It was Mullins, the banker, who told Mariposa all about the plan of a
Whirlwind Campaign and explained how it was to be done. He'd happened to
be in one of the big cities when they were raising money by a Whirlwind
Campaign for one of the universities, and he saw it all.
He said he would never forget the scene on the last day of it, when the
announcement was made that the total of the money raised was even more
than what was needed. It was a splendid sight,--the business men of the
town all cheering and laughing and shaking hands, and the professors
with the tears streaming down their faces, and the Deans of the
Faculties, who had given money themselves, sobbing aloud.
He said it was the most moving thing he ever saw.
So, as I said, Henry Mullins, who had seen it, explained to the others
how it was done. He said that first of all a few of the business men
got together quietly,--very quietly, indeed the more quietly the
better,--and talked things over. Perhaps one of them would dine,--just
quietly,--with another one and discuss the situation. Then these two
would invite a third man,--possibly even a fourth,--to have lunch with
them and talk in a general way,--even talk of other things part of the
time. And so on in this way things would be discussed and looked at
in different lights and viewed from different angles and then when
everything was ready they would go at things with a rush. A central
committee would be formed and sub-committees, with captains of each
group and recorders and secretaries, and on a stated day the Whirlwind
Campaign would begin.
Each day the crowd would all agree to meet at some stated place and
each lunch together,--say at a restaurant or at a club or at some eating
place. This would go on every day with the interest getting keener and
keener, and everybody getting more and more excited, till presently the
chairman would announce that the campaign had succeeded and there would
be the kind of scene that Mullins had described.
So that was the plan that they set in motion in Mariposa.
I don't wish to say too much about the Whirlwind Campaign itself. I
don't mean to say that it was a failure. On the contrary, in many ways
it couldn't have been a greater success, and yet somehow it didn't seem
to work out just as Henry Mullins had said it would. It may be that
there are differences between Mariposa and the larger cities that one
doesn't appreciate at first sight. Perhaps it would have been better to
try some other plan.
Yet they followed along the usual line of things closely enough. They
began with the regular system of some of the business men getting
together in a quiet way.
First of all, for example, Henry Mullins came over quietly to Duff's
rooms, over the Commercial Bank, with a bottle of rye whiskey, and
they talked things over. And the night after that George Duff came over
quietly to Mullins's rooms, over the Exchange Bank, with a bottle
of Scotch whiskey. A few evenings after that Mullins and Duff went
together, in a very unostentatious way, with perhaps a couple of bottles
of rye, to Pete Glover's room over the hardware store. And then all
three of them went up one night with Ed Moore, the photographer, to
Judge Pepperleigh's house under pretence of having a game of poker. The
very day after that, Mullins and Duff and Ed Moore, and Pete Glover and
the judge got Will Harrison, the harness maker, to go out without any
formality on the lake on the pretext of fishing. And the next night
after that Duff and Mullins and Ed Moore and Pete Glover and Pepperleigh
and Will Harrison got Alf Trelawney, the postmaster, to come over, just
in a casual way, to the Mariposa House, after the night mail, and the
next day Mullins and Duff and--
But, pshaw! you see at once how the thing is worked. There's no need to
follow that part of the Whirlwind Campaign further. But it just shows
the power of organization.
And all this time, mind you, they were talking things over, and looking
at things first in one light and then in another light,--in fact, just
doing as the big city men do when there's an important thing like this
under way.
So after things had been got pretty well into shape in this way, Duff
asked Mullins one night, straight out, if he would be chairman of
the Central Committee. He sprung it on him and Mullins had no time to
refuse, but he put it to Duff straight whether he would be treasurer.
And Duff had no time to refuse.
That gave things a start, and within a week they had the whole
organization on foot. There was the Grand Central Committee and six
groups or sub-committees of twenty men each, and a captain for
every group. They had it all arranged on the lines most likely to be
effective.
In one group there were all the bankers, Mullins and Duff and Pupkin
(with the cameo pin), and about four others. They had their photographs
taken at Ed Moore's studio, taken in a line with a background of
icebergs--a winter scene--and a pretty penetrating crowd they looked, I
can tell you. After all, you know, if you get a crowd of representative
bank men together in any financial deal, you've got a pretty
considerable leverage right away.
