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?”