CHAPTER SEVEN: The Ministrations of the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing

"Well, then, gentlemen, I think we have all agreed upon our man?"

Mr. d.i.c.k Overend looked around the table as he spoke at the managing trustees of St. Osoph's church. They were a.s.sembled 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 a.s.sembly. In the club there were no draughts.

Mr. d.i.c.k 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-cla.s.s man," muttered the trustees, "just what we want."

"I am sure, gentlemen," said Mr. d.i.c.k 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 a.s.sumed 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 "h.e.l.l." 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.dly young men, whatever the elders may be."

But there may have been a secondary cause at work, for among the G.o.dly 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 cla.s.s," 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?"