SIX
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 enquired if the
presence of mugwumps was fatal in matters of endeavour, 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 the 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 looked 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): beyond 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. Gingham, 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 Cullen 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 had so little sense
of his higher mission as to omit the teaching of logarithms. And the
rector mused so long that when he began again it seemed to him that
it was simpler and better to discard the personal note altogether,
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?--near or 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 fire bell 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 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 wooden 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 Wissanotti
could stay the course of its destruction. It was for that hundred
feet that they fought, the men of Mariposa, from the midnight call of
the bell till 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 hose 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 the 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, axe 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 a fireman's
helmet on, cutting through the main beam of solid cedar, twelve by
twelve, 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 two
hundred and eighty 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! At it,
Smith! Down with 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 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 grey maple
trees, and you could see in 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 twenty 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 grey
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 sodden heap of bricks and blackened
wood, still hissing here and there beneath the hose with the sullen
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 fourteen
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
Mullins, 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 the 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's 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 round 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 that 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, in 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 Pepperleigh disposed of the case and
dismissed the protest of the company in less than fifteen minutes!
Just what the jurisdiction of Judge Pepperleigh's court is I don't
know, but I do know that in upholding the rights of a Christian
congregation--I am 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. Pepperleigh even
threatened the plaintiffs with the 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 at 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 that he can read, With the
greatest ease, works 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.
