Having seen what I did, I wasn’t particularly surprised to meet Bobbie at the club next day looking about as merry and bright as a lonely gum-drop at an Eskimo tea-party.
He started in straightway. He seemed glad to have someone to talk to about it.
“Do you know how long I’ve been married?” he said.
I didn’t exactly.
“About a year, isn’t it?”
“Not about a year,” he said sadly. “Exactly a year—yesterday!”
Then I understood. I saw light—a regular flash of light.
“Yesterday was——?”
“The anniversary of the wedding. I’d arranged to take Mary to the Savoy, and on to Covent Garden. She particularly wanted to hear Caruso. I had the ticket for the box in my pocket. Do you know, all through dinner I had a kind of rummy idea that there was something I’d forgotten, but I couldn’t think what?”
“Till your wife mentioned it?”
He nodded——
“She—mentioned it,” he said thoughtfully.
I didn’t ask for details. Women with hair and chins like Mary’s may be angels most of the time, but, when they take off their wings for a bit, they aren’t half-hearted about it.
“To be absolutely frank, old top,” said poor old Bobbie, in a broken sort of way, “my stock’s pretty low at home.”
There didn’t seem much to be done. I just lit a cigarette and sat there. He didn’t want to talk. Presently he went out. I stood at the window of our upper smoking-room, which looks out on to Piccadilly, and watched him. He walked slowly along for a few yards, stopped, then walked on again, and finally turned into a jeweller’s. Which was an instance of what I meant when I said that deep down in him there was a certain stratum of sense.
* * * * *
It was from now on that I began to be really interested in this problem of Bobbie’s married life. Of course, one’s always mildly interested in one’s friends’ marriages, hoping they’ll turn out well and all that; but this was different. The average man isn’t like Bobbie, and the average girl isn’t like Mary. It was that old business of the immovable mass and the irresistible force. There was Bobbie, ambling gently through life, a dear old chap in a hundred ways, but undoubtedly a chump of the first water.
And there was Mary, determined that he shouldn’t be a chump. And Nature, mind you, on Bobbie’s side. When Nature makes a chump like dear old Bobbie, she’s proud of him, and doesn’t want her handiwork disturbed. She gives him a sort of natural armour to protect him against outside interference. And that armour is shortness of memory. Shortness of memory keeps a man a chump, when, but for it, he might cease to be one. Take my case, for instance. I’m a chump. Well, if I had remembered half the things people have tried to teach me during my life, my size in hats would be about number nine. But I didn’t. I forgot them. And it was just the same with Bobbie.
For about a week, perhaps a bit more, the recollection of that quiet little domestic evening bucked him up like a tonic. Elephants, I read somewhere, are champions at the memory business, but they were fools to Bobbie during that week. But, bless you, the shock wasn’t nearly big enough. It had dinted the armour, but it hadn’t made a hole in it. Pretty soon he was back at the old game.
It was pathetic, don’t you know. The poor girl loved him, and she was frightened. It was the thin edge of the wedge, you see, and she knew it. A man who forgets what day he was married, when he’s been married one year, will forget, at about the end of the fourth, that he’s married at all. If she meant to get him in hand at all, she had got to do it now, before he began to drift away.
I saw that clearly enough, and I tried to make Bobbie see it, when he was by way of pouring out his troubles to me one afternoon. I can’t remember what it was that he had forgotten the day before, but it was something she had asked him to bring home for her—it may have been a book.