ABOUT THE PYRENEES, AND THE CHARMS OF GOLF AT BIARRITZ AND PAU, WITH
POSSIBILITIES FOR GREAT ADVENTURE.
It is not a bad thing to be at the Gare d'Orsay in Paris on a night in
early February, seeing a porter attach to one's baggage a scarlet label
with the words "Pyrenees--_Cote d'Argent_" printed diagonally across it
on a bright yellow band. It indicates a journey southwards to the sun,
to a corner of the Bay of Biscay where there are Biarritz and St.
Jean-de-Luz and Pau, and the Pyrenees queening over all. Golf was played
in these parts some ages back; indeed it was here that the foundations
of continental winter golf were laid long before any stir was made
elsewhere. It is not always warm at Biarritz; often it is windy;
sometimes it is very cold; but generally it is genial and pleasant,
constantly sunny, and there is something about the place that conduces
to a strong and healthy sporting feeling. It is a matter of taste. I am
not here to write down that from the golfing point of view it is either
better or worse than the Riviera. They are not the same. They have bad
holes at each, and some good ones at both. Biarritz, which is one of the
most popular golfing winter resorts in existence and retains its great
popularity in spite of its rivals (really when I was there lately in the
month of February they told me they had already taken L700 in fees that
month, though there was then still a week to go), has some holes which,
as we think upon them at home in England, seem quite shockingly bad.
They are not so much bad as nearly improper. And yet when we are at
Biarritz we do love these holes, as do the great players without
exception, and as lief would we suggest the filling up of the Cardinal
bunker at Prestwick and the flattening of that range of Himalayas at the
same glorious golfing place as touch an inch of the face of the Cliff
hole at Biarritz. The course has the gravest faults, but it is very
enjoyable to play upon in February, and in the winds that blow there one
needs to be playing uncommonly well to get round in figures reasonably
low. On the other hand, the golf at Nivelle by St. Jean-de-Luz and Pau
is among the winter's best in Europe. There is indeed much difference
between the coast of silver and the coast of blue, and the contrast
comes out strongly in the golf. There is less of music and flowers and
softness of life, less languor at Biarritz than at Cannes and Nice and
other Riviera places. The games are everything, and the easy strolls and
the social dalliances are much less. In the morning we seldom see the
young ladies in fine costumes bought in Paris. They flit fast about the
streets and along up the Avenue Edouard VII. in short skirts and the
simplest _semi-neglige_ dress, each with a brightly coloured
jersey-jacket of a very distinctive colour--a brick red, a sulphur
yellow, a cobalt blue, something that does not hide itself. Every one is
keen and openly admits it. And the golf club beyond the lighthouse is a
great institution, and it is splendidly governed by Mr. W. M. Corrie,
the honorary secretary.
Biarritz golf is distinctly peculiar. The course is a short one; it
offers a generous continental supply of holes that can be reached with a
good shot from the tee (but they must be good and well-directed shots,
for the guards of the greens are exacting), and the turf and putting
greens are as good as one has any right to expect them to be in the
south of France. These are generalities. Now the course, like the old
Gaul of Caesar, is in three parts. We begin the play and go on for some
seven holes on a flat tableland; then we plunge down over the cliffs to
the level of the sea, come up again to the tableland at the thirteenth
hole, and so finish on the level. One may leave the first part of the
play out of consideration. It is neat, but one often feels the desire to
be "getting down below," where there is better sport and much scope for
skill and enterprise. At last we come to a teeing ground on the edge of
the steep white cliff which is some hundred and thirty feet in height.
It is a drive-and-iron hole that is before us, and quite a pretty thing,
a hole that for feature and natural beauty it would not be easy to
improve upon. To a part of the underland, where the drive must be
placed, has been given the name of "Chambre d'Amour," and tales for
sorrow and weeping are told of it, of lovers being caught by the tide
and dying there. The green is away in a corner of the course, tucked up
in the shadow of a towering lighthouse, and the bounding waves of Biscay
come rolling almost to its very edge. If we are not convinced that it is
technically perfect, this is at all events a charming hole, one of the
most picturesque we can find in France, At the lighthouse we turn about,
play some plainer things along the level of the sea, and then come to a
piece of golf which is famous all over the world. The ascent to the
higher surface has to be made at the thirteenth, and it is done at what
is known to every one as the Cliff hole.
