“Oh, I’m so glad to hear you say that!” cried Mr. Chowdler. “I’m so glad to hear you say that; because you know, we cling very, very faithfully here to our past and our great Conservative tradition.”
“Aren’t you forgetting,” said Mr. Flaggon quickly, “that Dr. Lanchester was always considered a Radical?”
Mr. Chowdler had forgotten; all Chiltern was in the habit of forgetting this unpleasant fact. But he would not own to any lapse of memory, and his voice took on a note of challenge as he replied:
“Oh, a name doesn’t frighten me; there’s nothing in a name; names are only the coinage of the foolish. Lanchester was a man of very Conservative instincts. He was not one of those who love change for change’s sake. He was a restorer, not a destroyer.”
“It must be difficult to be the one without the other,” remarked Mr. Flaggon quietly; “and I have always heard that Dr. Lanchester was both.”
Antipathies are often physical as well as moral, and the two men suddenly became conscious of a kind of physical distaste for one another. In Chowdler’s fleshy limbs, broad shoulders, bullet head, and aggressive manner, Mr. Flaggon saw for the moment the personification of that narrow but confident prejudice which blocks progress and strangles reform; while Mr. Chowdler realised acutely that “the man Flaggon” would easily get on his nerves. There was an awkward pause which Mr. Beadle filled by remarking:
“You must have found it very interesting work tutoring a foreign prince.”
But Mr. Chowdler, though momentarily disconcerted, was not to be diverted from his main purpose; and, before Mr. Flaggon could frame a reply, he interposed again with:
“Talking of princes reminds me of something that happened to me a little while ago.”
Mr. Chowdler had a large stock of anecdotes with which his colleagues were painfully familiar, for he was never afraid of repeating himself. In theory Mr. Chowdler scorned sentimentality and even sentiment, but in practice his stories were nearly all of the sentimental order and related how small boys had looked up at him wistfully, or old boys had grasped his hand with manly tears in their eyes. And both wistful small boys and manly old boys had nearly always contrived to say something illuminating about the Lanchester tradition.