The Happy Golfer Part 12

CHAPTER XIII

THE GAME IN ITALY, AND THE QUALITY OF THE COURSE AT ROME, WITH A SHORT CONSIDERATION OF THE VALUE OF STYLE.

The other day, when we sat on the deck of a little steamer plying on the lake of Como, contented in warm spring suns.h.i.+ne with a sublime panorama of blue water and white-topped Alps, I was led to recall some of the few remarks which a shrewd and pungent commentator on life and men, the late Henry Labouchere, had made about our game, and, as he was not himself a golfer, and not the most tolerant of men despite his certain breadth of mind, it may be guessed that they were not complimentary to the game. We had left Varenna, and the little s.h.i.+p was paying its dutiful respects to Bellagio and Menaggio and such like places of an Italian fairyland.

Hereabouts, as I remembered, Mr. Labouchere had lived in the proper season, and it came about some seven years back that a golf course--and a nice course too--was established near by, and the local hotel-keeper, in proper enterprise, ran a conveyance each day regularly at a certain time from his door to the club-house. Radical as he was--if he really was--Mr. Labouchere disliked this disturbance of the old peace and harmony of his lakeland retreat, and affected to see something vulgar in it. This wit and cynic, who once, answering an inquiry, said that he liked a certain lady of his acquaintance well enough but would not mind if she dropped down dead in front of him on the carpet, certainly wished that golf had never grown into the human scheme of things, and he complained loudly of its invasion here. He suggested that Italy was now pa.s.sing to the dogs. Had he lived a little longer he would surely have played at Menaggio, and we could have a.s.sured him then that golf in Italy was long before his time, and would certainly be of good help to the country for long after. It is one of the curious facts of golfing history that the game was played in Italy before any golf club, except one, was definitely established in Scotland, the only exception being the Edinburgh Burgess Golfing Society, and lo! it was played there by a Scot, and a Scot so good as the bonnie Prince Charlie himself. When I first went to the Villa Borghese in Rome, I remembered, on approaching it through the park, that when Lord Elcho went there in 1738 he found the Prince playing in the gardens. Many courses now exist in different parts of this beautiful Italy, and the country has begun to take its place in the great forward movement in European golf. It has begun slowly; but now, as I have seen it, does really advance.

A little fable is quickly told. A wise father had sent his son, for the good of his mind, to Rome, and when the boy returned he asked him what he thought of the city that is called eternal. Harold then answered, "I think, sir, that the lies at Rome are very good." Do not judge Harold harshly upon this answer, as you may be inclined to do. He might have come to know less of Rome had he not discovered that the lies on the Campagna were so good, and that the legions of mighty Caesar which were exercised there had left no enduring marks of their galloping behind them. He might not have gained so many good Roman friends to tell him helpfully of the wonders of the city. And if golf is a little thing, and the contemplation of Rome is so enthralling, yet, be it murmured, the golf of Rome is one of the wonders of the golfing world. I have found it so. As it was to me, so it will prove a revelation to all golfers who go to Rome and have as yet no knowledge of the course that is there. For the full-bodied character of the holes, caused by natural land formations, and for their variety and interest, I do not hesitate to say that there is no course on the continent of Europe which is better, and I support this statement with another, that while I can hardly recall any hole where a bad shot will go unpunished or a good one without reward, yet in the whole round there is not a single artificial bunker.

Nature has seen to all the tests and difficulties. Of what other course can this be said? Golf at Rome was begun in 1898, and ever since then there have been some fine golfing men working to what they were sure would be a successful end, chief among them being Mr. R. C. R. Young, who in the capacity of honorary secretary has been largely responsible for the general management of the club. Lately the round has been extended from nine holes to eighteen, Mr. Young and Doig, the professional, having done the planning of the new holes, and with this the golf of Rome enters upon a new era. The club flourishes, the golfing community, partly Roman, partly British, and partly American, is zealous, and the people there have come to believe that even the most serious, studious, and high-minded folk who go to Rome to steep themselves in living history of the past need for their refreshment some antidote to ruins. "St. Peter's, and the Colosseum, the Forum and the baths of Caracalla," said one of them to me, "will bring the foreigners to Rome, but only golf will keep them there!" Count this for weakness in man, and for his utter modernity if you like; but it is the truth.

Consequently the golf of Rome is entering upon a new forward movement. I think that when the public in distant places comes to realise that the golf of Rome is half as good as it really is, thousands and thousands more will go to Rome than do so now, to play upon the Campagna, and during the time to gather to their souls a scent of the glory of the ancient mistress of the world. I have a vision of Rome becoming a headquarters of continental golf in the near future.

