Isobel was delighted when I told her I contemplated joining the Country Club. She said it would do me all the good in the world to play a game of golf now and then, and when I mentioned that I thought of taking family membership, which would admit her to all the club privileges, she was more than pleased. So were Mr. Rolfs and Mr. Millington. I forget how many more dollars a family membership cost. They shook hands with me warmly, and Millington said something to Rolfs about their now being able to dump another load or two of sand on the bunker at the sixth hole. They also said the ladies would be delighted. Many, they said, had asked them why Isobel had not joined.
Then they mentioned earnestly that the initiation fee and the first year's dues were payable immediately. They even offered to send in my check for the amount with my membership application.
I had never played golf, but Millington said he would lend me an excellent book on the game, written by one of the great players, and Rolfs offered to pick me out a set of clubs. He was enthusiastic when we went to the shop where clubs were sold, and I must say he did not allow the clerk to foist off on me any old-fashioned, shopworn clubs. He said with pride, as we left the shop, that, so far as he knew, every club I had secured was absolutely new in model, and that not one club in the lot was of a kind ever seen on the Westcote course before. Some he said, he was sure had never been seen on any course anywhere.
He said my putter would create great excitement when it appeared on the course. I must give him credit for being right. The putter was, perhaps, too much like a brass sledge-hammer to be graceful, and I found later that it worked much better as a croquet mallet than as a tool for putting a golf ball into a hole, but it was fine advertisement for a new member. Members who might never have noticed me at all began to speak of me immediately. They referred to me as “that fellow that Rolfs got to buy the idiotic putter.”
The golf course at our Westcote Country Club is one of the best I have ever seen. It is almost free from those irregularities of ground that make so many golf courses fretful. In selecting the ground the Committee had in mind, I think, a billiard table, but as it was impossible to secure a sufficiently large plot of ground as level as that near Westcote, they secured the most level they could and then went over it with a steam grader. The envious members of the Oakland Club speak of it as the Westcote Croquet Grounds.
The first day I appeared at the club I saw that golf was indeed a difficult game, particularly after Mr. Millington had explained how it was worked. He began by remarking that, of course, I could not expect to do much with “that bunch of crazy scrap iron”—that being the manner in which he referred to the up-to-date clubs Rolfs had selected for me—and that no man who knew anything about golf ever used the red-white-and-pink polka-dot balls, which were the kind Rolfs had advised me to buy. Then he looked through my clubs scornfully and selected my putter.
“Usually,” he said ironically, “we begin with a driver, and drive the ball as far as we can from this place, which is called the driving green, but I think this tool, in your hands, will do as well as anything else in your collection of kitchen cutlery. What do you call this tool, anyway?”
I looked at the label on the handle and read it. I told Millington it was a putter, but he would not believe me. I showed him the label, which said quite plainly “putter,” but he was still skeptical. He did not deny positively that it was a putter; he merely said, “Well, if this instrument of torture is a putter, I'll eat it.”