Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich (21 page)

“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 she 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 realising 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 business man.”

“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, and with such further offerings of dynamite, of underpinning and blasting as his conscience prompted.

When the rector received and read the note and saw the figures of the cheque, there arose such a thankfulness in his spirit as he hadn’t felt for months, and he may well have murmured, for the repose of Mr. Newberry’s soul, a prayer not found in the rubric of King James.

All the more cause had he to feel light at heart, for as it chanced it was on that same evening that the Dumfarthings, father and daughter, were to take tea at the rectory. Indeed, a few minutes before six o’clock they might have been seen making their way from the manse to the rectory.

On their way along the avenue the minister took occasion to reprove his daughter for the worldliness of her hat (it was a little trifle from New York that she had bought out of the Sunday School money, – a temporary loan); and a little further on he spoke to her severely about the parasol she carried; and further yet about the strange fashion, specially
condemned by the Old Testament, in which she wore her hair. So Catherine knew in her heart from this that she must be looking her very prettiest, and went into the rectory radiant.

The tea was, of course, an awkward meal at the best. There was an initial difficulty about grace, not easily surmounted. And when the Rev. Mr. Dumfarthing sternly refused tea as a pernicious drink weakening to the system, the Anglican rector was too ignorant of the presbyterian system to know enough to give him Scotch whiskey.

But there were bright spots in the meal as well. The rector was even able to ask Catherine, sideways as a personal question, if she played tennis; and she was able to whisper behind her hand, “Not allowed,” and to make a face in the direction of her father, who was absorbed for the moment in a theological question with Juliana. Indeed, before the conversation became general again the rector had contrived to make a rapid arrangement with Catherine whereby she was to come with him to the Newberrys’ tennis court the day following and learn the game, with or without permission.

So the tea was perhaps a success in its way. And it is noteworthy that Juliana spent the days that followed it in reading Calvin’s “Institutes” (specially loaned to her) and “Dumfarthing on the Certainty of Damnation” (a gift), and in praying for her brother – a task practically without hope. During which same time the rector in white flannels, and Catherine in a white duck skirt and blouse, were flying about on the green grass of the Newberrys’ court, and calling, “love,” “love all,” to one another so gayly and so brazenly that even Mr. Newberry felt that there must be something in it.

But all these things came merely as interludes in the moving currents of greater events; for as the summer faded
into autumn and autumn into winter the anxieties of the trustees of St. Asaph’s began to call for action of some sort.

“Edward,” said the rector’s father on the occasion of their next quarterly discussion, “I cannot conceal from you that the position of things is very serious. Your statements show a falling off in every direction. Your interest is everywhere in arrears; your current account overdrawn to the limit. At this rate, you know, the end is inevitable. Your debenture and bondholders will decide to foreclose; and if they do, you know, there is no power that can stop them. Even with your limited knowledge of business you are probably aware that there is no higher power that can influence or control the holder of a first mortgage.”

“I fear so,” said the Rev. Edward very sadly.

“Do you not think perhaps that some of the shortcoming lies with yourself?” continued Mr. Furlong. “Is it not possible that as a preacher you fail somewhat, do not, as it were, deal sufficiently with fundamental things as others do? You leave untouched the truly vital issues, such things as the creation, death, and, if I may refer to it, the life beyond the grave.”

As a result of which the Reverend Edward preached a series of special sermons on the creation, for which he made a special and arduous preparation in the library of Plutoria University. He said that it had taken a million, possibly a hundred million, years of quite difficult work to accomplish, and that though when we looked at it all was darkness still we could not be far astray if we accepted and held fast to the teachings of Sir Charles Lyell. The book of Genesis, he said, was not to be taken as meaning a day when it said a day, but rather something other than a mere day; and the word “light” meant not exactly light, but possibly some sort
of phosphorescence, and that the use of the word “darkness” was to be understood not as meaning darkness, but to be taken as simply indicating obscurity. And when he had quite finished, the congregation declared the whole sermon to be mere milk and water. It insulted their intelligence, they said. After which, a week later, the Rev. Dr. Dumfarthing took up the same subject, and with the aid of seven plain texts pulverised the rector into fragments.

