第33章

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 (Ithink 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 Iknow 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: