第24章

The Ministrations of the Rev.Mr.Drone The Church of England in Mariposa is on a side street, where the maple trees are thickest, a little up the hill from the heart of the town.The trees above the church and the grass plot that was once the cemetery, till they made the new one (the Necropolis, over the brow of the hill), fill out the whole corner.Down behind the church, with only the driving shed and a lane between, is the rectory.It is a little brick house with odd angles.There is a hedge and a little gate, and a weeping ash tree with red berries.

At the side of the rectory, churchward, is a little grass lawn with low hedges and at the side of that two wild plum trees, that are practically always in white blossom.Underneath them is a rustic table and chairs, and it is here that you may see Rural Dean Drone, the incumbent of the Church of England Church, sitting, in the chequered light of the plum tress that is neither sun nor shadow.

Generally you will find him reading, and when I tell you that at the end of the grass plot where the hedge is highest there is a yellow bee hive with seven bees that belong to Dean Drone, you will realize that it is only fitting that the Dean is reading in the Greek.For what better could a man be reading beneath the blossom of the plum trees, within the very sound of the bees, than the Pastorals of Theocritus? The light trash of modern romance might put a man to sleep in such a spot, but with such food for reflection as Theocritus, a man may safely close his eyes and muse on what he reads without fear of dropping into slumber.

Some men, I suppose, terminate their education when they leave their college.Not so Dean Drone.I have often heard him say that if he couldn't take a book in the Greek out on the lawn in a spare half hour, he would feel lost.It's a certain activity of the brain that must be stilled somehow.The Dean, too, seemed to have a native feeling for the Greek language.I have often heard people who might sit with him on the lawn, ask him to translate some of it.But he always refused.One couldn't translate it, he said.It lost so much in the translation that it was better not to try.It was far wiser not to attempt it.If you undertook to translate it, there was something gone, something missing immediately.I believe that many classical scholars feel this way, and like to read the Greek just as it is, without the hazard of trying to put it into so poor a medium as English.So that when Dean Drone said that he simply couldn't translate it, I believe he was perfectly sincere.

Sometimes, indeed, he would read it aloud.That was another matter.

Whenever, for example, Dr.Gallagher--I mean, of course, old Dr.

Gallagher, not the young doctor (who was always out in the country in the afternoon)--would come over and bring his latest Indian relics to show to the Dean, the latter always read to him a passage or two.

As soon as the doctor laid his tomahawk on the table, the Dean would reach for his Theocritus.I remember that on the day when Dr.

Gallagher brought over the Indian skull that they had dug out of the railway embankment, and placed it on the rustic table, the Dean read to him so long from Theocritus that the doctor, I truly believe, dozed off in his chair.The Dean had to wait and fold his hands with the book across his knee, and close his eyes till the doctor should wake up again.And the skull was on the table between them, and from above the plum blossoms fluttered down, till they made flakes on it as white as Dr.Gallagher's hair.

I don't want you to suppose that the Rev.Mr.Drone spent the whole of his time under the trees.Not at all.In point of fact, the rector's life was one round of activity which lie himself might deplore but was powerless to prevent.He had hardly sat down beneath the trees of an afternoon after his mid-day meal when there was the Infant Class at three, and after that, with scarcely an hour between, the Mothers' Auxiliary at five, and the next morning the Book Club, and that evening the Bible Study Class, and the next morning the Early Workers' Guild at eleven-thirty.The whole week was like that, and if one found time to sit down for an hour or so to recuperate it was the most one could do.After all, if a busy man spends the little bit of leisure that he gets in advanced classical study, there is surely no harm in it.I suppose, take it all in all, there wasn't a busier man than the Rural Dean among the Anglican clergy of the diocese.

If the Dean ever did snatch a half-day from his incessant work, he spent it in fishing.But not always that, for as likely as not, instead of taking a real holiday he would put in the whole afternoon amusing the children and the boys that he knew, by making kites and toys and clockwork steamboats for them.

It was fortunate for the Dean that he had the strange interest and aptitude for mechanical advices which he possessed, or otherwise this kind of thing would have been too cruel an imposition.But the Rev.

Mr.Drone had a curious liking for machinery.I think I never heard him preach a better sermon than the one on Aeroplanes (Lo, what now see you on high Jeremiah Two).

So it was that he spent two whole days making a kite with Chinese wings for Teddy Moore, the photographer's son, and closed down the infant class for forty-eight hours so that Teddy Moore should not miss the pleasure of flying it, or rather seeing it flown.It is foolish to trust a Chinese kite to the hands of a young child.