In the second group were the lawyers, Nivens and Macartney and the
rest--about as level-headed a lot as you'd see anywhere. Get the lawyers
of a town with you on a thing like this and you'll find you've got a
sort of brain power with you that you'd never get without them.
Then there were the business men--there was a solid crowd for
you,--Harrison, the harness maker, and Glover, the hardware man, and
all that gang, not talkers, perhaps, but solid men who can tell you to
a nicety how many cents there are in a dollar. It's all right to talk
about education and that sort of thing, but if you want driving power
and efficiency, get business men. They're seeing it every day in the
city, and it's just the same in Mariposa. Why, in the big concerns
in the city, if they found out a man was educated, they wouldn't have
him,--wouldn't keep him there a minute. That's why the business men have
to conceal it so much.
Then in the other teams there were the doctors and the newspaper men and
the professional men like Judge Pepperleigh and Yodel the auctioneer.
It was all organized so that every team had its headquarters, two of
them in each of the three hotels--one upstairs and one down. And it
was arranged that there would be a big lunch every day, to be held in
Smith's caff, round the corner of Smith's Northern Health Resort and
Home of the Wissanotti Angler,--you know the place. The lunch was
divided up into tables, with a captain for each table to see about
things to drink, and of course all the tables were in competition with
one another. In fact the competition was the very life of the whole
thing.
It's just wonderful how these things run when they're organized. Take
the first luncheon, for example. There they all were, every man in his
place, every captain at his post at the top of the table. It was hard,
perhaps, for some of them to get there. They had very likely to be in
their stores and banks and offices till the last minute and then make a
dash for it. It was the cleanest piece of team work you ever saw.
You have noticed already, I am sure, that a good many of the captains
and committee men didn't belong to the Church of England Church. Glover,
for instance, was a Presbyterian, till they ran the picket fence of
the manse two feet on to his property, and after that he became a
free-thinker. But in Mariposa, as I have said, everybody likes to be in
everything and naturally a Whirlwind Campaign was a novelty. Anyway it
would have been a poor business to keep a man out of the lunches merely
on account of his religion. I trust that the day for that kind of
religious bigotry is past.
Of course the excitement was when Henry Mullins at the head of the table
began reading out the telegrams and letters and messages. First of all
there was a telegram of good wishes from the Anglican Lord Bishop of
the Diocese to Henry Mullins and calling him Dear Brother in Grace the
Mariposa telegraph office is a little unreliable and it read: "Dear
Brother in grease," but that was good enough. The Bishop said that his
most earnest wishes were with them.
Then Mullins read a letter from the Mayor of Mariposa Pete Glover was
mayor that year--stating that his keenest desires were with them: and
then one from the Carriage Company saying that its heartiest good will
was all theirs; and then one from the Meat Works saying that its nearest
thoughts were next to them. Then he read one from himself, as head of
the Exchange Bank, you understand, informing him that he had heard
of his project and assuring him of his liveliest interest in what he
proposed.
At each of these telegrams and messages there was round after round of
applause, so that you could hardly hear yourself speak or give an order.
But that was nothing to when Mullins got up again, and beat on the
table for silence and made one of those crackling speeches--just the way
business men speak--the kind of speech that a college man simply can't
make. I wish I could repeat it all. I remember that it began: "Now boys,
you know what we're here for, gentlemen," and it went on just as good as
that all through. When Mullins had done he took out a fountain pen
and wrote out a cheque for a hundred dollars, conditional on the fund
reaching fifty thousand. And there was a burst of cheers all over the
room.
Just the moment he had done it, up sprang George Duff,--you know the
keen competition there is, as a straight matter of business, between the
banks in Mariposa,--up sprang George Duff, I say, and wrote out a cheque
for another hundred conditional on the fund reaching seventy thousand.
You never heard such cheering in your life.
And then when Netley walked up to the head of the table and laid down
a cheque for a hundred dollars conditional on the fund reaching one
hundred thousand the room was in an uproar. A hundred thousand dollars!
Just think of it! The figures fairly stagger one. To think of a hundred
thousand dollars raised in five minutes in a little place like Mariposa!
And even that was nothing! In less than no time there was such a crowd
round Mullins trying to borrow his pen all at once that his waistcoat
was all stained with ink. Finally when they got order at last, and
Mullins stood up and announced that the conditional fund had reached a
quarter of a million, the whole place was a perfect babel of cheering.
