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…”

CHAPTER 14

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. For the first time in his life he felt NECESSARY—and necessary to something that was nearest his heart. There is no sublimer feeling in the world, and it was his at last.

He made new jokes, too—about the O.T.C. and the food-rationing system and the anti-air-raid blinds that had to be fitted on all the windows. There was a mysterious kind of rissole that began to appear on the School menu on Mondays, and Chips called it abhorrendum—“meat to be abhorred.” The story went round—heard Chips’s latest?

Chatteris fell ill during the winter of ‘17, and again, for the second time in his life, Chips became Acting Head of Brookfield. Then in April Chatteris died, and the Governors asked Chips if he would carry on “for the duration.” He said he would, if they would refrain from appointing him officially. From that last honor, within his reach at last, he shrank instinctively, feeling himself in so many ways unequal to it. He said to Rivers: “You see, I’m not a young man and I don’t want people to—um —expect a lot from me. I’m like all these new colonels and majors you see everywhere—just a war-time fluke. A ranker—that’s all I am really.”

1917. 1918. Chips lived through it all. He sat in the headmaster’s study every morning, handling problems, dealing with plaints and requests. Out of vast experience had emerged a kindly, gentle confidence in himself. To keep a sense of proportion, that was the main thing. So much of the world was losing it; as well keep it where it had, or ought to have, a congenial home.

On Sundays in Chapel it was he who now read out the tragic list, and sometimes it was seen and heard that he was in tears over it. Well, why not, the School said; he was an old man; they might have despised anyone else for the weakness.

One day he got a letter from Switzerland, from friends there; it was heavily censored, but conveyed some news. On the following Sunday, after the names and biographies of old boys, he paused a moment and then added: —

“Those few of you who were here before the War will remember Max Staefel, the German master.