KMKK >:>:KKKA;vyy i *
>; J'; >, 1^, }v > & fit !«' ia, <« ■» '*'.». l
if. >: >* >i >; 3'. >/ #■( >i i*. D» ., • v» r„ ,
'»■ !i" V i/s/>f ir F F fcjpr ¥■ >' y >»• *. ;?« i?«, > .» =• '
■ y r . ]wr>f >., >, 5'! >;. >. >u«,.«. «i: J- ^ ^ .
.; li ^>- '#: ]?• V >■ I"' >■ 5« i*" >\« :•»«..?>" ^ ■ '
:>f> T<>^^ >i tf ; >. !"■ X >; ;!^' > •)«:¥, ,» ^ , i ?
■» IT! W "jp ■■}!» ■« iJ«> fWt %' !)t' »■ 5«- > >» JW W > ,J8' .* ^ i
41 y iw a»-. isi in 'm % ;>i' %j' ;in 'if' ])r >■ ''■k^ lif< '«< :,» > ,Jf 1>; >-J jK' 'i»t »i >i yd m '»' \> '% if.-^ ■■ ■ "^ ,;»' -^l>\.*i
- >T «» V» .»• lift Jj^i Wi ^^trf !i, 'Jt, , .1 ]||i JW ^ J- j
T' '^ ,'»• "!> ■^^ v= i)iiit >»■ y- |i>« 3. r
' -' >' >•• i^' I*^' If^ 1^* '*»'• I il
<-/. V
^*'°- V\
-'^'' \^ ^'^ <^
"^ .<^'-
,c^^'
-.•i' -^
', -^,. <^^
^- -n^.
^,^'
.s^ %,
.Oo^
o> 'cf-.
^. ,,, \^:^^.v .^ .'X^-
■^^'
OO'
.^^ -^^
.^^^
-S^ '^.
|
-i^'- |
% |
|
|
'-;f^'^v^,x |
||
|
^ ' "' a\ |
I « ,, |
|
|
<^ -N' |
||
|
■^^ v^^ |
||
|
,0 o |
■^^Jii>'-!^
vV -P
■,V '^,
N^'%
.A -Ci
v^^ "^
^<'<^"
x^'
V .^,
,0 0.
^, v-^
,;v*^^"^;/;...>
"i^ <^'^'
ARCADIAN ADVENTURES
WITH THE IDLE RICH
BY STEPHEN LE ACOCK
AUTHOR OF "BEHIND THE BEYOND" "NONSENSE NOVELS," "LITERARY LAPSES," ETC.
NEW YORK : JOHN LANE COMPANY LONDON : JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD TORONTO : BELL & COCKBURN : MCMXIV
Uy^.u Z
COPYBIGHT, I914, BY
THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
JOHN LANE COMPANY \J
NOV -b 1914
:!.A:j882r)2 ^''
<u^~ t-
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. A Little Dinner With Mr. Lucullus
Fyshe 9
II. The Wizard of Finance .... 48
III. The Arrested Philanthropy of Mr. Tom-
linson 77
IV. The Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society of Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown 115
V. The Love Story of Mr. Peter Spillikins . 156
- VI. The Rival Churches of St. Asaph and St.
OsoPH 200
Vn. The Ministrations of the Rev. Utter- must DUMFARTHING 234
Vin. The Great Fight for Clean Government 274
ARCADIAN ADVENTURES WITH THE IDLE RICH
ARCADIAN ADVENTURES WITH THE IDLE RICH
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
BEHIND THE BEYOND NONSENSE NOVELS LITERARY LAPSES
SUNSHINE SKETCHES
Chapter I. — A Little Dinner with Mr, JLucullus Fyshe
THE Mausoleum Club stands on the quietest corner of the best residen- tial street in the City. It is a Gre- cian building of white stone. About It are great elm trees with birds — the most ex- pensive kind of birds — singing in the branches. The street in the softer hours of the morning has an almost reverential quiet. Great mo- tors move drowsily along it, with solitary chauf- feurs returning at 10.30 after conveying the earlier of the millionaires to their down-town offices. The sunlight flickers through the elm trees, illuminating expensive nursemaids wheel- ing valuable children in little perambulators. Some of the children are worth millions and millions. In Europe, no doubt, you may see in the Unter den Linden avenue or the Champs Elysees a little prince or princess go past with a clattering mihtary gutrd to do honour. But that is nothing. It is not half so Impressive, in the real sense, as what you may observe every morning on Plutoria Avenue beside the Mauso- leum Club In the quietest part of the city. 9
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Here you may see a little toddling princess in a rabbit suit who owns fifty distilleries in her own right. There, in a lacquered perambulator, sails past a little hooded head that controls from its cradle an entire New Jersey corporation. The United States attorney-general is suing her as she sits, in a vain attempt to make her dis- solve herself into constituent companies. Near by is a child of four, in a khaki suit, who repre- sents the merger of two trunk line railways. You may meet in the flickered sunlight any number of little princes and princesses far more real than the poor survivals of Europe. Incal- culable infants wave their fifty-dollar ivory rat- tles in an inarticulate greeting to one another. A million dollars of preferred stock laughs merrily in recognition of a majority control go- ing past in a go-cart drawn by an imported nurse. And through it all the sunlight falls through the elm-trees, and the birds sing and the motors hum, so that the whole world as seen from the boulevard of Plutoria Avenue is the very pleasantest place imaginable.
Just below Plutoria Avenue, and parallel with it, the trees die out and the brick and stone of the City begins in earnest. Even from the Avenue you see the tops of the sky-scraping buildings in the big commercial streets, and can hear or almost hear the roar of the elevated railway, earning dividends. And beyond that
10
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
again the City sinks lower, and is choked and crowded with the tangled streets and little houses of the slums.
In fact, if you were to mount to the roof of the Mausoleum Club itself on Plutoria Avenue you could almost see the slums from there. But why should you? And on the other hand, if you nev^er went up on the roof, but only dined inside among the palm-trees, you would never know that the slums existed — which is much better.
There are broad steps leading up to the club, so broad and so agreeably covered with mat- ting that the physical exertion of lifting one- self from one's motor to the door of the club Is reduced to the smallest compass. The richer members are not ashamed to take the steps one at a time, first one foot and then the other; and at tight money periods, when there is a black cloud hanging over the Stock Exchange, you may see each and every one of the mem- bers of the Mausoleum Club dragging himself up the steps after this fashion, his restless eyes filled with the dumb pathos of a man wondering where he can put his hand on half a million dollars.
But at gayer times, when there are gala re- ceptions at the club, its steps are all buried un- der expensive carpet, soft as moss and covered over with a long pavilion of red and white II
Arcadian Adventures tvith the Idle Rich
awning to catch the snowflakes; and beautiful ladies are poured into the club by the motorful. Then indeed it is turned into a veritable Arca- dia; and for a beautiful pastoral scene, such as would have gladdened the heart of a poet who understood the cost of things, commend me to the Mausoleum Club on just such an evening. Its broad corridors and deep recesses are filled with shepherdesses such as you never saw, dressed in beautiful shimmering gowns, and wearing feathers in their hair that droop off sideways at every angle known to trigonometry. And there are shepherds too with broad white waistcoats and little patent leather shoes and heavy faces and congested cheeks. And there is dancing and conversation among the shep- herds and shepherdesses, with such brilliant flashes of wit and repartee about the rise in Wabash and the fall in Cement that the soul of Louis Quatorze would leap to hear it. And later there is supper at little tables, when the shepherds and shepherdesses consume preferred stocks and gold-interest bonds in the shape of chilled champagne and iced asparagus, and great platefuls of dividends and special quar- terly bonuses are carried to and fro in silver dishes by Chinese philosophers dressed up to look like waiters.
