“The only way,” I said to Alexander, “of really finding out a man’s true character is to play golf with him. In no other walk of life does the cloven hoof so quickly display itself. I employed a lawyer for years, until one day I saw him kick his ball out of a heel-mark. 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. The man who can smile bravely when his putt is diverted by one of those beastly wormcasts is pure gold right through. But the man who is hasty, unbalanced, and violent on the links will display the same qualities in the wider field of everyday life. You don’t want an unbalanced treasurer do you?”
“Not if his books are likely to catch the complaint.”
“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. Whereas the bad golfers—and by bad I do not mean incompetent, but black-souled—the men who fail to count a stroke when they miss the globe; the men who never replace a divot; the men who talk while their opponent is driving; and the men who let their angry passions rise—these are in and out of Wormwood Scrubs all the time. They find it hardly worth while to get their hair cut in their brief intervals of liberty.”
Alexander was visibly impressed.
“That sounds sensible, by George!” he said.
“It is sensible.”
“I’ll do it! Honestly, I can’t see any other way of deciding between Holmes and Dixon.”
I started.
“Holmes? Not Mitchell Holmes?”
“Yes. Of course you must know him? He lives here, I believe.”
“And by Dixon do you mean Rupert Dixon?”
“That’s the man. Another neighbour of yours.”
I confess that my heart sank. It was as if my ball had fallen into the pit which my niblick had digged. I wished heartily that I had thought of waiting to ascertain the names of the two rivals before offering my scheme. I was extremely fond of Mitchell Holmes and of the girl to whom he was engaged to be married. Indeed, it was I who had sketched out a few rough notes for the lad to use when proposing; and results had shown that he had put my stuff across well. And I had listened many a time with a sympathetic ear to his hopes in the matter of securing a rise of salary which would enable him to get married. Somehow, when Alexander was talking, it had not occurred to me that young Holmes might be in the running for so important an office as the treasurership. I had ruined the boy’s chances. Ordeal by golf was the one test which he could not possibly undergo with success. Only a miracle could keep him from losing his temper, and I had expressly warned Alexander against such a man.
When I thought of his rival my heart sank still more. Rupert Dixon was rather an unpleasant young man, but the worst of his enemies could not accuse him of not possessing the golfing temperament. From the drive off the tee to the holing of the final putt he was uniformly suave.
When Alexander had gone, I sat in thought for some time. I was faced with a problem. Strictly speaking, no doubt, I had no right to take sides; and, though secrecy had not been enjoined upon me in so many words, I was very well aware that Alexander was under the impression that I would keep the thing under my hat and not reveal to either party the test that awaited him. Each candidate was, of course, to remain ignorant that he was taking part in anything but a friendly game.
But when I thought of the young couple whose future depended on this ordeal, I hesitated no longer. I put on my hat and went round to Miss Boyd’s house, where I knew that Mitchell was to be found at this hour.
The young couple were out in the porch, looking at the moon. They greeted me heartily, but their heartiness had rather a tinny sound, and I could see that on the whole they regarded me as one of those things which should not happen. But when I told my story their attitude changed. They began to look on me in the pleasanter light of a guardian, philosopher, and friend.
“Wherever did Mr. Paterson get such a silly idea?” said Miss Boyd, indignantly. I had—from the best motives—concealed the source of the scheme. “It’s ridiculous!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mitchell. “The old boy’s crazy about golf. It’s just the sort of scheme he would cook up. Well, it dishes me!”
“Oh, come!” I said.
“It’s no good saying ‘Oh, come!’ You know perfectly well that I’m a frank, outspoken golfer. When my ball goes off nor’-nor’-east when I want it to go due west I can’t help expressing an opinion about it. It is a curious phenomenon which calls for comment, and I give it. Similarly, when I top my drive, I have to go on record as saying that I did not do it intentionally. And it’s just these trifles, as far as I can make out, that are going to decide the thing.”
“Couldn’t you learn to control yourself on the links, Mitchell, darling?” asked Millicent. “After all, golf is only a game!”
Mitchell’s eyes met mine, and I have no doubt that mine showed just the same look of horror which I saw in his. Women say these things without thinking. It does not mean that there is any kink in their character. They simply don’t realize what they are saying.
“Hush!” said Mitchell, huskily, patting her hand and overcoming his emotion with a strong effort. “Hush, dearest!”
Two or three days later I met Millicent coming from the post-office. There was a new light of happiness in her eyes, and her face was glowing.
