 CHAPTER IV 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 checkered light of the plum trees 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 the highest there is a yellow beehive 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 Theocritis? The light trash of modern romance might put a man to sleep in such a spot, but with such food for reflection as Theocritis 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 in the lawn in 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. When he 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. Because 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, and 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 theocritis. 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 theocritis 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 flittered down till they made flakes on it as wide as Dr. Gallagher's hair. I don't want you to suppose that the Reverend 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 he himself might deplore, but was powerless to prevent. He had hardly sat down beneath the trees of an afternoon after his midday meal when there was the infant class at three, and after that with scarcely an hour between the mother's 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 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 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 steam-boats for them. It was fortunate for the dean that he had the strange interest in aptitude for mechanical advices which he possessed, or otherwise this kind of thing would have been too cruel and imposition. But the reverend 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 too. 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 a little marjorie Trelawney, 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 to often 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 gray 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. Where 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 Reverend Mr. Drone as he sat reading in the Greek, you would notice that no very long period ever passed without his taking up a sheet or two of paper that lay between the leaves of the theocritis, 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 were never 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, Lillian 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 mathematics 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 airplane, 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 I spoke of were not those of the model airplane. 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 dead 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 are trying 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 erythmos 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 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, of course, it couldn't be for 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' 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 arc 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. And it was at first proposed to take the stone out of it and build it into a Sunday school, as a luster testimony. Then when that proved 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 sleeve 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 assist. 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, inquiring, suggesting, till they besought him to lay off. And he was night and day with the architect's assistance, 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 have ever been finished, had not the warden's and vestry-men insisted that Mr. Drone must take a holiday, and sent him on the Mackinac 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 Wissanati 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 could never 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 a first fruit of endeavor, 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 harbor and a lighthouse, as well as being a city set upon a hill, and he ended by declaring it an arc 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 geriden 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 Company, 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 of with Christian serenity. I don't think that at first anybody troubled much about the dead 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 should shoulder the whole debt and trample it under their feet. Let them but set their hands to the plow, and they could soon guide it into the deep water. Then they might unfurl their sails and sit every man under his own olive tree. Meanwhile, while the congregation was waiting to gird up its loins, the interest on the debt was paid somehow, or when it wasn't paid it 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 installment 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 was the Hosanna Pipe and Steen Morgan Company, and it was noticed that when the rural dean announced a service of Lent and Sorrow, aimed more especially at the businessmen, the congregation had diminished by forty percent. I suppose these 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 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 McCartney 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, and calls, and appeals went out from the Ark of Gideon like rockets from a sinking ship. More and more with every month the dead 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 he went down the street from the lighted precincts of the greater testimony, and passed the Salvation Army, praying around a naff the 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 hosun, but perhaps you will allow me to translate it as equivalent to hoyun, 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 power 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 of 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 bit improper 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 northwest 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 a 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 in rankle, and make you wish you could hear it again to make sure of it, because perhaps you didn't hear it all right, 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 encyclopedia 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, to 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 stationary 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 Pepperly, 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 handwriting was 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 girl's 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, pin-cushion 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 was 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 Mullens 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 Mullens, he leaned upon him, in matters of business, as upon a staff, and though Mullens 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. Mullens 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. Dreary, the English literature teacher at the high school, to give an evening of readings from the great humorist 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 had 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 turnout. But you see that all the people had to go on was just the announcement of the name of the lecturer, Mr. Dreary, and that he would lecture on English humor. All seats twenty-five cents. 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 out 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, Belize 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 depths 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. 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 money raised was even more than what was needed. It was a splendid sight, the businessmen 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 businessmen 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 was beformed and subcommittees, 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 eat 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 said it would. It may be that there are differences between Mariposa and 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 businessmen getting together in a quiet way. 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 unauthenticious 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 Pepperley'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 without any formality on the lake on the pretext of fishing. And on the next night after that Duff and Mullins and Ed Moore and Pete Glover and Pepperley and Will Harrison got Alp Trelawney, the postmaster, to come over, just in a casual way, to the Mariposa house, and the night mail, and the next day Mullins and Duff and Pasha, you see it once how the thing has 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 doing just as the big city men do when there's an important thing like this underway. 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 subcommittees 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 pen, and about four others. They had their photographs taken at Edmore's studio, taken in a line with the 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 bankmen together in any financial deal, you've got a pretty considerable leverage right away. In the second group were the lawyers, Nivens and McCartney 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 brainpower with you that you'd never get without them. Then there were the businessmen. 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 nice city 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 businessmen. 