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 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 Mulllins was glad of that, because
it proved that the Dean wasn't feeling disappointed as,in a way, he might have.
Inded,the only time when the rector seemed animated and escited in the whole interview was when
Mullins said that the campaigh had been ruined by a lot of confounded mugwumps.Straight away the
Dean asked if those mugwumps hadreally prejudiced the outcome of the campaign.Mullins said there
was no doubt of it,and the Dean enquired if the presence of mugwumps was no doubt of it,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
extremeweariness 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 inruition,saw
thatit 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
esamination,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
sunlightm,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 hisletters.It was here always that he wrote his sermons.From the window of the room you
looked thoughthe 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 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 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 yaars ago,it
was onlya twist of fate that had prevented him from becoming a great write.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 readthe advertisements of Mr.Gingham,the undertaker,to know that
there is still in him a poetm,two could have written on death far more attractiveverses than the
Thanatopsis of Cullen Bryant,and under a title less likely to offend the public and drive away
castom.He has told me this himself.