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

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 liked it; he preached a special sermon to the poor and warned them to be mighty careful; he gave a series of weekly talks to workingmen, 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 showed 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 the 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 today."

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 of 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 forwards 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 Newberry's 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 tete-a-tete 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 armchair 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.

"Juliana," he said, "don't you think that perhaps, on account of Philippa and Tom, you ought—or at least it might be best for you to call on Miss Dumfarthing?"

Juliana turned to her brother as he laid aside her bonnet and her black gloves.

"I've just been there this afternoon," she said.

There was something as near to a blush on her face as her brother had ever seen.

"But she was not there!" he said.

"No," answered Juliana, "but Mr. Dumfarthing was. I stayed and talked some time with him, waiting for her."

The rector gave a sort of whistle, or rather that blowing out of air which is the episcopal symbol for it.

"Didn't you find him pretty solemn?" he said.

"Solemn!" answered his sister. "Surely, Edward, a man in such a calling as his ought to be solemn."

"I don't mean that exactly," said the rector; "I mean—er—hard, bitter, so to speak."

"Edward!" exclaimed Juliana, "how can you speak so. Mr. Dumfarthing hard! Mr. Dumfarthing bitter! Why, Edward, the man is gentleness and kindness itself. I don't think I ever met anyone so full of sympathy, of compassion with suffering."

Juliana's face had flushed It was quite plain that she saw things in the Reverend Uttermust Dumfarthing—as some one woman does in every man—that no one else could see.

The Reverend Edward was abashed. "I wasn't thinking of his character," he said. "I was thinking rather of his doctrines. Wait till you have heard him preach."

Juliana flushed more deeply still. "I heard him last Sunday evening," she said.

The rector was silent, and his sister, as if impelled to speak, went on,

"And I don't see, Edward, how anyone could think him a hard or bigoted man in his creed. He walked home with me to the gate just now, and he was speaking of all the sin in the world, and of how few, how very few people, can be saved, and how many will have to be burned as worthless; and he spoke so beautifully. He regrets it, Edward, regrets it deeply. It is a real grief to him."

On which Juliana, half in anger, withdrew, and her brother the rector sat back in his chair with smiles rippling all over his saintly face. For he had been wondering whether it would be possible, even remotely possible, to get his sister to invite the Dumfarthings to high tea at the rectory some day at six o'clock (evening dinner was out of the question), and now he knew within himself that the thing was as good as done.

While such things as these were happening and about to happen, there were many others of the congregation of St. Asaph's beside the rector to whom the growing situation gave cause for serious perplexities. Indeed, all who were interested in the church, the trustees and the mortgagees and the underlying debenture-holders, were feeling anxious. For some of them underlay the Sunday School, whose scholars' offerings had declined forty per cent, and others underlay the new organ, not yet paid for, while others were lying deeper still beneath the ground site of the church with seven dollars and a half a square foot resting on them.

"I don't like it," said Mr. Lucullus Fyshe to Mr. Newberry (they were both prominent members of the congregation). "I don't like the look of things. I took up a block of Furlong's bonds on his Guild building from what seemed at the time the best of motives. The interest appeared absolutely certain. Now it's a month overdue on the last quarter. I feel alarmed."

"Neither do I like it," said Mr. Newberry, shaking his head; "and I'm sorry for Fareforth Furlong. An excellent fellow, Fyshe, excellent. I keep wondering Sunday after Sunday, if there isn't something I can do to help him out. One might do something further, perhaps, in the way of new buildings or alterations. I have, in fact, offered—by myself, I mean, and without other aid—to dynamite out the front of his church, underpin it, and put him in a Norman gateway; either that, or blast out the back of it where the choir sit, just as he likes. I was thinking about it last Sunday as they were singing the anthem, and realizing what a lot one might do there with a few sticks of dynamite."

"I doubt it," said Mr. Fyshe. "In fact, Newberry, to speak very frankly, I begin to ask myself, Is Furlong the man for the post?"

"Oh, surely," said Mr. Newberry in protest.

"Personally a charming fellow," went on Mr. Fyshe; "but is he, all said and done, quite the man to conduct a church? In the first place, he is not a businessman."

"No," said Mr. Newberry reluctantly, "that I admit."

"Very good. And, secondly, even in the matter of his religion itself, one always feels as if he were too little fixed, too unstable. He simply moves with the times. That, at least, is what people are beginning to say of him, that he is perpetually moving with the times. It doesn't do, Newberry, it doesn't do." Whereupon Mr. Newberry went away troubled and wrote to Fareforth Furlong a confidential letter with a signed cheque in it for the amount of Mr. Fyshe's interest,