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 businessmen 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 Pepperley 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 a range that there would be a big lunch every day, to be held in Smith's Calf, round the corner of Smith's Northern Health Resort and home of the Wisinati 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 wonderful to see how these things run when they're organized. Take the first lunch in, 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 teamwork you ever saw. You have noticed already, I'm sure, that a good many of the captains and committeemen didn't belong to the Church of England Church. Glover, for instance, was a Presbyterian till they ran the picket fence of the man's two feet onto 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 Grace, 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 hardiest good will was all theirs, and then one from the meatworks, 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 businessmen 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 check for a hundred dollars, conditional on the fund reaching fifty thousand, and there was a burst of cheers all over the room. Just at the moment he had done it, up sprang George Duff, you know the keen competition there is, a straight matter of business between the banks in Mariposa, up sprang George Duff, I say, and wrote out a check 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 check 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 figure's 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 babble 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 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 what 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 Mariposa House to the Continental, and up to Mullins's rooms, and over to Duff's, 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, it was not lack of enthusiasm that killed the whirlwind campaign in Mariposa. It must have been something else. I don't know what it was, but I think it had something to do with the financial, the bookkeeping 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 around in some likely place, say the bar parler of Smith 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 cap of his hotel, and it's awfully hard to get a proper lunch. I mean the kind of 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 all 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 Pepperley 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 gray waistcoat. The third day he had on a dead daffodil and a cardigan under vest, 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 all that 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 news packet with a two-inch headline, a quarter of a million, but he wouldn't let himself read further because it would have spoiled 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 check 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 lamp light behind him from the open door of the rectory, and he shook hands with Mullins and they went in together. The Beacon on the Hill Mullins said afterward that it was ever so much easier than he thought it would have been. The Dean, he said, was so quiet. Of course, if Mr. Drone had started to swear at Mullins or tried to strike him, it would have been much harder. But as it was, he was so quiet that part of the time he hardly seemed to follow what Mullins was saying, so Mullins was glad of that because it proved that the Dean wasn't feeling disappointed as, in a way, he might have. Indeed, the only time when the rector seemed animated and excited in the whole interview was when Mullins said that the campaign had been ruined by a lot of confounded mugwumps. Straight away the Dean asked if those mugwumps had really prejudiced the outcome of the campaign. Mullins said there was no doubt of it, and the Dean inquired if the presence of mugwumps was fatal in matters of endeavor, and Mullins said that it was. Then the rector asked if even one mugwump was, in the Christian sense, deleterious. Mullins said that one mugwump would kill anything. After that the Dean hardly spoke at all. In fact, the rector presently said that he mustn't detain Mullins too long, and that he had detained him too long already, and that Mullins must be weary from his train journey, and that in cases of extreme weariness nothing but a sound sleep was of any avail. He himself, unfortunately, would not be able to avail himself of the priceless boon of slumber until he had first retired to his study to write some letters, so that Mullins, who had a certain kind of social quickness of intuition, saw that it was time to leave, and went away. It was midnight as he went down the street, and a dark, still night, that can be stated positively, because it came out in court afterwards. Mullins swore that it was a dark night. He admitted, under examination, that there may have been stars, or at least some of the less important of them, though he had made no attempt, as brought out on cross-examination to count them. There may have been, too, the electric lights, and Mullins was not willing to deny that it was quite possible that there was more or less moonlight, but that there was no light that night in the form of sunlight. Mullins was absolutely certain. All that, I say, came out in court. But meanwhile the rector had gone upstairs to his study, and had seated himself in front of his table to write his letters. It was here always that he wrote his sermons. From the window of the room you look through the bare white maple trees, to the sweeping outline of the church shadowed against the night sky, and beyond that, though far off, was the new cemetery, where the rector walked of a Sunday. I think I told you why. Be on that again, for the window faced the east, there lay, at no very great distance, the new Jerusalem. There were no better things that a man might look towards from his study window, nor anything that could serve as a better aid to writing. But this night the dean's letters must have been difficult indeed to write, for he sat beside the table holding his pen and with his head bent upon his other hand, and though he sometimes put a line or two on the paper, for the most part he sat motionless. The fact is that Dean Drone was not trying to write letters, but only one letter. He was writing a letter of resignation. If you have not done that for forty years, it is extremely difficult to get the words. So at least the dean found it. First he wrote one set of words, and then he sat and thought and wrote something else, but nothing seemed to suit. The real truth was that Dean Drone, perhaps more than he knew himself, had a fine taste for words and effects, and when you feel that a situation is entirely out of the common, you naturally try, if you have that instinct, to give it the right sort of expression. I believe that at the time when Rupert Drone had taken the medal in Greek over fifty years ago, it was only a twist of fate that had prevented him from becoming a great writer. There was a buried author in him, just as there was a buried financier in Jefferson Thorpe. In fact, there were many people in Mariposa like that, and for all I know, you may yourself have seen such elsewhere. For instance, I am certain that Billy Rawson, the telegraph operator at Mariposa, could easily have invented radium. In the same way, one has only to read the advertisements of Mr. Gangham, the undertaker, to know that there is still in him a poet, who could have written on death far more attractive verses than the Thanatopsis of Colin Bryant, and under a title less likely to offend the public and drive away custom. He has told me this himself. So the dean tried first this and then that, and nothing would seem to suit. First of all, he wrote, It is now forty years since I came among you, a youth full of life and hope and ardent in the work before me. Then he paused, doubtful of the accuracy and clearness of the expression, read it over again and again in deep thought, and then began again. It is now forty years since I came among you, a broken and melancholy boy, without life or hope, desiring only to devote to the service of this parish such few years as might remain of an existence blighted before it had truly begun. And then again the dean stopped. He read what he had written. He frowned. He crossed it through with his pen. This was no way to write, this thin egotistical strain of complaint, once more he started. It is now forty years since I came among you, a man already tempered and trained, except possibly in mathematics. And then again the rector paused and his mind drifted away to the memory of the Anglican professor that I spoke of, who had so little sense of his higher mission as to omit the teaching of phlegotherms. And the rector muse so long that when he began again it seemed to him that it was simpler and better to discard the personal note all together. And he wrote, There are times, gentlemen, in the life of a parish when it comes to an epoch which brings it to a moment when it reaches a point. The dean stuck fast again, but refusing this time to be beaten went resolutely on. Reaches a point where the circumstances of the moment make the epoch such as to focus the life of the parish in that time. Then the dean saw that he was beaten, and he knew that he not only couldn't manage the parish but couldn't say so in proper English, and of the two the last was the bitterer discovery. He raised his head and looked for a moment through the window at the shadow of the church against the night, so outlined that you could almost fancy that the light of the new Jerusalem was beyond it. Then he wrote, And this time not to the world at large, but only to