§ 4
Mr. Huss knew Mr. Farr very well. For the last ten years it had been his earnest desire to get rid of him, but he had been difficult to replace because of his real accomplishment in technical chemistry. In the course of their five minutes’ talk in his bedroom on Friday evening, Mr. Huss grasped the situation. Woldingstanton, his creation, his life work, was to be taken out of his hands, and in favour of this, his most soul-deadening assistant. He had been foolish no doubt, but he had never anticipated that. He had never supposed that Farr would dare.
He thought hard through that long night of Friday. His pain was no distraction. He had his intentions very ready and clear in his mind when his three visitors arrived.
He had insisted upon getting up and dressing fully.
“I can’t talk about Woldingstanton in bed,” he said. The doctor was not there to gainsay him.
Sir Eliphaz was the first to arrive, and Mrs. Huss retrieved him from Mrs. Croome in the passage and brought him in. He was wearing a Norfolk jacket suit of a coarse yet hairy consistency and of a pale sage green colour. He shone greatly in the eyes of Mrs. Huss. “I can’t help thinking of you, dear lady,” he said, bowing over her hand, and all his hair was for a moment sad and sympathetic like a sick Skye terrier’s. Mr. Dad and Mr. Farr entered a moment later; Mr. Farr in grey flannel trousers and a brown jacket, and Mr. Dad in a natty dark grey suit with a luminous purple waistcoat.
“My dear,” said Mr. Huss to his wife, “I must be alone with these gentlemen,” and when she seemed disposed to linger near the understanding warmth of Sir Eliphaz, he added, “Figures, my dear—Finance,” and drove her forth....
“’Pon my honour,” said Mr. Dad, coming close up to the armchair, wrinkling his muzzle and putting through his compliments in good business-like style before coming to the harder stuff in hand; “I don’t like to see you like this, Mr. Huss.”
“Nor does Sir Eliphaz, I hope—nor Farr. Please find yourselves chairs.”
And while Mr. Farr made protesting noises and Sir Eliphaz waved his hair about before beginning the little speech he had prepared, Mr. Huss took the discourse out of their mouths and began:
“I know perfectly well the task you have set yourselves. You have come to make an end of me as headmaster of Woldingstanton. And Mr. Farr has very obligingly....”
He held up his white and wasted hand as Mr. Farr began to disavow.
“No,” said Mr. Huss. “But before you three gentlemen proceed with your office, I should like to tell you something of what the school and my work in it, and my work for education, is to me. I am a man of little more than fifty. A month ago I counted with a reasonable confidence upon twenty years more of work before I relaxed.... Then these misfortunes rained upon me. I have lost all my private independence; there have been these shocking deaths in the school; my son, my only son ... killed ... trouble has darkened the love and kindness of my wife ... and now my body is suffering so that my mind is like a swimmer struggling through waves of pain ... far from land.... These are heavy blows. But the hardest blow of all, harder to bear than any of these others—I do not speak rashly, gentlemen, I have thought it out through an endless night—the last blow will be this rejection of my life work. That will strike the inmost me, the heart and soul of me....”
He paused.
“You mustn’t take it quite like that, Mr. Huss,” protested Mr. Dad. “It isn’t fair to us to put it like that.”
“I want you to listen to me,” said Mr. Huss.
“Only the very kindest motives,” continued Mr. Dad.
“Let me speak,” said Mr. Huss, with the voice of authority that had ruled Woldingstanton for five and twenty years. “I cannot wrangle and contradict. At most we have an hour.”
Mr. Dad made much the same sound that a dog will make when it has proposed to bark and has been told to get under the table. For a time he looked an ill-used man.
“To end my work in the school will be to end me altogether.... I do not see why I should not speak plainly to you, gentlemen, situated as I am here. I do not see why I should not talk to you for once in my own language. Pain and death are our interlocutors; this is a rare and raw and bleeding occasion; in an hour or so the women may be laying out my body and I may be silent for ever. I have hidden my religion, but why should I hide it now? To you I have always tried to seem as practical and self-seeking as possible, but in secret I have been a fanatic; and Woldingstanton was the altar on which I offered myself to God. I have done ill and feebly there I know; I have been indolent and rash; those were my weaknesses; but I have done my best. To the limits of my strength and knowledge I have served God.... And now in this hour of darkness where is this God that I have served? Why does he not stand here between me and this last injury you would do to the work I have dedicated to him?”
At these words Mr. Dad turned horrified eyes to Mr. Farr.
But Mr. Huss went on as though talking to himself. “In the night I have looked into my heart; I have sought in my heart for base motives and secret sins. I have put myself on trial to find why God should hide himself from me now, and I can find no reason and no justification.... In the bitterness of my heart I am tempted to give way to you and to tell you to take the school and to do just what you will with it.... The nearness of death makes the familiar things of experience flimsy and unreal, and far more real to me now is this darkness that broods over me, as blight will sometimes overhang the world at noon, and mocks me day and night with a perpetual challenge to curse God and die....
“Why do I not curse God and die? Why do I cling to my work when the God to whom I dedicated it is—silent? Because, I suppose, I still hope for some sign of reassurance. Because I am not yet altogether defeated. I would go on telling you why I want Woldingstanton to continue on its present lines and why it is impossible for you, why it will be a sort of murder for you to hand it over to Farr here, if my pain were ten times what it is....”
