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I wasna quite sae cramped for room and space to breathe as if I'd lived in the West End in a flat, maybe, like so many of my friends of the stage. But I always missed the glen, and I was always dreaming of going back to Scotland, when the time came. It was then I first began to play the gowf. Ye mind what I told ye o' my first game, wi' Mackenzie Murdoch?
At first, in the earlier stages of his initiation, Joel was often discouraged, whereupon West was wont to repeat the famous reply of the old St. Andrews player to the college professor, who did not understand why, when he could teach Latin and Greek, he failed so dismally at golf. "Ay, I ken well ye can teach the Latin and Greek," said the veteran, "but it takes brains, mon, to play the gowf!"
You nearly hit his serene graciousness the King!" "Mphm!" said the bearded man, nonchalantly, and began to wave his hoe mystically over another stone. Into the King's careworn face there had crept a look of interest, almost of excitement. "What god does he hope to propitiate by these rites?" he asked. "The deity, I learn from your Majesty's admiral is called Gowf." "Gowf? Gowf?"
King Merolchazzar uttered a loud cry. "By Tom, the son of Morris! Can this truly be so? What is thy handicap?" The Princess stared at him, wide-eyed. "Truly this is a miracle! Art thou also a worshipper of the great Gowf?" "Am I!" cried the King. "Am I!" He broke off. "Listen!" From the minstrels' room high up in the palace there came the sound of singing.
I never got tae be much more o' a hand than I was then, nae matter hoo much I played the game. I'm a gude Scot, but I'm thinkin' I didna tak' up gowf early enough in life. But I liked to play the game while I was living in London. For ane thing it reminded me of hame; for another, it gie'd me a chance to get mair exercise than I would ha done otherwise. In London ye canna walk aboot much.
We hesitated, but our landlady, a decent body, came in, and made light of our doots. "Hoots, lads," she said. "A'body plays gowf nooadays. I'll gie ye the lend of some of our Jamie's clubs, and it's no way at a' to the links," Secretly I had nae doot o' my bein' able to hit a little wee ball like them we'd found so far as was needful.
Not that in this book there's any great plan; it's just as if we were speerin' together. But one thing puts me in mind o' another. And it so happened that that gay morn at Montrose when Mac and I tried our hands at the gowf brought me in touch with another and very different experience. Ye'll mind I've talked a bit already of them that work and those they work for.
King Merolchazzar ran over in his mind the muster-roll of the gods of Oom. There were sixty-seven of them, but Gowf was not of their number. "It is a strange religion," he murmured. "A strange religion, indeed. But, by Belus, distinctly attractive. I have an idea that Oom could do with a religion like that. It has a zip to it. A sort of fascination, if you know what I mean.
He might be a child in worldly matters, said the High Priest, but if the King supposed that he did not know the difference between home-grown domestic and frozen imported foreign, it was time his Majesty was disabused of the idea. If, on top of this little unpleasantness, King Merolchazzar were to become an adherent of this new Gowf, the Vizier did not know what might not happen.
I mind that in Montrose, when we woke up one morning after the most successful concert we had ever given, and so were feeling very extra special, we found a couple o' gowf balls lyin' around in our diggings. "What do ye say tae a game, Mac?" I asked him. "I'm no sae glide a player, Harry," he said, a bit dubiously. For once in a way I was honest, and admitted that I'd never played at all.
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