The Undying Fire: A contemporary novel

by H. G. Wells

§ 1

It was three weeks later.

Never had there been so successful an operation as an operation in the experience of either Sir Alpheus Mengo or Dr. Barrack. The growth that had been removed was a non-malignant growth; the diagnosis of cancer had been unsound. Mr. Huss was still lying flat in his bed in Mrs. Croome’s house, but he was already able to read books, letters and newspapers, and take an interest in affairs.

The removal of his morbid growth had made a very great change in his mental atmosphere. He no longer had the same sense of an invisible hostile power brooding over all his life; his natural courage had returned. And the world which had seemed a conspiracy of misfortunes was now a hopeful world again. The last great offensive of the Germans towards Paris had collapsed disastrously under the counter attacks of Marshal Foch; each morning’s paper told of fresh victories for the Allies, and the dark shadow of a German Cæsarism fell no longer across the future. The imaginations of men were passing through a phase of reasonableness and generosity; the idea of an organized world peace had seized upon a multitude of minds; there was now a prospect of a new and better age such as would have seemed incredible in the weeks when the illness of Mr. Huss began to bear him down. And it was not simply a general relief that had come to his forebodings. His financial position, for example, which had been wrecked by one accident, had been restored by another. A distant cousin of Mr. Huss, to whom however Mr. Huss was the nearest relative, had died of softening of the brain, after a career of almost imbecile speculation. He had left his property partly to Mr. Huss and partly to Woldingstanton School. For some years before the war he had indulged in the wildest buying of depreciated copper shares, and had accumulated piles of what had seemed at the time valueless paper. The war had changed all that. Instead of being almost insolvent, the deceased in spite of heavy losses on Canadian land deals was found by his executors to be worth nearly thirty thousand pounds. It is easy to underrate the good in money. The windfall meant a hundred needed comforts and freedoms, and a release for the mind of Mrs. Huss that nothing else could have given her. And the mind of Mr. Huss reflected the moods of his wife much more than he suspected.

But still better things seemed to be afoot in the world of Mr. Huss. The rest of the governors of Woldingstanton, it became apparent, were not in agreement with Sir Eliphaz and Mr. Dad upon the project of replacing Mr. Huss by Mr. Farr; and a number of the old boys of the school at the front, getting wind of what was going on, had formed a small committee for the express purpose of defending their old master. At the head of this committee, by a happy chance, was young Kenneth Burrows, the nephew and heir of Sir Eliphaz. At the school he had never been in the front rank; he had been one of those good-all-round boys who end as a school prefect, a sound man in the first eleven, and second or third in most of the subjects he took. Never had he played a star part or enjoyed very much of the head’s confidences. It was all the more delightful therefore to find him the most passionate and indefatigable champion of the order of things that Mr. Huss had set up. He had heard of the proposed changes at his uncle’s dinner-table when on leave, and he had done something forthwith to shake that gentleman’s resolves. Lady Burrows, who adored him, became at once pro-Huss. She was all the readier to do this because she did not like Mr. Dad’s rather emphatic table manners, nor Mr. Farr’s clothes.

“You don’t know what Mr. Huss was to us, Sir,” the young man repeated several times, and returned to France with that sentence growing and flowering in his mind. He was one of those good types for whom the war was a powerful developer. Death, hardship, and responsibility—he was still not two-and-twenty, and a major in the artillery—had already made an understanding man out of the schoolboy; he could imagine what dispossession meant; his new maturity made it seem a natural thing to write to comfort his old head as one man writes to another. His pencilled sheets, when first they came, made the enfeebled recipient cry, not with misery but happiness. They were reread like a love-letter; they were now on the coverlet, and Mr. Huss was staring at the ceiling and already planning a new Woldingstanton rising from its ashes, greater than the old.

§ 2

It is only in the last few weeks, the young man wrote, that we have heard of all these schemes to break up the tradition of Woldingstanton, and now there is a talk of your resigning the headmastership in favour of Mr. Farr. Personally, Sir, I can’t imagine how you can possibly dream of giving up your work—and to him of all people;—I still have a sort of doubt about it; but my uncle was very positive that you were disposed to resign (personally, he said, he had implored you to stay), and it is on the off-chance of his being right that I am bothering you with this letter. Briefly it is to implore you to stand by the school, which is as much as to say to stand by yourself and us. You’ve taught hundreds of us to stick it, and now you owe it to us to stick it yourself. I know you’re ill, dreadfully ill; I’ve heard about Gilbert, and I know, Sir, we all know, although he wasn’t in the school and you never betrayed a preference or were led into an unfair thing through it, how much you loved him; you’ve been put through it, Sir, to the last degree. But, Sir, there are some of us here who feel almost as though they were your sons; if you don’t and can’t give us that sort of love, it doesn’t alter the fact that there are men out here who think of you as they’d like to think of their fathers. Men like myself particularly, who were left as boys without a father.

I’m no great hand at expressing myself; I’m no credit to Mr. Cross and his English class; generally I don’t believe in saying too much; but I would like to tell you something of what you have been to a lot of us, and why Woldingstanton going on will seem to us like a flag still flying and Woldingstanton breaking its tradition like a sort of surrender. And I don’t want a bit to flatter you, Sir, if you’ll forgive me, and set you up in what I am writing to you. One of the loveable things about you to us is that you have always been so jolly human to us. You’ve always been unequal. I’ve seen you give lessons that were among the best lessons in the world, and I’ve seen you give some jolly bad lessons. And there were some affairs—that business of the November fireworks for example—when we thought you were harsh and wrong—

“I was wrong,” said Mr. Huss.