Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich by Stephen Leacock (read book .TXT) 📗

as if to test its weight, "is too heavy. The people of today want something lighter, something easier to get hold of. Now if—"

But what Mr. Furlong was about to say was lost forever to the world.

For just at this juncture something occurred calculated to divert not only Mr. Furlong's sentence, but the fortunes and the surplus of St. Asaph's itself. At the very moment when Mr. Furlong was speaking a newspaper delivery man in the street outside handed to the sanctified boy the office copy of the noonday paper. And the boy had no sooner looked at its headlines than he said, "How dreadful!" Being sanctified, he had no stronger form of speech than that. But he handed the paper forthwith to one of the stenographers with hair like the daffodils of Sheba, and when she looked at it she exclaimed, "How awful!" And she knocked at once at the door of the ancient clerk and gave the paper to him; and when he looked at it and saw the headline the ancient clerk murmured, "Ah!" in the gentle tone in which very old people greet the news of catastrophe or sudden death.

But in his turn he opened Mr. Furlong's door and put down the paper, laying his finger on the column for a moment without a word.

Mr. Furlong stopped short in his sentence. "Dear me!" he said as his eyes caught the item of news. "How very dreadful!"

"What is it?" said the rector.

"Dr. McTeague," answered his father. "He has been stricken with paralysis!"

"How shocking!" said the rector, aghast. "But when? I saw him only this morning."

"It has just happened," said his father, following down the column of the newspaper as he spoke, "this morning, at the university, in his classroom, at a lecture. Dear me, how dreadful! I must go and see the president at once."

Mr. Furlong was about to reach for his hat and stick when at that moment the aged clerk knocked at the door.

"Dr. Boomer," he announced in a tone of solemnity suited to the occasion.

Dr. Boomer entered, shook hands in silence and sat down.

"You have heard our sad news, I suppose?" he said. He used the word "our" as between the university president and his honorary treasurer.

"How did it happen?" asked Mr. Furlong.

"Most distressing," said the president. "Dr. McTeague, it seems, had just entered his ten o'clock class (the hour was about ten-twenty) and was about to open his lecture, when one of his students rose in his seat and asked a question. It is a practice," continued Dr. Boomer, "which, I need hardly say, we do not encourage; the young man, I believe, was a newcomer in the philosophy class. At any rate, he asked Dr. McTeague, quite suddenly it appears; how he could reconcile his theory of transcendental immaterialism with a scheme of rigid moral determinism. Dr. McTeague stared for a moment, his mouth, so the class assert, painfully open. The student repeated the question, and poor McTeague fell forward over his desk, paralysed."

"Is he dead?" gasped Mr. Furlong.

"No," said the president. "But we expect his death at any moment. Dr. Slyder, I may say, is with him now and is doing all he can."

"In any case, I suppose, he could hardly recover enough to continue his college duties," said the young rector.

"Out of the question," said the president. "I should not like to state that of itself mere paralysis need incapacitate a professor. Dr. Thrum, our professor of the theory of music, is, as you know, paralysed in his ears, and Mr. Slant, our professor of optics, is paralysed in his right eye. But this is a case of paralysis of the brain. I fear it is incompatible with professorial work."

"Then, I suppose," said Mr. Furlong senior, "we shall have to think of the question of a successor."

They had both been thinking of it for at least three minutes. "We must," said the president. "For the moment I feel too stunned by the sad news to act. I have merely telegraphed to two or three leading colleges for a locum tenens and sent out a few advertisements announcing the chair as vacant. But it will be difficult to replace McTeague. He was a man," added Dr. Boomer, rehearsing in advance, unconsciously, no doubt, his forthcoming oration over Dr. McTeague's death, "of a singular grasp, a breadth of culture, and he was able, as few men are, to instil what I might call a spirit of religion into his teaching. His lectures, indeed, were suffused with moral instruction, and exercised over his students an influence second only to that of the pulpit itself."

He paused.

"Ah yes, the pulpit," said Mr. Furlong, "there indeed you will miss him."

"That," said Dr. Boomer very reverently, "is our real loss, deep, irreparable. I suppose, indeed I am certain, we shall never again see such a man in the pulpit of St. Osoph's. Which reminds me," he added more briskly, "I must ask the newspaper people to let it be known that there will be service as usual the day after tomorrow, and that Dr. McTeague's death will, of course, make no difference—that is to say—I must see the newspaper people at once."

That afternoon all the newspaper editors in the City were busy getting their obituary notices ready for the demise of Dr. McTeague.

"The death of Dr. McTeague," wrote the editor of the Commercial and Financial Undertone, a paper which had almost openly advocated the minister's dismissal for five years back, "comes upon us as an irreparable loss. His place will be difficult, nay, impossible, to fill. Whether as a philosopher or a divine he cannot be replaced."

"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.

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Ministrations of the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing

"Well, 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 Dunfermline, 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 a 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