CHAPTER V
MR. TIPHAM
It must be admitted that Mr. Flaggon was not uniformly lucky in his early experiments. This was notably the case in his first appointment to the staff. It has been already stated that he knew nothing of public schools from the inside, and, in selecting a successor to Mr. Cox, he may have been too exclusively influenced by the claims of intellect and have taken too little account of other necessary qualifications. Anyhow, he thought that the intellectual side of the staff needed reinforcing, and having a choice between a double first and a double blue, he appointed the double first.
Mr. Tipham brought with him from Cleopas College, Cambridge, two more or less fixed ideas; first, that art consists in depicting disagreeable things in a disagreeable way, and, secondly, that life in the twentieth century is governed by two conflicting forces—convention, which is always wrong, and Nature, which is always right. This theory had carried him not only safely but brilliantly through his university career. He had secured a first in both parts of the Tripos; he had played a prominent part in the life of his own college and been quoted outside it; he had worn strange clothes, founded a literary society in which thought was made to perform queer antics in shackles of its own imposing, and he had invented a new savoury. His slightly tilted nose and full cheeks gave him an air of confidence which unfriendly critics described as conceit, while the long brown hair, drawn back over the temples and plastered down with fragrant oils, the orange tie and loose green jacket, proclaimed that he was one of those for whom art is not merely a hobby but an integral part of life. One glance at his face would have informed any ordinarily shrewd observer that, in approaching new problems and unfamiliar ground, Mr. Tipham would not suffer from diffidence. The late Victorians might have called him untidy and even unwashed; but at no period in English history would he have been branded as modest.
It was inevitable that Mr. Tipham should fall foul of the Lanchester tradition. He would have fallen foul of any tradition. But he chose to defy it in most unnecessary and offensive ways. He smoked as he walked down to school from his lodgings, he refused even a perfunctory homage to the claims of age and seniority, and the scarf that he wore almost permanently round his throat (for Mr. Tipham was an indoor man and sensitive to cold and damp) was a combination of colours—the colours of the Brainstorm Club—that shocked the moral sense of Chiltern by its unblushing æstheticism. Mr. Chowdler took a violent dislike to him at their first meeting, and missed no opportunity of trying to put him down by heavy sarcasm. But Mr. Tipham was an unsatisfactory butt; and when attacked he had a way of raising his eyebrows and inquiring “How so?” in a bored and superior tone, which goaded Mr. Chowdler to frenzy.
It was, indeed, soon evident that, if the serious purpose of Mr. Tipham’s life was to teach the boys, his recreation consisted in shocking the masters. To all the things that they held sacred, the very things that ought to have impressed him most, he applied the same disparaging term, “mid-Victorian” or “bourgeois.” Even the weekly dinner in Common Room, with its quaint ceremonial and unique endowment, did not escape the damning epithet. Before a fortnight had elapsed, everybody went about saying that that fellow Tipham was impossible.
Mr. Plummer, whose ideal (never, alas! to be realised in this world) was a united staff, and who was also the last man to abandon any sinner as irreclaimable, made a final and unsuccessful effort to bring about a better understanding. He gave a bachelor dinner-party, to which he invited a few of his own friends and the erring Mr. Tipham: for Mr. Plummer had a touching belief that, if you can only bring mutually antagonistic people together over a glass of wine, they will learn to know and like each other.
Mr. Plummer occupied comfortable rooms in an old Georgian house that fronted the High Street. Bit by bit, and with a rare tact that spared natural susceptibilities, he had weeded out the furniture and pictures of his landlady and replaced them with his own. His taste was eclectic and eminently characteristic of pedagogic culture, and the inevitable photographs of the Hermes of Olympia and the Acropolis found a place of honour amongst the equally inevitable Arundels. His rooms were considered the best rooms in Chiltern, and he was not infrequently consulted by his colleagues on questions of art.
Mr. Tipham, for whose benefit Messrs. Bent, Rankin, Grady, and Chase had been brought together in the Georgian house, began the evening badly by arriving ten minutes late and in clothes which protested with unnecessary vehemence against the narrowness of convention. At Chiltern it was the custom, even at bachelor parties, for the guests to wear dress clothes; but Mr. Tipham scorned custom. A flannel shirt of that neutral tint which suggests either dirt or extreme age, a Norfolk jacket which might well have belonged to a tramp, and a pair of grey flannel trousers which the same tramp might conceivably have rejected, completed his festive attire, the only note of colour being provided by the bright orange tie which flamed beneath an unshaven chin. As Mr. Rankin said afterwards, he suggested a man who has snatched up some clothes hurriedly to run to the bathroom, rather than a guest at a dinner-party.
But Mr. Tipham was quite unconscious of the sudden drop in the temperature which followed his entry. He shot a rapid and critical glance round the room, and, walking straight up to a small pastel drawing of a youth’s head that hung on one of the walls, he tapped the glass lightly with his forefinger and inquired:
“Where did you get that?”