The Church of England in Mariposa is on a side street, where the maple
trees are thickest, a little up the hill from the heart of the town. The
trees above the church and the grass plot that was once the cemetery,
till they made the new one (the Necropolis, over the brow of the hill),
fill out the whole corner. Down behind the church, with only the driving
shed and a lane between, is the rectory. It is a little brick house with
odd angles. There is a hedge and a little gate, and a weeping ash tree
with red berries.
At the side of the rectory, churchward, is a little grass lawn with low
hedges and at the side of that two wild plum trees, that are practically
always in white blossom. Underneath them is a rustic table and chairs,
and it is here that you may see Rural Dean Drone, the incumbent of the
Church of England Church, sitting, in the chequered light of the plum
tress that is neither sun nor shadow. Generally you will find him
reading, and when I tell you that at the end of the grass plot where the
hedge is highest there is a yellow bee hive with seven bees that belong
to Dean Drone, you will realize that it is only fitting that the Dean is
reading in the Greek. For what better could a man be reading beneath the
blossom of the plum trees, within the very sound of the bees, than the
Pastorals of Theocritus? The light trash of modern romance might put
a man to sleep in such a spot, but with such food for reflection as
Theocritus, a man may safely close his eyes and muse on what he reads
without fear of dropping into slumber.
Some men, I suppose, terminate their education when they leave their
college. Not so Dean Drone. I have often heard him say that if he
couldn't take a book in the Greek out on the lawn in a spare half hour,
he would feel lost. It's a certain activity of the brain that must be
stilled somehow. The Dean, too, seemed to have a native feeling for the
Greek language. I have often heard people who might sit with him on
the lawn, ask him to translate some of it. But he always refused. One
couldn't translate it, he said. It lost so much in the translation that
it was better not to try. It was far wiser not to attempt it. If you
undertook to translate it, there was something gone, something missing
immediately. I believe that many classical scholars feel this way, and
like to read the Greek just as it is, without the hazard of trying to
put it into so poor a medium as English. So that when Dean Drone
said that he simply couldn't translate it, I believe he was perfectly
sincere.
Sometimes, indeed, he would read it aloud. That was another matter.
Whenever, for example, Dr. Gallagher--I mean, of course, old Dr.
Gallagher, not the young doctor (who was always out in the country in
the afternoon)--would come over and bring his latest Indian relics to
show to the Dean, the latter always read to him a passage or two. As
soon as the doctor laid his tomahawk on the table, the Dean would
reach for his Theocritus. I remember that on the day when Dr. Gallagher
brought over the Indian skull that they had dug out of the railway
embankment, and placed it on the rustic table, the Dean read to him so
long from Theocritus that the doctor, I truly believe, dozed off in his
chair. The Dean had to wait and fold his hands with the book across his
knee, and close his eyes till the doctor should wake up again. And the
skull was on the table between them, and from above the plum blossoms
fluttered down, till they made flakes on it as white as Dr. Gallagher's
hair.
I don't want you to suppose that the Rev. Mr. Drone spent the whole of
his time under the trees. Not at all. In point of fact, the rector's
life was one round of activity which lie himself might deplore but was
powerless to prevent. He had hardly sat down beneath the trees of an
afternoon after his mid-day meal when there was the Infant Class at
three, and after that, with scarcely an hour between, the Mothers'
Auxiliary at five, and the next morning the Book Club, and that evening
the Bible Study Class, and the next morning the Early Workers' Guild at
eleven-thirty. The whole week was like that, and if one found time to
sit down for an hour or so to recuperate it was the most one could do.
After all, if a busy man spends the little bit of leisure that he gets
in advanced classical study, there is surely no harm in it. I suppose,
take it all in all, there wasn't a busier man than the Rural Dean among
the Anglican clergy of the diocese.
If the Dean ever did snatch a half-day from his incessant work, he spent
it in fishing. But not always that, for as likely as not, instead of
taking a real holiday he would put in the whole afternoon amusing
the children and the boys that he knew, by making kites and toys and
clockwork steamboats for them.
It was fortunate for the Dean that he had the strange interest and
aptitude for mechanical advices which he possessed, or otherwise this
kind of thing would have been too cruel an imposition. But the Rev.
