It is difficult to estimate how many players of this game there are in the country at the present time, and whatever figures were fixed upon would soon be made inaccurate through the rapid increase that is going on all the time—more rapid by far than is the case in Britain. I have seen it estimated that there are six or seven hundred clubs in the States at the present time, with a total membership of about a hundred and fifty thousand. The Americans say that they will double their golfing population in the next five years.
§
It is impossible for a person who has not crossed the Atlantic to imagine the United States as the country and people really are. I found it easier to imagine Italy and Spain and oriental Morocco before ever I went to those places, than I did to conceive a picture of the country and the life of our own blood relations in this new America. All the fraternising with Americans in London and elsewhere, our reading of their newspapers and their books, printed in the words of our own language, pictures and photographs of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, of the sky-scrapers in the background and the Fifth Avenue that glitters on a summer's day, all the pictures of Boston and Washington, or of the boulevards and business activities of Chicago, will not help any one to preconceive those places exactly. The atmosphere and the life and the ways of the people are a little beyond the imagination of the untravelled western man. In the same way I do not think that British golfers who have not been to the United States can understand the American's present-day attitude towards the game; certainly those who have not been to America should not judge upon it as they are often inclined to do. It is good, sound, and in its every aspect it is exceedingly interesting.
Wandering through the country I have visited many clubs and courses. If we would have much golf in America we must move quickly as the Americans do, and think as little of travelling all night as they think, for it would be too much waste of time to make the long journeys that have to be made by precious daylight. As a rule the golfer at home protests against being asked to play anything like his best game after a night in a railway train. I remember Mr. H. E. Taylor, who is not possessed of the strongest constitution in the world, told me that he had set off from Charing Cross one morning in the winter, arrived at Cannes in the south of France at breakfast time on the next morning, cleaned himself and put on his golfing shoes, and then gone along to the golf course out at La Napoule to win a scratch gold medal. Again I recall that Mr. Hilton once travelled all night from Hoylake to Muirfield and broke the record of the course there on arrival, playing two more rounds the same day. However, men like these are exceptions to most rules.
But a golfer may cure himself of more of his weaknesses and susceptibilities than he may think he can—all that are imaginary and not really of the temperament. A man who hates wind and avoids it would learn to play well and bravely in it if he had always to take his golf on an exposed part of the eastern coast. The ability or otherwise to play in wind is largely a matter of temperament. So it is with the journeys. I had either to golf, and golf for me tolerably well, in the intervals of scampering from one part of the country to the other, or I had to spoil the whole expedition. I managed it somehow.
Arriving in New York for the first time early on a Sunday morning, I fixed myself up at my appointed quarters, rang up a golfer on the telephone, and then, according to arrangement, proceeded to track a man down at his club on the Fifth Avenue with the object of playing in the afternoon. I walked into Fifth Avenue from a cross street, and my first glimpse of it is one that will not soon be forgotten. It was a glorious morning, the sun shining hot and white, and New York, for the only time in its hustling week, was comparatively quiet. There was no traffic and few people just then in the Fifth Avenue, quite one of the most majestic and wonderful thoroughfares in the world despite its plain simplicity. But it was not the whiteness, not the glittering cleanliness, not the real splendour of this Fifth Avenue with all its newness, that struck the first impression on my mind. Upon the moment that this wandering British player of the most meditative of games emerged from somewhere round about West 36th or 37th, into the big avenue, there whizzed along it, right in front, a motor funeral which was doing a fine fifty miles an hour clip along the smooth and open thoroughfare. There was just the hearse with glass panels, the coffin plainly exhibited inside, and the chauffeur on the seat, with another man beside him who might have been a mourner. Holding life a little more cheaply in America than we do, they grieve a little less for those who lose it, which is not to say that they are heartless or unsympathetic, but more practical. This funeral, done with petrol instead of horses, was positively going north at the rate of fifty miles an hour. It was moving just as fast as I saw any car ever go in the United States, and I could not help reflecting that the spirit of the good American, viewing the last journey of its separated corpus, must feel a certain satisfaction that it was hustlingly done and that no time was wasted. Finis coronat opus! Inspired, I played on two different courses in New York on the same afternoon.
