Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich (20 page)

“We have no hesitation in saying,” so wrote the editor of the
Plutorian Times
, a three-cent morning paper, which was able to take a broad or three-cent point of view of men and things, “that the loss of Dr. McTeague will be just as much felt in Europe as in America. To Germany the news that the hand that penned ‘McTeague’s Shorter Exposition of the Kantian Hypothesis’ has ceased to write will come with the shock of poignant anguish; while to France –”

The editor left the article unfinished at that point. After all, he was a ready writer, and he reflected that there would be time enough before actually going to press to consider from what particular angle the blow of McTeague’s death would strike down the people of France.

So ran in speech and in writing, during two or three days, the requiem of Dr. McTeague.

Altogether there were more kind things said of him in the three days during which he was taken for dead, than in thirty years of his life – which seemed a pity.

And after it all, at the close of the third day, Dr. McTeague feebly opened his eyes.

But when he opened them the world had already passed on, and left him behind.

“W
ell then, gentlemen, I think we have all agreed upon our man?”

Mr. Dick Overend looked around the table as he spoke at the managing trustees of St. Osoph’s church. They were assembled in an upper committee room of the Mausoleum Club. Their official place of meeting was in a board room off the vestry of the church. But they had felt a draught in it, some four years ago, which had wafted them over to the club as their place of assembly. In the club there were no draughts.

Mr. Dick Overend sat at the head of the table, his brother George beside him, and Dr. Boomer at the foot. Beside them were Mr. Boulder, Mr. Skinyer (of Skinyer and Beatem) and the rest of the trustees.

“You are agreed, then, on the Reverend Uttermust Dumfarthing?”

“Quite agreed,” murmured several trustees together.

“A most remarkable man,” said Dr. Boomer. “I heard him preach in his present church. He gave utterance to
thoughts that I have myself been thinking for years. I never listened to anything so sound or so scholarly.”

“I heard him the night he preached in New York,” said Mr. Boulder. “He preached a sermon to the poor. He told them they were no good. I never heard, outside of a Scotch pulpit, such splendid invective.”

“Is he Scotch?” said one of the trustees.

“Of Scotch parentage,” said the university president. “I believe he is one of the Dumfarthings of Dumferline, Dumfries.”

Everybody said “Oh,” and there was a pause.

“Is he married?” asked one of the trustees. “I understand,” answered Dr. Boomer, “that he is a widower with one child, a little girl.”

“Does he make any conditions?”

“None whatever,” said the chairman, consulting a letter before him, “except that he is to have absolute control, and in regard to salary. These two points settled, he says, he places himself entirely in our hands.”

“And the salary?” asked someone.

“Ten thousand dollars,” said the chairman, “payable quarterly in advance.”

A chorus of approval went round the table. “Good,” “Excellent,” “A first-class man,” muttered the trustees, “just what we want.”

“I am sure, gentlemen,” said Mr. Dick Overend, voicing the sentiments of everybody, “we do
not
want a cheap man. Several of the candidates whose names have been under consideration here have been in many respects – in point of religious qualification, let us say – most desirable men. The name of Dr. McSkwirt, for example, has been mentioned with great favour by several of the trustees. But he’s a cheap man. I feel we don’t want him.”

“What is Mr. Dumfarthing getting where he is?” asked Mr. Boulder.

“Nine thousand nine hundred,” said the chairman.

“And Dr. McSkwirt?”

“Fourteen hundred dollars.”

“Well, that settles it!” exclaimed everybody with a burst of enlightenment.

And so it was settled.

In fact, nothing could have been plainer.

“I suppose,” said Mr. George Overend as they were about to rise, “that we are quite justified in taking it for granted that Dr. McTeague will never be able to resume work?”

“Oh, absolutely for granted,” said Dr. Boomer. “Poor McTeague! I hear from Slyder that he was making desperate efforts this morning to sit up in bed. His nurse with difficulty prevented him.”

“Is his power of speech gone?” asked Mr. Boulder.

“Practically so; in any case, Dr. Slyder insists on his not using it. In fact, poor McTeague’s mind is a wreck. His nurse was telling me that this morning he was reaching out his hand for the newspaper, and seemed to want to read one of the editorials. It was quite pathetic,” concluded Dr. Boomer, shaking his head.