Mr. Drone had a curious liking for machinery. I think I never heard him
preach a better sermon than the one on Aeroplanes (Lo, what now see you
on high Jeremiah Two).
So it was that he spent two whole days making a kite with Chinese wings
for Teddy Moore, the photographer's son, and closed down the infant
class for forty-eight hours so that Teddy Moore should not miss the
pleasure of flying it, or rather seeing it flown. It is foolish to trust
a Chinese kite to the hands of a young child.
In the same way the Dean made a mechanical top for little Marjorie
Trewlaney, the cripple, to see spun: it would have been unwise to allow
the afflicted girl to spin it. There was no end to the things that Mr.
Drone could make, and always for the children. Even when he was making
the sand-clock for poor little Willie Yodel (who died, you know) the
Dean went right on with it and gave it to another child with just the
same pleasure. Death, you know, to the clergy is a different thing from
what it is to us. The Dean and Mr. Gingham used often to speak of it as
they walked through the long grass of the new cemetery, the Necropolis.
And when your Sunday walk is to your wife's grave, as the Dean's was,
perhaps it seems different to anybody.
The Church of England Church, I said; stood close to the rectory, a
tall, sweeping church, and inside a great reach of polished cedar beams
that ran to the point of the roof. There used to stand on the same spot
the little stone church that all the grown-up people in Mariposa still
remember, a quaint little building in red and grey stone. About it was
the old cemetery, but that was all smoothed out later into the grass
plot round the new church, and the headstones laid out flat, and no new
graves have been put there for ever so long. But the Mariposa children
still walk round and read the headstones lying flat in the grass and
look for the old ones,--because some of them are ever so old--forty or
fifty years back.
Nor are you to think from all this that the Dean was not a man with
serious perplexities. You could easily convince yourself of the
contrary. For if you watched the Rev. Mr. Drone as he sat reading in the
Greek, you would notice that no very long period every passed without
his taking up a sheet or two of paper that lay between the leaves of the
Theocritus and that were covered close with figures.
And these the Dean would lay upon the rustic table, and he would add
them up forwards and backwards, going first up the column and then down
it to see that nothing had been left out, and then down it again to see
what it was that must have been left out.
Mathematics, you will understand, were not the Dean's forte. They never
were the forte of the men who had been trained at the little Anglican
college with the clipped hedges and the cricket ground, where Rupert
Drone had taken the gold medal in Greek fifty-two years ago. You will
see the medal at any time lying there in its open box on the rectory
table, in case of immediate need. Any of the Drone girls, Lilian, or
Jocelyn, or Theodora, would show it to you. But, as I say, mathematics
were not the rector's forte, and he blamed for it (in a Christian
spirit, you will understand) the memory of his mathematical professor,
and often he spoke with great bitterness. I have often heard him say
that in his opinion the colleges ought to dismiss, of course in
a Christian spirit, all the professors who are not, in the most
reverential sense of the term, fit for their jobs.
No doubt many of the clergy of the diocese had suffered more or less
just as the Dean had from lack of mathematical training. But the Dean
always felt that his own case was especially to be lamented. For you
see, if a man is trying to make a model aeroplane--for a poor family in
the lower part of the town--and he is brought to a stop by the need of
reckoning the coefficient of torsion of cast-iron rods, it shows plainly
enough that the colleges are not truly filling their divine mission.
But the figures that I speak of were not those of the model aeroplane.
These were far more serious. Night and day they had been with the rector
now for the best part of ten years, and they grew, if anything, more
intricate.
If, for example, you try to reckon the debt of a church--a large church
with a great sweep of polished cedar beams inside, for the special
glorification of the All Powerful, and with imported tiles on the roof
for the greater glory of Heaven and with stained-glass windows for the
exaltation of the All Seeing--if, I say, you try to reckon up the debt
on such a church and figure out its interest and its present worth, less
a fixed annual payment, it makes a pretty complicated sum. Then if you
try to add to this the annual cost of insurance, and deduct from it
three-quarters of a stipend, year by year, and then suddenly remember
that three-quarters is too much, because you have forgotten the
boarding-school fees of the littlest of the Drones (including French, as
an extra--she must have it, all the older girls did), you have got a sum
that pretty well defies ordinary arithmetic. The provoking part of it
was that the Dean knew perfectly well that with the help of logarithms
he could have done the thing in a moment. But at the Anglican college
they had stopped short at that very place in the book. They had simply
explained that Logos was a word and Arithmos a number, which at the
time, seemed amply sufficient.
