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The game itself is not everything in the golfing life; it attaches other occupations and diversions as necessities to itself which are all added to the sum of "a day's golf" and make of it a thing of adventure and time packed with variety of deed and thought. There is the meeting and the parting; the lunch time and—everything! Chiefly there is the journey, and has it been properly considered how golf and the car have been linked together for a magnificent combination of sporting joy? In the remembrances of every player there must be happy and stirring episodes of motoring to and from the game. I have hundreds of them, apart from all those countless pretty spins on the outskirts of London town. Motoring for golf is an entirely different thing from motoring for nothing.
The golf-motoring out from Paris to Fontainebleau and the other places round the capital of France is unforgettable, and always will there be clear cut in my mind the details of an expedition I once made to this Nivelle, St. Jean-de-Luz, at a time when lounging golfless in the north of Spain. It is not frequently that we go crossing frontiers in motor-cars and having our clubs examined with wonderment and irritating inquiry by officers of the douane twice in the day, going and returning, for just two rounds of the best of games. Nor is it a common thing that in one day English golfers should speed along in a German car from Spain to France and from France back again to Spain to play on a splendid course with French and Scottish opponents—a considerable mixture, if you like. I was idling at San Sebastian when the aforesaid Mr. Sharp, with such thought and kindness as golfers display towards each other, gave greeting and said, "Come to Nivelle again for a day of play." But how? It was thirty miles away, and those trains, with changes at Irun and Bayonne, would be most fearfully slow. "Bother the trains!" said Sharp, "what are motors for, and particularly what may be my own car for? Say the time when you will have risen and bathed and taken your café complet, and it will have gone over to San Sebastian by then." So it came about that it was waiting at the door of my hotel at eight o'clock in the morning. Coats were buttoned up, pipes were lighted, and when the first quarter was being chimed from the church steeples we were already doing our thirty to forty miles an hour through the hilly suburbs of San Sebastian. There are such hills in Spain and France between San Sebastian and St. Jean-de-Luz as you can hardly think of; but the speed dial showed that we flashed up some of them at thirty and darted down the other side at sixty-five. Great hills to the left with jagged skylines and strange formations as go by such names as "Camel's back"; and such sweet vales with mountains framing them over on the right! Hereabouts is some of the prettiest scenery of Spain, and I hope not to forget how on that glorious morning the mists of the new day dissolved in the warming sunlight, and the opalescent gossamer that had clung about those peaks of Spain gave place to strong blues and greys, and then to shimmering rose. At Irun, on the Spanish side of the frontier, the car's papers had to be shown, then we bowled over the dividing river, and at Hendaye the Frenchmen asked their questions and did their looking into things. Then up a steep hill for the last, and in a few minutes we were gliding down into St. Jean-de-Luz, all of this heartening business done within the hour. At the end of the day, two rounds done, when the sun was setting, I was swung again over those Spanish tracks, and just when the light had completely failed and a few spots of rain came beating upon the glass the sixty horses in the Benz had done their duty. I opened the casement of my room at the Maria Christina; soft sounds from the sea floated in, and soothed one to a pensive mood.
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The case of the golf of Pau is curious. Here, so far away from Britain, far from Paris, four hours even from the coast at Biarritz, inland and hugging closely to the Pyrenees, we have positively one of the oldest golf clubs in the whole world. At the beginning there was Blackheath, and then there were the Edinburgh Burgess, the Honourable Company, the Royal and Ancient, Aberdeen, and two or three other clubs. Golf, growing up, made its first leap across the seas to Calcutta in 1829, and seventeen years afterwards it settled in Bombay. It first landed in Europe in 1856, and was definitely and thoroughly established at Pau, and has remained there flourishing ever since. This circumstance is the more curious when we reflect that at that time there was no golf about London except at Blackheath. The Royal Wimbledon and the London Scottish Clubs were then unborn. Such great institutions now as the Royal Liverpool Club at Hoylake and the Royal North Devon at Westward Ho! were undreamt of, and a boy child might have been born to a golfer at Pau and grown almost to middle age before the Royal St. George's Club at Sandwich was begun. Scots, of course, were at the bottom of all this pioneering work. The early Blackheath golfers were Scots; they carried the game to Westward Ho!; they fostered it in India, and some of them went off with it to Pau, where they liked to spend the winter in the warm sunshine and in air which for sweet softness is almost incomparable. Over the fireplace in the smoking-room of the club-house is a picture of three of the founders of the club, who were still living in 1890—Colonel Hutchinson, Major Pontifex, and Archbishop Sapte. Another of those founders was Lieutenant-Colonel J. H. Lloyd-Anstruther. Thus it happens that the charm of age and long settlement hang upon the golf of Pau as they do upon no other golf club in Europe. Here, as not elsewhere, you feel impressed upon you the dignity of golf, realise that it is not a thing of to-day or of yesterday, and there are almost the same deep pleasure and elevation of spirit and feeling when you come to such a place after wandering among newnesses elsewhere as there are in abiding for a while at St. Andrews or North Berwick in October, the crowds then being gone away, after a course of southern golf of the most recent preparation.
