Golf stories, English; Golfers -- Fiction; Humorous stories, English
Chester drew a deep breath. His ordeal was over. That third shot, which
would lay the ball right up to the pin, was precisely the sort of thing
he did best. Almost from boyhood he had been a wizard at the short
approach. He could hole out in two now on his left ear. He strode up
the hill to his ball. It could not have been lying better. Two inches
away there was a nasty cup in the turf; but it had avoided this and was
sitting nicely perched up, smiling an invitation to the mashie-niblick.
Chester shuffled his feet and eyed the flag keenly. Then he stooped to
play, and Felicia watched him breathlessly. Her whole being seemed to
be concentrated on him. She had forgotten everything save that she was
seeing a course record get broken. She could not have been more wrapped
up in his success if she had had large sums of money on it.
* * * * *
The Wrecking Crew, meanwhile, had come to life again. They had stopped
twittering about Chester’s brassie-shot and were thinking of resuming
their own game. Even in foursomes where fifty yards is reckoned a good
shot somebody must be away, and the man whose turn it was to play was
the one who had acquired from his brother-members of the club the
nickname of the First Grave-Digger.
A word about this human wen. He was--if there can be said to be grades
in such a sub-species--the star performer of the Wrecking Crew. The
lunches of fifty-seven years had caused his chest to slip down into
the mezzanine floor, but he was still a powerful man, and had in his
youth been a hammer-thrower of some repute. He differed from his
colleagues--the Man With the Hoe, Old Father Time, and Consul, the
Almost Human--in that, while they were content to peck cautiously at
the ball, he never spared himself in his efforts to do it a violent
injury. Frequently he had cut a blue dot almost in half with his
niblick. He was completely muscle-bound, so that he seldom achieved
anything beyond a series of chasms in the turf, but he was always
trying, and it was his secret belief that, given two or three miracles
happening simultaneously, he would one of these days bring off a
snifter. Years of disappointment had, however, reduced the flood of
hope to a mere trickle, and when he took his brassie now and addressed
the ball he had no immediate plans beyond a vague intention of rolling
the thing a few yards farther up the hill.
The fact that he had no business to play at all till Chester had
holed out did not occur to him; and even if it had occurred he would
have dismissed the objection as finicking. Chester, bending over his
ball, was nearly two hundred yards away--or the distance of three full
brassie-shots. The First Grave-Digger did not hesitate. He whirled up
his club as in distant days he had been wont to swing the hammer, and,
with the grunt which this performance always wrung from him, brought it
down.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account