To You, Mr Chips (13 page)

'I see,' answered Chips, without seeing at all. He could not really understand why a man born in Brooklyn should have a sentimental desire to visit Brookfield: he could not understand why letters should be counted instead of read; he could not understand why a man who wished to avoid publicity should travel around with the kind of luggage that would rivet the attention of every fellow-traveller and railway porter. These things were mysteries. But he said, with a final attempt to discover what manner of man this Randolph Renny might be: 'In my young days we used--umph--to classify actors into two kinds--tragedians and comedians. Which kind are you, Mr. Renny?'

'I guess I'm not particularly either. Just an actor.'

'But--umph--for what parts did you become--umph--famous?'

'Oh, heroes, you know--romantic heroes. Fact is . . . I guess it sounds stupid, but I can't help it . . . I've sometimes been labelled the world's greatest lover.'

Chips raised his eyebrows and answered: 'I have a good memory for faces--umph--and also for names--umph--but in the circumstances, Mr. Renny, it seems fortunate that I--umph--easily forget reputations. . . .'

Thus they talked till the train arrived at Brookfield, by which time Chips had grown rather to like the elegant strange young man who seemed to have acquired the most fantastic renown by means of the most fantastic behaviour. For Chips, listening to Renny's descriptions of Hollywood life, could not liken it to anything he had ever experienced or read about. For instance, Renny had a son, and in Hollywood, so he said, the boy was taken to and from school every day in a limousine accompanied by an armed bodyguard--the reason being that Renny had received threatening letters from kidnappers. 'To tell you the truth, Mr. Chipping, I almost thought of sending him to a school in England. D'you know of any good school?'

'Umph,' replied Chips, thinking the matter over--or rather, not needing to think the matter over. 'There is a school at Brookfield.'

'A good school?'

'Well, I have--umph--some reason--to believe so.'

'You were educated there yourself?'

Chips answered, with a slow chuckle: 'Yes . . . umph . . . . I rather imagine I have picked up a little knowledge there during--umph--the past half-century or so. . . .'

By such exchanges of question and answer Chips and Hollywood's ace film-star came to know each other and each to marvel at the strange world that the other inhabited. It was on Chips's advice that Renny tore some of the labels off his luggage and wrapped up his Fifth Avenue hat-box in brown paper and did a few other simple things to frustrate the publicity he was apparently fleeing from. And at the Royal Hotel (still taking Chips's advice) he registered as plain Mr. Read, of London, and was careful to ask for 'tomahtoes,' not 'tomaitoes,' and to refrain from asking for ice-water at all. A few days later he rang up Chips on the telephone, said he was feeling a little bored and suggested a further meeting. Chips asked him to tea at his rooms opposite the School, and afterwards showed him over the School buildings. Renny was horrified at the primitiveness of the School bathrooms, and was still more horrified when Chips told him they had just been modernised. But he was pleased and relieved when Chips told him that there had not been a single case of kidnapping at Brookfield for the past three hundred years. 'Before that--umph--I cannot definitely say,' added Chips. 'There were very disturbed times--we had a headmaster hanged during the sixteenth century for preaching the wrong kind of sermon--yes--umph--we have had disturbed times, Mr. Renny.'

'You talk about them, sir, as if they were only yesterday.'

'So they were,' replied Chips, 'in the history of England. And Brookfield is a part of that.'

'And you're a part of Brookfield, I guess?'

'I should like to think so,' answered Chips, pouring himself tea.

The two men met again, several times. One afternoon they lazed in deck-chairs on the deserted School playing-fields; another day Chips took Renny to the local parish church, showed him the points of historic interest in it, and introduced him to the verger and the vicar as a visiting American. Renny seemed surprised that neither recognised him, and uttered a word of warning afterwards, 'You know, Mr. Chipping, you're taking a big chance showing me round like that.'

