Chapter 11
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 neighbourly 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 today, 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. . . .
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, Porson, 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.”
