
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada,
check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER
COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD
OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: Good-bye, Mr. Chips
Author: Hilton, James (1900-1954)
Date of first publication: 1934
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1934
Date first posted: 20 August 2014
Date last updated: 20 August 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1197

This ebook was produced by Al Haines






  Good-bye,
  MR. CHIPS


  BY

  JAMES HILTON



  MCCLELLAND & STEWART LIMITED
  PUBLISHERS TORONTO




  COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1934
  BY
  McCLELLAND & STEWART, LIMITED



  PRINTED IN CANADA

  T. H. BEST PRINTING CO., LIMITED
  TORONTO, ONT.




GOOD-BYE, MR. CHIPS



1

When you are getting on in years (but not ill, of course), you get very
sleepy at times, and the hours seem to pass like lazy cattle moving
across a landscape.  It was like that for Chips as the autumn term
progressed and the days shortened till it was actually dark enough to
light the gas before call-over.  For Chips, like some old sea captain,
still measured time by the signals of the past; and well he might, for
he lived at Mrs. Wickett's, just across the road from the School.  He
had been there more than a decade, ever since he finally gave up his
mastership; and it was Brookfield far more than Greenwich time that
both he and his landlady kept.  "Mrs. Wickett," Chips would sing out,
in that jerky, high-pitched voice that had still a good deal of
sprightliness in it, "you might bring me a cup of tea before prep, will
you?"

When you are getting on in years it is nice to sit by the fire and
drink a cup of tea and listen to the school bell sounding dinner,
call-over, prep, and lights-out.  Chips always wound up the clock after
that last bell; then he put the wire guard in front of the fire, turned
out the gas, and carried a detective novel to bed.  Rarely did he read
more than a page of it before sleep came swiftly and peacefully, more
like a mystic intensifying of perception than any changeful entrance
into another world.  For his days and nights were equally full of
dreaming.

He was getting on in years (but not ill, of course); indeed, as Doctor
Merivale said, there was really nothing the matter with him.  "My dear
fellow, you're fitter than I am," Merivale would say, sipping a glass
of sherry when he called every fortnight or so.  "You're past the age
when people get these horrible diseases; you're one of the few lucky
ones who're going to die a really natural death.  That is, of course,
if you die at all.  You 're such a remarkable old boy that one never
knows."  But when Chips had a cold or when east winds roared over the
fenlands, Merivale would sometimes take Mrs. Wickett aside in the lobby
and whisper: "Look after him, you know.  His chest ... it puts a strain
on his heart.  Nothing really wrong with him--only anno domini, but
that's the most fatal complaint of all, in the end."

Anno domini ... by Jove, yes.  Born in 1848, and taken to the Great
Exhibition as a toddling child--not many people still alive could boast
a thing like that.  Besides, Chips could even remember Brookfield in
Wetherby's time.  A phenomenon, that was.  Wetherby had been an old man
in those days--1870--easy to remember because of the Franco-Prussian
War.  Chips had put in for Brookfield after a year at Melbury, which he
hadn't liked, because he had been ragged there a good deal.  But
Brookfield he _had_ liked, almost from the beginning.  He remembered
that day of his preliminary interview--sunny June, with the air full of
flower scents and the plick-plock of cricket on the pitch.  Brookfield
was playing Barnhurst, and one of the Barnhurst boys, a chubby little
fellow, made a brilliant century.  Queer that a thing like that should
stay in the memory so clearly.  Wetherby himself was very fatherly and
courteous; he must have been ill then, poor chap, for he died during
the summer vacation, before Chips began his first term.  But the two
had seen and spoken to each other, anyway.

Chips often thought, as he sat by the fire at Mrs. Wickett's: I am
probably the only man in the world who has a vivid recollection of old
Wetherby....  Vivid, yes; it was a frequent picture in his mind, that
summer day with the sunlight filtering through the dust in Wetherby's
study.  "You are a young man, Mr. Chipping, and Brookfield is an old
foundation.  Youth and age often combine well.  Give your enthusiasm to
Brookfield, and Brookfield will give you something in return.  And
don't let anyone play tricks with you.  I--er--gather that discipline
was not always your strong point at Melbury?"

"Well, no, perhaps not, sir."

"Never mind; you're full young; it's largely a matter of experience.
You have another chance here.  Take up a firm attitude from the
beginning--that's the secret of it."

Perhaps it was.  He remembered that first tremendous ordeal of taking
prep; a September sunset more than half a century ago; Big Hall full of
lusty barbarians ready to pounce on him as their legitimate prey.  His
youth, fresh-complexioned, high-collared, and side-whiskered (odd
fashions people followed in those days), at the mercy of five hundred
unprincipled ruffians to whom the baiting of new masters was a fine
art, an exciting sport, and something of a tradition.  Decent little
beggars individually, but, as a mob, just pitiless and implacable.  The
sudden hush as he took his place at the desk on the dais; the scowl he
assumed to cover his inward nervousness; the tall clock ticking behind
him, and the smells of ink and varnish; the last blood-red rays
slanting in slabs through the stained-glass windows.  Someone dropped a
desk lid.  Quickly, he must take everyone by surprise; he must show
that there was no nonsense about him.  "You there in the fifth row--you
with the red hair--what's your name?"  "Colley, sir."  "Very well,
Colley, you have a hundred lines."  No trouble at all after that.  He
had won his first round.

And years later, when Colley was an alderman of the City of London and
a baronet and various other things, he sent his son (also red-haired)
to Brookfield, and Chips would say: "Colley, your father was the first
boy I ever punished when I came here twenty-five years ago.  He
deserved it then, and you deserve it now."  How they all laughed; and
how Sir Richard laughed when his son wrote home the story in next
Sunday's letter!

And again, years after that, many years after that, there was an even
better joke.  For another Colley had just arrived--son of the Colley
who was a son of the first Colley.  And Chips would say, punctuating
his remarks with that little "umph-um" that had by then become a habit
with him: "Colley, you are--umph--a splendid example
of--umph--inherited traditions.  I remember your grandfather--umph--he
could never grasp the Ablative Absolute.  A stupid fellow, your
grandfather.  And your father, too--umph--I remember him--he used to
sit at that far desk by the wall--he wasn't much better, either.  But I
do believe--my dear Colley--that you are--umph--the biggest fool of the
lot!"  Roars of laughter.

A great joke, this growing old--but a sad joke, too, in a way.  And as
Chips sat by his fire with autumn gales rattling the windows, the waves
of humor and sadness swept over him very often until tears fell, so
that when Mrs. Wickett came in with his cup of tea she did not know
whether he had been laughing or crying.  And neither did Chips himself.




2

Across the road behind a rampart of ancient elms lay Brookfield, russet
under its autumn mantle of creeper.  A group of eighteenth-century
buildings centred upon a quadrangle, and there were acres of playing
fields beyond; then came the small dependent village and the open fen
country.  Brookfield, as Wetherby had said, was an old foundation;
established in the reign of Elizabeth, as a grammar school, it might,
with better luck, have become as famous as Harrow.  Its luck, however,
had been not so good; the School went up and down, dwindling almost to
non-existence at one time, becoming almost illustrious at another.  It
was during one of these latter periods, in the reign of the first
George, that the main structure had been rebuilt and large additions
made.  Later, after the Napoleonic Wars and until mid-Victorian days,
the School declined again, both in numbers and in repute.  Wetherby,
who came in 1840, restored its fortunes somewhat; but its subsequent
history never raised it to front-rank status.  It was, nevertheless, a
good school of the second rank.  Several notable families supported it;
it supplied fair samples of the history-making men of the age--judges,
members of parliament, colonial administrators, a few peers and
bishops.  Mostly, however, it turned out merchants, manufacturers, and
professional men, with a good sprinkling of country squires and
parsons.  It was the sort of school which, when mentioned, would
sometimes make snobbish people confess that they rather thought they
had heard of it.

