Links

“ As we trace out with great pains the unbroken links stretching between the most diverse facts and appearances, links which a cursory view would never discover, we find that that theory which supposes a community of origin and descent for all that now is, has a remarkable body of evidence adducible in its favor. ”

“ For example, linking lines of Shakespeare to Wikipedia articles in the body of his pays, except on an Annotated version created for that purpose. The body text of literature should, in my opinion, be largely if not entirely devoid of links. (1) When reading a work of fiction, or a play, the links are distracting to many readers. (2) Links in the body of the text can cause problems for people scrolling on a touch screen, as they will open to the target when the reader touches them and take them out of the work they are trying to read. ”

“ One of the foremost of these schools of golf architecture is the Heroic. The name has only to be given, and every golfer of experience knows at once what links he would select as belonging to it—links with a fine length and needing a strong arm and a brave heart for successful play upon them, links which are broad and bold in their characteristics, never easy, and terribly difficult when Nature is in a tantrum mood. There are not so many drive and pitch holes on such courses, and when one is encountered the pitch calls for the most thoughtful golf. ”

“ In essence, the links should guide and focus the reader to the main themes of the story, not irrelevant tangents that may distract. It is the assumption that the reader has an advanced vocabulary and does not need to know the definitions of commonly used and known words. ”

“ I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller—some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in. ”

“ No class of man looks forward to the spring with keener anticipation than the golfer. Overburdened with his winter’s discontent, he fancies it as a time of sunshine, of dry courses, of sprouting young grass that holds up the ball on the suburban links and gives us the first good brassey lies that we have had for some months, of the frequent retirement of the energetic worm, of the quickening of the greens, of the leafing of the trees and the hedgerows, and the brightening of the face of Nature. ”

“ The sun and the rain are in such daily association in the days of the sportsman’s spring, and more than ever is he inclined at this season to give some passing thought to the phenomena of Nature, that one comes to wonder sometimes whether he reflects as he might do on the eternal exchange, how the drops of water that the sun takes up from the fields over which he tramps, the golf links that he plays over, the rivers and streams that he fishes, are every one of them placed back again, perhaps not on the same fields or in the same rivers, but in some field or river somewhere. ”

“ For some days now the links which have served us so faithfully and so well during all this year, have been at rest, asleep. Nature, the gentle considerate nurse, sometimes comes to the help of these precious acres of green turf in that season when their lot is the least happy, fending away us tyrant masters while she lays them to repose and wraps up each teeing ground and putting green and all the way between in the thick mantle that she weaves herself. ”

“ It is a good club, and it has done a fine service on the links, and as for its imperfections, are they not what its maker gave to it, trifling imperfections, too, which we are generously disposed to overlook when considering that fine record of service. But it is not the ideal club; it does not feel like that club that we sometimes handle in our imagination, and then enjoy a glorious sense of power as with no other. ”

“ It is one of the good things of golf that it has come into our civilisation to use up all utterly barren and waste tracts of coastwise land, and that generally the more barren and waste the better they are for golf. Are not some of the best links there are in Britain situated on coasts that are to the non-golfing mind, uneducated to the beauty and charm of testing, full-blooded and yet scrupulously fair holes, quite naked of all attraction? ”

“ When London takes a fancy to such a thing as golf she likes to be its master, and will leave nothing undone to assert her supremacy. She has taken to golf, and Scotland already knows with what masterful zeal she is pursuing it. These seaside links of eastern Kent are to all intents and purposes London links, in that they are nearer than any other to London, and are fed almost exclusively from the capital. ”

“ A golfer has no sooner come by some sort of a working knowledge of the different strokes of the game than he longs for adventures on strange courses, to play at holes that are new and strange to him, and—if it must be—to niblick his way out of bunkers that are more fearful than anything he ever encountered on his mother links. ”

“ There, during the last two minutes of his journey, is a view of the links, the Swilcan Burn, the players going out to the second and approaching the seventeenth—and there goes a ball on to that famous road!—just like the fathers of golf used to do in the olden days as it is written in the books. Then, walking in St. Andrews, one seems to breathe golf as never before. All the men and boys one sees are players or caddies; there is a knot of men at the street-corner talking about the 76 that one of the professionals did in his evening round; there are many golf shops; it is all golf. ”

“ So we like this late Prime Minister not because of his political rank, but because he loves his game and does his best by it, and is at all times an example to the acolytes who come forward in nervous ignorance of the great meaning of golf.
Then it is less interesting to consider what style of player Mr. Balfour is, than what kind of man he shows himself to be amid the trials and the triumphs of the links, where, it is indisputably held, a man’s entire human nature, despite all efforts at repression, is forced up to the surface for all to see. ”

“ A fragrant smell of moist earth rises up, and it is as if that very scent is a rare stimulant to the golfer after the heat of summer. There is a fine spring in the turf as we tread upon it, and, quite revelling in it, we find that we must needs go tripping light-heartedly along the links until the problems of the play at a couple of holes have sobered us down. We like even to see the dewdrops lingering on until starting time, taking advantage of the laggard autumnal sun. The film of mist that is hanging a few holes out, and the suspicion of a nip in the air, are fine. ”

“ There is enough good golfing land left in Pegwell Bay to make a fourth course, and some day not very far distant it may be made. Nature has here given to the golfer every natural advantage that it is possible to afford him in the preparation of those seaside links, the contemplation of which brings the light of pleasure into his eyes. ”

“ For, of all the classic writers whose work we read, there is none who gives such evidence in almost every line of it that he was possessed of a perfectly ideal golfing temperament, of a philosophy that seems constantly to have a subtle and most perfect application to the life of the links. Through and through it is the real golfer’s philosophy, that which is the best suited to the intensity of the game, to its deep humanity, and that which serves for the complete appreciation and full joy of the game. ”

