Letters and a Telegram

The Undying Fire by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. LETTERS AND A TELEGRAM

LETTERS AND A TELEGRAM

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 215collapsed 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 216thirty 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 217had 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 219been 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.

That almost led to a mutiny. But that is just where you score, and why Woldingstanton can’t do without you. When that firework row was on we called a meeting of the school and house prefects and had up some of the louts to it—you never heard of that meeting—and we said, we all agreed you were wrong and we all agreed that right or wrong we stood by you, and wouldn’t let the row go further. Perhaps you remember how that affair shut up all at once. But that is where you’ve got us. You do wrong, you let us see through you; there never was a schoolmaster or a father gave himself away so freely as you do, you never put up a sham front on us and consequently every one of us knows that what he knows about you is the real thing in you; the very kids in the lower fifth can get a glimpse of it and grasp that you are driving at something with all your heart and soul, and that the school goes somewhere and has life in it. We Woldingstanton boys have that in common when we meet; we understand one another; we have something that a lot of the other chaps one meets out here, even from the crack schools, don’t seem to have. It isn’t a flourish with us, Sir, it is a simple statement of fact that the life we joined up to at Woldingstanton is more important to us than the life 221in our bodies. Just as it is more important to you. It isn’t only the way you taught it, though you taught it splendidly, it is the way you felt it that got hold of us. You made us think and feel that the past of the world was our own history; you made us feel that we were in one living story with the reindeer men and the Egyptian priests, with the soldiers of Cæsar and the alchemists of Spain; nothing was dead and nothing alien; you made discovery and civilization our adventure and the whole future our inheritance. Most of the men I meet here feel lost in this war; they are like rabbits washed out of their burrows by a flood, but we of Woldingstanton have taken it in the day’s work, and when the peace comes and the new world begins, it will still be in the story for us, the day’s work will still join on. That’s the essence of Woldingstanton, that it puts you on the high road that goes on. The other chaps I talk to here from other schools seem to be on no road at all. They are tough and plucky by nature and association; they are fighters and sturdy men; but what holds them in it is either just habit and the example of people about them or something unsound that can’t hold out to the end; a vague loyalty to the Empire or a desire to punish the Hun or restore the peace of Europe, some short range view of 222that sort, motives that will leave them stranded at the end of the war, anyhow, with nothing to go on to. To talk of after the war to them is to realize what blind alleys their teachers have led them into. They can understand fighting against things but not for things. Beyond an impossible ambition to go back somewhere and settle down as they used to be, there’s not the ghost of an idea to them at all. The whole value of Woldingstanton is that it steers a man through and among the blind alleys and sets him on a way out that he can follow for all the rest of his days; it makes him a player in a limitless team and one with the Creator. We are all coming back to take up our jobs in that spirit, jobs that will all join up at last in making a real world state, a world civilization and a new order of things, and unless we can think of you, sir, away at Woldingstanton, working away to make more of us, ready to pick up the sons we shall send you presently—

Mr. Huss stopped reading.

§ 3

He lay thinking idly.

“I was talking about blind alleys the other day. Queer that he should have hit on the same phrase....

“Some old sermon of mine perhaps.... No doubt I’ve had the thought before....

“I suppose that one could define education as the lifting of minds out of blind alleys....

“A permissible definition anyhow....

“I wish I could remember that talk better. I said a lot of things about submarines. I said something about the whole world really being like the crew of a submarine....

“It’s true—universally. Everyone is in a blind alley until we pierce a road....

“That was a queer talk we had.... I remember I wouldn’t go to bed—a kind of fever in the mind....

“Then there was a dream.

“I wish I could remember more of that dream. It was as if I could see round some 224metaphysical corner.... I seemed to be in a great place—talking to God....

“But how could one have talked to God?...

“No. It is gone....”

His thought reverted to the letter of young Burrows.

He began to scheme out the reinstatement of Woldingstanton. He had an idea of rebuilding School House with a map corridor to join it to the picture gallery and the concert hall, which were both happily still standing. He wanted the maps on one side to show the growth and succession of empires in the western world, and on the other to present the range of geographical knowledge and thought at different periods in man’s history.

As with many great headmasters, his idle daydreams were often architectural. He took out another of his dream toys now and played with it. This dream was that he could organize a series of ethnological exhibits showing various groups of primitive peoples in a triple order; first little models of them in their savage state, then displays of their arts and manufactures to show their distinctive gifts and aptitudes, and then suggestions of the part such a people might play as artists or guides, or beast tamers or the 225like, in a wholly civilized world. Such a collection would be far beyond the vastest possibilities to which Woldingstanton would ever attain—but he loved the dream.

The groups would stand in well-lit bays, side chapels, so to speak, in his museum building. There would be a group of seats and a blackboard, for it was one of his fantasies to have a school so great that the classes would move about it, like little groups of pilgrims in a cathedral....

From that he drifted to a scheme for grouping great schools for such common purposes as the educational development of the cinematograph, a central reference library, and the like....

For one great school leads to another. Schools are living things, and like all living things they must grow and reproduce their kind and go on from conquest to conquest—or fall under the sway of the Farrs and Dads and stagnate, become diseased and malignant, and perish. But Woldingstanton was not to perish. It was to spread. It was to call to its kind across the Atlantic and throughout the world.... It was to give and receive ideas, interbreed, and develop....

Across the blue October sky the white clouds drifted, and the air was full of the hum of a 226passing aeroplane. The chained dog that had once tortured the sick nerves of Mr. Huss now barked unheeded.

“I would like to give one of the chapels of the races to the memory of Gilbert,” whispered Mr. Huss....

227§ 4

The door at the foot of his bed opened, and Mrs. Huss appeared.

She had an effect of appearing suddenly, and yet she moved slowly into the room, clutching a crumpled bit of paper in her hand. Her face had undergone some extraordinary change; it was dead white, and her eyes were wide open and very bright. She stood stiffly. She might have been about to fall. She did not attempt to close the door behind her.

Mrs. Croome became audible rattling her pans downstairs.

When Mrs. Huss spoke, it was in an almost noiseless whisper. “Job!”

He had a strange idea that Mrs. Croome must have given them notice to quit instantly or perpetrated some such brutality, a suspicion which his wife’s gesture seemed to confirm. She was shaking the crumpled scrap of paper in an absurd manner. He frowned in a gust of impatience.

228“I didn’t open it,” she said at last, “not till I had eaten some breakfast. I didn’t dare. I saw it was from the bank and I thought it might be about the overdraft.... All the while....”

She was weeping. “All the while I was eating my egg....”

“Oh what is it?”

She grimaced.

“From him.”

He stared.

“A cheque, Job—come through—from him. From our boy.”

His mouth fell open, he drew a deep breath. His tears came. He raised himself, and was reminded of his bandaged state and dropped back again. He held out his lean hand to her.

“He’s a prisoner?” he gasped. “Alive?”

She nodded. She seemed about to fling herself violently upon his poor crumpled body. Her arms waved about seeking for something to embrace.

Then she flopped down in the narrow space between bed and paper-adorned fireplace, and gathered the counterpane together into a lump with her clutching hands. “Oh my baby boy!” she wept. “My baby boy....

229“And I was so wicked about the mourning.... I was so wicked....”

Mr. Huss lay stiff, as the doctor had ordered him to do; but the hand he stretched down could just touch and caress her hair.

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