"And he, I suppose, has been going for walks with a girl as well?"
"Yes, sir."
There was another long pause, during which Roland realised that he had chosen the worst possible moment for his confession. Whatever decision the Chief might arrive at would be influenced, not only by his inevitable disappointment at the failure of a boy in whom he had trusted, but by its violent contrast with the friendly discussion over the essay and the natural annoyance of a busy man who has been interrupted in an important piece of work to discuss an unpleasant situation that has arisen unexpectedly. When the Chief at last began to speak there was an impatience in his voice that would have been absent if Roland had tackled him after dinner.
"I don't know," he said. "I am tempted sometimes to give up faith in you fellows altogether. I never know where I am with any of you. I feel as though I were sitting upon a volcano. Everything seems quiet and satisfactory and then suddenly the volcano breaks out and I find that the boys in whom I have placed, or am thinking of placing, responsibility have deceived me. Do you realise the hypocrisy of your behaviour during the last year? You have been meeting Mr Carus Evans and myself on friendly, straightforward terms, with an open look on your face, and all the time, behind our backs, you've been philandering with girls in the town. I haven't asked you for any details and I am not going to; that doesn't enter into the question at all. You've been false and doublefaced. You've been acting a lie for a year. It's the sort of thing that makes me sick of the whole lot of you. You can go."
Roland walked back to the studies, perplexed and miserable. The word "deceit" had cut hard into him. He loathed crookedness and he had always considered himself dead straight. It was a boast of his that he had never told a lie, at least not to a boy; masters were different. Of course they were, and it was absurd to pretend they weren't. Everyone did things that they wouldn't care to tell the Chief. There was a barrier between. The relationship was not open like friendship. He saw the Chief's point of view, but he did not consider it a sound one. He disliked these fine gradations of conduct, this talk of acting a lie: things were either black or white. He remembered how the Chief had once come round the upper dormitories and had endeavoured to persuade him that it was acting a lie to get into bed without cleaning his teeth. He had never understood why. An unclean act, perhaps, but acting a lie! oh, no, it wouldn't do. It was an unfair method of tackling the problem. It was hitting a man in the back, this appeal to a better nature. Life should be played like cricket, according to rules. You could either play for safety and score slowly, or you could run risks and hit across straight half-volleys. If one missed it one was out and that was the end of it. One didn't talk about acting a lie to the bowler because one played at the ball as though it were outside the leg stump. Why couldn't the Chief play the game like an umpire? Roland knew that he had done a thing which, in the eyes of authority, was wrong. He admitted that. He had known it was wrong all the time. He had been found out; he was prepared for punishment. That was the process of life. One took risks and paid the penalty. The issue was to Roland childishly simple, and he could not see why all these good people should complicate it so unnecessarily with their talk of hypocrisy and deceit.
That evening the headmaster wrote to Roland's father:
Dear Mr Whately,—I write to inform you of a matter that will cause you, I fear, a good deal of pain. I have discovered that for the last year Roland has been in the habit of going out for walks on Sunday afternoons with a young girl in the town, and that he has encouraged another and younger boy to accompany him. These walks resulted, I am sure, in nothing beyond a little harmless flirtation, and I do not regard the actual issue as important. I do consider, however, and I think that in this you will agree with me, that Roland's conduct in the matter is most reprehensible. It has involved a calculated and prolonged deception of you, his parent, and of us, his schoolmasters, and he has proved himself, I fear, unworthy of the responsibility of prefectship that I had hoped to place in him next term. If he were a younger boy the obvious course would be a sound thrashing. But Roland is too old for that. Perhaps he is too old to be at school at all. The leaving age of nineteen is arbitrary. Boys develop at such different ages; and though I should not myself have thought so before this affair arose, it may very well be that Roland has already passed beyond the age at which it is wise and, indeed, safe to keep him any longer at a school. For all we know, this trouble may prove to have been a blessing in disguise, and will have protected him from more serious difficulties. At any rate, I do not feel that I should be doing my duty by you or by the other parents who place the welfare of their boys in my hands if I were to keep Roland here after the summer. There is, of course, in this not the least suggestion of expulsion. Roland will leave at the end of the term with many of his contemporaries in the ordinary course of events. And he will become, if he wishes, as I hope he will wish, a member of the old Fernhurstian Society. Perhaps you may yourself decide to come down and have a talk with Roland. If so, perhaps we might discuss his future together. I do not myself see why this should prejudice in any way his going up to the University in a year's time. Of course he could not go up now as he has not yet passed responsions.
I very much hope that you will come down and that we shall be able to discuss the whole matter from every point of view. Sincerely yours,
J. F. Harrison.
This letter arrived at Hammerton by the evening post. Mr Whately had that morning received a letter from Roland, written before the row, with an account of a house game in which he had made 59 runs and taken 3 wickets. Mr Whately was most excited.
"He's really doing remarkably well," he said, after dinner. "He says that he's pretty certain for his second XI. colours, and I can't think why they don't give him a trial for the first. I know that Fernhurst have a pretty strong side this year, but they ought to try all the men they've got."
"He ought to get in next year at any rate," said his wife.