Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
FIVE
The Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa
It was Mullins, the banker, who told Mariposa all about the plan of a
Whirlwind Campaign and explained how it was to be done. He'd happened to be in
one of the big cities when they were raising money by a Whirlwind Campaign for
one of the universities, and he saw it all.
He said he would never forget the scene on the last day of it, when the
announcement was made that the total of the money raised was even more than what
was needed. It was a splendid sight,—the business men of the town all cheering
and laughing and shaking hands, and the professors with the tears streaming down
their faces, and the Deans of the Faculties, who had given money themselves,
sobbing aloud.
He said it was the most moving thing he ever saw.
So, as I said, Henry Mullins, who had seen it, explained to the others how it
was done. He said that first of all a few of the business men got together
quietly,—very quietly, indeed the more quietly the better,—and talked things
over. Perhaps one of them would dine,—just quietly,—with another one and discuss
the situation. Then these two would invite a third man,—possibly even a
fourth,—to have lunch with them and talk in a general way,—even talk of other
things part of the time. And so on in this way things would be discussed and
looked at in different lights and viewed from different angles and then when
everything was ready they would go at things with a rush. A central committee
would be formed and sub-committees, with captains of each group and recorders
and secretaries, and on a stated day the Whirlwind Campaign would begin.
Each day the crowd would all agree to meet at some stated place and each
lunch together,—say at a restaurant or at a club or at some eating place. This
would go on every day with the interest getting keener and keener, and everybody
getting more and more excited, till presently the chairman would announce that
the campaign had succeeded and there would be the kind of scene that Mullins had
described.
So that was the plan that they set in motion in Mariposa.
I don't wish to say too much about the Whirlwind Campaign itself. I don't
mean to say that it was a failure. On the contrary, in many ways it couldn't
have been a greater success, and yet somehow it didn't seem to work out just as
Henry Mullins had said it would. It may be that there are differences between
Mariposa and the larger cities that one doesn't appreciate at first sight.
Perhaps it would have been better to try some other plan.
Yet they followed along the usual line of things closely enough. They began
with the regular system of some of the business men getting together in a quiet
way.
First of all, for example, Henry Mullins came over quietly to Duff's rooms,
over the Commercial Bank, with a bottle of rye whiskey, and they talked things
over. And the night after that George Duff came over quietly to Mullins's rooms,
over the Exchange Bank, with a bottle of Scotch whiskey. A few evenings after
that Mullins and Duff went together, in a very unostentatious way, with perhaps
a couple of bottles of rye, to Pete Glover's room over the hardware store. And
then all three of them went up one night with Ed Moore, the photographer, to
Judge Pepperleigh's house under pretence of having a game of poker. The very day
after that, Mullins and Duff and Ed Moore, and Pete Glover and the judge got
Will Harrison, the harness maker, to go out without any formality on the lake on
the pretext of fishing. And the next night after that Duff and Mullins and Ed
Moore and Pete Glover and Pepperleigh and Will Harrison got Alf Trelawney, the
postmaster, to come over, just in a casual way, to the Mariposa House, after the
night mail, and the next day Mullins and Duff and—
But, pshaw! you see at once how the thing is worked. There's no need to
follow that part of the Whirlwind Campaign further. But it just shows the power
of organization.
And all this time, mind you, they were talking things over, and looking at
things first in one light and then in another light,—in fact, just doing as the
big city men do when there's an important thing like this under way.
So after things had been got pretty well into shape in this way, Duff asked
Mullins one night, straight out, if he would be chairman of the Central
Committee. He sprung it on him and Mullins had no time to refuse, but he put it
to Duff straight whether he would be treasurer. And Duff had no time to refuse.
That gave things a start, and within a week they had the whole organization
on foot. There was the Grand Central Committee and six groups or sub-committees
of twenty men each, and a captain for every group. They had it all arranged on
the lines most likely to be effective.
In one group there were all the bankers, Mullins and Duff and Pupkin (with
the cameo pin), and about four others. They had their photographs taken at Ed
Moore's studio, taken in a line with a background of icebergs—a winter scene—and
a pretty penetrating crowd they looked, I can tell you. After all, you know, if
you get a crowd of representative bank men together in any financial deal,
you've got a pretty considerable leverage right away.
In the second group were the lawyers, Nivens and Macartney and the rest—about
as level-headed a lot as you'd see anywhere. Get the lawyers of a town with you
on a thing like this and you'll find you've got a sort of brain power with you
that you'd never get without them.
Then there were the business men—there was a solid crowd for you,—Harrison,
the harness maker, and Glover, the hardware man, and all that gang, not talkers,
perhaps, but solid men who can tell you to a nicety how many cents there are in
a dollar. It's all right to talk about education and that sort of thing, but if
you want driving power and efficiency, get business men. They're seeing it every
day in the city, and it's just the same in Mariposa. Why, in the big concerns in
the city, if they found out a man was educated, they wouldn't have him,—wouldn't
keep him there a minute. That's why the business men have to conceal it so much.
Then in the other teams there were the doctors and the newspaper men and the
professional men like Judge Pepperleigh and Yodel the auctioneer.
It was all organized so that every team had its headquarters, two of them in
each of the three hotels—one upstairs and one down. And it was arranged that
there would be a big lunch every day, to be held in Smith's caff, round the
corner of Smith's Northern Health Resort and Home of the Wissanotti Angler,—you
know the place. The lunch was divided up into tables, with a captain for each
table to see about things to drink, and of course all the tables were in
competition with one another. In fact the competition was the very life of the
whole thing.
It's just wonderful how these things run when they're organized. Take the
first luncheon, for example. There they all were, every man in his place, every
captain at his post at the top of the table. It was hard, perhaps, for some of
them to get there. They had very likely to be in their stores and banks and
offices till the last minute and then make a dash for it. It was the cleanest
piece of team work you ever saw.
You have noticed already, I am sure, that a good many of the captains and
committee men didn't belong to the Church of England Church. Glover, for
instance, was a Presbyterian, till they ran the picket fence of the manse two
feet on to his property, and after that he became a free-thinker. But in
Mariposa, as I have said, everybody likes to be in everything and naturally a
Whirlwind Campaign was a novelty. Anyway it would have been a poor business to
keep a man out of the lunches merely on account of his religion. I trust that
the day for that kind of religious bigotry is past.
Of course the excitement was when Henry Mullins at the head of the table
began reading out the telegrams and letters and messages. First of all there was
a telegram of good wishes from the Anglican Lord Bishop of the Diocese to Henry
Mullins and calling him Dear Brother in Grace the Mariposa telegraph office is a
little unreliable and it read: "Dear Brother in grease," but that was good
enough. The Bishop said that his most earnest wishes were with them.
Then Mullins read a letter from the Mayor of Mariposa Pete Glover was mayor
that year—stating that his keenest desires were with them: and then one from the
Carriage Company saying that its heartiest good will was all theirs; and then
one from the Meat Works saying that its nearest thoughts were next to them. Then
he read one from himself, as head of the Exchange Bank, you understand,
informing him that he had heard of his project and assuring him of his liveliest
interest in what he proposed.
At each of these telegrams and messages there was round after round of
applause, so that you could hardly hear yourself speak or give an order. But
that was nothing to when Mullins got up again, and beat on the table for silence
and made one of those crackling speeches—just the way business men speak—the
kind of speech that a college man simply can't make. I wish I could repeat it
all. I remember that it began: "Now boys, you know what we're here for,
gentlemen," and it went on just as good as that all through. When Mullins had
done he took out a fountain pen and wrote out a cheque for a hundred dollars,
conditional on the fund reaching fifty thousand. And there was a burst of cheers
all over the room.
Just the moment he had done it, up sprang George Duff,—you know the keen
competition there is, as a straight matter of business, between the banks in
Mariposa,—up sprang George Duff, I say, and wrote out a cheque for another
hundred conditional on the fund reaching seventy thousand. You never heard such
cheering in your life.
And then when Netley walked up to the head of the table and laid down a
cheque for a hundred dollars conditional on the fund reaching one hundred
thousand the room was in an uproar. A hundred thousand dollars! Just think of
it! The figures fairly stagger one. To think of a hundred thousand dollars
raised in five minutes in a little place like Mariposa!