Mullins. My dear Harry, I want to resign my charge. Will you come over and help me? When the dean at last rose from writing that I think it was far on in the night, as he rose he looked again through the window, looked once and then once more, and so stood with widening eyes, and his face set towards what he saw. What was that, that light in the sky there, eastward, nearer far he could not say? Was it already the dawn of the new Jerusalem brightening in the east, or was it? Look, in the church itself, what is that, that dull red glow that shines behind the stained glass windows turning them to crimson, that fork of flame that breaks now from the casement and flashes upward along the wood, and see that sudden sheet of fire that springs the windows of the church with the roar of splintered glass, and surges upward into the sky, till the dark night and the bare trees and sleeping street of Mariposa are all illumined with its glow. Fire, fire, and the sudden sound of the bell now breaking upon the night. So stood the dean erect, with one hand pressed against the table for support, while the Mariposa firebell struck out its warning to the sleeping town. Stood there while the street grew loud with the tumult of voices, with the roaring gallop of the fire brigade, with the harsh note of the gong, and over all the other sounds the great seething of the flames that tore their way into the beams and rafters of the pointed church, and flared above it like a torch into the midnight sky. So stood the dean, and as the church broke thus into a very beacon kindled upon a hill, sank forward without a sign, his face against the table, stricken. You need to see a fire in a place such as Mariposa, a town still half of wood, to know what fire means. In the city it is all different. To the onlooker at any rate, a fire is only a spectacle, nothing more. Everything is arranged, organized, certain. It is only once perhaps in a century that fire comes to a large city, as it comes to the little wood in town, like Mariposa, as a great terror of the night. That, at any rate, is what it meant in Mariposa that night in April, the night the Church of England Church burnt down. Had the fire gained but a hundred feet or less, it could have reached from the driving shed behind the church, to the backs of the wooden shops of the main street. And once there, not all the waters of Lake Wisanati could stay the course of its direction. It was for that hundred feet that they fought, the men of Mariposa, from the midnight call of the bell to the slow coming of the day. They fought the fire, not to save the church, for that was doomed from the first outbreak of the flames, but to stop the spread of it and save the town. They fought it at the windows and at the blazing doors, and through the yawning furnace of the open belfry, fought it with the Mariposa engine thumping and panting in the street, itself aglow with fire like a servant-demon fighting its own kind, with tall ladders reaching to the very roof, and with hoes that poured their streams of tossing water foaming into the flames. Most of all they fought to save the wooden driving shed behind the church, from which a fire could leap into the heart of Mariposa. That was where the real fight was, for the life of the town. I wish you could have seen how they turned the hose against the shingles, ripping and tearing them from their places with the force of the driven water, how they mounted on the roof, ax in hand, and cut madly at the rafters to bring the building down, while the black clouds of smoke rolled in volumes about the men as they worked. You could see the fire-horses harnessed with logging chains, to the uprights of the shed, to tear the building from its place. Most of all I wish you could have seen Mr. Smith, proprietor, as I think you know, of Smith's Hotel, there on the roof with the fireman's helmet on, cutting through the main beam of Salad Cedar, 12 by 12, that held tight still when the rafters and the roof tree were down already, the shed on fire in a dozen places, and the other men driven from the work by the flaming sparks and by the strangle of the smoke. Not so, Mr. Smith. See him there as he plants himself firm at the angle of the beams, and with the full impact of his 280 pounds drives his axe into the wood. I tell you it takes a man from the pine country of the north to handle an axe. Right, left, left, right, down it comes, with never a pause or stay, never missing by a fraction of an inch the line of the stroke. Add it, Smith, down on it, till with a shout from the crowd the beam gapes asunder, and Mr. Smith is on the ground again, roaring his directions to the men and the horses as they haul down the shed, in a voice that dominates the fire itself. Who made Mr. Smith the head and chief of the Mariposa fire brigade that night? I cannot say. I do not know even where he got the huge red helmet that he wore, nor had I ever heard till the night the church burnt down that Mr. Smith was a member of the fire brigade at all. But it's always that way. Your little narrow-chested men may plan and organize, but when there is something to be done, something real, then it's the man of size and weight that steps to the front every time. Look at Bismarck and Mr. Gladstone and President Taft and Mr. Smith, the same thing in each case. I suppose it was perfectly natural that just as soon as Mr. Smith came on the scene he put on somebody's helmet and shouted his directions to the men and bossed the Mariposa fire brigade like Bismarck with the German Parliament. The fire had broken out late, late at night, and they fought it till the day. The flame of it lit up the town and the bare gray maple trees, and you can see at the light of it the broad sheet of the frozen lake, snow covered still. It kindled such a beacon as it burned that from the other side of the lake the people on the night express from the north could see it 20 miles away. It lit up such a testimony of flame that Mariposa has never seen the like of it before or since. Then when the roof crashed in and the tall steeple tottered and fell, so swift a darkness seemed to come that the gray trees and the frozen lake vanished in a moment as if blotted out of existence. When the morning came the Great Church of Mariposa was nothing but a ragged group of walls with a sod and heap of bricks and black and wood, still hissing here and there beneath the hose with the soul and anger of a conquered fire. Round the ruins of the fire walked the people of Mariposa next morning, and they pointed out where the wreck of the steeple had fallen and where the bells of the church lay in a molten heap among the bricks, and they talked of the loss that it was and how many dollars it would take to rebuild the church and whether it was insured and for how much. And there were at least 14 people who had seen the fire first, and more than that who had given the first alarm, and ever so many who knew how fires of this sort could be prevented. Most noticeable of all you could see the sidesmen and the wardens and molens, the chairman of the vestry, talking in little groups about the fire. Later in the day there came from the city the insurance men and the fire appraisers, and they too walked about the ruins and talked with the wardens and the vestry men. There was such a luxury of excitement in the town that day that it was just as good as a public holiday. But the strangest part of it was the unexpected sequel. I don't know through what error of the dean's figures it happened, through what lack of mathematical training the thing turned out as it did. No doubt the memory of the mathematical professor was heavily to blame for it. But the solid fact is that the Church of England Church of Mariposa turned out to be insured for a hundred thousand, and there were the receipts and vouchers, all signed and regular, just as they found them in a drawer of the rector's study. There was no doubt about it. The insurance people might protest as they liked. The straight, plain fact was that the Church was insured for about twice the whole amount of the cost and the debt and the rector salary and the boarding school fees of the littlest of the drones all put together. There was a whirlwind campaign for you. Talk of raising money. That was something like. I wonder if the universities and the city institutions that go around trying to raise money by the slow and painful method called a whirlwind campaign that takes perhaps all day to raise fifty thousand dollars ever thought of anything so beautifully simple as this. The greater testimony that had lain so heavily on the congregation went flaming to its end and burned up its debts and its obligations and enriched its worshippers by its destruction. Talk of a beacon on a hill. You can hardly beat that one. I wish you could have seen how the wardens and the sidesmen and Mullins, the chairman of the vestry, smiled and chuckled at the thought of it. Hadn't they said all along that all was needed was a little faith and effort? And here it was, just as they said, and they'd been right after all. Protest from the insurance people? Legal proceedings to prevent payment? My dear sir, I see you know nothing about the Mariposa Court, and spite of the fact that I have already said that it was one of the most precise instruments of British fair play ever established, why Judge Pepperley disposed of the case and dismissed the protest of the company in less than fifteen minutes. Just what the jurisdiction of Judge Pepperley's Court is, I don't know. But I do know that in upholding the rights of a Christian congregation, I'm quoting here the text of the decision, against the intrigues of a set of infernal