But on ordinary days there are no ladies in the club, but only the shepherds. You may see
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
them sitting about in little groups of two and three under the palm-trees drinking whiskey and soda; though of course the more temper- ate among them drink nothing but whiskey and Lithia water, and those who have important business to do in the afternoon limit themselves to whiskey and Radnor, or whiskey and Magi water. There are as many kinds of bubbling, gurgling, mineral waters in the caverns of the Mausoleum Club as ever sparkled from the rocks of Homeric Greece. And when you have once grown used to them, it is as impossible to go back to plain water as it is to live again in the forgotten house in a side street that you in- habited long before you became a member.
Thus the members sit and talk in undertones that float to the ear through the haze of Ha- vana smoke. You may hear the older men ex- plaining that the country is going to absolute ruin, and the younger ones explaining that the country is forging ahead as it never did before; but chiefly they love to talk of great national questions, such as the protective tariff and the need of raising It, the sad decline of the moral- ity of the working man, the spread of syndical- ism and the lack of Christianity In the labour class, and the awful growth of selfishness among the mass of the people.
So they talk, except for two or three that drop off to directors' meetings, till the after- 13
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
noon fades and darkens into evening, and the noiseless Chinese philosophers turn on soft lights here and there among the palm-trees. Presently they dine at white tables glittering with cut glass and green and yellow Rhine wines ; and after dinner they sit again among the palm-trees, half hidden in the blue smoke, still talking of the tariff and the labour class and trying to wash away the memory and the sadness of it in floods of mineral waters. So the evening passes into night, and one by one the great motors come throbbing to the door, and the Mausoleum Club empties and darkens till the last member is borne away and the Ar- cadian day ends in well-earned repose.
"I want you to give me your opinion very, very frankly," said Mr. LucuUus Fyshe on one side of the luncheon table to the Rev. Fareforth Furlong on the other.
"By all means," said Mr. Furlong.
Mr. Fyshe poured out a wineglassful of soda and handed it to the rector to drink.
"Now tell me very truthfully," he said, "is there too much carbon in it?"
"By no means," said Mr. Furlong.
"And — quite frankly — not too much hydro- gen?"
"Oh, decidedly not."
"And you would not say that the percentage 14
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
of sodium bicarbonate was too great for the ordinary taste?"
"I certainly should not," said Mr. Furlong, and in this he spoke the truth.
"Very good then," said Mr. Fyshe, "I shall use it for the Duke of Dulham this afternoon."
He uttered the name of the Duke with that quiet, democratic carelessness which meant that he didn't care whether half a dozen other mem- bers lunching at the club could hear or not. After all, what was a duke to a man who was president of the People's Traction and Subur- ban Co. and the Republican Soda and Siphon Co-operative, and chief director of the People's District Loan and Savings? If a man with a broad basis of popular support like that was proposing to entertain a duke, surely there could be no doubt about his motives? None at all.
Naturally, too, if a man manufactures soda himself, he gets a little over-sensitive about the possibility of his guests noticing the existence of too much carbon in it.
In fact, ever so many of the members of the Mausoleum Club manufacture things, or cause them to be manufactured, or — what is the same thing — merge them when they are manufac- tured. This gives them their peculiar chemical attitude towards their food. One often sees a member suddenly call the head waiter at break- 15
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
fast to tell him that there Is too much ammonia in the bacon; and another one protest at the amount of glucose in the olive oil; and another that there is too high a percentage of nitrogen in the anchovy. A man of distorted imagina- tion might think this tasting of chemicals in the food a sort of nemesis of fate upon the mem- bers. But that would be very foolish, for in every case the head waiter, who is the chief of the Chinese philosophers mentioned above, says that he'll see to it immediately and have the percentage removed. And as for the members themselves, they are about as much ashamed of manufacturing and merging things as the Mar- quis of Salisbury is ashamed of the founders of the Cecil family.
What more natural therefore than that Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, before serving the soda to the Duke, should try it on somebody else? And what better person could be found for this than Mr. Furlong, the saintly young rector of St. Asaph's, who had enjoyed the kind of ex- pensive college education calculated to develop all the faculties. Moreover, a rector of the Anglican Church who has been in the foreign mission field is the kind of person from whom one can find out, more or less incidentally, how one should address and converse with a duke, and whether you call him, "Your Grace," or "His Grace," or just "Grace," or "Duke," or i6
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
what. All of which things would seem to a director of the People's Bank and the presi- dent of the Republican Soda Co. so trivial in importance that he would scorn to ask about them.
So that was why Mr. Fyshe had asked Mr. Furlong to lunch with him, and to dine with him later on in the same day at the Mausoleum Club to meet the Duke of Dulham. And Mr. Furlong, realising that a clergyman must be all things to all men and not avoid a man merely because he is a duke had accepted the invita- tion to lunch, and had promised to come to dinner, even though it meant postponing the Willing Workers' Tango Class of St. Asaph's until the following Friday.
Thus it had come about that Mr. Fyshe was seated at lunch, consuming a cutlet and a pint of Moselle in the plain, downright fashion of a man so democratic that he is practically a revo- lutionary socialist, and doesn't mind saying so; and the young rector of St. Asaph's was sitting opposite to him in a religious ecstasy over a salmi of duck.
"The Duke arrived this morning, did he not?" said Mr. Furlong.
"From New York," said Mr. Fyshe; "he is staying at the Grand Palaver. I sent a telegram through one of our New York directors of the 17
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Traction, and his Grace has very kindly prom- ised to come over here to dine."
"Is he here for pleasure?" asked the rector.
"I understand he is — " Mr. Fyshe was going to say "about to invest a large part of his for- tune in American securities," but he thought bet- ter of it. Even with the clergy it is well to be careful. So he substituted "is very much inter- ested in studying American conditions."
"Does he stay long?" asked Mr. Furlong.
Had Mr. Lucullus Fyshe replied quite truth- fully, he would have said, "Not if I can get his money out of him quickly," but he merely an- swered, "That I don't know."
"He will find much to interest him," went on the rector in a musing tone. "The position of the Anglican Church in America should afford him an object of much consideration. I under- stand," he added, feeling his way, "that his Grace is a man of deep piety."
"Very deep," said Mr. Fyshe.
"And of great philanthropy?"
"Very great."
"And I presume," said the rector, taking a devout sip of the unfinished soda, "that he is a man of immense wealth?"
"I suppose so," answered Mr. Fyshe quite carelessly; "all these fellows are." — Mr. Fyshe generally referred to the British aristocracy as "these fellows" — "Land, you know, feudal
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
estates ; sheer robbery, I call it. How the work- ing class, the proletariat, stand for such tyranny is more than I can see. Mark my words. Fur- long, some day they'll rise and the whole thing will come to a sudden end."
Mr. Fyshe was here launched upon his fa- vourite topic; but he interrupted himself, just for a moment, to speak to the waiter.
"What the devil do you mean," he said, "by serving asparagus half cold?"
"Very sorry, sir," said the waiter, "shall I take it out?"
"Take it out? Of course take it out, and see that you don't serve me stuff of that sort again, or I'll report you."
"Very sorry, sir," said the waiter.
Mr. Fyshe looked at the vanishing waiter with contempt upon his features. "These pam- pered fellows are getting unbearable," he said. "By Gad, if I had my way I'd fire the whole lot of them: lock 'em out, put 'em on the street. That would teach 'em. Yes, Furlong, you'll live to see it that the whole working class will one day rise against the tyranny of the upper classes, and society will be overwhelmed."
But if Mr. Fyshe had realised that at that moment, in the kitchen of the Mausoleum Club, in those sacred precincts themselves, there was a walking delegate of the Waiters' Interna- tional Union leaning against a sideboard, with 19
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
his bowler hat over one corner of his eye, and talking to a little group of the Chinese philos- ophers, he would have known that perhaps the social catastrophe was a little nearer than even he suspected.
"Are you inviting any one else to-night?" asked Mr. Furlong.
"I should have liked to ask your father," said Mr. Fyshe, "but unfortunately he is out of town."
What Mr. Fyshe really meant was, "I am extremely glad not to have to ask your father, whom I would not introduce to the Duke on any account."
