To You, Mr Chips (11 page)

But he could never quite lose his interest in boys. And when, one September morning in 1917 in the English mountain-town of Keswick, he saw an eager-faced freckled youngster of about eleven or twelve swinging astride a hotel balcony reading a book, he couldn't help intervening: 'I'd be careful of that rail, if I were you. It doesn't look too safe.'

The boy looked up, got up, looked down at the rail, then shook it. As if to prove Chips's point, it obligingly collapsed and set them both laughing. 'So there you are,' said Chips. 'A minute more and you'd have been over the edge.'

'Don't tell father, that's all,' answered the boy. 'I'd never hear the end of it. I once cut my head open doing the same thing. See here?' And he tilted his head as he pointed to an inch-long scar above his right temple.

'What's the book?' Chips asked, thinking it better not to admire such an obviously valued trophy.

The boy then showed the book--an anthology of poems, open at Macaulay's ballad about the coming of the Spanish Armada. 'See,' cried the boy, with gathering enthusiasm, 'it says--"The red glare on Skiddaw roused the burglars of Carlisle." Where's Carlisle?'

'Burghers, not burglars. Carlisle's a town about thirty miles away.'

'And that's Skiddaw, isn't it?' The boy pointed to the green and lovely mountain that rose up at the back of the hotel.

'Yes, that's it.'

'And who were the burglars--burghers?'

'Oh, they were just citizens of the town. When they saw the bonfires on top of Skiddaw they knew it as the signal that the Spanish Armada had been sighted.'

'Oh, you know the poem, then?'

Considering that Chips had read it to his class at Brookfield for thirty years or more, he was justified in the slight smile that played over his face as he answered: 'Yes, I know it.'

'You like poetry?'

'Yes. Do you?'

'Yes. . . . I wish you'd come in the hotel and meet my father. We're staying here, you know. I want to climb Skiddaw, but he says it's too much for him at his age, and he won't let me go by myself because he says I'd break my neck over a precipice.'

'You probably would,' said Chips, 'if there 
were
 any precipices. But there aren't--on Skiddaw. It's a very safe mountain.'

'Oh, do come along and tell him that. . . .'

So Chips, almost before he realised what was happening, found himself piloted inside the breakfast-room and presented to Mr. Richard Renshaw, a squat, pasty-faced, pompous-mannered heavyweight of fifty or there-abouts. One glance at him was enough to explain his reluctance to climb Skiddaw, and one moment of his conversation was enough to suggest that the boy's love of poetry would awake no answering sympathy in the father. 'I'm a plain man,' began Mr. Renshaw, expounding himself with great vigour in a strong Lancashire accent. 'Just an ordinary plain business man--I don't claim to be anything else. I'm here because my doctor said I needed a rest-cure--and there's no rest-cure to me in pushing myself up the side of a mountain. So David must just stay down with me and make the best of it. Especially as it's due to him--very largely--that I 
need
 the rest-cure.'

He glanced at the boy severely, but the latter made no comment and showed no embarrassment. Presently David moved away and left the two men together. 'That boy's a terror,' continued Mr. Renshaw, pointing after him.

'He's not mine, understand--he's my second wife's by an earlier marriage. My lad's quite different--fine young chap of twenty-five--accountant in Birmingham--settled down very nicely, 
he
 has. But David . . . well, it's my belief there's bad blood in him somewhere.'

Chips went on listening; there was nothing else to do.

'Been sacked from two schools already . . . a proper good-for-nothing, if you ask me.'

Chips hadn't asked him, but now he did ask, with the beginnings of interest: 'What was he sacked for?'

'Well, from the first school it was for breaking into the matron's bedroom in the middle of the night and scaring her out of her wits . . . and the second school sacked him for an outrageous piece of hooliganism in the school chapel during Sunday service. Isn't that enough?'

'Quite enough,' agreed Chips. 'But what's the position now? What are you going to do with him?'

