Tommy's Honor (27 page)

The crowd gave the winners a grudging round of applause for what the
Fifeshire Journal
would rate “one of the best-contested matches ever seen.”

Tom pulled his son aside. “We must go,” he said. “Your wife is ill.”

They couldn’t go home the way they came. There would be no train out of North Berwick until seven o’clock, almost three hours hence. They could take a horse-drawn coach to Waverly Station in Edinburgh, catch a train to Granton and reach the ferry dock around sundown, but by then the last ferry would be gone. Ferries from Granton could not cross the Firth of Forth after dusk; there were no lights at Burntisland on the other side.

Tommy looked across the Forth with mounting worry. He saw the low hills of Fife, blue in the distance, fifteen miles away.

“I’ll take you,” said J.C.B. Lewis, a gentleman golfer who kept a yacht in North Berwick’s little harbor. “We’ll sail across.” Lewis pointed to a twenty-eight-foot ketch bobbing in choppy water at the foot of the links. He rounded up a two-man crew and they set sail—Lewis and Tom chatting, Tom casting fretful glances toward Tommy, who had nothing to do but watch the sun sink over Scotland.

A myth would grow up around their journey. In the myth the yacht races across the firth as if it were a river, the Morrises’ hobnailed boots clanking from the North Berwick dock to the St. Andrews pier in an hour or two. In fact it was a long night’s voyage, most of it in the dark, thirty-two miles in a ketch that made four knots in calm seas. Such a trip would take at least eight hours, which means that they could not reach St. Andrews before one in the morning.

The sun was already falling when Lewis’s crew hoisted sail and the boat swung out of North Berwick’s little harbor. Behind them a handful of Tommy’s friends waved from the pier, wishing him Godspeed. The ketch glided past white-faced Bass Rock and made for the Isle of May, a gray paving stone in the water to the north. Hours later it slid past the isle on its way to the eastern tip of Fife, and northwest from there toward Crail and St. Andrews.

“A long, weary crossing,” Tom called it years later, remembering “the frozen look Tommy had on his face.” The boat rolled as the crew trimmed its sails. Perhaps Lewis cracked open a bottle of porter for his passengers. The stars were thick and clear, the yachts’ lanterns the only other light. Midnight came and went. They heard the hull slapping water. They kept watch for the Bell Rock lighthouse, which would give them a line to their target. At last they saw it: three long beats of light followed by two short ones, the signature of the lighthouse at Bell Rock.

The yacht curved left like a putt on the Home Hole. Soon it found its way to the long stone pier. Tommy gripped the toe rail, waiting to jump out. The town was pitch dark; the lamplighter had snuffed out the last streetlamp hours ago. The time was between one and four in the morning.

They heard Jimmy’s voice. “Father, Tommy!” The telegraph office had closed just after word arrived from North Berwick saying that Tom and Tommy were coming home by boat. Nineteen-year-old Jimmy had gone to the pier to wait for his father and brother.

At the end of the pier, a set of stone steps rose out of the water. Tommy clambered out of the yacht, splashed onto the lowest step and hurried up to the pier. His father thanked Lewis and followed. The stars cast a pale light, just enough to keep a man from stepping off the pier into black water. Jimmy spoke to Tom for a moment, saying something Tommy didn’t hear.

Tommy walked 300 yards up the pier to the corner of town where the fisher-folk lived. The air smelled of gutted fish. He set off toward North Street.

The next day’s
Scotsman
would tell of a second telegram that had gone from St. Andrews to North Berwick on September 4, arriving moments after Lewis’s yacht departed: “[T]hey had just cleared the harbour, and were hoisting sail, when a messenger reached the pier bearing another telegram stating that Mrs. Morris had given birth to a son, but that both mother and child were dead. The purport of the message being made known to a number of [Tommy’s] friends who had been seeing him off they agreed, although the yacht was within easy hailing distance, to allow it to sail without acquainting those on board with the distressing news, fearing that the shock to the unhappy husband would be too great.”

Jimmy had whispered the news to his father. Now Tom had to say it aloud.

“Tommy, it’s over,” he said. Margaret was dead, he said. The baby was dead. He was sorry, he said.

Tommy started home. He walked past the shuttered fisher pubs, the Auld Hoose and the Bell Rock Tavern. It was an uphill mile from the pier to the house where he and Meg lived. Their house was at the western end of town, the links end, where the air smelled of turf and brine and seaweed. The houses he passed were dark, but yellow light leaked through drawn blinds at the house at the end of the street, 2 Playfair Place, Tommy and Meg’s house. The front door was darker than the street, recessed by six inches, hidden from starlight. Tommy shoved the door open. Inside he found his mother propped in a chair, his sister Lizzie and brother Jack, and the Country Parson himself, the Rev. A.K.H. Boyd, all waiting for him.