'No,' replied Chips. 'I think not. There are--umph--quite a number of people in England who--umph--have never heard of you, Mr. Renny. The vicar here, for instance, is much more familiar with the personalities of Rome during the age of Diocletian--he has written several books on the subject . . . while our verger is so passionately devoted to the cultivation of roses that--umph--I doubt if he ever goes to the cinema at all. . . . So I think you may feel quite safe in Brookfield--nobody will annoy or molest you.'

But after another few days had passed and there had been other meetings, a dark suspicion began to enter Chips's mind. Renny looked much better for his rest-cure; idle days in sunshine and fresh air had soothed the tired nerves of an idol whose pedestal too often revealed him as merely a target. All the same, there was this dark suspicion--a suspicion that suggested itself most markedly whenever the two men walked about the streets of Brookfield. Just this--that though Renny was doubtless sincere in wanting to get away from crowds of autograph-hunting admirers, he did not altogether relish the ease with which in Brookfield he was doing so. There were moments when, perhaps, the success of his incognito peeved him just a trifle. It would have been truly awful if a mob of girls had torn the clothes off his back (they had done this several times in America), but when they didn't, then . . . well, there were moments when Renny's attitude might almost have been diagnosed as: Why the hell don't they try to, anyway. . . ?

All of which came to a head in the sudden appearance of McElvie on the scene. This wiry little Scots-American arrived in Brookfield like a human tornado, expressed himself delighted with the improvement in Renny's health, demanded to meet the old gentleman with whom he had been spending so much time, wrung Chips's hand effusively, and opined (gazing across the road at the School buildings) that it certainly looked 'a swell joint.'

'And see,' he added, taking Renny and Chips by the arm and drawing them affectionately together, 'I've got a swell idea, too. . . . I'll work up a lot of phooey in the papers about your disappearance. . . . "Where is Randolph Renny?" "Has anybody seen him?"--"He's hiding somewhere--where is it?"--you know the sort of thing . . . and then, when all the excitement's just boiling over, we'll discover you here . . . spending a vacation with the old professor. . . .'

'I'm not a professor . . .' protested Chips, feebly.

'Aw, it's the same thing . . . and you knew Irving, too . . . and Forbes-Robertson . . . Sarah Bernhardt . . . the immortal Dewser. . . .'

'I didn't know them,' protested Chips, still feebly. 'I only saw them act.'

'Aw, what does that matter? . . . after all, you saw 'em and you're old enough to have known the whole bunch of 'em . . . they gave you tips about acting--and you took in what they said--and now you pass it all on to Renny here. . . . Oh, boy, what an idea--handing on the great tradition--Randolph Renny vacations secretly with Dewser's oldest friend--you were room-mates, maybe, you and Dewser--'

'Hardly,' answered Chip. 'It was--umph--before the days of co-education. . . .'

'Oh, a woman?' replied McElvie, seizing the point with an alertness Chips could not but recognise and admire. 'I beg your pardon, Mr. Chipping--no offence meant, I'm sure. . . . But you got the idea, haven't you?--why it's stupendous--it's unique--I don't believe it's ever been thought of before--Oh, boy, it'll be the greatest scoop in the history of movie publicity. . . .'

Which was why, that same evening, Chips gave Miss Lydia Jones the news that Randolph Renny was staying in Brookfield at the Royal Hotel. He decided that if there were to be a scoop at all (whatever a scoop was), Brookfield, as represented by the 
Brookfield Gazette
 and by its social reporter, should have it. And thus it came about that Miss Jones began her column of gossip ambiguously, ungrammatically, yet in substance correctly with the words: 'Coming out of the Royal Hotel the other day, who should I espy but Randolph Renny. . . .'

It only remains to add that the following term Renny's son began his career at Brookfield School, and, during a preliminary interview with Chips, remarked: 'Of course you know who my father is, don't you, sir?'

'I do, my boy,' Chips answered. 'But--umph--you need have no fear--on 
that
 account. We all know--but at Brookfield--umph--we do not care. . . .'

