It was just as he reached the door that the Rev. Needham overheard the all but blood-curdling remark.
"You must realize," Miss Whitcom was saying to his daughter's fiancé, "that it's much too hot there to wear any clothes!"
It being patently too late to turn back, the clergyman came on; somehow reached a chair. He sat down quickly and began rocking. He rocked helplessly, yet withal in a faintly ominous way—perhaps, deeper still, with a movement of guilty curiosity: for after all he was but human, poor man.
The sun had just dipped, and the sky and the sea were alive with the fire of this august departure. A wraith-like distribution of cloud still received direct beams and glowed like a bit of magic dream-stuff; but the lower world had to rest content now with reflected glory—a sheen of softening brightness which would grow steadily thicker and thicker, like quandary in the clergyman's breast, till at length the light was all gone and darkness had settled across the sea and the sand. Ah, peaceful eventide! Good-bye, sweet day! But the heart of the minister was all full of horrid little quick jerks and a settling mugginess.
The conversation his appearance had served to interrupt did not continue as it had evidently begun. Yet even at its worst it appeared to have constituted merely a laughing digression from the major theme, which had to do with the perfectly proper topic of dry-farming. No one would think of calling the topic of dry-farming improper. But the tenor of the talk which succeeded the minister's arrival in their midst did not, for all its unimpeachable correctness, serve to diminish the poignancy of that awful phrase: too hot to wear any clothes!
"Mr. Barry," she explained to her brother-in-law, "has been telling me a lot of interesting things about the sorghums."
Alfred Needham cleared his throat—just as he always did, for instance, before ascending the pulpit on Sunday—and nodded. But he was not thinking about the sorghums—just as sometimes, it is to be feared, in the very act of coming out of the vestry, and with the eyes of the congregation upon him, he failed to keep his mind entirely on the sermon he was about to deliver.
"It seems they've made enormous strides since my day," she went on. "Mr. Barry, how many varieties did you say are now possible?"
"Well," he replied solemnly, his eyes large with helpless unhappiness, "the sorghums now include common or sweet sorghum, milo maize, Kaffir corn—and of course broom corn. These have become standard crops, and we're introducing them more and more into the southern district." He rocked a trifle self-consciously. All three rocked a moment in silence.
"There's considerably less rainfall down there," commented the Rev. Needham.