On a morning after some days among the ruins--such a glorious morning, with the Italian sun burning gold amid a heavenly blue--two n.o.ble Romans came in their chariot for a barbarian wanderer at his hotel at half-past nine. They were not real Romans, but Augustus could have played their part of host no better, and a forty-horse-power car moved us towards the Campagna more speedily than the best of chariots. Away we went by the foot of the Equilinus, down the Via Emanuele Filiberto, through the gate of St. John Lateran in the Aurelian wall, and then straight on. In a few minutes we were at Acqua Santa and inside the club-house. Of all the club-houses in the world, this is surely one of the most curious and interesting. It is an old farm-house, skilfully adapted to its purpose, and we shall be sorry if in the course of time and a grand extension of the golf at Rome it is given up for anything more palatial and conventional. Here in an upper room we take the necessary nourishment in a simple way, and among other liquid refreshments there is the real _acqua santa_ itself, a pleasantly bitter and quite delicious water that is drawn from a spring by a farm-house at a corner of the course. In days gone by the water was considered, perhaps not without good reason, to have splendid curative properties, and popes of Rome came to it and blessed it accordingly. I believe that one of them derived some healing benefit from it. And now, as we think of popes and cardinals, we recall that one of the latter, Cardinal Merry del Val, had some kind of a course in his private grounds, and so far he has been the only cardinal golfer. Once before he died a scheme was afoot for a visit by him to the course at Acqua Santa. In a good and sensible and honest way the golf club of Rome is already a considerable social centre. Perhaps some day the King of Italy--already patron of the club--will join himself to the majority of kings and become a golfer too. A leading member of the famous historical family of Colonna, Don Prospero Colonna, is president, and a number of the most eminent people of Rome are among the members.

Princes and princesses, counts and countesses, amba.s.sadors of nearly all countries, and American millionaires may be found playing the game regularly at Acqua Santa. The keenest golfer of them all is Dr. Wayman Cushman, who is handicapped at plus 4, an American who spends half his year in Maine and the other half in Rome, where he plays golf nearly every day. The Americans are strong in the golf of Rome, and some of the young Italians are showing excellent form. There is one of them, Don Francesca Ruspoli, educated in England and son of a Roman father and American mother, of whom great golfing things are expected.

Really this is an excellent course; but the full merit of it will hardly be appreciated in the first round or the second, for the wonderful views and the special points of interest in them will constantly interfere with concentration on the strokes and thought upon the scheme for reaching the putting green. Standing upon the first teeing ground and pondering for a moment upon the carry to be made across the little valley in front, the panorama begins at once to suggest its superior claims. Leftwards are the Apennines, opalescent in the morning mist, capped with snow upon their peaks. There are the Alban Hills, where the shepherds were born who followed Romulus on the Palatine, and at the end of the range is Monte Cavo, on the top of which are the ruins of the temple of the G.o.d of the Latin races, living in the Latium, the ground between the mountains and the sea. On the wine-yielding bosom of these s.h.i.+ning hills there lies sparkling white in the morning sun the village of Frascati. There are the Sabine Hills with Tivoli, and away in another direction there is Mount Soracte, well said to look out there like a wave in a stormy sea. Up into our middle distance on the left-hand side, on the fringe of the course, are the splendid ruins of the Claudian aqueduct which stretch right across the Campagna, one lonely pile coming close up to our sixteenth green alongside which the Via Appia Nuova stretches, with two famous umbrella pines helping on the scene.

There is so much for a beginning, and more views press upon us as we advance along the course. The play is opened with a good hole of drive and iron length, the second brings us back again with a drive and a pitch, and then away we go to the left with one of the cunningest seconds to be played across twin streams, making this third hole of Rome one of the most exacting in the way of approach that is to be found in Italy or even in the whole of Europe. When we come to the sixth we play up to the summit of a high tableland, and as we ascend the hill we pluck from the turf some of the freshest, prettiest crocuses that have ever grown, the course being as nearly thick with them in March as North Berwick is with daisies in the month of May. And from these heights what a view again over towards the city of Rome! Out along that way there is the tomb of Cecilia Metella, Cra.s.sus' wife, and away on the boundary there is the church of St. John Lateran and the great dome of St.

Peter's. If golf is a royal and ancient game, here is a setting for it.

Near to the eighth hole we turned aside to the ruins of an ancient Roman villa, and Santino, my little Italian caddie, with finger excavation, gathered some morsels of polished marble which may have touched the feet of Roman ladies in those great days of old. The line of the tenth comes close to one of those deep-cut streams that flow to feed the hungry Tiber, and in some ways this hole reminds us of the fourth at Prestwick where the Pow Burn insinuates itself close to the golfer's way. At our backs when we stand on the eleventh tee is a cave that might serve for robbers but which really makes an excellent shelter, and it was related that a few weeks before my time in Rome three amba.s.sadors, being the British, the American, and the Austrian, were seen to sit in there and shelter. And who then shall say that, if "only a game," golf has no possibilities and powers in such high crafts as diplomacy? The twelfth is an excellent hole, and so are they all. The sixteenth takes us winding round a big bend between a hill and a stream and then faces us full to the putting green, which has the Claudian ruins for a background. The play concludes with a seventeenth which has a putting green very shrewdly placed, and an eighteenth where the second shot is played through a little valley, these ending holes abounding in golfing beauty and character.