Nearly all who have never even seen it have heard of the Cliff hole of
Biarritz, have studied pictures of it, and speculated upon its peculiar
difficulties. No hole on the continent of Europe has nearly such a
reputation; indeed, it is perhaps the only one with a special celebrity.
I have been asked questions about it in America. I have seen and played
it, examined it thoroughly, and thought it out. It is a queer thing,
quite different from any other hole I know. It needs such a shot to play
it properly as is not demanded elsewhere. And yet it requires absolute
skill, the proper shot must be played and played thoroughly well, and it
is practically impossible to fluke it. Why, then, should this not be
reckoned a good golfing hole? The circumstances are these: The teeing
ground is on the lower level, and it is only some fifty yards from the
base of the cliff. The ground in between is rough and stony. The cliff
here is about forty yards in height, and, if not vertical in the face,
bulges outwards frowningly at the top, while a thin stream of water
trickling down at one side seems to add a little more to the
fearsomeness of the thing. At the top edge of the cliff there is grassy
ground sloping quickly upwards for about a dozen yards until a line of
wire is reached, and there the green begins. The fact that the green
(which is tolerably large and in two parts, an upper and a lower) then
slopes downwards away from the player does not make matters easier.
Beyond it is another precipice, but wire netting is there to save the
ball from this, and there is some wooden palisading to keep it out of
trouble on the left. Then there is a local rule saying that if the ball
reaches the top of the cliff, but does not pass the wire, it must be
teed again, with loss of distance only, the man not being allowed to
play it from the tee side of the wire. (He would do so at peril of
toppling over the cliff!) But all these things do not make this awful
hole much easier in the play. One day I sat on the edge of the cliff and
watched the people playing it, and the ball that reached the green and
stayed there was a rarity. It can be done. Braid and Taylor and Vardon
would do it all the time, and it is no trick shot that is wanted. You
might hit hard at the ground in front of the wire and make the ball
trickle on, but that would call for more than human accuracy. Or you
might sky your ball up to the heavens and let it fall straight down on
to the green, and that would be superb. But champion Taylor would take
his mashie and play, perhaps, some fifteen yards above the cliff with
all the cut that he could put upon the ball, and then he would be
putting for a two. A difficult hole follows, but after that the work is
easier.
* * * * *
With a pair of prism glasses looking Spainwards to the left, we may just
discern the quaint and quiet little town of St. Jean-de-Luz. It is one
of the best of the winter places for golf, for health and sunshine, and
no nonsense. The little town is thoroughly Basque, and the player in his
hours away from the game will have a good satisfaction in wandering
about it and peering into such places as the old thirteenth-century
church which is a perfect specimen of the religious architecture of the
Basques, and such a thing in churches as you would not see elsewhere. It
was here that Louis XIV. came for his wedding two and a half centuries
back. And in this locality we have three courses to play upon--three!
There is the old one of St. Barbe, which is a nine-holes affair, and has
one hole--the third--called the "Chasm," which is a very strong piece of
golf, for the drive is over a deep fissure in the rocks, with the sea
running in below. St. Barbe is the second oldest course in France--Pau
being the oldest--and there are some fears, perhaps exaggerated, that it
may not be in existence for many years more. Another of the three is the
course of the St. Jean-de-Luz club at Chalet du Lac, and this also is
one of nine holes. Until a little while since there were twelve, but
then three were captured by the terrible builders, who seem to oppress
the golfers all over the world; but the club received some compensation
in having a new and neat little club-house erected for them at the
landlord's expense. And here also they make the claim that "the scenery
surrounding the course is probably the finest to be obtained from any
course in Europe." Certainly it is very good. The nine holes are very
tolerable in golfing quality. Here and there the driving must be very
straight. A pull, for instance, at the third, will deliver the unhappy
ball to the Bay of Biscay, and the sea will bang it about the rocks for
a long time after. At the fifth, again, one must respect the ocean when
approaching. Generally, however, the holes are somewhat easy, and do not
worry so much as to hinder appreciation of the surrounding views, which
are indeed magnificent. Out one way is the grand panorama of the
snow-topped Pyrenees, and the light and colour effects upon them change
at nearly every hour throughout the day. Below is the pretty harbour and
town of St. Jean-de-Luz. Away to the west is the great expanse of the
Atlantic, framed here at the course with a wildly rocky coast, and up
along to the north is a rough fringe of shore, the innermost corner of
the Bay of Biscay, which leads the eyes out to the most distant point,
where a cluster of buildings gleams in the sunlight, and the tall, white
lighthouse beyond them indicates that the place is Biarritz.
