“My dear fellow … anything that I can do … where did you meet her first, for instance?”
“At a dinner….” Eustace Hignett broke off abruptly. He had a good memory and he had just recollected the fish they had served at that dinner—a flabby and exhausted looking fish, half sunk beneath the surface of a thick white sauce.
“And what struck you most forcibly about her at first? Her lovely hair, I suppose?”
“How did you know she had lovely hair?”
“My dear chap, I naturally assumed that any girl with whom you fell in love would have nice hair.”
“Well, you are perfectly right, as it happens. Her hair was remarkably beautiful. It was red….”
“Like autumn leaves with the sun on them!” said Marlowe ecstatically.
“What an extraordinary thing! That is an absolutely exact description. Her eyes were a deep blue….”
“Or, rather, green.”
“Blue.”
“Green. There is a shade of green that looks blue.”
“What the devil do you know about the colour of her eyes?” demanded Eustace heatedly. “Am I telling you about her, or are you telling me?”
“My dear old man, don’t get excited. Don’t you see I am trying to construct this girl in my imagination, to visualise her? I don’t pretend to doubt your special knowledge, but after all green eyes generally do go with red hair and there are all shades of green. There is the bright green of meadow grass, the dull green of the uncut emerald, the faint yellowish green of your face at the present moment….”
“Don’t talk about the colour of my face! Now you’ve gone and reminded me just when I was beginning to forget.”
“Awfully sorry! Stupid of me! Get your mind off it again—quick! What were you saying? Oh, yes, this girl. I always think it helps one to form a mental picture of people if one knows something about their tastes—what sort of things they are interested in, their favourite topics of conversation, and so on. This Miss Bennett now, what did she like talking about?”
“Oh, all sorts of things.”
“Yes, but what?”
“Well, for one thing she was very fond of poetry. It was that which first drew us together.”
“Poetry!” Sam’s heart sank a little. He had read a certain amount of poetry at school, and once he had won a prize of three shillings and sixpence for the last line of a limerick in a competition in a weekly paper, but he was self-critic enough to know that poetry was not his long suit. Still there was a library on board ship and no doubt it would be possible to borrow the works of some standard poet and bone them up from time to time.
“Any special poet?”
“Well, she seemed to like my stuff. You never read my sonnet-sequence on Spring, did you?”
“No. What other poets did she like besides you?”
“Tennyson principally,” said Eustace Hignett with a reminiscent quiver in his voice. “The hours we have spent together reading the Idylls of the King!”
“The which of what?” enquired Sam, taking a pencil from his pocket and shooting out a cuff.
“The Idylls of the King. My good man, I know you have a soul which would be considered inadequate by a common earthworm, but you have surely heard of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King?”
“Oh,
“There is a copy in my kit-bag. The very one we used to read together. Take it and keep it or throw it overboard. I don’t want to see it again.”
Sam prospected among the shirts, collars and trousers in the bag and presently came upon a morocco-bound volume. He laid it beside him on the lounge.
“Little by little, bit by bit,” he said, “I am beginning to form a sort of picture of this girl, this—what was her name again? Bennett—this Miss Bennett. You have a wonderful knack of description. You make her seem so real and vivid. Tell me some more about her. She wasn’t keen on golf, by any chance, I suppose?”
“I believe she did play. The subject came up once and she seemed rather enthusiastic. Why?”
“Well, I’d much sooner talk to a girl about golf than poetry.”
“You are hardly likely to be in a position to have to talk to Wilhelmina Bennett about either, I should imagine.”
“No, there’s that, of course. I was thinking of girls in general. Some girls bar golf, and then it’s rather difficult to know how to start conversation. But, tell me, were there any topics which got on Miss Bennett’s nerves, if you know what I mean? It seems to me that at one time or another you may have said something that offended her. I mean, it seems curious that she should have broken off the engagement if you had never disagreed or quarrelled about anything.”
“Well, of course, there was always the matter of that dog of hers. She had a dog, you know, a snappy brute of a Pekingese. If there was ever any shadow of disagreement between us, it had to do with that dog. I made rather a point of it that I would not have it about the home after we were married.”
“I see!” said Sam. He shot his cuff once more and wrote on it: “Dog-conciliate.”
