To You, Mr. Chips

by James Hilton

  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. …”

  “You’d better come down with me,” said Chips, taking the boy’s arm. A few half-burned newspapers at their feet testified to the attempt that had been made. “And you needn’t worry about the burghers of Carlisle—burghers, not burglars—they’re all fat, elderly gentlemen who’re so fast asleep at this time of night that they wouldn’t see anything even if you’d set the whole mountain on fire. … So come on down.”

  David laughed. “Are burghers like that? They sound like father.”

  “Oh no. He’s anything but fast asleep. He’s worried about where you’ve got to.”

  “Don’t tell him you found me up here. Please don’t tell him. Say I just went for a walk and got lost and you found me.”

  “Why don’t you want me to tell him the truth?”

  “He wouldn’t understand. …”

  “And do you think I do?”

  “I don’t know. Somehow … I think you do in a way. … There’s something about you that makes it easy for me to tell you things. … Do you know what I mean?”

  On the way down the mountain Chips talked to David quite a lot, and David, thus encouraged, gave his own versions of the escapades that had led to his expulsion from two schools.

  “You see, Mr. Chipping … it was a line from one of Browning’s poems—I’m like that about poetry, you know—a line gets hold of me sometimes—I can’t help it … sort of makes me do things—crazy things. … Well, anyway, this was a line about trees bent by the wind over the edge of a lake … it said they bent over ‘as wild men watch a sleeping girl.’ … I just couldn’t forget that, somehow … it thrilled me … I wanted to act being a wild man … but I didn’t know any sleeping girl … so I dressed up in a blanket and blacked my face and climbed in through the Matron’s window … of course, she wasn’t exactly a girl, but she was asleep, anyway. … Oh, she was asleep all right … but she woke up while I was watching her … and my goodness, how she screamed.”

  “And that’s what you were expelled for?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose she didn’t believe your explanation?”

  “Nobody did.”

  “Well … tell me about the other school. … What did they expel you for there?”

  “Oh, that was different. … You see, there was a preacher who used to visit us regularly and he always used to pray something about the weather—if there was a drought he’d pray for rain, and if there were floods he’d pray for the rain to stop, and so on. Seemed to me he just did it as a matter of course—so I thought it would be fun to find out if he’d really be surprised to have a prayer answered right away. There was a sort of trap-door in the chapel roof just over the pulpit, and one Sunday during the summer term, after there’d been no rain for a month, I guessed he’d start praying for it, and he did … so I just opened the trap-door and tippled a bucket of water over him. … I thought he might think I was God. …”

  When Chips and David reached the hotel, the first glimmer of dawn lay over the mountain horizon. Renshaw was pacing up and down in his room, perplexed, alarmed, and—as soon as he saw David—in a furious rage. Chips tried, and eventually was able, to pacify him somewhat. They all breakfasted together a few hours later—David, very tired and subdued, half dozing over ham and eggs. Renshaw was still—and perhaps not without reason—in a grumbling mood.

  “I’m damned if I know what to do with him,” he said, glancing distastefully at his stepson, and careless whether the boy heard his words or not. “If only schoolmasters were any use I’d try to send him to another place, but they won’t have him, y’know, when they find out he’s been sacked twice already. Damned lazy fellows, schoolmasters—take your money and then say the job’s too hard for them. After all, that’s what they’re paid for, to deal with boys—even with bad boys—why do they shirk it? … I tell you, I’ve no patience with schoolmasters—too easy a life, too many holidays—they don’t know what real work is. … What’s your opinion, Chipping?”

  Chips smiled. “Perhaps it’s a prejudiced one, Mr. Renshaw,” he answered. “You see, I am a schoolmaster.”

  “What? Oh … I didn’t mean …”

  “Don’t apologise—I’m not offended. … I should never have told you except that … well, I wonder if you’d consider sending David to Brookfield … he could be—umph—directly under my—I won’t say ‘control’—let’s call it ‘guidance’ …”

  “Do you really mean it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m sure it’s very generous of you. …”

  “Not at all. It’s just that—as you say—schoolmasters oughtn’t to shirk their jobs.”

  At this point David looked up from his dozing and Renshaw turned to him. “David—did you hear that? Mr. Chipping is a schoolmaster … how would you like to go to his school?”

  David stared at Chips and Chips looked at David and they both began to smile. Then David said: “What? You a schoolmaster? I don’t believe it!”

  “I take that as a compliment,” answered Chips.

