“Oh, of course, I wasn’t crabbing the real Lanchester,” said Mr. Bent; “it’s only his ghost that annoys me. The man was an educational reformer, but the ghost is only a glorified cricket ‘pro.’ What are the papers?”
“They have been sent me,” replied the headmaster, “by a Mrs. Core, whose grandfather wrote the life of Dr. Lanchester. Probably the best things are in the book already, but there may be a gem here and there that has been passed over. Would you care to do a little sifting?”
“I should love it,” said Mr. Bent. “You see, we have done what the descendants of prophet-slayers always do. We have hidden away our prophet under a showy tomb, built out of the very stones that slew him. I should vastly enjoy digging for his bones.”
So Mr. Bent carried home, one day, a boxful of old papers, and spent several happy evenings going over them. The gem of the collection was a little bundle of letters, written to an intimate friend during the early years of the doctor’s headmastership, and so outspoken in their comments on persons and events that, apparently, the biographer had been afraid to use them. Such phrases as “I am determined, God willing, to lift this school out of the mire into which it has fallen.... The unruly spirit of the boys troubles me less than the prejudice of the masters.... Alexander the coppersmith” (probably an allusion to the Rev. John Alexander, at that time second master at Chiltern) “does me much harm.... I apprehend more and more clearly that a headmaster must be a despot.... The moral and intellectual deadness of these people to the larger issues of education appals me”—delighted Mr. Bent and whetted his appetite for more. When he returned the papers at the end of the week, he observed:
“There’s matter enough here to blow up Chiltern and half the county into the bargain. Some of the letters are splendid and quite new, but it would never do to publish them. People would say they were an impudent forgery. Lanchester was a much finer fellow than I realised, and intensely modern. By the way, I understood he had had difficulties, but I never knew that he had to begin by sacking a third of the school and two of the senior——” But a look on Mr. Flaggon’s face pulled him up abruptly. “That’s the worst of headmasters,” he said to himself afterwards. “The moment you begin to be natural with them, you tumble up against the official.”
But Mr. Flaggon was not offended. He had merely remembered, suddenly and with a twinge of pain, the difficult problems that confronted him, and what sharp remedies he might be forced to employ before they were finally solved.
CHAPTER XI
MR. CHOWDLER WINS A BATTLE AND MEETS WITH A REBUFF
When Term began again towards the end of January, Mr. Tipham and his many-coloured scarf were no longer a feature of Chiltern. He had transferred himself to Cambridge and tutorial work, feeling possibly that Cleopas College and the undergraduate were in closer touch with Nature than Chiltern and the public schoolboy. Anyhow he was gone, and his place had been taken by a young man of less pronounced views, who wore spectacles and listened deferentially to Mr. Chowdler.
Mr. Chowdler himself had returned in splendid fighting form. He had spent the greater part of the holidays at Sauersprudel, and he had employed the time in wrestling and prevailing. Long before “all the vulgar people that Harry hates so” (we are quoting from Mrs. Chowdler) flocked out to Switzerland at Christmas, Mr. Chowdler had discovered Sauersprudel in the Spitzenthal and planted the British flag there. It is true that all the English families who have visited the place in Mr. Chowdler’s wake speak of themselves as having discovered it too. But that does not alter the fact that Mr. Chowdler was the real Christopher Columbus of Sauersprudel and the father of the Adler Hotel—at least as a winter resort.
In the early days of the British occupation the settlers were not numerous, but they came regularly every winter. There were, besides Mr. and Mrs. Chowdler, the Hon. Fitzroy Plashy and party, Canon and Mrs. Dubbin, Dr. Cushat and family, Mr. Weatherbury, K.C., and a few others who had suddenly realised that sunshine and frost are not peculiar to the Engadine, and that Sauersprudel is much nearer to London than St. Moritz is. These pioneers lived together on fairly amicable terms, enjoying equal rights, but possessing no written laws, no organised constitution.