“I’ll try, mother, I’ll try.”
She rose from her chair, walked across to him, and, bending down, kissed his forehead.
“We do feel for you, dear,” she said, “really we do.”
“I know you do, mother.”
For a long while after she had left him Roland remained in the drawing-room; he was burdened by a confused reaction against the influences that were shaping his future for him. He supposed he was in love with April, that one day he would marry her; but was there any need for this insistence upon domesticity? Could he not be free a little longer? His eyes traveled miserably round the small, insignificant drawing-room. The window curtains had long since yielded their fresh color to the sunshine and hung dingily in the gaslight. The wall paper was shabby and tawdry, with its festooned roses. The carpet near the door was threadbare; the coverings to the stiff-backed chairs were dull and crinkly. This was what marriage meant to men and women in his position. He contrasted the narrow room with the comfort and repose of Hogstead. What chance did people stand whose lives were circumscribed by endless financial difficulties, who could not afford to surround themselves with deep arm-chairs and heavy carpets and warm-colored wall papers? It was cruel that now, at the very moment when he had begun to escape from the drab environment of his childhood, these fetters should be attached to him. It was cruel. And rising from his chair he walked backwards and forwards, up and down the room. The days of his freedom were already numbered. They would be soon ended, the days of irresponsible, unreflecting action. It was maddening, this semblance of liberty where there was no liberty. He recalled a simile in a novel he had once read, though the name of the book and of the author had escaped his memory, in which human beings were described as fishes swimming in clear water, with the net of the fisherman about them. He was like that. He was swimming in clear water, but at any moment the fisherman might lift the net and he would be gasping and quivering on the bank.
Next day, in pitiful reaction, he presented to Mr. Marston a request to be allowed to commence his foreign tour immediately instead of, as had been previously arranged, in the beginning of the autumn.
“But, my dear fellow,” Mr. Marston expostulated, “you surely don’t want to go in the very middle of the cricket season, when you’re in such splendid form? Think what games you’ll be missing. There’s the Whittington match in August. We simply can’t do without you. And then there’s that game against Hogstead in September, in which you did so splendidly last year. It’s no good, my dear fellow, we simply can’t spare you.”
But Roland was stubborn.
“I’m very sorry, sir,” he said, “but I do feel that I ought to be going out there soon, and July and August will be slack months—just the time to see people and form alliances. In the autumn they would be too busy to worry about me.”
Mr. Marston shrugged his shoulders. It was annoying, but still the business came first, he supposed.