  6. MR. CHIPS MEETS A STAR

  “COMING OUT OF THE Royal Hotel the other day, who should I espy but Randolph Renny …” wrote Miss Lydia Jones ambiguously, ungrammatically, but in substance correctly. For it really was Randolph Renny himself, and by identifying him she made the scoop of a
lifetime. A pretty long lifetime, too, for she had been doing an unpaid-for social gossip column for the Brookfield Gazette for over thirty years. Prim and spinsterish, she knew the exact difference (if any)between a pianoforte solo “tastefully rendered ” and one “brilliantly performed”; and three times a year, at the Brookfield School end-of- term concert, she sat in the front row, note-book and pencil in hand, fully aware of herself as Brookfield’s critical and social arbiter.

  She had occupied this position so long that only one person could clearly remember her as an eager, ambitious girl, hopeful about her first and never-published novel; and that person was Chips. She had been a friend of his wife’s, which was something he could never forget. As she grew primmer and more spinsterish with the years,, he sometimes meditated on the strange chemistry of the sexes that so often enabled a man to ripen with age where a woman must only wither; and when she withered out of her fifties into her sixties, and Brookfield began to laugh at her and the Gazette to print fewer and fewer of her contributions, then Chips’s attitude became even more gentle and benevolent. Poor old thing—she meant no harm, and she loved her work. He would always stop for a chat if he met her in the village, and he only smiled when, from time to time, she referred to him as “the doyan [sic] of the Brookfield staff.”

  Indeed, it was Chips who had given her the scoop about Randolph Renny—a scoop which many a bright young man from Fleet Street would have paid good money for. But Chips chose to give it to Miss Lydia Jones, of the Brookfield Gazette, and Miss Jones, faced with something far outside her customary world of whist-drives and village concerts, could only deal with it in the way she dealt with most things … that is to say, ambiguously, ungrammatically, but in substance correctly.

  This is how it had all happened. One August evening Chips had been returning by train from London to Brookfield. The School was on summer vacation, and though he had long since retired from active teaching work (he was over eighty), he still experienced, during vacations, a sense of being on holiday himself. Travelling back after an enjoyable week-end with friends, he had been somewhat startled by the invasion of his compartment at the last moment by a youngish, almost excessively handsome, and certainly excessively well-dressed fellow, who slumped down into a corner-seat breathlessly, mopped his forehead with a silk handkerchief, and absurdly overtipped a porter who threw in after him some items of very rich and strange luggage.

  Now it was Chips’s boast that he never forgot the faces of his old boys, that somehow their growing up into manhood made no difference to his powers of recognition. That was mainly true; but as he grew older he was apt to err in the other direction, to recognise too often, to accost a stranger by name and receive the bewildered reply that there must be some mistake, the stranger had never been to Brookfield School, had never even heard of Brookfield, and so on. And on such occasions, a little sad and perhaps also a little bothered, Chips would mumble an apology and wonder why it was that his memory could see so much more clearly than his eyes.

  And now, in the train, memory tempted him again—this time with the vision of a good-looking twelve-year-old who had almost established a record for the minimum amount of Latin learnable during a year in Chips’s classical form. So he leaned forward after a few moments and said to the still breathless intruder: “Well—umph—Renny … how are you?”

  The young man looked up with a rather scared expression. “I beg you, sir, not to give me away …” he stammered.

  “Give you away … umph …” Some joke, obviously—Renny had always been one for jokes. “What is it you’ve been up to this time—umph?”

  “I’m trying to get away from the crowd—I thought I’d actually succeeded…. I chose this compartment because—if you’ll pardon me for saying it—I noticed you were reading the paper through double spectacles—so I guessed—I hoped—”

  “I may be—umph—a little short-sighted, Renny—but I assure you—umph—I never forget a Brookfield face. …”

  “Brookfield? Why, that’s where I’m going to. What sort of a place is it?”

  Chips looked astonished. Surely this was carrying a joke too far. “Much the same—umph—as when you were there fifteen years ago, my boy.”

  Then the young man looked astonished. “I? … But—but I’ve never been there before in my life—this is my first visit to England, even….I don’t understand.”

  Neither did Chips understand, though he certainly—now that the other had suggested it—detected an accent from across the sea. He said: “But—your name—it’s Charles Renny … isn’t it?”

  “Renny, yes, but not Charles … Randolph—that’s my name—Randolph Renny. I thought you recognised me.”

  “I thought so too. I—umph—must apologise.”

  “Well, I hope you won’t give me away now that I’ve told you.”

  “Give you away? I—umph—I don’t know what you’re driving at.”