So the Dean was perpetually taking out his sheets of figures, and adding
them upwards and downwards, and they never came the same. Very often
Mr. Gingham, who was a warden, would come and sit beside the rector and
ponder over the figures, and Mr. Drone would explain that with a book of
logarithms you could work it out in a moment. You would simply open the
book and run your finger up the columns (he illustrated exactly the way
in which the finger was moved), and there you were. Mr. Gingham said
that it was a caution, and that logarithms (I quote his exact phrase)
must be a terror.
Very often, too, Nivens, the lawyer, who was a sidesman, and Mullins,
the manager of the Exchange Bank, who was the chairman of the vestry,
would come and take a look, at the figures. But they never could make
much of them, because the stipend part was not a matter that one could
discuss.
Mullins would notice the item for a hundred dollars due on fire
insurance and would say; as a business man, that surely that couldn't
be fire insurance, and the Dean would say surely not, and change it:
and Mullins would say surely there couldn't be fifty dollars for taxes,
because there weren't any taxes, and the Dean would admit that of course
it couldn't be for the taxes. In fact, the truth is that the Dean's
figures were badly mixed, and the fault lay indubitably with the
mathematical professor of two generations back.
It was always Mullins's intention some day to look into the finances of
the church, the more so as his father had been with Dean Drone at the
little Anglican college with the cricket ground. But he was a busy man.
As he explained to the rector himself, the banking business nowadays
is getting to be such that a banker can hardly call even his Sunday
mornings his own. Certainly Henry Mullins could not. They belonged
largely to Smith's Hotel, and during the fishing season they belonged
away down the lake, so far away that practically no one, unless it was
George Duff of the Commercial Bank, could see them.
But to think that all this trouble had come through the building of the
new church.
That was the bitterness of it.
For the twenty-five years that Rural Dean Drone had preached in the
little stone church, it had been his one aim, as he often put it in his
sermons, to rear a larger Ark in Gideon. His one hope had been to set up
a greater Evidence, or, very simply stated, to kindle a Brighter Beacon.
After twenty-five years of waiting, he had been able at last to kindle
it. Everybody in Mariposa remembers the building of the church. First
of all they had demolished the little stone church to make way for the
newer Evidence. It seemed almost a sacrilege, as the Dean himself said,
to lay hands on it. Indeed it was at first proposed to take the stone of
it and build it into a Sunday School, as a lesser testimony. Then,
when that provided impracticable, it was suggested that the stone be
reverently fashioned into a wall that should stand as a token. And when
even that could not be managed, the stone of the little church was
laid reverently into a stone pile; afterwards it was devoutly sold to a
building contractor, and, like so much else in life, was forgotten.
But the building of the church, no one, I think, will forget. The
Dean threw himself into the work. With his coat off and his white
shirt-sleeves conspicuous among the gang that were working at the
foundations, he set his hand to the shovel, himself guided the
road-scraper, urging on the horses; cheering and encouraging the men,
till they begged him to desist. He mingled with the stone-masons,
advising, helping, and giving counsel, till they pleaded with him
to rest. He was among the carpenters, sawing, hammering, enquiring,
suggesting, till they besought him to lay off. And he was night and day
with the architect's assistants, drawing, planning, revising, till the
architect told him to cut it out.
So great was his activity, that I doubt whether the new church would
ever have been finished, had not the wardens and the vestry men insisted
that Mr. Drone must take a holiday, and sent him on the Mackinaw trip up
the lakes,--the only foreign travel of the Dean's life.
So in due time the New Church was built and it towered above the maple
trees of Mariposa like a beacon on a hill. It stood so high that from
the open steeple of it, where the bells were, you could see all the
town lying at its feet, and the farmsteads to the south of it, and the
railway like a double pencil line, and Lake Wissanotti spread out like
a map. You could see and appreciate things from the height of the new
church,--such as the size and the growing wealth of Mariposa,--that you
never could have seen from the little stone church at all.
Presently the church was opened and the Dean preached his first sermon
in it, and he called it a Greater Testimony, and he said that it was an
earnest, or first fruit of endeavour, and that it was a token or pledge,
and he named it also a covenant. He said, too, that it was an anchorage
and a harbour and a lighthouse as well as being a city set upon a hill;
and he ended by declaring it an Ark of Refuge and notified them that
the Bible Class would meet in the basement of it on that and every other
third Wednesday.
