And, when they reached her home, she would jump out of the taxi and run straight up the steps without turning to say good-bye to him, and he would sit back in the cushions reflecting dismally that in three days he would sail for India, and would not see her again for three—perhaps four—years.
A good story! I would sit down to write it as soon as I got home, not waiting for the morning to blur my impression of her startled girlhood. And I should not find it difficult to end this story. While he was away he would write to her and ask forgiveness, protesting that he loved her, had always loved her, that he was sorry for his rudeness; and that, when he came back, might he hope—a trite letter it would be; but then, if it were anything but trite, he would be a writer of much talent, and that I did not propose to make him. No; he would write her an ordinary love-letter, and she, being an ordinary woman, would be moved by it, and, with the distance hiding her blushes, she would write, saying that she had been young and foolish, but was now wise, and would gladly wait for him. And during four years they would create slowly, letter by letter, an illusion of each other out of the enchantment of things remote. He would become her Prince Charming, and she would be for him a creature of infinite fragrance. And then, when they met again, she would find herself in the arms of a prosaic Anglo-Indian, with thinning hair, and he would find that a girl had become a woman, that her pretty features had grown petulant during the years of waiting.
And in the morning I should have to decide whether or not they should marry; probably they would, from a lack of the courage that looks at itself in the glass and says: “You have failed, my friend.” Yes, it would be truer to make them marry, and perhaps she might be happy in her children, while he found pleasure in the society of another woman. But, at any rate, a dream would have been passed, and that would be the object of my story: to tell simply how everything changes, everything passes; not a new philosophy and one that occurred to Heraclitus, but true nevertheless.
And looking across at the couple in the corner, I thought with real sympathy on their sad fate. They were just getting ready to go; the waiter had brought the bill neatly folded upon a plate; the girl had turned towards a large photograph of the Royal Family, and was endeavouring to arrange her hair from the blurred reflection in it.
She was smiling and happy, ignorant of the disaster that awaited her. Within five minutes she would have been embraced clumsily, would have assured her lover that “he had spoiled everything,” and the curtain would have descended on the first act of the tragedy. Could nothing be done to save her; it was cruel—so young, so fresh and with so brief a springtime.
I was indulging myself in this soft, sentimental reverie, for a story-teller always runs in great danger of confusing his own reality with that of the world, and of regarding everything that happens to himself and to his friends as chapter headings in a novel. I was just, I say, indulging my pet weakness to the top of my bent when suddenly, for the first time in my life, I was the witness of a real dramatic incident.
The girl had turned to arrange her hair in the blurred reflection of the sheet of glass that protected the Royal Family from dust, and, in order to brush a little powder from her chin, she had taken her pocket-handkerchief from her bag. The bag lay open on the table, its mouth pointing to her companion, and, to my amazement, I saw the man lean forward, glance round the room to see if anyone was looking, and then quickly take from the bag a couple of pound notes; these he placed on the plate under the bill, added another note of his own, and called the waiter’s attention to the plate. Then, a minute later, the plate returned; the waiter received a substantial tip, in return for which he helped his clients on with their coats and bowed them out of the restaurant; all of which I watched in dazed, though intrigued, wonderment. I suppose I ought to have risen from my seat and called the girl’s attention to the theft, but it is hard for one who has chosen for himself the rôle of onlooker to decide on violent and sudden action. And besides, I have learnt that interference is invariably unwise, that I cannot expect other people to mind their own business until I mind mine. At any rate, whatever was the right thing to do, I did what it was natural for me to do under such circumstances: I sat where I was, and in five minutes became lost in a vague and wistful speculation.
The reasons for the man’s embarrassment were now clear; all the evening he had been waiting his opportunity to steal his companion’s money—that much was obvious. And to think that for half an hour I had been concocting an absurd story after the manner of Turgenev, about an Indian Civil Servant and “the girl he left behind him”! Impatiently I called for my bill, tipped the waiter, and walked out into Dean Street.
The cool air did me good in restoring my self-confidence. It was a mistake, I told myself, that anyone might have made. We do not expect to meet thieves outside the Stock Exchange and the pages of the police reports. And it was quite a good story that I had invented—a slight debt to Turgenev perhaps, but then every short story that is written owes something either to Turgenev or de Maupassant or Tchecov. And I had, besides, the material for another really first-class tale. I could see it so clearly: the young girl prattling away pleasantly and the man getting more and more worried. “Will she never powder her nose?” he asks himself, and tries to hide his anxiousness beneath a series of amusing anecdotes. And no doubt I could make them discuss the modern girl, and she will say that she hates the girl who powders and paints; and he will have to agree with her, seeing that her complexion is her own, although he is, for the first time in his life, hating the fresh bloom of her cheek and praying that she were another sort of girl—a delightful situation. And then, at last, when all seems lost, I could make her lean forward to smell the flowers on the table, and a speck of yellow pollen would attach itself to her chin, to which he would, of course, call her attention.
“Is there really,” she would say, and, opening her bag, she would take out her handkerchief, turn to the photograph beside them, and give him his opportunity.