But if it had not been this sort of school it would probably not have
taken Chips.  For Chips, in any social or academic sense, was just as
respectable, but no more brilliant, than Brookfield itself.

It had taken him some time to realize this, at the beginning.  Not that
he was boastful or conceited, but he had been, in his early twenties,
as ambitious as most other young men at such an age.  His dream had
been to get a headship eventually, or at any rate a senior mastership
in a really first-class school; it was only gradually, after repeated
trials and failures, that he realized the inadequacy of his
qualifications.  His degree, for instance, was not particularly good,
and his discipline, though good enough and improving, was not
absolutely reliable under all conditions.  He had no private means and
no family connections of any importance.  About 1880, after he had been
at Brookfield a decade, he began to recognize that the odds were
heavily against his being able to better himself by moving elsewhere;
but about that time, also, the possibility of staying where he was
began to fill a comfortable niche in his mind.  At forty, he was
rooted, settled, and quite happy.  At fifty, he was the doyen of the
staff.  At sixty, under a new and youthful Head, he _was_
Brookfield--the guest of honor at Old Brookfeldian dinners, the court
of appeal in all matters affecting Brookfield history and traditions.
And in 1913, when he turned sixty-five, he retired, was presented with
a check and a writing desk and a clock, and went across the road to
live at Mrs. Wickett's.  A decent career, decently closed; three cheers
for old Chips, they all shouted, at that uproarious end-of-term dinner.

Three cheers, indeed; but there was more to come, an unguessed
epilogue, an encore played to a tragic audience.




3

It was a small but very comfortable and sunny room that Mrs. Wickett
let to him.  The house itself was ugly and pretentious; but that didn't
matter.  It was convenient--that was the main thing.  For he liked, if
the weather were mild enough, to stroll across to the playing fields in
an afternoon and watch the games.  He liked to smile and exchange a few
words with the boys when they touched their caps to him.  He made a
special point of getting to know all the new boys and having them to
tea with him during their first term.  He always ordered a walnut cake
with pink icing from Reddaway's, in the village, and during the winter
term there were crumpets, too--a little pile of them in front of the
fire, soaked in butter so that the bottom one lay in a little shallow
pool.  His guests found it fun to watch him make tea--mixing careful
spoonfuls from different caddies.  And he would ask the new boys where
they lived, and if they had family connections at Brookfield.  He kept
watch to see that their plates were never empty, and punctually at
five, after the session had lasted an hour, he would glance at the
clock and say: "Well--umph--it's been very delightful--umph--meeting
you like this--I'm sorry--umph--you can't stay...."  And he would smile
and shake hands with them in the porch, leaving them to race across the
road to the School with their comments.  "Decent old boy, Chips.  Gives
you a jolly good tea, anyhow, and you _do_ know when he wants you to
push off...."

And Chips also would be making his comments--to Mrs. Wickett when she
entered his room to clear away the remains of the party.  "A
most--umph--interesting time, Mrs. Wickett.  Young Branksome tells
me--umph--that his uncle was Major Collingwood--the Collingwood we had
here in--umph--nought-two, I think it was.  Dear me, I remember
Collingwood very well.  I once thrashed him--umph--for climbing on to
the gymnasium roof--to get a ball out of the gutter.  Might
have--umph--broken his neck, the young fool.  Do you remember him, Mrs.
Wickett?  He must have been in your time."

Mrs. Wickett, before she saved money, had been in charge of the linen
room at the School.

"Yes, I knew 'im, sir.  Cheeky, 'e was to me, gener'ly.  But we never
'ad no bad words between us.  Just cheeky-like.  'E never meant no
harm.  That kind never does, sir.  Wasn't it 'im that got the medal,
sir?"

"Yes, a D.S.O."

"Will you be wanting anything else, sir?"

"Nothing more now--umph--till chapel time.  He was killed--in Egypt, I
think....  Yes--umph--you can bring my supper about then."

"Very good, sir."

A pleasant, placid life, at Mrs. Wickett's.  He had no worries; his
pension was adequate, and there was a little money saved up besides.
He could afford everything and anything he wanted.  His room was
furnished simply and with schoolmasterly taste: a few bookshelves and
sporting trophies; a mantelpiece crowded with fixture cards and signed
photographs of boys and men; a worn Turkey carpet; big easy-chairs;
pictures on the wall of the Acropolis and the Forum.  Nearly everything
had come out of his old housemaster's room in School House.  The books
were chiefly classical, the classics having been his subject; there
was, however, a seasoning of history and belles-lettres.  There was
also a bottom shelf piled up with cheap editions of detective novels.
Chips enjoyed these.  Sometimes he took down Vergil or Xenophon and
read for a few moments, but he was soon back again with Doctor
Thorndyke or Inspector French.  He was not, despite his long years of
assiduous teaching, a very profound classical scholar; indeed, he
thought of Latin and Greek far more as dead languages from which
English gentlemen ought to know a few quotations than as living tongues
that had ever been spoken by living people.  He liked those short
leading articles in the _Times_ that introduced a few tags that he
recognized.  To be among the dwindling number of people who understood
such things was to him a kind of secret and valued freemasonry; it
represented, he felt, one of the chief benefits to be derived from a
classical education.

So there he lived, at Mrs. Wickett's, with his quiet enjoyments of
reading and talking and remembering; an old man, white-haired and only
a little bald, still fairly active for his years, drinking tea,
receiving callers, busying himself with corrections for the next
edition of the Brookfeldian Directory, writing his occasional letters
in thin, spidery, but very legible script.  He had new masters to tea,
as well as new boys.  There were two of them that autumn term, and as
they were leaving after their visit one of them commented: "Quite a
character, the old boy, isn't he?  All that fuss about mixing the
tea--a typical bachelor, if ever there was one."

Which was oddly incorrect; because Chips was not a bachelor at all.  He
had married; though it was so long ago that none of the staff at
Brookfield could remember his wife.




4

There came to him, stirred by the warmth of the fire and the gentle
aroma of tea, a thousand tangled recollections of old times.
Spring--the spring of 1896.  He was forty-eight--an age at which a
permanence of habits begins to be predictable.  He had just been
appointed housemaster; with this and his classical forms, he had made
for himself a warm and busy corner of life.  During the summer vacation
he went up to the Lake District with Rowden, a colleague; they walked
and climbed for a week, until Rowden had to leave suddenly on some
family business.  Chips stayed on alone at Wasdale Head, where he
boarded in a small farmhouse.

