly.

“Every time they come out I expect to see them rush down the hill from the first tee and hurl themselves into the lake at the second. Of all the—”

One of the most charming things about him was his delightful boyish smile. Shyness had caused him to iron this out of his countenance till no trace of it remained.

Not only did he not smile, he looked like a man who never had smiled and never would.

His mouth was a thin, rigid line. His back was stiff with what appeared to be contemptuous aversion. He looked down his nose at Miss Blakeney as if she were less than the dust beneath his chariot-wheels.

In similar circumstances those who have not had the benefit of a sound training in golf are too apt to go wrong.

Goaded by the sudden anguish, they take to drink, plunge into dissipation, and write vers libre.

Chester was mercifully saved from this. I saw him the day after he had been handed the mitten, and was struck by the look of grim determination in his face.

At the second, the lake hole, he lost a ball in the water and got another five. It was only at the third that he began to pull himself together.

The test of a great golfer is his ability to recover from a bad start.

Chester had this quality to a preeminent degree. A lesser man, conscious of being three over bogey for the first two holes, might have looked on his round as ruined.

“No, never mind,” she said, as he stooped to put her ball on the sand. “I don’t think I’ll play any more. I’d much rather just watch you.”

“Oh, that you could watch me through life!” said Chester, but he said it to himself.

His actual words were “Very well!” and he spoke them with a stiff coldness which chilled the girl.

Even Peter Willard has occasionally come home in a canter with a six, five, and seven, conceding himself only two eight-foot putts.

It is, I think, this mild conclusion to a tough course that makes the refreshment-room of our club so noticeable for its sea of happy faces.

The bar every day is crowded with rejoicing men who, forgetting the agonies of the first fifteen, are babbling of what they did on the last three. The seventeenth, with its possibilities of holing out a topped second, is particularly soothing.

Then, with a final swift waggle, he laid his club-head behind the ball and slowly raised it. It was just coming down when the world became full of shouts of “Fore!” and something hard smote him violently on the seat of his plus-fours.

The supreme tragedies of life leave us momentarily stunned.

For an instant which seemed an age Chester could not understand what had happened.

“You should! You should!” cried the girl, passionately. “You should have said all that and a lot more. That awful man ruining your record round like that!

Oh, why am I a poor weak woman with practically no vocabulary that’s any use for anything?

”

“There is nothing to be done about it,” he said. “We can only hope that the poison will in time work its way out of the man’s system.

Sudden success at golf is like the sudden acquisition of wealth. It is apt to unsettle and deteriorate the character.

And, as it comes almost miraculously, so only a miracle can effect a cure. The best advice I can give you is to refrain from playing with Nathaniel Frisby till you can keep your tee-shots straight.”

Its great service to humanity is that it teaches human beings that, whatever petty triumphs they may have achieved in other walks of life, they are after all merely human. It acts as a corrective against sinful pride.

I attribute the insane arrogance of the later Roman emperors almost entirely to the fact that, never having played golf, they never knew that strange, chastening humility which is engendered by a topped chip-shot.

If Cleopatra had been outed in the first round of the Ladies’ Singles, we should have heard a lot less of her proud imperiousness.

It acts as a corrective against sinful pride. I attribute the insane arrogance of the later Roman emperors almost entirely to the fact that, never having played golf, they never knew that strange, chastening humility which is engendered by a topped chip-shot.

If Cleopatra had been outed in the first round of the Ladies’ Singles, we should have heard a lot less of her proud imperiousness.

And, coming down to modern times, it was undoubtedly his rotten golf that kept Wallace Chesney the nice unspoiled fellow he was. For in every other respect he had everything in the world calculated to make a man conceited and arrogant.

“Pop straight back into the changing-room while I’ve got my eyes shut, and remove the fancy-dress.”

“Darling,” said Charlotte, “I think it’s sweet and patriotic of you to be proud of your cycling club colours or whatever they are, but you mustn’t wear them on the links. It will unsettle the caddies.”

“They are a trifle on the bright side,” admitted Wallace. “But it helps my game, wearing them. I was trying a few practice-shots just now, and I couldn’t go wrong. Slammed the ball on the meat every time.

