At the Glen View Country Club they have a special autumn festival also which has a character of its own. The motto of Glen View is "Laigh and lang"—low and long—which is a good variation on the monotonous "far and sure." And about Glen View there is a Scottish flavour; in manners and customs for a very brief season in the golden days of the fall there is wafted from the far distant Highlands a breath of Scotland. Here they call their festival the "Twa Days," and it is carried through with a fine spirit. There are competitions in number and kind to satisfy everybody, and the social side of the affair is excellent.
Glen View, again, is not like the others either. I spent some days there as the guest of the club, and nowhere have I had a more pleasurable time. It came after an exceedingly strenuous, rushing period at other places, and towards the end of one of the hottest spells of weather that they had known for many summers in those burning parts. Glen View is a pretty name, but it is not prettier than the golf course there, which is one of the most charming I know. It reminded one in some ways of Sudbrook Park in the early summer, always, as I think, one of the most delightful inland courses in the south of England; but Glen View, with its sleepy streams, is nicer. It may not be up to "championship standard" in its architectural features, but it might be made so. Yet if such a change would remove much of the character of Glen View, I, in my selfishness, knowing that on some future morning I shall again take the 9.35 from Chicago on the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad, and alight at the station which is called "Golf," hope for my high pleasure that there will be none such made. When a club once becomes infatuated with the championship idea its contentment and happiness depart, and Glen View is best as it is. The holes have character. The greens are placed in the most beautiful nooks and corners, great belts of trees surround the course, and a stream winds snake-like through the grounds. At about every third hole there is a large barrel which is filled every morning with fresh spring water, into which a large block of ice is placed. When you play in a shade temperature of nearly a hundred degrees, as I have done at this place, you appreciate these barrels. They have a natty way of naming their holes at Glen View. The first is called "The Elm," the second "High Ball," the third "Sleepy Hollow," and the next in order are "Polo," "Lover's Lane," "Old Hickory," "The Round Up," "Trouble," "Reservoir," "Westward Ho!" "The Grove," "Sunset," "The Bridge," "The Roost," "Spookey," "The Orchard," "Log Cabin," and "Sweet Home." The course is 6279 yards long, and every one of these yards is a pleasure to play along. Visitors do like this place. In one year recently there were 3550 of them who paid a dollar a day for the privilege of playing. The members of the club pay one hundred dollars a year subscription, and nowadays it costs about five hundred dollars for admission. Every member must be the possessor of a hundred-dollar share in the club, and these shares are now at a premium of about five times their par value. At few other places in the golfing world is there such a nicely appointed club-house as there is here. One could put two or three of the largest dining-rooms that our golf clubs possess into the one of Glen View, and the furnishing is finely and tastefully done in a Flemish style. Some of the golfing prints with which we are most familiar hang upon the walls. Other pictures of value keep them company, and there is a large crayon drawing done on the spot by my old friend, the late Tom Browne, who once came here with his bag of clubs.
The café at the Glen View club is an interesting institution. The club has one of the cleverest cocktail mixers in America, and the printed list of available liquid refreshments that is laid upon the tables suggests a little consideration. The American golfers, for the most part, do not drink very much, and what they do drink has little effect upon them, thanks to the heat and much perspiration; but they do like novelties and the variety. So on this list—which, mind you, includes no wines, which are quoted on a separate sheet—there are scheduled no fewer than 147 different kinds of refreshments. There are thirteen "soft drinks," eight different lemonade mixtures, eleven sorts of mineral waters, thirteen beers and ales, six rye whiskies, seven Bourbon whiskies, eleven Scotch and Irish whiskies, thirteen varieties of cocktails, two "toddies," three "sours," three "rickies," three "cobblers," six "fizzes," two "flips," seven "punches," three "smashes," and thirty-six "miscellaneous." The last is a most interesting section. It includes the "Prairie Oyster," the "Millionaire," the "Pousse l'Amour," the "Sam Ward," the "Russian Cooler," the "Japanese Cooler," the "Golfer's Delight," the "Angel's Dream," the "Ladies' Puff," and the "Glen View High Ball." Nearly all of these cost twenty or twenty-five cents each.
