Holworthy Hall

“ Stoddard ran up, dead. Hardly glancing at the line of his fifteen-footer, Hargrave confidently ran down the putt for a birdie four, and his third consecutive championship. Probably no man living would have played the hole under similar conditions, with such absence of nerves and such abnormal assurance. From tee to green Hargrave barely addressed the ball at all: he simply walked up to it, and hit it. And certainly in the United States, if not in the world, there is no man who can compete with Hargrave when the champion happens to be in a fighting mood. ”

“ He must hole this putt. He was thinking now not so much of the result of holing it as of the result of missing it. He could fancy the wretched spectacle he would make of himself on the play-off; he could fancy the explosive, tumultuous joy of the gallery; he could picture the dumb, stunned radiance of Stoddard. And Stoddard was so young. Hargrave wouldn't have minded defeat at the hands of an older man, he told himself fiercely—but at the hands of a boy! To be beaten by a lad hardly old enough for the ballot! ”

“ Hargrave's caddy, as dour and uncommunicative as the champion himself, stalked abreast, the clubs rattling synchronously to his stride. Hargrave was studying the contour of the land in front; he glowered at the marshals who had suffered the gallery to break formation and overflow the course; and he was tempted to ask his caddy how, when the entire middle distance was blocked by spectators, the Golf Association thought a finalist could judge the hole. But he denied himself the question; it was seven years since he had condescended to complain of, or to criticize, the conditions of a tournament. ”

“ The niblick turned in his perspiring hands. He gripped more firmly, and as his wrists reacted to the weight of the club-head, he was automatic. The niblick rose, and descended, smashing down the hinder edge of the bowl-like cavity, and tearing the ball free. A spray of dust sprang up, and bits of sod and dirt. The ball shot forward, overrunning the hole by a dozen feet. Almost before it came to rest, Stoddard played carefully with a jigger, and landed ten inches from the hole. ”

“ If he could sink that curling putt, nothing could deprive him of his victory. He would be down in four, and Stoddard now lay three. He would have a half—and the match by one up in thirty-six holes. He would be the Amateur Champion of the United States—and he could quit! He could quit as the only man who ever won three years consecutively. And if he missed, and Stoddard took the hole in four to five, Hargrave knew that even if his legs would support him to the first tee, his arms would fall at the next trial. He doubted if sanity itself would stay with him for another hole. ”

“ The mold of ancestry would have stamped out another failure, another charge upon the good opinion of the world. The child would have been the father of the man. And Stoddard—witness his behavior and his generosity—was of no varnished metal. He was without alloy. He was a gentleman because his great-grandfathers had been gentlemen. He was rich because they had made him so. But Hargrave had allowed himself to experience an anomalous and paternal emotion toward Stoddard—Stoddard who at twenty was higher in rank, higher in quality, higher in the affection of the people than Hargrave at fifty-five. ”

“ He observed, with a little flicker of amusement, that Stoddard was eyeing him sidewise, and he felt that Stoddard was not a little affected by that enormous brassey, as well as by Hargrave's outward indifference toward it. Hargrave, however, appraised his own flinty exterior as one of his championship assets. He seldom praised the other man, or even noticed him; and if the other man chose to burst into fervid eulogy, the champion's manner was so arctic, so repelling, that not infrequently he gained a point on the very next shot through the adversary's dazed inefficiency. ”

“ A YEAR ago he had promised himself that, as champion, he would withdraw from competition. It was his dream to retire at the height of his prowess, to go down in the history of games as one of that rare company who have known when to file their resignations. Indeed, he had vowed not to defend his title this year. But when he had sniffed the atmosphere of a club grill, and after he had tested his strength in a practise round or two, he had diffidently entered for the Atlantic City tournament, and won it. ”

“ But if Hargrave should risk his crown on a mighty endeavor to equal Stoddard's titanic brassey shot, he would have the odds of war alarmingly against him. The trajectory must be perfect to the fifth degree from a surveyor's line. The ball must either fall short of the brook by ten yards, or clear it by ten, and bounding neither to the left, among the trees, nor to the right, among the sand-pits, surmount the grade. An unfortunate angle of consequence, a mere rub of the green, would be doubly fatal. The ball might even be unplayable. ”

“ But as he observed that Stoddard showed premonitory symptoms of increased nervousness, and that Stoddard was impelled to speak, and yet held his tongue to save himself from sure rebuff, the champion's breast expanded with golden hope.
Stoddard, after all, was a mere boy: a veteran golfer—yes, but immature in the mentality of golf. And Hargrave some times won his matches, especially from younger men, in the locker-room before he put on his shoes. If Stoddard praised him now, he could send Stoddard into catastrophe with a word. But Stoddard didn't speak. ”

“ 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 ”

“ He exhaled slowly, and held out his hand to the caddy.
“Niblick!” said Hargrave thickly.
THE distance to the hole was greater than he had fancied. The lie of the ball was worse than he had feared. His calculation intimated that he must strike hard, and stiffly, with a pronounced up-and-down swing to get at the back of the ball. The force of the extricating stroke must be considerable; the green, however, was too keen, too fine, to permit liberty in the manner of approaching it. ”

“ He could attempt a heroic stroke with the brassey, sacrificing accuracy for distance, or he could play his normal shot, which was practically sure to clear the brook, but still leave him at a critical disadvantage. In the latter instance he could guarantee himself a five, but already Stoddard was morally assured of his four. And that four, if he achieved it, meant a squared match for Stoddard, and his resultant victory. Hargrave could halve the hole only if Stoddard blundered; and for an hour and more Stoddard's golf had been flawless, wonderful. ”

“ And Hargrave, whose bitterness toward the golfing public had progressed arithmetically through these earlier rounds, had come up to the finals in a mood of acid which, in the true analysis, was a form of specious envy and regret. He realized that in comparison with any of the men he had removed from brackets, he was unattractive, aged, cynical, repugnant. He envied youth—but how could he regain his own? ”

“ 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 ”