Chapter VIII: A Fortunate Meeting

Mr. Whately’s one idea on his return to Hammerton was to hide the fact that Roland’s sudden leaving was the result of a scandal. He wished the decision in no way to seem unpremeditated. Two days later, therefore, he went round to the Curtises’ and prepared the way by a discussion of the value of university training.

“Really, you know, Mrs. Curtis,” he said, “I very much doubt whether Oxford is as useful as we sometimes think it is. What will Roland be able to do afterwards? If I know Roland he will do precious little work. He is not very clever; I doubt if he will get into the Civil Service, and what else is there open to him? Nothing, perhaps, except schoolmastering, and he would not be much use at that. I am not at all certain that it is not wiser, on the whole, to take a boy away at about seventeen or eighteen, send him abroad for a couple of months and then put him into business.”

Mrs. Curtis was not a little surprised. For a good sixteen years Mr. Whately had refused to consider the possibility of any education for Roland other than Fernhurst and Brasenose.

“But you are not thinking of taking him away from Fernhurst and not sending him to Brasenose?” she said.

“Oh, no, Mrs. Curtis, but I have been thinking that if we could do things all over again I am not at all sure but that’s not the way I should have arranged his education.”

That was the first step.

A few nights later he came round again, and again talked of the value of two or three months in France.

“What does Roland think about it, Mr. Whately?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact, I only heard from Roland on the subject to-day; he seems quite keen on it. I just threw it out as a suggestion to him. I pointed out that most of his friends will have left at the end of the term, that next year he would be rather lonely, and that there would not be anything very much for him to do when he came down from Oxford. He seemed to agree with me.”

Mrs. Curtis, however, was no fool. She had spent the greater part of her middle age sitting in front of a fire watching life drift past her, and her one amusement had been the examination of the motives and actions of her friends.

“There is something rather curious here,” she said that evening to her husband. “As long as we have known the Whatelys they have insisted on the value of public school and university education. Now, quite suddenly, they have turned round, and they are talking about business and commerce and the value of French.”

Mr. Curtis, who was a credulous creature, saw no reason why they should not change their minds if they wanted to.

“After all,” he said, “it is quite true that Latin and Greek are of very little use to anyone in the City.”

But Mrs. Curtis refused to be convinced.

“I do not care what you say,” she said. “You just wait and see.”

And, sure enough, within a week Mr. Whately had confessed his intention of taking Roland away from Fernhurst at the end of the term.

“And you are going to send him to France?” said Mrs. Curtis.

“I am not quite certain about that,” he said. “I am going to look round first to see if I can’t get him a job at once. We both agree that another year at Fernhurst would be a waste of time.”

Mrs. Curtis smiled pleasantly. As soon as he had gone she expressed herself forcibly.

“I do not believe for a moment,” she insisted, “that Mr. Whately has changed his mind without some pretty strong reason. He was frightfully anxious to see Roland captain of his house. He was so proud of everything he did at Fernhurst. There must be a row or something; unless, of course, he has lost his money.”

But that idea Mr. Curtis pooh-poohed.

“My dear Edith,” he said, “that is quite impossible. You know that Whately’s got a good salaried post in the bank. He has got no private means to lose and he is not the sort of man to live above his income. It is certainly not money. I don’t see why a man should not change his mind if he wants to.”

Mrs. Curtis again refused to be convinced.

“You wouldn’t,” she said.

April was of the same opinion. She knew perfectly well that Roland, of his own free will, would never have agreed to such a plan. There must be trouble of some sort or other, she said to herself, and Roland instantly became more interesting in her eyes. She wondered what he had done. Her knowledge of school life was based mainly upon the stories of Talbot Baines Reid, and she began to picture some adventure in which he had taken the blame upon his own shoulders. A friend of his had contracted liabilities at the Eversham Arms and Roland had become involved; or perhaps someone had endeavored to steal the papers of a Scholarship examination and Roland had been falsely accused. She could not imagine that Roland had himself done anything dishonorable, and she could not be expected to know the usual cause for which boys are suddenly removed from their school. Ralph Richmond was the only person who was likely to know the true story, and to him she went.