§
English people hear much about railroad travelling being far better in the United States than it is in our own country. It is—and it is not. The comfort and conveniences of the cars in the daytime are much in advance of anything we have. The men's smoking cars, the observation cars, the parlour cars, are delightful and enable us thoroughly to enjoy the journeys. Although they standardise so many things in America, they cease their standardisations when considerations of personal comfort and peculiarities have to be considered. It never occurred to me until I travelled my first thousand miles in America that it is a hardship that, no matter what our girth may be, nor the length of our bodies and legs, we must all of us at home, though we pay for our first-class accommodation, sit in standardised seats which are all the same and attached to each other. In the American railroad car running on a long-distance journey there are seats of different sorts, some are high and some are low, and they are detached. This makes much difference. In the dining-cars the tables and chairs are all loose, and one does not have to squeeze into them with the feeling that one is being locked into one's place as we do in England. And the dining arrangements on the American cars are far superior to what they are elsewhere. But if the American system gains by day the British system makes up for much of the lost comfort at night, and that is when the American, golfer and non-golfer, does most of his long-distance travelling. The Pullman day cars are converted into sleepers by the dark-skinned attendants (uncommonly good railroad car servants these niggers make), and by an almost magical transformation the lounging car is made into a sleeper with about two dozen berths, a dozen on each side, half uppers and half lowers, and an alley down the middle. The chief difference between the upper berths and the lower is that the uppers have to be reached by a short stepladder and are not convenient to fat, gouty, or unathletic persons, while those who wake early and like to look upon the prairie, or what once was that, have a window at the bottom as the people in the top have not. The berths are covered in with thick green curtains which button together. We may leave our boots outside for the attendant to brush in the morning, but our other clothes and traps must go along to bed with us, and be stowed away at the bottom of the berth, or in the little netting that hangs alongside. And here I must timidly state in evidence that there are not separate cars for the sexes; in America all go together, and the ladies and the men occupy the same cars. The ladies generally go off to bed earlier than the men. Whether they do or not, we all climb into our respective berths, fasten up the curtains, and undress in the very limited space at our disposal, a process which seems to me must be the same as that by which acrobatic performers wriggle themselves out of chains and ropes with which their limbs and bodies have been tied up fast. After a time we become expert. What is most difficult to become accustomed to is the horrible jolting, and the painfully sudden stopping of the trains in the middle of the night. Their permanent ways are not laid so finely as the magnificent lines along our coasts from London to Scotland. Their rails are not fixed in chairs laid on the sleepers, but are pinned down straight on to the wood. This makes much difference. The cars shake exceedingly. Then the drivers at night have to be wary and stop quickly at times, and no doubt they do right not to reduce their speed gradually for the sake of the men and women who are asleep behind them, but instead to stop with a suddenness that could only be improved upon by a collision. However, I say again, that we find ourselves accustomed to it all in time.
I shall not forget my first experience of a thousand-mile golfing journey from the New York Central Station to Chicago. A few golfers were in a party going westward for the championship at Wheaton in Illinois, and we discussed the game from the time of starting in the late afternoon until we had passed Albany, about ten, when we moved into our sleeping quarters. My bag of clubs had to go to bed with me, and they lay alongside all the night; there was no room for them underneath. I had to sleep with one hand on the bag to prevent them from attacking me or going overboard into the avenue, so much did that wretched train rattle and shake as it hurtled its way through the darkness, with the big bell in the front of the engine jangling mournfully all the time. And what a wild, sad note it is that is struck by the bells on these American engines, suggestive of the loneliness of the open country through which they speed, now and then making a big noise with a sort of foghorn. I am much attached to my clubs, and they are the chosen favourites of a vast number that go with their master everywhere, and are carefully watched and tended, but the intimacy that was sprung upon us then was too much, and I invented another arrangement for the next travelling night. James Braid, very wise man indeed, tells me that long, deep nights of placid slumber are the best things in the world for the golfer who would keep steady his hands and nerves and clear his eyes so that he may play the best game of which he is capable. But no British golfer could sleep at the beginning of his American experiences in such circumstances. I was just falling into some sort of a doze in the small hours of the morning when the train pulled up sharply at a station which I discovered to be Schenectady, where the famous putter that disturbed the peace of two nations was born. Next, one realised that we were within a mile or two of the Niagara Falls, and so on with jolting and banging and sudden stopping all the night. By and by daylight came and then we had a long day of travelling through the heart of America to Chicago.
Some may suggest that all this about railroad travelling in the country where there is more of it than any other has little to do with golf, but it has all to do with it, for the thorough golfer in America, whether a citizen or British, must needs spend a large part of his time in the train, and if he would have the maximum amount of golf, much sleeping must be done behind the green curtains in the darkened cars. The travelling done by the American golfer, therefore, is a surprising thing, but a few months of it is a fine and valuable experience for the British golfer afterwards. No longer, since I have been across the Atlantic, do I consider it a far way from London to the links of Dornoch. St. Andrews and North Berwick have come pleasingly near to me. All the world has shrunk, and I feel I have my foot on every course—or soon may have.