Part 38 (1/2)
”Give us a kiss, Jack!”
Pip complied, with a satisfactory thoroughness that elicited a humorous expostulation from the only porter, who was pa.s.sing by.
”Good-bye!” he said. ”You'll be all right when you get to King's Cross.”
Which cryptic remark was the last he ever addressed to the Princ.i.p.al Boy, for the train glided out of the station, and he never saw her again.
Before leaving the station Pip despatched the following telegram:--
_Lister, Crown Theatre, Strand, London._
Arriving King's Cross 7.30. Can you meet me? Want help badly.
LOTTIE.
The following morning, having discarded his chauffeur's attire and departed from Broadoak Manor, after listening to an eloquent and most enjoyable valedictory address from its tenant, Pip returned to London.
At the end of a highly satisfactory interview with the Gresleys he turned his steps in the direction of the Oxford and Cambridge Club, which he had not entered for three years.
He made himself known to those in authority, and announced that he had now returned from ”abroad.” He then asked if there was any letter for ”Armstrong,” which, he explained rather lamely, had been sent him under that name, ”by mistake.”
Yes, there was a note left by a messenger that afternoon. He opened it.
It contained a single line--
All's well; and we thank you--_both_ of us!
LOTTIE LISTER.
BOOK THREE
THE JOURNEY'S END
CHAPTER X
AN ANCIENT GAME
I
SOMEWHERE on the east coast of Scotland lie the famous Links of Eric.
The district has not changed much, to all seeming, during the last thousand years--or ten thousand, for that matter. Then, as now, the links were a sandy waste, a wilderness of whin, sand, and bent, the home of countless scuttling rabbits and plaintive peewits. Later, perhaps, when William the Conqueror was creating a disturbance in the southern parts of remote England, a tiny fis.h.i.+ng town began to grow up round the little harbour reluctantly yielded by the tall red cliffs to the eternal industry of the ocean, and the adjoining strip of low-lying sand-dunes acquired the t.i.tle that it now bears, derived, it is said, from the name of the Norse king who once landed on this, the only piece of accessible sh.o.r.e for miles, and was there slain, after a b.l.o.o.d.y battle with the neighbouring lord and his retainers. The town itself will have none of these barbaric t.i.tles, but exists smugly and contentedly as Port Allan.
But it was through her little-valued links that Port Allan achieved fame. Two hundred years ago a new minister came from St. Andrew's, and introduced the men of Port Allan to a game called Golf. They took to it in their deliberate, methodical fas.h.i.+on, and laid out a little course on the hitherto neglected Links of Eric. Thither they repaired on fine summer evenings, carrying queer long-nosed wooden clubs and feather-stuffed b.a.l.l.s. The golfing minister went the way of all flesh, and his compeers with him, but the golf endured. Generations of slow-moving fisher-folk, ecclesiastical luminaries, and holiday-making scholars--for the fame of the links brought visitors from so great a distance as a hundred miles--all played round the links in their day, recking nothing of Medal Scores, Colonel Bogey, the Schenectady putter, or other modern excrescences. They used their long-nosed wooden clubs to some purpose, and though they did not drive the feather-stuffed ball very far they drove it very straight. Once the great Allan Robertson visited Port Allan. He p.r.o.nounced favourably on the course, and a word from Allan Robertson in those days was as good as a descriptive article in ”Golf Ill.u.s.trated” in these. And so for many years the Links of Eric grew steadily in favour with golfers.
But one day--one momentous day--the men of England came to the conclusion that golf was the one and only game worth playing, and Scotland the one and only place to play it in. Accordingly, with that spontaneous readiness to suit the action to the word that has ever been the characteristic of an Empire-making race, they migrated with their wives and families across the Border, and proceeded to hew divots from the face of Scotland with an eagerness and _bonhomie_ which was equalled only by the unanimity with which they forbore to replace them. Golf, which had existed for centuries as a sort of religious ceremony, to be cultivated by its votaries in reverent silence and at a strictly processional pace, suddenly became a species of bank-holiday picnic; and those ancient and highly respectable burghs which fostered the game in especial purity were converted into rather _recherche_ editions of Hampstead Heath.
However unpleasant this foray might be for the Scottish golfer, it presented certain compensating features to the Scottish railways and hotel-proprietors. Of remote villages, which had formerly figured in the traffic returns as occasional yielders of a truck-load of fish, there now appeared highly-tinted pictures, with the Company's name at the top and a list of trains at the bottom. The hotel proprietors, on their part, quickly realising that to the average Englishman a golf-course consists of any tract of land in Scotland plentifully endowed with rabbit-holes, hastily staked out a claim on the nearest collection of sand-hills, and advertised to all and sundry that visitors to their hotel would be permitted, for a consideration, to play golf over the celebrated links of so-and-so, ”adjoining the hotel.”