There is to be said of this course, and in the most sober and well-considered judgment by one who has seen golf in many lands, that there is scarcely an inland course anywhere that seems more naturally adapted to the game. Each hole has strong character of its own; I could remember them all after but a single round. Some time soon they will make an attempt at Acqua Santa to carry their putting greens on from one season to the next, and then they will get a thickness and trueness and quality that greens can gain in no other way. The golfers of Rome are keen, and they have energy and enterprise. A great future awaits this club and course, and I believe that when more money is spent on it, as will be soon, it will be in nearly every thinkable way the most attractive course on the Continent. The mood that gathers about one when in Rome tends to taking the game rather more seriously and thoughtfully than at the Mediterranean resorts; it becomes a real recreation, the refres.h.i.+ng change. The club's nearness and convenience to the city are very good. It is but a few minutes' journey by either train or tram from the heart of Rome to the club-house, near which there is a special golfers' railway station.

A Franciscan friar was the first to point out to me the situation of the nine holes of Florence--nine plain fair holes, though they have nothing of architectural beauty in them, not a trace of feeling, nothing of the mediaeval glow of spirit that separates this city from all others in the world, hardly a touch of imagination in their two or three thousand yards. Yet they serve their modern purpose well. For six days and six nights the rain had poured down upon the dripping Firenze from inexhaustible clouds; the saucer in which the city is laid emptied its floods into the Arno until, dirtier and more turbulent than usual, the big stream tumbled itself violently through the bridges. We wandered through the Uffizi Galleries and the Pitti Palace and the Bargello of courtyard fame. There is nothing in the world like sweet Florence, and it is a hopeless soul that feels no spark of artistic fire crackle for at least one inspiring moment when the glories of this city that was born and lived to the human expression of beauty are contemplated. But an incessant rain provokes a bold defiance; there almost seemed to be a weakness in such constant shelter, and I remembered a suggestion that was sent to me from a far distance--"Go up to Fiesole if you can." So in the car I went to Fiesole. We went out of the town and by San Gervasio, and wound past San Domenico, and twisted our way up the hill until, with five miles done, or it may have been a little more, the old Etruscan town, with the fragment of an ancient wall, was reached. At the very summit, where once a Roman castle stood, there is the Franciscan monastery. A brother in his umbrian gown looked meditatively outwards from the porch, and he was gracious and friendly when I told him I would like to go inside. From a loggia within we looked out upon one of the finest panoramic views of its kind. The rain had ceased. Gra.s.s was seen upon the Etruscan hills, tentacles of the Apennines came clear again through dissolving mists, and a golden light flamed up in the western sky. And in its peaceful hollow there lay Florence, the palace of art, a mediaeval jewel glistening there like a mosaic in white and terra cotta, with its great duomo in many-coloured marbles lording it over the lowlier piles. Florence! Sweeping the valley with a glance, the monk turned towards the north-east and, leaning upon a wall, he pointed with his right hand and said, "Pisa!" Over there was the city of the leaning tower and the baptistery with the amazing echo. But in the nearer distance there was a square patch of vivid green, and I traced its situation along there by the course of the Arno, by the Cascine, and other landmarks, and made nearly sure of what it was. The thought was incongruous at the time, nearly inexcusable, but yet there is little in golf that is vulgar after all, and it could not be denied that there was the golf course out that way. By some careful questions I gained confirmation from the friar. I told him I looked for a place, a special place, whose locality I described precisely. And he held out his hand again. The golf course was nearly in the line of Pisa.

While so many things in Florence are four or five hundred years old at least, the golf course is only fifteen. Still, fifteen years makes a good maturity in these times, and Italy, if its courses are few, has some distinctions among them. Many continental courses depend for their attraction on their setting. Those of Florence and Rome have the most perfect setting conceivable, but while the course of Rome could live on its merits had there been no Rome, the course of Florence never could.

Yet the city helps it out, and, though poor be the holes, here we have indeed one of the most enthusiastic little golf communities one might ever wish to mix among. The club is captained by Mr. J. W. Spalding, head of the great athletic business firm, who has ceased to live in America and lives now wholly in Florence, which he would hardly do were it not for this golf course, on which he plays nearly every day. Mr.

Spalding is a fine example of the keen and determined golfer. A few years ago, in a terrible motor-car smash in Italy, he lost completely the sight of one eye. As soon as the surgeons and the doctors let him loose again he hurried to his favourite course at Florence and--think of it!--at once he won the scratch gold medal. He is a scratch man now, and plays as well as ever.

These and many other things I learned on the day after the monk had pointed out to me the direction of the nine holes of Florence, when I went along to San Donato to make a closer view of them, to drive and putt at them. The golfers of Florence are a good company, managed with zeal by Signor Mavrogordato, in the capacity of honorary secretary. They are as keen and interested in their game as if they were at Sandwich, and they have a miniature club-house situated on a spot of land that has a cemented water-filled moat all round it, those who would enter having to pa.s.s over a little rustic bridge. The holes are plain with artificial cross bunkers, and the architecture is of what might be called the low Victorian school. One of the features of the course is a couple of tall trees that stand up in the middle with thin straight trunks parallel to each other, looking for all the world like Rugby football goal-posts.

One great advantage that this course has is that it is splendidly convenient to the city. Take a tram-car No. 17 labelled "Cascine" from one particular corner of the cathedral square, say "Golf" to the conductor, pay him a penny for the fare, and the rest is inevitable. In a quarter of an hour you will be deposited at a junction in the roads by the barrier of Ponte alle Mosse, and two minutes' walk from there takes you to the iron gates which give admission to the course.

There is the beautiful bay at Naples, and Pompeii, and a short voyage on the steamboat to the sweet isle of Capri; but golf has not yet come to Naples, though it will do so soon. When we travelled down there from Rome we were aboard a train that was taken by many of the Naples members of the Italian Parliament who were going home for the week-end--the "deputies' train" they often call that six o'clock from Rome. They had been having a fearful week of it, wrangling about their recent Libyan war and the cost of it, and their nerves were in rather a jagged state.

I fell into conversation with one of them, and he said that he wished he were a golfer, as from all that he had heard and understood it was the real and only thing for the soothing of a deputy after such scrimmaging and scratching as they had been having in the Chamber that weary week. He asked questions about our Parliamentary golfers, and was informed about Mr. Balfour, Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George, and all the others. I told this honourable member for Naples that nearly all our Parliamentarians played the greatest game of all, and that the Mother of Parliaments was all the better for it. He was impressed. He said there should be golf at Naples by the time I went there again--even if it was set there for the benefit of the tired members only!

Above all things, Venice is a place for reflection, and when we are there we think of all things we have seen and done in Italy, and shape exactly the impressions that have been made. One time there were two or three of us in a gondola. The crescent of a seven days' moon hung among the stars in the Venetian night. The gentle regular plash that was made by Giovanni Cerchieri, our gondolier (and be it said that his gondola is the blackest and smartest and most finely dignified of all that glide on the Grand Ca.n.a.l), as he swung backwards and forwards to his work behind us, with a sigh or a murmur that might have swollen to a real boat-song had we encouraged it, was nearly the only sound on the still waters. And in this Venetian night, an hour after the coffee, we were in the mood of men who feel that they are soon to return to the cold hard facts of life. The rest of Venice might go to glory; we, soothed amid such ease and comfort as might have satisfied a doge, turned our thoughts to the links of home. There was nothing incongruous in the a.s.sociation of ideas and facts. Venice we found to be splendid for meditation, and any place with such a quality, like the top of a mountain, or the side of a purling stream, is a fine one for golfing consideration and conjecture.

One man would talk of art, of pictures, and of sculpture; another would stupidly keep to golf. And then a compromise was suggested, when it was said that a question had once been asked as to whether there was such a thing as style in golf!

Any thoughtful player who ever had any doubt upon this matter--but, of course, no thoughtful player ever could--would have it dispelled if he went to Italy even though he never played a game, did not take his clubs, and never saw a golf course there. It were indeed better for his education in this matter that he should not play when on Italian ground, for one would not expect to find on the courses there the best examples of golfing style. The fact of style in golf would come home to him when he wandered through the galleries and looked upon all the magnificent sculptures that are among the matchless treasures of the country, though there is no study of a golfing swing among them. I do not see how any player of the game who is thoughtful and contemplative can go to Italy and fail to be enormously impressed with the lessons that are silently delivered from the sculpture in the galleries and museums of Rome, Florence, and other cities. In hundreds of pieces here we see the suggestion of beauty put forward in every movement and exercise of the human body, and particularly when the frame is being brought to some considerable physical effort, when the limbs are being placed upon the strain, are grace and rhythm and style exhibited to us, and with them there is the suggestion always of the extreme of power. There is indicated the close relations.h.i.+p between exact and graceful poise, perfect balance, and supreme controlled and concentrated force. The very utmost efficiency is always suggested in all this artistic balance. As the art is better and more appealing, so the suggestion of power is increased and the marble almost seems to break with life.