But Nivelle, the course that rises up from the bank of the broad river
of that name, is the chief course of the group and quite a wonder of
golfing France. When I first saw it and inquired upon its origin I felt
that here was something which was undoubtedly among the best in Europe,
and yet only five or six years ago all the land, except a small piece
which is occupied by two of the eighteen holes, was bare soil on which
cabbages, turnips, and other edibles were being grown. Listen to the
story of the creation of Nivelle. One day Mr. Frank Jacobs, the
secretary of the St. Jean-de-Luz Club, and a Spanish doctor, went
exploring the country round, and they hastened to Count O'Byrne to tell
him that there was ground on the banks of the stream Nivelle which
looked to have the possibilities of such a full-sized golf course as was
needed then. He agreed with them. They were men of keen discernment; for
even then while a little of that land was pasture the rest was under
cabbages and other growths. It was ascertained that a hundred and sixty
acres could be bought for six thousand pounds, but such a sum of money
was not at hand. Count O'Byrne told the local hotel-keepers the truth
that unless there was a first-class golf course there St. Jean-de-Luz
would lose in the race for winter popularity, and he asked them to
guarantee the money in the first place, a company to relieve them
afterwards. They did so accordingly, and the land was secured; but the
farmers could not be turned off at once, and some time was lost thereby.
When they came to make the course they followed an interesting and, as
we would think, an extraordinary procedure. The farmers, recovering from
their grief and resentment, gave up to the incoming golfers a priceless
secret. They said that if they would leave the bare land alone to look
after itself it would from its own sources grow for them the most
beautiful grass for their purposes that they could ever dream of on the
happiest summer's night. So the Count and his comrades gathered their
men about them, the land was raked and smoothed out, and then they
borrowed the town roller, being the heaviest thing of the kind in the
district, to flatten it down. And so they left it and waited. Sure
enough up came the tender blades of grass, and in a season there was a
thick coating there, fine, beautiful turf, and I can answer for it that
it is nice to the touch of the feet and excellent for the game. The
climate in these parts is most times a little moist and better for the
production and preservation of golfing turf than that of the Riviera.
The hotel-keepers were soon relieved of the full responsibility by a
company floated for ten thousand pounds, the capital afterwards being
increased to twelve thousand, but they were so much enamoured of the
project, believed in it so utterly, that they and the tradesmen took up
as many shares as they could get. But some great personal driving force
was needed, and it was found. A Dundee gentleman, a keen golfer and a
great lover of this sweet spot in France, Mr. W. R. Sharp, came forward
and increased his commanding interest in the club and the course, and he
has done wonders for them. That he is president of the club is a good
thing for the club. Now there is a charming club-house; Arnaud Massy,
once open champion, has a pretty villa for himself close by, some
hundred and forty golfers are playing on the course at the busy
time--and play goes on all through the year--and only four years after
the course was opened the company was able to pay a dividend. So I say
that this is a miracle of golf.
Of course, the story is not complete at this. Fine turf and a prosperous
club do not necessarily make good holes. But St. Jean-de-Luz has holes
as good as most in Europe. They would even be good on a first-class
inland course in Britain. They are, thanks to the broad undulations of
the land, good in character. The round is opened with a fine two-shotter
of a full four hundred yards, with an incline against the player from
the tee. The drive must be properly placed, and that is the case nearly
all the way round. The second is a pretty short hole; the third presents
a fearsome drive across a yawning quarry; at the fourth the return over
it is made in the progress to the longest hole, one of five hundred and
fifty yards, and so on to the end, some of the middle holes being very
good, the seventeenth a fine full one-shot hole, and a good drive and
iron of three hundred and eighty yards downhill to terminate. The view
from the seventeenth and eighteenth tees, the town of St. Jean-de-Luz
shining in the sun, the Nivelle pressing itself into it, and the pretty
harbour white-flaked with the waves, is peaceful and pleasant, and it
gives that sense of "going home" which one always likes to have when
playing the last holes of a round.
