The last occasion, before its death of inanition, on which the International Match was played, it was played in foursomes. I do not think that was an experiment likely to prolong its life. With all respect in the world for the foursome as a very pleasant pastime, I cannot believe in it as anything like the test of golf that a single provides. To me it is an infinitely more easy form of the game, though I am well aware there are good judges and good players who think otherwise. I can only say that for my own part it has always been easier for me to play well in a foursome than in a single. It is not, I believe, the common experience.
I am inclined to think it is a pity that the International Match is dead. There are many who would like it revived. It gave useful practice to the young players coming on, who thus had a chance, apart from the championship, of showing what they could do in good company. That was its value, more than as a spectacle of the two countries set in array against each other. Scotland nearly always had the better of us. For one thing they have always seemed to lunch more wisely or more well than we of England. Perhaps their digestion is more powerful. At all events it has happened again and again that we have been leading finely at luncheon, only to be beaten decisively in the end. But if we had had Jack Graham on our side even this lack of the gastric juices would not, I think, have turned the day so often against us.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Alas, if writing to-day, in 1919, it is in the past tense that this and some following passages would need to be phrased. He was gallant in volunteering, joined a Scottish regiment, and met a soldier's death.
CHAPTER XXXII
HOW MR. JUSTICE BUCKLEY KEPT HIS EYE ON THE HASKELL BALL
One night I was going North by one of the sleeping trains and, having business late in the afternoon in Holborn, did not return to the civilized parts of the town, but dined at the Inns of Court Hotel. There are little tables for two, and at mine was dining also a man with whom I got into conversation. He told me he came from Glasgow and was in town on a business which he dared say I should think a very curious one—a big lawsuit pending about such a small matter as a ball used in the playing of the game of golf. Did I play golf? I said, "A little." I also said that in all the history of coincidences this was just about the most singular, for that I, too, had been engaged as a witness in the very same case. It was the case that the manufacturers of the Haskell ball were bringing against the manufacturers of the Kite ball. The point was to prove the Haskell patent good for their protection in a monopoly of making rubber-cored balls. The Haskell people had asked me to give evidence, because I was the first man to play with these balls in England, and because I considered them, and pace the law, still consider them, an absolutely new departure in golf-ball manufacture.
It would be ungrateful not to think that providence designed this meeting at the Inns of Court Hotel, for my new friend was able to tell me what the right fee was for me to charge as an expert witness. He told me that that was what I was—an expert witness. I did not know it before, although I knew, without his telling me, the ancient divisions of the species "liar," into "liar," "d——d liar," and "expert witness." I was prepared to play my part, especially when I heard, with pleased surprise, the large fees paid for witnesses of this expert and unimpeachable character.
So, in due course of time, I was summoned up to London to attend the trial. I suppose other trials are sometimes as humorous, but I could not have believed it possible that there could be such good entertainment as I found in that Court, where I sat with much enjoyment calculating, between the acts, the sum to which my expert witness fees were mounting up as I waited. The Judge, Mr. Justice Buckley, if I remember right, was not a golfer; yet the way in which he kept his eye on the ball during the three days or so of that trial was above all praise. And the ball took a deal of keeping of the eye on itself, for there were many balls of different sorts brought into Court, and they were constantly running off the judge's desk, and tumbling and jumping about in the body of the Court, where learned gentlemen knocked their wigs together as they bent down to search for them. There was an old lady who said she had made balls which were practically identical with these Haskells all her life—balls for boys to play with. So she was commanded to go away and to come back with all her apparatus and to show in Court how the balls were made. She returned, and it appeared that, after some winding of thread about a core, the next proceeding was to dip the balls into a molten solution of some boiling stuff which smelt abominably. She cooked this up in Court, and the whole business was very suggestive of the making of the hell-broth of the witches in "Macbeth," only that perhaps the Court of Law did not give a striking representation of the "blasted heath." The balls were apt to escape from the old lady when they were half cooked and to go running about the Court where the barristers, retrieving them, got their fingers into the most awfully sticky state and their wigs seemed to be the appropriate places on which to rub the stickiness off.