One may be most pleasurably lazy at Glen View. The club-house has some forty bedrooms, with a fine equipment of shower and other baths, and the usual telephone service to all the bedrooms with a complete telephone exchange downstairs. The service and comfort are as good as they can be. I liked the lounges and the shady verandahs, with rocking-chairs to tip one away to a short dream on a hot afternoon of purling brooks on English hills and woods in Wales. Yet when I awake I am satisfied. There is no hurry here. In the mornings one would hear the men rising at six o'clock and splashing themselves about in the bath department, and generally becoming very active all at once. Some time later I would join them at breakfast, and see them depart very early for their businesses at Chicago. When they had gone one could settle down, and there were ladies to chatter with or to play Chopin or something else on the piano. It is necessary to take things a little easily during the early and hot part of the day, because soon in the afternoon the men come back from Chicago, and they are all energy and rush as if they had not spent a howling morning in the "Pit" or one of the other great business centres. One has to fall in with their schemes of activity, which endure until the evening meal, taken in an easy way of en famille in the restaurant of the club, luscious green corn to begin with and the most appetising dishes later, with laughter and gossip always. And later in the evening David Noyes and I might sit in the dark on the verandah, and under those stars of Illinois speak of the differences between English people and the Americans as we respectively saw them. We understood each other and could be frank. "The worst of America," said I, "is that it has no soul, and the Americans have none either." "Well," said he; "but we have big hearts." Agreed. He is a leading broker in the "Pit" at Chicago, the great wheat market of the world, and one morning he took me there and I met many golfers I knew round about those four screeching masses of men who make of this place a babel and such an exhibition of raw fighting human nature as, with all its differences, I can only compare with the same brilliant and yet ugly show that is made in the rooms of the Casino at Monte Carlo. It is raw life on the strain at both places—hot seething life. The reposeful Glen View is needed for the people who barter there.
§
Massachusetts is a fine golfing land, and it rose to the heights in 1913. After gaiety in New York, and amazement at Chicago, you should go to Boston. And really they who live there have reason for their pride. There is no other town or city in the United States or Canada that has anything like such an English flavour as this in the New England. There are times when we wander along the great thoroughfare, Washington Street, or turn up one of the side avenues like Boylston, that the American idea for a moment ceases to press closely upon us, and when we pass the old churches, wander through historic chambers Georgian in their style, look into the Faneuil Hall, or into the old-fashioned market, or go down to the shipping in the docks where our Boston man will surely take us, that we may see the place of the "tea party," as they call it now, which had vast consequences to the States and England when taxes were made and were rejected—then in the New England we feel the old one there. And, of course, the wandering Englishman is taken out to Bunker Hill as well. Though with all Americans their spirit of independence is an obsession, and it seems sometimes that they like to think of themselves as a new race of people come up out of nothing or from heaven, owing nothing to any other race, yet at Boston I suspect they are a trifle glad that they and their city are not like the others, but are something more English in their way. There is a difference in the atmosphere. A certain ease is possible, a culture is apparent. Streets and shops do not look as if they had been cut out by machinery at the same time that the streets and shops of a dozen other cities were being cut, and all life is not mathematically arranged and standardised. If an American university is not at all like either Oxford or Cambridge, still Harvard is an influence, and Harvard is at Cambridge, a near suburb of Boston. The result of it all is that we feel something of the old atmosphere of home and are stimulated. Boston grows upon us very rapidly. The father of one of my good American friends, Mr. John G. Anderson, who has gone on golfing expeditions with me in England, Scotland, France and the United States, is a Scot with a great love for his home country, and our rambles round old Boston have been of a peculiarly interesting kind. And when in Boston, and the car of a friend comes along to the Touraine in the morning, we throw the clubs in the back of it, and get up with just that feeling of having a sporting day ahead that one develops in the country at home and hardly anywhere else.
There are many courses round about Boston, and there are four of them, all quite different from each other, of which I shall have a clear recollection always. Two have very special places of their own in American golf, one being The Country Club of Brookline already described. Massachusetts itself will not be called a "state" like other states, but is a "commonwealth," and The Country Club is not the Boston Country Club or the Brookline Country Club, but The Country Club, and visitors who would be appreciative and make no faux pas are recommended to keep the point in mind, the reason being that this one, with its charter of incorporation away back in the eighteenth century, was the first of all the country clubs in America, and is dignified accordingly.