* * * * *
The game itself is not everything in the golfing life; it attaches other
occupations and diversions as necessities to itself which are all added
to the sum of "a day's golf" and make of it a thing of adventure and
time packed with variety of deed and thought. There is the meeting and
the parting; the lunch time and--everything! Chiefly there is the
journey, and has it been properly considered how golf and the car have
been linked together for a magnificent combination of sporting joy? In
the remembrances of every player there must be happy and stirring
episodes of motoring to and from the game. I have hundreds of them,
apart from all those countless pretty spins on the outskirts of London
town. Motoring for golf is an entirely different thing from motoring for
nothing.
The golf-motoring out from Paris to Fontainebleau and the other places
round the capital of France is unforgettable, and always will there be
clear cut in my mind the details of an expedition I once made to this
Nivelle, St. Jean-de-Luz, at a time when lounging golfless in the north
of Spain. It is not frequently that we go crossing frontiers in
motor-cars and having our clubs examined with wonderment and irritating
inquiry by officers of the _douane_ twice in the day, going and
returning, for just two rounds of the best of games. Nor is it a common
thing that in one day English golfers should speed along in a German car
from Spain to France and from France back again to Spain to play on a
splendid course with French and Scottish opponents--a considerable
mixture, if you like. I was idling at San Sebastian when the aforesaid
Mr. Sharp, with such thought and kindness as golfers display towards
each other, gave greeting and said, "Come to Nivelle again for a day of
play." But how? It was thirty miles away, and those trains, with changes
at Irun and Bayonne, would be most fearfully slow. "Bother the trains!"
said Sharp, "what are motors for, and particularly what may be my own
car for? Say the time when you will have risen and bathed and taken your
_cafe complet_, and it will have gone over to San Sebastian by then." So
it came about that it was waiting at the door of my hotel at eight
o'clock in the morning. Coats were buttoned up, pipes were lighted, and
when the first quarter was being chimed from the church steeples we were
already doing our thirty to forty miles an hour through the hilly
suburbs of San Sebastian. There are such hills in Spain and France
between San Sebastian and St. Jean-de-Luz as you can hardly think of;
but the speed dial showed that we flashed up some of them at thirty and
darted down the other side at sixty-five. Great hills to the left with
jagged skylines and strange formations as go by such names as "Camel's
back"; and such sweet vales with mountains framing them over on the
right! Hereabouts is some of the prettiest scenery of Spain, and I hope
not to forget how on that glorious morning the mists of the new day
dissolved in the warming sunlight, and the opalescent gossamer that had
clung about those peaks of Spain gave place to strong blues and greys,
and then to shimmering rose. At Irun, on the Spanish side of the
frontier, the car's papers had to be shown, then we bowled over the
dividing river, and at Hendaye the Frenchmen asked their questions and
did their looking into things. Then up a steep hill for the last, and in
a few minutes we were gliding down into St. Jean-de-Luz, all of this
heartening business done within the hour. At the end of the day, two
rounds done, when the sun was setting, I was swung again over those
Spanish tracks, and just when the light had completely failed and a few
spots of rain came beating upon the glass the sixty horses in the Benz
had done their duty. I opened the casement of my room at the Maria
Christina; soft sounds from the sea floated in, and soothed one to a
pensive mood.
