To You, Mr Chips Read Online Free PDF Page B

volcano more stoutly than it had ever been sealed before, so that a man and his son and his son's son might live and die in the belief that the world would not witness certain things again. The crust, indeed, was such that even after the first shattering its debris is something to cling to--until the next.
    All of which may sound a huge digression in a book dedicated to the memory of an old schoolmaster. But for me it is not so. I cannot think of my schooldays without the image of that incredible background--Zeppelins droning over sleeping villages, Latin lessons from which boys stepped into the brief lordliness of a second lieutenancy on the Somme. I cannot forget the little room where my friends and I fried sausages over a gas-ring and played George Robey records on the gramophone, and how, in that same little room with the sausages frying and the gramophone playing, one of us received a telegram with bad news in it, and how we all tried to sympathise, yet in the end arrived at no better idea than to open a hoarded tin of pineapple chunks to follow the sausages. I cannot forget cycling so often over the ridge of the Gogmagogs (which, as Mr. Chips always informed us, was the highest land between Brookfield and the Ural Mountains), and the soft fenland rain beginning to fall on Cambridge streets at dusk, with old men fumbling in and out of bookshops, and young men, spent after route-marches, scampering over ancient quadrangles. Those days were history, but most of us were too young to be historians, too young to disassociate the trivial from the momentous--gnarled desks and war-headlines, photogravure generals and the school butler who stood at the foot of the dormitory staircase and at lights-out warned sepulchrally--'Time, Gentlemen, Time.' It was Time in a way that so many of us could not realise. That warning marked the days during which, on an average, ten thousand men were killed.
     
    Mr. Chips would walk between the lines of beds in the dormitory and turn out the lights. He was an old man then, and it was impossible to think he had ever been much younger. He seemed already ageless, beyond the reach of any time that could be called. Schooldays are a microcosm of life--the boy is born the day he enters the school and dies the day he leaves it; in between are youth, middle-age, and the elderly respectability of the sixth-form. But outside this cycle stands the schoolmaster, watching the three-year lifetimes as they pass him by, remembering faces and incidents as a god might remember history. An old schoolmaster, if he is well-liked and has dignity, is rather like a god. You can joke about him behind his back, but you must acknowledge him to his face while you love him a little carelessly in your hearts. This has been the relationship of good men and good gods since the world began.
     
    There was no single schoolmaster I ever knew who was entirely Mr. Chips, but there were several who had certain of his attributes and achieved that best reward of a well-spent life--to grow old beloved. One of them was my father. He did not train aristocrats to govern the Empire or plutocrats to run their fathers' businesses, but he employed his wise and sweetening influence just as valuably among the thousands of elementary school boys who knew and know him still in a London suburb.
     
     

CHAPTER TWO

GERALD AND THE CANDIDATE
     
    Gerald was eight when he first went to stay with Uncle Richard. He had no parents, and the frequent prep-school holidays had to be filled up somehow; that was the reason. He was a quiet boy, full of dreams. For weeks during the winter term at Grayshott (which was the prep school for Brookfield) he had talked to Martin Secundus about the visit: 'I say, Martin, I'll have to go into training--Uncle Richard always takes people such long walks when they go and stay with him. He's a great explorer, you know. Once he was nearly killed in the jungle by a tiger. He can climb any mountain there is. And he lives in an