“There was a pathetic event here at the beginning of September,” Pastor Boyd wrote. “On Thursday September 2, father and son went together to North Berwick, to play a great match on the Links there. Tommy left his wife perfectly well…. But on Saturday afternoon that fine girl…ran down and died. A telegram was sent to Tom, who told his son they must leave at once…I was in the house [when] they arrived. What can one say in such an hour? I never forget the young man’s stony look:
stricken
was the word: and how all of a sudden he started up and cried, ‘It’s not true!’ I have seen many sorrowful things, but not many like that Saturday night.”

Tommy hurried to the bedroom.

T
he blood was gone, soaked up in sheets that were soon to be burned, but the scent of blood hung in the room. Meg lay in bed as if she were asleep. Beside her was a bundle no bigger than a cat. Male, the doctor said. A son. Stillborn, the doctor said, meaning that the child had not died in the womb but in the struggle to be born, a struggle that lasted four hours according to Dr. Moir, who reduced Meg’s dying to two crisply penned lines in the town’s death registry:
Ruptured uterus, 4 hours
.

Tommy sagged. “It’s not true.” After that night, wrote Tulloch, “He went about like one who had received a mortal blow.”

In the coming days he let his father do most of what had to be done. It was Tom Morris who signed the death registry on behalf of the family. It was Tom who handled many of the funeral arrangements. There was whisky to buy, for one thing. Custom called for everyone visiting a house where a death had occurred to be offered a dram. Tommy roused himself enough to take a sip from time to time, feeling it warm his gullet like hot tea. He had little energy for choosing a coffin for Meg; or for buying a white linen mort cloth to wrap around her body and a smaller mort cloth for their stillborn child; or for hiring a hearse and a team of black horses to pull the hearse to the Cathedral cemetery; or for selecting a Bible verse for Meg’s memorial cards, the black-bordered reminders that urged recipients to remember Margaret Morris and pray for her soul. Such matters were better left to his father, the diplomat. Tom Morris was a gracious host, shaking hands, offering each visitor a drink, making solemn small talk while Tommy did his best to nod hello.

The blinds in Tommy and Meg’s house stayed shut until the hearse came later that week to carry her away. The Morrises gave Meg a funeral like no Whitburn girl could have expected. Nothing signaled respectability like a fine funeral. Whitburn’s poor, like the poor everywhere, dreaded getting a pauper’s burial, a hurried ride to the cemetery behind a drunken coachman singing, “Rattle his bones over the stones, he’s only a pauper nobody owns.” Tenement dwellers paid a penny a week to burial societies that provided decent funerals for £3 or £4. A successful tradesman could be laid to rest for £20, a tradesman’s wife for £10. But Meg’s funeral was a £50 affair. No one put the price in the newspaper or even said it aloud, but the point was made by the hearse, the team of horses pulling it, and the coachmen with their silk scarves and top hats with black silk hatbands. The point was that the deceased was no sinner and no housemaid but a respectable wife, her soul recommended to heaven by the Reverend A.K.H. Boyd.

For Tommy, still staggered by Saturday’s events, Meg’s funeral was likely a blurred parade of black-clad mourners on green turf, her Whitburn relatives filing past in the same clothes they had worn to her wedding ten months before; the pastor mumbling prayers beside Wee Tom’s old white stone and a pile of porridge-colored earth. The grave went more than ten feet down into the Cathedral churchyard. Cemetery plots were so expensive that families dug deep and sometimes buried as many as ten family members in a vertical queue. Meg’s elm coffin held two bodies, for she was buried with her stillborn son in her arms.

If Tommy blamed his father for hiding the truth from him at North Berwick, he also loved Tom Morris enough to forgive him, or at least to try. In fact he moved back into his father’s house. Tommy gathered up his clothes, razor, pocket watch, and Championship Belt, left his and Meg’s house, and pulled the door shut behind him. He carried his things two blocks west, to 6 Pilmour Links Road, where he slept in a drafty room in the attic.

