§ 1
While this unhappy conversation was occurring at Sundering-on-Sea, three men were discussing the case of Mr. Huss very earnestly over a meatless but abundant lunch in the bow window of a club that gives upon the trees and sunshine of Carlton Gardens. Lobster salad engaged them, and the ice in the jug of hock cup clinked very pleasantly as they replenished their glasses.
The host was Sir Eliphaz Burrows, the patentee and manufacturer of those Temanite building blocks which have not only revolutionized the construction of army hutments, but put the whole problem of industrial and rural housing upon an altogether new footing; his guests were Mr. William Dad, formerly the maker of the celebrated Dad and Showhite car de luxe, and now one of the chief contractors for aeroplanes in England; and Mr. Joseph Farr, the head of the technical section of Woldingstanton School. Both the former gentlemen were governors of that foundation and now immensely rich, and Sir Eliphaz had once been a pupil of the father of Mr. Huss and had played a large part in the appointment of the latter to Woldingstanton. He was a slender old man, with an avid vulturine head poised on a long red neck, and he had an abundance of parti-coloured hair, red and white, springing from a circle round the crown of his head, from his eyebrows, his face generally, and the backs of his hands. He wore a blue soft shirt with a turn-down collar within a roomy blue serge suit, and that and something about his large loose black tie suggested scholarship and refinement. His manners were elaborately courteous. Mr. Dad was a compacter, keener type, warily alert in his bearing, an industrial fox-terrier from the Midlands, silver-haired and dressed in ordinary morning dress except for a tan vest with a bright brown ribbon border. Mr. Farr was big in a grey flannel Norfolk suit; he had a large, round, white, shiny, clean-shaven face and uneasy hands, and it was apparent that he carried pocket-books and suchlike luggage in his breast pocket.
They consumed the lobster appreciatively, and approached in a fragmentary and tentative manner the business that had assembled them: namely, the misfortunes that had overwhelmed Mr. Huss and their bearing upon the future of the school.
“For my part I don’t think there is such a thing as misfortune,” said Mr. Dad. “I don’t hold with it. Miscalculation if you like.”
“In a sense,” said Mr. Farr ambiguously, glancing at Sir Eliphaz.
“If a man keeps his head screwed on the right way,” said Mr. Dad, and attacked a claw with hope and appetite. Mr. Dad affected the parsimony of unfinished sentences.
“I can’t help thinking,” said Sir Eliphaz, putting down his glass and wiping his moustache and eyebrows with care before resuming his lobster, “that a man who entrusts his affairs to a solicitor, after the fashion of the widow and orphan, must be singularly lacking in judgment. Or reckless. Never in the whole course of my life have I met a solicitor who could invest money safely and profitably. Clergymen I have known, women of all sorts, savages, monomaniacs, criminals, but never solicitors.”
“I have known some smart business parsons,” said Mr. Dad judicially. “One in particular. Sharp as nails. They are a much underestimated class.”
“Perhaps it is natural that a solicitor should be a wild investor,” Sir Eliphaz pursued his subject. “He lives out of the ordinary world in a dirty little office in some antiquated inn, his office fittings are fifty years out of date, his habitual scenery consists of tin boxes painted with the names of dead and disreputable clients; he has to take the law courts, filled with horseboxes and men dressed up in gowns and horsehair wigs, quite seriously; nobody ever goes near him but abnormal people or people in abnormal states: people upset by jealousy, people upset by fear, blackmailed people, cheats trying to dodge the law, lunatics, litigants and legatees. The only investments he ever discusses are queer investments. Naturally he loses all sense of proportion. Naturally he becomes insanely suspicious; and when a client asks for positive action he flounders and gambles.”
“Naturally,” said Mr. Dad. “And here we find poor Huss giving all his business over—”
“Exactly,” said Sir Eliphaz, and filled his glass.
“There’s been a great change in him in the last two years,” said Mr. Farr. “He let the war worry him for one thing.”
“No good doing that,” said Mr. Dad.
“And even before the war,” Sir Eliphaz.
“Even before the war,” said Mr. Farr, in a pause.
“There was a change,” said Sir Eliphaz. “He had been bitten by educational theories.”
“No business for a headmaster,” said Mr. Farr.
“Our intention had always been a great scientific and technical school,” said Sir Eliphaz. “He introduced Logic into the teaching of plain English—against my opinion. He encouraged some of the boys to read philosophy.”
“All he could,” said Mr. Farr.
