"What do you mean?"
"Why, when you propose to Celia Tennant. You remember you were saying when we spoke of this before--"
"Oh, that!" said George, carelessly. "I"ve arranged all that."
"What!"
"Oh, yes. On my way up from the station. I looked in on Celia about an hour ago, and it"s all settled."
"Amazing!"
"Well, I don"t know. I just put the thing to her, and she seemed to see it."
"I congratulate you. So now, like Alexander, you have no more worlds to conquer."
"Well, I don"t know so much about that," said George. "The way it looks to me is that I"m just starting. This eloquence is a thing that rather grows on one. You didn"t hear about my after-dinner speech at the anniversary banquet of the firm, I suppose? My dear fellow, a riot! A positive stampede. Had "em laughing and then crying and then laughing again and then crying once more till six of "em had to be led out and the rest down with hiccoughs. Napkins waving ... three tables broken ... waiters in hysterics. I tell you, I played on them as on a stringed instrument...."
"Can you play on a stringed instrument?"
"As it happens, no. But as I would have played on a stringed instrument if I could play on a stringed instrument. Wonderful sense of power it gives you. I mean to go in pretty largely for that sort of thing in future."
"You must not let it interfere with your golf."
He gave a laugh which turned my blood cold.
"Golf!" he said. "After all, what is golf? Just pushing a small ball into a hole. A child could do it. Indeed, children have done it with great success. I see an infant of fourteen has just won some sort of championship. Could that stripling convulse a roomful of banqueters? I think not! To sway your fellow-men with a word, to hold them with a gesture ... that is the real salt of life. I don"t suppose I shall play much more golf now. I"m making arrangements for a lecturing-tour, and I"m booked up for fifteen lunches already."
Those were his words. A man who had once done the lake-hole in one. A man whom the committee were grooming for the amateur championship. I am no weakling, but I confess they sent a chill shiver down my spine.
George Mackintosh did not, I am glad to say, carry out his mad project to the letter. He did not altogether sever himself from golf. He was still to be seen occasionally on the links. But now--and I know of nothing more tragic that can befall a man--he found himself gradually shunned, he who in the days of his sanity had been besieged with more offers of games than he could manage to accept. Men simply would not stand his incessant flow of talk. One by one they dropped off, until the only person he could find to go round with him was old Major Moseby, whose hearing completely petered out as long ago as the year "98. And, of course, Celia Tennant would play with him occasionally; but it seemed to me that even she, greatly as no doubt she loved him, was beginning to crack under the strain.
So surely had I read the pallor of her face and the wild look of dumb agony in her eyes that I was not surprised when, as I sat one morning in my garden reading Ray on Taking Turf, my man announced her name. I had been half expecting her to come to me for advice and consolation, for I had known her ever since she was a child. It was I who had given her her first driver and taught her infant lips to lisp "Fore!" It is not easy to lisp the word "Fore!" but I had taught her to do it, and this const.i.tuted a bond between us which had been strengthened rather than weakened by the pa.s.sage of time.
She sat down on the gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sionately. "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 princ.i.p.al 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 club-house 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 some one 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 mid-air, and the ball trickled off into the rough half-way 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 Mackintosh, I confess, had unnerved me. The feeling he gave me resembled the self-conscious panic which I used to experience in my childhood when informed that there was One Awful Eye that watched my every movement and saw my every act. It was only the fact that poor Celia appeared even more affected by his espionage that enabled me to win the first hole in seven.