by James Hilton
Sir John had said, on that morning in 1908, taking Chips by the arm as they walked round the deserted cricket pitches: "Chips, old boy, I hear you've been having the deuce of a row with Ralston. Sorry to hear about it, for your sake--but I want you to know that the Governors are with you to a man. We don't like the fellow a great deal. Very clever and all that, but a bit too clever, if you ask me. Claims to have doubled the School's endowment funds by some monkeying on the Stock Exchange. Dare say he has, but a chap like that wants watching. So if he starts chucking his weight about with you, tell him very politely he can go to the devil. The Governors don't want you to resign. Brookfield wouldn't be the same without you, and they know it. We all know it. You can stay here till you're a hundred if you feel like it--indeed, it's our hope that you will."
And at that--both then and often when he recounted it afterward-- Chips broke down.
12
So he stayed on at Brookfield, having as little to do with Ralston as possible. And in 1911 Ralston left, "to better himself"; he was offered the headship of one of the greater public schools. His successor was a man named Chatteris, whom Chips liked; he was even younger than Ralston had been--thirty-four. He was supposed to be very brilliant; at any rate, he was modern (Natural Sciences Tripos), friendly, and sympathetic. Recognizing in Chips a Brookfield institution, he courteously and wisely accepted the situation.
In 1913 Chips had had bronchitis and was off duty for nearly the whole of the winter term. It was that which made him decide to resign that summer, when he was sixty-five. After all, it was a good, ripe age; and Ralston's straight words had, in some ways, had an effect. He felt that it would not be fair to hang on if he could not decently do his job. Besides, he would not sever himself completely. He would take rooms across the road, with the excellent Mrs. Wickett who had once been linen-room maid; he could visit the School whenever he wanted, and could still, in a sense, remain a part of it.
At that final end-of-term dinner, in July 1913, Chips received his farewell presentations and made a speech. It was not a very long speech, but it had a good many jokes in it, and was made twice as long, perhaps, by the laughter that impeded its progress. There were several Latin quotations in it, as well as a reference to the Captain of the School, who, Chips said, had been guilty of exaggeration in speaking of his (Chips's) services to Brookfield. "But then--umph--he comes of an--umph--exaggerating family. I--um-- remember--once--having to thrash his father--for it. [Laughter] I gave him one mark--umph--for a Latin translation, and he--umph-- exaggerated the one into a seven! Umph--umph!" Roars of laughter and tumultuous cheers! A typical Chips remark, everyone thought.
And then he mentioned that he had been at Brookfield for forty-two years, and that he had been very happy there. "It has been my life," he said, simply. "O mihi praeteritos referat si Jupiter annos. . . . Umph--I need not--of course--translate. . . ." Much laughter. "I remember lots of changes at Brookfield. I remember the--um--the first bicycle. I remember when there was no gas or electric light and we used to have a member of the domestic staff called a lamp-boy--he did nothing else but clean and trim and light lamps throughout the School. I remember when there was a hard frost that lasted for seven weeks in the winter term--there were no games, and the whole School learned to skate on the fens. Eighteen- eighty-something, that was. I remember when two-thirds of the School went down with German measles and Big Hall was turned into a hospital ward. I remember the great bonfire we had on Mafeking night. It was lit too near the pavilion and we had to send for the fire brigade to put it out. And the firemen were having their own celebrations and most of them were--um--in a regrettable condition. [Laughter] I remember Mrs. Brool, whose photograph is still in the tuckshop; she served there until an uncle in Australia left her a lot of money. In fact, I remember so much that I often think I ought to write a book. Now what should I call it? 'Memories of Rod and Lines'--eh? [Cheers and laughter. That was a good one, people thought--one of Chips's best.] Well, well, perhaps I shall write it, some day. But I'd rather tell you about it, really. I remember . . . I remember . . . but chiefly I remember all your faces. I never forget them. I have thousands of faces in my mind-- the faces of boys. If you come and see me again in years to come-- as I hope you all will--I shall try to remember those older faces of yours, but it's just possible I shan't be able to--and then some day you'll see me somewhere and I shan't recognize you and you'll say to yourself, 'The old boy doesn't remember me.' [Laughter] But I DO remember you--as you are NOW. That's the point. In my mind you never grow up at all. Never. Sometimes, for instance, when people talk to me about our respected Chairman of the Governors, I think to myself, 'Ah, yes, a jolly little chap with hair that sticks up on top--and absolutely no idea whatever about the difference between a Gerund and a Gerundive.' [Loud laughter] Well, well, I mustn't go on--umph--all night. Think of me sometimes as I shall certainly think of you. Haec olim meminisse juvabit . . . again I need not translate." Much laughter and shouting and prolonged cheers.