One day, climbing on Great Gable, he noticed a girl waving excitedly
from a dangerous-looking ledge.  Thinking she was in difficulties, he
hastened toward her, but in doing so slipped himself and wrenched his
ankle.  As it turned out, she was not in difficulties at all, but was
merely signaling to a friend farther down the mountain; she was an
expert climber, better even than Chips, who was pretty good.  Thus he
found himself the rescued instead of the rescuer; and neither role was
one for which he had much relish.  For he did not, he would have said,
care for women; he never felt at home or at ease with them; and that
monstrous creature beginning to be talked about, the New Woman of the
nineties, filled him with horror.  He was a quiet, conventional person,
and the world, viewed from the haven of Brookfield, seemed to him full
of distasteful innovations; there was a fellow named Bernard Shaw who
had the strangest and most reprehensible opinions; there was Ibsen,
too, with his disturbing plays; and there was this new craze for
bicycling which was being taken up by women equally with men.  Chips
did not hold with all this modern newness and freedom.  He had a vague
notion, if he ever formulated it, that nice women were weak, timid, and
delicate, and that nice men treated them with a polite but rather
distant chivalry.  He had not, therefore, expected to find a woman on
Great Gable; but, having encountered one who seemed to need masculine
help, it was even more terrifying that she should turn the tables by
helping him.  For she did.  She and her friend had to.  He could
scarcely walk, and it was a hard job getting him down the steep track
to Wasdale.

Her name was Katherine Bridges; she was twenty-five--young enough to be
Chips's daughter.  She had blue, flashing eyes and freckled cheeks and
smooth straw-colored hair.  She too was staying at a farm, on holiday
with a girl friend, and as she considered herself responsible for
Chips's accident, she used to bicycle along the side of the lake to the
house in which the quiet, middle-aged, serious-looking man lay resting.

That was how she thought of him at first.  And he, because she rode a
bicycle and was unafraid to visit a man alone in a farmhouse sitting
room, wondered vaguely what the world was coming to.  His sprain put
him at her mercy, and it was soon revealed to him how much he might
need that mercy.  She was a governess out of a job, with a little money
saved up; she read and admired Ibsen; she believed that women ought to
be admitted to the universities; she even thought they ought to have a
vote.  In politics she was a radical, with leanings toward the views of
people like Bernard Shaw and William Morris.  All her ideas and
opinions she poured out to Chips during those summer afternoons at
Wasdale Head; and he, because he was not very articulate, did not at
first think it worth while to contradict them.  Her friend went away,
but she stayed; what _could_ you do with such a person, Chips thought.
He used to hobble with sticks along a footpath leading to the tiny
church; there was a stone slab on the wall, and it was comfortable to
sit down, facing the sunlight and the green-brown majesty of the Gable
and listening to the chatter of--well, yes, Chips had to admit it--a
very beautiful girl.

He had never met anyone like her.  He had always thought that the
modern type, this "new woman" business, would repel him; and here she
was, making him positively look forward to the glimpse of her safety
bicycle careering along the lakeside road.  And she, too, had never met
anyone like _him_.  She had always thought that middle-aged men who
read the _Times_ and disapproved of modernity were terrible bores; yet
here he was, claiming her interest and attention far more than youths
of her own age.  She liked him, initially, because he was so hard to
get to know, because he had gentle and quiet manners, because his
opinions dated from those utterly impossible seventies and eighties and
even earlier--yet were, for all that, so thoroughly honest; and
because--because his eyes were brown and he looked charming when he
smiled.  "Of course, _I_ shall call you Chips, too," she said, when she
learned that was his nickname at school.

Within a week they were head over heels in love; before Chips could
walk without a stick, they considered themselves engaged; and they were
married in London a week before the beginning of the autumn term.




5

When Chips, dreaming through the hours at Mrs. Wickett's, recollected
those days, he used to look down at his feet and wonder which one it
was that had performed so signal a service.  That, the trivial cause of
so many momentous happenings, was the one thing of which details evaded
him.  But he resaw the glorious hump of the Gable (he had never visited
the Lake District since), and the mouse-gray depths of Wastwater under
the Screes; he could resmell the washed air after heavy rain, and
refollow the ribbon of the pass across to Sty Head.  So clearly it
lingered, that time of dizzy happiness, those evening strolls by the
waterside, her cool voice and her gay laughter.  She had been a very
happy person, always.

They had both been so eager, planning a future together; but he had
been rather serious about it, even a little awed.  It would be all
right, of course, her coming to Brookfield; other housemasters were
married.  And she liked boys, she told him, and would enjoy living
among them.  "Oh, Chips, I'm so glad you are what you are.  I was
afraid you were a solicitor or a stockbroker or a dentist or a man with
a big cotton business in Manchester.  When I first met you, I mean.
Schoolmastering's so different, so important, don't you think?  To be
influencing those who are going to grow up and matter to the world..."

Chips said he hadn't thought of it like that--or, at least, not often.
He did his best; that was all anyone could do in any job.

"Yes, of course, Chips.  I do love you for saying simple things like
that."

And one morning--another memory gem-clear when he turned to it--he had
for some reason been afflicted with an acute desire to depreciate
himself and all his attainments.  He had told her of his only mediocre
degree, of his occasional difficulties of discipline, of the certainty
that he would never get a promotion, and of his complete ineligibility
to marry a young and ambitious girl.  And at the end of it all she had
laughed in answer.

She had no parents and was married from the house of an aunt in Ealing.
On the night before the wedding, when Chips left the house to return to
his hotel, she said, with mock gravity: "This is an occasion, you
know--this last farewell of ours.  I feel rather like a new boy
beginning his first term with you.  Not scared, mind you--but just, for
once, in a thoroughly respectful mood.  Shall I call you 'sir'--or
would 'Mr. Chips' be the right thing?  'Mr. Chips,' I think.  Good-bye,
then--good-bye, Mr. Chips...."

(A hansom clop-clopping in the roadway; green-pale gas lamps flickering
on a wet pavement; newsboys shouting something about South Africa;
Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street.)

"Good-bye, Mr. Chips...."




6

There had followed then a time of such happiness that Chips,
remembering it long afterward, hardly believed it could ever have
happened before or since in the world.  For his marriage was a
triumphant success.  Katherine conquered Brookfield as she had
conquered Chips; she was immensely popular with boys and masters alike.
Even the wives of the masters, tempted at first to be jealous of one so
young and lovely, could not long resist her charms.

But most remarkable of all was the change she made in Chips.  Till his
marriage he had been a dry and rather neutral sort of person; liked and
thought well of by Brookfield in general, but not of the stuff that
makes for great popularity or that stirs great affection.  He had been
at Brookfield for over a quarter of a century, long enough to have
established himself as a decent fellow and a hard worker; but just too
long for anyone to believe him capable of ever being much more.  He
had, in fact, already begun to sink into that creeping dry rot of
pedagogy which is the worst and ultimate pitfall of the profession;
giving the same lessons year after year had formed a groove into which
the other affairs of his life adjusted themselves with insidious ease.
He worked well; he was conscientious; he was a fixture that gave
service, satisfaction, confidence, everything except inspiration.

And then came this astonishing girl-wife whom nobody had
expected--least of all Chips himself.  She made him, to all
appearances, a new man; though most of the newness was really a warming
to life of things that were old, imprisoned, and unguessed.  His eyes
gained sparkle; his mind, which was adequately if not brilliantly
equipped, began to move more adventurously.  The one thing he had
always had, a sense of humor, blossomed into a sudden richness to which
his years lent maturity.  He began to feel a greater sureness; his
discipline improved to a point at which it could become, in a sense,
less rigid; he became more popular.  When he had first come to
Brookfield he had aimed to be loved, honored, and obeyed--but obeyed,
at any rate.  Obedience he had secured, and honor had been granted him;
but only now came love, the sudden love of boys for a man who was kind
without being soft, who understood them well enough, but not too much,
and whose private happiness linked them with their own.  He began to
make little jokes, the sort that schoolboys like--mnemonics and puns
that raised laughs and at the same time imprinted something in the
mind.  There was one that never failed to please, though it was only a
sample of many others.  Whenever his Roman History forms came to deal
with the Lex Canuleia, the law that permitted patricians to marry
plebeians, Chips used to add: "So that, you see, if Miss Plebs wanted
Mr. Patrician to marry her, and he said he couldn't, she probably
replied: 'Oh yes, you can, you liar!'"  Roars of laughter.