Now, there is in the Latin Grammar a morality contained in an example of a conditional sentence which runs in the following words: “Even though they are silent they say enough.” In spite of Ralph’s desperate efforts to assume ignorance it was quite obvious to April that he knew all about it, also that it was something that Roland would not want her to know. She was puzzled and distressed. If there had been no embarrassment between them during the holidays she would probably have written to Roland and asked him about it, but under the conditions she felt that this was impossible.

“I shall have to wait till he returns,” she said. “Perhaps he will tell me of his own accord.”

But when Roland came home he showed not the slightest inclination to tell her anything. If he were acting a part he was acting it extraordinarily well. He told her how glad he was that he was leaving Fernhurst. “One outgrows school,” he said. “It is all right for a bit. It is great fun when you are a fag and when you are half-way up; but it is not worth it when you have got responsibilities. And as I went there at thirteen--a year earlier than most people--nearly all my friends will have left. I should have been very lonely next term. I think I am well out of it.”

April reminded him of his eagerness to go to Oxford. That objection, too, he managed to brush aside.

“Oxford,” he said; “that is nothing but school over again. It is masters and work and regulations. I am very glad it is over.”

For a while she was almost tempted to believe he was telling her the truth, but as August passed she noticed that Roland seemed less satisfied with his prospects. He spoke with diminishing enthusiasm of the freedom of an office. Indeed, whenever she introduced the subject he changed it quickly.

“I expect father will find me something decent soon,” he would say, and began to talk of cricket or of some rag that he remembered.

But Mr. Whately was not finding it easy to procure a post for his son. Roland, after all, possessed no special qualifications. He had been in the Sixth Form of a public school, but he had not been a particularly brilliant member of it. He had passed no standard examinations. He was too young for any important competitive work and Mr. Whately had very few influential friends. Roland began to see before him the prospect of long days spent in a bank--a dismal prospect. “What will it lead to, father?” he used to ask, and Mr. Whately had not been able to hold out very much encouragement.

“Well, I suppose in time if you work well you would become a manager. If you do anything really brilliant you might be given some post of central organization.”

“But it is not very likely, is it, father?” said Roland.

“Not very likely; no.”

The years seemed mapped out before him and he found it difficult to maintain his pose of complacent satisfaction, so that one evening, when he felt more than ordinarily depressed, and when the need of sympathy became irresistible, he found himself telling April the story of his trouble.

She listened to him quietly, sitting huddled up in the window-seat, her knees drawn up towards her, her hands clasped beneath them. She said nothing for a while after he had finished.

“Well,” he said at last, “that’s the story. You know all about it now.”

She looked up at him. There was in her eyes neither annoyance nor repulsion nor contempt, but only interest and sympathy.

“Why did you do it, Roland?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. And because this happened to be the real reason, and because he felt it to be inadequate, he searched his memory for some more plausible account.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It seemed to happen this way: Things were awfully dull at school, and then, during the Christmas holidays, we had that row. If it hadn’t been for that I think I should have chucked it up altogether. But you didn’t seem to care for me; it didn’t seem to matter much either way; and--well one drifts into these things.”

There was another pause.

“But I don’t understand, Roland. Do you mean to say if we hadn’t had that row at Christmas nothing of this would have happened?”

Because their disagreement had not been without its influence on Roland’s general attitude towards his school romance, and because Roland was always at the mercy of the immediate influence, and in the presence of April was unable to think that anything but April could have influenced him, he mistook the part for the whole, and assured her that if they had not had that quarrel at the dance he would have given up Dolly altogether. And because the situation was one they had often met in plays and stories they accepted it as the truth.

“It’s all my fault,” she said, “really all my fault.” And turning her head away from him she allowed her thoughts to travel back to that ineffectual hour of loneliness and resignation. “I can do nothing, nothing myself,” she said. “I can only spoil things for other people.”

At the time Roland was disappointed, but two hours later he decided that he was, on the whole, relieved that Mrs. Curtis should have chosen that particular moment to return from her afternoon call. In another moment he would have been saying things that would have complicated life most confoundedly. April had been very near tears; he disliked heroics. He would have had to do something to console her. He would probably have said to her a great many things that at the time would have seemed to him true, but which afterwards he would have regretted. He had sufficient worries of his own already.

