But he was not dismayed by the difficulty of the task that lay before him. His whole life had been spent in overcoming difficulties, and he had the quiet confidence of a man who is sure of his own temper and accustomed to succeed. As has been stated before, he brought with him to his new work a great zeal for the cause of education; but he had no cut-and-dried theories of reform, no patent nostrum of his own. He knew what education ought to be, what it had been to himself—an individual renaissance, a quickening of the highest faculties of mind and spirit; and he knew that that was precisely what public school education was not. He was determined to study the problem on the spot and to proceed tentatively. The machinery, as he saw it, was antiquated, the bill of fare obsolete, the valley full of dry bones. But the dry bones were only waiting for a revivifying spirit to become clothed with flesh and to start into life again. In his mind’s eye he saw the boys as hungry sheep who looked up and were not fed. He had not yet become acquainted with that particular breed of sheep that is born without an appetite.
But ever since his first flying visit to the school, Mr. Flaggon had begun to realise that there were other problems behind the educational one which would claim the attention of a headmaster. He had always taken on trust the virtues that are considered inherent in the public school system—loyalty, discipline, gentlemanly behaviour, and a subordination of the individual will to the interests of the community. In his undergraduate days he had often experienced an absurd sensation of being considered morally, as well as socially, inferior to the more fortunate alumni of the great public schools. Old Boys had talked to him with flashing eyes and genuine conviction of the exceptional merits of their own schools, and of the enhanced value which they gave to life; and he had believed them. And what he believed of other schools he had been taught to believe as pre-eminently true of Chiltern. Chiltern was the only institution of its kind about which nobody had as yet written a schoolboy story; but it ranked amongst the aristocracy of public schools, and, in the eyes of Chilternians, even higher. And it had special characteristics of its own. Somebody had said that Chiltern turned out gentlemen rather than scholars; and somebody else, probably an Old Chilternian, had added that you could always tell a Chiltern boy from the way he behaved in a drawing-room. Wealthy manufacturers sent their sons to Chiltern to acquire the easy manners and social polish which seemed natural to the place; and to be an Old Chilternian was an “open sesame” to any club that was not primarily intellectual.
Mr. Flaggon had expected, therefore, to find a somewhat low level of mental attainments but a high standard of good breeding. But, ever since his first visit, his mind had been haunted by the picture of three vapid youths strolling past their headmaster with insolent unconcern and the blasé voices saying:
“Is that the new Gus?”
“Looks like it—unless it’s his shuvver.”
And then there was the writing on certain walls in Mr. Cox’s house.
This unfavourable impression was confirmed as he watched the boys in Chapel on the first Sunday of the Term. There was an air of insolence and swagger about the way in which the bigger boys strolled in last and lounged, instead of kneeling, during the prayers. Signs of intelligence were frequent between block and block; and, even among the smaller boys, there was often a kind of self-consciousness and pose, which, though he could not quite analyse the cause, affected Mr. Flaggon unpleasantly. He had often heard of the impressiveness of a school-chapel service. There was certainly nothing impressive about the service at Chiltern on the first Sunday of the Term, except, perhaps, the singing of the hymns—and that was much more noisy than reverent.
Mr. Flaggon belonged to no definite party in the Church. A dislike of labels and definitions, coupled with a strong desire to make the Church inclusive rather than exclusive, had won him the easy hatred of the dogmatists and the reputation of being unorthodox. His own religious views had been deeply coloured by the life and example of his father, a man of great but unrecognised power, who had cheerfully sacrificed all personal ambition to work in an obscure Cumbrian parish. At one period of his youth, his father’s attitude to life and cheerful acceptance of a lot so far below his merits, had puzzled him; and he had allowed himself to wonder whether such complete self-abnegation was commendable or even right. But the extraordinary manifestations of grief which that father’s death provoked in the whole neighbourhood had taught him to judge the value of work by a different standard, and to realise that the things of the spirit can never be adequately measured in terms of the flesh. Henceforward, the life of duty, and faith in the individual conscience, which had been the secret of the father’s influence, became the ideals of the son, and, if he was attracted into the field of education, it was largely because, to him, education in its truest sense meant a lifting of the veil from the spirit. But as he mounted the Chiltern pulpit to deliver his first sermon from the text “The letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive,” he felt conscious, instinctively and with something of a chill, that the note he was going to sound was not a note that would find an echo in the hearts of his congregation. Here were no hungry sheep looking up to be fed, but indifference, inertia, and an unknown something that was probably worse than either and possibly the cause of both.
Mr. Flaggon was an interesting and a distinguished preacher; his worst enemies admitted that. He had the gift of saying what he meant, the happy phrase, and the inevitable word. But, if his manner could not but create a favourable impression, his matter caused serious alarm amongst the staff, and there was much shaking of heads afterwards in the great quadrangle under the shadow of Dr. Lanchester’s statue.
“It’s not so much the sermon,” said Mr. Pounderly in his most confidential tones; “it’s the text that frightens me. There were some points in the sermon, but the text was full of innuendo.”