What Is Billiards - The Story

Never in the whole history of Morrison's boarding establishment had such festive preparations been known. But on the whole I think that golf is perhaps the greatest trial of all. You can do this far more easily at billiards than you can at golf. If strength or the consideration of strength be the chief cause of nervousness, billiards ought therefore to be more of a test of nerve than golf. Golf has also a lesson to teach us. Kadir Baksh did not say that he had taken from each gang two annas for rent in advance, and then, beyond my ear-shot, had beaten them with the big green umbrella whose use I could never before divine. But Kadir Baksh has no notions of morality. As to lawn tennis-another dangerous rival-we hear a good deal in these days about "foot-faults." That seems to show the trend of modern thought. We very, very seldom played the piano; we played the flute and the clarinet together, and made good music, too, what there was of it, but we always played the same old tune; it was a very pretty tune-how well I remember it-I wonder when I shall ever get rid of it.

I have seen a player who was bad at lofting a ball over a bunker forty yards from the hole, play the previous stroke short in order, instead of having to play a forty-yards shot, to make one that took eighty yards to get over the bunker. After prayers the Synagogue shortly took the semblance of a writing school. So thought the major as he approached her and shook her hand, with some well-turned compliment upon his lips. First I thought I’d leave France out and start fresh. But I would, first of all, what is billiards put eighty miles of sound assessed crop-land between myself and that dâk-bungalow before nightfall. Impossible to mistake the sound of billiard-balls! But Mr. Hilton has to take out an iron club, because there are some occasions when it is absolutely impossible to use any other club. I do not pretend to say that an average player is always "off" with this or that club, but as every golfer knows there come times or spells of times when all skill with one class of club seems to vanish.

Thus a tennis player may offer to play against his inferior with a selzer-bottle instead of a racquet; or a golfer to play with only one club; or a chess-player to make his moves without seeing the board. A golfer by practice may improve his play with a club, but he very likely will find that, during the time he has occupied himself with this club, another has mysteriously failed him; and in any case the terrible ordeal of putting has to be gone through, and it is the painful experience of bad putters that practice does by no means perfect, but only causes new terrors to appear. Some holes are in a sort of pot, which, though small just where the hole is, nevertheless has widely expanding sides, and you probably will find your ball dead if you get it into it at all from any distance; but another is on a table-land, where the chief difficulty is not to get the ball on the table-land but to keep it there. If you get angry with him, he refers to some Sahib dead and buried these thirty years, and says that when he was in that Sahib's service not a butler in the Province could touch him.

He either cuts it too fine and is very short in the attempt to lay it dead, or else, frightened of the bunker that lies so dangerously near to him, he determines to get over at all risks and overruns the green by forty or fifty yards. And well it might, when a restless little rat was running to and fro inside the dingy ceiling-cloth, and a piece of loose window-sash was making fifty breaks off the window bolt as it shook in the breeze. I heard the palanquins dumped on the ground, and the shutter in front of my door shook. I did not. So surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the scores of things in the bed because the bulk of my blood was in my heart, so surely did I hear every stroke of a long game at billiards played in the echoing room behind the iron-barred door. I entered the room without fear, for there was sunlight within and a fresh breeze without. There are other games besides cricket.