And Kathie broadened his views and opinions, also, giving him an
outlook far beyond the roofs and turrets of Brookfield, so that he saw
his country as something deep and gracious to which Brookfield was but
one of many feeding streams.  She had a cleverer brain than his, and he
could not confute her ideas even if and when he disagreed with them; he
remained, for instance, a Conservative in politics, despite all her
radical-socialist talk.  But even where he did not accept, he absorbed;
her young idealism worked upon his maturity to produce an amalgam very
gentle and wise.

Sometimes she persuaded him completely.  Brookfield, for example, ran a
mission in East London, to which boys and parents contributed
generously with money but rarely with personal contact.  It was
Katherine who suggested that a team from the mission should come up to
Brookfield and play one of the School's elevens at soccer.  The idea
was so revolutionary that from anyone but Katherine it could not have
survived its first frosty reception.  To introduce a group of slum boys
to the serene pleasaunces of better-class youngsters seemed at first a
wanton stirring of all kinds of things that had better be left
untouched.  The whole staff was against it, and the School, if its
opinion could have been taken, was probably against it too.  Everyone
was certain that the East End lads would be hooligans, or else that
they would be made to feel uncomfortable; anyhow, there would be
"incidents," and everyone would be confused and upset.  Yet Katherine
persisted.

"Chips," she said, "they're wrong, you know, and I'm right.  I'm
looking ahead to the future, they and you are looking back to the past.
England isn't always going to be divided into officers and 'other
ranks.'  And those Poplar boys are just as important--to England--as
Brookfield is.  You've got to have them here, Chips.  You can't satisfy
your conscience by writing a check for a few guineas and keeping them
at arm's length.  Besides, they're proud of Brookfield--just as you
are.  Years hence, maybe, boys of that sort will be coming here--a few
of them, at any rate.  Why not?  Why ever not?  Chips, dear, remember
this is eighteen-ninety-seven--not sixty-seven, when you were up at
Cambridge.  You got your ideas well stuck in those days, and good ideas
they were too, a lot of them.  But a few--just a few, Chips--want
unsticking...."

Rather to her surprise, he gave way and suddenly became a keen advocate
of the proposal, and the _volte-face_ was so complete that the
authorities were taken unawares and found themselves consenting to the
dangerous experiment.  The boys from Poplar arrived at Brookfield one
Saturday afternoon, played soccer with the School's second team, were
honorably defeated by seven goals to five, and later had high tea with
the School team in the Dining Hall.  They then met the Head and were
shown over the School, and Chips saw them off at the railway station in
the evening.  Everything had passed without the slightest hitch of any
kind, and it was clear that the visitors were taking away with them as
fine an impression as they had left behind.

They took back with them also the memory of a charming woman who had
met them and talked to them; for once, years later, during the War, a
private stationed at a big military camp near Brookfield called on
Chips and said he had been one of that first visiting team.  Chips gave
him tea and chatted with him, till at length, shaking hands, the man
said: "And 'ow's the missus, sir?  I remember her very well."

"Do you?" Chips answered, eagerly.  "Do you remember her?"

"Rather.  I should think anyone would."

And Chips replied: "They don't, you know.  At least, not here.  Boys
come and go; new faces all the time; memories don't last.  Even masters
don't stay forever.  Since last year--when old Gribble
retired--he's--um--the School butler--there hasn't been anyone here who
ever saw my wife.  She died, you know, less than a year after your
visit.  In ninety-eight."

"I'm real sorry to 'ear that, sir.  There's two or three o' my pals,
anyhow, who remember 'er clear as anything, though we did only see 'er
that wunst.  Yes, we remember 'er, all right."

"I'm very glad....  That was a grand day we all had--and a fine game,
too."

"One o' the best days aht I ever 'ad in me life.  Wish it was then and
not nah--straight, I do.  I'm off to Frawnce to-morrer."

A month or so later Chips heard that he had been killed at
Passchendaele.




7

And so it stood, a warm and vivid patch in his life, casting a radiance
that glowed in a thousand recollections.  Twilight at Mrs. Wickett's,
when the School bell clanged for call-over, brought them back to him in
a cloud--Katherine scampering along the stone corridors, laughing
beside him at some "howler" in an essay he was marking, taking the
cello part in a Mozart trio for the School concert, her creamy arm
sweeping over the brown sheen of the instrument.  She had been a good
player and a fine musician.  And Katherine furred and muffed for the
December house matches, Katherine at the Garden Party that followed
Speech Day Prize-giving, Katherine tendering her advice in any little
problem that arose.  Good advice, too--which he did not always take,
but which always influenced him.

"Chips, dear, I'd let them off if I were you.  After all, it's nothing
very serious."

"I know.  I'd like to let them off, but if I do I'm afraid they'll do
it again."

"Try telling them that, frankly, and give them the chance."

"I might."

And there were other things, occasionally, that were serious.

"You know, Chips, having all these hundreds of boys cooped up here is
really an unnatural arrangement, when you come to think about it.  So
that when anything does occur that oughtn't to, don't you think it's a
bit unfair to come down on them as if it were their own fault for being
here?"

"Don't know about that, Kathie, but I do know that for everybody's sake
we have to be pretty strict about this sort of thing.  One black sheep
can contaminate others."

"After he himself has been contaminated to begin with.  After all,
that's what probably _did_ happen, isn't it?"

"Maybe.  We can't help it.  Anyhow, I believe Brookfield is better than
a lot of other schools.  All the more reason to keep it so."

"But this boy, Chips ... you're going to sack him?"

"The Head probably will, when I tell him."

"And you're going to tell the Head?"

"It's a duty, I'm afraid."

"Couldn't you think about it a bit ... talk to the boy again ...  find
out how it began ... After all--apart from this business--isn't he
rather a nice boy?"

"Oh, he's all right."

"Then, Chips dear, don't you think there _ought_ to be some other
way..."

And so on.  About once in ten times he was adamant and wouldn't be
persuaded.  In about half of these exceptional cases he afterward
rather wished he had taken her advice.  And years later, whenever he
had trouble with a boy, he was always at the mercy of a softening wave
of reminiscence; the boy would stand there, waiting to be told his
punishment, and would see, if he were observant, the brown eyes twinkle
into a shine that told him all was well.  But he did not guess that at
such a moment Chips was remembering something that had happened long
before he was born; that Chips was thinking: Young ruffian, I'm hanged
if _I_ can think of any reason to let him off, but I'll bet _she_ would
have done!

But she had not always pleaded for leniency.  On rather rare occasions
she urged severity where Chips was inclined to be forgiving.  "I don't
like his type, Chips.  He's too cocksure of himself.  If he's looking
for trouble I should certainly let him have it."