Everyone wanted him to play golf. The game did not stop to mourn Margaret: Willie Park won the Open at Prestwick that fall while Tom and Tommy grieved in St. Andrews. “It was a matter of much regret that severe family bereavement should have caused the absences of the Morrises,”
The Field
noted. “During the entire day the links presented a scene of gaiety and animation.” Tommy’s friends kept saying a match would take his mind off his grief, if only for a few hours, and wasn’t that what he needed? His father thought so. “Just when you want to lay down and die, a good tight match will clear your brain,” Tom said. Tommy was more inclined to take long, late-evening walks or to sit and drink, a habit he indulged more often as the days grew shorter. But in early October, a month after Meg died, he agreed to play again. Along with Davie Strath, Mungo Park, and Bob Cosgrove, the Musselburgh stroke-shaver, he entered the 1875 St. Andrews Professional Tournament. “Tommy…had been out of practice,”
The Field
reported, adding that he lacked “his usual force and brilliancy” off the tee but swung with his usual flair “whenever the iron or cleek was put into his hands.” Wearing a black armband that marked him as St. Andrews’ youngest widower, he shot a tepid 93 and finished fifth.

Next he joined his father in a foursomes match against Strath and another professional, Bob Martin. With hundreds of spectators in his wake, Tommy flashed his old form, drilling drives and spoon shots into the wind, rapping putts that thudded into the back of the cup on their way down. He and Tom held a four-hole lead over Strath and Martin as they stood on the fourteenth tee. “The match seemed to be finished,” according to Tulloch, “when Tommy broke down.” Suddenly he could do nothing right. He bunkered his drives, foozled approach shots. Too weak or halfhearted to summon up a rally at the end, Tommy plodded through the Valley of Sin to the eighteenth green. “They lost every one of the remaining 5 holes and, consequently, the match.”

On the night of October 27 the ship
Fantee
ran aground in heavy seas just north of St. Andrews Castle. The
Fantee
turned sideways and began to break apart in rocks a hundred yards offshore. Sailors lit torches to signal their distress. Few of them could swim, for knowing how to swim was thought to jinx a sailor, daring the sea to sink his ship. Seamen said they’d prefer a quick drowning to a long, losing fight to stay alive. And even Captain Webb, the famed Channel swimmer, would have struggled in that night’s thundering waves. The St. Andrews lifeboat fought the storm for several minutes before turning back.

Like the meteor shower of ’72, the wreck of the
Fantee
brought townspeople flocking to the shore. Tommy was probably in the crowd who watched the town’s rocket brigade set up two cannons in the castle ramparts. The rocket brigade was the sailors’ last chance. With blasts that shook the castle walls, its cannons launched rocket-driven lifelines toward the ship. “Port fires and blue lights were burned,” the
Citizen
reported, “which illuminated, with an almost unearthly light, the surroundings, the vessel as well as the Castle ruin, and lit up hundreds of pale anxious faces of those clustered on its walls.” After several tries, one of the lifelines found its target. Sailors lashed it down and began pulling themselves hand-over-hand through waves and rocks to the beach. “As man after man was brought safely to land, a cheer rent the air.” Cheering would have echoed oddly in Tommy’s ear. Aside from a few shouts during his failed outings of the past month, the last cheering he’d heard was on the day he and his father played the Park brothers at North Berwick.

The next morning, men with axes rowed out to the
Fantee
and chopped it up for salvage. By nightfall there was nothing left of the ship but its men, drinking and singing in St. Andrews pubs. They were the lucky ones. A month later a storm took down three ships and thirty-seven men.

“At this time there was a great golfing family from Westward Ho, playing splendid golf,” Tulloch wrote, “winning great victories wherever they went.” The golfing family’s patriarch was Captain George Molesworth, a wealthy amateur who played with only three clubs: a driver he called Faith, a cleek known as Hope and a putter called Charity. Captain Molesworth took out advertisements in
The Field
challenging any other father-son pair to play him and one of his three sons, the best of whom was eighteen-year-old Arthur. Tom and Tommy had never responded to Molesworth’s challenge. They had nothing to gain by playing English dabblers who would want strokes or odds in a match against professionals. Then, in the fall of 1875, Arthur Molesworth challenged Tommy to single combat.

The men of the Rose Club were all for it. What better tonic than demolishing a teenaged golf celebrity from England? “Tommy’s friends readily entered into it with the view of rousing him,” wrote George Bruce, “trying to infuse new life and vigour into his withered feelings.” Tommy’s friends pushed him to play the lad whose victory in the club championship at Westward Ho had made him an amateur prodigy, at least in his father’s eyes.
The Field
, parroting the Captain’s claims, informed readers that young Arthur “has been successful in matches against a professional player from St. Andrews.” That player was, happily for himself, not named. Whoever he was, he was not near Tommy’s level and the Molesworths, knowing as much, set daunting terms: Arthur would play Tommy Morris only if he got six strokes per round in a punishing six-day, twelve-round match. Tommy would thus be spotting young Molesworth seventy-two strokes. The bait: £50. Tommy said yes.