August 1913. Chips went for a cure to Wiesbaden, where he lodged at the home of the German master at Brookfield, Herr Staefel, with whom he had become friendly. Staefel was thirty years his junior, but the two men got on excellently. In September, when term began, Chips returned and took up residence at Mrs. Wickett's. He felt a great deal stronger and fitter after his holiday, and almost wished he had not retired. Nevertheless, he found plenty to do. He had all the new boys to tea. He watched all the important matches on the Brookfield ground. Once a term he dined with the Head, and once also with the masters. He took on the preparation and editing of a new Brookfeldian Directory. He accepted presidency of the Old Boys' Club and went to dinners in London. He wrote occasional articles, full of jokes and Latin quotations, for the Brookfield terminal magazine. He read his Times every morning--very thoroughly; and he also began to read detective stories--he had been keen on them ever since the first thrills of Sherlock. Yes, he was quite busy, and quite happy, too. A year later, in 1914, he again attended the end-of-term dinner. There was a lot of war talk-- civil war in Ulster, and trouble between Austria and Serbia. Herr Staefel, who was leaving for Germany the next day, told Chips he thought the Balkan business wouldn't come to anything.
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The War years.
The first shock, and then the first optimism. The Battle of the Marne, the Russian steam-roller, Kitchener.
"Do you think it will last long, sir?"
Chips, questioned as he watched the first trial game of the season, gave quite a cheery answer. He was, like thousands of others, hopelessly wrong; but, unlike thousands of others, he did not afterward conceal the fact. "We ought to have--um--finished it--um-- by Christmas. The Germans are already beaten. But why? Are you thinking of--um--joining up, Forrester?"
Joke--because Forrester was the smallest new boy Brookfield had ever had--about four feet high above his muddy football boots. (But not so much a joke, when you came to think of it afterward; for he was killed in 1918--shot down in flames over Cambrai.) But one didn't guess what lay ahead. It seemed tragically sensational when the first Old Brookfeldian was killed in action--in September. Chips thought, when that news came: A hundred years ago boys from this school were fighting AGAINST the French. Strange, in a way, that the sacrifices of one generation should so cancel out those of another. He tried to express this to Blades, the Head of School House; but Blades, eighteen years old and already in training for a cadetship, only laughed. 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 galle
ry, 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. . . ."
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. He was in Germany, visiting his home, when war broke out. He was popular while he was here, and made many friends. Those who knew him will be sorry to hear that he was killed last week, on the Western Front."
He was a little pale when he sat down afterward, aware that he had done something unusual. He had consulted nobody about it, anyhow; no one else could be blamed. Later, outside the Chapel, he heard an argument:--
"On the Western Front, Chips said. Does that mean he was fighting for the Germans?"
"I suppose it does."
"Seems funny, then, to read his name out with all the others. After all, he was an ENEMY."
"Oh, just one of Chips's ideas, I expect. The old boy still has 'em."
Chips, in his room again, was not displeased by the comment. Yes, he still had 'em--those ideas of dignity and generosity that were becoming increasingly rare in a frantic world. And he thought: Brookfield will take them, too, from me; but it wouldn't from anyone else.
