“Now, walk up to the counter and pretend to choose a cake; if she wants to see any more of you she will drop her handkerchief, or purse, or at any rate give you an opportunity of speaking to her; if she does, slip this note into her hand. If she doesn’t, you can buy me an éclair, and thank your lucky stars that you’ve been preserved from making a most abandoned fool of yourself.”
Roland was in such a hurry to get to the counter that he tripped against a table and only saved himself from falling by gripping violently the shoulder of an elderly bourgeois. By the time he had completed his apologies his charmer had very nearly reached the door.
“It’s all up,” he told himself; “she thinks me a clumsy fool, that it’s not worth her while to worry about. I ought to have gone straight up to her at once”; and he followed with dejected eyes her progress towards the door.
She was carrying in one hand an umbrella and in the other a little velvet bag. As she raised her hand to open the door, the bag slipped from her fingers and fell upon the floor. There were three persons nearer to the bag than Roland, but before even a hand had been stretched out to it he had precipitated himself forward, had picked it up and was handing it to the lady. She smiled at him with gracious gratitude. So far all had gone splendidly. Then he began to fumble. The note was in the other hand, and in the flurry of the moment he did not know how to maneuver the bag and the note into the same hand. First of all, he tried to change the bag from the right hand to the left. But his forefinger and thumb were so closely engaged with the note that the remaining three fingers failed to grasp the handle of the bag. He made a furious dive and caught the bag in his right hand just before it reached the floor. Panic seized him. He lost all sense of the proprieties. He handed the bag straight to her, and then realizing, before she had had time to take it from him, that somehow or other the note also had to come into her possession, he offered it to her between the forefinger and thumb of his left hand with less secrecy than he would have displayed in giving a tip to a waiter. The sudden change of the lady’s expression from inviting kindliness to a surprised affronted indignation threw him into so acute a fever of embarrassment that once again he endeavored to move the bag from the right hand to the left. Again he fumbled, but with a different result. He piloted the bag successfully into the lady’s hands, but allowed the note to slip from between his fingers. It fell face upwards on the floor.
Several ways of escape were open to him. He might have affected unconcern, and either picked up the piece of paper or left it where it lay. He might have kicked the note away and walked forward to open the door. He might have placed his foot on the note till the attention of the room was once again directed to its separate interests. None of these things, however, did he do. He did what was natural for him in such an unexpected situation. He did nothing. He stood quite still and gazed at the note as it lay there startlingly white against the black tiles of the floor. The eyes of everyone in the room appeared to be directed towards it. The features of the startled lady assumed an expression of horrified amazement. Two waitresses leaned over the counter in undisguised excitement; another stopped dead with a tray in her hand to survey the incriminating document. The fat gentleman against whom Roland had collided began to make some unpleasantly loud remarks to his companion. An old woman leaned forward and asked the room in general what was happening. From a far corner came the horrible suppression of a giggle.
The lady herself, who was, as a matter of fact, perfectly respectable, though she liked to be thought otherwise, and had dropped her bag accidentally, was the first to recover her composure. She fixed on Roland a glance of which as a combination of hatred and contempt he had never seen the equal, turned quickly and walked out of the restaurant. The sudden bang of the door behind her broke the tension. The various spectators of this entertaining interlude returned to their ices and their chocolate, the waitresses resumed their duties, the patron of the establishment fussed up the center of the room, and Gerald, who had watched the scene with intense if slightly nervous amusement, left his table, picked up the note, and taking Roland by the arm, led him out of the public notice, and listened to his friend’s solemn vow that never again, under any circumstances, would he be induced to open negotiations with any woman, be she never so lovely, who did not by her dress, her manner and the places she frequented proclaim unquestionably her profession.
It was hardly surprising that as a result of these adventures a more developed, more independent Roland returned at the end of his six months’ tour, a Roland, moreover, with a different attitude to himself, his future, his surroundings, who was prepared to despise the chrysalis from which he had emerged. His school-days appeared trivial.
“What a deal of fuss we made about things that didn’t really matter at all,” he said to Gerald as they leaned over the taffrail and watched the dim line that was England grow distinct, its gray slowly whitening as they drew near. “What a fuss about one’s place in form, one’s position in the house; whether one ragged or whether one didn’t rag. I can see all those masters, with their solemn faces, thinking I had perjured my immortal soul because I had walked out with a girl. They really thought it mattered.”
How puny it became in comparison with this magnificent gamble of finance! What were marks in an exam, to set against a turnover of several thousands? Duty, privilege, responsibility: what had they been but the brightly colored bricks with which children play in the nursery; and as for the fret and fever concerning their arrangement, where could be found an equivalent for the serious absorption of a child?
In the same way he thought of his home and the environment of his boyhood. What a gray world it had been! How monotonous, how arid! He remembered sitting as a child at the bars of his nursery window watching the stream of business men hurrying to their offices in the morning, their newspapers tucked under their arms. They had seemed to him like marionettes. The front door had opened. Husband and wife had exchanged a brusque embrace; the male marionette had trotted down the steps, had paused at the gate to wave his hand, and as he had turned into the street the front door had closed behind him. Always the same thing every day. And then in the evening the same stream of tired listless men hurrying home, their bulky morning paper exchanged for the slim evening newssheet. They would trot up the white stone steps, the front door would swing open, again in the porch the marionettes would kiss. It had amused him as a child, this dumb show, but as a boy he had come to hate it—and to fear it also. For he knew that this was the life that awaited him if he failed to turn to account his superior opportunities.