“In that case,” said Mr. Chowdler, turning half round in his chair so as to face his colleagues, “I, for one, shall decline to obey.”
“I have noted your refusal with extreme regret,” replied Mr. Flaggon, so quietly that the words would hardly have been heard in the more distant parts of the room, if it had not been for the intense silence that prevailed. And then, before anybody had recovered from the surprise and shock, he passed on to the second item on the programme.
The rest of the business was dispatched rapidly and without any of the irrelevant comment which was usually a feature of masters’ meetings. Everybody was anxious to get away, to breathe the fresh air, and to take stock of his own and other people’s impressions.
“Chowdler’s downed him,” whispered Mr. Rankin, as the masters trooped into the great quadrangle with grave and anxious faces.
“I don’t know,” replied the younger man thus addressed. “It can’t end there. And,” he added, “it ought not to end there.”
Whether Mr. Chowdler felt any secret misgivings, it is impossible to say. Probably not. By dint of always speaking of “the empty one” he had persuaded himself that Mr. Flaggon was essentially a weak, unmeritable man who was aping the despot. Besides, Mr. Chowdler was not an adept at self-criticism, and was quite incapable of looking at himself from the outside. Presumably, therefore, he regarded his display of temper as an outburst of passionate but righteousness indignation, a kind of prophetic “Thus saith the Lord.” And, as the day ended without further incident, he may have thought, with Mr. Rankin, that the man Flaggon was “downed.”
But, on the morrow, two things happened which brought him face to face with some very unpleasant facts. At first lesson a notice came round to say that in future, on Sunday afternoons, there would be preparation in houses at 4.30 o’clock; and, later on in the morning, he received a letter from the headmaster couched in the following terms:
Dear Mr. Chowdler,
I have put off writing till to-day in the hope that some word from you would enable me to take a course different from the one which the events of yesterday and your subsequent silence compel me to pursue. I hope that I shall never fear honest and outspoken criticism. But there are decencies to be observed without which a headmaster’s position becomes impossible; and your behaviour to myself yesterday leaves me no alternative but to assume that you intended deliberately to challenge my authority as headmaster. It is with a grave sense of responsibility and in no vindictive spirit that I feel obliged to request you to send in your resignation, to take effect at the end of the present Term.
Yours faithfully,
S. E. Flaggon.