Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough

by A. G. Gardiner

And first let me say that I have nothing to teach you in the way of play. I am in that stage of the novitiate that seems sheer imbecility. When I get a good stroke I stare after it as stout Cortez stared at the Pacific, "with a wild surmise." But it is because I am a bad player that I feel I can be useful to you. For most of my time on the links is spent in looking for lost balls. Now, I do not object to looking for balls. I rather enjoy it. It is a healthy, open-air occupation that keeps the body exercised and the mind fallow. There are some people who think the spectacle of a grown-up man (with a family) looking in an open field for a ball that isn't there is ridiculous. They are mistaken. It is really, seen from the philosophic angle, a very noble spectacle. It is the symbol of deathless hope. It is part of the great discipline of the game. It is that part of the game at which I do best. There is not a spinney over the whole course that I do not know by heart. There is not a bit of gorse that I have not probed and been probed by. I must have spent hours in the ditches, and I have upon me the scars left by every hedgerow. And the result is that, while I am worthless as a golfer, I think I may claim to be quite in the first class at finding lost balls.

Now all discoveries hinge upon some sudden illumination. I had up to a certain point been a sad failure in recovering balls. I watched them fall with the utmost care and was so sure of them that I felt that I could walk blindfold and pick them up. But when I came to the spot the ball was not there. This experience became so common that at last the conclusion forced itself upon me that the golf ball had a sort of impish intelligence that could only be met by a superior cunning. I suspected that it deliberately hid itself, and that so long as it was aware that you were hunting for it, it took a fiendish delight in dodging you. If, said I, one could only let the thing suppose it was not being looked for it would be taken off its guard. I put the idea into operation, and I rejoice to say it works like a charm.

The method is quite simple. You lose the ball, of course, to begin with. That is easy enough. Then you search for it, and the longer you search the deeper grows the mystery of its vanishing. Your companions come and help you to poke the hedge and stir up the ditch, and you all agree that you have never known such a perfectly ridiculous thing before. And having clearly proved that the ball isn't anywhere in the neighbourhood, you take another out of the bag, and proceed with the game.

So far everything is quite ordinary. The game is over, the ball is lost, and you prepare to go. But you decide to go home by a rather roundabout way that brings you by the spot that you have scoured in vain. You are not going to search for the ball. That would simply put the creature up to some new artifice. No, you are just walking round that way accidentally. What so natural as that you should have your eyes on the ground? And there, sure enough, lies the ball, taken completely unaware. It is so ridiculously obvious that to say that it was lying there when you were looking for it so industriously is absurd. It simply couldn't have been there. You suspect that if after your search, instead of going on with the play you had hidden behind the hedge and watched, you would have seen the creature come out from its hole.

I do not expect to have my theory that the golf-ball has an intelligence accepted. The mystery is explicable, I am told, on the doctrine of the "fresh eye." You look for a thing so hard that you seem to lose the faculty of vision. Then you forget all about it and find it. The experience applies to all the operations of the mind. If I get "stuck" in writing an article I go and do a bit of physical work, ride a bicycle or merely walk round the garden, and the current flows again. Or you have a knotty problem to decide. You think furiously about it all day and get more hopelessly undecided the longer you think. Then you go to bed, and you wake in the morning with your mind made up. Hence the phrase, "I will sleep on it." It is this freshness of the vision, this faculty of passive illumination, that Wordsworth had in mind when he wrote:

Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

And yet I cannot quite get rid of my fancy that the golf ball does enjoy the game.

ON A PRISONER OF WAR

There are still a few apples on the topmost branches of the trees in the orchard. They are there because David, the labourer, who used to come and lend us a hand in his odd hours—chiefly when the moon was up—is no longer available. You may remember how David opened his heart to me about enlisting when he stood on the ladder picking the pears last year. He did not like to go and he did not like to stay. All the other chaps had gone, and he didn't feel comfortable like in being left behind, but there was his mother and his wife and his Aunt Jane, and not a man to do a hand's turn for 'em or to dig their gardens if he went. And there was the allotment—that 'ud run to weeds. And …

Well, the allotment has run to weeds. I passed it to-day and looked over the hedge and saw the chickweed and the thistles in undisputed possession. For David has gone. "It will take a long time to turn him into a soldier," we said when we saw him leave his thatched roof last spring to join up, and watched him shambling down the lane to the valley and the distant station. "The war will be over before he gets into the trenches," I said cheerfully to his wife, his mother, and Aunt Jane as they sat later in the day mingling their tears in the "parlour"—that apartment sacred to Sundays, funerals, and weddings. "Poor boy, what'll he do without his comfortable bed?" moaned his mother.