Indeed, Mr. Furlong, senior, the father of the rector of St. Asaph's, who was President of the New Amalgamated Hymnal Corpora- tion, and Director of the Hosanna Pipe and Steam Organ, Limited, was entirely the wrong man for Mr. Fyshe's present purpose. In fact, he was reputed to be as smart a man as ever sold a Bible. At this moment he was out of town, busied in New York with the preparation of the plates of his new Hindu Testament (copyright) ; but had he learned that a duke with several millions to Invest was about to visit the city, he would not have left it for the whole of Hindustan.
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
"I suppose you are asking Mr. Boulder," said the rector.
"No," answered Mr. Fyshe very decidedly, dismissing the name absolutely.
Indeed, there was even better reason not to introduce Mr. Boulder to the Duke. Mr. Fyshe had made that sort of mistake once, and never Intended to make It again. It was only a year ago, on the occasion of the visit of young Vis- count FItzThistle to the Mausoleum Club, that Mr. Fyshe had Introduced Mr. Boulder to the Viscount and had suffered grievously thereby. For Mr. Boulder had no sooner met the Vis- count than he Invited him up to his hunting- lodge in Wisconsin, and that was the last thing known of the Investment of the FItzThistle fortune.
This Mr. Boulder of whom Mr. Fyshe spoke might indeed have been seen at that moment at a further table of the lunch room eating a soli- tary meal, an oldish man with a great frame suggesting broken strength, with a white beard and with falling under-eyelids that made him look as If he were just about to cry. His eyes were blue and far away, and his still, mourn- ful face and his great bent shoulders seemed to suggest all the power and mystery of high finance.
Gloom indeed hung over him. For, when one heard him talk of listed stocks and cumu-
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
lative dividends, there was as deep a tone in his quiet voice as if he spoke of eternal punishment and the wages of sin.
Under his great hands a chattering viscount, or a sturdy duke, or a popinjay Italian marquis was as nothing.
Mr. Boulder's methods with titled visitors investing money in America were deep. He never spoke to them of money, not a word. He merely talked of the great American forest — he had been born sixty-five years back, in a lum- ber state — and, when he spoke of primeval trees and the howl of the wolf at night among the pines, there was the stamp of reality about it that held the visitor spellbound; and when he fell to talking of his hunting-lodge far away in the Wisconsin timber, duke, earl, or baron that had ever handled a double-barrelled ex- press rifle listened and was lost.
"I have a little place," Mr. Boulder would say in his deep tones that seemed almost like a sob, "a sort of shooting box, I think you'd call it, up in Wisconsin; just a plain place" — he would add, almost crying — *'made of logs."
"Oh, really," the visitor would interject, "made of logs. By Jove, how interesting!"
All titled people are fascinated at once with logs, and Mr. Boulder knew it — at least sub- consciously.
"Yes, logs," he would continue, still in deep
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
sorrow; "just the plain cedar, not squared, you know, the old original timber; I had them cut right out of the forest."
By this time the visitor's excitement was ob- vious. "And is there game there?" he would ask.
"We have the timber wolf," said Mr. Boul- der, his voice half choking at the sadness of the thing, "and of course the jack wolf and the lynx."
"And are they ferocious?"
"Oh, extremely so — quite uncontrollable."
On which the titled visitor was all excitement to start for Wisconsin at once, even before Mr. Boulder's invitation was put in words.
And when he returned a week later, all tanned and wearing bush-whackers' boots, and covered with wolf bites, his whole available fortune was so completely invested in Mr. Boul- der's securities that you couldn't have shaken twenty-five cents out of him upside down.
Yet the whole thing had been done merely incidentally — round a big fire under the Wis- consin timber, with a dead wolf or two lying in the snow.
So no wonder that Mr. Fyshe did not pro- pose to invite Mr. Boulder to his little dinner. No, indeed. In fact, his one aim was to keep Mr. Boulder and his log house hidden from the Duke.
23
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
And equally no wonder that as soon as Mr. Boulder read of the Duke's arrival in New- York, and saw by the Commercial Echo and Financial Undertone that he might come to the City looking for investments, he telephoned at once to his little place in Wisconsin — which had, of course, a primeval telephone wire run- ning to it — and told his steward to have the place well aired and good fires lighted; and he especially enjoined him to see if any of the shanty men thereabouts could catch a wolf or two, as he might need them.
"Is no one else coming then?" asked the rector.
"Oh yes. President Boomer of the Univer- sity. We shall be a party of four. I thought the Duke might be interested in meeting Boomer. He may care to hear something of the archaeological remains of the continent."
If the Duke did so care, he certainly had a splendid chance in meeting the gigantic Dr. Boomer, the president of Plutoria University.
If he wanted to know anything of the exact distinction between the Mexican Pueblo and the Navajo tribal house, he had his opportunity right now. If he was eager to hear a short talk — say half an hour — on the relative an- tiquity of the Neanderthal skull and the gravel deposits of the Missouri, his chance had come. 24
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
He could learn as much about the stone age and the bronze age, in America, from President Boomer, as he could about the gold age and the age of paper securities from Mr. Fyshe and Mr. Boulder.
So what better man to meet a duke than an archaeological president?
And if the Duke should feel inclined, as a result of his American visit (for Dr. Boomer, who knew everything, understood what the Duke had come for) inclined, let us say, to endow a chair in Primitive Anthropology, or do any useful little thing of the sort, that was only fair business all round; or if he even was wilHng to give a moderate sum towards the general fund of Plutoria University — enough, let us say, to enable the president to dismiss an old professor and hire a new one — that surely was reasonable enough.
The president, therefore, had said yes to Mr. Fyshe's invitation with alacrity, and had taken a look through the list of his more in- competent professors to refresh his memory.
The Duke of Dulham had landed in New York five days before and had looked round eagerly for a field of turnips, but hadn't seen any. He had been driven up Fifth Avenue and had kept his eyes open for potatoes, but there were none. Nor had he seen any shorthorns in
25
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Central Park, nor any Southdowns on Broad- way. For the Duke, of course, like all dukes, was agricultural from his Norfolk jacket to his hobnailed boots.
At his restaurant he had cut a potato in two and sent half of it to the head waiter to know if it was Bermudian. It had all the look of an early Bermudian, but the Duke feared from the shading of it that it might be only a late Trini- dad. And the head waiter sent it to the chef, mistaking it for a complaint, and the chef sent it back to the Duke with a message that it was not a Bermudian but a Prince Edward Island. And the Duke sent his compliments to the chef, and the chef sent his compliments to the Duke. And the Duke was so pleased at learning this that he had a similar potato wrapped up for him to take away, and tipped the head waiter twenty-five cents, feeling that in an extravagant country the only thing to do is to go the people one better. So the Duke carried the potato round for five days in New York and showed It to everybody. But beyond this he got no sign of agriculture out of the place at all. No one who entertained him seemed to know what the beef that they gave him had been fed on; no one, even In what seemed the best society, could talk rationally about preparing a hog for the breakfast table. People seemed to eat cauliflower without distinguishing the Denmark 26
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
variety from the Oldenburg, and few, If any, knew Sileslan bacon even when they tasted it. And when they took the Duke out twenty-five miles into what was called the country, there were still no turnips, but only real estate, and railway embankments, and advertising signs; so that altogether the obvious and visible de- cline of American agriculture In what should have been its leading centre saddened the Duke's heart. Thus the Duke passed four gloomy days. Agricuture vexed him, and still more, of course, the money concerns which had brought him to America.
Money is a troublesome thing. But it has got to be thought about even by those who were not brought up to it. If, on account of money matters, one has been driven to come over to America in the hope of borrowing money, the awkwardness of how to go about it naturally makes one gloomy and preoccupied. Had there been broad fields of turnips to walk in and Hol- steln cattle to punch in the ribs, one might have managed to borrow it in the course of gentle- manly intercourse, as from one cattle-man to another. But in New York, amid piles of masonry and roaring street-traflic and glitter- ing lunches and palatial residences, one simply couldn't do it.