At home life was not made easy for Roland. He received little sympathy. Ralph told him that he deserved all he had got and had been lucky to get off so cheaply. His father repeated a number of moral platitudes, the source of which Roland was able to recognize.

“After all,” said Mr. Whately, “I have been in a bank all my life; I have not done badly in it, and you, with your education and advantages, should be able to do much better.”

This was a line of argument which did not appeal to Roland. He was very fond of his father, but he had always regarded his manner of life as a fate, at all costs, to be avoided. And though his mother in his presence endeavored to make him believe that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, when she was alone with her husband she saw only her son’s point of view.

“If this is all we have got to offer him,” she said, “all the money and time we have spent will be wasted. If a desk at a bank is going to be the end of it, he might just as well have gone to a day school, and all the extra money we have spent could have been put away for him in a bank.”

Mr. Whately reminded her that the change in their plans was due entirely to Roland.

“Oh, yes, yes, yes,” she said, “that is all very well. But it is a cruel shame that a boy’s whole life should depend on a thing he does when he is seventeen years old.”

Mr. Whately murmured something about it being the way of the world, adding he himself had been in a bank now for thirty years.

“Which is the very reason,” said Mrs. Whately, “that I don’t want my son to go into one”--an argument that did not touch her husband.

But talk how they might, and whatever philosophic attitude they might adopt, the practical position remained unchanged. Roland had been offered a post in a bank, which he could take up at the beginning of October. Three weeks were left him in which he might try to find something better for himself; but of this there seemed little prospect.

And as he sat in the free seats at the Oval, on an afternoon of late September, Roland had to face his position honestly, and own to himself there was no alternative to the bank.

He was lonely as he sat there in the mild sunshine watching the white figures move across the grass. That evening school would be going back and he would not be with them. It was hard to realize that in four hours’ time the cloisters would be alive with voices, that feet would be clattering up and down the study steps, that the eight-fifteen would have just arrived and the rush to the hall would have begun.

The play became slow; two professionals were wearing down the bowling. He began to feel sleepy in the languid atmosphere of this late summer afternoon. He could not concentrate his attention upon the cricket. He could think only of himself, and the river that was bearing him without his knowledge to a country he did not know.

It was not merely that he had left school, that he had exchanged one discipline for another; he had altered entirely his mode of life, and for this new life a new technique would be required. Up till now everything had been marked out clearly in definite stages; he had been working in definite lines. It was not merely that the year was divided into terms, but his career also was so divided. There had been a gradation in everything. It had been his ambition to get his firsts at football, and the path was marked out clearly for him--house cap., seconds, firsts: in form he had wanted to get into the Sixth, and here again the course had been clear--Fourth, Fifth, Sixth: he had wanted to become a house prefect; the process was the same--day room table, Lower Fourth table, Fifth Form table, Sixth Form table. He had known exactly what he was doing; everything had been made simple for him. His ambitions had been protected. It was quite different now; nothing was clearly defined. He would have to spend a certain number of hours a day in an office. Outside of that office he would be free to do what he liked. He could choose his own ambition, but as yet he could not decide what that would be. He was as dazed by the imminence of this freedom as a mortal man whose world is ordered by the limits of time and space when confronted suddenly with the problem of infinity. Roland could not come to terms with a world in which he would not be tethered to one spot by periods of three months. His reverie was interrupted by a hand that descended heavily on his shoulder and a voice he recognized, that addressed him by his name. He turned and saw Gerald Marston standing behind him.

“So you are a free man at last,” he said. “How did the rest of the term go?”

It was a pleasant surprise; and Roland welcomed the prospect of a cheery afternoon with a companion who would soon dispel his melancholy.

“Oh, not so badly,” he said. “I lay pretty quiet and saw as little of Carus Evans as I could.”

“And how is the amiable Brewster?” asked Marston.

“He’s all right, I suppose. He won’t have much of a time this year, though, I should think. He ought to have been captain of the XI., but they say now he is not responsible enough, and Jenkins, a man he absolutely hates, is going to run it instead.”

“So you’re not sorry you have left?”

