“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, those! Why, my dear old chap; Tennyson’s Idylls of the King! Well, I should say! Have I heard of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King? Well, really! I suppose you haven’t a copy with you on board by any chance?”
“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.”
“Yes, of course, that must have wounded her.”
“Not half so much as he wounded me! He pinned me by the ankle the day before we—Wilhelmina and I, I mean—were to have been married. It is some satisfaction to me in my broken state to remember that I got home on the little beast with considerable juiciness and lifted him clean over the Chesterfield.”
Sam shook his head reprovingly.
“You shouldn’t have done that!” he said. He extended his cuff and added the words “Vitally important” to what he had just written. “It was probably that which decided her.”
“Well, I hate dogs,” said Eustace Hignett querulously. “I remember Wilhelmina once getting quite annoyed with me because I refused to step in and separate a couple of the brutes, absolute strangers to me, who were fighting in the street. I reminded her that we were all fighters now-a-ways, that life itself was in a sense a fight: but she wouldn’t be reasonable about it. She said that Sir Galahad would have done it like a shot. I thought not. We have no evidence whatsoever that Sir Galahad was ever called upon to do anything half as dangerous. And, anyway, he wore armour. Give me a suit of mail reaching well down over the ankles, and I will willingly intervene in a hundred dog fights. But in thin flannel trousers no!”