What a host of little incidents, all deep-buried in the past--problems
that had once been urgent, arguments that had once been keen, anecdotes
that were funny only because one remembered the fun.  Did any emotion
really matter when the last trace of it had vanished from human memory;
and if that were so, what a crowd of emotions clung to him as to their
last home before annihilation!  He must be kind to them, must treasure
them in his mind before their long sleep.  That affair of Archer's
resignation, for instance--a queer business, that was.  And that affair
about the rat that Dunster put in the organ loft while old Ogilvie was
taking choir practice.  Ogilvie was dead and Dunster drowned at
Jutland; of others who had witnessed or heard of the incident, probably
most had forgotten.  And it had been like that, with other incidents,
for centuries.  He had a sudden vision of thousands and thousands of
boys, from the age of Elizabeth onward; dynasty upon dynasty of
masters; long epochs of Brookfield history that had left not even a
ghostly record.  Who knew why the old fifth-form room was called "the
Pit"?  There was probably a reason, to begin with; but it had since
been lost--lost like the lost books of Livy.  And what happened at
Brookfield when Cromwell fought at Naseby, near by?  How did Brookfield
react to the great scare of the "Forty-Five"?  Was there a whole
holiday when news came of Waterloo?  And so on, up to the earliest time
that he himself could remember--1870, and Wetherby saying, by way of
small talk after their first and only interview: "Looks as if we shall
have to settle with the Prussians ourselves one of these fine days, eh?"

When Chips remembered things like this he often felt that he would
write them down and make a book of them; and during his years at Mrs.
Wickett's he sometimes went even so far as to make desultory notes in
an exercise book.  But he was soon brought up against difficulties--the
chief one being that writing tired him, both mentally and physically.
Somehow, too, his recollections lost much of their flavor when they
were written down; that story about Rushton and the sack of potatoes,
for instance--it would seem quite tame in print, but Lord, how funny it
had been at the time!  It was funny, too, to remember it; though
perhaps if you didn't remember Rushton ... and who would, anyway, after
all those years?  It was such a long time ago....  Mrs. Wickett, did
you ever know a fellow named Rushton?  Before your time, I dare say ...
went to Burma in some government job ... or was it Borneo? ... Very
funny fellow, Rushton....

And there he was, dreaming again before the fire, dreaming of times and
incidents in which he alone could take secret interest.  Funny and sad,
comic and tragic, they all mixed up in his mind, and some day, however
hard it proved, he _would_ sort them out and make a book of them....




8

And there was always in his mind that spring day in ninety-eight when
he had paced through Brookfield village as in some horrifying
nightmare, half struggling to escape into an outside world where the
sun still shone and where everything had happened differently.  Young
Faulkner had met him there in the lane outside the School.  "Please,
sir, may I have the afternoon off?  My people are coming up."

"Eh?  What's that?  Oh yes, yes----"

"Can I miss Chapel, too, sir?"

"Yes ... yes..."

"And may I go to the station to meet them?"

He nearly answered: "You can go to blazes for all I care.  My wife is
dead and my child is dead, and I wish I were dead myself."

Actually he nodded and stumbled on.  He did not want to talk to anybody
or to receive condolences; he wanted to get used to things, if he
could, before facing the kind words of others.  He took his fourth form
as usual after call-over, setting them grammar to learn by heart while
he himself stayed at his desk in a cold, continuing trance.  Suddenly
someone said: "Please, sir, there are a lot of letters for you."

So there were; he had been leaning his elbows on them; they were all
addressed to him by name.  He tore them open one after the other, but
each contained nothing but a blank sheet of paper.  He thought in a
distant way that it was rather peculiar, but he made no comment; the
incident gave hardly an impact upon his vastly greater preoccupations.
Not till days afterward did he realize that it had been a piece of
April foolery.


They had died on the same day, the mother and the child just born; on
April 1, 1898.




9

Chips changed his more commodious apartments in School House for his
old original bachelor quarters.  He thought at first he would give up
his housemastership, but the Head persuaded him otherwise; and later he
was glad.  The work gave him something to do, filled up an emptiness in
his mind and heart.  He was different; everyone noticed it.  Just as
marriage had added something, so did bereavement; after the first
stupor of grief he became suddenly the kind of man whom boys, at any
rate, unhesitatingly classed as "old."  It was not that he was less
active; he could still knock up a half century on the cricket field;
nor was it that he had lost any interest or keenness in his work.
Actually, too, his hair had been graying for years; yet now, for the
first time, people seemed to notice it.  He was fifty.  Once, after
some energetic fives, during which he had played as well as many a
fellow half his age, he overheard a boy saying: "Not half bad for an
old chap like him."

Chips, when he was over eighty, used to recount that incident with many
chuckles.  "Old at fifty, eh?  Umph--it was Naylor who said that, and
Naylor can't be far short of fifty himself by now!  I wonder if he
still thinks that fifty's such an age?  Last I heard of him, he was
lawyering, and lawyers live long--look at Halsbury--umph--Chancellor at
eighty-two, and died at ninety-nine.  There's an--umph--age for you!
Too old at fifty--why, fellows like that are too _young_ at fifty....
I was myself ... a mere infant...."

And there was a sense in which it was true.  For with the new century
there settled upon Chips a mellowness that gathered all his developing
mannerisms and his oft-repeated jokes into a single harmony.  No longer
did he have those slight and occasional disciplinary troubles, or feel
diffident about his own work and worth.  He found that his pride in
Brookfield reflected back, giving him cause for pride in himself and
his position.  It was a service that gave him freedom to be supremely
and completely himself.  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...."




10

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.




11

And then the row with Ralston.  Funny thing, Chips had never liked him;
he was efficient, ruthless, ambitious, but not, somehow, very likable.
He had, admittedly, raised the status of Brookfield as a school, and
for the first time in memory there was a longish waiting list.  Ralston
was a live wire; a fine power transmitter, but you had to beware of him.

Chips had never bothered to beware of him; he was not attracted by the
man, but he served him willingly enough and quite loyally.  Or, rather,
he served Brookfield.  He knew that Ralston did not like him, either;
but that didn't seem to matter.  He felt himself sufficiently protected
by age and seniority from the fate of other masters whom Ralston had
failed to like.

Then suddenly, in 1908, when he had just turned sixty, came Ralston's
urbane ultimatum.  "Mr. Chipping, have you ever thought you would like
to retire?"

Chips stared about him in that book-lined study, startled by the
question, wondering why Ralston should have asked it.  He said, at
length: "No--umph--I can't say that--umph--I have thought much about
it--umph--yet."

"Well, Mr. Chipping, the suggestion is there for you to consider.  The
Governors would, of course, agree to your being adequately pensioned."

Abruptly Chips flamed up.  "But--umph--I don't want--to retire.  I
don't--umph--need to consider it."

"Nevertheless, I suggest that you do."

"But--umph--I don't see--why--I should!"

"In that case, things are going to be a little difficult."

"Difficult?  Why--difficult?"

And then they set to, Ralston getting cooler and harder, Chips getting
warmer and more passionate, till at last Ralston said, icily: "Since
you force me to use plain words, Mr. Chipping, you shall have them.
For some time past, you haven't been pulling your weight here.  Your
methods of teaching are slack and old-fashioned; your personal habits
are slovenly; and you ignore my instructions in a way which, in a
younger man, I should regard as rank insubordination.  It won't do, Mr.
Chipping, and you must ascribe it to my forbearance that I have put up
with it so long."

"But--" Chips began, in sheer bewilderment; and then he took up
isolated words out of that extraordinary indictment.
"_Slovenly_--umph--you said--?"

"Yes, look at the gown you're wearing.  I happen to know that that gown
of yours is a subject of continual amusement throughout the School."