* * * * *
The case of the golf of Pau is curious. Here, so far away from Britain,
far from Paris, four hours even from the coast at Biarritz, inland and
hugging closely to the Pyrenees, we have positively one of the oldest
golf clubs in the whole world. At the beginning there was Blackheath,
and then there were the Edinburgh Burgess, the Honourable Company, the
Royal and Ancient, Aberdeen, and two or three other clubs. Golf, growing
up, made its first leap across the seas to Calcutta in 1829, and
seventeen years afterwards it settled in Bombay. It first landed in
Europe in 1856, and was definitely and thoroughly established at Pau,
and has remained there flourishing ever since. This circumstance is the
more curious when we reflect that at that time there was no golf about
London except at Blackheath. The Royal Wimbledon and the London Scottish
Clubs were then unborn. Such great institutions now as the Royal
Liverpool Club at Hoylake and the Royal North Devon at Westward Ho! were
undreamt of, and a boy child might have been born to a golfer at Pau and
grown almost to middle age before the Royal St. George's Club at
Sandwich was begun. Scots, of course, were at the bottom of all this
pioneering work. The early Blackheath golfers were Scots; they carried
the game to Westward Ho!; they fostered it in India, and some of them
went off with it to Pau, where they liked to spend the winter in the
warm sunshine and in air which for sweet softness is almost
incomparable. Over the fireplace in the smoking-room of the club-house
is a picture of three of the founders of the club, who were still living
in 1890--Colonel Hutchinson, Major Pontifex, and Archbishop Sapte.
Another of those founders was Lieutenant-Colonel J. H. Lloyd-Anstruther.
Thus it happens that the charm of age and long settlement hang upon the
golf of Pau as they do upon no other golf club in Europe. Here, as not
elsewhere, you feel impressed upon you the dignity of golf, realise that
it is not a thing of to-day or of yesterday, and there are almost the
same deep pleasure and elevation of spirit and feeling when you come to
such a place after wandering among newnesses elsewhere as there are in
abiding for a while at St. Andrews or North Berwick in October, the
crowds then being gone away, after a course of southern golf of the most
recent preparation.
The club-house at Pau is of the kind you would expect to discover at a
good club of long and honourable standing up-country in England. The
attributes of age and tradition are to be found within it. On a wall is
a painting twelve feet long depicting the leading golfers of Pau in
1884, assembled on the course, and it was done by that Major Hopkins who
did such work, now celebrated, concerning the earliest golfers at
Westward Ho! gathered by their iron hut. In this picture of Pau there
are some eminent golfers shown, such as Colonel Kennard, not long since
dead, who was field-marshal of the Royal Blackheath Club; but the artist
leads the eye to the gaunt figure of Sir Victor Brooke, a tam-o'-shanter
on his head, addressing the ball on the tee in the way of a determined
man. Sir Victor, for four or five years captain of the club, was the
lion of the golf of Pau in those days, and when a match book, now lying
musty in a corner, was started his was the first entry that was made in
it. The course is beautifully situated on the Billere plain, a mile or
so to the west of the middle of the town; and in the unusual absence of
a friendly car it is a pleasant walk through a shaded avenue of lofty
beeches in the splendid Parc du Chateau.
One is a little puzzled to estimate the quality of this course, being
faced with a kind of semi-official printed statement that "Pau is
undoubtedly the best course on the continent" which to some degree is
intimidating. The turf, grown on a dark, sandy soil, is excellent, and
more than fifty years of play upon it have given it the firmness and
crispness that we miss elsewhere. The holes are of good length, well
arranged, and not easy. Yet pancake was never flatter than the central
part of the course, and with the very dullest and plainest kind of
mid-Victorian bunkering--three low, straight grassy banks in line with
each other right across the fairway--the golf hereabouts is less good to
the eye, at all events, than it is to the spirit in the play. The first
hole, a long one, with a road running diagonally across near the green,
close to which there is a little cottage, somehow by its surroundings
recalls memories of old "Mrs. Forman's" at ancient Musselburgh, and the
second is a short hole of quality. From the fourth tee the line of the
course bends round to the right, and for half a dozen holes we are away
from that central part; there are ups and downs in the land that give
more colour to the golf, and here and there are clumps of bushes that
need consideration. All the time we are close to the bank of the River
Gave, and at length, near to a point where a wild stream plunges into
it, we cross to a spit of land between them and play a few holes there.
They are nice holes. The ground heaves and rolls, and there must be good
calculation and accuracy in approaching. Another stream runs through
this isolated part of the course, and the green of the fourteenth hole
closes to a point where two running waters nearly meet and there is a
rutty road alongside. It is a pretty green, the situation is cunning and
delightful, and that fourteenth hole is one of the best in France. Not a
doubt about it--Pau is very good in parts. But we turn up a note on the
golf in a little guide to Pau, and read: "Owing to the nature of the
soil and their admirable preservation, the links at Pau compare
favourably with the course at St. Andrews, in Scotland, where the
conditions are almost ideal." O, Pau!
* * * * *
Now Pau is one of those places where the golf, excellent and admired, is
not domineering, as one might say. You take it, you enjoy it, and yet
you live in an easy contentment after your game without raving about it.
It is a delightful little of a most happy and contenting whole. That is
because Pau of all places on this planet makes one feel rested,
contented, peacefully, languorously happy, and that is a most blessed
state at which to arrive after a long season's course of tubes and
taxi-cabs, noises and disturbances, crushes and crashes, late nights
and far too early mornings, and, yes--for they also come with the burden
of the Londoner--heavily bunkered five-hundred-yard-holes near our
excellent London town. The air is famous for its sweet soothing
properties. It wraps itself round your tired limbs, it steals into your
nervy senses, and it comforts you. Pau lets you quietly down, rests you,
gives you sleep, stills those jagged nerves that twitched so much in
town. Every one says so, and it is true. One morning I gossiped on the
course with Mr. Charles Hutchings, the wonderful man who won the Amateur
Championship at Hoylake in 1902, and who has known what nerves are
since. He told me he has now been wintering at Pau for the last twenty
years, and it is the only place that is any good to him. "Before I come
to Pau, and even when I am at Biarritz," said he, "my nerves are like
this"--and he slowly passed his right hand up along his left arm from
the hand to the shoulder--"and when I am at Pau they are like this," he
added, and he smoothed the arm back again from the shoulder to the
fingers. It was as if he had been stroking a cat the wrong way and the
right one--that was the idea. Biarritz, so very bracing, certainly makes
you jumpy, and many of us have played far better at Pau than at
Biarritz; in fact, we find that at Pau we can hit the ball as cleanly
and with as much confidence as anywhere.
That reflection leads us when gazing abstractedly upon those Pyrenees,
which are so good for thought, to consider the effect of climate upon
one's game. Undoubtedly the effect is great, and yet it is neither
appreciated nor properly considered. After working hard for a spell in
town we say we will go for a weekend's golf, and, when we can, we choose
a highly bracing place, because we believe it is good for us and "bucks
us up." But do you remember how often the golf that we play at such
places is so extremely disappointing? The "bucking up" seems to have
failed. Take Deal, for example. There is hardly a course in the world
that I like and admire as much as this; but that strong air of Deal
upsets the game of nearly every man at the beginning. Pau is supposed to
be a little relaxing, but, except for the fact that we do not eat so
much as at Biarritz, we hardly notice it. It soothes us, quietens us
down, reduces our boiler and engine arrangements to low pressure, and
_voila!_ our game comes on, and it does so because the question of
playing well or ill by a man who knows the game is nearly always a
question of the steadiness of his nerves, and there are fine shades of
this steadiness that we do not always realise. That is why we play well
at Pau, and it makes us think sometimes that the relaxing places have
not had full credit for their golfing quality hitherto.
There is a general conspiracy among all things at Pau to rest and soothe
the tired man. There are the bells. How can they affect the golf? you
ask. See, then. We know of the fame in song of "The Bells of Lynn" and
those of Aberdovey too; but it seems to me that the bells of Pau should
have an equal celebrity. They are excellent. Alongside the hotel at
which I stay at Pau a fine church steeple towers up, and there is in it
a splendid belfry with skilful ringers to use it. Sometimes their
performances wake us before our proper time in the morning, which is the
first effect. Then on some days and nights the ringers practise a kind
of bell music, which holds one spellbound. It begins slowly and quietly
with a few hesitating notes in the bass. Soon there is an answering echo
in the treble, and then it all gradually increases in time and volume
until in three or four minutes a veritable torrent of stormy music is
crashing out from the tower and flinging itself out to the Pyrenees.