Herein lay the truth about the Duke of Dul- ham's visit and the error of Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, 27
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Mr. Fyshe was thinking that the Duke had come to lend money. In reality he had come to borrow it. In fact, the Duke was reckoning that by putting a second mortgage on Dulham Towers for twenty thousand sterling, and by selling his Scotch shooting and leasing his Irish grazing and sub-letting his Welsh coal rent he could raise altogether a hundred thousand pounds. This, for a duke, is an enormous sum. If he once had it he would be able to pay off the first mortgage on Dulham Towers, buy in the rights of the present tenant of the Scotch shooting and the claim of the present mort- gagee of the Irish grazing, and in fact be just where he started. This is ducal finance, which moves always in a circle.
In other words the Duke was really a poor man — not poor in the American sense, where poverty comes as a sudden blighting stringency, taking the form of an inability to get hold of a quarter of a million dollars, no matter how badly one needs it, and where it passes like a storm-cloud and is gone, but poor in that perma- nent and distressing sense known only to the British aristocracy. The Duke's case, of course, was notorious, and Mr, Fyshe ought to have known of it. The Duke was so poor that the Duchess was compelled to spend three or four months every year at a fashionable hotel on the Riviera simply to save money, and his eldest 28
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
son, the young Marquis of Beldoodle, had to put in most of his time shooting big game in Uganda, with only twenty or twenty-five beat- ers, and with so few carriers and couriers and such a dearth of elephant men and hyena boys that the thing was a perfect scandal. The Duke indeed was so poor that a younger son, simply to add his efforts to those of the rest, was com- pelled to pass his days in mountain climbing in the Himalayas, and the Duke's daughter was obliged to pay long visits to minor German princesses, putting up with all sorts of hardship. And while the ducal family wandered about in this way — cHmbing mountains, and shooting hyenas, and saving money, the Duke's place or seat, Dulham Towers, was practically shut up, with no one in it but servants and housekeepers and gamekeepers and tourists; and the picture galleries, except for artists and visitors and vil- lagers, were closed; and the town house, except for the presence of servants and tradesmen and secretaries, was absolutely shut. But the Duke knew that rigid parsimony of this sort, if kept up for a generation or two, will work wonders, and this sustained him; and the Duchess knew it, and it sustained her; in fact, all the ducal family, knowing that it was only a matter of a generation or two, took their misfortune very cheerfully.
The only thing that bothered the Duke was 29
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
borrowing money. This was necessary from time to time when loans or mortgages fell in, but he hated it. It was beneath him. His an- cestors had often taken money, but had never borrowed it, and the Duke chafed under the necessity. There was something about the process that went against the grain. To sit down in pleasant converse with a man, perhaps almost a gentleman, and then lead up to the subject and take his money from him, seemed to the Duke's mind essentially low. He could have understood knocking a man over the head with a fire shovel and taking his money, but not borrowing it.
So the Duke had come to America, where borrowing is notoriously easy. Any member of the Mausoleum Club, for instance, would bor- row fifty cents to buy a cigar, or fifty thousand dollars to buy a house, or five millions to buy a railroad with complete indifference, and pay it back, too, if he could, and think nothing of it. In fact, ever so many of the Duke's friends were known to have borrowed money in Amer- ica with magical ease, pledging for it their seats or their pictures, or one of their daughters — anything.
So the Duke knew it must be easy. And yet,
incredible as it may seem, he had spent four
days in New York, entertained everywhere, and
made much of, and hadn't borrowed a cent. He
30
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
had been asked to lunch In a Riverside palace, and, fool that he was, had come away without so much as a dollar to show for it. He had been asked to a country house on the Hudson, and, like an idiot — he admitted it himself — hadn't asked his host for as much as his train fare. He had been driven twice round Central Park In a motor and had been taken tamely back to his hotel not a dollar the richer. The thing was childish, and he knew it. But to save his life the Duke didn't know how to be- gin. None of the things that he was able to talk about seemed to have the remotest connec- tion with the subject of money. The Duke was able to converse reasonably well over such top- ics as the approaching downfall of England (they had talked of it at Dulham Towers for sixty years), or over the duty of England to- ward China, or the duty of England to Persia, or its duty to aid the Young Turk Movement, and Its duty to check the Old Servia agitation. The Duke became so interested in these topics and in explaining that while he had never been a Little Englander he had always been a Big : Turk, and that he stood for a Small Bulgaria ' and a Restricted Austria, that he got further and further away from the topic of money, which was what he really wanted to come to; 1 and the Duke rose from his conversations with j a look of such obvious distress on his face that
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
everybody realised that his anxiety about Eng- land was killing him.
And then suddenly light had come. It was on his fourth day in New York that he unex- pectedly ran into the Viscount Belstairs (they had been together as young men in Nigeria, and as middle-aged men in St. Petersburg), and Belstairs, who was in abundant spirits and who was returning to England on the Glori- tania at noon the next day, explained to the Duke that he had just borrowed fifty thousand pounds, on security that wouldn't be worth a halfpenny in England.
And the Duke said with a sigh, "How the deuce do you do it, Belstairs?"
"Do what?"
"Borrow it," said the Duke. "How do you manage to get people to talk about it? Here I am wanting to borrow a hundred thousand, and I'm hanged if I can even find an opening."
At which the Viscount had said, "Pooh, pooh! you don't need any opening. Just bor- row it straight out — ask for it across a dinner table, just as you'd ask for a match; they think nothing of it here."
"Across the dinner table?" repeated the Duke, who was a literal man.
"Certainly," said the Viscount. "Not too soon, you know — say after a second glass of wine. I assure you it's absolutely nothing." i2
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
And it was just at that moment that a tele- gram was handed to the Duke from Mr. Lucul- lus Fyshe, praying him, as he was reported to be visiting the next day the City where the Mausoleum Club stands, to make acquaintance with him by dining at that institution.
And the Duke, being as I say a literal man, decided that just as soon as Mr. Fyshe should give him a second glass of wine, that second glass should cost Mr. Fyshe a hundred thousand pounds sterling.
And oddly enough, at about the same mo- ment, Mr. Fyshe was calculating that provided he could make the Duke drink a second glass of the Mausoleum champagne, that glass would cost the Duke about five million dollars.
So the very morning after that the Duke had arrived on the New York express in the City; and being an ordinary, democratic, commercial sort of place, absorbed in its own affairs, it made no fuss over him whatever. The morn- ing edition of the Pliitopian Citizen simply said, "We understand that the Duke of Dulham ar- rives at the Grand Palaver this morning," after which it traced the Duke's pedigree back to Jock of Ealing in the twelfth century and let the matter go at that; and the noon edition of the People's Advocate merely wrote, "We learn that Duke Dulham is in town. He is a relation
22,
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
of Jack Ealing." But the Commercial Echo and Financial Undertone, appearing at four o'clock, printed in its stock market columns the announcement : "We understand that the Duke of Dulham, who arrives in town to-day, is pro- posing to invest a large sum of money in Ameri- can Industrials."
And of course that announcement reached every member of the Mausoleum Club within twenty minutes.
The Duke of Dulham entered the Mauso- leum Club that evening at exactly seven of the clock. He was a short, thick man with a shaven face, red as a brick, and grizzled hair, and from the look of him he could have got a job at sight in any lumber camp in Wisconsin. He wore a dinner jacket, just like an ordinary per- son, but even without his Norfolk coat and his hobnailed boots there was something in the way in which he walked up the long main hall of the Mausoleum Club that every imported waiter in the place recognised in an instant.
The Duke cast his eye about the club and approved of it. It seemed to him a modest, quiet place, very different from the staring os- tentation that one sees too often in a German hof or an Italian palazzo. He liked it.
