“Not yet. I shall think it out in the train. I shall be able to say the right thing when the time comes.”
“You won’t be hard to him. I expect he’s very miserable.”
It was a bad day for Mr. Whately. During the long train journey through fields and villages, vivid in the bright June sunlight, he wondered in what spirit he should receive his son. Roland would be no doubt waiting for him at the station. What would they say to each other? How would they begin? He would have lunch, of course, at the Eversham Hotel, and then, he supposed, he would have to see the headmaster. That would be very difficult. He always felt shy in the headmaster’s presence. The headmaster was such an aristocrat; he was stamped with the hallmark of Eton and Balliol, while he himself was the manager of a bank in London. He was always aware of his social inferiority in that book-lined study, with the five austere reproductions of Greek sculpture. The interview would be very difficult. But the headmaster would at least do most of the talking; whereas with Roland.... Mr. Whately shifted uneasily in his corner seat. What on earth was he going to say? Something, surely, about the moral significance of the act. Roland must realize that he was guilty of really immoral conduct, and yet how was he to be made to realize it? What arguments must be produced? Wherein lay the harm of calf love? And looking back over his own life Mr. Whately could not see that there was any particular vice attached to it. It was absurd and preposterous, but it was very pleasant. He remembered how he had once fancied himself in love with his grandmother’s housemaid. He used to get up early in the morning so that he could sit with her while she laid the grate, and he had knelt down beside her and joined his breath with hers in a fierce attempt to kindle the timid flame. He had never kissed her, but she had let him hold her hand, and the summer holidays had passed in delicious reveries. He remembered also how, a little later, he had fallen desperately in love with the girl at the tobacconist’s, and he could still recall the breathless excitement of that morning when he had come into the shop and found it empty. For a second she had listened at the door leading to the private part of the house and had then leaned forward over the counter: “Quick,” she had whispered.
Mr. Whately smiled at the recollection and then remembered suddenly for what cause he was traveling down to Fernhurst. “I must say something to him. What shall I say?” And for want of any better argument he began to adapt a speech that he had heard spoken a few weeks earlier in a melodrama at the Aldwich. The hero, a soldier, had come home from the war to find his betrothed in the arms of another, and she had protested that it was him alone she loved, and that she was playing with the other; but the returned warrior had delivered himself of an oration on the eternal sanctity of love. “Love cannot be divided like a worm and continue to exist. It is not a game.” There was something in that argument, and Mr. Whately decided to tell Roland that love came only once in a man’s life, and that he must reserve himself for that one occasion. “If you make love to every girl you meet, you will spoil yourself for the real love affair. It will be the removal of a shovelful of gravel from a large pile. One shovelful appears to make no difference, but in the end the pile of gravel disappears.” That is what he would say to Roland. And because the idea seemed suitable, he did not pause to consider whether or not it was founded upon truth. He lay back in his corner seat and began to arrange his ideas according to that line of persuasion.
But all this fine flow of wit and logic was dispelled when the train drew up at Fernhurst station and Mr. Whately descended from the carriage to find Roland waiting for him on the platform.
“Hullo! father,” he said, and the two of them walked in silence out of the station, and turned into the Eversham Rooms.
“I’ve booked a table at the hotel,” said Roland.
“Good.”
“I expect you’re feeling a bit hungry after your journey, aren’t you, father?”
“Yes, I am a bit.”