THE FIRST SKIRMISH
Mr. Flaggon had come to Chiltern with a determination to do great
things for education. He himself had had a hard struggle to win to
knowledge, and the phases of the struggle had left their mark deeply
imprinted on his character. Born with a thirst for knowledge, he had
had to force his way, step by step, to the fountain head; and the
narrow circumstances of a Cumberland vicarage had strewn the path
with difficulties. Old and musty books spelled out by candlelight
in his father’s study, then a scholarship at a decaying provincial
grammar school, and finally a classical exhibition at a small Oxford
College--such had been the stages by which he had made his way up the
stream. And, when he reviewed the past, he could not but remember how
brackish and unsatisfying the water had often been in the channels
where he had been compelled to seek it. If his thirst had been less
insatiable, his own experiences might well have cured him of the
desire to drink.
To a childhood spent among the Cumbrian Fells he owed a robust
constitution and a toughness of fibre that defied fatigue; perhaps,
too, a certain gravity and reticence which seem to come naturally to
those who are bred among mountains. Rather below middle height, with a
clear-cut face and an intellectual forehead, his most striking feature
was his eyes--fearless, grey, receptive eyes, which looked out upon the
world with a quiet but penetrating interest. A friend, who knew him
intimately, described them as seeing, rather than speaking, eyes.
Of public schools he knew nothing from the inside, and he had few
opportunities of studying public school men at his own small college.
In such as he came across he had noted a certain self-sufficiency and
polite lack of interest in things intellectual, which he put down
to the narrowness of their training. The circumstances of his own
upbringing had thrown him almost entirely among boys and men who had
to make their own way in the world, and who were desperately intent on
turning even half a talent to profitable use. Their aims might be low
and their ambitions sordid, but there was no trifling with opportunity,
no deliberate rejection of golden chances. He had had no practical
experience of that large and wealthy class of people who have been well
off for two generations and whose children are born with an assured
future--the people, in fact, who send their boys to the richer public
schools; and he had yet to learn how paralysing to the intellectual
life an assured future may be. In a word, he did not yet understand the
psychology of the horse who refuses to drink when taken to the water;
and, noticing that public school men were, as a class, unintellectual,
he assumed that their minds had been starved, and that their teachers
set no store by intellect.
The idea of standing for a headmastership had first been suggested
to him by an acquaintance whom chance had thrown in his way. After
securing his Fellowship, Mr. Flaggon had accepted a post as tutor to
a foreign prince, partly because the work was light and he needed a
holiday, and partly because the tutorship was a travelling one and
he was eager to see something of the world. Ten days of continuous
rain and snow on the Riffel Alp had thrown him much into the society
of the great man behind the scenes to whom allusion has already been
made. The great man was both an enthusiast for education and a firm
believer in ability; he even had the hardihood to maintain that ability
is of greater value than experience, and experiment more fruitful
of results than the accepted method of playing for safety. Being a
shrewd judge of men, he soon discerned, beneath the tutor’s quiet and
unsensational exterior, signs of exceptional power; and he did not lose
sight of him. The Welsh appointment was largely his doing, and, when
the headmastership of Chiltern fell vacant, it was he who wrote and
suggested that Mr. Flaggon should stand.
Mr. Flaggon himself had hardly regarded his candidature even as a
forlorn hope. It was intended rather as a _ballon d’essai_, a notice to
the scholastic world that he considered himself a possible headmaster,
and an opportunity of gauging how that world would regard his
claims. Chiltern, as we have seen, had no hesitation in branding his
pretensions as presumptuous; and Mr. Flaggon was quite aware that the
success of his audacious move, which had come as a surprise to himself,
had been more than a disappointment to his future colleagues.
But he was not dismayed by the difficulty of the task that lay before
him. His whole life had been spent in overcoming difficulties, and he
had the quiet confidence of a man who is sure of his own temper and
accustomed to succeed. As has been stated before, he brought with him
to his new work a great zeal for the cause of education; but he had
no cut-and-dried theories of reform, no patent nostrum of his own.
He knew what education _ought_ to be, what it had been to himself--an
individual renaissance, a quickening of the highest faculties of mind
and spirit; and he knew that that was precisely what public school
education was _not_. He was determined to study the problem on the
spot and to proceed tentatively. The machinery, as he saw it, was
antiquated, the bill of fare obsolete, the valley full of dry bones.
But the dry bones were only waiting for a revivifying spirit to become
clothed with flesh and to start into life again. In his mind’s eye he
saw the boys as hungry sheep who looked up and were not fed. He had not
yet become acquainted with that particular breed of sheep that is born
without an appetite.
But ever since his first flying visit to the school, Mr. Flaggon had
begun to realise that there were other problems behind the educational
one which would claim the attention of a headmaster. He had always
taken on trust the virtues that are considered inherent in the public
school system--loyalty, discipline, gentlemanly behaviour, and a
subordination of the individual will to the interests of the community.
In his undergraduate days he had often experienced an absurd sensation
of being considered morally, as well as socially, inferior to the more
fortunate alumni of the great public schools. Old Boys had talked to
him with flashing eyes and genuine conviction of the exceptional merits
of their own schools, and of the enhanced value which they gave to
life; and he had believed them. And what he believed of other schools
he had been taught to believe as pre-eminently true of Chiltern.
Chiltern was the only institution of its kind about which nobody had as
yet written a schoolboy story; but it ranked amongst the aristocracy of
public schools, and, in the eyes of Chilternians, even higher. And it
had special characteristics of its own. Somebody had said that Chiltern
turned out gentlemen rather than scholars; and somebody else, probably
an Old Chilternian, had added that you could always tell a Chiltern boy
from the way he behaved in a drawing-room. Wealthy manufacturers sent
their sons to Chiltern to acquire the easy manners and social polish
which seemed natural to the place; and to be an Old Chilternian was an
“open sesame” to any club that was not primarily intellectual.
Mr. Flaggon had expected, therefore, to find a somewhat low level of
mental attainments but a high standard of good breeding. But, ever
since his first visit, his mind had been haunted by the picture of
three vapid youths strolling past their headmaster with insolent
unconcern and the blasé voices saying:
“Is that the new Gus?”
“Looks like it--unless it’s his shuvver.”
And then there was the writing on certain walls in Mr. Cox’s house.
This unfavourable impression was confirmed as he watched the boys in
Chapel on the first Sunday of the Term. There was an air of insolence
and swagger about the way in which the bigger boys strolled in last
and lounged, instead of kneeling, during the prayers. Signs of
intelligence were frequent between block and block; and, even among
the smaller boys, there was often a kind of self-consciousness and
pose, which, though he could not quite analyse the cause, affected Mr.
Flaggon unpleasantly. He had often heard of the impressiveness of a
school-chapel service. There was certainly nothing impressive about the
service at Chiltern on the first Sunday of the Term, except, perhaps,
the singing of the hymns--and that was much more noisy than reverent.
Mr. Flaggon belonged to no definite party in the Church. A dislike
of labels and definitions, coupled with a strong desire to make the
Church inclusive rather than exclusive, had won him the easy hatred
of the dogmatists and the reputation of being unorthodox. His own
religious views had been deeply coloured by the life and example of
his father, a man of great but unrecognised power, who had cheerfully
sacrificed all personal ambition to work in an obscure Cumbrian parish.
At one period of his youth, his father’s attitude to life and cheerful
acceptance of a lot so far below his merits, had puzzled him; and he
had allowed himself to wonder whether such complete self-abnegation
was commendable or even right. But the extraordinary manifestations of
grief which that father’s death provoked in the whole neighbourhood had
taught him to judge the value of work by a different standard, and to
realise that the things of the spirit can never be adequately measured
in terms of the flesh. Henceforward, the life of duty, and faith in
the individual conscience, which had been the secret of the father’s
influence, became the ideals of the son, and, if he was attracted into
the field of education, it was largely because, to him, education in
its truest sense meant a lifting of the veil from the spirit. But as he
mounted the Chiltern pulpit to deliver his first sermon from the text
“The letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive,” he felt conscious,
instinctively and with something of a chill, that the note he was
going to sound was not a note that would find an echo in the hearts of
his congregation. Here were no hungry sheep looking up to be fed, but
indifference, inertia, and an unknown something that was probably worse
than either and possibly the cause of both.
Mr. Flaggon was an interesting and a distinguished preacher; his worst
enemies admitted that. He had the gift of saying what he meant, the
happy phrase, and the inevitable word. But, if his manner could not but
create a favourable impression, his matter caused serious alarm amongst
the staff, and there was much shaking of heads afterwards in the great
quadrangle under the shadow of Dr. Lanchester’s statue.
“It’s not so much the sermon,” said Mr. Pounderly in his most
confidential tones; “it’s the text that frightens me. There were some
points in the sermon, but the text was full of innuendo.”
“Surely,” exclaimed Mr. Bent, “you are not going to hang a dog for his
collar?”
“Pardon me!” said Mr. Pounderly, “I hang no man. But, unless my
judgment is strangely at fault, that text, considering the time and the
place, spells upheaval.”
“And the manner!” chimed in Mr. Beadle, “the assured, precocious
manner! The air of confidence and authority! I agree with Pounderly
that we are marked down for slaughter; it is the death-knell of the
Classics!”
And the two men walked off together shaking their heads.
Mr. Chowdler did not content himself with shaking his head afterwards
in the great quadrangle. He shook it frequently and emphatically
during the sermon, in order that everybody might know that he was in
complete disagreement with the preacher. And on him fell the unpleasant
duty, as he phrased it, of making a reply and restating the Lanchester
position, on the third Sunday of the Term.
For, needless to say, Mr. Chowdler was in orders. No mere laymen could
have combined such a capacity for quarrelling with so profound a
conviction of his own reasonableness and humility. In Mr. Chowdler’s
hands religion became a weapon to smite with. For choice, he smote
lies, cant, humbug, and Bible critics; but, occasionally, quite
innocent and respectable things found themselves floored by Mr.
Chowdler’s massive fist and trampled under his double-welted heel.
For, when Mr. Chowdler mounted the pulpit, necessity was laid upon him
to smite something or somebody. There were men, like Mr. Plummer, who
doubted whether there would be much scope in Heaven for Mr. Chowdler’s
type of religion; but, if they did not regard it as the highest form of
Christianity, they had to admit that it was manly, and therefore good
for the boys.
But, on this third Sunday of the Term, Mr. Chowdler was no ordinary
smiter; he was the incarnation of the Lanchester spirit repelling
a German invasion. And his text, “Hold fast to that which is good,”
was not delivered like an ordinary text; it was fired like a six-inch
shell full at the stall in which the headmaster was sitting. Mr. Bent
said, afterwards, that he fully expected to see Chowdler follow up the
discharge of the text by leaving the cover of the pulpit and attacking
with the bayonet. However, the preacher spoke daggers but used none.
Change? Yes, change was necessary, growth was necessary; but not change
in essentials and axioms, not change in the foundations. Hold fast to
the foundations, hold fast to that which is good! There was a tendency
in a restless, riotous age to imagine that, because a thing lasted,
because it was old and venerable, it was therefore obsolete. A fool’s
mistake! Why, granite lasts, gold lasts. Hold fast to the granite,
hold fast to the gold, hold fast to that which is good. Again, there
was a tendency in an age of feverish and futile activity to assail
whatever is venerable, whatever has withstood the destructiveness of
man and the storms of time. You tear up the mighty oak, and replace it
by what? Tares? Yes, too often by tares, or at best by some finnikin
exotic treelet, such as you may see in gaudy Eastern pots in decadent
drawing-rooms. Once more, hold fast to the mighty oak, hold fast to
that which is good! Fortunately, and God be praised for it, they had in
that place a great example by which to guide their endeavours--Abraham
Lanchester, their great headmaster, restorer not destroyer, whose
clear, sane intellect and genius, conservative in the best and noblest
meaning of the word, had left them an imperishable birthright and a
priceless heritage. Hold fast to a priceless heritage, hold fast to
a great tradition, hold fast to that which is good! And so on for
five-and-twenty minutes.
Mr. Flaggon was conscious that he was being preached at, and he knew
that the boys knew it; for they kept turning round continually to
see how he was taking it. Mrs. Chowdler, who watched him narrowly,
maintained that he had been profoundly impressed and “looked as if a
new light had suddenly dawned on him”; but the general opinion among
the boys was that he hadn’t “turned a hair” and that it was impossible
to be sure whether he had really understood what “Old Jowler” was
driving at.
It is reasonable to suppose that the sermon gave Mr. Flaggon food for
reflection; he certainly sat for some time afterwards in his study,
looking into the fire and apparently thinking. But, whatever his
thoughts may have been, he kept them to himself and said nothing.
Mr. Chowdler’s effort was much appreciated on the staff, even by
some who were more prone to criticise than to praise. Mr. Pounderly
pronounced it statesmanlike, and Mr. Black went so far as to say that
it was inspired. Mr. Bent’s was the only voice that called it “bosh,”
and he received a grave and well-deserved rebuke from Mr. Plummer for
his lack of reverence. It was confidently assumed by many that Mr.
Chowdler’s serious note of warning, voicing, as it did, the general
feeling of the staff, would give Mr. Flaggon pause and force him to
recognise facts. But their optimism was of short duration; for, within
a few days, a notice asking every master to send in a copy of his
weekly routine, made it clear to the most sanguine that the era of
change and experiment had begun.