MR. TIPHAM
It must be admitted that Mr. Flaggon was not uniformly lucky in his
early experiments. This was notably the case in his first appointment
to the staff. It has been already stated that he knew nothing of public
schools from the inside, and, in selecting a successor to Mr. Cox, he
may have been too exclusively influenced by the claims of intellect
and have taken too little account of other necessary qualifications.
Anyhow, he thought that the intellectual side of the staff needed
reinforcing, and having a choice between a double first and a double
blue, he appointed the double first.
Mr. Tipham brought with him from Cleopas College, Cambridge, two more
or less fixed ideas; first, that art consists in depicting disagreeable
things in a disagreeable way, and, secondly, that life in the twentieth
century is governed by two conflicting forces--convention, which is
always wrong, and Nature, which is always right. This theory had
carried him not only safely but brilliantly through his university
career. He had secured a first in both parts of the Tripos; he had
played a prominent part in the life of his own college and been quoted
outside it; he had worn strange clothes, founded a literary society in
which thought was made to perform queer antics in shackles of its own
imposing, and he had invented a new savoury. His slightly tilted nose
and full cheeks gave him an air of confidence which unfriendly critics
described as conceit, while the long brown hair, drawn back over the
temples and plastered down with fragrant oils, the orange tie and loose
green jacket, proclaimed that he was one of those for whom art is not
merely a hobby but an integral part of life. One glance at his face
would have informed any ordinarily shrewd observer that, in approaching
new problems and unfamiliar ground, Mr. Tipham would not suffer from
diffidence. The late Victorians might have called him untidy and even
unwashed; but at no period in English history would he have been
branded as modest.
It was inevitable that Mr. Tipham should fall foul of the Lanchester
tradition. He would have fallen foul of any tradition. But he chose to
defy it in most unnecessary and offensive ways. He smoked as he walked
down to school from his lodgings, he refused even a perfunctory homage
to the claims of age and seniority, and the scarf that he wore almost
permanently round his throat (for Mr. Tipham was an indoor man and
sensitive to cold and damp) was a combination of colours--the colours
of the Brainstorm Club--that shocked the moral sense of Chiltern by
its unblushing æstheticism. Mr. Chowdler took a violent dislike to him
at their first meeting, and missed no opportunity of trying to put him
down by heavy sarcasm. But Mr. Tipham was an unsatisfactory butt; and
when attacked he had a way of raising his eyebrows and inquiring “How
so?” in a bored and superior tone, which goaded Mr. Chowdler to frenzy.
It was, indeed, soon evident that, if the serious purpose of Mr.
Tipham’s life was to teach the boys, his recreation consisted in
shocking the masters. To all the things that they held sacred, the
very things that ought to have impressed him most, he applied the same
disparaging term, “mid-Victorian” or “bourgeois.” Even the weekly
dinner in Common Room, with its quaint ceremonial and unique endowment,
did not escape the damning epithet. Before a fortnight had elapsed,
everybody went about saying that that fellow Tipham was impossible.
Mr. Plummer, whose ideal (never, alas! to be realised in this world)
was a united staff, and who was also the last man to abandon any sinner
as irreclaimable, made a final and unsuccessful effort to bring about
a better understanding. He gave a bachelor dinner-party, to which he
invited a few of his own friends and the erring Mr. Tipham: for Mr.
Plummer had a touching belief that, if you can only bring mutually
antagonistic people together over a glass of wine, they will learn to
know and like each other.
Mr. Plummer occupied comfortable rooms in an old Georgian house that
fronted the High Street. Bit by bit, and with a rare tact that spared
natural susceptibilities, he had weeded out the furniture and pictures
of his landlady and replaced them with his own. His taste was eclectic
and eminently characteristic of pedagogic culture, and the inevitable
photographs of the Hermes of Olympia and the Acropolis found a place
of honour amongst the equally inevitable Arundels. His rooms were
considered the best rooms in Chiltern, and he was not infrequently
consulted by his colleagues on questions of art.
Mr. Tipham, for whose benefit Messrs. Bent, Rankin, Grady, and Chase
had been brought together in the Georgian house, began the evening
badly by arriving ten minutes late and in clothes which protested
with unnecessary vehemence against the narrowness of convention. At
Chiltern it was the custom, even at bachelor parties, for the guests to
wear dress clothes; but Mr. Tipham scorned custom. A flannel shirt of
that neutral tint which suggests either dirt or extreme age, a Norfolk
jacket which might well have belonged to a tramp, and a pair of grey
flannel trousers which the same tramp might conceivably have rejected,
completed his festive attire, the only note of colour being provided
by the bright orange tie which flamed beneath an unshaven chin. As Mr.
