What had all that history stuff to do with it,
anyhow? Just old Chips with one of his queer ideas, that’s all.
1915. Armies clenched in deadlock from the sea to Switzerland. The
Dardanelles. Gallipoli. Military camps springing up quite near Brookfield;
soldiers using the playing fields for sports and training; swift developments
of Brookfield O.T.C. Most of the younger masters gone or in uniform. Every
Sunday night, in the Chapel after evening service, Chatteris read out the
names of old boys killed, together with short biographies. Very moving; but
Chips, in the black pew under the gallery, thought: They are only names to
him; he doesn’t see their faces as I do…
1916… The Somme Battle. Twenty-three names read out one Sunday
evening.
Toward the close of that catastrophic July, Chatteris talked to Chips one
afternoon at Mrs. Wickett’s. He was overworked and overworried and looked
very ill. “To tell you the truth, Chipping, I’m not having too easy a time
here. I’m thirty-nine, you know, and unmarried, and lots of people seem to
think they know what I ought to do. Also, I happen to be diabetic, and
couldn’t pass the blindest M.O., but I don’t see why I should pin a medical
certificate on my front door.”
Chips hadn’t known anything about this; it was a shock to him, for he
liked Chatteris.
The latter continued: “You see how it is. Ralston filled the place up with
young men—all very good, of course—but now most of them have
joined up and the substitutes are pretty dreadful, on the whole. They poured
ink down a man’s neck in prep one night last week—silly fool— got
hysterical. I have to take classes myself, take prep for fools like that,
work till midnight every night, and get cold-shouldered as a slacker on top
of everything. I can’t stand it much longer. If things don’t improve next
term I shall have a breakdown.”
“I do sympathize with you,” Chips said.
“I hoped you would. And that brings me to what I came here to ask you.
Briefly, my suggestion is that—if you felt equal to it and would care
to—how about coming back here for a while? You look pretty fit, and, of
course, you know all the ropes. I don’t mean a lot of hard work for you
—you needn’t take anything strenuously—just a few odd jobs here
and there, as you choose. What I’d like you for more than anything else is
not for the actual work you’d do—though that, naturally, would be very
valuable—but for your help in other ways—in just BELONGING here.
There’s nobody ever been more popular than you were, and are
still—you’d help to hold things together if there were any danger of
them flying to bits. And perhaps there is that danger…”
Chips answered, breathlessly and with a holy joy in his heart: “I’ll
come…”
He still kept on his rooms with Mrs. Wickett; indeed, he
still lived there; but every morning, about half-past ten, he put on his coat
and muffler and crossed the road to the School. He felt very fit, and the
actual work was not taxing. Just a few forms in Latin and Roman
History—the old lessons—even the old pronunciation. The same joke
about the Lex Canuleia—there was a new generation that had not heard
it, and he was absurdly gratified by the success it achieved. He felt a
little like a music-hall favorite returning to the boards after a positively
last appearance.
They all said how marvelous it was that he knew every boy’s name and face
so quickly. They did not guess how closely he had kept in touch from across
the road.
He was a grand success altogether. In some strange way he did, and they
all knew and felt it, help things.
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