Roland shrugged his shoulders.

“In a way not; if there hadn’t been a row, though, I should have had a pretty good time this term.”

“Well, you can’t have things both ways. What’s going to happen to you now?”

With most people Roland would have preferred to pass the matter off with some casual remark about his father having got him a good job in the City. He liked sympathy, but was afraid of sympathy when it became pity. He did not want the acquaintances who, six months ago, had been talking of him as “that lucky little beast, Whately,” to speak of him now as “poor old Whately; rotten luck on him; have you heard about it?” But it is always easier to make a confession to a stranger than to a person with whom one is brought into daily contact. Marston was a person with whom he felt intimate, although he knew him so little; and so he found himself telling Marston about the bank and of the dismal future that awaited him.

Marston was highly indignant.

“What a beastly shame,” he said. “You will simply hate it. Cannot your father get you something better?”

“I don’t think so. He has always lived a very quiet life; he has not got any influential friends--but really, what’s the good of talking about it? Something may turn up. Let’s watch the cricket.”

“Oh, rot, man!” expostulated Marston. “You can’t let the thing drop like this. After all, my father is rather a big pot in the varnish world; he may be able to do something.”

“But I don’t know anything about varnish.”

“You don’t need to, my dear fellow. The less you know about it the better. All you’ve got to do is to believe that our kind of varnish is the best.” And as they walked round the ground during the tea interval a happy idea occurred to Marston.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “We have got a cricket match on Saturday against the village; we’re quite likely to be a man short; at any rate we can always play twelve-a-side. You come down and stay the week-end with us. The pater’s frightfully keen on cricket. If you can manage to make a few he’s sure to be impressed, and then I’ll tell him all about you. You will get a pleasant week-end and I expect quite a good game of cricket.”

Roland naturally accepted this proposal eagerly. He did not, however, tell his people of the prospect of a job in Marston & Marston, Limited; he preferred to wait till things were settled one way or another. If he were to be disappointed, he would prefer to be disappointed alone. He did not need any sympathy at such a time.

But when he went round to the Curtises’ April could tell, from the glow in his face, that he was unusually excited about something. She did not have a chance to speak to him when he was in the drawing-room. Her mother talked and talked. Arthur had just gone back to school and she was garrulous about his outfit.

“It is so absurd, you know, Mr. Whately,” she said, “the way people say women care more about clothes than men. There is Arthur to-day; he insisted on having linen shirts instead of woolen ones, although woolen shirts are much nicer and much warmer. ‘My dear Arthur,’ I said, ‘no one can see your shirt; your waistcoat hides most of it and your tie the rest.’ But he said that all the boys wore linen shirts instead of flannel. ‘But, my dear Arthur,’ I said, ‘who is going to see what kind of a shirt you are wearing if it is covered by your waistcoat and tie? And I can cut your sleeves shorter so that they would not be seen beneath your coat.’ And do you know what he said, Mr. Whately? He said, ‘You don’t understand, mother; the boys would see that I was wearing a flannel shirt when I changed for football, and I would be ragged for it.’ Well, now, Mr. Whately, isn’t that absurd?”

She went on talking and talking about every garment she had bought for her son--his ties, his boots, his socks, his coat.

Roland hardly talked at all. His father mentioned that he was going down for the week-end to stay with some friends and take part in a cricket match.

“So that is what you are so excited about!” April had interposed. And Roland had laughed and said that that was it.

But she would not believe that he could be so excited about a game of cricket, and in the hall she had pulled him by his coat sleeve.

“What is it?” she had whispered. “Something has happened. It is not only a cricket match.”

And because he wanted to share his enthusiasm with someone, and because April looked so pretty, and because he felt that courage would flow to him from her faith in him, he confided in her his hope.

“Oh, that would be lovely,” she said. “I do hope things will turn out all right. I’ve felt so guilty all along about it; if it hadn’t been for me none of this would ever have happened.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Roland. “Things are beginning to turn right now.”

There was no time for further conversation; Mrs. Curtis had completed her doorstep homily to Mr. Whately. April pressed Roland’s hand eagerly as she said good-by to him.

“Good luck!” she whispered.