T WAS five o'clock, and rapidly shading into dusk. The September sun, which earlier had set the air to simmering in tremulous heat-waves, now moved reluctant to ambush behind the hills, and, as though sullen at the exigency of its time, gave warning by its bloodshot eye of pitiless heat to be renewed with to-morrow's dawn. From the curving line of trees—thin elms and maples, bordering upon the hard-packed road, long, soothing shadows edged out into the fresh green of the fairway, measuring with their deeper green the flight of hours, and the peaceful ebbing of the afternoon.
From the distant Sound, a transient breeze, shy as a maiden in the manner of its coming, ventured out from the protection of the ridge, hesitated, wavered, and passed across the sward so fleetingly that almost before it seemed assured a fact, it was a memory.
Then, from the trees at the roadside, and from the trees beyond, and from the little brook dawdling along from east to west, and from the reeded lake far over to the right, a breath of evening crept out upon the lawns, and there was silence.
In a clearing at the southern end of the sinuous line of maples there was a trim plateau, close-shorn of grass, and sharply defined by boundaries of sedge and stubble. From this spot forward an expansive belt of untrimmed land stretched northward for a hundred yards, to merge presently with the more aristocratic turf of the fairway.
Thereafter, between the trees and a long of pits, the wide trail of adventure ran through rolling country, skirted a grove of locusts, dipped down to ford the brook, climbed past a pair of shallow trenches which glistened with coarse sand, and finally found refuge on a terraced green, protected by towering chestnuts and flanked by the arm of a Colonial house which rested comfortably beneath the trees.
From clearing to terrace the crow, flying as crow's are popularly supposed to fly, would have accomplished five hundred and forty-five yards. It was the eighteenth hole at Kenilworth,
The trim plateau, which was the eighteenth tee, now marked the apex of a human letter, a V of which a thousand men and women formed each stroke. Converging sharply toward that rectangle in the sedge, two thousand men and women—twin lines of white, slashed here and there with burning color—restrained and held in check by twisted ropes, leaned out and gaped and wondered, breathless; now standing hushed by things already seen, now vibrant to the future, uneasy, murmuring.
And as in recompense for toiling through the humid afternoon two thousand men and women held this privilege: to stand, and wait, and watch until a boy, a sturdy, laughing boy, and then a man, a grayed and quiet man, played, stroke by stroke, the eighteenth hole at Kenilworth.
And silhouetted in the background, nervous on the tee, there stood the man and the boy, the finalists for the Amateur Championship; two wizards of the links whose faces had gone rigid, whose palms were suddenly wet and cold, whose souls were newly strung upon the natural laws which govern flying objects. For of these two, the man—Hargrave, the present champion—was one.
He was fifty-five, this Hargrave; in commercial life he had known bankruptcy at forty. Golf, which had been heretofore diversion, he made the solace of his penury; it had then made itself his religion. Within the decade he had snatched the national title for his keepsake; subsequently he had lost it, struggled for it desperately, regained, and defended it. The gold medal meant in finitely more to him than a mere visible token of success at golf: it was suggestive of success elsewhere. It was the embodiment of conquests he had never made, of victories he never might accomplish. In other years wealth had eluded him, power had been alien to him, social distinction was to be classed among the impossibilities; but when he stepped morosely out upon the course, he vaunted in his heart that he was high-born to the purple.
Granted that he was poor indeed in purse, he knew no multimillionaire in all the world who could undertake to meet him on equal terms; he could concede six strokes, and still administer a beating, to the finest gentleman and the finest golfer in the Social Register. And so, while golf was his theology and arbitrary par his creed, he played the Scottish game as though it symbolized the life he had proved incapable of mastering—and he mastered the game instead.