Once, asked for his opinion of bayonet practice being carried on near the cricket pavilion, he answered, with that lazy, slightly asthmatic intonation that had been so often and so extravagantly imitated: "It seems--to me--umph--a very vulgar way of killing people."
The yarn was passed on and joyously appreciated--how Chips had told some big brass hat from the War Office that bayonet fighting was vulgar. Just like Chips. And they found an adjective for him--an adjective just beginning to be used: he was pre-War.
15
And once, on a night of full moonlight, the air-raid warning was given while Chips was taking his lower fourth in Latin. The guns began almost instantly, and, as there was plenty of shrapnel falling about outside, it seemed to Chips that they might just as well stay where they were, on the ground floor of School House. It was pretty solidly built and made as good a dugout as Brookfield could offer; and as for a direct hit, well, they could not expect to survive that, wherever they were.
So he went on with his Latin, speaking a little louder amid the reverberating crashes of the guns and the shrill whine of anti- aircraft shells. Some of the boys were nervous; few were able to be attentive. He said, gently: "It may possibly seem to you, Robertson--at this particular moment in the world's history--umph-- that the affairs of Caesar in Gaul some two thousand years ago--are-- umph--of somewhat secondary importance--and that--umph--the irregular conjugation of the verb tollo is--umph--even less important still. But believe me--umph--my dear Robertson--that is not really the case." Just then there came a particularly loud explosion--quite near. "You cannot--umph--judge the importance of things--umph--by the noise they make. Oh dear me, no." A little chuckle. "And these things--umph--that have mattered--for thousands of years--are not going to be--snuffed out--because some stink merchant--in his laboratory--invents a new kind of mischief." Titters of nervous laughter; for Buffles, the pale, lean, and medically unfit science master, was nicknamed the Stink Merchant. Another explosion--nearer still. "Let us--um--resume our work. If it is fate that we are soon to be--umph--interrupted, let us be found employing ourselves in something--umph--really appropriate. Is there anyone who will volunteer to construe?"
Maynard, chubby, dauntless, clever, and impudent, said: "I will, sir."
/>
"Very good. Turn to page forty and begin at the bottom line."
The explosions still continued deafeningly; the whole building shook as if it were being lifted off its foundations. Maynard found the page, which was some way ahead, and began, shrilly:--
"Genus hoc erat pugnae--this was the kind of fight--quo se Germani exercuerant--in which the Germans busied themselves. Oh, sir, that's good--that's really very funny indeed, sir--one of your very best--"
Laughing began, and Chips added: "Well--umph--you can see--now-- that these dead languages--umph--can come to life again--sometimes-- eh? Eh?"
Afterward they learned that five bombs had fallen in and around Brookfield, the nearest of them just outside the School grounds. Nine persons had been killed.
The story was told, retold, embellished. "The dear old boy never turned a hair. Even found some old tag to illustrate what was going on. Something in Caesar about the way the Germans fought. You wouldn't think there were things like that in Caesar, would you? And the way Chips laughed . . . you know the way he DOES laugh . . . the tears all running down his face . . . never seen him laugh so much. . . ."
He was a legend.
With his old and tattered gown, his walk that was just beginning to break into a stumble, his mild eyes peering over the steel-rimmed spectacles, and his quaintly humorous sayings, Brookfield would not have had an atom of him different.
November 11, 1918.
News came through in the morning; a whole holiday was decreed for the School, and the kitchen staff were implored to provide as cheerful a spread as wartime rationing permitted. There was much cheering and singing, and a bread fight across the Dining Hall. When Chips entered in the midst of the uproar there was an instant hush, and then wave upon wave of cheering; everyone gazed on him with eager, shining eyes, as on a symbol of victory. He walked to the dais, seeming as if he wished to speak; they made silence for him, but he shook his head after a moment, smiled, and walked away again.