At the mention of his name, Mr. Farr started and looked first at Mr. Dad, and then at Sir Eliphaz. “Really,” he said, “really! One might think I had conspired—”
“I am afraid, Mr. Huss,” said Sir Eliphaz, with a large reassuring gesture to the technical master, “that the suggestion that Mr. Farr should be your successor came in the first instance from me.”
“You must reconsider it,” said Mr. Huss, moistening his lips and staring steadfastly in front of him.
Here Mr. Dad broke out in a querulous voice: “Are you really in a state, Mr. Huss, to discuss a matter like this—feverish and suffering as you are?”
“I could not be in a better frame for this discussion,” said Mr. Huss.... “And now for what I have to say about the school:—Woldingstanton, when I came to it, was a humdrum school of some seventy boys, following a worn-out routine. A little Latin was taught and less Greek, chiefly in order to say that Greek was taught; some scraps of mathematical processes, a few rags of general knowledge, English history—not human history, mind you, but just the national brand, cut dried flowers from the past with no roots and no meaning, a smattering of French.... That was practically all; it was no sort of education, it was a mere education-like posturing. And to-day, what has that school become?”
“We never grudged you money,” said Sir Eliphaz.
“Nor loyal help,” said Mr. Farr, but in a half whisper.
“I am not thinking of its visible prosperity. The houses and laboratories and museums that have grown about that nucleus are nothing in themselves. The reality of a school is not in buildings and numbers but in matters of the mind and soul. Woldingstanton has become a torch at which lives are set aflame. I have lit a candle there—the winds of fate may yet blow it into a world-wide blaze.”
As Mr. Huss said these things he was uplifted by enthusiasm, and his pain sank down out of his consciousness.
“What,” he said, “is the task of the teacher in the world? It is the greatest of all human tasks. It is to ensure that Man, Man the Divine, grows in the souls of men. For what is a man without instruction? He is born as the beasts are born, a greedy egotism, a clutching desire, a thing of lusts and fears. He can regard nothing except in relation to himself. Even his love is a bargain; and his utmost effort is vanity because he has to die. And it is we teachers alone who can lift him out of that self-preoccupation. We teachers.... We can release him into a wider circle of ideas beyond himself in which he can at length forget himself and his meagre personal ends altogether. We can open his eyes to the past and to the future and to the undying life of Man. So through us and through us only, he escapes from death and futility. An untaught man is but himself alone, as lonely in his ends and destiny as any beast; a man instructed is a man enlarged from that narrow prison of self into participation in an undying life, that began we know not when, that grows above and beyond the greatness of the stars....”
He spoke as if he addressed some other hearer than the three before him. Mr. Dad, with eyebrows raised and lips compressed, nodded silently to Mr. Farr as if his worst suspicions were confirmed, and there were signs and signals that Sir Eliphaz was about to speak, when Mr. Huss resumed.
“For five and twenty years I have ruled over Woldingstanton, and for all that time I have been giving sight to the blind. I have given understanding to some thousands of boys. All those routines of teaching that had become dead we made live again there. My boys have learnt the history of mankind so that it has become their own adventure; they have learnt geography so that the world is their possession; I have had languages taught to make the past live again in their minds and to be windows upon the souls of alien peoples. Science has played its proper part; it has taken my boys into the secret places of matter and out among the nebulæ.... Always I have kept Farr and his utilities in their due subordination. Some of my boys have already made good business men—because they were more than business men.... But I have never sought to make business men and I never will. My boys have gone into the professions, into the services, into the great world and done well—I have had dull boys and intractable boys, but nearly all have gone into the world gentlemen, broad-minded, good-mannered, understanding and unselfish, masters of self, servants of man, because the whole scheme of their education has been to release them from base and narrow things.... When the war came, my boys were ready.... They have gone to their deaths—how many have gone to their deaths! My own son among them.... I did not grudge him.... Woldingstanton is a new school; its tradition has scarcely begun; the list of its old boys is now so terribly depleted that its young tradition wilts like a torn seedling.... But still we can keep on with it, still that tradition will grow, if my flame still burns. But my teaching must go on as I have planned it. It must. It must.... What has made my boys all that they are, has been the history, the biological science, the philosophy. For these things are wisdom. All the rest is training and mere knowledge. If the school is to live, the head must still be a man who can teach history—history in the widest sense; he must be philosopher, biologist, and archæologist as well as scholar. And you would hand that task to Farr! Farr! Farr here has never even touched the essential work of the school. He does not know what it is. His mind is no more opened than the cricket professional’s.”
Mr. Dad made an impatient noise.
The sick man went on with his burning eyes on Farr, his lips bloodless.
“He thinks of chemistry and physics not as a help to understanding but as a help to trading. So long as he has been at Woldingstanton he has been working furtively with our materials in the laboratories, dreaming of some profitable patent. Oh! I know you, Farr. Do you think I didn’t see because I didn’t choose to complain? If he could have discovered some profitable patent he would have abandoned teaching the day he did so. He would have been even as you are. But with a lifeless imagination you cannot even invent patentable things. He would talk to the boys of the empire at times, but the empire to him is no more than a trading conspiracy fenced about with tariffs. It goes on to nothing.... And he thinks we are fighting the Germans, he thinks my dear and precious boy gave his life and that all these other brave lads beyond counting died, in order that we might take the place of the Germans as the chapman-bullies of the world. That is the measure of his mind. He has no religion, no faith, no devotion. Why does he want my place? Because he wants to serve as I have served? No! But because he envies my house, my income, my headship. Whether I live or die, it is impossible that Woldingstanton, my Woldingstanton, should live under his hand. Give it to him, and in a little while it will be dead.”