Chips knew it, too, but it had never seemed to him a very regrettable
matter.

He went on: "And--you also said--umph--something
about--_insubordination_--?"

"No, I didn't.  I said that in a younger man I should have regarded it
as that.  In your case it's probably a mixture of slackness and
obstinacy.  This question of Latin pronunciation, for instance--I think
I told you years ago that I wanted the new style used throughout the
School.  The other masters obeyed me; you prefer to stick to your old
methods, and the result is simply chaos and inefficiency."

At last Chips had something tangible that he could tackle.  "Oh,
_that_!" he answered, scornfully.  "Well, I--umph--I admit that I don't
agree with the new pronunciation.  I never did.  Umph--a lot of
nonsense, in my opinion.  Making boys say 'Kickero' at school
when--umph--for the rest of their lives they'll say 'Cicero'--if they
ever--umph--say it at all.  And instead of 'vicissim'--God bless my
soul--you'd make them say, 'We kiss 'im'!  Umph--umph!"  And he
chuckled momentarily, forgetting that he was in Ralston's study and not
in his own friendly form room.

"Well, there you are, Mr. Chipping--that's just an example of what I
complain of.  You hold one opinion and I hold another, and, since you
decline to give way, there can't very well be any alternative.  I aim
to make Brookfield a thoroughly up-to-date school.  I'm a science man
myself, but for all that I have no objection to the classics--provided
that they are taught efficiently.  Because they are dead languages is
no reason why they should be dealt with in a dead educational
technique.  I understand, Mr. Chipping, that your Latin and Greek
lessons are exactly the same as they were when I began here ten years
ago?"

Chips answered, slowly and with pride: "For that matter--umph--they are
the same as when your predecessor--Mr. Meldrum--came here, and
that--umph--was thirty-eight years ago.  We began here, Mr. Meldrum and
I--in--umph--in 1870.  And it was--um--Mr. Meldrum's predecessor, Mr.
Wetherby--who first approved my syllabus.  'You'll take the Cicero for
the fourth,' he said to me.  Cicero, too--not Kickero!"

"Very interesting, Mr. Chipping, but once again it proves my point--you
live too much in the past, and not enough in the present and future.
Times are changing, whether you realize it or not.  Modern parents are
beginning to demand something more for their three years' school fees
than a few scraps of languages that nobody speaks.  Besides, your boys
don't learn even what they're supposed to learn.  None of them last
year got through the Lower Certificate."

And suddenly, in a torrent of thoughts too pressing to be put into
words, Chips made answer to himself.  These examinations and
certificates and so on--what did they matter?  And all this efficiency
and up-to-dateness--what did _that_ matter, either?  Ralston was trying
to run Brookfield like a factory--a factory for turning out a snob
culture based on money and machines.  The old gentlemanly traditions of
family and broad acres were changing, as doubtless they were bound to;
but instead of widening them to form a genuine inclusive democracy of
duke and dustman, Ralston was narrowing them upon the single issue of a
fat banking account.  There never had been so many rich men's sons at
Brookfield.  The Speech Day Garden Party was like Ascot.  Ralston met
these wealthy fellows in London clubs and persuaded them that
Brookfield was _the_ coming school, and, since they couldn't buy their
way into Eton or Harrow, they greedily swallowed the bait.  Awful
fellows, some of them--though others were decent enough.  Financiers,
company promoters, pill manufacturers.  One of them gave his son five
pounds a week pocket money.  Vulgar ... ostentatious ... all the hectic
rotten-ripeness of the age....  And once Chips had got into trouble
because of some joke he had made about the name and ancestry of a boy
named Isaacstein.  The boy wrote home about it, and Isaacstein _pre_
sent an angry letter to Ralston.  Touchy, no sense of humor, no sense
of proportion--that was the matter with them, these new fellows....  No
sense of proportion.  And it was a sense of proportion, above all
things, that Brookfield ought to teach--not so much Latin or Greek or
Chemistry or Mechanics.  And you couldn't expect to test that sense of
proportion by setting papers and granting certificates....

All this flashed through his mind in an instant of protest and
indignation, but he did not say a word of it.  He merely gathered his
tattered gown together and with an "umph--umph" walked a few paces
away.  He had had enough of the argument.  At the door he turned and
said: "I don't--umph--intend to resign--and you can--umph--do what you
like about it!"

Looking back upon that scene in the calm perspective of a quarter of a
century, Chips could find it in his heart to feel a little sorry for
Ralston.  Particularly when, as it happened, Ralston had been in such
complete ignorance of the forces he was dealing with.  So, for that
matter, had Chips himself.  Neither had correctly estimated the
toughness of Brookfield tradition, and its readiness to defend itself
and its defenders.  For it had so chanced that a small boy, waiting to
see Ralston that morning, had been listening outside the door during
the whole of the interview; he had been thrilled by it, naturally, and
had told his friends.  Some of these, in a surprisingly short time, had
told their parents; so that very soon it was common knowledge that
Ralston had insulted Chips and had demanded his resignation.  The
amazing result was a spontaneous outburst of sympathy and partisanship
such as Chips, in his wildest dreams, had never envisaged.  He found,
rather to his astonishment, that Ralston was thoroughly unpopular; he
was feared and respected, but not liked; and in this issue of Chips the
dislike rose to a point where it conquered fear and demolished even
respect.  There was talk of having some kind of public riot in the
School if Ralston succeeded in banishing Chips.  The masters, many of
them young men who agreed that Chips was hopelessly old-fashioned,
rallied round him nevertheless because they hated Ralston's slave
driving and saw in the old veteran a likely champion.  And one day the
Chairman of the Governors, Sir John Rivers, visited Brookfield, ignored
Ralston, and went direct to Chips.  "A fine fellow, Rivers," Chips
would say, telling the story to Mrs. Wickett for the dozenth time.
"Not--umph--a very brilliant boy in class.  I remember he could
never--umph--master his verbs.  And now--umph--I see in the
papers--they've made him--umph--a baronet.  It just shows you--umph--it
just shows you."

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.




13

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 back 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...."




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
Csar 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 Csar 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 war-time 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.

It had been a damp, foggy day, and the walk across the quadrangle to
the Dining Hall had given him a chill.  The next day he was in bed with
bronchitis, and stayed there till after Christmas.  But already, on
that night of November 11, after his visit to the Dining Hall, he had
sent in his resignation to the Board of Governors.

When school reassembled after the holidays he was back at Mrs.
Wickett's.  At his own request there were no more farewells or
presentations, nothing but a handshake with his successor and the word
"acting" crossed out on official stationery.  The "duration" was over.




16

And now, fifteen years after that, he could look back upon it all with
a deep and sumptuous tranquillity.  He was not ill, of course--only a
little tired at times, and bad with his breathing during the winter
months.  He would not go abroad--he had once tried it, but had chanced
to strike the Riviera during one of its carefully unadvertised cold
spells.  "I prefer--um--to get my chills--umph--in my own country," he
used to say, after that.  He had to take care of himself when there
were east winds, but autumn and winter were not really so bad; there
were warm fires, and books, and you could look forward to the summer.
It was the summer that he liked best, of course; apart from the
weather, which suited him, there were the continual visits of old boys.
Every week-end some of them motored up to Brookfield and called at his
house.  Sometimes they tired him, if too many came at once; but he did
not really mind; he could always rest and sleep afterward.  And he
enjoyed their visits--more than anything else in the world that was
still to be enjoyed.  "Well, Gregson--umph--I remember
you--umph--always late for everything--eh--eh?  Perhaps you'll be late
in growing old--umph--like me--umph--eh?"  And later, when he was alone
again and Mrs. Wickett came in to clear away the tea things: "Mrs.
Wickett, young Gregson called--umph--you remember him, do you?  Tall
boy with spectacles.  Always late.  Umph.  Got a job with
the--umph--League of Nations--where--I
suppose--his--um--dilatoriness--won't be noticeable--eh?"