Mr. Fyshe and Mr. Furlong were standing in a deep alcove or bay where there was a fire
34
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
and india-rubber trees and pictures with shaded lights and a whiskey-and-soda table. There the Duke joined them. Mr. Fyshe he had met already that afternoon at the Palaver, and he called him "Fyshe" as if he had known him forever; and indeed, after a few minutes he called the rector of St. Asaph's simply "Fur- long," for he had been familiar with the Angli- can clergy in so many parts of the world that he knew that to attribute any peculiar godliness to them, socially, was the worst possible taste.
"By Jove," said the Duke, turning to tap the leaf of a rubber-tree with his finger, "that fel- low's a Nigerian, isn't he?"
"I hardly know," said Mr. Fyshe, "I imagine so"; and he added, "You've been in Nigeria, Duke?"
"Oh, some years ago," said the Duke, "after big game, you know — fine place for it."
"Did you get any?" asked Mr. Fyshe.
"Not much," said the Duke; "a hippo or two."
"Ah," said Mr. Fyshe.
"And, of course, now and then a giro," the Duke went on, and added, "My sister was luck- ier, though; she potted a rhino one day, straight out of a doolie; I call that rather good."
Mr. Fyshe called it that too.
"Ah, now here's a good thing," the Duke went on, looking at a picture. He carried in his 35
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
waist-coat pocket an eyeglass that he used for pictures and for Tamworth hogs, and he put it to his eye with one hand, keeping the other in the left pocket of his jacket; "and this — this is a very good thing,"
"I believe so," said Mr. Fyshe.
"You really have some awfully good things here," continued the Duke. He had seen far too many pictures in too many places ever to speak of "values" or "compositions" or any- thing of that sort. The Duke merely looked at a picture and said, "Now here's a good thing," or "Ah! here now is a very good thing," or, "I say, here's a really good thing."
No one could get past this sort of criticism. The Duke had long since found it bullet-proof.
"They showed me some rather good things In New York," he went on, "but really the things you have here seem to be awfully good things."
Indeed, the Duke was truly pleased with the pictures, for something In their composition, or else In the soft, expensive light that shone on them, enabled him to see in the distant back- ground of each a hundred thousand sterling And that is a very beautiful picture indeed.
"When you come to our side of the water, Fyshe," said the Duke, "I must show you my Botticelli."
Had Mr. Fyshe, who knew nothing of art, 36
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
expressed his real thought, he would have said, "Show me your which ?" But he only answered, "I shall be delighted to see it."
In any case there was no time to say more, for at this moment the portly figure and the great face of Dr. Boomer, president of Plutoria University, loomed upon them. And with him came a great burst of conversation that blew all previous topics into fragments. He was in- troduced to the Duke, and shook hands with Mr. Furlong, and talked to both of them, and named the kind of cocktail that he wanted, all in one breath, and in the very next he was ask- ing the Duke about the Babylonian hieroglyphic bricks that his grandfather, the thirteenth Duke, had brought home from the Euphrates, and which every archaeologist knew were pre- served in the Duke's library at Dulham Towers. And though the Duke hadn't known about the bricks himself, he assured Dr. Boomer that his grandfather had collected some really good things, quite remarkable.
And the Duke, having met a man who knew about his grandfather, felt in his own element. In fact, he was so delighted with Dr. Boomer and the Nigerian rubber-tree and the shaded pictures and thq charm of the whole place and the certainty that half a million dollars was easily findable in it, that he put his eye-glass back in his pocket and said, 37
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
"A charming club you have here, really most charming."
"Yes," said Mr. Fyshe, in a casual tone, "a comfortable place, we like to think."
But if he could have seen what was happen- ing below in the kitchens of the Mausoleum Club, Mr. Fyshe would have realised that just then it was turning into a most uncomfortable place.
For the walking delegate with his hat on side- ways, who had haunted it all day, was busy now among the assembled Chinese philosophers, writing down names and distributing strikers' cards of the International Union and assuring them that the "boys" of the Grand Palaver had all walked out at seven, and that all the "boys" of the Commercial and the Union and of every restaurant in town were out an hour ago.
And the philosophers were taking their cards and hanging up their waiters' coats and putting on shabby jackets and bowler hats, worn side- ways, and changing themselves by a wonderful transformation from respectable Chinese to slouching loafers of the lowest type.
But Mr. Fyshe, being in an alcove and not in the kitchens, saw nothing of these things. Not even when the head waiter, shaking with ap- prehension, appeared with cocktails made by himselt, in glasses that he himself had had to wipe, did Mr. Fyshe, absorbed in the easy 38
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
urbanity of the Duke, notice that anything was amiss.
Neither did his guests. For Dr. Boomer, having discovered that the Duke had visited Nigeria, was asking him his opinion of the famous Bimbaweh remains of the lower Niger. The Duke confessed that he really hadn't no- ticed them, and the Doctor assured him that Strabo had indubitably mentioned them (he would show the Duke the very passage), and that they apparently lay, if his memory served him, about half-way between Oohat and Ohat; whether above Oohat and below Ohat or above Ohat and below Oohat he would not care to say for a certainty; for that the Duke must wait till the president had time to consult his hbrary.
And the Duke was fascinated forthwith with the president's knowledge of Nigerian geog- raphy, and explained that he had once actually descended from below Tlm.buctoo to Oohat in a doolie manned only by four swats.
So presently, having drunk the cocktails, the party moved solemnly in a body from the al- cove towards the private dining-room upstairs, still busily talking of the Bimbaweh remains, and the swats, and whether the doolie was, or was not, the original goatskin boat of the book of Genesis.
And when they entered the private dining- room with its snow-white table and cut glass 39
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
and flowers (as arranged by a retreating phil- osopher now heading towards the Gaiety The- atre with his hat over his eyes) , the Duke again exclaimed,
"Really, you have a most comfortable club — delightful."
So they sat down to dinner, over which Mr. Furlong offered up a grace as short as any that are known even to the Anglican clergy. And the head waiter, now in deep distress — for he had been sending out telephone messages in vain to the Grand Palaver and the Continental, like the captain of a sinking ship — served oys- ters that he had opened himself and poured Rhine wine with a trembling hand. For he knew that unless by magic a new chef and a waiter or two could be got from the Palaver, all hope was lost.
But the guests still knew nothing of his fears. Dr. Boomer was eating his oysters as a Niger- ian hippo might eat up the crew of a doolie, in great mouthfuls, and commenting as he did so upon the luxuriousness of modern life.
And in the pause that followed the oysters he illustrated foi the Duke with two pieces of bread the essential difference in structure be- tween the Mexican pueblo and the tribal house of the Navajos, and lest the Duke should con- found either or both of them with the adobe 40
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
hut of the Bimbaweh tribes he showed the dif- ference at once with a couple of olives.
By this time, of course, the delay in the ser- vice was getting noticeable. Mr. Fyshe was directing angry glances towards the door, look- ing for the reappearance of the waiter, and growHng an apology to his guests. But the president waved the apology aside.
"In my college days," he said, "I should have considered a plate of oysters an ample meal. I should have asked for nothing more. We eat," he said, "too much."
This, of course, started Mr. Fyshe on his favourite topic, "Luxury!" he exclaimed, "I should think so! It is the curse of the age. The appalling growth of luxury, the piling up of money, the ease with which huge fortunes are made" (Good! thought the Duke, here we are comJng to it), "these are the things that are going to ruin us. Mark my words, the whole thing is bound to end in a tremendous crash. I don't mind telling you, Duke — my friends here, I am sure, know it already — that I am more or less a revolutionary socialist. I am absolutely convinced, sir, that our modern civilisation will end in a great social catastrophe. Mark what I say" — and here Mr. Fyshe be- came exceedingly impressive — "a great social catastrophe. Some of us may not live to see it, 41
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
perhaps; but you, for Instance, Furlong, are a younger man; you certainly will."
But here Mr. Fyshe was understating the case. They were all going to live to see it, right on the spot.
For it was just at this moment, when Mr. Fyshe was talking of the social catastrophe and explaining with flashing eyes that it was bound to come, that it came; and when it came it lit, of all places in the world, right there in the private dining-room of the Mausoleum Club.