And then it is as if the crisis passes, the bell music dies away again,
and at the end there is but the thin little tinkle of a treble bell
sounding lonely in the night. There are other fine belfries in the town;
but, more than that, there are little churches all along the hill that
frames our course on its northern side, and these have good bells as
well, and they all chime the hours and the quarters--and all at
different times! When one set of chiming begins just as you reach the
green, you know that listening for the others will so much distract you
that three or four putts may be needed, while the other man, being very
phlegmatic, is down in two for a win again. There is one of these
churches with its bells which has cost me many holes; its chime for the
quarters is exactly the first four notes of the good old tune, "Home to
Our Mountains." It strikes once for the quarter, twice for the half,
three times for the three-quarters, and four times for the full hour,
and, with the other two quick notes of the line missing, it always seems
incomplete, and always irritates. If I am just about to swing when these
bells begin to chime I see a catastrophe before me.
If there were no Pyrenees there would be no golf at Pau; I doubt if
there would be Pau. Those glorious hills, beyond which are the castles
and gold of Spain, make an almost matchless view, and they are so
strong, so insistent, that they seem to dominate us in every
consideration. If you should tell me that mountains that are more than
twenty miles away can have nothing to do with the golfer's life and
game, I ask you to go to Pau and be surprised. Those far-away hills give
us rest, and they calm us to those moods of reflection to which, as
golfers, we are so well inclined. From the window of my favourite room
at Pau, I look right out on to the majestic chain, and have the best
view of it that is to be had. Below is the Boulevard des Pyrenees, more
than a mile in length. Beyond there is a valley, and beyond that the
Pyrenees rise up to one long wonderful white-topped line. Looked at in
this way they seem so very near, and yet their nearest point is more
than a dozen miles away, and there are peaks four thousand feet in
height which seem within easy walking range, and yet are distant forty
miles. From one end to the other we look out upon a length of some
thirty miles of these peaks, and indeed the effect is most enchanting.
This is the view that I get at its very best from my little window high
above the boulevard, and it is the view that brings scores of thousands
of pounds of English money to be spent in the winter and the spring at
Pau. It is a view that never palls, for it is never the same. To our
eyes those great Pyrenees are always changing--kaleidoscopic in variety
of shapes and colours. There are mysteries of the light and atmosphere
about them which make for perpetual curiosity and wonderment. In the
morning when we rise our first thought is as to what the Pyrenees will
look like to-day, and gazing out from our little window we see them all
done up afresh in new colours and shapes by Nature. They change as the
hours pass, and then one is curious to know what new surprise the sunset
will have in store. Sometimes in the morning they stand out bold in
black and white, just as if they were plain and simple Pyrenees. In the
middle of the chain two great points of peaks rise up from all the rest,
and they are in the straight line out from the lofty window where I sit.
They are the Grand Pic and the Petit Pic du Midi d'Ossau, and they are
the pet favourites of all of us who gaze out southwards to the range
beyond which the Spaniards dwell. The greater peak curls over a little
at the top towards the lesser one, that seems always to be snuggling up
close to it, and they look to us always to be like a lover hill and his
timid lady. Another morning all these mountains will be of a sapphire
blue. Next day they may be rosy red. But the best effects are those of a
phantom kind. Now and then those Pyrenees seem to have gone away to a
hundred miles beyond, and we see them rather dimly, but still with their
outlines well defined. They look like ghost mountains, and in
imagination we can peer through them to a nothingness beyond. Yet more
curious, there are mornings, fine and bright in Pau, with everything
shining in the sunlight, when there are no Pyrenees at all! There is
that little low range of hills in front, with the chalets and the
chateaux all plainly to be seen, and the light seems as good as ever it
was in southern France; but the Pyrenees, where have they gone? Not a
trace of them is left, and we are lonely, disconsolate. It is as if a
jealous Providence had wrapped them up in the night and carried them off
to another land where their eternal solitude would not be hindered by
the touring man and woman. But they come back again by night, and their
gradual reappearance is a thing for happy contemplation. Yet for the
greater glory and richness of colour the evening sunset effects are the
best of all. Then from the corner at the right the setting sun shines
along the hidden valley between the little hills and mountains beyond,
and it is as if in that unseen place below, millions of fierce lights
had been set burning and shining up the Pyrenees as rows of hidden
electric bulbs are sometimes used to throw a soft, weird glow upon a
ceiling and cause it to be reflected back again beneath. Then the
Pyrenees are as an ethereal vision; their base is like a golden band and
their tops like filmy gossamer, so that these seem to us to be not
mountains of the world at all, but high hills of heaven itself. And away
in the west the sun sets in a burning Indian red, and the thin crescent
of a new moon, with an attendant star, rises in the firmament. It is
this that I look upon from my own crow's nest at Pau when my tramping of
the day is done.