“ The man who can play the real game in a high wind, and use it to his advantage at every opportunity, knows golf as others do not. He is a finished player, and he rather likes the days of March for the rich sport that they afford—the real big game of the links. The other man, when he hears the wind playing like a German band round the side of the house as he tries to get himself off to sleep at night, thinks to himself that he will have to give up the idea of golf in the morning. ”

“ SPRING I To discover the secret of its wonderful charm is not the least of the problems of golf. It is a game that encourages the reflective and philosophical mind to close investigation, and so it is not enough for the worthy player that he should take the things that he sees and feels for granted, with no questions concerning the mystic influences that seem constantly to brood over the links, and the people who are of them. ”

“ Don’t ask permission of your opponent to take your wife or your sister or your mother round the links with you to watch the match, even with the proviso that she shall keep at a convenient distance from you both. Like the good fellow he is sure to be, he will say at once that he will be delighted, and will be most agreeable. But would you be delighted, and would you play your best game in such circumstances? Would not the presence of a lady stranger rather irritate you, however gallant you might desire to be? ”

“ In many sequestered places there are fine courses that the golfer in general knows little of. Demand of him suddenly that he shall tell you of a far-away seaside links where you may rest and play for a little while until the city calls you back, and by force of habit he will begin to murmur pleasantly about his Carnousties and his Gullanes and all the rest. They are excellent, most excellent; but we call for change, and where for the old wanderer is the change that is good enough? ”

“ But, tell us, why is it that the clergyman, with all his magnificent opportunities, is so seldom anything like a good player, so often has a handicap deep down in the teens? You may see him on the links six days a week, and yet he goes on from year to year no nearer to the degree of scratch, still driving his short and very wayward ball with that nervous, fearful stance of his, that slow, hesitating swing. ”

“ And never a man more honest, more deservedly popular, and loved by all his contemporaries than he, as witness the fact that when, alas! he went to the links of Valhalla before he reached the age of sixty, the company mourned for him as golfers had never mourned before. They met at a special meeting and dinner in the most solemn mourning, with the Captain in the chair and Sir James Stirling, Baronet, Lord Provost of the City of Edinburgh, beside him, and drank to Balfour’s memory in the most solemn of toasts. ”

“ Then what is deeper than the soul’s content of the golfer when he finishes the afternoon round just as the red sun is dipping away to other lands, and by the time he and his clubs are cleaned, the twilight is already changing into the evening gloom, and the thing that it seems best to do is that which is one of the happiest in the golfer’s day, which is to sit by a bright fire and talk with one’s enemy of the links of all the good and the bad golf that has been played since the morning. ”

“ Give it that the man has golfed above his true ability, and how he does fear that the next game may put him back again; but here again there is buoyant hope in evidence, and when the evening is filled with the exaltation of it, how sweet it is to wander a little over the resting, deserted links and mark the places where balls were pitched, and the lines along which fine putts were made, and the points to which play shall be directed when the next round is in the making, perhaps the best of all. ”

“ We have evidently been playing at new holes all the way out so far, and we must continue to do so. It is the new holes that count.’ ‘But,’ expostulated Shakespeare, ‘there are more old holes on the course at the present time than new ones. ”

“ Did you not observe the shock your news was to me?”
“But how on earth could you know all that?”
“I was right then? But I knew it. The little gray cells, my friend, the little gray cells! They told me. Thus, and in no other way, could there have been a second death. Now tell me all. If we go round to the left here, we can take a short cut across the golf links which will bring us to the back of the Villa Geneviève much more quickly.”
As we walked, taking the way he had indicated, I recounted all I knew. Poirot listened attentively. ”

“ The freedom that it has always enjoyed, and in which it is superior to any other game that has a right to be compared to it for quality, interest, and popularity, has become irksome. It is felt that there can be disadvantages in too much freedom, and so these people sigh to be placed under a yoke—a yoke of their own choosing, but none the less stern and powerful and, above all, active. These agitations, if they are to be dignified with such a name, commonly begin in the dullest days of winter, when both links and livers are abnormally heavy, and they flicker out again in the spring. ”

“ The heart of every golfer is touched by all these changes, for whatever may have been his previous disposition and his tastes in life, each one becomes in time something of a Nature lover, and acquires a knowledge and interest in some of the simpler features of her work. For, of all games, golf is the game which is most closely allied with simple Nature. A little ball, a stick, a small hole, and the open country at her wildest and roughest, and there you have your golf. ”

“ Now let us suppose that in each country a centre of communication were to be established, by means of which such persons could come into contact with each other, and that at each such centre a journal or newspaper were to be established, by means of which such persons could exchange their thoughts;—not a centre from which supreme wisdom was to be dispensed and from whence dogmas were to be doled out for the unthinking believers; but a centre through which the thought of the members of the society could freely flow ”

“ By an objective connexion, I mean such a connexion as there is between the bucket in the well and the hand that draws it up,—when the hand stops, the bucket stops too; or between a man and his shadow,—when the man moves, the shadow moves too ”

“ And this drama of the emotions of the individual is played always in the most perfect setting for such a simple human play—the sea and green fields and plain earth, and the simplest tools to move a little white ball, not along marked lines or within narrow limits or in protected arenas, but anywhere along that green grass, over the hills and through the valleys and across the streams and rushing rivers, while the wind blows now this way and then that, and the rain pours. All the time the golfer pursues the little ball, alone with plain nature and his human adversary. ”