Presently Peter said:
“I shall miss you.”
“What do you mean, miss me?”
“When you’re gone. Woodhaven won’t seem the same place. But of course you’ll soon be able to come back. I shan’t waste any time proposing.”
“Leave me your address,” said James, “and I’ll send you a wire when you can return. You won’t be offended if I don’t ask you to be best man at the wedding? In the circumstances it might be painful to you.”
Peter sighed dreamily.
“We’ll have the sitting-room done in blue. Her eyes are blue.”
“Remember,” said James, “there will always be a knife and fork for you at our little nest. Grace is not the woman to want me to drop my bachelor friends.”
“Touching this match,” said Peter. “Strict Royal and Ancient rules, of course?”
“Certainly.”
“I mean to say—no offence, old man—but no grounding niblicks in bunkers.”
“Precisely. And, without hinting at anything personal, the ball shall be considered holed-out only when it is in the hole, not when it stops on the edge.”
“Undoubtedly. And—you know I don’t want to hurt your feelings—missing the ball counts as a stroke, not as a practice-swing.”
“Exactly. And—you’ll forgive me if I mention it—a player whose ball has fallen in the rough, may not pull up all the bushes within a radius of three feet.”
“In fact, strict rules.”
“Strict rules.”
They shook hands without more words. And presently Peter walked out, and James, with a guilty look over his shoulder, took down Sandy MacBean’s great work from the bookshelf and began to study the photograph of the short approach-shot showing Mr. MacBean swinging from Point A, through dotted line B–C, to Point D, his head the while remaining rigid at the spot marked with a cross. He felt a little guiltily that he had stolen a march on his friend, and that the contest was as good as over.
I cannot recall a lovelier summer day than that on which the great Todd-Willard eighteen-hole match took place. It had rained during the night, and now the sun shone down from a clear blue sky on to turf that glistened more greenly than the young grass of early spring. Butterflies flitted to and fro; birds sang merrily. In short, all Nature smiled. And it is to be doubted if Nature ever had a better excuse for smiling—or even laughing outright; for matches like that between James Todd and Peter Willard do not occur every day.
Whether it was that love had keyed them up, or whether hours of study of Braid’s Advanced Golf and the Badminton Book had produced a belated effect, I cannot say; but both started off quite reasonably well. Our first hole, as you can see, is a bogey four, and James was dead on the pin in seven, leaving Peter, who had twice hit the United Kingdom with his mashie in mistake for the ball, a difficult putt for the half. Only one thing could happen when you left Peter a difficult putt; and James advanced to the lake hole one up, Peter, as he followed, trying to console himself with the thought that many of the best golfers prefer to lose the first hole and save themselves for a strong finish.
Peter and James had played over the lake hole so often that they had become accustomed to it, and had grown into the habit of sinking a ball or two as a preliminary formality with much the same stoicism displayed by those kings in ancient and superstitious times who used to fling jewellery into the sea to propitiate it before they took a voyage. But today, by one of those miracles without which golf would not be golf, each of them got over with his first shot—and not only over, but dead on the pin. Our “pro” himself could not have done better.
I think it was at this point that the two men began to go to pieces. They were in an excited frame of mind, and this thing unmanned them. You will no doubt recall Keats’s poem about stout Cortez staring with eagle eyes at the Pacific while all his men gazed at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien. Precisely so did Peter Willard and James Todd stare with eagle eyes at the second lake hole, and gaze at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a tee in Woodhaven. They had dreamed of such a happening so often and woke to find the vision false, that at first they could not believe that the thing had actually occurred.
“I got over!” whispered James, in an awed voice.
“So did I!” muttered Peter.
“In one!”
“With my very first!”
They walked in silence round the edge of the lake, and holed out. One putt was enough for each, and they halved the hole with a two. Peter’s previous record was eight, and James had once done a seven. There are times when strong men lose their self-control, and this was one of them. They reached the third tee in a daze, and it was here that mortification began to set in.
The third hole is another bogey four, up the hill and past the tree that serves as a direction-post, the hole itself being out of sight. On his day, James had often done it in ten and Peter in nine; but now they were unnerved. James, who had the honour, shook visibly as he addressed his ball. Three times he swung and only connected with the ozone; the fourth time he topped badly. The discs had been set back a little way, and James had the mournful distinction of breaking a record for the course by playing his fifth shot from the tee. It was a low, raking brassey-shot, which carried a heap of stones twenty feet to the right and finished in a furrow. Peter, meanwhile, had popped