skunks that make too much money, anyway, the Mariposa Court is without an equal. Pepperley even threatened the plaintiffs with a penitentiary, or worse. How the fire started, no one ever knew. There was a queer story that went about to the effect that Mr. Smith and Mr. Gingham's assistant had been seen very late that night, carrying an automobile can of kerosene up the street. But that was amply disproved by the proceedings of the court and by the evidence of Mr. Smith himself. He took his dying oath, not his ordinary one, as used in the license cases, but his dying one, that he had not carried a can of kerosene up the street, and that anyway it was the rottenest kind of kerosene he had ever seen and no more use than so much molasses. So that point was settled. Dean Drone, did he get well again? Why, what makes you ask that? You mean was his head all affected after the stroke? No, it was not. Absolutely not. It was not affected in the least, though how anybody who knows him now in Mariposa could have the faintest idea that his mind was in any way impaired by the stroke is more than I can tell. The engaging of Mr. Uttermost, the curate, whom perhaps you have heard preach in the new church, had nothing whatever to do with Dean Drone's head. It was merely a case of the pressure of overwork. It was felt, very generally, by the wardens that in these days of specialization, the rector was covering too wide a field, and that if he should abandon some of the lesser duties of his office, he might devote his energies more intently to the infant class. That was all. You may hear him there any afternoon talking to them, if you will stand under the maple trees and listen through the open windows of the new infant school. And as for audiences, for intelligence, for attention, well, if I want to find listeners who can hear and understand about the great spaces of Lake Huron, let me tell of it, every time face to face with the blue eyes of the infant class, fresh from the infinity of spaces greater still. Talk of grown-up people all you like, but for listeners, let me have the infant class, with their pinafores and their teddy bears and their feet not even touching the floor. And Mr. Uttermost may preach to his heart's content of the newer forms of doubt revealed by the higher criticism. So you will understand that the Dean's mind is, if anything, even keener, and his head even clearer than before. And if you want proof of it, notice him there beneath the plum blossoms reading in the Greek. He has told me that he finds he can read with the greatest ease ricks in the Greek that seemed difficult before, because his head is so clear now. And sometimes, when his head is very clear, as he sits there reading beneath the plum blossoms, he can hear them singing beyond, and his wife's voice. End of Chapter 6 Recording by Bridget Chapter 7 of Sunshine Sketches This is a Librivax recording, all Librivax recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivax.org Recording by Bridget Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock Chapter 7 The Extraordinary Entanglement of Mr. Pupkin Judge Pepperley lived in a big house with hardwood floors and a wide piazza that looked over the lake from the top of Onida Street. Every day about half past five he used to come home from his office in the Mariposa Courthouse. On some days, as he got near the house, he would call out to his wife, Almighty Moses Martha, who left the sprinkler on the grass. On other days, he would call to her from quite a little distance off. Hello, Mother, got any supper for a hungry man? And Mrs. Pepperley never knew which it would be. On the days when he swore at the sprinkler, you could see his spectacles flash like dynamite. But on the days when he called, Hello, Mother, they were simply aerodated with kindliness. Some days, I say, he would cry out with a perfect wine of indignation. Suffering Caesar, his dead infernal dog torn up those strainiums again. And on other days, you would hear him singing out, Hello, Rover, well doggie, well old fellow. In the same way at breakfast, the Judge, as he looked over the morning paper, would sometimes leap to his feet with a perfect howl of suffering and cry. Everlasting Moses, the Viberals have carried east Elgin. Or else he would lean back from the breakfast table with the most good-humored laugh you ever heard and say, Ha, ha, the Conservatives have carried south Norfolk. And yet, he was perfectly logical when you come to think of it. After all, what is more annoying to a sensitive, highly strung man than an infernal sprinkler playing all over the place, and what more agreeable to a good-natured, even-tempered fellow than a well-prepared supper? Or what is more likeable than one's good, old, affectionate dog bounding down the path from sheer delight at seeing you, or more execrable than an infernal whelp that has torn up the geraniums and is too old to keep anyway? As for politics, well, it all seemed reasonable enough. When the Conservatives got in anywhere, pepperly laughed and enjoyed it, simply because it does one good to see a straight, fine, honest fight where the best man wins. When a Viberal got in, it made him mad, and he said so. Not mind you, from any political bias, for his office forbid it, but simply because one can't bear to see the country go absolutely to the devil. I suppose, too, it was partly the effect of sitting in court all day listening to cases. One gets what you might call the judicial temper of mind. Pepperly had it so strongly developed that I've seen him kick a hydrangea pot to pieces with his foot because the accursed thing wouldn't flower. He once, through the canary cage, clear into the lilac bushes because the blasted bird wouldn't stop singing. It was a straight case of judicial temper. Lots of judges have it, developed in just the same broad, all-round way as with Judge Pepperly. I think it must be passing sentences that does it. Anyway, Pepperly had the aptitude for passing sentences so highly perfected that he spent his whole time at it inside of court and out. I've heard him hand out sentences for the Sultan of Turkey and Mrs. Pankhurst and the Emperor of Germany that made one's blood run cold. He would sit there on the piazza of a summer evening reading the paper with dynamic sparks flying from his spectacles as he sentenced the Tsar of Russia to ten years in the salt mines and made it fifteen a few minutes afterwards. Pepperly always read the foreign news, the news of things that he couldn't alter as a form of wild and stimulating torment. So you can imagine that in some ways the judge's house was a pretty difficult house to go to. I mean you can see how awfully hard it must have been for Mr. Pupkin. I tell you it took some nerve to step up on that piazza and say, in a perfectly natural offhand way, oh, how do you do, judge? Is Ms. Dina in? No, I won't stay. Thanks. I think I ought to be going. I simply called. A man who can do that has got to have a pretty fair amount of save war, what do you call it? And he's got to be mighty well-shaved and have his cameo pin put in his tie at a pretty undeniable angle before he can tackle it. Yes, and even then he may need to hang round behind the lilac bushes for half an hour first and quill off. And he's apt to make pretty good time down Onida Street on the way back. Still, that's what you call love and if you've got it and are well-shaved and your boots well blacked you can do things that seem almost impossible. Yes, you can do anything even if you do trip over the dog in getting off the piazza. Don't suppose for a moment that Judge Pepperley was an unapproachable or a harsh man always and to everybody, even Mr. Pupkin had to admit that that couldn't be so. To know that you had only to see Zena Pepperley put her arm around his neck and call him Daddy. She would do that even when there were two or three young men sitting on the edge of the piazza. You know, I think the way they sit on the edge in Mariposa. It is meant to indicate what part of the family they have come to see. Thus, when George Duff, the bank manager, came up to the Pepperley House, he always sat in the chair on the veranda and talked to the Judge. But when Pupkin or Mallory Tompkins or any fellow like that came, he sat down in a side-long fashion on the edge of the boards and then they knew exactly what he was there for. If he knew the house well, he leaned his back against the veranda post and smoked a cigarette. But that took nerve. But I am afraid that this is a digression, and of course, you know all about it just as well as I do. All that I was trying to say was that I don't suppose that the Judge had ever spoken a crossword to Zena in his life. Oh, he threw her novel over the grapevine. I don't deny that. But then why on earth should a girl read trash like the errant quest of the Paladin pilgrim and the life of Sir Gala-head when the house was full of good reading like the life of Sir John A. MacDonald and Pioneer Days and Takumsa Township? Still, what I mean is that the Judge never spoke harshly to Zena, except perhaps under extreme provocation, and I'm quite sure that he never, never had to kneel. But then what father ever would want to speak angrily to such a boy as Neil Pepperley? The Judge took no credit himself for that. The finest grown boy in the whole county and so broad and big that they took him into the Missinaba horse when he was only 17. And clever, so clever that he didn't need to study, so clever that he used to come out at the foot of the class in mathematics at the Mariposa High School through sheer surplus of brain power. I've heard the Judge explain it a dozen times. Why, Neil was so clever that he