She sat down on the grass beside my chair, and looked up at my face in silent pain. We had known each other so long that I know that it was not my face that pained her, but rather some unspoken malaise of the soul. I waited for her to speak, and suddenly she burst out impetuously as though she could hold back her sorrow no longer.
“Oh, I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it!”
“You mean … ?” I said, though I knew only too well.
“This horrible obsession of poor George’s,” she cried passionately. “I don’t think he has stopped talking once since we have been engaged.”
“He is chatty,” I agreed. “Has he told you the story about the Irishman?”
“Half a dozen times. And the one about the Swede oftener than that. But I would not mind an occasional anecdote. Women have to learn to bear anecdotes from the men they love. It is the curse of Eve. It is his incessant easy flow of chatter on all topics that is undermining even my devotion.”
“But surely, when he proposed to you, he must have given you an inkling of the truth. He only hinted at it when he spoke to me, but I gather that he was eloquent.”
“When he proposed,” said Celia dreamily, “he was wonderful. He spoke for twenty minutes without stopping. He said I was the essence of his every hope, the tree on which the fruit of his life grew; his Present, his Future, his Past … oh, and all that sort of thing. If he would only confine his conversation now to remarks of a similar nature, I could listen to him all day long. But he doesn’t. He talks politics and statistics and philosophy and … oh, and everything. He makes my head ache.”
“And your heart also, I fear,” I said gravely.
“I love him!” she replied simply. “In spite of everything, I love him dearly. But what to do? What to do? I have an awful fear that when we are getting married instead of answering ‘I will,’ he will go into the pulpit and deliver an address on Marriage Ceremonies of All Ages. The world to him is a vast lecture-platform. He looks on life as one long after-dinner, with himself as the principal speaker of the evening. It is breaking my heart. I see him shunned by his former friends. Shunned! They run a mile when they see him coming. The mere sound of his voice outside the clubhouse is enough to send brave men diving for safety beneath the sofas. Can you wonder that I am in despair? What have I to live for?”
“There is always golf.”
“Yes, there is always golf,” she whispered bravely.
“Come and have a round this afternoon.”
“I had promised to go for a walk …” She shuddered, then pulled herself together. “… for a walk with George.”
I hesitated for a moment.
“Bring him along,” I said, and patted her hand. “It may be that together we shall find an opportunity of reasoning with him.”
She shook her head.
“You can’t reason with George. He never stops talking long enough to give you time.”
“Nevertheless, there is no harm in trying. I have an idea that this malady of his is not permanent and incurable. The very violence with which the germ of loquacity has attacked him gives me hope. You must remember that before this seizure he was rather a noticeably silent man. Sometimes I think that it is just Nature’s way of restoring the average, and that soon the fever may burn itself out. Or it may be that a sudden shock … At any rate, have courage.”
“I will try to be brave.”
“Capital! At half-past two on the first tee, then.”
“You will have to give me a stroke on the third, ninth, twelfth, fifteenth, sixteenth and eighteenth,” she said, with a quaver in her voice. “My golf has fallen off rather lately.”
I patted her hand again.
“I understand,” I said gently. “I understand.”
The steady drone of a baritone voice as I alighted from my car and approached the first tee told me that George had not forgotten the tryst. He was sitting on the stone seat under the chestnut-tree, speaking a few well-chosen words on the Labour Movement.
“To what conclusion, then, do we come?” he was saying. “We come to the foregone and inevitable conclusion that. …”
“Good afternoon, George,” I said.
He nodded briefly, but without verbal salutation. He seemed to regard my remark as he would have regarded the unmannerly heckling of someone at the back of the hall. He proceeded evenly with his speech, and was still talking when Celia addressed her ball and drove off. Her drive, coinciding with a sharp rhetorical question from George, wavered in midair, and the ball trickled off into the rough halfway down the hill. I can see the poor girl’s tortured face even now. But she breathed no word of reproach. Such is the miracle of women’s love.
“Where you went wrong there,” said George, breaking off his remarks on Labour, “was that you have not studied the dynamics of golf sufficiently. You did not pivot properly. You allowed your left heel to point down the course when you were at the top of your swing. This makes for instability and loss of distance. The fundamental law of the dynamics of golf is that the left foot shall be solidly on the ground at the moment of impact. If you allow your heel to point down the course, it is almost impossible to bring it back in time to make the foot a solid fulcrum.”
I drove, and managed to clear the rough and reach the fairway. But it was not one of my best drives. George