Considered in this way, what a fine thing is the "David" of Bernini in the Borghese Gallery! But for our golfing suggestion some of the discobolus models serve us better. Without ever having attempted to throw a discus, one may very well understand that success at such an exercise depends almost wholly upon perfect balance and accurate concentration of force and true rhythmical movement, and in the models in the Vatican and the National Museums in Rome and elsewhere we see how it might be done. The discobolus of Myron, reconstructed as it has been, and with the head made to face in the wrong direction, so they say, is a magnificent thing. In the National Gallery of Rome they have made a reconstruction from a fragment of another, and they have made the figure to look sideways and half upwards to the discus held at arm's length behind him ready for the throw, whereas in the Myron the face is to the front and the eyes are down. (Though one may know nothing at all about the ways in which the discs were really thrown, or what is the best way to throw them, one is hardly convinced of the desirability of disturbing the head in the back-swing of the arm and letting the eyes follow the object in the hand. Surely concentration would be impeded and balance suffer.) But in these images we see the intensity of the relation between style and power, and we realise that if there were no style in golf there ought to be, and the next moment, that of all modern games golf is a game of style and nothing else. Perhaps you may play it without style, but then it is not the same thing, and it can never be so thoroughly effective and precise. Unconsciously, perhaps, James Braid had style in his mind when he said that at the top of the swing the golfer should feel like a spring coiled up to its fullest tension, straining for the release. That is just what the discobolus suggests, and the golfer gets the fullest enjoyment from the game, the supreme physical thrills, when he feels this high tension for a moment and then its even, smooth, and quick escape, and he cannot feel it so when he has no style and all his movements and positions have not been made in perfect harmony. Some may say that the actions of the discobolus were probably not so very fine as the sculptors have made them out to be, and that much of the shape is merely artist's fancy, but probably they are fairly true to life. If they are not, one cannot contemplate them for more than a few moments without feeling that life ought to be true to them. The golfer in the suggestion of grace and power, as in the models that have been cut of Harry Vardon at the top and end of his driving swing, reaches some way towards the discobolus.

CHAPTER XIV

THE AWAKENING OF SPAIN, AND SOME MARVELLOUS GOLFING ENTERPRISE IN MADRID, WITH A STATEMENT OF GOLFERS' DISCOVERIES.

"When we were in Madrid----" I have sometimes begun in conversation, and then invariably from one or more in the company there has been a quick interruption with--"But there can be no golf in Madrid! You do not go to Spain for golf!" But one who knows may answer that there is as good reason to go there for it as to most other places out of Britain, that in different parts of Spain there is fair golf to be had, that in Madrid there is a new course which is excellent and embraces some of the prettiest holes we would ever wish to play after pa.s.sing by the Pyrenees, and that I have found there Spanish gentlemen to play with who have been among the happiest and most agreeable companions and opponents I have encountered. In a reflection upon my own experiences I dare to say that I would recommend a doubtful stranger to go to Spain only if he is a golfer, for by the agency of the game will the life and facts of the country be best presented to him, and mysteries be explained. The magic pa.s.sport of golf is indispensable in all such circ.u.mstances. The truth is that it was golf that led me to Spain on my second visit to the country, and I had then one of the most interesting and instructive holidays I have had in my travelling life, during which I had the opportunity of seeing something of the inside of Spanish life and government, of discovering truth about the forces that work in the regeneration of this old country, for really an awakening is taking place, and one dares to say the firm establishment of golf is a symbol of it. I had some interesting conversations with the Count Romanones, who was then the Prime Minister, with his brother, who is the Duke of Tovar, a man of broad sympathies who takes a leading part in many social movements of high importance in Madrid, and with other persons of much importance. These talks, with the open sight of all that was pa.s.sing in Madrid, made a deep impression.

"You are a golfer, and we of Spain may give you some good golf to play!"

said the Prime Minister cordially when by invitation I called upon him at his palace in the Paseo de la Castellana. He is a man of forcible appearance and manner. The face is thin, and its lines of character are strong--cold and strong. The aquiline features have something of Spanish--no Italian--fierceness about them, and the Count makes a piercing look which is considered discomforting to nervous strangers.

But he is a very attractive companion in talk; his verve, his vivacity are wonderful. When discussing a subject in which he is interested his whole being becomes aflame; eyes sparkle and features quiver; he beats his fingers in the palms of his hands; he leans over towards you and gesticulates like an artist in enthusiasm. A man of hot nervous energy, one of keen purpose and determination is this statesman of Spain. He suggested that the new sports of his country were symbolic of her great awakening, of which he said he would talk to me that I might tell others what Spain is now and what she would be. "Europe does not understand my country," he remarked, "True, there has been little occasion to understand her. But a change occurs. Spain at this moment is pa.s.sing through a most remarkable process of transition. You are right in a suggestion you have made to me; unsuccessful wars do not cause interminable loss and disasters. The war with the United States was not all bad for Spain. We may have lost Cuba, but the development that has taken place since then in our country at home, in its agriculture and its mining, and again in its healthy natural feeling, has been enormous, and is a good subst.i.tute for many islands." And then he went on in a deeply interesting conversation to tell me of the great awakening of Spain indicated in many different ways, and of all her political, social, and other ambitions.