In the opening months of preaching about it the Dean had called the
church so often an earnest and a pledge and a guerdon and a tabernacle,
that I think he used to forget that it wasn't paid for. It was only when
the agent of the building society and a representative of the Hosanna
Pipe and Steam Organ Co. (Limited), used to call for quarterly payments
that he was suddenly reminded of the fact. Always after these men came
round the Dean used to preach a special sermon on sin, in the course
of which he would mention that the ancient Hebrews used to put unjust
traders to death,--a thing of which he spoke with Christian serenity.
I don't think that at first anybody troubled much about the debt on the
church. Dean Drone's figures showed that it was only a matter of time
before it would be extinguished; only a little effort was needed,
a little girding up of the loins of the congregation and they could
shoulder the whole debt and trample it under their feet. Let them but
set their hands to the plough and they could soon guide it into the deep
water. Then they might furl their sails and sit every man under his own
olive tree.
Meantime, while the congregation was waiting to gird up its loins, the
interest on the debt was paid somehow, or, when it wasn't paid, was
added to the principal.
I don't know whether you have had any experience with Greater
Testimonies and with Beacons set on Hills. If you have, you will realize
how, at first gradually, and then rapidly, their position from year to
year grows more distressing. What with the building loan and the organ
instalment, and the fire insurance,--a cruel charge,--and the heat
and light, the rector began to realize as he added up the figures that
nothing but logarithms could solve them. Then the time came when not
only the rector, but all the wardens knew and the sidesmen knew that the
debt was more than the church could carry; then the choir knew and the
congregation knew and at last everybody knew; and there were special
collections at Easter and special days of giving, and special weeks of
tribulation, and special arrangements with the Hosanna Pipe and Steam
Organ Co. And it was noticed that when the Rural Dean announced a
service of Lenten Sorrow,--aimed more especially at the business
men,--the congregation had diminished by forty per cent.
I suppose things are just the same elsewhere,--I mean the peculiar kind
of discontent that crept into the Church of England congregation in
Mariposa after the setting up of the Beacon. There were those who
claimed that they had seen the error from the first, though they had
kept quiet, as such people always do, from breadth of mind. There were
those who had felt years before how it would end, but their lips were
sealed from humility of spirit. What was worse was that there were
others who grew dissatisfied with the whole conduct of the church.
Yodel, the auctioneer, for example, narrated how he had been to the city
and had gone into a service of the Roman Catholic church: I believe, to
state it more fairly, he had "dropped in,"--the only recognized means
of access to such a service. He claimed that the music that he had heard
there was music, and that (outside of his profession) the chanting and
intoning could not be touched.
Ed Moore, the photographer, also related that he had listened to a
sermon in the city, and that if anyone would guarantee him a sermon like
that he would defy you to keep him away from church. Meanwhile, failing
the guarantee, he stayed away.
The very doctrines were impeached. Some of the congregation began to
cast doubts on eternal punishment,--doubts so grave as to keep them
absent from the Lenten Services of Sorrow. Indeed, Lawyer Macartney took
up the whole question of the Athanasian Creed one afternoon with Joe
Milligan, the dentist, and hardly left a clause of it intact.
All this time, you will understand, Dean Drone kept on with his special
services, and leaflets, calls, and appeals went out from the Ark of
Gideon like rockets from a sinking ship. More and more with every month
the debt of the church lay heavy on his mind. At times he forgot it. At
other times he woke up in the night and thought about it. Sometimes
as he went down the street from the lighted precincts of the Greater
Testimony and passed the Salvation Army, praying around a naphtha lamp
under the open sky, it smote him to the heart with a stab.
But the congregation were wrong, I think, in imputing fault to the
sermons of Dean Drone. There I do think they were wrong. I can speak
from personal knowledge when I say that the rector's sermons were not
only stimulating in matters of faith, but contained valuable material
in regard to the Greek language, to modern machinery and to a variety
of things that should have proved of the highest advantage to the
congregation.