And sometimes, when the bell rang for call-over, he would go to the
window and look across the road and over the School fence and see, in
the distance, the thin line of boys filing past the bench.  New times,
new names ... but the old ones still remained ... Jefferson, Jennings,
Jolyon, Jupp, Kingsley Primus, Kingsley Secundus, Kingsley Tertius,
Kingston ... where are you all, where have you all gone to? ... Mrs.
Wickett, bring me a cup of tea just before prep, will you, please?

The post-War decade swept through with a clatter of change and
maladjustments; Chips, as he lived through it, was profoundly
disappointed when he looked abroad.  The Ruhr, Chanak, Corfu; there was
enough to be uneasy about in the world.  But near him, at Brookfield,
and even, in a wider sense, in England, there was something that
charmed his heart because it was old--and had survived.  More and more
he saw the rest of the world as a vast disarrangement for which England
had sacrificed enough--and perhaps too much.  But he was satisfied with
Brookfield.  It was rooted in things that had stood the test of time
and change and war.  Curious, in this deeper sense, how little it had
changed.  Boys were a politer race; bullying was non-existent; there
was more swearing and cheating.  There was a more genuine friendliness
between master and boy--less pomposity on the one side, less
unctuousness on the other.  One of the new masters, fresh from Oxford,
even let the Sixth call him by his Christian name.  Chips didn't hold
with that; indeed, he was just a little bit shocked.  "He might as
well--umph--sign his terminal reports--umph--'yours
affectionately'--eh--eh?" he told somebody.  During the General Strike
of 1926, Brookfield boys loaded motor vans with foodstuffs.  When it
was all over, Chips felt stirred emotionally as he had not been since
the War.  Something had happened, something whose ultimate significance
had yet to be reckoned.  But one thing was clear: England had burned
her fire in her own grate again.  And when, at a Speech Day function
that year, an American visitor laid stress on the vast sums that the
strike had cost the country, Chips answered: "Yes,
but--umph--advertisement--always _is_ costly."

"Advertisement?"

"Well, wasn't it--umph--advertisement--and very fine
advertisement--too?  A whole week of it--umph--and not a life lost--not
a shot fired!  Your country would have--umph--spilt more blood
in--umph--raiding a single liquor saloon!"

Laughter ... laughter ... wherever he went and whatever he said, there
was laughter.  He had earned the reputation of being a great jester,
and jests were expected of him.  Whenever he rose to speak at a
meeting, or even when he talked across a table, people prepared their
minds and faces for the joke.  They listened in a mood to be amused and
it was easy to satisfy them.  They laughed sometimes before he came to
the point.  "Old Chips was in fine form," they would say, afterward.
"Marvelous the way he can always see the funny side of things...."

After 1929, Chips did not leave Brookfield--even for Old Boys' dinners
in London.  He was afraid of chills, and late nights began to tire him
too much.  He came across to the School, however, on fine days; and he
still kept up a wide and continual hospitality in his room.  His
faculties were all unimpaired, and he had no personal worries of any
kind.  His income was more than he needed to spend, and his small
capital, invested in gilt-edged stocks, did not suffer when the slump
set in.  He gave a lot of money away--to people who called on him with
a hard-luck story, to various School funds, and also to the Brookfield
mission.  In 1930 he made his will.  Except for legacies to the mission
and to Mrs. Wickett, he left all he had to found an open scholarship to
the School.

1931....  1932....

"What do you think of Hoover, sir?"

"Do you think we shall ever go back to gold?"

"How d' you feel about things in general, sir?  See any break in the
clouds?"

"When's the tide going to turn, Chips, old boy?  You ought to know,
with all your experience of things."

They all asked him questions, as if he were some kind of prophet and
encyclopdia combined--more even than that, for they liked their answer
dished up as a joke.  He would say:--

"Well, Henderson, when I was--umph--a much younger man--there used to
be someone who--um--promised people ninepence for fourpence.  I don't
know that anybody--umph--ever got it, but--umph--our present rulers
seem--um--to have solved the problem how to give--umph--fourpence for
ninepence."

Laughter.

Sometimes, when he was strolling about the School, small boys of the
cheekier kind would ask him questions, merely for the fun of getting
Chips's "latest" to retail.

"Please, sir, what about the Five-Year Plan?"

"Sir, do you think Germany wants to fight another war?"

"Have you been to the new cinema, sir?  I went with my people the other
day.  Quite a grand affair for a small place like Brookfield.  They've
got a Wurlitzer."

"And what--umph--on earth--is a Wurlitzer?"

"It's an organ, sir--a cinema organ."

"Dear me....  I've seen the name on the hoardings, but I
always--umph--imagined--it must be some kind of--umph--sausage."

Laughter....  Oh, there's a new Chips joke, you fellows, a perfectly
lovely one.  I was gassing to the old boy about the new cinema, and ...




17

He sat in his front parlor at Mrs. Wickett's on a November afternoon in
thirty-three.  It was cold and foggy, and he dare not go out.  He had
not felt too well since Armistice Day; he fancied he might have caught
a slight chill during the Chapel service.  Merivale had been that
morning for his usual fortnightly chat.  "Everything all right?
Feeling hearty?  That's the style--keep indoors this weather--there's a
lot of flu about.  Wish I could have your life for a day or two."

_His_ life ... and what a life it had been!  The whole pageant of it
swung before him as he sat by the fire that afternoon.  The things he
had done and seen: Cambridge in the sixties; Great Gable on an August
morning; Brookfield at all times and seasons throughout the years.
And, for that matter, the things he had _not_ done, and would never do
now that he had left them too late--he had never traveled by air, for
instance, and he had never been to a talkie-show.  So that he was both
more and less experienced than the youngest new boy at the School might
well be; and that, that paradox of age and youth, was what the world
called progress.

Mrs. Wickett had gone out, visiting relatives in a neighboring village;
she had left the tea things ready on the table, with bread and butter
and extra cups laid out in case anybody called.  On such a day,
however, visitors were not very likely; with the fog thickening hourly
outside, he would probably be alone.

But no.  About a quarter to four a ring came, and Chips, answering the
front door himself (which he oughtn't to have done), encountered a
rather small boy wearing a Brookfield cap and an expression of anxious
timidity.  "Please, sir," he began, "does Mr. Chips live here?"

"Umph--you'd better come inside," Chips answered.  And in his room a
moment later he added: "I am--umph--the person you want.  Now what can
I--umph--do for you?"

"I was told you wanted me, sir."

Chips smiled.  An old joke--an old leg-pull, and he, of all people,
having made so many old jokes in his time, ought not to complain.  And
it amused him to cap their joke, as it were, with one of his own; to
let them see that he could keep his end up, even yet.  So he said, with
eyes twinkling: "Quite right, my boy.  I wanted you to take tea with
me.  Will you--umph--sit down by the fire?  Umph--I don't think I have
seen your face before.  How is that?"