For the gloomy head waiter re-entered and leaned over the back of Mr, Fyshe's chair and whispered to him.
"Eh? what?" said Mr. Fyshe.
The head waiter, his features stricken with Inward agony, whispered again. »
"The infernal, damn scoundrels!" said Mr. Fyshe, starting back in his chair. "On strike: In this club! It's an outrage!"
"I'm very sorry, sir. I didn't like to tell you, sir. I'd hoped I might have got help from the outside, but it seems, sir, the hotels are all the same way."
"Do you mean to say," said Mr. Fyshe, speaking very slowly, "that there is no dinner?"
"I'm sorry, sir," moaned the waiter. "It appears the chef hadn't even cooked It. Be- yond what's on the table, sir, there's nothing."
The social catastrophe had come. 42
Arcadian Adventures tcith the Idle Rich
Mr. Fyshe sat silent with his fist clenched. Dr. Boomer, with his great face transfixed, stared at the empty oyster-shells, thinking per- haps of his college days. The Duke, with his hundred thousand dashed from his lips in the second cup of champagne that was never served, thought of his politeness first and murmured something about taking them to his hotel.
But there is no need to follow the unhappy details of the unended dinner. Mr. Fyshe's one idea was to be gone: he was too true an artist to think that finance could be carried on over the table-cloth of a second-rate restaurant, or on an empty stomach in a deserted club. The thing must be done over again; he must wait his time and begin anew.
And so it came about that the little dinner- party of Mr. Lucullus Fyshe dissolved itself into its constituent elements, like broken pieces of society in the great cataclysm portrayed by Mr. Fyshe himself.
The Duke was bowled home in a snorting motor to the brilliant rotunda of the Grand Palaver, itself waiterless and supperless.
The rector of St. Asaph's wandered off home to his rectory, musing upon the contents of its pantry.
And Mr. Fyshe and the gigantic Doctor walked side by side homewards along Plutoria Avenue, beneath the elm trees. 43
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Nor had they gone any great distance before Dr. Boomer fell to talking of the Duke.
"A charming man," he said, "delightful. I feel extremely sorry for him."
"No worse off, I presume, than any of the rest of us," growled Mr. Fyshe, who was feel- ing in the sourest of democratic moods; "a man doesn't need to be a duke to have a stomach."
"Oh, pooh, pooh!" said the president, wav- ing the topic aside with his hand in the air; "I don't refer to that. Oh, not at all. I was thinking of his financial position — an ancient family like the Dulhams; it seems too bad al- together."
For, of course, to an achseologist like Dr. Boomer an intimate acquaintance with the pedi- gree and fortunes of the greater ducal families from Jock of Ealing downwards was nothing. It went without saying. As beside the Neander- thal skull and the Bimbaweh ruins It didn't count.
Mr. Fyshe stopped absolutely still in his tracks. "His financial position?" he questioned, quick as a lynx.
"Certainly," said Dr. Boomer; "I had taken it for granted that you knew. The Dulham family are practically ruined. The Duke, I imagine, is under the necessity of mortgaging his estates; indeed, I should suppose he Is here in America to raise money." 44
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Mr. Fyshe was a man of lightning action. Any man accustomed to the Stock Exchange learns to think quickly.
"One moment!" he cried; "I see we are right at your door. May I just run in and use your telephone? I want to call up Boulder for a moment."
Two minutes later Mr. Fyshe was saying into the telephone, "Oh, is that you, Boulder? I was looking for you in vain to-day — wanted you to meet the Duke of Dulham, who came in quite unexpectedly from New York; felt sure you'd like to meet him. Wanted you at the club for dinner, and now it turns out that the club's all upset — waiters' strike or some such rascality — and the Palaver, so I hear, is in the same fix. Could you possibly "
Here Mr. Fyshe paused, listening a moment and then went on, "Yes, yes; an excellent idea — most kind of you. Pray do send your motor to the hotel and give the Duke a bite of dinner. No, I won't join you, thanks. Most kind. Good-night "
And within a few minutes more the motor of Mr. Boulder was rolling down from Plutoria Avenue to the Grand Palaver Hotel.
What passed between Mr. Boulder and the Duke that evening is not known. That they must have proved congenial company to one 45
Arcadian Adventures tvith the Idle Rich
another there is no doubt. In fact, It would seem that, dissimilar as they were in many ways, they found a common bond of interest in sport. And it is quite likely that Mr. Boulder may have mentioned that he had a hunting- lodge — what the Duke would call a shooting- box — in Wisconsin woods, and that it was made of logs, rough cedar logs not squared, and that the timber wolves and others which surrounded it were of a ferocity without parallel.
Those who know the Duke best could meas- ure the effect of that upon his temperament.
At any rate, it is certain that Mr. Lucullus Fyshe at his breakfast-table next morning chuckled with suppressed joy to read in the Pliitopian Citizen the item :
"We learn that the Duke of Dulham, who has been paying a brief visit to the City, leaves this morning with Mr. Asmodeus Boulder for the Wisconsin woods. We understand that Mr. Boulder intends to show his guest, v/ho is an ardent sportsman, something of the Ameri- can wolf."
And so the Duke went whirling westwards and northwards with Mr. Boulder in the draw- ing-room end of a Pullman car, that was all lit- tered up with double-barrelled express rifles and leather game bags, and lynx catchers and wolf traps and Heaven knows what. And the 46
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Duke had on his very roughest sporting suit, made, apparently, of alligator hide; and as he sat there with a rifle across his knees, while the train swept onward through open fields and broken woods, the real country at last, towards the Wisconsin forest, there v/as such a light of genial happiness in his face that had not been seen there since he had been marooned in the mud jungles of Upper Burmah.
And opposite, Mr. Boulder looked at him with fixed, silent eyes, and murmured from time to time some renewed information of the feroc- ity of the timber wolf.
But of wolves other than the timber wolf, and fiercer still, into whose hands the Duke might fall in America, he spoke never a word.
Nor is it known in the record what happened in Wisconsin, and to the Mausoleum Club the Duke and his visit remained only as a passing and a pleasant memory.
47
Chapter II, — The Wizard of Finance
DOWN in the City itself, just below the residential street where the Mauso- leum Club is situated, there stands overlooking Central Square the Grand Palaver Hotel. It is, in truth, at no great distance from the club, not half a minute in one's motor. In fact, one could almost walk it.
But in Central Square the quiet of Plutoria Avenue is exchanged for another atmosphere. There are fountains that splash unendingly and mingle their music with the sound of the motor- horns and the clatter of the cabs. There are real trees and little green benches, with people reading yesterday's newspaper, and grass cut into plots among the asphalt. There is at one end a statue of the first governor of the state, life-size, cut in stone; and at the other a statue of the last, ever so much larger than life, cast in bronze. And all the people who pass by pause and look at this statue and point at it with walking sticks, because it is of extraordinary interest; in fact, it is an example of the new electro-chemical process of casting by which you a8
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
can cast a state governor any size you like, no matter what you start from. Those who know about such things explain what an interesting contrast the two statues are; for in the case of the governor of a hundred years ago one had to start from plain, rough material and work pa- tiently for years to get the effect, whereas now the material doesn't matter at all, and with any sort of scrap, treated in the gas furnace under tremendous pressure, one may make a figure of colossal size like the one in Central Square.