So the whole matter was settled, and next day all the town knew that St. Osoph’s Church had extended a call to the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing, and that he had accepted it.

Within a few weeks of this date the Reverend Uttermust Dumfarthing moved into the manse of St. Osoph’s and assumed his charge. And forthwith he became the sole topic of conversation on Plutoria Avenue. “Have you seen the new minister of St. Osoph’s?” everybody asked. “Have you been
to hear Dr. Dumfarthing?” “Were you at St. Osoph’s Church on Sunday morning? Ah, you really should go! most striking sermon I ever listened to.”

The effect of him was absolute and instantaneous; there was no doubt of it.

“My dear,” said Mrs. Buncomhearst to one of her friends, in describing how she had met him, “I never saw a more striking man. Such power in his face! Mr. Boulder introduced him to me on the avenue, and he hardly seemed to see me at all, simply scowled! I was never so favourably impressed with any man.”

On his very first Sunday he preached to his congregation on eternal punishment, leaning forward in his black gown and shaking his fist at them. Dr. McTeague had never shaken his fist in thirty years, and as for the Rev. Fareforth Furlong, he was incapable of it.

But the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing told his congregation that he was convinced that at least seventy per cent of them were destined for eternal punishment; and he didn’t call it by that name, but labelled it simply and forcibly “hell.” The word had not been heard in any church in the better part of the City for a generation. The congregation was so swelled next Sunday that the minister raised the percentage to eighty-five, and everybody went away delighted. Young and old flocked to St. Osoph’s. Before a month had passed the congregation at the evening service at St. Asaph’s Church was so slender that the offertory, as Mr. Furlong senior himself calculated, was scarcely sufficient to pay the overhead charge of collecting it.

The presence of so many young men sitting in serried files close to the front was the only feature of his congregation that extorted from the Rev. Mr. Dumfarthing something like approval.

“It is joy to me to see,” he remarked to several of his trustees, “that there are in the City so many godly young men, whatever the elders may be.”

But there may have been a secondary cause at work, for among the godly young men of Plutoria Avenue the topic of conversation had not been, “Have you heard the new presbyterian minister?” but, “Have you seen his daughter? You
haven’t
? Well, say!”

For it turned out that the “child” of Dr. Uttermust Dumfarthing, so-called by the trustees, was the kind of child that wears a little round hat, straight from Paris, with an upright feather in it, and a silk dress in four sections, and shoes with high heels that would have broken the heart of John Calvin. Moreover, she had the distinction of being the only person on Plutoria Avenue who was not one whit afraid of the Reverend Uttermust Dumfarthing. She even amused herself, in violation of all rules, by attending evening service at St. Asaph’s, where she sat listening to the Reverend Edward, and feeling that she had never heard anything so sensible in her life.

“I’m simply dying to meet your brother,” she said to Mrs. Tom Overend, otherwise Philippa; “he’s such a complete contrast with father.” She knew no higher form of praise. “Father’s sermons are always so frightfully full of religion.”

And Philippa promised that meet him she should.

But whatever may have been the effect of the presence of Catherine Dumfarthing, there is no doubt the greater part of the changed situation was due to Dr. Dumfarthing himself.

Everything he did was calculated to please. He preached sermons to the rich and told them they were mere cobwebs, and they like it; he preached a special sermon to the poor and
warned them to be mighty careful; he gave a series of weekly talks to working men, and knocked them sideways; and in the Sunday School he gave the children so fierce a talk on charity and the need of giving freely and quickly, that such a stream of pennies and nickels poured into Catherine Dumfarthing’s Sunday School Fund as hadn’t been seen in the church in fifty years.

Nor was Mr. Dumfarthing different in his private walk of life. He was heard to speak openly of the Overend brothers as “men of wrath,” and they were so pleased that they repeated it to half the town. It was the best business advertisement they had had for years.

Dr. Boomer was captivated with the man. “True scholarship,” he murmured, as Dr. Dumfarthing poured undiluted Greek and Hebrew from the pulpit, scorning to translate a word of it. Under Dr. Boomer’s charge the minister was taken over the length and breadth of Plutoria University, and reviled it from the foundations up.

“Our library,” said the president, “two hundred thousand volumes!”