'I'm damned if I know. What can 
anybody
 do with him? If schoolmasters themselves . . . but it's my belief they don't try. I've not a lot of faith in schoolmasters.'

'Neither have I--sometimes,' said Chips.

During the days that followed Chips would have had more and better chances to get to know David if Mr. Renshaw himself had been less obtrusive. He seemed a lonely, unhappy sort of man, and, having found in Chips a tolerant listener, he made the most of his opportunities. Chips could hardly get rid of the fellow at the hotel, and was heartily glad that he was no mountaineer. It was not that there was anything especially unpleasant about him--merely that he was a loud-voiced nuisance, and the more Chips saw and talked with him the more he felt that David, with or without bad blood, could not have found life very harmonious with such a stepfather. Chips wondered why such an ill-assorted pair chose to take their holidays together. The answer came in Renshaw's own words. 'Y'see, Chipping, there's nowhere else for him to go. The rest of the family wouldn't take him as a gift--and you can't blame 'em. So he has to stay with me whether he likes it or not. I'm here for my health and he's here for his sins.'

Chips smiled. 'I only hope my own sins will never take me to a worse place.'

'Oh, Keswick's all right, I know. Quite a nice spot for a holiday. But the boy isn't satisfied with a stroll in the afternoon--he's restless all the time--restless as a monkey. Only the other day one of the waiters caught him in the hotel kitchen tasting all the food out of the pans . . . of course I had to give the fellow a tip to say nothing about it. The boy's incorrigible, I tell you. Hasn't even the sense to see what's to his own advantage. He knows that his whole future depends on what I decide to do with him during the next few days.'

'Oh?'

'Well, y'see, I promised that if he was a good boy I'd overlook his disgraceful behaviour at school and put him under a private tutor for a couple of years--then after that, if he still behaved well, my son in Birmingham--the accountant, y'know--might take him into his office. . . . Wonderful chance, that, for a boy who's had to leave school under a cloud. . . . You'd think it would make him turn over a new leaf, wouldn't you? But it doesn't . . . he doesn't seem to care.'

Which was true enough. David's efforts to impress his stepfather with any appearance of remorse or future good intentions were, Chips could see, so vagrant as to be almost imperceptible. Once Chips gave the boy a lead to discuss the matter by saying, during a casual conversation in the hotel lobby: 'By the way, your father says there's a chance of your becoming an accountant. . . . It's a good profession, if you like it.'

'I wouldn't like it,' answered David, with decision.

'What do you want to be, then?'

'An explorer.'

Chips smiled. 'That's not a very easy thing to be, nowadays.'

'I once explored some caves in Scotland. It was easy enough. It was father who made all the fuss about it.'

'Oh?'

'Just because the tide came up and I had to sit on a ledge all night and wait for it to go down again. But I didn't find any gems.'

'Any gems? What do you mean?'

'Well, it said in the poem, you know--"Full many a gem of purest ray serene the dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear." . . . But I didn't find any.'

Towards mid-September, as the beginning of term at Brookfield approached, Chips began to feel the familiar willingness to be back at work. His strenuous month of walking and climbing had made him feel immensely fit for his years; even Renshaw's conversations couldn't spoil such a holiday, despite their tendency to become less restrained and more repetitive. They dealt largely with the trials and tribulations of family and business life; Renshaw had not been a happy man, nor--quite evidently--had he possessed the knack of making others happy. It seemed that he had lost a great deal of money owing to the War. He couldn't forget it, and Chips, for whom money meant little and for whom the War (then in its third year) was a continuing nightmare, was scarcely interested to hear in great detail how certain properties of his in Germany had been confiscated. 'There never was anything like it,' said Renshaw, mournfully philosophising. 'And I'd put so much into them. That's what the War does.'

Chips could have told him of other and perhaps worse things that the War did, but he refrained.

'And it's nearly as bad over here, Chipping, the way the export trade's going to pieces,' Renshaw continued. 'I'm in cotton, and I know.' And he added, putting the direct question: 'What are you in?'

