Book Three — The Journey’s End
Chapter X An Ancient Game
I
Somewhere on the east coast of Scotland lie the famous Links of Eric. The district has not changed much, to all seeming, during the last thousand years—or ten thousand, for that matter. Then, as now, the links were a sandy waste, a wilderness of whin, sand, and bent, the home of countless scuttling rabbits and plaintive peewits. Later, perhaps, when William the Conqueror was creating a disturbance in the southern parts of remote England, a tiny fishing town began to grow up round the little harbour reluctantly yielded by the tall red cliffs to the eternal industry of the ocean, and the adjoining strip of low-lying sand-dunes acquired the title that it now bears, derived, it is said, from the name of the Norse king who once landed on this, the only piece of accessible shore for miles, and was there slain, after a bloody battle with the neighbouring lord and his retainers. The town itself will have none of these barbaric titles, but exists smugly and contentedly as Port Allan.
But it was through her little-valued links that Port Allan achieved fame. Two hundred years ago a new minister came from St. Andrew’s, and introduced the men of Port Allan to a game called Golf. They took to it in their deliberate, methodical fashion, and laid out a little course on the hitherto neglected Links of Eric. Thither they repaired on fine summer evenings, carrying queer long-nosed wooden clubs and feather-stuffed balls. The golfing minister went the way of all flesh, and his compeers with him, but the golf endured. Generations of slow-moving fisher-folk, ecclesiastical luminaries, and holiday-making scholars—for the fame of the links brought visitors from so great a distance as a hundred miles—all played round the links in their day, recking nothing of Medal Scores, Colonel Bogey, the Schenectady putter, or other modern excrescences. They used their long-nosed wooden clubs to some purpose, and though they did not drive the feather-stuffed ball very far they drove it very straight. Once the great Allan Robertson visited Port Allan. He pronounced favourably on the course, and a word from Allan Robertson in those days was as good as a descriptive article in “Golf Illustrated” in these. And so for many years the Links of Eric grew steadily in favour with golfers.
But one day—one momentous day—the men of England came to the conclusion that golf was the one and only game worth playing, and Scotland the one and only place to play it in. Accordingly, with that spontaneous readiness to suit the action to the word that has ever been the characteristic of an Empire-making race, they migrated with their wives and families across the Border, and proceeded to hew divots from the face of Scotland with an eagerness and bonhomie which was equalled only by the unanimity with which they forbore to replace them. Golf, which had existed for centuries as a sort of religious ceremony, to be cultivated by its votaries in reverent silence and at a strictly processional pace, suddenly became a species of bank-holiday picnic; and those ancient and highly respectable burghs which fostered the game in especial purity were converted into rather recherché editions of Hampstead Heath.
However unpleasant this foray might be for the Scottish golfer, it presented certain compensating features to the Scottish railways and hotel-proprietors. Of remote villages, which had formerly figured in the traffic returns as occasional yielders of a truck-load of fish, there now appeared highly-tinted pictures, with the Company’s name at the top and a list of trains at the bottom. The hotel proprietors, on their part, quickly realising that to the average Englishman a golf-course consists of any tract of land in Scotland plentifully endowed with rabbit-holes, hastily staked out a claim on the nearest collection of sand-hills, and advertised to all and sundry that visitors to their hotel would be permitted, for a consideration, to play golf over the celebrated links of so-and-so, “adjoining the hotel.”
Port Allan was one of the places which benefited by reason of the boom. The nearest railway station was seven miles away, but the Company quickly remedied that defect, and advertised through bookings from King’s Cross. A special time-table was published, decorated at the top with a coloured view of the Links of Eric, in the foreground of which a golf-match was in progress between a gentleman in a sky-blue Norfolk suit and a red cap, and a lady in a red dress and a sky-blue hat. The lady was depicted in the act of driving off from the tee (with a blue putter); while the gentleman, rather ungallantly, had gone forward a few yards, and was engaged in playing out of the first bunker (with a red brassie).
The inhabitants of Port Allan soon realised that to play golf over their own links in summer was out of the question. They accordingly accepted the situation, and, relegating their own golfing efforts to the autumn, turned to the equally congenial task of spoiling the Egyptians. Elderly seafaring men, who had hitherto extracted a precarious livelihood from the grudging ocean, abandoned their nets and took to carrying clubs, the fee of eighteenpence per round which they were permitted to charge being inclusive of a vast amount of caustic criticism, and priceless, if unintelligible, advice.
Behold, then, the Links of Eric one fine morning in early August. Observe the throng of golfers, male and female, young and old. Here you may see Youth, full of slashing drives and strange oaths, and Age, known for his sage counsel and long putts. Here is a schoolboy, with bare knees and head, and a supple swing that makes middle-aged golfers wriggle with envy. Here is a “golfing minister.” His clubs are old-fashioned and his ball has been repainted; you will outdrive him over and over again, but unless you have at least a stroke in hand when it comes to approaching and putting, he will beat you. Those two men over there, playing in their shirt-sleeves, are Americans, of course. They are playing very keenly, but they are thinking, not of the game, but of some entirely new and original way of winning it. The fat gentleman is an Englishman. He originally took up golf by his doctor’s orders, but by this time is badly bitten. He wears a red coat, adorned with the buttons of the Toadley-in-the-Hole Golf Club, and ekes out his want of skill by the help of patent clubs, an india-rubber tee,—ye gods!—and a wealth of technical phraseology. The couple in the middle of the course, with a highly profane throng waiting behind them, are a honeymoon, and as such ought not to be there at all. Their balls lie side by side in a rabbit-scrape; and they are disputing, not as to the right club to use, but whether Pussy can possibly love Sweetie more than Sweetie loves Pussy. Ah! an irascible couple have driven into them! Sweetie, at once putting a protecting arm round Pussy, turns and glares at them wrathfully, but Pussy, looking distinctly relieved, picks up both balls and impels her newly acquired lord over an adjacent sand-hill to a secluded spot that she knows of, where they can sit in peace till lunch-time.
But besides these anomalies and curiosities—common objects of all golf-links in summer—there are some real golfers to be seen. Here are two young men worth watching. Number One is addressing his ball for an approach shot. It will have to be a cunning stroke, for there is a yawning bunker in front of the green and a thick patch of whin beyond it. If he attempts to run the ball up, the bunker will catch it, and if he plays to carry the bunker, the chances are that he will overrun the green and find himself in the whins. He plays a fine lofted ball, which drops on to the hard green six yards from the pin, and then, with that marvellous back-spin which only a master-hand can impart, gives a curious staggering rebound, and after trickling forward for a few yards lies almost dead.
“Good shot!” remarks Number Two, and turns to play his own ball. It is lying very badly in some bents, half buried in sand. Number Two—he is a left-hander—rejects the proffered niblick and selects a ponderous driving-mashie. Then, with an opening of the shoulders and an upward lift that betray the cricketer in every movement, he gives a mighty slog, and propels a confused cloud of sand, bents, and ball into the bunker guarding the green sixty yards away.
“Too good that time, Pip,” remarks his companion.
“Didn’t think I could get so far,” replied Pip. “However, I get a stroke from you this hole, so wait a bit.”
He descended into the bunker, but the ball was reposing in a heel-mark, and it required two even of Pip’s earth-compelling niblick shots to remove it. Colquhoun, plus one at St. Andrew’s, consequently took the hole in four.
Pip was staying at the Station Hotel, by himself. The motive which had brought him to a distant part of Scotland, to play a game at which he was far from being first-class, will appear in due course. Sufficient to say that it was a strong motive, and an exceedingly ancient one,—a motive which has brought about even more surprising events than the abandonment of first-class cricket, on the eve of a Test Match, by the finest amateur bowler in England.
They finished their match half an hour later, Pip, who was in receipt of a half, being one down. As they turned to leave the last green Pip found himself confronted by a large man in a Panama hat.
“Pip!” cried the stranger—“Pip! Bless my soul! What the blazes are you doing in Scotland in August?”
“Hallo, Raven,” replied Pip. “Fancy meeting you, old man!”
They turned and walked up the road together.
“Why aren’t you playing for the County?” inquired Pip severely.
“Missis,” replied Raven Innes laconically. Then he added,—
“Said we must go away for August on account of the kiddies. I’m taking a holiday from cricket in consequence: golf isn’t a bad substitute. But what are you doing here, young man? Aren’t you about due at Old Trafford for the Test Match?”
“No,” replied Pip, beginning to fill his pipe; “I’m not.”
Innes stopped short in his walk.
“You don’t mean to tell me,” he said, “that they have been such fools—”
“It’s not that,” said Pip.
“Oh! So you’re chosen all right, then?”
“Yes, I’m chosen, but I’m not going to play.”
“Great Cæsar! Why?”
“Well, I’m a bit stale, and I’m rather off cricket, and—and I want to play golf.”
Now Raven Innes was a man of the world. Moreover, he was a married man,—married to a young and pretty wife,—and married men know things that are not revealed to the ordinary unobservant bachelor. Constant female society sharpens their wits. A woman has only one explanation for all male eccentricities, and Raven Innes had been married long enough to know that in nine cases out of ten this explanation is the correct one. He therefore pursued the conversation on the lines which he felt sure would have been adopted by Mrs. Raven had she been present.
“We have taken a cottage down the road—‘Knocknaha,’ it’s called—so you must come and look us up. No time like the present, so come along now. By the way, my little sister is staying with us—Elsie. Have you seen her yet?”
The diplomat cocked an inquiring eye in the direction of his victim. Personally he had never noticed anything unusual in Pip’s relations with Elsie, but in matters of this kind Raven was guided entirely by his wife, and as that female Hawkshaw, whose feminine instincts were infallible in these cases, had long since informed him that there was something in the wind, he was now embarking upon this elephantine effort of cross-examination.
“No, really?” said Pip, who was lighting his pipe at the moment. “No, I haven’t seen her yet.”
He threw away the match and walked on, his features as immobile as usual. But his old weakness betrayed him, and he turned a dusky red.
Raven Innes noted this portent, chuckled, and inwardly dug himself in the ribs, as we all do when we find that our natural acumen has unearthed a savoury secret.
Nearly a year had passed since Pip returned from “abroad,” once more to take his place among his friends and in first-class cricket. During that time he had met Elsie only once—at Pipette’s wedding; but he had gathered then, by dint of some artful cross-examination, that she would probably be the guest of the Ravens at Port Allan during August. Had Raven Innes realised that their chance meeting on the links that morning had been the result of a fortnight’s planning, waiting, and scheming on the part of the enigmatical young man beside him; that the said young man had abandoned first-class cricket in the height of the season, and taken the precaution of arriving at Port Allan a full week before he knew Elsie was due there, in order to avoid all appearance of having followed her, and had even endeavoured to give a casual appearance to their prospective and greatly desired meeting by withholding his presence for another three days,—Raven Innes would have realised that a superficial blush may conceal a greater depth of guile than the ordinary male intellect can fathom.