Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
FOUR
The Ministrations of the Rev. Mr. Drone
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.