The Duke of Tovar, who is also coming to take an interest in the golf of Spain, smoked his cigar on a divan in his palace, and a Moorish boy brought coffee to us. The Duke travels much, and brings things and people back with him. I see that he has been an amba.s.sador-extraordinary to the Pope of Rome and has received the most gracious papal thanks. A little of a statesman, he is much of an artist, and a marble bust of Alfonso _rex_, his own sculpture, casts a shadow beside us. In innumerable ways this Spanish n.o.bleman a.s.sociates himself with the life of the people, goes among them, attends their meetings, and he began telling me that one of the secrets of the new Spain was the important fact of the n.o.bles taking to business, becoming the promoters and managers of industrial companies, as they were. He told me of dukes who were doing things. One of the new movements, in which he has a.s.sisted to his utmost and thoroughly believes in, is the boy scout movement, which has caught on like wildfire in Madrid. Three thousand Spanish boys were enrolled within a few weeks of the establishment of the system in the city, and the Duke became a president of a section. All cla.s.s distinctions are avoided in this matter. "My son is going with the son of the porter," said the Duke of Tovar. And he most certainly believed in golf for the people, and would tell me stories of its beginning and its development.

As to Madrid, never was such a quick transformation accomplished in any city of the world, save when 'Frisco perished and was made again, as is being done here in the city on the plateau of Castile. The Spaniards having decided on the regeneration of their country and on persuading foreigners to come to it, have determined they must have a capital befitting a first-cla.s.s power. The result is that Madrid is being torn to pieces and rebuilt. Everywhere there is a fever of building raging.

Think of it: but three years ago and there was not a single first-cla.s.s hotel in Madrid; now there are two fine ones. The Alcala, where the Madrilenos stroll and mount up the hill to the Puerta del Sol, the great bare square where the idlers lounge, where the bull-fighting papers are sold, where there are many offices for the sale of lottery tickets, where there are cafes and yellow tramcars (run by Belgian companies, if you please!) and much life but no gaiety until very late at night, is soon to be deposed from being chief street of Madrid, for they are making a new ideal street, very wide and one mile long, which is cut straight through the heart of the city and is to be called the Gran Via when it is done. Millions and millions of pesetas' worth of property have been demolished to allow for the straightness of this street, which is to ask for comparison with a part of the Fifth Avenue across the water. Thirty-seven millions of pesetas were lately voted by the Munic.i.p.al Council for the removal of the cobble stones of Madrid, their places to be taken by asphalte and wood. The cobbles of Madrid are picturesque; they make good harmony with those antique watchmen who seem to have been reincarnated from our own eighteenth-century London, walking the slumberous streets at night, lanterns in their hands and jangling bunches of giant keys suspended from their girdles, their business being to open the outside doors of blocks of flats for late-returning occupiers who in an unthinking languorous way of Spain would carry no keys, but leave the affair of their homecoming to the fortune of the night, the vigilance of the watchman, and the blessing of Providence. But the cobbles are not convenient. They are seldom repaired, and even in such a s.p.a.cious public place as the Prado, which is a kind of Hyde Park Corner, there are sometimes deep holes which fill with water when it rains and make such pools as ducks might like and dogs would drink, but which take a leg of mine some way upwards to the knee when the night is dark. There was an old Madrid of which trills of love and pa.s.sion have been sung. Fevered lovers sang to ladies whose lips were red, and whose skin was dark, as their hearts were gay--voluptuous women. Guitars and flowers; blood and life. That Madrid has nearly pa.s.sed away. A few steep and narrow streets and some dirty open s.p.a.ces, with little of the delicate charm of age to recommend them, are most of what is left of it in a quarter near to the royal palace.

The city of later times, the Madrid of to-day, is already and quickly giving way to a third Madrid which will soon be made.

In this that I have written I may seem to neglect my theme, and yet the state of Spain does most closely concern the strange case of golf in the country. Here is an answer to interrupters who are quick to say that one does not go to Madrid for golf. When Spain was all romance and colour, all dirt and laziness, it was no place for games like this. Bicycles were not popular then because they had to be pedalled ceaselessly, or the riders would fall: they, being as symbols of action, did not permit of lounging or a little slumber. In the days of the first and second Madrids, athletics could not be contemplated; the corrida was supreme and solitary for Spanish "sport." Now there is an athletic movement.

There are many football clubs; there is a national cup compet.i.tion and the King has given the cup. Still the corrida flourishes, but it is threatened. In the new movement for the third Madrid there are social clubs such as we have in London. There is an inclination for strong, healthy sport, and the King encourages it with all his royal might and influence. Don Alfonso has been the good leader of the royal game in Spain. The main point is that golf in these days is a token of a healthier disposition and a new progress, and it is a strong influence upon character. In the old Spain such a sport as this was quite impossible; now it grows, and, to me as one who has considered the birth and rise of golf in many countries, the case of Spain is deeply interesting. When I went there I remembered what some of the thoughtful and candid Americans had said about this game exerting a needed and subtle influence upon their own national character. It is such influences that are needed in Spain, and I shall go again among the Madrilenos to see this one in the working. Already they have courses, nice and tolerable, in Barcelona, Bilbao, and many other provincial places. When I went to San Sebastian, one of the most beautiful and fully equipped seaside resorts in the whole world, the munic.i.p.al authorities a.s.sured me that they felt a fear that the bull-fights were becoming a doubtful attraction to foreign visitors, and they were giving their attention to the establishment of a munic.i.p.al golf course. It will be the first munic.i.p.al golf course on the continent of Europe.

