“Yes, sir, it do look pretty dismal, but you wait. April’s a funny month; why, to-morrow we shall probably have brilliant sunshine, and there’ll be twenty or thirty people down here, and when you go away you’ll be thinking about getting out that bat of yours and putting a drop of oil on it.” Roland expressed a hope that this prophecy would prove correct.
April was a funny month: it was cold to-day, but within a week the sun would be shining on green grass and new white flannels. Only another week! The fixing of this date, however, reminded Roland that in a week’s time he would be in a small village under the Downs, three miles from the nearest station, and this reminder was somewhat of a shock to him. He would miss the first four weeks of the season. By the time he came back everyone else would have found their form; it was rather a nuisance. Still, a honeymoon! Ah, well, one could not have it both ways.
Gerald was not arriving till the afternoon, and the morning passed slowly for Roland. He walked from Kennington over Westminster Bridge and along the Embankment to Charing Cross; he strolled down the Strand, looking into the shop windows and wondering whether he was hungry enough to have his lunch. He decided he was not and continued his walk, but boredom made him reconsider the decision, and he found himself unable to pass a small Italian restaurant at the beginning of Fleet Street; and as he had a long time, with nothing to do in it, he ordered a heavy lunch. When the waiter presented him with his bill he had become fretfully irritable—the usual penalty of overeating.
What on earth should he do with himself for two hours? How slowly the time was passing. It was impossible to realize that in twenty-four hours’ time he would be standing beside Muriel before the altar, that in two days’ time they would be man and wife. What would it be like? Pondering the question, he walked along to Trafalgar Square, and still pondering it he mounted a bus and traveled on it as far as a sevenpenny ticket would take him. Then he got on to a bus that was going in the opposite direction, and by the time he was back again at Trafalgar Square, Gerald’s train from Hogstead was nearly due.
It was not a particularly exciting evening and the atmosphere was distinctly edgy. Mr. Whately was bothered about his clothes, and whether he should wear a white or a dark tie; and Mrs. Whately was fussing over little things. “Did old Mrs. Whately know that she had to change at Waterloo? Had anyone written to tell her? And who was going to meet her at the other end?” It was a relief to Roland when they had gone to bed and he and Gerald were left alone.
“It’s a funny thing,” Gerald said; “five years ago we didn’t know each other; you were nothing to me, nor I to you, and then we meet in Brewster’s study, and again at the Oval and, before we know where we are you’re a junior partner in the business and engaged to my sister. To think what a difference you’ve made to all of us!”
“And the funniest thing of all,” said Roland, “is to think that if I hadn’t caught the three-thirty from Waterloo instead of the four-eighteen, none of this would have happened. I shouldn’t have met that blighter Howard, nor gone out with those girls; and, even so, none of it would have happened if I had taken my footer boots down to be mended, as I ought to have done, on a Sunday afternoon instead of loafing in my study. One can’t tell what’s going to be a blessing till one’s done with it. If I hadn’t had that row I should never have met you and I should never have met Muriel.” And he paused, wondering what would have happened to him if he had caught the four-eighteen and taken his boots down to be mended. He would have stayed on another year at school; he would have been captain of the house; he would have gone up to the ’Varsity. He would have had a good time, no doubt, but where would he be now? Probably an assistant master at a second-rate public school, an ill-paid post that had been given to him because he was good at games. Probably also he would be engaged to April, and he would be making desperate calculations with account books to discover whether it was possible to marry on one hundred and fifty pounds a year.
“That row,” he said, “was the luckiest thing for me that ever happened.”
And they sat for a while in silence pondering the strange contradictions of life, pondering also the instability of human schemes. One might plan out the future, pigeon-hole it, have everything arranged as by a machine, and then what happened? Someone caught a train at three-thirty instead of at four-eighteen, or was too lazy to take his football boots down to be mended on a wet afternoon, and the plans that had been built up so elaborately through so many years were capsized, and one had to begin again.
“And it’s so funny,” Roland said, “to think of the fuss they made at Fernhurst about a thing like that—just taking a girl out for a walk, and you’d think I’d broken the whole ten commandments, and all the talk there was about my corrupting the pure soul of Brewster.”