The suggestion of uneasiness was repeated as he leaned over the table towards her with the menu. “He is a little too eager,” I told myself. “He is anxious to make a success of it, and he is overacting. He is confoundedly uncomfortable.” And, calling the waiter, I ordered a dish of which the preparation would take, I knew, a good twenty minutes—and settled myself to enjoy the little comedy.
He had ordered an expensive dinner—champagne, a fried sole, a pheasant and a Japanese salad, and a mushroom savoury. He was desperately anxious to make it a success, and, to avoid awkward pauses, he was talking most of the time: amusingly, too, I gathered, for she often smiled at what he said, and once she burst out laughing—fresh, clear laughter; and that laugh, which came about half-way through the meal, revealed to me what indeed I should have seen before, that, while he was enduring agonies of self-consciousness, she was solely concerned with the natural enjoyment of a good dinner in pleasant company. “The plot thickens,” I said, for this discovery ruled out the possibility of the pleasant little romance I had been considering—their parents had forbidden their marriage, they had decided to run away feeling very brave when the scheme was only under discussion, but now that the moment had come they repented the splendid resolution and would give anything to be in their respective homes sitting before the fire, thinking pleasantly of bed. That solution would have to go; for, if this was the case, she would certainly be as nervous, and probably more nervous, than he, unless—but that was a contingency of which I refused to consider the possibility. The elopement idea would have to go, and, besides, there was not the least suggestion that they were lovers; they had not once looked into each other’s eyes; they had not been even silent together, and silence is the beginning of love. They were not man and wife; they were not avowed lovers; they did not even seem to be potential lovers.
And yet this dinner was for him certainly a big occasion. She meant something to him. But what? It was possible, of course, that he was in love with her, and not she with him. But that was no cause for shyness. Courtship is a leisured and, on the whole, pleasant business; and surely the young man was not so foolish as to be contemplating a premature proposal on the way home. For there is nothing more fatal than a hurried courtship. A moment comes when a girl expects a man to take her by the hand and tell her that he loves her, and would be angry with him if he did not. But it is disastrous to anticipate a climax. And this the young man knows; being a man of thirty such moments must have often come to him before. “And yet, perhaps,” I said to myself, “he is contemplating this folly. Why?”
And, putting down my glass, I began to frame a story. He had been an officer in the war, and after demobilisation had gone up to Oxford to take his degree. That was quite possible, and would make him twenty-eight years old to-day. Yes, he had gone up to Oxford, and had decided to go in for the Civil Service; he had wanted a post in the Home Civil, but he had not been able to make up for the years he had lost during the war, and he had passed into the Indian Civil. In a fortnight he would go abroad for several years, and there was this girl whom he had met perhaps at tennis, and with whom he had fallen in love, fascinated by her delicacy, her frail grace, her suggestion of the butterfly. She was young and inexperienced, and had regarded his love as comradeship, for he was undemonstrative, and talked about dancing and the cricket championship; and now he was going away. He had asked her out to dinner, and was desperately anxious to bring things to a head before he went. And of all this she knew nothing.
An interesting situation that could be developed into a good story. In the man’s failure to pass into the Home Civil Service there would be just a hint of the sad position of the ex-soldier; he had served, and had been passed over in favour of someone who had not. And on this failure hung the significance of his romance. He had prepared himself for a slow, quiet courtship, and now found that he had to compress into a few days the campaign of several months—and, of course, he had not been able to. He was not the man to capture a young girl’s heart by storm. If he succeeded in making her fall in love with him, it would be only after many weeks of growing intimacy. She would begin by confiding in him—that would be the first step; and then—but it would be a slow business, and, at any rate, it was impossible now. In three days he would have to go to India.
It was really a capital story, and I began to plan it out: the meeting at a tennis tournament; the news of his failure at the exam.; the dinner party in the restaurant; and then the journey home in the taxi. I could see it so clearly.
They would sit in silence for a while. Then he would lean forward and whisper her name, and she would turn her head and look at him with surprise.
“Yes,” she would say.
And he would not know what to do in the unaccustomed situation; and, as he had over-acted in the restaurant to hide his nervousness, so would he overact now. Without any warning he would take her in his arms and kiss her awkwardly and say: “I love you.” It would be a horrible failure. Very likely it would be her first kiss, and she would have her own romantic conception of what a first kiss should be, and she would be angry with him for his clumsiness. The kiss will have given her no pleasure, and that she cannot forgive him. She will push him from her, will probably say: “Now you’ve spoilt it all,” for at these moments it is the ridiculous that occurs to us, and she would speak out of her recollection of book and magazine heroines, and he would try and explain, but she would shake her head angrily.
“Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Can’t you see that you’ve spoilt everything?”