Let me plunge to my revelation and state that Madrid, in New Castile, land of the toreador, country where so much of the Middle Ages does yet survive, where games till lately have been almost unknown, this Madrid comes now to be possessed of such a first-cla.s.s course as might be the envy of many a British seaside resort. While I lingered in the city Senor Fabricio de Potestad, one of the most active members of the general committee of the Madrid Golf Club, and of its green committee too, was a kind counsellor and guide. Just as might happen at home, while at breakfast at the Ritz there came to me notice that the car was waiting. Senor de Potestad, his clubs and mine inside the car, had the golfer's expectancy upon a genial Spanish countenance, rubbed hands, and declared it was a fine day for the game. We sped away from the Prado, and considered handicaps and odds as golfers must. But first we went for object lessons in the progress of Spanish golf. Three or four miles out we reached the hippodrome where some nine years back the game was born.

Don Alfonso had been learning golf in England; he had striven with it in a left-handed way while he wooed a British princess in the Isle of Wight, and he gave a Spanish decoration then to the professional who showed him how to hold his hands and where to put his feet. Then nine simple stupid little holes were laid out in this hippodrome, and there they still remain as relics of the earliest age in the golf history of this country, the uncultured time when the ball was missed, the days when a hole in nine might have been considered good and a seven enough to make the soul of a great grandee quiver with a new found joy. Three Spaniards stood forward with the King as the pioneers of Spanish golf, and still they are among its leaders. There was a great sportsman, the Duke of Alva, president of the club; there was the Marquis de Santa Cruz, and there was the Senor Pedro Caro, perhaps the only Spanish golfer of early times besides Don Alfonso himself who learned his strokes and swings in England, where he was schooled, and who with the Count de la Cimera and the Count Cuevas de Vera, cousin of my guide, is one of the three best players of Spain. Two of them are Spanish scratch, and the Count de la Cimera lately achieved the distinction of being the first of his land to rise to the eminence of plus one. Thus you may perceive that the golf of Spain is helped by the best people, and that is not because it is fas.h.i.+onable, and it is not only because the King has shown a liking for it, but because the Spaniards have found in it a quick fascination, an awakening pastime, such a strong diversion from the often heavy life of their country as they had not imagined. Had you seen, as I did, the Duke of Aliaga bunkered one afternoon before a high steep cliff in front of the eighteenth green on the second oldest course of Madrid; had you seen him pensive as he felt the extraneous sorrows of a Spanish n.o.bleman of riches and high station; had you seen the gleam of gladness in two Spanish eyes when the ball was heaved somehow to the top in one (the G.o.ds may know how he managed it; but we said to him that it was a splendid shot, and I do believe it was!) you would not doubt that golf was meant for Spain as these people declare it was--"the thing of all others that we needed," so they say.

This second oldest course, the "old course" as they begin to call it now, marks the transition period of Spanish golf. It is not the primeval course of the hippodrome, but one which was made in 1907 at a place apart and a little farther along the road. The land is worth a million and three-quarters of pesetas now when Madrid has become so much bigger than it was, and the course falls within the city zone; and as the players became educated they yearned for something better, and they moved again. But fond memories will cling for long enough to this old course of Spain; with a little help from fancy one may look upon it even now as a kind of old Blackheath of Spanish golf. There is a small club-house with dining-room, dressing-rooms and all complete, in quite the English way, on a spot of rising ground, and from the verandah we may look over a part of the course, with a short hole to begin with and some curious bunkering here and there, with a highly modern attempt to adopt the system of humps-and-hollows bunkering that has been so well established on inland courses at home. Somehow one gathers the impression that the Spaniards have been striving all the time towards some kind of indistinct ideal, realising that the sport they had discovered was a great one and trying to improve their practice of it.

And I recall that it was J. H. Taylor, the old designer, the old constructor, the quintuple champion, who was pioneer in the planning of courses in Madrid, and he laid out this one of eighteen holes very well for the early Spanish golfers.

One of the curiosities of the course is the putting green at the eleventh hole, which is quite round and is surrounded by an evenly shaped earthen rampart. On seeing it for the first time the average Englishman observes to the Spaniard who is with him, "How like a bull-ring!" The remark is justifiable and it seems appropriate; but the Spanish gentleman has heard it many times. Playing the bull-ring hole is a satisfying experience, most exceedingly contenting. We play what we shall consider a perfect approach shot to our Plaza de Toros hole. The ball is pitched into the ring just over the near side of the barricade.