“Young Tom has not been in robust health for some time, but he is now steadily at work and seems to be regaining his wonted vigour,” the
Citizen
declared, adding that he was “not playing such a strong game as he did in his great matches against Strath…but on the other hand, he has generally been able to play well at the proper time, and the occasion may bring the play.”

On the last morning of November, Arthur Molesworth arrived at St. Andrews’ first teeing-ground for his moment in golf history. Six years younger than Tommy, the eighteen-year-old had the high forehead and wispy mustache of a university man. He shook Tommy’s hand in weather
The Field
called “exceedingly cold, a strong breeze prevailing off the sea with occasional blasts of snow and hail.” Little David Ayton, shivering as he cradled Tommy’s clubs under his arm, teed up a gutty and stepped back, giving his man room to waggle. Thus began a match that would unfold in what
The Field
would call the worst weather the game had ever seen.

Molesworth announced that he would take his strokes at the second, fifth, and eighth holes of each nine. He made them count in the early going. Tommy fell behind in the first round, hitting drives that fell short of his usual distance, but revived enough to take the last three holes. After a luncheon break he had a lapse at the fourth hole, Ginger Beer: Tapping in to win the hole while Molesworth’s ball sat on the lip of the cup, he misfired. His putt brushed the other ball and both balls fell in—the hole was halved. Still, he finished the day two holes up despite his six-stroke handicap.

The next day, Wednesday, began with a half after Tommy chipped to the first green from an ice-crusted puddle. He kept his two-hole lead until they reached the short twelfth, which had bedeviled him off and on since its scab-turfed days as the Hole o’ Shell. “Mr. Molesworth secured the hole, reducing the lead against him to one,”
The Field
related, using “Mr.” to signify young Molesworth’s status as a gentleman. “After this, however, the game went steadily in favour of Young Tom, who had warmed up into his usual style.” On the long fourteenth, where the challenger got a stroke, Molesworth topped his drive into a pot bunker. Soon Tommy was seven holes ahead. That afternoon Molesworth nearly drove the green with a gust-aided drive at the 300-yard Heathery Hole, but Tommy kept the pressure on, halving the holes on which Molesworth got a stroke, winning more than his share of the rest. At the end of two days’ play he led by twelve holes. A third of the way through their wintry marathon, the Englishman looked beaten.

On Friday
The Field
’s correspondent telegraphed an account that must have pleased his London editors, who had puffed the “Great Golf Match.” Molesworth’s tidy 45 on the outward nine that day beat Tommy’s 47 straight up, and with his strokes he chopped three holes off his deficit. The golfers were trading blows like equals. “That an amateur from England, a stranger to the green, should have ventured into golfing Scotland,”
The Field
gushed, “required pluck, and Mr. Molesworth is not deficient in this quality.”

On Saturday, December 4, the links were top-dressed with snow. White golf balls would be invisible, so the players used gutties that had been painted red. Tom Morris dispatched workmen with shovels and brooms to clear the putting-greens. Tom, puffing his pipe, followed the players while the tall, stiff-backed Captain Molesworth peered over smaller members of a gallery that would number more than a thousand before the day was out. Young Arthur Molesworth led early. Making a show of playing in shirtsleeves while everyone else wore jackets and wool hats, he capitalized on his handicap strokes while Tommy struggled to navigate icy greens and bunkers decked with snow. The challenger had a putt to win the Home Hole but three-putted from point-blank range, his ball skidding twice around the cup. That boosted Tommy’s edge to nine with four rounds remaining.

On Sunday they rested, watching the sky. Dusk came early, a sign of a storm on the way. Most of St. Andrews was asleep when the first flakes came down, followed by more and more until the night sky was as thick and pale as Tom’s whiskers. “On Monday…it was doubtful if the match could be proceeded with,”
The Field
reported. “A heavy fall of snow had taken place during the night and had drifted into wreaths of considerable depth, while overhead the sky hung thick.” Tommy wanted to stay inside. Chasing a red ball through boot-high drifts was “no’ golf.” Several friends urged him to play, hoping that victory would bolster his spirits, while others told him to sit by the fire with a cup of tea to warm his hands, and perhaps a drop of something stronger to warm the inner man. Tommy had brought a new caddie with him, none other than Davie Strath, and Strath had no desire to see Tommy risk his health to finish off Arthur Molesworth. When the umpire declared the links unplayable, Strath made ready to lead his friend home. But the Molesworths objected: “Mr. Molesworth and his father, Capt. Molesworth, stated it would inconvenience them to delay.”