Tempest Tost

Catch as catch can, and every man for himself, the conversation spun on through the night. Only Hector was silent, nodding from time to time and allowing his glass to be filled almost without protest. At five o’clock they went home, Roger to appear at a lecture at nine, Humphrey to sleep till noon, and Hector to greet a class which found him pale, inattentive and apt to desert them while he sought the drinking fountain.

Six

Eight days before the first night of The Tempest the following advertisement appeared in the Salterton evening paper for the last of five successive publications:

The complete Household Effects of the late Dr Adam Savage will be sold at auction at his former residence, 33 King Street, on Friday, June 8, begi

All furnishings, ornaments, china and glass, carpets, bed linen, etc. will positively be sold to the highest bidder under the conditions posted on the door. No catalogue. View day Thursday, June 7.

Do not miss this sale which is the most Important to be held in Salterton so far this year.

And for this fifth appearance the following note was appended to the advertisement:

We are directed by Miss Valentine Rich, executor of the late Dr Savage, to a

Elliot & Maybee

This addition to the auction notice was printed in no larger type than the rest of the advertisement, but it caught a surprising number of eyes on the Tuesday when it appeared. Anything which concerns a subject dear to us seems to leap from a large page of print. Freddy Webster, who was no careful reader of newspapers, saw it, and snorted like a young warhorse.

“Giving away books!” said she. “But only to preachers! Damn!”

Later that evening she met Solly, who was in the garden wondering, as all directors of outdoor performances of The Tempest must, whether the arrangements for the storm-tossed ship in the first scene of the play would provoke the audience to such derisive laughter that they would rise in a body and demand the return of their money at the gate.

“Yes, I saw it,” he said in answer to her question. “Pretty rotten, confining it to the clergy. Not that I care about Philosophy, or Theology, or even Superior Fiction. But there might just be something tucked away in Miscellaneous which would be lost on the gentlemen of the cloth.”

“Whatever made Valentine do it?”

“Apparently, two or three years ago, the old chap said something, just in passing, about wanting his books dealt with that way. And they’re quite unsaleable, you know. A bookseller wouldn’t give five cents apiece for the lot.”

“Have you seen them, Solly?”

“No; but you know how hard it is to get rid of books. Especially Theology. Nothing changes fashion so quickly as Theology.”

“But there might just be a treasure or two among them.”

“I know.”

“Still, I don’t suppose a preacher would know a really valuable book if he saw one. They’ll go for the concordances and commentaries on the Gospels. Do you suppose Val would let us look through what’s left?”

“Freddy, my i

Freddy recognized the truth of what he said. She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which ca

Still, she had her pride. She would not beg Valentine to regard her as a member of the clergy for a day; she would not even hang about the house in a hinting ma

With this plan in view she was at the residence of the late Dr Adam Savage at five minutes to ten on the following morning, dismayed to find that an astounding total of two hundred and seventeen clergymen were there before her, waiting impatiently on the lawn. They ranged from canons of the cathedral, in shovel hats and the grey fla

It was never discovered how clergymen for a radius of fifty miles around Salterton got wind of Dr Savage’s posthumous bounty. The local newspaper took the great assembly of holy men as a tribute to the power of its advertising columns; indeed, as Freddy approached, a press photographer was climbing into a tree to take a picture of the extraordinary sight. However, the orgulous pride of newspapers is widely understood. The gossips of Salterton decided, after several weeks of discussion, that the matter was beyond any rational explanation, but that the Christian Church must be better organized, and more at one on certain matters, than they had thought.