  “My being Randolph Renny—that’s what I mean. I’m travelling incognito.”

  “Mr. Renny, I’m afraid I still don’t understand.”

  “You mean you don’t recognize my name?”

  “I fear not … My own name—since you have been good enough to introduce yourself—is Chipping.”

  “Well, Mr. Chipping … you fairly beat the band. I reckon you must be the only person on this train who hasn’t seen one or other of my pictures.”

  “Pictures? You are an artist?”

  “I should hope so. … Oh, I get you—you mean a painter … No, not that sort of artist, I’m on the films. Don’t you ever go to the cinema?”

  Chips paused; then he answered, contemplatively: “I went on one occasion only—umph—and that was ten years ago, I am given to understand—umph—that there have been certain improvements since then … but the—umph—poster-advertising outside has never—umph—tempted me to discover how far that is true.”

  Renny laughed. “So that’s why you’ve never heard my name? My goodness, wouldn’t I like to show you round Hollywood! … I suppose you’re not interested in acting?”

  “Indeed, yes. In my young days I was a great admirer of Henry Irving and Forbes- Robertson and—umph—Sarah Bernhardt—and the immortal Duse——”

  “I guess none of them ever got three thousand fan letters a week—as I do.”

  “Fan letters?”

  “Letters from admirers—total strangers—all over the world—who write to me.”

  Chips was bewildered. “You mean—umph—you have to read three thousand letters a week?”

  “Well, I don’t read ’em. But my secretary counts ’em.”

  “Dear me—umph—how extraordinary. …” And after a little pause for thought, Chips added: “You know, Mr. Renny, I feel—umph—somewhat in the mood of the late Lord Balfour when he was taken to see the sights of New York. He was shown the—umph—I think it is called the Woolworth Building—and when—umph—the boast was made to him that it was completely fireproof, all he could reply was—‘What a pity!’”

  “Good yarn—I must remember it. Tell me something about this place Brookfield.”

  “It’s just a small English village. A pleasant place, I have always thought.”

  “You know it well?”

  “Yes, I think I can say I do. … But why—if I may ask—are you going there?”

  “Darned if I know myself, really. Matter of fact, it’s my publicity man’s idea, not mine. Fellow named McElvie—smart man. … You see, Mr. Chipping, your English public—bless their hearts—have fussed over me so much during the last few weeks that I’m all in—gets on your nerves after a time—signing autographs and being mobbed everywhere … so I said to McElvie, I’m going to take a real rest-cure, get away to some little place and hide myself, travel incognito … just some little place in the country—must be lots of places like that in England … and then McElvie suddenly had one of his bright ideas. You see, I was born in Brooklyn, so he looks it up and finds there isn’t a Brooklyn in England, but there’s a Br
ookfield. Sort of sentimental association … you see?”

  “I see,” answered Chips, without seeing at all. He could not really understand why a man born in Brooklyn should have a sentimental desire to visit Brookfield: he could not understand why letters should be counted instead of read; he could not understand why a man who wished to avoid publicity should travel around with the kind of luggage that would rivet the attention of every fellow-traveller and railway porter. These things were mysteries. But he said, with a final attempt to discover what manner of man this Randolph Renny might be: “In my young days we used—umph—to classify actors into two kinds—tragedians and comedians. Which kind are you, Mr. Renny?”

  “I guess I’m not particularly either. Just an actor.”

  “But—umph—for what parts did you become—umph—famous?”

  “Oh, heroes, you know—romantic heroes. Fact is … I guess it sounds stupid, but I can’t help it … I’ve sometimes been labeled the world’s greatest lover.”

  Chips raised his eyebrows and answered: “I have a good memory for faces—umph—and also for names—umph—but in the circumstances, Mr. Renny, it seems fortunate that I—umph—easily forget reputations. …”

  Thus they talked till the train arrived at Brookfield, by which time Chips had grown rather to like the elegant strange young man who seemed to have acquired the most fantastic renown by means of the most fantastic behaviour. For Chips, listening to Renny’s descriptions of Hollywood life, could not liken it to anything he had ever experienced or read about. For instance, Renny had a son, and in Hollywood, so he said, the boy was taken to and from school, every day in a limousine accompanied by an armed bodyguard—the reason being that Renny had received threatening letters from kidnappers. “To tell you the truth, Mr. Chipping, I almost thought of sending him to a school in England. D’you know of any good school?”

  “Umph,” replied Chips, thinking the matter over—or rather, not needing to think the matter over. “There is a school at Brookfield.”

  “A good school?”