CHAPTER XTHE LANCHESTER LETTERS
TheTerm did not end without further unpleasantness. The treatment of le Willow had created a feeling of deep resentment in the school, and this feeling was intensified when Old Chilternians came down and said that the place was becoming a regular Sunday school, and that the new man deserved to be shot. It was known, too, that some of the masters shared the opinion of the Old Chilternians, and “the Jowler” was generally recognised as the champion who was foremost in defending the old flag against attacks. Mr. Chowdler himself was quite unconscious that he had revealed his inner mind to the boys or fanned the flame of disloyalty. But there was no doubt that he talked with great freedom to parents and old boys; and neither parents nor old boys are invariably discreet.
The upshot of it all was that, at the school concert on the last night but one of the Term, both Mr. Chowdler and le Willowreceived a great ovation which contrasted forcibly with the very faint cheering that greeted the entrance of the headmaster. It was said that there had even been hissing; but, while some maintained that it had proceeded from a group of old boys, and some ascribed it to isolated members of Mr. Chowdler’s house, others asserted that there had been nothing of the kind at all. Anyhow, it was not very marked, and Mr. Flaggon ignored it. He had a disconcerting way of concealing his feelings, an air of impenetrability which suggested, somehow, that he might have a trump card up his sleeve. The boys did not like him the better for this. Boys feel more at home with a man who plays with all his cards on the table.
But the school got a glimpse into the working of their headmaster’s mind when they were summoned into the Great Hall, just before the last chapel, to hear some remarks which Mr. Flaggon thought it his duty to address to them. The Term, he said, had been an unsatisfactory Term. He dwelt on the prevalence of cribbing, on the general slackness of discipline and the apparent absence of any healthy public opinion on matters that were vital to the school. He spoke sternly, but in measured language and without exaggeration of bitterness, and he ended with an appeal to the best traditionsof the school and the better instincts of the better boys. There were no threats; but everybody realised that the speech was intended as a grave warning.
Many of the masters were considerably impressed upon it. A few of the older ones, however, headed by Mr. Chowdler, chose to regard it as an unwarranted attack on themselves. The boys listened, as boys will always listen to easy and effective speaking, with every appearance of being moved; and the singing in chapel, immediately afterwards, was unusually subdued. But, as soon as the first effect had worn off and the tongues of the scoffers were unloosed, the discontented spirit reasserted itself again, and the opinion most commonly expressed in the houses that night was that they had been treated like preparatory schoolboys. A few there were, chiefly boys in the highest forms, who felt dimly that they had been brought face to face with a real man and a nobler conception of life than they had hitherto realised; but, as yet, they were only few and they held their peace, leaving the talking to the malcontents.
On the first morning of the holidays, the headmaster had a long interview with Mr. Chase. Mr. Chase was not altogether happy about his house; no more was Mr. Flaggon. Indeed, he was not very happy about any of the houses. In his dealings with offenderswho had been reported to him in the course of the Term, he had been painfully struck by a kind of moral hardness in them, an apparent imperviousness to the influences that make life a noble thing. It stamped itself on their faces in a particular look which was half defiant, half bored, and a sort of easy insolence which seemed to mistake itself for good breeding. And it was something new in his experience. With the thoughtless, daredevil, and impetuous temperament his own school days had made him familiar; but this was a new type, which seemed incapable of repentance and met punishment and appeal alike with the same callous indifference.
And, as he watched the boys’ faces day by day and week by week from his place in chapel, he was conscious of a gradual deterioration in many of them. Bigger boys, who at the beginning of the Term had suggested, with all their uncouthness, something of the frankness and spontaneity of healthy-minded youth, were growing old and veiled and blasé. Even among the new boys there were some who had exchanged the frank and grubby light-heartedness, natural to their years, for a look of self-conscious pertness that was decidedly unpleasing. It seemed as if there were a blight upon the place, some secret impalpable influence that was poisoning the springs of life. Mr. Flaggon had diagnosed it at firstas a lack of discipline, and he had set himself to fight the evil with heroic remedies. Cost what it might, he would have discipline. But he was beginning to suspect that indiscipline was only a symptom and that he had not yet penetrated to the root of the mischief.
By his advice Mr. Chase, who was conscientious if unimaginative, was getting rid of some of the older boys in his house, who had been vegetating for a long time in the lower forms. He now suggested that the housemaster should try to establish confidential relations with some of the parents of his new boys, and find out from them, if possible, whether all was really well. Mr. Chase looked dubious. “I don’t quite like it,” he said. “It seems a little underhand—rather like going behind people’s backs; because I have been talking a good deal lately to my Prætor and to some of the old boys, and they all assure me that, though there is a prejudice in the school against my house, it is really quite right and as good as any. Besides, I don’t want to alarm parents unnecessarily.”
Mr. Flaggon concealed a slight feeling of impatience. “We mustn’t,” he said, “allow ourselves to be bound by a more than Spanish etiquette. We have got to do the very best we can for the boys who are under us, and, if we don’t use whatever help the parents cangive us, we are surely guilty of a grave breach of duty. And as for frightening them—no sensible parent would be alarmed at being asked to co-operate with us in the interests of his child. Only, you must choose the right parents; for I’m really afraid there are some who don’t mind what happens to their sons, provided they do well at their games and have a good time.”
Mr. Chase yielded to persuasion, and, when he had gone, Mr. Flaggon sat down to a still harder task. He had decided that he must write to Mr. Chowdler. Ordinarily, in handling a delicate situation, he preferred the spoken to the written word. But in this case he felt that he could write more calmly and sympathetically than he could speak; for he was conscious that Mr. Chowdler’s voice and personality jarred upon him, and he feared that, in an interview, this latent irritation might betray itself in a tone or a gesture which would embitter rather than end the quarrel. Anyhow, something had to be done, for the situation was rapidly becoming impossible. Mr. Flaggon was aware of Mr. Chowdler’s indiscretions. The knowledge had come to him through various channels; and, once or twice lately, Mr. Chowdler’s tone and language to himself had been of a kind which it is difficult for a headmaster to ignore with dignity.
The letter was a difficult one to compose, and Mr. Flaggon weighed his words very carefully. He tried to recall Mr. Chowdler to a sense of elementary loyalty. He had, he said, every respect for differences of opinion, and he did not expect his own views or actions to pass uncriticised. But there were limits to the manner in which such criticisms could be expressed without doing harm to the school, and he was bound to say that, on several occasions, Mr. Chowdler had—quite unconsciously, no doubt—gone beyond those limits. He disclaimed any personal animus, and ended with a generous tribute to Mr. Chowdler’s many services to Chiltern.
When he had read and re-read the letter and marked it “private,” he dispatched it by a messenger and anxiously awaited the reply.
And he did not have long to wait. Whenever his indiscretions were called in question, Mr. Chowdler made great play with the word “gossip.” The headmaster, said Mr. Chowdler, had evidently been listening to gossip, and would do well to be more shy of it in the future. He (Mr. Chowdler) had nothing to reproach himself with, and he refused to be held responsible for other folk’s mistakes. His advice had always been at the service of the headmaster, but it had been consistently ignored. People must lie in their beds as they make them.
The headmaster sighed as he read this answer to his appeal, but he felt that nothing would be gained by continuing the correspondence or dotting the “i’s.” He hoped against hope that, though Mr. Chowdler was incapable of admitting himself to be in the wrong, he would lay the admonition to heart and be more cautious in the future.
Mr. Flaggon spent the greater part of the holidays at Chiltern, working a rough draft of a new curriculum and mastering a great mass of detail. It was rumoured that his mother and sister were coming to live with him in the summer; but at present they were wintering abroad, and Mr. Flaggon was alone. In the course of the holidays he became more closely acquainted with Mr. Bent. The two men, each out for a solitary walk, had come from opposite footpaths into the same lane. Neither was in search of company, but, as both were obviously bound in the same direction, escape was impossible.
“Hullo!” said Mr. Flaggon. “I didn’t know you were here still, Bent. I thought you were sure to be in Switzerland.”
