§ 5
“Gentlemen!” Mr. Farr protested with a white perspiring face.
“I had no idea,” ejaculated Mr. Dad, “I had no idea that things had gone so far.”
Sir Eliphaz indicated by waving his hand that his associates might allay themselves; he recognized that the time had come for him to speak.
“It is deplorable,” Sir Eliphaz began.
He put down his hands and gripped the seat of his chair as if to hold himself on to it very tightly, and he looked very hard at the horizon as if he was trying to decipher some remote inscription. “You have imported a tone into this discussion,” he tried.
He got off at the third attempt. “It is an extremely painful thing to me, Mr. Huss, that to you, standing as you do on the very brink of the Great Chasm, it should be necessary to speak in any but the most cordial and helpful tones. But it is my duty, it is our duty, to hold firmly to those principles which have always guided us as governors of the Woldingstanton School. You speak, I must say it, with an extreme arrogance of an institution to which all of us here have in some measure contributed; you speak as though you, and you alone, were its creator and guide. You must pardon me, Mr. Huss, if I remind you of the facts, the eternal verities of the story. The school, sir, was founded in the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, and many a good man guided its fortunes down to the time when an unfortunate—a diversion of its endowments led to its temporary cessation. The Charity Commissioners revived it after an inquiry some fifty years ago, and it has been largely the lavish generosity of the Papermakers’ Guild, of which I and Dad are humble members, that has stimulated its expansion under you. Loth as I am to cross your mood, Mr. Huss, while you are in pain and anxiety, I am bound to recall to you these things which have made your work possible. You could not have made bricks without straw, you could not have built up Woldingstanton without the money obtained by that commercialism for which you display such unqualified contempt. We sordid cits it was who planted, who watered....”
Mr. Huss seemed about to speak, but said nothing.
“Exactly what I say,” said Mr. Dad, turning for confirmation to Mr. Farr. “The school is essentially a modern commercial school. It should be run as that.”
Mr. Farr nodded his white face ambiguously with his eye on Sir Eliphaz.
“I should have been chary, Mr. Huss, of wrangling about our particular shares and contributions on an occasion so solemn as this, but since you will have it so, since you challenge discussion....”
He turned to his colleagues as if for support.
“Go on,” said Mr. Dad. “Facts are facts.”