“Such a splendid thing has happened,” she said. “After Mitchell left that night I happened to be glancing through a magazine, and I came across a wonderful advertisement. It began by saying that all the great men in history owed their success to being able to control themselves, and that Napoleon wouldn’t have amounted to anything if he had not curbed his fiery nature, and then it said that we can all be like Napoleon if we fill in the accompanying blank order-form for Professor Orlando Rollitt’s wonderful book, ‘Are You Your Own Master?’ absolutely free for five days and then seven shillings, but you must write at once because the demand is enormous and pretty soon it may be too late. I wrote at once, and luckily I was in time, because Professor Rollitt did have a copy left, and it’s just arrived. I’ve been looking through it, and it seems splendid.”
She held out a small volume. I glanced at it. There was a frontispiece showing a signed photograph of Professor Orlando Rollitt controlling himself in spite of having long white whiskers, and then some reading matter, printed between wide margins. One look at the book told me the professor’s methods. To be brief, he had simply swiped Marcus Aurelius’s best stuff, the copyright having expired some two thousand years ago, and was retailing it as his own. I did not mention this to Millicent. It was no affair of mine. Presumably, however obscure the necessity, Professor Rollitt had to live.
“I’m going to start Mitchell on it today. Don’t you think this is good? ‘Thou seest how few be the things which if a man has at his command his life flows gently on and is divine.’ I think it will be wonderful if Mitchell’s life flows gently on and is divine for seven shillings, don’t you?”
At the club-house that evening I encountered Rupert Dixon. He was emerging from a shower-bath, and looked as pleased with himself as usual.
“Just been going round with old Paterson,” he said. “He was asking after you. He’s gone back to town in his car.”
I was thrilled. So the test had begun!
“How did you come out?” I asked.
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.”
I felt a gleam of hope at these last words.
“Oh, you had bad luck?”
“The worst. I over-shot the green at the third with the best brassey-shot I’ve ever made in my life—and that’s saying a lot—and lost my ball in the rough beyond it.”
“And I suppose you let yourself go, eh?”
“Let myself go?”
“I take it that you made some sort of demonstration?”
“Oh, no. Losing your temper doesn’t get you anywhere at golf. It only spoils your next shot.”
I went away heavy-hearted. Dixon had plainly come through the ordeal as well as any man could have done. I expected to hear every day that the vacant treasurership had been filled, and that Mitchell had not even been called upon to play his test round. I suppose, however, that Alexander Paterson felt that it would be unfair to the other competitor not to give him his chance, for the next I heard of the matter was when Mitchell Holmes rang me up on the Friday and asked me if I would accompany him round the links next day in the match he was playing with Alexander, and give him my moral support.
“I shall need it,” he said. “I don’t mind telling you I’m pretty nervous. I wish I had had longer to get the stranglehold on that ‘Are You Your Own Master?’ stuff. I can see, of course, that it is the real tabasco from start to finish, and absolutely as mother makes it, but the trouble is I’ve only had a few days to soak it into my system. It’s like trying to patch up a motor car with string. You never know when the thing will break down. Heaven knows what will happen if I sink a ball at the water-hole. And something seems to tell me I am going to do it.”
There was a silence for a moment.
“Do you believe in dreams?” asked Mitchell.
“Believe in what?”
“Dreams.”
“What about them?”
“I said, ‘Do you believe in dreams?’ Because last night I dreamed that I was playing in the final of the Open Championship, and I got into the rough, and there was a cow there, and the cow looked at me in a sad sort of way and said, ‘Why don’t you use the two-V grip instead of the interlocking?’ At the time it seemed an odd sort of thing to happen, but I’ve been thinking it over and I wonder if there isn’t something in it. These things must be sent to us for a purpose.”
“You can’t change your grip on the day of an important match.”
“I suppose not. The fact is, I’m a bit jumpy, or I wouldn’t have mentioned it. Oh, well! See you tomorrow at two.”
The day was bright and sunny, but a tricky cross-wind was blowing when I reached the club-house. Alexander Paterson was there, practising swings on the first tee; and almost immediately Mitchell Holmes arrived, accompanied by Millicent.
“Perhaps,” said Alexander, “we had better be getting under way. Shall I take the honour?”
“Certainly,” said Mitchell.
Alexander teed up his ball.
Alexander Paterson has always been a careful rather than a dashing player. It is his custom, a sort of ritual, to take two measured practice-swings before addressing the ball, even on the putting-green. When he does address the ball he shuffles his feet for a moment or two, then pauses, and scans the horizon in a suspicious sort of way, as if he had been expecting it to play some sort of trick on him when he was not looking. A careful inspection seems to convince him of the horizon’s bona fides, and he turns his attention to the ball again. He shuffles his feet once more, then raises his club. He waggles the club smartly over the ball three times, then lays it behind the globule. At this point he suddenly peers at the horizon again, in the apparent hope of catching it off its guard. This done, he raises his club very slowly, brings it back very slowly till it almost touches the ball, raises it again, brings it down again, raises it once more, and brings it down for the third time. He then stands motionless, wrapped in thought, like some Indian fakir contemplating the infinite. Then he raises his club again and replaces it behind the ball. Finally he quivers all over, swings very slowly back, and drives the ball for about a hundred and fifty yards in a dead straight line.