One notable result of the controversy was that Juliana Furlong refused henceforth to attend her brother’s church and sat, even at morning service, under the minister of St. Osoph’s.

“The sermon was, I fear, a mistake,” said Mr. Furlong senior; “perhaps you had better not dwell too much on such topics. We must look for aid in another direction. In fact, Edward, I may mention to you in confidence that certain of your trustees are already devising ways and means that may help us out of our dilemma.”

Indeed, although the Reverend Edward did not know it, a certain idea, or plan, was already germinating in the minds of the most influential supporters of St. Asaph’s.

Such was the situation of the rival churches of St. Asaph and St. Osoph as the autumn slowly faded into winter: during which time the elm trees on Plutoria Avenue shivered and dropped their leaves and the chauffeurs of the motors first turned blue in their faces and then, when the great snows came, were suddenly converted into liveried coachmen with tall bearskins and whiskers like Russian horseguards, changing back again to blue-nosed chauffeurs the very moment of a thaw. During this time also the congregation of the Reverend Fareforth Furlong was diminishing month by month, and that of the Reverend Uttermust Dumfarthing was so numerous
that they filled up the aisles at the back of the church. Here the worshippers stood and froze, for the minister had abandoned the use of steam heat in St. Osoph’s on the ground that he could find no warrant for it.

During this same period other momentous things were happening, such as that Juliana Furlong was reading, under the immediate guidance of Dr. Dumfarthing, the
History of the Progress of Disruption in the Churches of Scotland
in ten volumes; such also as that Catherine Dumfarthing was wearing a green and gold winter suit with Russian furs and a Balkan hat and a Circassian feather, which cut a wide swath of destruction among the young men on Plutoria Avenue every afternoon as she passed. Moreover by the strongest of coincidences she scarcely ever seemed to come along the snow-covered avenue without meeting the Reverend Edward, – a fact which elicited new exclamations of surprise from them both every day: and by an equally strange coincidence they generally seemed, although coming in different directions, to be bound for the same place; towards which they wandered together with such slow steps and in such oblivion of the passers-by that even the children on the avenue knew by instinct whither they were wandering.

It was noted also that the broken figure of Dr. McTeague had reappeared upon the street, leaning heavily upon a stick and greeting those he met with such a meek and willing affability, as if in apology for his stroke of paralysis, that all who talked with him agreed that McTeague’s mind was a wreck.

“He stood and spoke to me about the children for at least a quarter of an hour,” related one of his former parishioners, “asking after them by name, and whether they were going to school yet and a lot of questions like that. He never used to speak of such things. Poor old McTeague, I’m afraid he is
getting soft in the head.” “I know,” said the person addressed. “His mind is no good. He stopped me the other day to say how sorry he was to hear about my brother’s illness. I could see from the way he spoke that his brain is getting feeble. He’s losing his grip. He was speaking of how kind people had been to him after his accident and there were tears in his eyes. I think he’s getting batty.”

Nor were even these things the most momentous happenings of the period. For as winter slowly changed to early spring it became known that something of great portent was under way. It was rumoured that the trustees of St. Asaph’s Church were putting their heads together. This was striking news. The last time that the head of Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, for example, had been placed side by side with that of Mr. Newberry, there had resulted a merger of four soda-water companies, bringing what was called industrial peace over an area as big as Texas and raising the price of soda by three peaceful cents per bottle. And the last time that Mr. Furlong senior’s head had been laid side by side with those of Mr. Rasselyer-Brown and Mr. Skinyer, they had practically saved the country from the horrors of a coal famine by the simple process of raising the price of nut coal seventy-five cents a ton and thus guaranteeing its abundance.