ET it be understood that every stranger at Warwick is presumed innocent until he steps out on the turf. It is only when he accepts a starting-card from the caddy-master that he becomes an object of suspicion and interest. No fairway was ever seriously injured by club-house conversation, so that an alien's claim of eighty-five rests undisputed up to the point of trial; but statistics show that the man who in the grill-room prophesies eighty-five or better for his first round at Warwick generally scores one hundred and ten or worse; and this average includes both the golfer who can excavate more rapidly with a spoon than a longshoreman with a shovel and the experienced man who ordinarily could proceed from one strategic position to another, chosen carefully in advance. They may know golf, but they don't know Warwick; and as they lag wearily to the players' entrance, they are mentally competent to appreciate the fugitive verse painted in small letters above the door. The underlying thought is one which a circuit judge is said to have conceived with respect to Miss Muller. It is n't humorous.
Seen from the elevation of the veranda, the course is beautiful rather than suggestive of good golf; it presents the cultivated appearance of a millionaire's lawn, landscaped by the king of expert gardeners. Trees by Corot and brooks by Inness lie in a background of charming composition; vast reaches of lawn in the middle distance temper the glare of sunlight; far to the east a Maxfield Parrish harbor sleeps peacefully beneath a blanket of clouds by Elmer Garnsey. The sheer sweep of turf is nowhere marred by unsightly sand-pits; the ungainly cop-bunker is visible not at all. Save for an occasional oasis for a putting-green, an occasional direction-flag whipping in the breeze, the course might be a deer-park or a national reservation. Obviously, to the stranger on the veranda, it is too well manicured to offer sport. It is too refined. It lacks the complications without which no true golfer can be content. It should be maintained exclusively for poets and artists; surely it is n't a test course for a red-blooded human being equipped with a dreadnought driver and a heavy mashy which scars the ground at every shot. Why, for a man to take turf at Warwick would be equivalent to mayhem!
But the professional who supervised the engineering was by birth a seer and a bushwhacker by education. To judge from the craftiness displayed in his handiwork, he could probably have ambushed an Apache in broad daylight in the middle of a field as level and unobstructed as a billiard-table. Not merely against par does one compete at Warwick; not against the decrepit and outlawed colonel; not even against an opponent in the flesh: the game is played against the fiendish imagination and ingenuity of Donald Ross. Witness the unexpected, hanging side-hill lies; witness the undulating greens of almost impossible keenness; witness the paucity of hazards, the infrequency of rough, the astonishing presence of both whenever a shot wanders fitfully from the line of geometrical progress. The dainty brook by Inness, the trees by Corot, so stand that to avoid them the study of triangulation is utterly essential. That soft strip of grass, which seemed the most inconsequential species of rough, proves to be the falsest of beards concealing the identity of swale and swamp. An impenetrable morass masquerades, from the club-house, as a Japanese garden. Neither bunker nor trap impedes the player in his journey from tee to green; everywhere his gaze falls upon the natural coloring of a lawn, but in some places the blades rise three inches higher than they do in other places. So the amateur record is still seventy-five.
a certain particularly attractive morning in July, Mr. Robert Corbett, President, and Mr. Samuel Bowker, Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, met in the New York office of a real-estate corporation. Five minutes later they were staring first at each other, then at the diffident gentleman who temporarily controlled their golfing destinies. This was a gentleman of tremendous ideas; one could easily discern the fact from the frown which he wore as a business adjunct, and from the ineffable forward thrust of his shoulders, which brought his chest into deserved prominence.
"Unfortunately—for you," said Mr. Farwell, again breaking the silence, "our purpose in conducting this company is to sell real property. The Warwick Estates is n't an eleemosynary institution in any sense of the word. Already we 've renewed the lease of the golf club two years beyond the limit we originally set; we can't renew it further. Of course, if you care to buy—"