'I'm in clover,' answered Chips, almost to himself.

Renshaw looked puzzled. 'What's that? . . . Oh, I see--I suppose you mean you sold out in time and can sit back on the profits? . . . Lucky fellow--I wish 
I
 had.'

'Yes, I think I've been pretty lucky,' agreed Chips, leading the conversation gently astray.

There came the last evening. Both Chips and the Renshaws were to leave the following morning--in different directions, Chips was not sorry to realise. As a kindly gesture towards someone whom he did not definitely dislike (though he was aware that they had little in common), he agreed to visit Renshaw's room after dinner for a final drink and chat. He did this dutifully, listening in patience to the man's renewed plaints against the state of trade and affairs in general; about ten o'clock he thought he could decently take his leave. 'I don't suppose we'll meet in the morning,' he said. 'I'd like to have said goodbye to David, but I suppose he's in bed by now.'

'Not he,' answered Renshaw. 'I packed him off to the pictures to keep him out of the way while we had our talk. There's Chaplin on or something. . . . He can't get into much mischief in a cinema. Ought to be back any minute now.'

'Well, say good-bye to him for me,' said Chips, shaking hands.

But about midnight he was awakened by a tapping at his room door. Renshaw, in nightshirt and dressing-gown, stood outside. 'I say, Chipping . . . sorry to wake you up . . . but David hasn't come back yet. What do you suppose I ought to do about it? Call the police?'

They adjourned to Renshaw's room to discuss the situation further. It was a night of bright moonlight and Chips, standing by the window, could see the full curve of Skiddaw outlined against a blue-black sky. He thought he had never seen the mountain look more beautiful, and he remembered, with a sharp ache of longing, his first meeting with his wife on another mountain not many miles away--the lovely girl whose marriage and death had taken place twenty years before, yet whose memory still lay as fresh as moonlight in his heart. And he knew, in some ways, that it was David as well as the mountain that had made him think of her, for she would have liked David, would have known how to deal with him--she had always known how to deal with boys, and whatever he himself had learned of that difficult art, the most had been from her. He said quietly: 'I'd give him a bit more time before calling the police, if I were you. After all, it's a nice night--he may have gone for a walk.'

'Gone for a walk? At midnight? Are you crazy?'

'No . . . but 
he
 may be . . . a little . . . In fact . . .' And then suddenly Chips, turning his eyes to the mountain again, saw at the very tip of the summit a strange phenomenon--a faintly pinkish glow that might almost have been imagined, yet--on the other hand--might almost not have been. 'Yes,' he added, 'I think he 
is
 a little crazy. . . . Do you mind if I go out and look for him? . . . I have an idea . . . well, let me look for him, anyway. And you wait here . . . don't call for help . . . till I come back. . . .'

Chips dressed and hurriedly left the hotel, walked through the deserted streets, and then, at the edge of the town, turned to the side-track that led steeply up the flank of the mountain. He knew his way; the night was brilliant; he had climbed Skiddaw many times before. A certain eagerness of heart, a feeling almost of youth, infected him as he climbed--an eagerness to find out if his guess were true, and a gladness to find that he could still climb a three-thousand-foot mountain without utter exhaustion. He clambered on, till at last the town lay beneath in spectral panorama, its roofs like pebbles in a silver pool. Life was strange and mysterious, nearer perhaps to the heart of a boy than to the account-books of a man. . . . And presently, reaching the rounded hump that was the summit, Chips heard a voice, a weak, rather scared, treble voice that cried: 'Hello--hello!'

'Hello, David,' said Chips. 'What are you doing up here?'

(Quite naturally, without excitement or indignation, just as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world for a boy to be on top of Skiddaw at two in the morning.)

'I've been trying to make a bonfire,' David replied, sadly. 'I wanted to rouse the burglars of Carlisle. But the wind kept blowing it out . . . and I'm tired and cold. . . .'