第25章

In the same way the Dean made a mechanical top for little Marjorie Trewlaney, the cripple, to see spun: it would have been unwise to allow the afflicted girl to spin it.There was no end to the things that Mr.Drone could make, and always for the children.Even when he was making the sand-clock for poor little Willie Yodel (who died, you know) the Dean went right on with it and gave it to another child with just the same pleasure.Death, you know, to the clergy is a different thing from what it is to us.The Dean and Mr.Gingham used often to speak of it as they walked through the long grass of the new cemetery, the Necropolis.And when your Sunday walk is to your wife's grave, as the Dean's was, perhaps it seems different to anybody.

The Church of England Church, I said; stood close to the rectory, a tall, sweeping church, and inside a great reach of polished cedar beams that ran to the point of the roof.There used to stand on the same spot the little stone church that all the grown-up people in Mariposa still remember, a quaint little building in red and grey stone.About it was the old cemetery, but that was all smoothed out later into the grass plot round the new church, and the headstones laid out flat, and no new graves have been put there for ever so long.But the Mariposa children still walk round and read the headstones lying flat in the grass and look for the old ones,--because some of them are ever so old--forty or fifty years back.

Nor are you to think from all this that the Dean was not a man with serious perplexities.You could easily convince yourself of the contrary.For if you watched the Rev.Mr.Drone as he sat reading in the Greek, you would notice that no very long period every passed without his taking up a sheet or two of paper that lay between the leaves of the Theocritus and that were covered close with figures.

And these the Dean would lay upon the rustic table, and he would add them up forwards and backwards, going first up the column and then down it to see that nothing had been left out, and then down it again to see what it was that must have been left out.

Mathematics, you will understand, were not the Dean's forte.They never were the forte of the men who had been trained at the little Anglican college with the clipped hedges and the cricket ground, where Rupert Drone had taken the gold medal in Greek fifty-two years ago.You will see the medal at any time lying there in its open box on the rectory table, in case of immediate need.Any of the Drone girls, Lilian, or Jocelyn, or Theodora, would show it to you.But, as I say, mathematics were not the rector's forte, and he blamed for it (in a Christian spirit, you will understand) the memory of his mathematical professor, and often he spoke with great bitterness.Ihave often heard him say that in his opinion the colleges ought to dismiss, of course in a Christian spirit, all the professors who are not, in the most reverential sense of the term, fit for their jobs.

No doubt many of the clergy of the diocese had suffered more or less just as the Dean had from lack of mathematical training.But the Dean always felt that his own case was especially to be lamented.For you see, if a man is trying to make a model aeroplane--for a poor family in the lower part of the town--and he is brought to a stop by the need of reckoning the coefficient of torsion of cast-iron rods, it shows plainly enough that the colleges are not truly filling their divine mission.

But the figures that I speak of were not those of the model aeroplane.These were far more serious.Night and day they had been with the rector now for the best part of ten years, and they grew, if anything, more intricate.

If, for example, you try to reckon the debt of a church--a large church with a great sweep of polished cedar beams inside, for the special glorification of the All Powerful, and with imported tiles on the roof for the greater glory of Heaven and with stained-glass windows for the exaltation of the All Seeing--if, I say, you try to reckon up the debt on such a church and figure out its interest and its present worth, less a fixed annual payment, it makes a pretty complicated sum.Then if you try to add to this the annual cost of insurance, and deduct from it three-quarters of a stipend, year by year, and then suddenly remember that three-quarters is too much, because you have forgotten the boarding-school fees of the littlest of the Drones (including French, as an extra--she must have it, all the older girls did), you have got a sum that pretty well defies ordinary arithmetic.The provoking part of it was that the Dean knew perfectly well that with the help of logarithms he could have done the thing in a moment.But at the Anglican college they had stopped short at that very place in the book.They had simply explained that Logos was a word and Arithmos a number, which at the time, seemed amply sufficient.

So the Dean was perpetually taking out his sheets of figures, and adding them upwards and downwards, and they never came the same.Very often Mr.Gingham, who was a warden, would come and sit beside the rector and ponder over the figures, and Mr.Drone would explain that with a book of logarithms you could work it out in a moment.You would simply open the book and run your finger up the columns (he illustrated exactly the way in which the finger was moved), and there you were.Mr.Gingham said that it was a caution, and that logarithms (I quote his exact phrase) must be a terror.

Very often, too, Nivens, the lawyer, who was a sidesman, and Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank, who was the chairman of the vestry, would come and take a look, at the figures.But they never could make much of them, because the stipend part was not a matter that one could discuss.

Mullins would notice the item for a hundred dollars due on fire insurance and would say; as a business man, that surely that couldn't be fire insurance, and the Dean would say surely not, and change it: