It was at the conclusion of the golf item in the pentathlon, and on the eighteenth green. Dick had holed out his last putt and won from me. He had also won from Margery, and Margery had a long putt of ten yards to halve with me. She looked at it for some time. She was standing with her back to the sun, so that her brown hair was flushed and gilded with it; her eyes, very blue and vivid with thought, were intent on the line to the hole, her mouth was a little drooped, and the white line of her teeth showed below her lip.
Suddenly she said, ‘Yes, I see,’ and putted.
The ball travelled smoothly along the turf, and she threw her arms wide.
‘It’s going in,’ she cried. ‘What a darling!’ and as the ball dropped into the hole she looked up at me. Then something caught in my breath, and it was no longer the Margery that I knew that stood there, but She. She who was completion and perfection—woman to me a man.
For a time the old intimacy of the alliance of laughter went on externally, I suppose, as before. I think we laughed no less. We contested as many pentathlons. We made plans for every day of Dick’s leave, and usually abandoned them for subsequent improvisations. Then, not more than a week afterwards, there came a day when Margery had to go to town, and Dick and I were left alone. She was coming back in the evening, and we were to go to the station to meet her, have tea there, and ride our bicycles back over the ridge of Ashdown Forest, down home in time to be exceedingly late for dinner.
The afternoon was very hot and sultry, and Dick and I abandoned the game at tennis we had begun, for we were both slack and heavy-handed, and strolled through the woods up the ‘boys’ path’ for the coolness and shelter of the beech-trees. The ground rises rapidly near the broken paling, and, finding a suitable bed of bracken, we lay down and smoked, looking out from cover over the great ridge of gorse and heather that stretched below us. The air was full of the innumerable murmurs of a hot day, and a warm heathery smell hung idly on the air. Near at hand was a flaming bank of gorse, and as we lay there, far more silent than our wont, we could hear the popping of the ripened seeds. The birds, too, were very silent in the bushes; only the grasshopper chirped unweariedly in the grass. Dick, I remember, was cleaning his pipe with yellow grass-stems, his straw hat tilted over his eyes. I, though lying there, was in reality waiting for the train at Victoria, No. 6 Platform. It started in five minutes, and had two hours’ run before it. Then Dick sat up.
‘Look here,’ he said: ‘I’ve something to tell you. There’s no doubt about it—I’ve fallen in love.’
I think I knew, almost before he spoke, what he would say; certainly before he spoke again I knew what was coming.
‘Yes, Margery,’ he went on: ‘my God! I have fallen in love.’
He turned his brown eyes suddenly from the hot reeling landscape in front to me.