Oh, these Whirlwind Campaigns are wonderful things!
I can tell you the Committee felt pretty proud that first day. There was
Henry Mullins looking a little bit flushed and excited, with his white
waistcoat and an American Beauty rose, and with ink marks all over him
from the cheque signing; and he kept telling them that he'd known all
along that all that was needed was to get the thing started and telling
again about what he'd seen at the University Campaign and about the
professors crying, and wondering if the high school teachers would come
down for the last day of the meetings.
Looking back on the Mariposa Whirlwind, I can never feel that it was
a failure. After all, there is a sympathy and a brotherhood in
these things when men work shoulder to shoulder. If you had seen the
canvassers of the Committee going round the town that evening shoulder
to shoulder from the Mariposa House to the Continental and up to
Mullins's rooms and over to Duffs, shoulder to shoulder, you'd have
understood it.
I don't say that every lunch was quite such a success as the first. It's
not always easy to get out of the store if you're a busy man, and a good
many of the Whirlwind Committee found that they had just time to hurry
down and snatch their lunch and get back again. Still, they came, and
snatched it. As long as the lunches lasted, they came. Even if they had
simply to rush it and grab something to eat and drink without time to
talk to anybody, they came.
No, no, it was not lack of enthusiasm that killed the Whirlwind Campaign
in Mariposa. It must have been something else. I don't just know what
it was but I think it had something to do with the financial, the
book-keeping side of the thing.
It may have been, too, that the organization was not quite correctly
planned. You see, if practically everybody is on the committees, it is
awfully hard to try to find men to canvass, and it is not allowable for
the captains and the committee men to canvass one another, because their
gifts are spontaneous. So the only thing that the different groups
could do was to wait round in some likely place--say the bar parlour
of Smith's Hotel--in the hope that somebody might come in who could be
canvassed.
You might ask why they didn't canvass Mr. Smith himself, but of course
they had done that at the very start, as I should have said. Mr. Smith
had given them two hundred dollars in cash conditional on the lunches
being held in the caff of his hotel; and it's awfully hard to get a
proper lunch I mean the kind to which a Bishop can express regret at not
being there--under a dollar twenty-five. So Mr. Smith got back his own
money, and the crowd began eating into the benefactions, and it got
more and more complicated whether to hold another lunch in the hope of
breaking even, or to stop the campaign.
It was disappointing, yes. In spite of all the success and the sympathy,
it was disappointing. I don't say it didn't do good. No doubt a lot of
the men got to know one another better than ever they had before. I have
myself heard Judge Pepperleigh say that after the campaign he knew
all of Pete Glover that he wanted to. There was a lot of that kind of
complete satiety. The real trouble about the Whirlwind Campaign was that
they never clearly understood which of them were the whirlwind and who
were to be the campaign.
Some of them, I believe, took it pretty much to heart. I know that Henry
Mullins did. You could see it. The first day he came down to the lunch,
all dressed up with the American Beauty and the white waistcoat. The
second day he only wore a pink carnation and a grey waistcoat. The third
day he had on a dead daffodil and a cardigan undervest, and on the last
day, when the high school teachers should have been there, he only wore
his office suit and he hadn't even shaved. He looked beaten.
It was that night that he went up to the rectory to tell the news to
Dean Drone. It had been arranged, you know, that the rector should not
attend the lunches, so as to let the whole thing come as a surprise;
so that all he knew about it was just scraps of information about the
crowds at the lunch and how they cheered and all that. Once, I believe,
he caught sight of the Newspacket with a two-inch headline: A QUARTER
OF A MILLION, but he wouldn't let himself read further because it would
have spoilt the surprise.
I saw Mullins, as I say, go up the street on his way to Dean Drone's.
It was middle April and there was ragged snow on the streets, and the
nights were dark still, and cold. I saw Mullins grit his teeth as he
walked, and I know that he held in his coat pocket his own cheque for
the hundred, with the condition taken off it, and he said that there
were so many skunks in Mariposa that a man might as well be in the Head
Office in the city.
The Dean came out to the little gate in the dark,--you could see the
lamplight behind him from the open door of the rectory,--and he shook
hands with Mullins and they went in together.