But in about a week conditions were back to normalcy. Within ten days the Plus Fours became a familiar feature of the landscape, and were accepted as such without comment.

They were pointed out to strangers together with the waterfall, the Lovers’ Leap, and the view from the eighth green as things you ought not to miss when visiting the course; but apart from that one might almost say they were ignored.

And meanwhile Wallace Chesney continued day by day to make the most extraordinary progress in his play.

That was the soul of golf, the thing that made it the wonderful pursuit it was—that speculativeness, that not knowing where the dickens your ball was going when you hit it, that eternal hoping for the best, that never-failing chanciness.

It is better to struggle hopefully than to arrive, and at last this great truth had come home to Wallace Chesney.

He realized now why pro’s were all grave, silent men who seemed to struggle manfully against some secret sorrow. It was because they were too darned good. Golf had no surprises for them, no gallant spirit of adventure.

“

If he had been a golfer, he would have ignored the Armada altogether.

”

One evening, when they had gone out into the garden together to look at the new moon—Rollo, by his mother’s advice, wearing a woollen scarf to protect his throat—he endeavoured to bring the conversation round to the important subject.

Mary’s last remark had been about earwigs. Considered as a cue, it lacked a subtle something; but Rollo was not the man to be discouraged by that.

“Talking of earwigs, Miss Kent,” he said, in a low, musical voice, “have you ever been in love?”

“Yes, once. When I was eleven. With a conjurer who came to perform at my birthday-party.

He took a rabbit and two eggs out of my hair, and life seemed one grand sweet song.

”

Little Lettice, I should mention, was the daughter of Rollo’s sister Enid, who lived in the neighbourhood. Mrs. Willoughby had been compelled to go away on a visit a few days before and had left her child with Mrs. Podmarsh during her absence.

You can fool some of the people all the time, but Lettice Willoughby was not of the type that is easily deceived.

A nice, old-fashioned child would no doubt have accepted without questioning her grandmother’s dictum that roly-poly pudding could not fail to hand a devastating wallop to the blood-pressure, and that to take two helpings of it was practically equivalent to walking right into the family …

… were telling this story to a golfer instead of to an excrescence—I use the word in the kindliest spirit—who spends his time messing about on a bowling-green, nothing would please me better than to describe shot by shot Rollo’s progress over the remaining nine holes.

Epics have been written with less material.

But these details would, I am aware, be wasted on you. Let it suffice that by the time his last approach trickled on to the eighteenth green he had taken exactly fifty shots.

In a basket-chair in the shadows the Oldest Member puffed a cigar and listened, well content.

His was the peace of the man who has reached the age when he is no longer expected to dance.

A door opened, and a young man came out of the clubhouse. He stood on the steps with folded arms, gazing to left and right. The Oldest Member, watching him from the darkness, noted that he wore an air of gloom.

They had much in common, for she was a calm, slow-moving person too. They had a mutual devotion to golf, and played together every day; and the fact that their handicaps were practically level formed a strong bond.

Most divorces, as you know, spring from the fact that the husband is too markedly superior to his wife at golf; this leading him, when she starts criticizing his relations, to say bitter and unforgivable things about her mashie-shots.

Nothing of this kind could happen with William and Jane. They would build their life on a solid foundation of sympathy and understanding. The years would find them consoling and encouraging each other, happy married lovers.

She gazed yearningly at the chandelier.

“I wish mother would take me to Algiers next winter,” she murmured, absently. “It would do her rheumatism so much good.”

I went away frankly uneasy. These novelists, I felt, ought to be more careful. They put ideas into girls’ heads and made them dissatisfied. I determined to look William up and give him a kindly word of advice.

I went away frankly uneasy.

These novelists, I felt, ought to be more careful. They put ideas into girls’ heads and made them dissatisfied.

I determined to look William up and give him a kindly word of advice. It was no business of mine, you may say, but they were so ideally suited to one another that it seemed a tragedy that anything should come between them.

“No, but he’s very broad-minded about it.”

I shuddered. Women say these things so lightly.