“I never held with his fad for teaching history,” said Mr. Dad. “He was history mad. It got worse and worse. What’s history after all? At the best, it’s over and done with.... But he wouldn’t argue upon it—not reasonably. He was—overbearing. He had a way of looking at you.... It was never our intention to make Woldingstanton into a school of history.”
“And now, Mr. Farr,” said Sir Eliphaz, “what are the particulars of the fire?”
“It isn’t for me to criticize,” said Mr. Farr.
“What I say,” said Mr. Dad, projecting his muzzle with an appearance of great determination, “is, fix responsibility. Fix responsibility. Here is a door locked that common sense dictated should be open. Who was responsible?”
“No one in School House seems to have been especially responsible for that door so far as I can ascertain,” said Mr. Farr.
“All responsibility,” said Mr. Dad, with an expression of peevish insistence, as though Mr. Farr had annoyed him, “all responsibility that is not delegated rests with the Head. That’s a hard and fast and primary rule of business organization. In my factory I say quite plainly to everyone who comes into it, man or woman, chick or child....”
Mr. Dad was still explaining in a series of imaginary dialogues, tersely but dramatically, his methods of delegating authority, when Sir Eliphaz cut across the flow with, “Returning to Mr. Huss for a moment....”
The point that Sir Eliphaz wanted to get at was whether Mr. Huss expected to continue headmaster at Woldingstanton. From some chance phrase in a letter Sir Eliphaz rather gathered that he did.
“Well,” said Mr. Farr portentously, letting the thing hang for a moment, “he does.”
“Tcha!” said Mr. Dad, and shut his mouth tightly and waved his head slowly from side to side with knitted brows as if he had bitten his tongue.
“I would be the first to recognize the splendid work he did for the school in his opening years,” said Mr. Farr. “I would be the last to alter the broad lines of the work as he set it out. Barring that I should replace a certain amount of the biological teaching and practically all this new history stuff by chemistry and physics. But one has to admit that Mr. Huss did not know when to relinquish power nor when to devolve responsibility. We, all of us, the entire staff—it is no mere personal grievance of mine—were kept, well, to say the least of it, in tutelage. Rather than let authority go definitely out of his hands, he would allow things to drift. Witness that door, witness the business of the nurse.”
Mr. Dad, with his lips compressed, nodded his head; each nod like the tap of a hammer.
“I never believed in all this overdoing history in the school,” Mr. Dad remarked rather disconnectedly. “If you get rid of Latin and Greek, why bring it all back again in another form? Why, I’m told he taught ’em things about Assyria. Assyria! A modern school ought to be a modern school—business first and business last and business all the time. And teach boys to work. We shall need it, mark my words.”
“A certain amount of modern culture,” waved Sir Eliphaz.
“Modern,” said Mr. Farr softly.
Mr. Dad grunted. “In my opinion that sort of thing gives the boys ideas.”
Mr. Farr steered his way discreetly. “Science with a due regard to its technical applications should certainly be the substantial part of a modern education.”...
They were in the smoking-room and half way through three princely cigars before they got beyond such fragmentary detractions of the fallen headmaster. Then Mr. Dad in the clear-cut style of a business man, brought his companions to action. “Well,” said Mr. Dad, turning abruptly upon Sir Eliphaz, “what about it?”
“It is manifest that Woldingstanton has to enter on a new phase; what has happened brings us to the parting of the ways,” said Sir Eliphaz. “Much as I regret the misfortunes of an old friend.”
“That,” said Mr. Dad, “spells Farr.”
“If he will shoulder the burthen,” said Sir Eliphaz, smiling upon Mr. Farr not so much with his mouth as by the most engaging convolutions, curvatures and waving about of his various strands of hair.
“I don’t want to see the school go down,” said Mr. Farr. “I’ve given it a good slice of my life.”
“Right,” said Mr. Dad. “Right. File that. That suits us. And now how do we set about the affair? The next thing, I take it, is to break it to Huss.... How?”
He paused to give the ideas of his companions a fair chance.
“Well, my idea is this. None of us want to be hard on Mr. Huss. Luck has been hard enough as it is. We want to do this job as gently as we can. It happens that I go and play golf at Sundering-on-Sea ever and again. Excellent links, well kept up all things considered, and the big hotel close by does you wonderfully, the railway company sees to that; in spite of the war. Well, why shouldn’t we all, if Sir Eliphaz’s engagements permit, go down there in a sort of casual way, and take the opportunity of a good clear talk with him and settle it all up? The thing’s got to be done, and it seems to me altogether more kindly to go there personally and put it to him than do it by correspondence. Very likely we could put it to him in such a way that he himself would suggest the very arrangement we want. You particularly, Sir Eliphaz, being as you say an old friend.”...