“No,” said Mr. Bent; “I have shed my youthful indiscretions. I still can’t stand Chiltern in the Easter or summer holidays, but I have at last realised, with infinite relief, that at Christmas no place is so attractive as one’s own fireside. It saves me a world ofanxious thought and planning. I just run up to town for the last week-end, and that gives me the feeling, necessary to the pedagogue, of having been away and seen things.”
Mr. Flaggon had not had time or opportunity to become at all intimate with any of his staff. He was, as we have said, by nature rather shy and reticent, and the consciousness of much latent hostility had made advances unusually difficult. There had, of course, been formal calls and dinner-parties; but neither calls nor dinner-parties lend themselves to the formation of friendships.
Mr. Bent had been a puzzle to him. The flippancy of his tone and manner at masters’ meetings had often been annoying; but he had sometimes said things which suggested ideals and a breadth of view at variance with his apparent cynicism. When, therefore, as they were passing his house, Mr. Bent said, “Won’t you come in and have a cup of tea?” Mr. Flaggon accepted the invitation. That walk and tea led to other walks and other teas. Mr. Bent recognised in the headmaster a man of great mental alertness and wide interests; and Mr. Flaggon discovered an unexpectedly serious vein in his companion, veiled, as it often was, under an ironic humour. As conversation became more intimate, Mr. Bent ventured one day to express his innerfeelings about Chiltern and the Lanchester tradition.
“We are haunted here,” he said, “as you have doubtless observed, by the ghost of greatness; and it won’t let us speak, or think, or do. Nothing is so paralysing (the preachers call it inspiring) as the memory of a great man. If I want a new Latin prose book, I can’t have it because Dr. Lanchester taught out of the old one; and if I want a window that will open, it is impossible because Lanchester didn’t believe in ventilation. This, of course, is fearful heresy, and men have died on the scaffold for less.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Flaggon with a laugh, “that you are so prejudiced against Lanchester, because I had a proposal to make to you. I’ve just come into possession of some papers of his, and I am going to ask you to look through them for me and see if they contain anything of real interest. I simply haven’t got time myself.”
“Oh, of course, I wasn’t crabbing therealLanchester,” said Mr. Bent; “it’s only his ghost that annoys me. Themanwas an educational reformer, but theghostis only a glorified cricket ‘pro.’ What are the papers?”
“They have been sent me,” replied the headmaster, “by a Mrs. Core, whose grandfather wrote the life of Dr. Lanchester.Probably the best things are in the book already, but there may be a gem here and there that has been passed over. Would you care to do a little sifting?”
“I should love it,” said Mr. Bent. “You see, we have done what the descendants of prophet-slayers always do. We have hidden awayourprophet under a showy tomb, built out of the very stones that slew him. I should vastly enjoy digging for his bones.”
So Mr. Bent carried home, one day, a boxful of old papers, and spent several happy evenings going over them. The gem of the collection was a little bundle of letters, written to an intimate friend during the early years of the doctor’s headmastership, and so outspoken in their comments on persons and events that, apparently, the biographer had been afraid to use them. Such phrases as “I am determined, God willing, to lift this school out of the mire into which it has fallen.... The unruly spirit of the boys troubles me less than the prejudice of the masters.... Alexander the coppersmith” (probably an allusion to the Rev. John Alexander, at that time second master at Chiltern) “does me much harm.... I apprehend more and more clearly that a headmaster must be a despot.... The moral and intellectual deadness of these people to the larger issues of education appals me”—delightedMr. Bent and whetted his appetite for more. When he returned the papers at the end of the week, he observed:
“There’s matter enough here to blow up Chiltern and half the county into the bargain. Some of the letters are splendid and quite new, but it would never do to publish them. People would say they were an impudent forgery. Lanchester was a much finer fellow than I realised, and intensely modern. By the way, I understood he had had difficulties, but I never knew that he had to begin by sacking a third of the school and two of the senior——” But a look on Mr. Flaggon’s face pulled him up abruptly. “That’s the worst of headmasters,” he said to himself afterwards. “The moment you begin to be natural with them, you tumble up against the official.”
But Mr. Flaggon was not offended. He had merely remembered, suddenly and with a twinge of pain, the difficult problems that confronted him, and what sharp remedies he might be forced to employ before they were finally solved.