* * * * *
One day at Pau a voice was raised in our little party and it said, "Let
us get up closer to those splendid Pyrenees"; but another said, "Where
should we get our golf?" It was answered that there was golf everywhere,
and there must be some right alongside those white-capped peaks.
Argeles! We remembered. It was advertised and well recommended as a good
course, "open all the year round," and laid in the most delightful
situation, the Pyrenees going up from its very edge. The prospect
sounded well. We decided at night that on the morrow we would proceed
with our bags of clubs to Argeles, and the porter at our hotel gave full
directions for getting there, which made it seem a very simple business.
It appeared that it was about thirty miles from Pau to Lourdes, and with
the journey two-thirds done we were to change trains there. But, short
as the distance was, it was to take us two hours. Our train would start
at twenty minutes to nine in the morning. The match of the day, with
four golfers implicated, was accordingly made overnight, and
anticipation of the joys of Argeles became keen. All this was well, but
when three of us had slept and were mightily refreshed, certain hitches
and accidents began to happen. The fourth party to our contract still
slumbered heavily at a quarter-past eight, and being then reminded, by
sundry taps, of the prevailing circumstances, he muttered indistinctly
that he was not to be tempted from his situation by the opportunity of
playing two rounds on any course in Paradise. So we left him snoring,
piglike, there, and we were only three.
We got to Lourdes and descended from the train. Troubles arose
forthwith. The station-master blandly observed, and as it seemed with a
hardly hidden smile (how is it that non-golfers of all classes always do
seem to be made happy upon the contemplation of a golfer being suddenly
robbed of his game?), that there was no train from there to Argeles
until the afternoon, the service which the hotel porter had in mind not
beginning until three days later. By the same token the return train
which we reckoned on was non-existent, and he expressed doubts about our
sleeping that night at Pau if we persisted in what he could not help
regarding as a very mad enterprise born of too much enthusiasm. We
thanked him, and went out into the streets of Lourdes to see what could
be done. Truly, we were only ten miles from Argeles, even if the road
was through the mountains. And it was a fine day.
Suddenly, and as it seemed from nowhere, up came carriages from all
parts of the compass, each drawn by a pair of horses, the coachmen all
loudly soliciting the favour of driving us to Argeles, which they
explained was fifteen miles away--a deliberate exaggeration. The first
man to whip up to us asked for twenty francs for the single journey, and
the others were amazed at his impudence. Another offered to take us for
fifteen, and a third cabby came down at once to twelve. Then they all
did so, and the market seemed to settle at that price, a great gathering
of coachmen surrounding us and expatiating on the superior merits of
their various horses and the comfort of their vehicles. It was a great
spectacle, this golfers' carriage market at Lourdes! At last the first
man to make an offer to us, suddenly, in a mood of desperation, came
down to ten francs, and we closed with him, not so much because of the
saving of an odd franc or two, but because his pair of bays certainly
did seem to have more fast trotting in them than any of the others. It
was such a glorious journey down the valley of Argeles as golfers seldom
make, huge, rocky, snow-capped mountains rising up from either side of
the winding road. Leaving Lourdes there were two high hills on the left,
one surmounted with a single cross and the other with three crosses of
"Calvary" standing out clearly against the sky. Then, later, from the
bottom of the valley a stumpy hill suddenly rose up in the middle, an
old keep of mediaeval times on the top of it, and after that the great
peak of the Viscos, with the pass to Gavernie on one side of it and that
to Cauterets on the other were presented. Soon afterwards we rattled
down the little main street of Argeles, and lunched at the chief hotel.
There was then a ten minutes' drive to the course, and our coachman--a
local fellow, and not the one who drove us from Lourdes--stopped at
various cottages on the way and shouted out inquiries as to whether
Adolphe or Marie or Jeanne was at home. He was getting caddies for us,
as he explained there would be none otherwise. Eventually from different
places we picked up three--two little girls and a boy--who hung on to
the back of the vehicle and proceeded with us to the appointed place.
The course has great possibilities, but as yet they are thinly
developed.