"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.
On the way to the second tee George discoursed on the beauties of
Nature, pointing out at considerable length how exquisitely the silver
glitter of the lake harmonized with the vivid emerald turf near the
hole and the duller green of the rough beyond it. As Celia teed up her
ball, he directed her attention to the golden glory of the sand-pit to
the left of the flag. It was not the spirit in which to approach the
lake-hole, and I was not surprised when the unfortunate girl's ball
fell with a sickening plop half-way across the water.
"Where you went wrong there," said George, "was that you made the
stroke a sudden heave instead of a smooth, snappy flick of the wrists.
Pressing is always bad, but with the mashie----"
"I think I will give you this hole," said Celia to me, for my shot had
cleared the water and was lying on the edge of the green. "I wish I
hadn't used a new ball."
"The price of golf-balls," said George, as we started to round the
lake, "is a matter to which economists should give some attention. I am
credibly informed that rubber at the present time is exceptionally
cheap. Yet we see no decrease in the price of golf-balls, which, as I
need scarcely inform you, are rubber-cored. Why should this be so? You
will say that the wages of skilled labour have gone up. True. But----"
"One moment, George, while I drive," I said. For we had now arrived at
the third tee.
"A curious thing, concentration," said George, "and why certain
phenomena should prevent us from focusing our attention---- This brings
me to the vexed question of sleep. Why is it that we are able to sleep
through some vast convulsion of Nature when a dripping tap is enough to
keep us awake? I am told that there were people who slumbered
peacefully through the San Francisco earthquake, merely stirring
drowsily from time to time to tell an imaginary person to leave it on
the mat. Yet these same people----"
Celia's drive bounded into the deep ravine which yawns some fifty yards
from the tee. A low moan escaped her.
"Where you went wrong there----" said George.
"I know," said Celia. "I lifted my head."
I had never heard her speak so abruptly before. Her manner, in a girl
less noticeably pretty, might almost have been called snappish. George,
however, did not appear to have noticed anything amiss. He filled his
pipe and followed her into the ravine.
"Remarkable," he said, "how fundamental a principle of golf is this
keeping the head still. You will hear professionals tell their pupils
to keep their eye on the ball. Keeping the eye on the ball is only a
secondary matter. What they really mean is that the head should be kept
rigid, as otherwise it is impossible to----"
His voice died away. I had sliced my drive into the woods on the right,
and after playing another had gone off to try to find my ball, leaving
Celia and George in the ravine behind me. My last glimpse of them
showed me that her ball had fallen into a stone-studded cavity in the
side of the hill, and she was drawing her niblick from her bag as I
passed out of sight. George's voice, blurred by distance to a
monotonous murmur, followed me until I was out of earshot.
I was just about to give up the hunt for my ball in despair, when I
heard Celia's voice calling to me from the edge of the undergrowth.
There was a sharp note in it which startled me.
I came out, trailing a portion of some unknown shrub which had twined
itself about my ankle.
"Yes?" I said, picking twigs out of my hair.
"I want your advice," said Celia.
"Certainly. What is the trouble? By the way," I said, looking round,
"where is your _fiance_?"
"I have no _fiance_," she said, in a dull, hard voice.
"You have broken off the engagement?"
"Not exactly. And yet--well, I suppose it amounts to that."
"I don't quite understand."
"Well, the fact is," said Celia, in a burst of girlish frankness, "I
rather think I've killed George."
"Killed him, eh?"
It was a solution that had not occurred to me, but now that it was
presented for my inspection I could see its merits. In these days of
national effort, when we are all working together to try to make our
beloved land fit for heroes to live in, it was astonishing that nobody
before had thought of a simple, obvious thing like killing George
Mackintosh. George Mackintosh was undoubtedly better dead, but it had
taken a woman's intuition to see it.
"I killed him with my niblick," said Celia.
I nodded. If the thing was to be done at all, it was unquestionably a
niblick shot.
"I had just made my eleventh attempt to get out of that ravine," the
girl went on, "with George talking all the time about the recent
excavations in Egypt, when suddenly--you know what it is when something
seems to snap----"
"I had the experience with my shoe-lace only this morning."
"Yes, it was like that. Sharp--sudden--happening all in a moment. I
suppose I must have said something, for George stopped talking about
Egypt and said that he was reminded by a remark of the last speaker's
of a certain Irishman-----"