So naturally Central Square with Its trees and Its fountains and its statues is one of the places of chief Interest In the City. But espe- cially because there stands along one side of It the vast pile of the Grand Palaver Hotel. It rises fifteen stories high and fills all one side of the square. It has, overlooking the trees in the square, twelve hundred rooms with three thousand windows, and it would have held all George Washington's army. Even people In other cities who have never seen it know it well from its advertising; "the most homelike hotel In America," so it is labelled in all the maga- zines, the expensive ones, on the continent. In fact, the aim of the company that owns the Grand Palaver — and they do not attempt to conceal it — is to make the place as much a home as possible. Therein lies its charm. It is a home. You realise that when you look up at 49
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
the Grand Palaver from the square at night when the twelve hundred guests have turned on the lights of the three thousand windows. You realise it at theatre time when the great strings of motors come sweeping to the doors of the Palaver, to carry the twelve hundred guests to twelve hundred seats In the theatres at four dollars a seat. But most of all do you appreciate the character of the Grand Palaver when you step into Its rotunda. Aladdin's enchanted palace was nothing to It. It has a vast ceiling with a hundred glittering lights, and within It night and day Is a surging crowd that is never still and a babel of voices that Is never hushed, and over all there hangs an enchanted cloud of thin blue tobacco smoke such as might enshroud the conjured vision of a magician of Bagdad or Damascus.
In and through the rotunda there are palm- trees to rest the eye and rubber-trees in boxes to soothe the mind, and there are great leather lounges and deep arm-chairs, and here and there huge brass ash-bowls as big as Etruscan tear-jugs. Along one side is a counter with grated wickets like a bank, and behind it are five clerks with flattened hair and tall collars, dressed In long black frock-coats all day like members of a legislature. They have great books in front of them In which they study un- ceasingly, and at their lightest thought they so
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
strike a bell with the open palm of their hand, and at the sound of it a page boy in a monkey suit, with G. P. stamped all over him in brass, bounds to the desk and off again, shouting a call into the unheeding crowd vociferously. The sound of it fills for a moment the great space of the rotunda ; it echoes down the corridors to the side; it floats, softly melodious, through the palm-trees of the ladies' palm room; it is heard, fainter and fainter, in the distant grill, and in the depths of the barber shop below the level of the street the barber arrests a moment the drowsy hum of his shampoo brushes to catch the sound — as might a miner in the sunken gal- leries of a coastal mine cease In his toil a mo- ment to hear the distant murmur of the sea.
And the clerks call for the pages, the pages call for the guests, and the guests call for the porters, the bells clang, the elevators rattle, till home Itself was never half so home-like.
"A call for Mr. Tomllnson ! A call for Mr. Tomhnson 1"
So went the sound, echoing through the ro- tunda.
And as the page boy found him and handed him on a salver a telegram to read, the eyes of the crowd about him turned for a moment to look upon the figure of Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance.
51
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
There he stood in his wide-awake hat and his long black coat, his shoulders slightly bent with his fifty-eight years. Anyone who had known him in the olden days on his bush farm beside Tomlinson's Creek in the country of the Great Lakes would have recognised him in a moment. There was still on his face that strange, puzzled look that it habitually wore, only now, of course, the financial papers were calling it "unfathom- able." There was a certain way in which his eye roved to and fro inquiringly that might have looked like perplexity, were it not that the Financial Undertone had recognised it as the "searching look of a captain of industry." One might have thought that for all the good- ness in it there was something simple in his face, were it not that the Commercial and Pictorial Review had called the face "inscrutable," and had proved it so with an illustration that left no doubt of the matter. Indeed, the face of Tomlinson of Tomlinson's Creek, now Tom- linson the Wizard of Finance, was not com- monly spoken of as a face by the paragraphers of the Saturday magazine sections, but was more usually referred to as a mask; and it would appear that Napoleon the First had had one also. The Saturday editors were never tired of describing the strange, impressive per- sonality of Tomlinson, the great dominating character of the newest and highest finance.
52
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
From the moment when the interim prospectus of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated had broken like a tidal wave over Stock Exchange circles, the picture of Tomlinson, the sleeping share- holder of uncomputed millions, had filled the im- agination of every dreamer in a nation of poets.
They all described him. And when each had finished he began again.
"The face," so wrote the editor of the "Our Own Men" section of Ourselves Monthly, "is that of a typical American captain of finance, hard, yet with a certain softness, broad but with a certain length, ductile but not without its own firmness."
"The mouth," so wrote the editor of the "Success" column of Brains, "is strong but pli- able, the jaw firm and yet movable, while there is something in the set of the ear that suggests the swift, eager mind of the born leader of men."
So from state to state ran the portrait of Tomlinson of Tomlinson's Creek, drawn by people who had never seen him; so did it reach out and cross the ocean, till the French journals inserted a picture which they used for such oc- casions, and called it Monsieur Tomlinson, nouveau capitaine de la haute finance en Amerique; and the German weeklies, inserting also a suitable picture from their stock, marked it Herr Tomlinson, Amerikanischer Industrte-
53
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
und Finanzcapitdn. Thus did Tomlinson float from Tomlinson's Creek beside Lake Erie to the very banks of the Danube and the Drave.
Some writers grew lyric about him. What visions, they asked, could one but read them, must lie behind the quiet, dreaming eyes of that inscrutable face?
They might have read them easily enough, had they but had the key. Anyone who looked upon Tomlinson as he stood there in the roar and clatter of the great rotunda of the Grand Palaver with the telegram in his hand, fumbhng at the wrong end to open it, might have read the visions of the master-mind had he but known their nature. They were simple enough. For the visions in the mind of Tomlinson, Wizard of Finance, were for the most part those of a wind-swept hillside farm beside Lake Erie, where Tomlinson's Creek runs down to the low edge of the lake, and where the off-shore wind ripples the rushes of the shallow water: that, and the vision of a frame house, and the snake fences of the fourth concession road where it falls to the lakeside. And if the eyes of the man are dreamy and abstracted, it is because there lies over the vision of this vanished farm an infinite regret, greater in its compass than all the shares the Erie Auriferous Consolidated has ever thrown upon the market.
54
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
When Tomllnson had opened the telegram he stood with it for a moment in his hand, look- ing the boy full in the face. His look had in it that peculiar far-away quality that the news- papers were calling "Napoleonic abstraction." In reality he was wondering whether to give the boy twenty-five cents or fifty.
The message that he had just read was worded, "Morning quotations show preferred A. G. falling rapidly recommend instant sale no confidence send instructions."
The Wizard of Finance took from his pocket a pencil (it was a carpenter's pencil) and wrote across the face of the message,
"Buy me quite a bit more of the same yours truly."
This he gave to the boy. "Take it over to him," he said, pointing to the telegraph corner of the rotunda. Then after another pause he mumbled, "Here, sonny," and gave the boy a dollar.
With that he turned to walk towards the ele- vator, and all the people about him who had watched the signing of the message knew that some big financial deal was going through — a coup, in fact, they called it.
The elevator took the Wizard to the second
floor. As he went up he felt in his pocket and
gripped a quarter, then changed his mind and
felt for a fifty-cent piece, and finally gave them
55
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
both to the elevator boy, after which he walked along the corridor till he reached the corner suite of rooms, a palace in itself, for which he was paying a thousand dollars a month ever since the Erie Auriferous Consolidated Com- pany had begun tearing up the bed of Tomlin- son's Creek in Cahoga County with its hy- draulic dredges.
"Well, mother," he said as he entered.
There was a woman seated near the window, a woman with a plain, homely face such as they wear in the farm kitchens of Cahoga County, and a set of fashionable clothes upon her such as they sell to the ladies of Plutoria Avenue.
This was 'mother,' the wife of the Wizard of Finance and eight years younger than him- self. And she too was in the papers and the public eye; and whatsoever the shops had fresh from Paris, at fabulous prices, that they sold to mother. They had put a Balkan hat upon her with an upright feather, and they had hung gold chains on her, and everything that was most expensive they had hung and tied on mother. You might see her emerging any morn- ing from the Grand Palaver in her beetle-back jacket and her Balkan hat, a figure of infinite pathos. And whatever she wore, the lady ed- itors of Spring Notes and Causcrie dii Boudoir wrote it out in French, and one paper had called her a belle chatelaine, and another had spoken 56
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
of her as a grande dame, which the Tomllnsons thought must be a misprint.
But in any case, for Tomllnson the Wizard of Finance it was a great relief to have as his wife a woman like mother, because he knew that she had taught school in Cahoga County and could hold her own in the city with any of them.
