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.