A big bound and it is by the hole side, a smaller skip and it is away to the other side of the circle, and then there is one nervous little jump up towards that enclosing height. The perplexed ball seems in our fancy to claw up the steep slope, which is about four or five feet high; it nearly reaches the top. We, the player, feel a little pitter-patter in the heart. Is that little white bull of a ball of ours going to get over the fence and spoil the thing? It should not; we pitched him as nicely as human skill could ever pitch. He is vicious; but he is spent. The gay life which he had at the beginning of the stroke is flickering out. He cannot escape. Our cuadrilla of one, the little Spanish lad with the bag of clubs, advances and hands the putter, taking back the mas.h.i.+e which has done its business. The ball comes trickling back from the bank--back and back, and it comes on to within some seven or eight feet of the side of the hole. Then it falters and stops, done for. Meanwhile there is another white bull of a ball only four feet away; this also had come back from the bank, but a little more. I, as an espada, take my steel putter for the finis.h.i.+ng touch. I see the line, I have the momentary hesitation, the nerves are tightened, and then I make the stroke, and happily it is a good one. The ball has gone down. In truth both b.a.l.l.s go down, and "Four, senor!" and "Four--a half, _amigo_!" and the play to the eleventh hole of old Madrid is done. Even if there is a slope to the hole and there is the bull-ring rampart round it, we say that a four at this piece of golf is good. We also argue out that bull-ring with our consciences. I have seen nothing like it. It was clearly the object of those who made it to pen the ball up towards the hole, to make the golf a little easier, for it was found to be hard enough (as you and I have found it hard enough at home) to catch the ball and keep it and lead it to its hole. This hole, the rampart, seems to be a concession to the frail humanity of man. Conscience murmurs chidingly, "You know, you English golfer, that you should never have been so near to that Spanish pin! You should have been bunkered, my friend, perhaps badly bunkered, beyond the green!" But being in Spain, and doing as Spaniards do, we are a little independent, have a freedom of idea, and with some peevishness of manner, an arrogance, a way as of telling conscience to attend its other business and get back to London--where in some places they do place bunkers and hills upon the greens to keep the golfer, as it seems, from holing out at all--I retort, "I played a good shot anyhow; I only just pitched over the bull-ring fence; I pitched the ball up high and let it drop straight down, and cut every leg from it that it ever had.

No man could do better with the ground so hard. It was right that the ball should come back."

I shall hope that with their attachment to a new love that is so beautiful and good, the Spaniards will not give up their old course here that has served them faithfully and brought on their game. Besides, it is a course that is pretty in its situation. Away beyond, many miles away, are those snow-topped Guadarrama Mountains, fine rough things.

Though it was March, and untruths are told about the wickedness of the Spanish climate, we lunched with Senora Elena de Potestad in the open outside the club-house in warm suns.h.i.+ne glistening on a pretty scene.

Senora Elena is quite the best lady golfer of Spain; but writing the truth as she told it, the charming wife of my friend is not Spanish, but is a Russian lady from Khieff. I suspect her of being the best Russian lady golfer and the best Spanish too; it is curious. She has done the first nine holes here at Madrid in something less than bogey. Next to her on the champions.h.i.+p list is the Marquesa de Alamoncid de los Oteros, six strokes behind. Queen Victoria sometimes plays, and I have seen that extremely popular lady of Spain, the Infanta Isabella, golfing here with the professional and a maid of honour. The game is doing well with the ladies of the peninsula; they like it. I had a gentle argument with the Senora Elena, who seemed a little doubtful whether golf were quite a ladies' game, for all her own skill and love for it. She pleaded the other feminine occupations and interests, even the distractions, and the difficulty of surrendering to the tyranny of golf. In her view it seemed to be of the ladies' life a thing apart, while we have known it to be a man's complete existence.

As our speedy car skimmed the road on the way back to Madrid that night, Senor Fabricio would talk of the good influence of the game, and the special benefits that it might and did confer upon his hopeful countrymen. "Twelve years ago," he reflected, "I might meet all my friends at the corrida. All were for the bull fight--and the ladies too.

But now--if I went myself, as I do not--I should see none. They are all for golf. At my club in Madrid we say one to another about the time of lunch, 'Do you go to golf this afternoon?' It used to be, 'I suppose you go to the corrida, eh?'" One thinks and wonders.

I took tea in the lounge at the Ritz, and gossiped with a man who had just come along from Portugal and told me of some exciting times they had been having there. They had decided on having more golf, and were about to make a munic.i.p.al matter of it near Lisbon. Hitherto, as I knew, they had had only one golf course in the whole country, and that was at a place called Espinho, some eleven miles out from Oporto, and it was said that bulls intended for the fights were fed up there and did their roaming exercise on this course. It is not a comfortable idea. The new course is out at Belem on the banks of the Tagus near to Lisbon, and this is the exact place at which Vasco de Gama landed on returning from his greatest voyage of discovery. It is an eighteen-holes course; it has been well planned; and much money is being spent on it. The Portuguese having started a new form of government and begun a new national life--as they hope--have come quickly to the conclusion that they need golf and much of it, for already a second course for Lisbon is being arranged, and there are to be others in different parts of the country.

If King Manoel goes back, he will be prepared for them, for he has cultivated a fair game at Richmond.