There was, I say, the Greek language. The Dean always showed the
greatest delicacy of feeling in regard to any translation in or out of
it that he made from the pulpit. He was never willing to accept even the
faintest shade of rendering different from that commonly given without
being assured of the full concurrence of the congregation. Either the
translation must be unanimous and without contradiction, or he could not
pass it. He would pause in his sermon and would say: "The original Greek
is 'Hoson,' but perhaps you will allow me to translate it as equivalent
to 'Hoyon.'" And they did. So that if there was any fault to be found it
was purely on the side of the congregation for not entering a protest at
the time.
It was the same way in regard to machinery. After all, what better
illustrates the supreme purpose of the All Wise than such a thing as
the dynamo or the reciprocating marine engine or the pictures in the
Scientific American?
Then, too, if a man has had the opportunity to travel and has seen the
great lakes spread out by the hand of Providence from where one leaves
the new dock at the Sound to where one arrives safe and thankful with
one's dear fellow-passengers in the spirit at the concrete landing stage
at Mackinaw--is not this fit and proper material for the construction
of an analogy or illustration? Indeed, even apart from an analogy, is it
not mighty interesting to narrate, anyway? In any case, why should the
church-wardens have sent the rector on the Mackinaw trip, if they had
not expected him to make some little return for it?
I lay some stress on this point because the criticisms directed
against the Mackinaw sermons always seemed so unfair. If the rector
had described his experiences in the crude language of the ordinary
newspaper, there might, I admit, have been something unfitting about it.
But he was always careful to express himself in a way that showed,--or,
listen, let me explain with an example.
"It happened to be my lot some years ago," he would say, "to find myself
a voyager, just as one is a voyager on the sea of life, on the broad
expanse of water which has been spread out to the north-west of us by
the hand of Providence, at a height of five hundred and eighty-one feet
above the level of the sea,--I refer, I may say, to Lake Huron." Now,
how different that is from saying: "I'll never forget the time I went on
the Mackinaw trip." The whole thing has a different sound entirely. In
the same way the Dean would go on:
"I was voyaging on one of those magnificent leviathans of the water,--I
refer to the boats of the Northern Navigation Company,--and was standing
beside the forward rail talking with a dear brother in the faith who was
journeying westward also--I may say he was a commercial traveller,--and
beside us was a dear sister in the spirit seated in a deck chair, while
near us were two other dear souls in grace engaged in Christian pastime
on the deck,--I allude more particularly to the game of deck billiards."
I leave it to any reasonable man whether, with that complete and
fair-minded explanation of the environment, it was not perfectly proper
to close down the analogy, as the rector did, with the simple words: "In
fact, it was an extremely fine morning."
Yet there were some people, even in Mariposa, that took exception
and spent their Sunday dinner time in making out that they couldn't
understand what Dean Drone was talking about, and asking one another
if they knew. Once, as he passed out from the doors of the Greater
Testimony, the rector heard some one say: "The Church would be all right
if that old mugwump was out of the pulpit." It went to his heart like a
barbed thorn, and stayed there.
You know, perhaps, how a remark of that sort can stay and rankle,
and make you wish you could hear it again to make sure of it, because
perhaps you didn't hear it aright, and it was a mistake after all.
Perhaps no one said it, anyway. You ought to have written it down at the
time. I have seen the Dean take down the encyclopaedia in the rectory,
and move his finger slowly down the pages of the letter M, looking for
mugwump. But it wasn't there. I have known him, in his little study
upstairs, turn over the pages of the "Animals of Palestine," looking for
a mugwump. But there was none there. It must have been unknown in the
greater days of Judea.
So things went on from month to month, and from year to year, and the
debt and the charges loomed like a dark and gathering cloud on the
horizon. I don't mean to say that efforts were not made to face the
difficulty and to fight it. They were. Time after time the workers of
the congregation got together and thought out plans for the extinction
of the debt. But somehow, after every trial, the debt grew larger
with each year, and every system that could be devised turned out more
hopeless than the last.
They began, I think, with the "endless chain" of letters of appeal. You
may remember the device, for it was all-popular in clerical circles some
ten or fifteen years ago. You got a number of people to write each of
them three letters asking for ten cents from three each of their friends
and asking each of them to send on three similar letters. Three each
from three each, and three each more from each! Do you observe the
wonderful ingenuity of it? Nobody, I think, has forgotten how the
Willing Workers of the Church of England Church of Mariposa sat down
in the vestry room in the basement with a pile of stationery three
feet high, sending out the letters. Some, I know, will never forget it.