used to be able to play billiards at the Mariposa House all evening when the other boys had to stay at home and study. Such a powerful looking fellow too. Everybody in Mariposa remembers how Neil Pepperley smashed in the face of Peter McGinnis, the liberal organizer at the big election, you recall it, when the old McDonald government went out. Judge Pepperley had to try him for it the next morning, his own son. They say there was never such a scene even in the Mariposa Court. There was, I believe, something like it on a smaller scale in Roman history, but it wasn't half as dramatic. I remember Judge Pepperley leaning forward to pass the sentence for a judge's bound, you know, by his oath, and how grave he looked and yet so proud and happy, like a man doing his duty and sustained by it. And he said, My boy, you are innocent. You smashed in Peter McGinnis' face, but you did it without criminal intent. You put a face on him by Jehazaphat that he won't lose for six months, but you did it without evil purpose or maligned design. My boy, look up. Give me your hand. You leave this court without a stain upon your name. They said it was one of the most moving scenes ever enacted in the Mariposa court. But the strangest thing is that if the judge had known what everyone else in Mariposa knew, it would have broken his heart. If he could have seen Neil with the drunk and flesh on his face in the billiard room of the Mariposa house, if he had known, as everyone else did, that Neil was crazed with drink the night he struck the liberal organizer when the old McDonald government went out. If he could have known that even on that last day, Neil was drunk when he rode with the Missinaba horse to the station to join the third contingent for the war, and all the street of the little town was one great roar of people. But the judge never knew, and now he never will. For if you could find it in the meanness of your soul to tell him, it would serve no purpose now except to break his heart. And there would rise up to rebuke you the pictured vision of an untended grave somewhere in the great silences of South Africa. Did I say above or seem to imply that the judge sometimes spoke harshly to his wife, or did you gather for a minute that her lot was one to lament over or feel sorry for? If so, it just shows that you know nothing about such things, and that marriage, at least as it exists in Mariposa, is a sealed book to you. You are as ignorant as Miss Spifkins, the biology teacher at the high school, who always says how sorry she is for Mrs. Pepperley. You get that impression simply because the judge howled like an Algonquin Indian when he saw the sprinkler running on the lawn. But are you sure you know the other side of it? Are you quite sure when you talk like Miss Spifkins does about the rights of it that you are taking all things into account? You might have thought differently, perhaps, of the Pepperleys, anyway, if you had been there that evening when the judge came home to his wife, with one hand pressed to his temple, and in the other, the Cablegram, that said that Neil had been killed in action in South Africa. That night they sat together with her hand in his, just as they had sat together thirty years ago when he was a law student in the city. Go and tell Miss Spifkins that hindrangeas, canaries, temper, blazes, what does Miss Spifkins know about it all? But in any case, if you tried to tell Judge Pepperleys about Neil now, he wouldn't believe it. He'd laugh at the scorn. That is Neil's picture in uniform, hanging in the dining room beside the Fathers of Confederation. That military-looking man in the picture beside him is General Kitchener, whom you may perhaps have heard of, for he was very highly spoken of in Neil's letters. I'll run the room, in fact, and still more in the Judge's library upstairs. You will see pictures of South Africa and the departure of the Canadians. There are none of the return, and of mounted infantry, and of unmounted calvary, and a lot of things that only soldiers and the Fathers of soldiers know about. So you can realize that for a fellow who isn't military, and who wears nothing nearer to a uniform than a daffodil tennis blazer, the Judge's house is the devil of a house to come to. I think you remember young Mr. Pupkin. Do you not? I have referred to him several times already, as the junior teller in the exchange bank. But if you know Mariposa at all, you have often seen him. You have noticed him, I am sure, going for the bank mail in the morning in an office suit effect of clinging gray with a gold neck-tie pin shaped like a riding whip. You have seen him often enough going down to the lakefront after supper in tennis things, smoking a cigarette, and with a paddle in a crimson canoe cushion under his arm. You have seen him entering Dean Drone's church in a top hat and a long frock coat nearly to his feet. You have seen him, perhaps, playing poker in Peter Glover's room over the hardware store and trying to look as if he didn't hold three aces. In fact, giving absolutely no sign of it be on the wild flush in his face and the fact that his hair stands on end. That kind of reticence is a thing you simply have to learn in banking. I mean, if you've got to be in a position where you know for a fact that the Mariposa packing company's account is overdrawn by sixty-four dollars, and yet Daren't say anything about it, not even to the girls that you play tennis with. I don't say not a casual hint as a reference, but not really tell them. Not, for instance, bring down the bank ledger to the tennis court and show them. You've learned a sort of reticence and self-control that people outside of banking circles never can attain. Why, I've known Pupkin at the fireman's ball, lean against the wall in his dress suit, and talk away to Jim Elliott the drugist, without giving the faintest hint or indication that Elliott's note for twenty-seven dollars had been protested that very morning. Not a hint of it. I don't say he didn't mention it, in a sort of way, in the supper room, just two one or two, but I mean there is nothing in the way he lent up against the wall to suggest it. But, however, I don't mention that as either for or against Mr. Pupkin. That sort of thing is merely the ABC of banking, as he himself told me when explaining why it was that he hesitated to divulge the exact standing of the Mariposa Carriage Company. Of course, once you get past the ABC, you can learn a lot that is mighty interesting. So I think that if you know Mariposa and understand even the rudiments of banking, you are perfectly acquainted with Mr. Pupkin. What? You remember him as being in love with Miss Lawson, the high school teacher? In love with her? What a ridiculous idea. You mean merely because on the night when the Mariposa bell sank with every soul on board, Pupkin put off from the town in a skiff to rescue Miss Lawson? Oh, but you're quite wrong. That wasn't love. I've heard Pupkin explain it himself a dozen times. That sort of thing, paddling out to a sinking steamer at night in a crazy skiff, may indicate a sort of attraction, but not real love. Not what Pupkin came to feel afterwards. Indeed, when he began to think of it, it wasn't even attraction. It was merely respect. That's all it was. And anyway, that was long before, six or seven months back, and Pupkin admitted that at the time he was a mere boy. Mr. Pupkin, I must explain, lived with Mallory Tompkins in rooms over the exchange bank, on the very top floor, the third, with Mullen's own rooms below them. Extremely comfortable quarters they were, with two bedrooms and a sitting room that was all fixed up with snowshoes and tennis rackets on the walls, and dance programs and canoe club badges, and all that sort of thing. Mallory Tompkins was a young man with long legs and check trousers, who worked on the Mariposa Times Herald. That was what gave him his literary taste. He used to read Ibsen and the other Dutch author. Bumstone Bumstone, isn't it? And you can judge that he was a mighty intellectual fellow. He was so intellectual that he was, as he himself admitted, a complete agnostic. He and Pupkin used to have the most tremendous arguments about creation and evolution, and how if you study at a school of applied science, you learn that there's no hell beyond the present life. Mallory Tompkins used to prove absolutely that the miracles were only electricity, and Pupkin used to admit that it was an awfully good argument, but claimed that he had heard it awfully well answered in a sermon, though unfortunately he had forgotten how. Tompkins used to show that the flood was contrary to geology, and Pupkin would acknowledge that the point was an excellent one, but that he had read a book, the title of which he ought to have written down, which explained geology away altogether. Mallory Tompkins generally got the best of the merely logical side of the arguments, but Pupkin, who was a tremendous Christian, was much stronger in the things he had forgotten. So the discussions often lasted till far into the night, and Mr. Pupkin would fall asleep and dream of a splendid argument, which would have settled the whole controversy, only unfortunately he couldn't recall it in the morning. Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on an intellectual par with Mallory Tompkins. That would have been ridiculous. Mallory Tompkins had read all sorts of things, and had half a mind to write a novel himself, either that or a play. All he needed, he said, was to have a chance to get away somewhere by himself and think. Every time he went away to the city, Pupkin expected that he might return with the novel all finished, but though he often came back with his eyes read from thinking, the novel is yet remained incomplete. Meantime, Mallory Tompkins, as I say, was a mighty intellectual fellow. You could see that from the books on the bamboo bookshelves in the sitting-room. There was, for instance, the Encyclopedia Metropolitana and 40 volumes that he bought on the installment plan for two dollars a month. Then, when they took that away, there was the history of civilization and 50 volumes at fifty cents a week for fifty years. Tompkins had read in it halfway through the Stone Age before they took it from him. After that, there was the lives of the painters, one volume at a time, a splendid thing in which you could read all about Arendt and Axenthal and Axe and men of that class. After all, there's nothing like educating oneself. Mallory Tompkins knew about the opening period of all sorts of things, and in regard to people whose names began with A, you couldn't stick him. I don't mean that he and Mr. Pupkin lived a mere routine of studious evenings. That would be untrue. Quite often, their time was spent in much less commendable ways than that, and there were poker parties in their sitting-room that didn't break up till nearly midnight. Card-playing, after all, is a slow business unless you put money on it. And besides, if you are in a bank and are handling money all day, gambling has a fascination. I've seen Pupkin and Mallory Tompkins and Joe Milligan, the dentist and Mitchell, the ticket agent, and the other boys sitting round the table with matches enough, piled up in front of them to stock a factory. Ten matches counted for one chip and ten chips made a cent. So, you see, they weren't merely playing for the fun of the thing. Of course, it's a hollow pleasure. You realize that when you wake up at night, parched with thirst, ten thousand matches to the bad. But banking is a wildlife, and everybody knows it. Sometimes Pupkin would swear off and keep away from the cursed thing for weeks, and then perhaps he'd see by sheer accident a pile of matches on the table or a match lying on the floor, and it would start the craze in him. I am using his own words, a craze. That's what he called it when he told Ms. Lawson all about it, and she promised to cure him of it. She would have, too. Only, as I say, Pupkin found out that what he had mistaken for attraction was only respect. And there's no use worrying a woman that you respect about your crazes. It was for Mallory Tompkins that Pupkin learned all about the Mariposa people, because Pupkin came from a way off, somewhere down in the Maritime provinces, and didn't know a soul. Mallory Tompkins used to tell him about Judge Pepperly, and what a wonderfully clever man he was, and how he would have been in the Supreme Court, for certain, if the conservative government had stayed in another 15 or 20 years, instead of coming to a premature end. He used to talk so much about the Pepperlys that Pupkin was sick of the very name. But just as soon as he had seen Zena Pepperly, he couldn't hear enough of them. He would have talked with Tompkins for hours about the Judge's dog Rover. And as for Zena, if he could have brought her name over his lips, he would have talked of her forever. He first saw her, by one of the strangest coincidences in the world, on the main street of Mariposa. If he hadn't happened to be going up the street, and she'd be coming down it, the thing wouldn't have happened. Afterwards, they both admitted that it was one of the most peculiar coincidences they ever heard of. Pupkin owned that he had the strangest feeling that morning, as if something were going to happen. A feeling not at all to be classed with the one of which he had once spoken to Miss Lawson, and which was, at the most, a mere anticipation of respect. But as I say, Pupkin met Zena Pepperly on the 26th of June at 25 minutes to 11. And at once the whole world changed. The past was all blotted out. Even in the new 40-volume edition of the installment record of humanity that Mallory Tompkins had just received, Pupkin wouldn't have bothered with it. She, that word henceforth meaning Zena, had just come back from her boarding school, and of all times of year, coming back from a boarding school, and for wearing a white shirt waist and a crimson tie, and for carrying a tennis racket on the stricken street of a town, commend me to the month of June in Mariposa. And for Pupkin, straight away the whole town was irredated with sunshine, and there was such a singing of the birds, and such a dancing of the rippled waters of the lake, and such a kindness in the faces of all the people, that only those who have lived in Mariposa, and been young there, can know it all what he felt. The simple fact is that just the moment he saw Zena pupperly, Mr. Pupkin was clean, plumb, straight, flat, absolutely in love with her. Which fact is so important that it would be folly not to close the chapter and think about it. End of Chapter 7 Recording by Bridget Chapter 8 of Sunshine Sketches This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Bob Sherman Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock Chapter 8 The Four Ordained Attachment of Zena Pepperly and Peter Pupkin Zena Pepperly used to sit reading novels on the piazza of the judge's house, half hidden by the Virginia creepers. At times the book would fall upon her lap and there was such a look of unstilled yearning in her violet eyes that it did not entirely disappear even when she picked up the apple that lay beside her and took another bite out of it. With hands clasped, she would sit there dreaming all the beautiful daydreams of girlhood. When you saw that faraway look in her eyes it meant that she was dreaming that a plumed and armored knight was rescuing her from the embattled keep of a castle beside the Danube. At other times she was being born away by an Algerian corsair over the blue waters of the Mediterranean and was reaching out her arms towards France to say farewell to it. Sometimes when you notice the sweet look of resignation that seemed to rest upon her features it meant that Lord Ronald de Chavirre was kneeling at her feet and that she was telling him to rise that her humbler birth must ever be a bar to their happiness and Lord Ronald was getting into an awful state about it as English peers do with the least suggestion of anything of the sort. Or if it wasn't that then her lover had just returned to her side tall and soldierly and sunburned after fighting for ten years in the Sudan for her sake and had come back to ask her for her answer and to tell her that for ten years her face had been with him even in the watches of the night he was asking her for a sign any kind of sign ten years in the Sudan and titles them to a sign and Zina was plucking a white rose just one from her hair when she would hear her father step on the piazza and make a grab for the pioneers of to come to township and start reading it like mad she was always, as I say, being rescued and being born away and being parted and reaching out her arms to France and to Spain and saying goodbye forever to Viadolid or the gray old towers of Hoenn Brantvine and I don't mean that she was in the least exceptional or romantic because all the girls in Mariposa were just like that an Algerian corsair could have come into the town and had a dozen of them for the asking and as for a wounded English officer well, perhaps it's better not to talk about it outside or the little town would become a regular military hospital because, mind you, the Mariposa girls are all right you've only to look at them to realize that you see, you can get in Mariposa a print dress of pale blue or pale pink for a dollar twenty that looks infinitely better than anything you ever see in the city compare with it a broad straw hats and a background of maple trees and the green grass of a tennis court and if you remember too that these are cultivated girls who've all been to the Mariposa High School and can do decimal fractions you will understand that an Algerian corsair would sharpen his scimitar at the very sight of them don't think either that they're all dying to get married because they are not I don't say they wouldn't take an errant night or a Buccaneer or a Hungarian refugee but for the ordinary marriages of ordinary people they feel nothing but a pitying disdain so it is that each one of them in due time marries an enchanted prince and goes to live in one of the little enchanted houses in the lower part of the town I don't know whether you know it but you can rent an enchanted house in Mariposa for eight dollars a month and some of the most completely enchanted and cheapest as for the enchanted princes they find them in the strangest places where you never expected to see them working under a spell you understand in drugstores and printing offices and even selling things in shops but to be able to find them you have first to read ever so many novels about Sir Galahad and the errant quest and that sort of thing naturally then Zena Pepperley came to Piazza dreamed of bandits and of wounded officers and of Lord Ronald's riding on foam flecked chargers but that she ever dreamed of a junior bank teller in a daffodil blazer riding past on a bicycle is pretty hard to imagine so when Mr. Pupkin came tearing past up the slope of Oneida Street at a speed that proved that he wasn't riding there merely to pass the house I don't suppose that Zena Pepperley knew about his existence that may be a slight exaggeration she knew perhaps that he was the new junior teller in the exchange bank and that he came from the maritime provinces and that nobody knew who his people were and that he'd never been in a canoe in his life till he came to Mariposa and that he sat four pews back in Dean Drone's church and that his salary was eight hundred dollars beyond that she didn't know a thing about him the reason why he went past so fast was because he didn't dare to go slow this of course was perfectly correct ever since the day when Mr. Pupkin met Zena in the main street he used to come past the house on his bicycle just after bank hours he would have gone past twenty times a day but he was afraid to as he came up Oneida Street he used to pedal faster and faster they never meant to but he couldn't help it till he went past the piazza where Zena was sitting at an awful speed with his little yellow blazer flying in the wind in a second he disappeared in a buzz in a cloud of dust and the momentum of it carried him clear out into the country for miles and miles before he ever dared to pause or look back then Mr. Pupkin would ride in a huge circuit about the country trying to think he was looking at the crops and sooner or later his bicycle would be turned towards the town again for Oneida Street and would get going quicker and quicker and quicker till the pedals whirled round with a buzz and he came past the judge's house again like a bullet out of a gun he rode fifteen miles to pass the house twice and even then it took all the nerve that he had the people on Oneida Street thought that Mr. Pupkin was crazy but Zena Pepperley knew that he was not already you see there was a sort of dim parallel between the passing of the bicycle and the last ride of Tancred the inconsolable along the banks of the Danube I've already mentioned I think how Mr. Pupkin and Zena Pepperley first came to know one another like everything else about them it was a sheer matter of coincidence quite inexplicable unless you understand that these things are foreordained that of course is the way with foreordained affairs and that's where they differ from ordinary love I won't even try to describe how Mr. Pupkin felt when he first spoke with Zena and sat beside her as they copied out the endless chain letter asking for ten cents they wrote out as I said no less than eight of the letters between them and they found out that their handwriting were so alike that you could hardly tell them apart except that Pupkin's letters were round and Zena's letters were pointed and Pupkin wrote straight up and down and Zena wrote on a slant beyond that the writing was so alike that it was the strangest coincidence in the world of course when they made figures it was different and Pupkin explained to Zena that in the bank you have to be able to make a seven so that it doesn't look like a nine so as I say they wrote the letters all afternoon and when it was over they walked up Oneida Street together ever so slowly when they got near the house Zena asked Pupkin to come into tea with such an easy offhand way that you couldn't have told that she was half an hour late and was taking awful chances on the judge Pupkin hadn't had time to say yes before the judge appeared at the door just as they were stepping up onto the piazza and he had a table napkin in his hand and the dynamite sparks were flying from his spectacles as he called out great heaven Zena why an everlasting blazes can't you get into tea at a Christian hour Zena gave one look of appeal to Pupkin and Pupkin looked one glance of comprehension and turned and fled down Oneida Street and if the scene wasn't quite as dramatic as the renunciation of Tankard the troubadour it at least had something of the same elements in it Pupkin walked home to his supper at the Mariposa house on air and that evening there was a gentle distance in his manner towards Sadie the dining room girl that I suppose no bank clerk in Mariposa ever showed before it was like Sir Gala had talking with the tire women of Queen Guinevere and receiving Huckleberry Pie at their hands after that Mr. Pupkin and Zena Pepperley constantly met together they played tennis as partners on the grass court behind Dr. Gallagher's house the Mariposa tennis club rented you remember for fifty cents a month and Pupkin used to perform perfect prodigies of valor leaping in the air to serve with his little body hooked like a letter S sometimes too they went out on Lake Wisonati in the evening in Pupkin's canoe with Zena sitting in the bow and Pupkin paddling in the stern and they went out ever so far and it was after dark and the stars were shining before they came home Zena would look at the stars and say how infinitely far away they seemed and Pupkin would realize that a girl with a mind like that couldn't have any use for a fool such as him Zena used to ask him to point out the pliades and Jupiter and Ursa Minor and Pupkin showed her exactly where they were that impressed them both tremendously because Pupkin didn't know that Zena remembered the names out of the astronomy book at her boarding school and Zena didn't know that Pupkin simply took a chance on where the stars were and ever so many times they talked so intimately that Pupkin came mighty near telling her about his home in the maritime provinces and about his father and mother and then kicked himself that he had in the manliness to speak straight out about it and take the consequences please don't imagine for many of this that the course of Mr. Pupkin's love ran smooth on the contrary Pupkin himself felt that it was absolutely hopeless from the start there were it might be admitted certain things that seemed to indicate progress in the course of the months of June and July and August he had taken Zena out in his canoe thirty one times allowing an average of two miles for each evening Pupkin had paddled Zena sixty two miles or more than a hundred thousand yards that surely was something he had played tennis with her on sixteen afternoons three times he had left his tennis racket up at the judge's house in Zena's charge and once he had with her full consent left his bicycle there all night this must count for something no girl could trifle with a man to the extent of having his bicycle leaning against the veranda post all night and mean nothing by it more than that he had been to tea at the judge's house fourteen times and seven times he'd been asked by Lillian Drone to the rectory when Zena was coming and five times by Nora Gallagher to tea at the doctor's house because Zena was there all together he'd eaten so many meals where Zena was that his meal ticket at the Mariposa lasted nearly double its proper time and the face of Sadie the dining room girl had grown to wear a look of melancholy resignation sadder than romance still more than that Pupkin had bought for Zena reckoning it all together about two buckets of ice cream and perhaps half a bushel of chocolate not that Pupkin grudged the expanse of it on the contrary over and above the ice cream of the chocolate he'd bought her a white waistcoat and a walking stick with a gold top a lot of new neckties and a pair of patent leather boots that is they were all bought on account of her which is the same thing add to all this that Pupkin and Zena had been to the Church of England church nearly every Sunday evening for two months and one evening they'd even gone to the Presbyterian church for fun which if you know Mariposa you will realize to be a wild sort of escapade that ought to speak volumes yet in spite of this Pupkin felt that the thing was hopeless which only illustrates the dreadful ups and downs that held alternations of hope and despair that characterized an exceptional affair of this sort yes it was hopeless every time that Pupkin watched Zena praying in church he knew that she was too good for him every time that he came to call for her and found her reading Browning and Omar Kayam he knew that she was too clever for him and every time that he saw her at all he realized that she was too beautiful for him you see Pupkin knew that he wasn't a hero when Zena would clasp her hands and talk rapturously but crusaders and soldiers and firemen and heroes generally Pupkin knew just where he came in not in it that was all if a war could have broken out in Mariposa or the judge's house had been invaded by the Germans he might have had a chance but as it was hopeless then there was Zena's father heaven knows Pupkin tried hard to please the judge he agreed with every theory that Judge Pepperly advanced and that took a pretty pliable intellect in itself they denounced female suffrage one day and they favored it the next one day the judge would claim that the labour movement was eating out the heart of the country and the next day he would hold that the hope of the world lay in the organization of the toiling masses Pupkin shifted his opinions like the glass in a kaleidoscope indeed the only things on which he was allowed to maintain a steadfast conviction were the purity of the conservative party of Canada and the awful wickedness of the recall of judges but with all that the judge was hardly civil to Pupkin he hadn't asked him to the house till Zena brought him there though as a rule all the bank clerks in Mariposa treated Judge Pepperly's premises as their own he used to sit and sneer at Pupkin after he had gone till Zena would throw down the pioneers of Tecumseh township in a temper and flounce off the piazza to her room after which the judge's manner would change instantly and he would relight his corn cob pipe and sit and positively beam with contentment in all of which there was something so mysterious as to prove that Mr. Pupkin's chances were hopeless nor was that all of it Pupkin's salary was eight hundred dollars a year and the exchange bank limit for marriage was a thousand I suppose you were aware of the grinding capitalistic