CHAPTER XVIII
THREE DAYS
THE summer was nearly over, however, before the crisis came. It was on a Friday evening in the beginning of September, and Roland was sitting with his mother, as was usual with them, for a short talk after his father had gone to bed. He could tell that something was worrying her. Her conversation had been disjointed and many of her remarks irrelevant. And suddenly his instinct warned him that she was going to speak to him about April. He went suddenly still. If someone had thrown a stone at him at that moment he would have been unable to move out of the way of it. He could recollect distinctly, to the end of his life, everything that had passed through his mind during that minute of terrifying silence that lay between his realization of what was coming and the first sound of that opening sentence.
“Roland, dear, I hope you won’t mind my mentioning it, but your father and I have been talking together about you and April.”
He could remember everything: the shout of a newsboy in the street—“Murder in Tufnell Park!” the slight rustle of the curtain against the window-sill; the click of his mother’s knitting needles. And, till that moment, he had never noticed that the pattern of the carpet was irregular, that on the left side there were seven roses and five poppies and on the right six roses and six poppies. They had had that carpet for twenty years and he had never noticed it before. His eyes were riveted on this curious deformity, while through the window came the shriek of the newsboy—“Murder in Tufnell Park!” Then his mother’s voice broke the tension. The moment had come; he gathered his strength to him. As he had walked five years earlier with unflinching head, up the hill to Carus Evans, so now he answered his mother with an even voice:
“Yes, mother?”
“Well, dear, we’ve been thinking that you really ought to be settling something definite about yourself and April.”
“But we didn’t want to be engaged, mother.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that, dear. I know about that. It’s a modern idea, I suppose, though I think myself that it would have been better some time ago, but it’s not an engagement so much we’re thinking of as of your marriage.”
It was more sudden than Roland had expected.
“Oh, but—oh, surely Mrs. Curtis would never agree. She’d say we were much too young.”