Chester Meredith, a golfer of considerable vocabulary, falls for Felicia Blakeney. He learns from the Oldest Member that he was at school with her brother, a lad he regularly kicked. But the brother is in India, so Chester can pretend they were friends, and he can curb his language.
Yet somehow this does not impress Felicia who feels Chester is shallow about golf. Then in a final round together, Chester has a chance to beat the course record ...
| The Oldest Member | narrator and advisor |
| Chester Meredith | in love with |
| Felicia Blakeney | a young woman |
| The Wrecking Crew | four golfers |
First published 7 July 1923 in the Saturday Evening Post (US).
Also published May 1924 in the Strand magazine.
Bisques
- free strokes to be taken at any time in a round. See also my notes on golf for the terms, clubs etc used in this story.
Gadarene swine
- see Mark: Chapter 5, Verse 13.
Purity League
- name adopted by many groups attempting to impose their (usually narrow) moral views on others.
'She is the Alligator's Adam's apple.'
- a nonsense phrase like 'the bees' knees' meaning excellent, the best. This one is probably invented by PG.
'... less than the dust beneath his chariot-wheels.
- Laurence Hope, The Garden of Kama.
'... cramping Chester's style.'
- preventing him acting freely or naturally.
Holy Grail
- any object of veneration and aspiration. Supposedly the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper, it was the subject of quests by the Arthurian Knights of legend.
George Duncan
- a Scottish golfer, born 1883, won the British Open in 1920.
'I could see that he was the master of his fate and the captain of his soul.'
- William Ernest Henley, Invictus.
'... over the whatnot on to the Chesterfield.'
- a whatnot is a display stand for small objects; a Chesterfield is a sofa with arms and back of the same height and curved outwards at the top.
Coal scuttle
- a container for coal to supply a domestic fire (a specially shaped bucket).
Browning's 'Last Ride Together'
- a poem by Robert Browning, The Last Ride Together.
'Yes, by Vardon ...'
- Harry Vardon (1887-1937), top English golfer, six times winner of the Open and once of the US Open.
Soames Forsyte
- a character in John Galsworthy's set of novels known collectively as The Forsyte Saga. Soames treated his wife like property.
Sir Willoughby Patterne
- a character in The Egoist by George Meredith in which the heroine tries to free herself from an unwanted engagement.
Ray and Taylor
- Edward 'Ted' Ray (1877-1943), English golfer, winner of US and British Opens and John Henry Taylor (1871-1963), English golfer, five times Open champion and co-founder of the British PGA.
First Grave-Digger
- here used to describe a playing action, probably taking very large divots, but the name is from a character in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1.
The Man with the Hoe
- from the 1899 poem by Edwin Markham The Man with a Hoe inspired by an 1863 painting by Jean-François Millet L'Homme à la houe. The first lines of the poem are:
Old Father Time
- the personification of time, a favourite character at the New Year.
Consul, the Almost-Human
- possibly referring to a chimpanzee performing on the British stage in the 1900s, named 'Consul, the performing ape' or 'Consul the chimp' and billed as 'Almost Human'. (The name might originate earlier.)
'The spectacle of a flubber flubbing ahead of us ...'
- to flub is to botch or blunder.