But Gerald was the one figure that remained distinct for Roland. The girls, for the most part, resembled each other so closely that he could only in rare instances recall their features or what they had worn or what they had said. He remembered far more vividly his walks with Gerald through the lighted streets, their confidences and hesitations. Should they go into this café or into that; and then when they had selected their café how Gerald would open the wine fist and carefully run his finger down the page, while the waiter would hover over him: “Yes, yes, sir, a very good wine that, sir, a very good wine indeed!” And then when the wine was ordered how they would look round at the girls who sat in couples at the marble-topped tables, sipping a citron or a bock. “What do you think of that couple over there?” “Not bad, but let’s wait a bit; something better may turn up soon”; and a little later: “Oh, look, that girl over there, the one with the green dress, just beneath the picture; try and catch her eye, she looks ripping!” They had been more exciting, those moments of expectation, than the subsequent embraces.
Gerald was always the dominant figure.
It was the expression of Gerald’s face that Roland remembered most clearly on that disappointing evening when they had taken two chorus girls to dinner at a private room and Roland’s selected had refused champagne and preferred fried sole to pheasant—an abstinence so alarming that, in spite of Roland’s protests, Gerald had suddenly decided that they would have to catch a train to Paris that evening instead of being able to wait till the morning.
And it was Gerald whom Roland particularly associated with the memory of that ignominious occasion on which he had thought at last to have discovered real romance.
They had dropped into a restaurant in the afternoon for a cup of chocolate, and had seen sitting by herself a girl who could hardly have been twenty years of age. She wore a wide-brimmed hat, under which Roland could just see, as she bent her head over her ice, the tip of her nose, the smooth curve of a cheek, the strain on the muscles of her neck. She raised the spoon delicately to her mouth, her lips closed on it and held it there. Her eyelids appeared to droop in a sort of sensual contentment. Roland watched her, fascinated; watched her till she drew the spoon slowly from her mouth. She lingered pensively, and between the even rows of her white teeth the red tip of her tongue played for a moment on the spoon. At that moment she raised her eyes, observed that Roland was staring at her, smiled, and dropped her eyes again.
“Did you see that?” whispered Roland excitedly. “She smiled at me, and she’s ripping! I must go and speak to her!”
“Don’t be a fool,” said Gerald; “a smile may not mean anything. Besides, she’s obviously not a tart and she may be known here. If she is she won’t want to be seen talking to a stranger. You sit still, like a good boy, and see if she smiles at you again.”
Against his will Roland consented. But he had his reward a few minutes later when she turned her chair to catch the waitress’s attention, and her eyes, meeting his, smiled at them again—a challenging, alluring smile, that seemed to say, “Well, are you brave enough?” He was dismayed, however, to notice that she had turned in order to ask for her bill. He saw her run her eye down the slip of paper, take some money from her purse and begin to button on her gloves, long gauntlet gloves that fastened above the elbow.
“She’s going! what shall I do?” he asked.
For answer Marston took a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote on it: “Meet me at the Café des Colombes to-night at eight-thirty.”