CHAPTER SEVEN

MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. CHIPS

They say that old schoolmasters get into a rut, that it takes a young man to supply new ideas. Perhaps so; and it is true enough that Chips, in his seventieth year, was giving pretty much the same Latin lessons as he had given in his fiftieth or his thirtieth. The use of--umph--the Supine in "u," Richards,' said Chips, from his desk in the fourth-form room, 'seems to have escaped your notice--umph--and that--umph--can only be ascribed to the Supine in You!' Laughter . . . and if some young man could have done it better, let us give him a cheer, for he is probably doing it better, or trying to--at Brookfield now.

But in 1917, that desperate year darkening towards its close, there were no young men at Brookfield. There was a strange gap between boyhood and age, between the noisy challenge of fourth-formers and the weary glances of elderly overworked men; and only Chips, oldest and most overworked of them all, knew how to bridge that gap with something eternally boyish in himself.

Besides, ideas did come to him--once, for instance, as he was sitting at his desk in the Head's study, that more illustrious desk to which, after his retirement in 1913, he had been summoned as youths were being summoned elsewhere. (But his own service, he often said, was 'acting' rather than 'active'; and that, with the little 'umph-umph' that had become a mannerism with him, was a joke at the expense of his official status of 'acting-headmaster.')

The idea came because a tall air-browned soldier knocked at the study door during the hour devoted to what Chips called his 'acting,' strode colossally over the threadbare carpet, and, with a mixture of extreme shyness and bursting cordiality, stood grinning in front of the desk. 'Hullo, sir. Thought I'd give you a call while I was hereabouts. And I'll bet you don't know who I am!'

And Chips, adjusting his spectacles in a room already dim with November fog, blinked a little, and--after five seconds--answered: 'Oh yes . . . it's--umph--it's Greenaway, isn't it?'

'Well, I guess that's one on me! You've got it right first time, sir! How on earth d'you manage it--Pelmanism or something?'

Chips shook his head with a slow smile.

'No . . . no . . . I just--umph--remember. . . . I just remember. . . .' But he was a little saddened, because he had never taken so long to remember before, and he wondered if it were his eyesight or his memory that was beginning to fail; but perhaps, after all, only his eyes, for he added: 'You were here in--umph--let me see--in nineteen-hundred, eh? Well, how are you, my boy? Umph--you won't mind if--umph--I call you that, will you? . . . Sit down and talk to me. I'm--umph--delighted to see you again. Still--umph--imitating the farmyard?'

'Goodness--you remember 
that,
 too? You're a wonder. . . . I've turned Canadian--went out there in nineteen-oh-seven--got my own ranch--found quite a lot of new animals to imitate. . . . Now I'm over with the battalion, and by the freakiest chance we've been sent here to camp. Quite a thriving military centre, Brookfield, just now. I met another fellow the other day who used to be in your fourth form--English fellow named Wallingford.'

'Wallingford . . . there was only one Wallingford. A quiet boy--umph--red hair. . . .'

'That's right--it's still red, what's left of it. He asked me to remember him to you. Too shy to come around. I guess there's quite a few Brookfield men stationed here feel the same. School's a strange place when you've left it a dozen years--makes you feel your age when you don't come across a single face you can remember.'

'Except mine--umph--eh?'

'Sure . . . and you don't look a day older. But I thought I saw in the papers you'd retired--quite a time ago?'

'So I had, my boy. . . .' And then came the little joke about the 'acting service.'

The idea came later, when Greenaway, having stayed to lunch in the School dining-hall, had returned to camp, and when Chips, pleased as he always was by such an encounter, was resting and musing over his afternoon cup of tea. The idea came to him with sudden breathtaking excitement, as a young man may realise that he is in love, or as a poet may think of a lovely line. He would have a party, a Christmas party; there should be no more of that shyness; the men who had once been to Brookfield should meet the boys who were still there; all should meet and mix in the School Hall for an end-of-term party . . . a supper, the best that war-time catering could provide . . . a few songs . . . nonsense for those who liked nonsense, talk and gossip for those who preferred it . . . a few simple toasts, perhaps, and no speeches; nothing formal; everything to make the occasion gay and happy . . . his own party, and his own idea of a party.