It is a method of procedure which proves sometimes a little exasperating to the highly strung, and I watched Mitchell’s face anxiously to see how he was taking his first introduction to it. The unhappy lad had blenched visibly. He turned to me with the air of one in pain.
“Does he always do that?” he whispered.
“Always,” I replied.
“Then I’m done for! No human being could play golf against a one-ring circus like that without blowing up!”
I said nothing. It was, I feared, only too true. Well-poised as I am, I had long since been compelled to give up playing with Alexander Paterson, much as I esteemed him. It was a choice between that and resigning from the Baptist Church.
At this moment Millicent spoke. There was an open book in her hand. I recognized it as the life-work of Professor Rollitt.
“Think on this doctrine,” she said, in her soft, modulated voice, “that to be patient is a branch of justice, and that men sin without intending it.”
Mitchell nodded briefly, and walked to the tee with a firm step.
“Before you drive, darling,” said Millicent, “remember this. Let no act be done at haphazard, nor otherwise than according to the finished rules that govern its kind.”
The next moment Mitchell’s ball was shooting through the air, to come to rest two hundred yards down the course. It was a magnificent drive. He had followed the counsel of Marcus Aurelius to the letter.
An admirable iron-shot put him in reasonable proximity to the pin, and he holed out in one under bogey with one of the nicest putts I have ever beheld. And when at the next hole, the dangerous water-hole, his ball soared over the pond and lay safe, giving him bogey for the hole, I began for the first time to breathe freely. Every golfer has his day, and this was plainly Mitchell’s. He was playing faultless golf. If he could continue in this vein, his unfortunate failing would have no chance to show itself.
The third hole is long and tricky. You drive over a ravine—or possibly into it. In the latter event you breathe a prayer and call for your niblick. But, once over the ravine, there is nothing to disturb the equanimity. Bogey is five, and a good drive, followed by a brassey-shot, will put you within easy mashie-distance of the green.
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.” Alexander concluded the movements, and landed a bare three yards on the other side of the ravine. “He’s what you would call a steady performer, isn’t he? Never varies!”
Mitchell won the hole comfortably. There was a jauntiness about his stance on the fourth tee which made me a little uneasy. Over-confidence 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.
“I didn’t say it!” he said. “What on earth happened then?”
“Search men’s governing principles,” said Millicent, “and consider the wise, what they shun and what they cleave to.”
“Exactly,” I said. “You swayed your body.”
“And now I’ve got to go and look for that infernal ball.”
“Never mind, darling,” said Millicent. “Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.”
“Besides,” I said
, “you’re three up.”
“I shan’t be after this hole.”
He was right. Alexander won it in five, one above bogey, and regained the honour.
Mitchell was a trifle shaken. His play no longer had its first careless vigour. He lost the next hole, halved the sixth, lost the short seventh, and then, rallying, halved the eighth.
The ninth hole, like so many on our links, can be a perfectly simple four, although the rolling nature of the green makes bogey always a somewhat doubtful feat; but, on the other hand, if you foozle your drive, you can easily achieve double figures. The tee is on the farther side of the pond, beyond the bridge, where the water narrows almost to the dimensions of a brook. You drive across this water and over a tangle of trees and undergrowth on the other bank. The distance to the fairway cannot be more than sixty yards, for the hazard is purely a mental one, and yet how many fair hopes have been wrecked there!
Alexander cleared the obstacles comfortably with his customary short, straight drive, and Mitchell advanced to the tee.
I think the loss of the honour had been preying on his mind. He seemed nervous. His up-swing was shaky, and he swayed back perceptibly. He made a lunge at the ball, sliced it, and it struck a tree on the other side of the water and fell in the long grass. We crossed the bridge to look for it; and it was here that the effect of Professor Rollitt began definitely to wane.
“Why on earth don’t they mow this darned stuff?” demanded Mitchell, querulously, as he beat about the grass with his niblick.
“You have to have rough on a course,” I ventured.
“Whatever happens at all,” said Millicent, “happens as it should. Thou wilt find this true if thou shouldst watch narrowly.”
“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!”
Millicent and I exchanged glances. There were tears in her eyes.
The Golf Omnibus Page 13
