The Last Drive and Other Stories

From there it was an easy mashie approach to the green, on which Mr. Innes’s ball was already lying eight feet from the pin. Mr. Jellie holed out in two putts, and his opponent did the same.

“Eight,” said Mr. Jellie.

“Four,” said Mr. Innes.

“That’s the match,” the other returned. “Better than I did with Tom Hudson yesterday. He ended it on the twelfth green. Come on, Nibbie.”

Fifteen minutes later, as the two golfers passed down the piazza of the Grassview Country Club house on their way to the nineteenth hole, Mr. Jellie called out to Mac Donaldson, the club professional, who was loitering about:

“Oh, Mac! Give Mr. Innes a box of balls and charge it to me.”

Which explains why so poor a golfer as Aloysius Jellie never experienced any difficulty in getting a match. There was every reason why he should have been the most unpopular member of the Grassview Country Club. His average score for the eighteen holes was 121; he had once made a 98 and had framed the score card and hung it in the room which he kept at the club house the year round. He cut up turf frightfully; he was a strong man and his divots always flew so far away that no caddie could ever find them again. He refused to play in foursomes, and he was outspoken in his criticism of a bad shot, whenever and by whomsoever made.

Worst of all, he was the owner of Nibbie. Where the dog got the name of Nibbie was Mr. Jellie’s secret, but it was openly asserted by other members of the club that it was a nickname, or term of endearment, derived from “niblick.” Whoever took Mr. Jellie on for a match was forced to deduct beforehand a considerable amount of the pleasure and profit of the encounter by discounting the presence of Nibbie. He was always at his master’s heels, and he was the only serious critic of his master’s play. If Mr. Jellie topped his drive or missed a two-footer Nibbie howled his disapproval and dismay. A long iron or brassie over a hazard, or a soaring recovery from a sandpit, or the holing of a 30 foot putt, was the signal for joyous barks and caperings. But he was always careful to indulge in none of these noisy demonstrations while his master’s opponent was addressing the ball; he appeared to know the etiquette as well as the science of the game. It was wonderful the way his actions and feelings responded to the movements of the little white sphere.

“That dog,” said Mac Donaldson, the club pro, one day, “is Scotch. I don’t know what kinds of a dog it is, but it’s Scotch for sure. I never saw such an understanding of the game in any animal whatever, unless it was Tom Ferguson’s cow who lay down on Sandy MacRae’s ball so he couldn’t find it, and Tom won the hole. It’s a great dog, and I could name some humans he could give lessons to.”

But it is certain that the other club members would never have stood for the ubiquitous Nibbie, with his eternal howlings and barkings, if they had not been so desirous to avoid offending Mr. Jellie; for Mr. Jellie, score 121, was always willing to play anyone on even terms for a box of balls or a set of clubs or a ten spot. He never won. The numbers of balls and mashies and drivers and putters he paid for every month was appalling. But he always refused to take a handicap.

“I am a strong and fairly intelligent man,” he would say, “and I ought to be able to play golf as well as anyone. I refuse to baby myself with a handicap. Make it a ball a hole.”

Then he would make the first in 9, and would probably be 61 at the turn. He usually took his defeats gracefully, but now and then after an unusually bad round he would become morose and refuse absolutely to utter a word. He was also known to lose his temper occasionally; once he had taken his bag of clubs and thrown them into the lake — the water hazard on the eleventh hole — and was prevented just in time from throwing his caddie in after them. It was truly pitiful, the earnest and determined manner in which he strove day after day to improve his game, and the sustained horror of his score.

Then came Nibbie’s tragic end. Late one Saturday afternoon in May, there was gathered at the nineteenth hole a representative group of the members of the Grassview Country Club. Marsfield, the Egyptologist, was there, with his soft beard and sleepy, studious eyes; Innes and Fraser, lawyers; Huntington, Princeton professor; and several New York bankers and business men. They had just come in from the links; the day was hot and dry and they were emptying many tall glasses in which the cracked ice clinked.

They were talking, of course, of Scores and Reasons Why, otherwise known as Alibis. Fraser was explaining that the bite of a mosquito while he was addressing the ball had cost him the fourteenth hole and probably the match (though he had finished four down); Marsfield, the Egyptologist, was telling of a 20 foot putt that went absolutely in the hole and then bounced out again; Innes was making sarcastic and pointed remarks concerning the incredible luck of Huntington, who had beaten him 2 and 1.