"I've only just come out of the sanatorium, sir--I've been there since
the beginning of term with measles."

"Ah, that accounts for it."

Chips began his usual ritualistic blending of tea from the different
caddies; luckily there was half a walnut cake with pink icing in the
cupboard.  He found out that the boy's name was Linford, that he lived
in Shropshire, and that he was the first of his family at Brookfield.

"You know--umph--Linford--you'll like Brookfield--when you get used to
it.  It's not half such an awful place--as you imagine.  You're a bit
afraid of it--um, yes--eh?  So was I, my dear boy--at first.  But that
was--um--a long time ago.  Sixty-three years ago--umph--to be precise.
When I--um--first went into Big Hall and--um--I saw all those boys--I
tell you--I was quite scared.  Indeed--umph--I don't think I've ever
been so scared in my life.  Not even when--umph--the Germans bombed
us--during the War.  But--umph--it didn't last long--the scared
feeling, I mean.  I soon made myself--um--at home."

"Were there a lot of other new boys that term, sir?" asked Linford
shyly.

"Eh?  But--God bless my soul--I wasn't a boy at all--I was a man--a
young man of twenty-two!  And the next time you see a young man--a new
master--taking his first prep in Big Hall--umph--just think--what it
feels like!"

"But if you were twenty-two then, sir--"

"Yes?  Eh?"

"You must be--very old--now, sir."

Chips laughed quietly and steadily to himself.  It was a good joke.

"Well--umph--I'm certainly--umph--no chicken."

He laughed quietly to himself for a long time.

Then he talked of other matters, of Shropshire, of schools and school
life in general, of the news in that day's papers.  "You're growing up
into--umph--a very cross sort of world, Linford.  Maybe it will have
got over some of its--umph--crossness--by the time you're ready for it.
Let's hope so--umph--at any rate....  Well..."  And with a glance at
the clock he delivered himself of his old familiar formula.
"I'm--umph--sorry--you can't stay..."

At the front door he shook hands.

"Good-bye, my boy."

And the answer came, in a shrill treble: "Good-bye, Mr. Chips...."

Chips sat by the fire again, with those words echoing along the
corridors of his mind.  "Good-bye, Mr. Chips...."  An old leg-pull, to
make new boys think that his name was really Chips; the joke was almost
traditional.  He did not mind.  "Good-bye, Mr. Chips...."  He
remembered that on the eve of his wedding day Kathie had used that same
phrase, mocking him gently for the seriousness he had had in those
days.  He thought: Nobody would call me serious to-day, that's very
certain....

Suddenly the tears began to roll down his cheeks--an old man's failing;
silly, perhaps, but he couldn't help it.  He felt very tired; talking
to Linford like that had quite exhausted him.  But he was glad he had
met Linford.  Nice boy.  Would do well.

Over the fog-laden air came the bell for call-over, tremulous and
muffled.  Chips looked at the window, graying into twilight; it was
time to light up.  But as soon as he began to move he felt that he
couldn't; he was too tired; and, anyhow, it didn't matter.  He leaned
back in his chair.  No chicken--eh, well--that was true enough.  And it
had been amusing about Linford.  A neat score off the jokers who had
sent the boy over.  Good-bye, Mr. Chips ... odd, though, that he should
have said it just like that....




18

When he awoke, for he seemed to have been asleep, he found himself in
bed; and Merivale was there, stooping over him and smiling.  "Well, you
old ruffian--feeling all right?  That was a fine shock you gave us!"

Chips murmured, after a pause, and in a voice that surprised him by its
weakness: "Why--um--what--what has happened?"

"Merely that you threw a faint.  Mrs. Wickett came in and found
you--lucky she did.  You're all right now.  Take it easy.  Sleep again
if you feel inclined."

He was glad someone had suggested such a good idea.  He felt so weak
that he wasn't even puzzled by the details of the business--how they
had got him upstairs, what Mrs. Wickett had said, and so on.  But then,
suddenly, at the other side of the bed, he saw Mrs. Wickett.  She was
smiling.  He thought: God bless my soul, what's she doing up here?  And
then, in the shadows behind Merivale, he saw Cartwright, the new Head
(he thought of him as "new," even though he had been at Brookfield
since 1919), and old Buffles, commonly called "Roddy."  Funny, the way
they were all here.  He felt: Anyhow, I can't be bothered to wonder why
about anything.  I'm going to go to sleep.

But it wasn't sleep, and it wasn't quite wakefulness, either; it was a
sort of in-between state, full of dreams and faces and voices.  Old
scenes and old scraps of tunes: a Mozart trio that Kathie had once
played in--cheers and laughter and the sound of guns--and, over it all,
Brookfield bells, Brookfield bells.  "So you see, if Miss Plebs wanted
Mr. Patrician to marry her ... yes, you can, you liar...."  Joke ...
Meat to be abhorred....  Joke ... That you, Max?  Yes, come in.  What's
the news from the Fatherland? ... _O mihi praeteritos_ ... Ralston said
I was slack and inefficient--but they couldn't manage without me....
_Obile heres ago fortibus es in aro_ ... Can you translate that, any of
you? ... It's a joke....

Once he heard them talking about him in the room.

Cartwright was whispering to Merivale.  "Poor old chap--must have lived
a lonely sort of life, all by himself."

Merivale answered: "Not always by himself.  He married, you know."

"Oh, did he?  I never knew about that."

"She died.  It must have been--oh, quite thirty years ago.  More,
possibly."

"Pity.  Pity he never had any children."

And at that, Chips opened his eyes as wide as he could and sought to
attract their attention.  It was hard for him to speak out loud, but he
managed to murmur something, and they all looked round and came nearer
to him.  He struggled, slowly, with his words.  "What--was
that--um--you were saying--about me--just now?"

Old Buffles smiled and said: "Nothing at all, old chap--nothing at
all--we were just wondering when you were going to wake out of your
beauty sleep."

"But--umph--I heard you--you were talking about me--"

"Absolutely nothing of any consequence, my dear fellow--really, I give
you my word...."

"I thought I heard you--one of you--saying it was a pity--umph--a pity
I never had--any children ... eh? ... But I have, you know ... I
have..."

The others smiled without answering, and after a pause Chips began a
faint and palpitating chuckle.

"Yes--umph--I have," he added, with quavering merriment.  "Thousands of
'em ... thousands of 'em ... and all boys."

And then the chorus sang in his ears in final harmony, more grandly and
sweetly than he had ever heard it before, and more comfortingly too....
Pettifer, Pollett, Person, Potts, Pullman, Purvis, Pym-Wilson, Radlett,
Rapson, Reade, Reaper, Reddy Primus ... come round me now, all of you,
for a last word and a joke....  Harper, Haslett, Hatfield, Hatherley
... my last joke ... did you hear it? ... Did it make you laugh? ...
Bone, Boston, Bovey, Bradford, Bradley, Bramhall-Anderson ... wherever
you are, whatever has happened, give me this moment with you ... this
last moment ... my boys ...

And soon Chips was asleep.

He seemed so peaceful that they did not disturb him to say good-night;
but in the morning, as the School bell sounded for breakfast,
Brookfield had the news.  "Brookfield will never forget his
lovableness," said Cartwright, in a speech to the School.  Which was
absurd, because all things are forgotten in the end.  But Linford, at
any rate, will remember and tell the tale: "I said good-bye to Chips
the night before he died...."






[End of Good-bye, Mr. Chips, by James Hilton]