Rankin said afterwards, he suggested a man who has snatched up some
clothes hurriedly to run to the bathroom, rather than a guest at a
dinner-party.
But Mr. Tipham was quite unconscious of the sudden drop in the
temperature which followed his entry. He shot a rapid and critical
glance round the room, and, walking straight up to a small pastel
drawing of a youth’s head that hung on one of the walls, he tapped the
glass lightly with his forefinger and inquired:
“Where did you get that?”
“That?” replied Mr. Plummer; “oh, I picked that up at Chartres for a
few francs; but I don’t know that I care very much for it.”
“It’s the best thing in the room,” said Mr. Tipham quietly; “looks as
if it might possibly be an early Creusot.”
Nobody but Mr. Tipham had ever beard of Creusot; so the remark was
not taken up, and the party moved into the dining-room in depressed
silence. At dinner it soon became apparent that Mr. Tipham was out
to give instruction on other matters than art. The conversation had
drifted, as conversation often did at Chiltern, on to the subject
of boys. Mr. Grady had complained of their carelessness in handling
chemicals, which resulted in frequent explosions, and their incapacity
for anything like patient or systematic research; and Mr. Chase had
pointed out the superiority of the Classics in this respect, in that
they compelled a boy to think and left no room for experiment. “You’re
both right and both wrong,” said Mr. Tipham with easy assurance.
“Chemistry can be made very interesting and the Classics very dull, and
_vice versâ_. The truth is that, if you want to keep boys interested,
you must make things lively. _I_ always chip in for part of the time
with something quite off the lesson. To-day I gave them a little
lecture on Green Chartreuse.”
Mr. Plummer, who had long been struggling with a desire to snub
tempered by a sense of his duties as a host, now cleared his throat and
said, not without an effort:
“I suppose you had a good deal of experience before you came here?”
“No,” replied Mr. Tipham tartly; “but I happen to have been a boy
myself.”
And again the temperature fell by several degrees.
Mr. Bent had so far held himself in reserve, profoundly annoyed yet
watching with a certain cynical enjoyment the growing irritation of
his colleagues and their inability to clothe it in appropriate words.
But when, shortly afterwards, Mr. Tipham laid it down as an axiom that
“Dorian Grey” was the greatest work of art that the human intellect has
ever produced, he saw his opportunity and began in his best ironic vein.
“Its refreshing to hear you say that; so few people ever venture,
nowadays, to express old-fashioned opinions; and the Victorians seldom
get justice done to them by the rising generation. I don’t know that I
agree with you on this particular point, but I am delighted to claim
you as a Victorian.”
If there was one thing which Mr. Tipham disliked more than another it
was to be identified in any way with the Victorians; so he raised his
eyebrows and said coldly, “How so?”
If Mr. Bent had been wise he would have left well alone; as it was, he
went on to embroider the theme a little recklessly. “If one wants to be
in the swim nowadays,” he said, “one has to go into ecstasies over de
Barsac or Roger Filkison. You read Roger Filkison, of course?”
Mr. Tipham admitted, with some reluctance, that he did not.
“Oh, he’s the man, you know,” continued Mr. Bent, “who writes the
testimonials for the liver and kidney pills--the neo-realism they call
it; very clever and morbid. I don’t like it myself, but I know several
Cambridge men who think it the most poignant literature since Verlaine.”
As Messrs. Rankin and Grady were both Cambridge men, the pleasantry
fell flat, and there was an awkward silence, till Mr. Tipham, lifting
his eyebrows again, said in his most condescending manner:
“Ought one to be amused?”
And, though Mr. Bent tried to look unconcerned, everybody realised
that he had been rapped rather smartly over the knuckles. After this
unfortunate incident there was a general feeling of constraint, which
lasted through the rest of dinner. But when Mr. Chase had withdrawn to
read prayers to his house, and cigars had been lit in the sitting-room,
Mr. Tipham unbent once more and became enthusiastic over the merits
of the post-impressionists--the dazzling designs of Van Googlen, the
superb greens of le Beaupère, and the masterly way in which Grummer
painted flesh with one stroke of a glue-brush.
“I don’t count him amongst the greatest masters,” said Mr. Bent, who
had recovered his equanimity, “because he can’t paint pimples.”
“Perhaps,” replied Mr. Tipham loftily, “you have never seen his ‘Lepers
bathing.’”
“No, I haven’t,” said Mr. Bent warmly, “and I can’t say that I want to.”
