London Lovers
When I was walking along the Embankment on a path of pale sun, I saw a young man and a young woman leaning over the grey stone watching the river. There were white gulls wheeling, and the river was high; and this man and this woman were very still and intent. When I stood beside them I found they were not looking at the river, they were looking at the Future!
Under cover of their leaning arms they were holding hands. They were in the last stage of love, their eyes like fields full of moon-calves. His clothes were Sundayfied and his boots were new and brown—the colour of a retired Indian general.
Her hat had been made at home in a hurry. And they were standing there lost in the illimitable wonder of each other. They were not in London. They were in that aerial country on the boundaries of paradise, from which such men and women descend to a small red box in the suburbs and the current price of eggs.
I could compose their imaginary dialogue easily. I could tell you that he whispered about the fifteen pounds in the bank, that they murmured daringly of banns, and an oak suite on the instalment system. But, no! They said nothing, because they had reached that condition when words cease to capture meaning.
And I thought how well worth writing of are the lovers of London, the ordinary little lovers, whose sitting-out places are the parks, whose adventures are omnibus rides to Kew, whose extravagances are tea and buns.
Every Sunday they walk London. Every week-day you can see them in the solemn City snatching a half-hour at luncheon, she with an index finger purpled by a new ribbon, he very clerkly and correct. And you must never think them mean when, having watched each other eat steak and kidney pie as if they were sitting at a mystery play, they call for separate bills.
He pays his one and threepence and she pays hers. How significant that is. Had he been philandering with her they would have had a far nicer luncheon in a very much nicer restaurant, and he would have carelessly ordered an ice and ended up recklessly with coffee and perhaps even a sinister crème de menthe. And he would have paid the bill, giving her the impression it was a mere nothing. She would not be allowed to know that his hand, groping mysteriously in his pocket, was trying desperately to discover whether there was enough left for seats in a cinema, whether—dash it all!—that little coin in the dark of his slender pocket was a penny or a much-hoped-for half-crown.
Ah, a bad sign. The road to bankruptcy is paved with boasting and insincerity and such little showings off! Let him once discover the Girl, and then with life imminent they get down to truth, and she discovers that he is not the lordly thing he pretended to be, that he is not earning a splendid fiver a week but a solemn two pounds ten. Crisis? Oh, dear, no!