tyranny of the banks in Mariposa whereby marriage is put beyond the reach of ever so many mature and experienced men of nineteen and twenty and twenty-one who are compelled to go on eating on a meal ticket at the Mariposa house and living over the bank to suit the whim of a group of capitalists whenever Pupkin thought of this two hundred dollars he understood all that it meant by social unrest in fact he interpreted all forms of social discontent in terms of it Russian anarchism, German socialism, the labour movement Henry George, Lloyd George he understood the whole lot of them by thinking of his two hundred dollars when I tell you that at this period Mr. Pupkin read memoirs of the great revolutionists and even thought of blowing up Henry Mullins with dynamite you can appreciate his state of mind but not even by all these hindrances and obstacles to his love for Zena Pepperley would Peter Pupkin have been driven to commit suicide oh yes he committed it three times as I'm going to tell you had it not been for another thing that he knew stood once and for all and in cold reality between him and Zena he felt it in a sort of way as soon as he knew her each time that he tried to talk to her about his home and his father and mother and found that something held him back he realized more and more the kind of thing that stood between them most of all did he realize it with a sudden sickness of heart when he got word that his father and mother wanted to come to Mariposa to see him and he had all he could do to head them off from it why? why stop them? the reason was simple enough that Pupkin was ashamed of them bitterly ashamed the picture of his mother and father turning up in Mariposa and being seen by his friends there and going up to the Pepperley's house made him feel faint with shame no I don't say it wasn't wrong it only shows what difference of fortune the difference of being rich and being poor means in this world you perhaps have been so lucky that you cannot appreciate what it means to feel shame at the station of your own father and mother you think it doesn't matter that honesty and kindness of heart are all that counts that only shows that you've never known some of the bitterest feelings of people less fortunate than yourself so it was with Mr. Pupkin when he thought of his father and mother turning up in Mariposa his face reddened with unworthy shame he could just picture the scene he could see them getting out of their limousine touring car with the chauffeur holding open the door for them and his father asking for a suite of rooms just think of it a suite of rooms at the Mariposa house the very thought of it turned him ill what? you've mistaken my meaning ashamed of them because they were poor? good heavens no but because they were rich and not rich in the sense in which they use the term in Mariposa where a rich person merely means a man who has money enough to build a house with a piazza and to have everything he wants but rich in the other sense motor cars, rich hotels steam yachts, summer islands and all that sort of thing why Pupkin's father what's the use of trying to conceal it any longer was the senior partner in the law firm of Pupkin, Pupkin and Pupkin if you know the maritime provinces at all you've heard of the Pupkins the name's a household word from Chetabucto to Chetabecto and for the matter of that the law firm and the fact that Pupkin's senior had been an attorney general was the least part of it attorney general why there's no money in that it's no better than the senate no no Pupkin's senior like so many lawyers was practically a promoter and he blew companies like bubbles and when he wasn't in the maritime provinces he was in Boston and New York raising money and floating loans and when they had no money left in New York he floated it in London and when he had it he floated it on top of big rafts of lumber on the Miramashi and codfish on the Grand Banks and lesser fish in the Fundy Bay you've heard perhaps of the tidal transportation company and Fundy Fisheries Corporation and the Pespebiac Pulp and Paper Unlimited who all of those were Pupkin's senior under other names so just imagine him in Mariposa wouldn't he be utterly foolish there just imagine him meeting Jim Elliott and treating him like a drugist merely because he ran a drug store or speaking to Jefferson Thorpe as if he were a barber simply because he shaved for money why a man like that could ruin young Pupkin in Mariposa in half a day and Pupkin knew it that wouldn't matter so much but think of the Pepperleys and Zina everything would be over with them at once Pupkin knew just what the judge thought of riches and luxuries how often had he heard the judge pass sentences of life imprisonment on Pierpont Morgan and Mr. Rockefeller how often had Pupkin heard him say that any man who received more than $3,000 a year that was the judicial salary in the Missinaba district was a mere robber unfit to shake the hand of an honest man bitter I should think he was oh he was not so bitter perhaps as Mr. Muddelson the principal of the Mariposa High School who said that any man who received more than $1,500 was a public enemy he was certainly not so bitter as Trelawney the postmaster who said that any man who got from society more than $1,300 apart from a legitimate increase in recognition of a successful election was a danger to society still he was bitter they all were in Mariposa Pupkin could just imagine how they would despise his father and Zina that was the worst of all how often had Pupkin heard her say that she simply hated diamonds wouldn't wear them despise them wouldn't give a thank you for a whole tiara of them as for motor cars and steam yachts it was pretty plain that that sort of thing had no chance with Zina pepperly why she had told Pupkin one night in the canoe that she would only marry a man who was poor and had his way to make and would hew down difficulties for her sake and when Pupkin couldn't answer the argument she was quite cross and silent all the way home what was Peter Pupkin doing then at $800 in a bank in Mariposa if you ask that it means that you know nothing of the life of the Maritime provinces and the sturdy temper of the people I suppose there are no people in the world who hate luxury and extravagance and that sort of thing quite as much as the Maritime province people and of them no one hated luxury more than Pupkin Sr don't mistake the man he wore a long seal skin coat in winter, yes but mark you, not as a matter of luxury but merely as a question of his lungs he smoked I admitted a 35 cent cigar not because he preferred it but merely through a delicacy of the thorax that made it imperative he drank champagne at lunch I concede the point not in the least from the enjoyment of it but simply on account of a peculiar affection of the tongue and lips that positively dictated it his own longing and his wife shared it was for the simple, simple life of an island somewhere with birds and trees they bought three or four islands one in the St. Lawrence and two in the Gulf and one off the coast of Maine looking for this sort of thing Pupkin Sr often said that he wanted to have some place that would remind him of the little old farm up the Eurostuk where he was brought up he often bought little old farms just to try them but they always turned out to be so near a city that he cut them into real estate lots without even having had time to look at them but, and this is where the emphasis lay in the matter of luxury for his only son Peter Pupkin Sr was a maritime province man right to the core with all the hardy-hood of the United Empire loyalists ingrained in him no luxury for that boy, no sir from his childhood Pupkin Sr had undertaken at the least sign of luxury to tan it out of him after the fashion still in vogue in the provinces then he sent him to an old-fashioned school to get it thumped out of him and after that he'd put him for a year on a Nova Scotia schooner to get it knocked out of him if after all that young Pupkin even when he came to Mariposa wore cameo pins and daffodil blazers and broke out into ribbed silk saffron ties on payday it only shows that the old Adam still needs further tanning even in the maritime provinces young Pupkin of course was to have gone into law that was his father's cherished dream and would have made the firm Pupkin, Pupkin, Pupkin, and Pupkin as it ought to have been but young Peter was kept out of the law by the full system of examinations devised since his father's time hence there was nothing for it but to sling him into a bank sling him was I think the expression his father decided that if Pupkin was to be slung he should be slung good and far clean into Canada you know the way they use that word in the maritime provinces and to sling Pupkin he called in the services of an old friend a man after his own heart just as violent as himself who used to be at the law school in the city with Pupkin senior thirty years ago so this friend who happened to live in Mariposa and who was a violent man said at once Edward by Jehoshaphat send the boy up here so that is how Pupkin came to Mariposa and if when he got there his father's friend gave no sign and treated the boy with roughness and incivility that may have been for all I know a continuation of the tanning process of the maritime people did I mention that the Pepperlea family generations ago had taken up land near the Eurustuk and that it was from there the judge's father came to Tecumseh township perhaps not but it doesn't matter but surely after such reminiscences as these the awful things that are impending over Mr. Pupkin must be kept for another chapter End of chapter 8