THE NEW GOLF.

“Let’s go and play the new golf,” said James.

Now as I understand it there are four kinds of golf.  First, the ordinary golf, as played by all people who are not quite right in their heads; second, the ideal golf, to be played by me (but not till I get to heaven) on a bowling-green with a croquet-mallet, the holes being sixty-six feet apart and both cutting-in and going-through strictly prohibited; third, the absurd golf, as played by James in pre-war days on his private nine-hole course; and fourth, it seemed, the new golf, such as James would be liable to create during a recovery from shell-shock.

James is one of those people who, possessing what Country Life would call one of the lesser country-houses of England, has an indeterminate bit of ground beyond the garden, called, according to choice of costume, “the rock-garden,” “the home-farm,” “the grouse moor,” or “no rubbish may be shot here.”  James calls his own particular nettle-bed (or slag heap) “the golf-course.”

When anyone went to stay with James, he was adjured to “bring-your-golf-clubs-old-man-as-I-can-give -you-a-bit-of-a-game-on-my-own-course-only-a-nine-hole-one-y
ou understand.”  And when James went—­far more willingly—­to stay opposite the Germans, until an interesting visit was short-circuited by shell-shock, he showed himself so wonderfully at home in dug-outs and shell-holes and mine-craters, so completely undisturbed by the weariful lack of any green on the course over which his battalion was playing, that he rose from Second-Lieutenant to Lieutenant with almost unheard-of celerity in the space of two years and nine months.  And now the absurd figure-of-eight nine-hole course, the third hole of which was also the seventh, and the first the ninth, had been complicated into a war kitchen-garden, and James, bored with ordinary difficulties and discomforts, had evolved the new golf.

“Come on,” said he, burning with the zeal of a martyr-burner, “I’ll show you the ground.”

“Can’t I see it by standing up in the hammock?” I protested.

We approached the dark demesne, which was now pretty decently clothed with potatoes, artichokes, rhubarb, raspberry-canes, marrows and even cucumber-frames.  In the midst was a large open cask which filled itself by a pipe from a former six-inch water-hazard.  Here James began to propound the mysteries.

“The game,” he said, “is a mixture of the old golf, tiddleywinks, ludo and the race game.”

“Not spillikins?” I protested.  “A game I rather fancy myself at.”

“For your information, please,” continued James in his kindliest military manner, “I may remark that a mashie is the club mostly used—­except when it is necessary to keep low between, say, two clumps of potatoes.”

“So as not to rouse the wireworms,” I nodded.  “Yes—­go on.”

“The conditions of the game are governed by the necessity of paying due respect to the vegetable hazards.  There is only one hole on the course.”