“Yes. He has no objection to my going on playing. He says he likes my pretty enthusiasms.”

He was humming now as she addressed her ball, and for an instant a spasm of irritation shot through her. She fought it down bravely and concentrated on her drive, and when the ball soared over the cross-bunker she forgot her annoyance.

There is nothing so mellowing, so conducive to sweet and genial thoughts, as a real juicy one straight down the middle, and this was a pipterino.

“Nice work,” said William Bates, approvingly.

The woman on the bank looked up from her Vardon as Rodney Spelvin’s agonized scream rent the air. She saw a boat upon the water, a man rowing the boat, another man, hatless, gesticulating in the stern, a girl beating the water with a niblick.

She nodded placidly and understandingly. A niblick was the club she would have used herself in such circumstances.

Everything appeared to her entirely regular and orthodox. She resumed her book.

The woman on the bank looked absently in their direction. Then she resumed her book.

“It’s all right,” said William Bates, contentedly. “We’re in our depth.”

“My bag!” cried Jane. “My bag of clubs!”

“Taking a big chance,” agreed William Bates.

“Sort of fellow who would poison the cat’s milk and kick the baby in the face.”

He took a deep breath and disappeared. “Here are your clubs, old girl,” he said, coming to the surface again. “Only wanted a bit of looking for.”

I saw the announcement of the publication in the papers; but beyond a passing resolve that nothing would induce me to read the thing I thought no more of the matter.

It is always thus with life’s really significant happenings.

Fate sneaks its deadliest wallops in on us with such seeming nonchalance. How could I guess what that book was to do to the married happiness of Jane and William Bates?

I saw the announcement of the publication in the papers; but beyond a passing resolve that nothing would induce me to read the thing I thought no more of the matter. It is always thus with life’s really significant happenings.

Fate sneaks its deadliest wallops in on us with such seeming nonchalance.

How could I guess what that book was to do to the married happiness of Jane and William Bates?

Besides, even if they had met the day before yesterday, he could get out of it by saying that the hours had seemed like years.

For you cannot stymie these modern poets. The boys are there.

“More than five,” murmured Jane.

“Good Lord!” gurgled William, jovially. “You don’t mean to say that bird is still going around loose? I should have thought he would have been lynched years ago. Looks like negligence somewhere.”

There comes a moment in married life when every wife gazes squarely at her husband and the scales seem to fall from her eyes and she sees him as he is⁠—one of Nature’s Class A fatheads.

Fortunately for married men, these times of clear vision do not last long, or there would be few homes left unbroken. It was so that Jane gazed at William now, but unhappily her conviction that he was an outsize in roughneck chumps did not pass.

There comes a moment in married life when every wife gazes squarely at her husband and the scales seem to fall from her eyes and she sees him as he is—one of Nature’s Class A fatheads.

Fortunately for married men, these times of clear vision do not last long, or there would be few homes left unbroken.

It was so that Jane gazed at William now, but unhappily her conviction that he was an outsize in roughneck chumps did not pass. Indeed, all through that evening it deepened.

Then he began to fail to be himself with the mashie-niblick. And when at length he discovered that he was only fulfilling himself about every fifth shot off the tee he felt that this thing must stop.

The conscientious historian will always distinguish carefully between the events leading up to a war and the actual occurrence resulting in the outbreak of hostilities.

The latter may be, and generally is, some almost trivial matter, whose only importance is that it fulfils the function of the last straw.

Through the door there came a sound. It was the sound of a silvery laugh. And as he heard it William’s face hardened. Without another word he picked up his suitcase and golf bag, and with set jaw strode out into the night.

One of the things that tend to keep the home together in these days of modern unrest is the fact that exalted moods of indignation do not last.

William, released from the uncongenial atmosphere of the studio, proceeded at once to plunge into an orgy of golf that for awhile precluded regret.

An acute spasm of regret shot through William’s massive bosom. In that instant of clear thinking he understood that golf is not all.

What shall it profit a man that he do the long hole in four, if there is no loving wife at his elbow to squeak congratulations?