“Aye,” said the minister, “a powerful heap of rubbish, I’ll be bound!”

“The photograph of our last year’s graduating class,” said the president.

“A poor lot, to judge by the faces of them,” said the minister.

“This, Dr. Dumfarthing, is our new radiographic laboratory; Mr. Spiff, our demonstrator, is preparing slides which, I believe, actually show the movements of the atom itself, do they not, Mr. Spiff?”

“Ah,” said the minister, piercing Mr. Spiff from beneath his dark brows, “it will not avail you, young man.”

Dr. Boomer was delighted. “Poor McTeague,” he said – “and by the way, Boyster, I hear that McTeague is trying to walk again; a great error, it shouldn’t be allowed! – poor McTeague knew nothing of science.”

The students themselves shared in the enthusiasm, especially after Dr. Dumfarthing had given them a Sunday afternoon talk in which he shewed that their studies were absolutely futile. As soon as they knew this they went to work with a vigour that put new life into the college.

Meantime the handsome face of the Reverend Edward Fareforth Furlong began to wear a sad and weary look that had never been seen on it before. He watched his congregation drifting from St. Asaph’s to St. Osoph’s and was powerless to prevent it. His sadness reached its climax one bright afternoon in the late summer, when he noticed that even his episcopal blackbirds were leaving his elms and moving westward to the spruce trees of the manse.

He stood looking at them with melancholy on his face.

“Why, Edward,” cried his sister Philippa, as her motor stopped beside him, “how doleful you look! Get into the car and come out into the country for a ride. Let the parish teas look after themselves for to-day.”

Tom, Philippa’s husband, was driving his own car – he was rich enough to be able to – and seated with Philippa in the car was an unknown person, as prettily dressed as Philippa herself. To the rector she was presently introduced as Miss Catherine Something – he didn’t hear the rest of it. Nor did he need to. It was quite plain that her surname, whatever it was, was a very temporary and transitory affair.

So they sped rapidly out the City and away out into the country, mile after mile, through cool, crisp air, and among
woods with the touch of autumn bright already upon them, and with blue sky and great still clouds white overhead. And the afternoon was so beautiful and so bright that as they went along there was no talk about religion at all! nor was there any mention of Mothers’ Auxiliaries, or Girls’ Friendly Societies, nor any discussion of the poor. It was too glorious a day. But they spoke instead of the new dances, and whether they had come to stay, and of such sensible topics as that. Then presently, as they went on still further, Philippa leaned forward and talked to Tom over his shoulder and reminded him that this was the very road to Castel Casteggio, and asked him if he remembered coming up it with her to join the Newberrys ever so long ago. Whatever it was that Tom answered it is not recorded, but it is certain that it took so long in the saying that the Reverend Edward talked in
tête-à-tête
with Catherine for fifteen measured miles, and was unaware that it was more than five minutes. Among other things he said, and she agreed – or she said and he agreed – that for the new dances it was necessary to have always one and the same partner, and to keep that partner all the time. And somehow simple sentiments of that sort, when said direct into a pair of listening blue eyes behind a purple motor veil, acquire an infinite significance.

Then, not much after that, say three or four minutes, they were all of a sudden back in town again, running along Plutoria Avenue, and to the rector’s surprise the motor was stopping outside the manse, and Catherine was saying, “Oh, thank you ever so much, Philippa; it was just heavenly!” which showed that the afternoon had had its religious features after all.

“What!” said the rector’s sister, as they moved off again, “didn’t you know? That’s Catherine Dumfarthing!”

––

When the Rev. Fareforth Furlong arrived home at the rectory he spent an hour or so in the deepest of deep thought in an arm-chair in his study. Nor was it any ordinary parish problem that he was revolving in his mind. He was trying to think out some means by which his sister Juliana might be induced to commit the sin of calling on the daughter of a presbyterian minister.

The thing had to be represented as in some fashion or other an act of self-denial, a form of mortification of the flesh. Otherwise he knew Juliana would never do it. But to call on Miss Catherine Dumfarthing seemed to him such an altogether delightful and unspeakably blissful process that he hardly knew how to approach the topic. So when Juliana presently came home the rector could find no better way of introducing the subject than by putting it on the ground of Philippa’s marriage to Miss Dumfarthing’s father’s trustee’s nephew.