He had won, by seniority
and ripeness, an uncharted no-man’s-land of privilege; he had acquired the
right to those gentle eccentricities that so often attack schoolmasters and
parsons. He wore his gown till it was almost too tattered to hold together;
and when he stood on the wooden bench by Big Hall steps to take call-over, it
was with an air of mystic abandonment to ritual. He held the School List, a
long sheet curling over a board; and each boy, as he passed, spoke his own
name for Chips to verify and then tick off on the list. That verifying glance
was an easy and favorite subject of mimicry throughout the School—
steel-rimmed spectacles slipping down the nose, eyebrows lifted, one a little
higher than the other, a gaze half rapt, half quizzical. And on windy days,
with gown and white hair and School List fluttering in uproarious confusion,
the whole thing became a comic turn sandwiched between afternoon games and
the return to classes.
Some of those names, in little snatches of a chorus, recurred to him ever
afterward without any effort of memory… Ainsworth, Attwood, Avonmore,
Babcock, Baggs, Barnard, Bassenthwaite, Battersby, Beccles, Bedford-Marshall,
Bentley, Best…
Another one:—
… Unsley, Vailes, Wadham, Wagstaff, Wallington, Waters Primus, Waters
Secundus, Watling, Waveney, Webb…
And yet another that comprised, as he used to tell his fourth-form
Latinists, an excellent example of a hexameter:—
… Lancaster, Latton, Lemare, Lytton-Bosworth, MacGonigall,
Mansfield…
Where had they all gone to, he often pondered; those threads he had once
held together, how far had they scattered, some to break, others to weave
into unknown patterns? The strange randomness of the world beguiled him, that
randomness which never would, so long as the world lasted, give meaning to
those choruses again.
And behind Brookfield, as one may glimpse a mountain behind another
mountain when the mist clears, he saw the world of change and conflict; and
he saw it, more than he realized, with the remembered eyes of Kathie. She had
not been able to bequeath him all her mind, still less the brilliance of it;
but she had left him with a calmness and a poise that accorded well with his
own inward emotions. It was typical of him that he did not share the general
jingo bitterness against the Boers. Not that he was a pro-Boer—he was
far too traditional for that, and he disliked the kind of people who WERE
pro-Boers; but still, it did cross his mind at times that the Boers were
engaged in a struggle that had a curious similarity to those of certain
English history-book heroes—Hereward the Wake, for instance, or
Caractacus. He once tried to shock his fifth form by suggesting this, but
they only thought it was one of his little jokes.
However heretical he might be about the Boers, he was orthodox about Mr.
Lloyd George and the famous Budget. He did not care for either of them. And
when, years later, L. G. came as the guest of honor to a Brookfield Speech
Day, Chips said, on being presented to him: “Mr. Lloyd George, I am nearly
old enough—umph—to remember you as a young man, and—
umph—I confess that you seem to me—umph—to have
improved—umph—a great deal.” The Head standing with them, was
rather aghast; but L. G. laughed heartily and talked to Chips more than to
anyone else during the ceremonial that followed.
“Just like Chips,” was commented afterward. “He gets away with it. I
suppose at that age anything you say to anybody is all right…”
In 1900 old Meldrum, who had succeeded Wetherby as Head and
had held office for three decades, died suddenly from pneumonia; and in the
interval before the appointment of a successor, Chips became Acting Head of
Brookfield. There was just the faintest chance that the Governors might make
the appointment a permanent one; but Chips was not really disappointed when
they brought in a youngster of thirty-seven, glittering with Firsts and Blues
and with the kind of personality that could reduce Big Hall to silence by the
mere lifting of an eyebrow. Chips was not in the running with that kind of
person; he never had been and never would be, and he knew it. He was an
altogether milder and less ferocious animal.
Those years before his retirement in 1913 were studded with sharply
remembered pictures.
A May morning; the clang of the School bell at an unaccustomed time;
everyone summoned to assemble in Big Hall. Ralston, the new Head, very
pontifical and aware of himself, fixing the multitude with a cold, presaging
severity. “You will all be deeply grieved to hear that His Majesty King
Edward the Seventh died this morning… There will be no school this
afternoon, but a service will be held in the Chapel at four-thirty.”
A summer morning on the railway line near Brookfield. The railwaymen were
on strike, soldiers were driving the engines, stones had been thrown at
trains. Brookfield boys were patrolling the line, thinking the whole business
great fun. Chips, who was in charge, stood a little way off, talking to a man
at the gate of a cottage. Young Cricklade approached. “Please, sir, what
shall we do if we meet any strikers?”
“Would you like to meet one?”
“I—I don’t know, sir.”
God bless the boy—he talked of them as if they were queer animals
out of a zoo! “Well, here you are, then—umph—you can meet Mr.
Jones—he’s a striker. When he’s on duty he has charge of the signal box
at the station. You’ve put your life in his hands many a time.”
Afterward the story went round the School: There was Chips, talking to a
striker.
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