Certainly not Mr. Pupkin, the teller in the Exchange Bank, for it was
here that he met Zena Pepperleigh, the judge's daughter, for the
first time; and they worked so busily that they wrote out ever so many
letters--eight or nine--in a single afternoon, and they discovered
that their handwritings were awfully alike, which was one of the most
extraordinary and amazing coincidences, you will admit, in the history
of chirography.
But the scheme failed--failed utterly. I don't know why. The letters
went out and were copied broadcast and recopied, till you could see the
Mariposa endless chain winding its way towards the Rocky Mountains.
But they never got the ten cents. The Willing Workers wrote for it in
thousands, but by some odd chance they never struck the person who had
it.
Then after that there came a regular winter of effort. First of all they
had a bazaar that was got up by the Girls' Auxiliary and held in the
basement of the church. All the girls wore special costumes that were
brought up from the city, and they had booths, where there was every
imaginable thing for sale--pincushion covers, and chair covers, and sofa
covers, everything that you can think of. If the people had once started
buying them, the debt would have been lifted in no time. Even as it was
the bazaar only lost twenty dollars.
After that, I think, was the magic lantern lecture that Dean Drone gave
on "Italy and her Invaders." They got the lantern and the slides up from
the city, and it was simply splendid. Some of the slides were perhaps
a little confusing, but it was all there,--the pictures of the dense
Italian jungle and the crocodiles and the naked invaders with their
invading clubs. It was a pity that it was such a bad night, snowing
hard, and a curling match on, or they would have made a lot of money
out of the lecture. As it was the loss, apart from the breaking of the
lantern, which was unavoidable, was quite trifling.
I can hardly remember all the things that there were after that. I
recollect that it was always Mullins who arranged about renting the hall
and printing the tickets and all that sort of thing. His father, you
remember, had been at the Anglican college with Dean Drone, and though
the rector was thirty-seven years older than Mullins, he leaned upon
him, in matters of business, as upon a staff; and though Mullins was
thirty-seven years younger than the Dean, he leaned against him, in
matters of doctrine, as against a rock.
At one time they got the idea that what the public wanted was not
anything instructive but something light and amusing. Mullins said
that people loved to laugh. He said that if you get a lot of people all
together and get them laughing you can do anything you like with them.
Once they start to laugh they are lost. So they got Mr. Dreery, the
English Literature teacher at the high school, to give an evening of
readings from the Great Humorists from Chaucer to Adam Smith. They came
mighty near to making a barrel of money out of that. If the people had
once started laughing it would have been all over with them. As it was I
heard a lot of them say that they simply wanted to scream with laughter:
they said they just felt like bursting into peals of laughter all
the time. Even when, in the more subtle parts, they didn't feel like
bursting out laughing, they said they had all they could do to keep from
smiling. They said they never had such a hard struggle in their lives
not to smile.
In fact the chairman said when he put the vote of thanks that he was
sure if people had known what the lecture was to be like there would
have been a much better "turn-out." But you see all that the people
had to go on was just the announcement of the name of the lecturer,
Mr. Dreery, and that he would lecture on English Humour All Seats
Twenty-five Cents. As the chairman expressed it himself, if the people
had had any idea, any idea at all, of what the lecture would be like
they would have been there in hundreds. But how could they get an idea
that it would be so amusing with practically nothing to go upon?
After that attempt things seemed to go from bad to worse. Nearly
everybody was disheartened about it. What would have happened to the
debt, or whether they would have ever paid it off, is more than I
can say, if it hadn't occurred that light broke in on Mullins in the
strangest and most surprising way you can imagine. It happened that he
went away for his bank holidays, and while he was away he happened to
be present in one of the big cities and saw how they went at it there
to raise money. He came home in such a state of excitement that he went
straight up from the Mariposa station to the rectory, valise and all,
and he burst in one April evening to where the Rural Dean was sitting
with the three girls beside the lamp in the front room, and he cried
out:
"Mr. Drone, I've got it,--I've got a way that will clear the debt before
you're a fortnight older. We'll have a Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa!"
But stay! The change from the depth of depression to the pinnacle of
hope is too abrupt. I must pause and tell you in another chapter of the
Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa.