The Long Hole
The young man, as he sat filling his pipe in the club-house
smoking-room, was inclined to be bitter.
'If there's one thing that gives me a pain squarely in the centre of
the gizzard,' he burst out, breaking a silence that had lasted for some
minutes, 'it's a golf-lawyer. They oughtn't to be allowed on the
links.'
The Oldest Member, who had been meditatively putting himself outside a
cup of tea and a slice of seed-cake, raised his white eyebrows.
'The Law,' he said, 'is an honourable profession. Why should its
practitioners be restrained from indulgence in the game of games?'
'I don't mean actual lawyers,' said the young man, his acerbity
mellowing a trifle under the influence of tobacco. 'I mean the
blighters whose best club is the book of rules. You know the sort of
excrescences. Every time you think you've won a hole, they dig out Rule
eight hundred and fifty-three, section two, sub-section four, to prove
that you've disqualified yourself by having an ingrowing toe-nail.
Well, take my case.' The young man's voice was high and plaintive. 'I
go out with that man Hemmingway to play an ordinary friendly
round--nothing depending on it except a measly ball--and on the seventh
he pulls me up and claims the hole simply because I happened to drop my
niblick in the bunker. Oh, well, a tick's a tick, and there's nothing
more to say, I suppose.'
The Sage shook his head.
'Rules are rules, my boy, and must be kept. It is odd that you should
have brought up this subject, for only a moment before you came in I
was thinking of a somewhat curious match which ultimately turned upon a
question of the rule-book. It is true that, as far as the actual prize
was concerned, it made little difference. But perhaps I had better tell
you the whole story from the beginning.'
The young man shifted uneasily in his chair.
'Well, you know, I've had a pretty rotten time this afternoon
already----'
'I will call my story,' said the Sage, tranquilly, ''The Long Hole',
for it involved the playing of what I am inclined to think must be the
longest hole in the history of golf. In its beginnings the story may
remind you of one I once told you about Peter Willard and James Todd,
but you will find that it develops in quite a different manner. Ralph
Bingham....'
'I half promised to go and see a man----'
'But I will begin at the beginning,' said the Sage. 'I see that you are
all impatience to hear the full details.'
* * * * *
Ralph Bingham and Arthur Jukes (said the Oldest Member) had never been
friends--their rivalry was too keen to admit of that--but it was not
till Amanda Trivett came to stay here that a smouldering distaste for
each other burst out into the flames of actual enmity. It is ever so.
One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am
unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the
time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old