The club-house at Pau is of the kind you would expect to discover at a good club of long and honourable standing up-country in England. The attributes of age and tradition are to be found within it. On a wall is a painting twelve feet long depicting the leading golfers of Pau in 1884, assembled on the course, and it was done by that Major Hopkins who did such work, now celebrated, concerning the earliest golfers at Westward Ho! gathered by their iron hut. In this picture of Pau there are some eminent golfers shown, such as Colonel Kennard, not long since dead, who was field-marshal of the Royal Blackheath Club; but the artist leads the eye to the gaunt figure of Sir Victor Brooke, a tam-o'-shanter on his head, addressing the ball on the tee in the way of a determined man. Sir Victor, for four or five years captain of the club, was the lion of the golf of Pau in those days, and when a match book, now lying musty in a corner, was started his was the first entry that was made in it. The course is beautifully situated on the Billère plain, a mile or so to the west of the middle of the town; and in the unusual absence of a friendly car it is a pleasant walk through a shaded avenue of lofty beeches in the splendid Parc du Château.
One is a little puzzled to estimate the quality of this course, being faced with a kind of semi-official printed statement that "Pau is undoubtedly the best course on the continent" which to some degree is intimidating. The turf, grown on a dark, sandy soil, is excellent, and more than fifty years of play upon it have given it the firmness and crispness that we miss elsewhere. The holes are of good length, well arranged, and not easy. Yet pancake was never flatter than the central part of the course, and with the very dullest and plainest kind of mid-Victorian bunkering—three low, straight grassy banks in line with each other right across the fairway—the golf hereabouts is less good to the eye, at all events, than it is to the spirit in the play. The first hole, a long one, with a road running diagonally across near the green, close to which there is a little cottage, somehow by its surroundings recalls memories of old "Mrs. Forman's" at ancient Musselburgh, and the second is a short hole of quality. From the fourth tee the line of the course bends round to the right, and for half a dozen holes we are away from that central part; there are ups and downs in the land that give more colour to the golf, and here and there are clumps of bushes that need consideration. All the time we are close to the bank of the River Gave, and at length, near to a point where a wild stream plunges into it, we cross to a spit of land between them and play a few holes there. They are nice holes. The ground heaves and rolls, and there must be good calculation and accuracy in approaching. Another stream runs through this isolated part of the course, and the green of the fourteenth hole closes to a point where two running waters nearly meet and there is a rutty road alongside. It is a pretty green, the situation is cunning and delightful, and that fourteenth hole is one of the best in France. Not a doubt about it—Pau is very good in parts. But we turn up a note on the golf in a little guide to Pau, and read: "Owing to the nature of the soil and their admirable preservation, the links at Pau compare favourably with the course at St. Andrews, in Scotland, where the conditions are almost ideal." O, Pau!
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Now Pau is one of those places where the golf, excellent and admired, is not domineering, as one might say. You take it, you enjoy it, and yet you live in an easy contentment after your game without raving about it. It is a delightful little of a most happy and contenting whole. That is because Pau of all places on this planet makes one feel rested, contented, peacefully, languorously happy, and that is a most blessed state at which to arrive after a long season's course of tubes and taxi-cabs, noises and disturbances, crushes and crashes, late nights and far too early mornings, and, yes—for they also come with the burden of the Londoner—heavily bunkered five-hundred-yard-holes near our excellent London town. The air is famous for its sweet soothing properties. It wraps itself round your tired limbs, it steals into your nervy senses, and it comforts you. Pau lets you quietly down, rests you, gives you sleep, stills those jagged nerves that twitched so much in town. Every one says so, and it is true. One morning I gossiped on the course with Mr. Charles Hutchings, the wonderful man who won the Amateur Championship at Hoylake in 1902, and who has known what nerves are since. He told me he has now been wintering at Pau for the last twenty years, and it is the only place that is any good to him. "Before I come to Pau, and even when I am at Biarritz," said he, "my nerves are like this"—and he slowly passed his right hand up along his left arm from the hand to the shoulder—"and when I am at Pau they are like this," he added, and he smoothed the arm back again from the shoulder to the fingers. It was as if he had been stroking a cat the wrong way and the right one—that was the idea. Biarritz, so very bracing, certainly makes you jumpy, and many of us have played far better at Pau than at Biarritz; in fact, we find that at Pau we can hit the ball as cleanly and with as much confidence as anywhere.
That reflection leads us when gazing abstractedly upon those Pyrenees, which are so good for thought, to consider the effect of climate upon one's game. Undoubtedly the effect is great, and yet it is neither appreciated nor properly considered. After working hard for a spell in town we say we will go for a weekend's golf, and, when we can, we choose a highly bracing place, because we believe it is good for us and "bucks us up." But do you remember how often the golf that we play at such places is so extremely disappointing? The "bucking up" seems to have failed. Take Deal, for example. There is hardly a course in the world that I like and admire as much as this; but that strong air of Deal upsets the game of nearly every man at the beginning. Pau is supposed to be a little relaxing, but, except for the fact that we do not eat so much as at Biarritz, we hardly notice it. It soothes us, quietens us down, reduces our boiler and engine arrangements to low pressure, and voila! our game comes on, and it does so because the question of playing well or ill by a man who knows the game is nearly always a question of the steadiness of his nerves, and there are fine shades of this steadiness that we do not always realise. That is why we play well at Pau, and it makes us think sometimes that the relaxing places have not had full credit for their golfing quality hitherto.