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. Talking to a striker. Might have been quite friendly, the way they
were talking together.
Chips, thinking it over a good many times, always added to himself that
Kathie would have approved, and would also have been amused.
Because always, whatever happened and however the avenues of politics
twisted and curved, he had faith in England, in English flesh and blood, and
in Brookfield as a place whose ultimate worth depended on whether she fitted
herself into the English scene with dignity and without disproportion. He had
been left a vision that grew clearer with each year—of an England for
which days of ease were nearly over, of a nation steering into channels where
a hair’s breadth of error might be catastrophic. He remembered the Diamond
Jubilee; there had been a whole holiday at Brookfield, and he had taken
Kathie to London to see the procession. That old and legendary lady, sitting
in her carriage like some crumbling wooden doll, had symbolized impressively
so many things that, like herself, were nearing an end. Was it only the
century, or was it an epoch?
And then that frenzied Edwardian decade, like an electric lamp that goes
brighter and whiter just before it burns itself out.
Strikes and lockouts, champagne suppers and unemployed marchers, Chinese
labor, tariff reform, H.M.S. Dreadnought, Marconi, Home Rule for Ireland,
Doctor Crippen, suffragettes, the lines of Chatalja…
An April evening, windy and rainy; the fourth form construing Vergil, not
very intelligently, for there was exciting news in the papers; young Grayson,
in particular, was careless and preoccupied. A quiet, nervous boy.
“Grayson, stay behind—umph—after the rest.”
Then:—
“Grayson, I don’t want to be—umph—severe, because you are
generally pretty good—umph—in your work, but to-day— you
don’t seem—umph—to have been trying at all. Is anything the
matter?”
“N-no, sir.”
“Well—umph—we’ll say no more about it, but—umph —I
shall expect better things next time.”
Next morning it was noised around the School that Grayson’s father had
sailed on the Titanic, and that no news had yet come through as to his
fate.
Grayson was excused lessons; for a whole day the School centred
emotionally upon his anxieties. Then came news that his father had been among
those rescued.
Chips shook hands with the boy. “Well, umph—I’m delighted, Grayson.
A happy ending. You must be feeling pretty pleased with life.”
“Y-yes, sir.”
A quiet, nervous boy. And it was Grayson Senior, not Junior, with whom
Chips was destined later to condole.
And then the row with Ralston. Funny thing, Chips had never
liked him; he was efficient, ruthless, ambitious, but not, somehow, very
likable.
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