A dull sensation of forlorn emptiness afflicted William Bates. It passed, but it had been. And he knew it would come again.

He increased his day’s output to sixty-three holes, but found no relief. When he reflected that he had had the stupendous luck to be married to a girl like Jane and had chucked the thing up, he could have kicked himself round the house.

He was in exactly the position of the hero of the movie when the subtitle is flashed on the screen: “Came a Day When Remorse Bit Like An Adder Into Roland Spenlow’s Soul.”

Of all the chumps who had ever tripped over themselves and lost a good thing, from Adam downwards, he, he told himself, was the woollen-headedest.

The last thing in the world that she wanted to do was to watch Rodney Spelvin eating cake.

It is a curious thing about men of the Spelvin type, how seldom they really last.

They get off to a flashy start and for a while convince impressionable girls that the search for a soul-mate may be considered formally over; but in a very short while reaction always sets in.

It is a curious thing about men of the Spelvin type, how seldom they really last.

They get off to a flashy start and for a while convince impressionable girls that the search for a soul-mate may be considered formally over; but in a very short while reaction always sets in.

There had been a time when Jane could have sat and listened to Rodney Spelvin for hours on end. Then she began to feel that from fifteen to twenty minutes was about sufficient.

“No, quite well. Ha, ha!” she replied, hysterically.

She stared at him wildly, as she might have stared at a caterpillar in her salad.

If it had not been for this man, she felt, she would have been with William in their snug little cottage, a happy wife.

and his eye, gazing down at the rolling expanse of turf, lacked its customary genial benevolence. His favourite chair, consecrated to his private and personal use by unwritten law, had been occupied by another.

That is the worst of a free country⁠—liberty so often degenerates into licence.

“I trust,” he said, “you find that chair comfortable?”

“You really love him?” she quavered.

“If he beckoned to me in the middle of a medal round, I would come to him,” said Anastatia.

Jane realized that further words were useless. A sickening sense of helplessness obsessed her. Something ought to be done about this terrible thing, but what could she do?

This William Bates, as I have indicated in my previous references to him, was not an abnormally emotional or temperamental man.

Built physically on the lines of a motor-lorry, he had much of that vehicle’s placid and even phlegmatic outlook on life.

Few things had the power to ruffle William, but, unfortunately, it so happened that one of these things was Rodney Spelvin. He had never been able entirely to overcome his jealousy of this man.

It seemed to Jane, as the door closed, that she heard a curious clicking noise, and she wondered for a moment if little Braid had got out of bed and was playing with the Mah-Jongg counters. But it was only William gnashing his teeth.

There is nothing sadder in this life than the spectacle of a husband and wife with practically identical handicaps drifting apart; and to dwell unnecessarily on such a spectacle is, to my mind, ghoulish.

It is not my purpose, therefore, to weary you with a detailed description of the hourly widening of the breach between this once ideally united pair.

Also, they began to avoid one another in the house. Jane would sit in the drawing-room, while William retired down the passage to his den.

In short, if you had added a couple of icons and a photograph of Trotsky, you would have had a mise-en-scène which would have fitted a Russian novel like the paper on the wall.

One evening, about a week after the beginning of this tragic state of affairs, Jane was sitting in the drawing-room, trying to read Braid on Taking Turf. But the print seemed blurred and the philosophy too metaphysical to be grasped.

Jane sorted them out. There were three for William, which she gave to the maid to take to him in his den. There were two for herself, both bills. And there was one for Anastatia, in the well-remembered handwriting of Rodney Spelvin.

Jane placed this letter on the mantelpiece, and stood looking at it like a cat at a canary.

Anastatia was away for the day, visiting friends who lived a few stations down the line; and every womanly instinct in Jane urged her to get hold of a kettle and steam the gum off the envelope.

The very elements joined in the general disapproval.

The sky had turned a sullen grey, and faraway thunder muttered faintly, like an impatient golfer held up on the tee by a slow foursome.

It was a relief when at length she found herself at the back of Rodney Spelvin’s house, standing before the scullery window, which it was her intention to force with the pocketknife won in happier days as second prize in a competition at a summer …