And even that was nothing! In less than no time there was such a crowd round
Mullins trying to borrow his pen all at once that his waistcoat was all stained
with ink. Finally when they got order at last, and Mullins stood up and
announced that the conditional fund had reached a quarter of a million, the
whole place was a perfect babel of cheering. Oh, these Whirlwind Campaigns are
wonderful things!
I can tell you the Committee felt pretty proud that first day. There was
Henry Mullins looking a little bit flushed and excited, with his white waistcoat
and an American Beauty rose, and with ink marks all over him from the cheque
signing; and he kept telling them that he'd known all along that all that was
needed was to get the thing started and telling again about what he'd seen at
the University Campaign and about the professors crying, and wondering if the
high school teachers would come down for the last day of the meetings.
Looking back on the Mariposa Whirlwind, I can never feel that it was a
failure. After all, there is a sympathy and a brotherhood in these things when
men work shoulder to shoulder. If you had seen the canvassers of the Committee
going round the town that evening shoulder to shoulder from the Mariposa House
to the Continental and up to Mullins's rooms and over to Duffs, shoulder to
shoulder, you'd have understood it.
I don't say that every lunch was quite such a success as the first. It's not
always easy to get out of the store if you're a busy man, and a good many of the
Whirlwind Committee found that they had just time to hurry down and snatch their
lunch and get back again. Still, they came, and snatched it. As long as the
lunches lasted, they came. Even if they had simply to rush it and grab something
to eat and drink without time to talk to anybody, they came.
No, no, it was not lack of enthusiasm that killed the Whirlwind Campaign in
Mariposa. It must have been something else. I don't just know what it was but I
think it had something to do with the financial, the book-keeping side of the
thing.
It may have been, too, that the organization was not quite correctly planned.
You see, if practically everybody is on the committees, it is awfully hard to
try to find men to canvass, and it is not allowable for the captains and the
committee men to canvass one another, because their gifts are spontaneous. So
the only thing that the different groups could do was to wait round in some
likely place—say the bar parlour of Smith's Hotel—in the hope that somebody
might come in who could be canvassed.
You might ask why they didn't canvass Mr. Smith himself, but of course they
had done that at the very start, as I should have said. Mr. Smith had given them
two hundred dollars in cash conditional on the lunches being held in the caff of
his hotel; and it's awfully hard to get a proper lunch I mean the kind to which
a Bishop can express regret at not being there—under a dollar twenty-five. So
Mr. Smith got back his own money, and the crowd began eating into the
benefactions, and it got more and more complicated whether to hold another lunch
in the hope of breaking even, or to stop the campaign.
It was disappointing, yes. In spite of all the success and the sympathy, it
was disappointing. I don't say it didn't do good. No doubt a lot of the men got
to know one another better than ever they had before. I have myself heard Judge
Pepperleigh say that after the campaign he knew all of Pete Glover that he
wanted to. There was a lot of that kind of complete satiety. The real trouble
about the Whirlwind Campaign was that they never clearly understood which of
them were the whirlwind and who were to be the campaign.
Some of them, I believe, took it pretty much to heart. I know that Henry
Mullins did. You could see it. The first day he came down to the lunch, all
dressed up with the American Beauty and the white waistcoat. The second day he
only wore a pink carnation and a grey waistcoat. The third day he had on a dead
daffodil and a cardigan undervest, and on the last day, when the high school
teachers should have been there, he only wore his office suit and he hadn't even
shaved. He looked beaten.
It was that night that he went up to the rectory to tell the news to Dean
Drone. It had been arranged, you know, that the rector should not attend the
lunches, so as to let the whole thing come as a surprise; so that all he knew
about it was just scraps of information about the crowds at the lunch and how
they cheered and all that. Once, I believe, he caught sight of the Newspacket
with a two-inch headline: A QUARTER OF A MILLION, but he wouldn't let himself
read further because it would have spoilt the surprise.
I saw Mullins, as I say, go up the street on his way to Dean Drone's. It was
middle April and there was ragged snow on the streets, and the nights were dark
still, and cold. I saw Mullins grit his teeth as he walked, and I know that he
held in his coat pocket his own cheque for the hundred, with the condition taken
off it, and he said that there were so many skunks in Mariposa that a man might
as well be in the Head Office in the city.
The Dean came out to the little gate in the dark,—you could see the lamplight
behind him from the open door of the rectory,—and he shook hands with Mullins
and they went in together.