“But, in that case,” remarked Mr. Tipham, “you are hardly in a position
to judge, are you?”
Soon after ten, Messrs. Bent, Rankin, and Grady rose to go. Their host
escorted them to the door with rather a wan look, for Mr. Tipham,
instead of following their example, had just lit a fresh cigarette and
dropped into the easy-chair vacated by Mr. Bent.
“Conceited idiot!” said Mr. Bent, when the three men were in the street.
“He has a lot to learn about boys,” added Mr. Grady, with a shake of
his head.
“Wants a good scrubbing with soap and water, inside and out,” growled
Mr. Rankin. “But,” he added, afterwards, privately to Mr. Grady, “old
Bent didn’t get much change out of him.”
As for Mr. Tipham, he continued to smoke cigarettes and instruct his
host in the first principles of art till well after midnight.
Among the boys Mr. Tipham was generally regarded as a freak, and his
nickname, “The Super-tramp,” could hardly be regarded as flattering.
But he had his disciples. Mind at Chiltern was held in little esteem,
and, where it existed, uncongenial surroundings were apt to turn it
sour. There were generally a few boys in the highest forms (for the
most part boys of inferior physique and precocious interests) who were
always in a state of latent revolt against a system which left them out
of account. They repaid contempt with scorn, and the scorn was all the
bitterer because it seldom dared to express itself in words and had to
ferment inwardly.
To such boys Mr. Tipham appealed as a breath from a wider world and
a champion of intellectual liberty. At the little dinners in his
lodgings, at which a wine, which had the alluring title of a _petit vin
blanc_, was followed by liqueurs, tongues were unloosed, and thought,
if it was not always particularly clear, was at least delightfully
audacious; and the crudest speculation passed for philosophy. Acting on
a suggestion from their master, three of the disciples determined to
found a school magazine in which Truth should at last find a voice. It
must be admitted that the first and only number of “Veritas” which saw
the light, though not deficient in schoolboy humour, was unnecessarily
personal and occasionally lacking in good taste. It contained obvious
allusions to the headmaster, Mr. Grady, and many other members of the
staff; but the most regrettable item of all was an imaginary interview,
in which, under the transparent pseudonym of “Howler,” Mr. Chowdler was
held up to ridicule and contempt.
“Veritas” achieved a sensational but all too brief success. It sold
like hot potatoes; but, within six hours of its publication, Mr.
Chowdler appeared in the headmaster’s study with thunder on his brow
and a copy of the offensive journal in his hand. The venture had been
anonymous; but the secret, like most school secrets, had been badly
kept, and both the names of the editors and the complicity of Mr.
Tipham were matters of common knowledge. Mr. Chowdler demanded that the
editors should be made to apologise publicly before the whole school.
As for what happened to Mr. Tipham, he did not care, for Mr. Tipham was
beneath contempt; but the obvious course was probably the right one.
In pressing his demand Mr. Chowdler was careful to explain that he was
actuated by no desire for personal revenge; he was thinking only of
discipline. At all costs discipline and the decencies of life must be
preserved.
Mr. Flaggon was much annoyed by the whole occurrence. He had himself
suggested to Mr. Tipham, when appointing him, the idea of stimulating
the boys to literary activity; but, needless to say, he had not
intended the literary activity to take the form of a lampoon on Mr.
Chowdler. However, he deprecated extreme measures and endeavoured to
soothe the victim’s ruffled feelings. The unsold copies of “Veritas”
were confiscated, and its further publication suppressed. Mr. Tipham,
to borrow an expressive French phrase, “had his head washed,” and
the editors offered a full but private apology to Mr. Chowdler. But
Mr. Chowdler was not satisfied. He maintained that “the empty one”
had behaved weakly to the boys and disloyally to himself. “A paltry
revenge,” he said, “for my sermon.” Opinion on the staff was divided.
Mr. Chase and the moderates thought that, on the whole, justice had
been done. Mr. Pounderly and the irreconcilables considered that “poor
Chowdler” had been sacrificed. Nearly everybody was agreed that the
headmaster was largely to blame; for he and he alone was responsible
for appointing a man like Tipham--“the Flaggonette,” as he was
facetiously called. Mrs. Chowdler was quite bewildered.
“I cannot understand,” she said, “how anyone can be so wicked and
spiteful as to write such things about Harry, for everybody knows that
my husband has gone out of his way to be kind and helpful to Mr.
Tipham, as indeed he always does to all the new masters. And surely
the headmaster must see that, by not supporting Harry and properly
punishing the offenders, he will weaken his own position and make
himself very unpopular; for the boys worship Harry.”