They do blow the place up in America when they determine to make a golf course. Forest and rock are of no more hindrance to any idea or scheme than a few daisies might be. I was strongly impressed with this view of things when I was out one day at the Essex County Club at Manchester-by-the-Sea, another of the outer-Boston courses. "Come to golf at Essex in the morning; you will see something of the way in which we do our golf in America that you have never seen before." Such was the substance of an invitation from Mr. George F. Willett, one of the most ardent and admirable leaders of the golfing movement in the Eastern States. So in the morning golf at Essex, twenty miles out of Boston, was the programme of the day, and by half-past ten we were on the first tee preparing to drive from an eminence down towards low land in front. The terms of the invitation were amply justified. Towards noon, when we might be somewhere about the thirteenth or fourteenth hole, a great roar and crashing sound came from the other side of the course in the locality of the fifth hole, and looking towards it there was to be seen a rising cloud of smoke, with masses of earth and splintered rocks being hurled high into the air. A moment later and there was another deafening bang and more earth, more rocks, and various stumps of trees were shot up towards the sky. Bang! bang! bang!—ten times in the space of a few seconds was this surprise repeated, and it began to seem that we must be on Olympian links and that Jove himself or Hercules was bunkered. "It's only Ross's men tinkering away at the new fourth," said my man unconcernedly, as he ran down a long putt. A couple of minutes afterwards we rounded a bend of the course, and as we did so some wild yells were heard and a number of the Italian workmen were seen running fast in our direction and then stopping suddenly to hide themselves behind trees. Three more big bangs, more smoke, flying earth, flying rocks and roots, and then as my partner played his brassey he soliloquised that he had added, unintentionally, a touch of slice to the stroke and was in the pot on the right. As to the noises, our part of the course, I was assured, was perfectly safe. The three explosions were made by Ross's Italians at the new fifth. Thirteen of them in five minutes was perhaps a little unusual, but they were all over now, and, as could be seen, the Italians, with sundry calls to each other, were moving back towards the place they had sprinted from. The object of this concentration of noise and disturbance in five minutes, it was explained, was to give the full body of workmen plenty to do as soon as they resumed after their midday meal.
The truth is, that golf at Essex, when I was first there, was undergoing a great and most wonderful transformation, regardless of cost, regardless of the magnitude and seeming impossibilities of the task, regardless of everything, but caused by the insatiable desire of the American golfer to have courses that are as good as they can be. To satisfy this desire he is everywhere pulling Nature to pieces and reconstructing her, doing his work deftly and skilfully, and with a good eye for pleasing effect. At the finish you might think that, save for the putting greens and bunkers, it was all the simple work of the mother of earth herself in her gentler moods, smooth swards for rocks, and chaste glades where forests were. This transformation and extension of American golf and the way it is being done is most amazing. All the old courses are being lengthened and greatly improved, and new ones of first-class quality are being made in large numbers. When it is desired to make changes and extensions on a British course the work that has to be done is not generally of a very formidable character. Some tolerably smooth sort of land is frequently available, and alternatives to existing holes may be planned. But even so, the question of expense seems often to be a fearsome thing, and a year or more of thought and yet another year for action are commonly needed. A thousand pounds or two thousand seems to be a mighty sum to spend, but for all that we think that in the south, at all events, we are doing our golf on a very grand scale in these days. And when I think of St. George's Hill and Coombe Hill and others of their kind I know we are doing it on a very fine scale. But the case of America at present is most specially remarkable. In the Eastern States particularly, the courses have had for the most part to be carved out of virgin forests. Tens of thousands of tons of rocks have had to be blasted, and hundreds of acres of swamps drained before the fairways could be laid and sown with grass. Such work is having to be done now for the extensions and improvements, and it is wonderfully done. The committees appear to take about a week to think about it, a day to decide, and then in two or three months, with the help of dynamite, tree-fellers, and hundreds of foreign workmen, the new scheme is carried through. The cost is not considered till afterwards, and then it never worries, but it is enormous. Here at Essex, the chief work that was being done was the addition of a total of 175 yards only to the fourth and fifth holes, which were to be given new numbers, and this little bit of lengthening, with the tree-felling, the splendid draining of a swamp, and the use of 400 lbs. of dynamite on the rocks, was costing 10,000 dollars or £2000. Some other alterations and new constructions were being done, and the course, one of fine undulations, well-planned bunkering, magnificent putting greens, and glorious scenery, was being brought to perfection. The work was being carried out under the direction of Mr. Donald J. Ross, the chief superintendent of the club and course, who was once a Dornoch man. He thinks out his construction schemes in the grand way, and he is going about America blowing hundreds of acres of it up into the air and planting smooth courses upon the levelled remains. Shortly before this, they called him up to a mountainous place at Dixville Notch, in New Hampshire, to plan a new nine-holes course that had to be cut out of solid rock, at a cost of £10,000. No golfer had ever been to that place, and the first had yet to arrive when the promoters wrote hurriedly to Mr. Ross, not long back home, saying: "We are convinced that it will soon be necessary to have a longer course, and are very desirous that you will come at once to lay one out on Panorama Hill." It will cost £20,000, but that does not matter. Golf is demanded everywhere in America, and it must be supplied. A little extra space was required for play by the Rhode Island Country Club at Narragansett, so, with Ross's help they took forty acres from the sea, and are now playing the game where a year previously the waves were rolling. Again, this remarkable golf engineer a little while since finished his work on the very first course that has been laid out in Cuba. I do not know what the future of American golf will be, but its present is a bewildering, astonishing thing.