So mother spent her time sitting in her beetle jacket in the thousand-dollar suite, reading new novels in brilliant paper covers. And the Wiz- ard on his trips up and down to the rotunda brought her the very best, the ones that cost a dollar fifty, because he knew that out home she had only been able to read books like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walter Scott, that were only worth ten cents.
"How's Fred?" said the Wizard, laying aside his hat, and looking towards the closed door of an inner room. "Is he better?"
"Some," said mother. "He's dressed, but he's lying down."
Fred was the son of the Wizard and mother. In the inner room he lay on a sofa, a great hulking boy of seventeen in a flowered dressing- gown, fancying himself ill. There was a packet of cigarettes and a box of chocolates on a chair beside him, and he had the blind drawn and his eyes half-closed to impress himself. 57
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Yet this was the same boy that less than a year ago on Tomlinson's Creek had worn a rough store suit and set his sturdy shoulders to the buck-saw. At present Fortune was busy taking from him the golden gifts which the fairies of Cahoga County, Lake Erie, had laid in his cradle seventeen years ago.
The Wizard tip-toed into the inner room, and from the open door his listening wife could hear the voice of the boy saying, in a tone as of one distraught with suffering:
"Is there any more of that jelly?"
"Could he have any, do you suppose?" asked Tomlinson coming back.
"It's all right," said mother, "if it will sit on his stomach."
For this, in the dietetics of Cahoga County, is the sole test. All those things can be eaten which will sit on the stomach. Anything that won't sit there is not eatable.
"Do you suppose I could get them to get any?" questioned Tomlinson. "Would it be all right to telephone down to the office, or do you think it would be better to ring?"
"Perhaps," said his wife, "it would be better to look out into the hall and see if there isn't someone round that would tell them."
This was the kind of problem with which Tomlinson and his wife, in their thousand-dol- lar suite in the Grand Palaver, grappled all S8
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
day. And when presently a tall waiter in dress- clothes appeared, and said, "Jelly? Yes, sir, immediately, sir; would you like, sir. Mara- schino, sir, or Portovino, sir?" Tomlinson gazed at him gloomily, wondering if he would take five dollars.
"What does the doctor say is wrong with Fred?" asked Tomlinson, when the waiter had gone.
"He don't just say," said mother; "he said he must keep very quiet. He looked in this morning for a minute or two, and he said he'd look in later in the day again. But he said to keep Fred very quiet."
Exactly! In other words Fred had pretty much the same complaint as the rest of Dr. Slyder's patients on Plutoria Avenue, and was to be treated in the same way. Dr. Slyder, who was the most fashionable practitioner in the City, spent his entire time moving to and fro in an almost noiseless motor earnestly ad- vising people to keep quiet. "You must keep very quiet for a little while," he would say with a sigh, as he sat beside a sick-bed. As he drew on his gloves in the hall below he would shake his head very impressively and say, "You must keep him very quiet," and so pass out, quite soundlessly. By this means Dr. Slyder often succeeded in keeping people quiet for weeks. It was all the medicine that he knew. But it 59
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
was enough. And as his patients always got well — there being nothing wrong with them — his reputation was immense.
Very naturally the Wizard and his wife were impressed with him. They had never seen such therapeutics in Cahoga County, where the prac- tice of medicine is carried on with forceps, pumps, squirts, splints, and other instruments of violence.
The waiter had hardly gone when a boy ap- peared at the door. This time he presented to Tomlinson not one telegram but a little bun- dle of them.
The Wizard read them with a lengthening face. The first ran something like this, "Con- gratulate you on your daring market turned instantly" ; and the next, "Your opinion justi- fied market rose have sold at 20 points profit"; and a third, "Your forecast entirely correct C. P. rose at once send further instructions."
These and similar messages were from brok- ers' offices, and all of them were in the same tone; one told him that C. P. was up, and an- other T. G. P. had passed 129, and another that T. C. R. R, had risen ten — all of which things were imputed to the wonderful sagacity of Tomlinson. Whereas if they had told him that X. Y. Z. had risen to the moon he would have been just as wise as to what it meant.
"Well," said the wife of the Wizard as her 60
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
husband finished looking through the reports, "how are things this morning? Are they any- better ?"
"No," said Tomlinson, and he sighed as he said it; "this is the worst day yet. It's just been a shower of telegrams, and mostly all the same. I can't do the figuring of it lilce you can, but I reckon I must have made another hundred thou- sand dollars since yesterday."
"You don't say so!" said mother, and they looked at one another gloomily.
"And half a million last week, wasn't it?" said Tomlinson as he sank into a chair. "I'm afraid, mother," he continued, "it's no good. We don't know how. We weren't brought up to it."
All of which meant that if the editor of the Monetary Afternoon or Financial Sunday had been able to know what was happening with the two wizards, he could have written up a news story calculated to electrify all America.
For the truth was that Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, was attempting to carry out a coup greater than any as yet attributed to him by the Press. He was trying to lose his money. That, in the sickness of his soul, crushed by the Grand Palaver, overwhelmed with the burden of high finance, had become his aim, to be done with it, to get rid of his whole fortune.
But if you own a fortune that is computed 6i
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
anywhere from fifty millions up, with no limit at the top, if you own one-half of all the pre- ferred stock of an Erie Auriferous Consoli- dated that is digging gold in hydraulic bucket- fuls from a quarter of a mile of river bed, the task of losing it is no easy matter.
There are men, no doubt, versed in finance, who might succeed in doing it. But they have a training that Tomlinson lacked. Invest it as he would in the worst securities that offered, the most rickety of stock, the most fraudulent bonds, back it came to him. When he threw a handful away, back came two in its place. And at every new coup the crowd applauded the incomparable daring, the unparalleled presci- ence of the Wizard.
Like the touch of Midas, his hand turned everything to gold.
"Mother," he repeated, "it's no use. It's like this here Destiny, as the books call it."
The great fortune that Tomlinson, the Wiz- ard of Finance, was trying his best to lose had come to him with wonderful suddenness. As yet it was hardly six months old. As to how it had originated, there were all sorts of stories afloat in the weekly illustrated press. They agreed mostly on the general basis that Tom- linson had made his vast fortune by his own indomitable pluck and dogged industry. Some 62
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
said that he had been at one time a mere farm hand who, by sheer doggedness, had fought his way from the hay-mow to the control of the produce market of seventeen states. Others had it that he had been a lumber-jaclc who, by sheer doggedness, had got possession of the whole lumber forest of the Lake district. Oth- ers said that he had been a miner in a Lake Superior copper mine who had, by the dogged- ness of his character, got a practical monopoly of the copper supply. These Saturday articles, at any rate, made the Saturday reader rigid with sympathetic doggedness himself, which was all that the editor (who was doggedly try- ing to make the paper pay) wanted to effect.
But in reality the making of Tomlinson's for- tune was very simple. The recipe for it is open to anyone. It is only necessary to own a hillside farm beside Lake Erie where the uncleared bush and the broken fields go straggling down to the lake, and to have running through it a creek, such as that called Tomlinson's, brawling among the stones and willows, and to discover In the bed of a creek — a gold mine.
That is all.
Nor is It necessary in these well-ordered days to discover the gold for one's self. One might have lived a lifetime on the farm, as Tomlin- son's father had, and never discover it for one's self. For that Indeed the best medium of des- 63
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
tiny is a geologist, let us say the senior professor of geology at Plutoria University.
That was how it happened.
The senior professor, so it chanced, was spending his vacation near by on the shores of the lake, and his time was mostly passed — for how better can a man spend a month of pleas- ure?— in looking for outcroppings of Devonian rock of the post-tertiary period. For which purpose he carried a vacation hammer in his pocket, and made from time to time a note or two as he went along, or filled his pockets with the chippings of vacation rocks.
So it chanced that he came to Tomlinson's Creek at the very point where a great slab of Devonian rock bursts through the clay of the bank. When the senior professor of geology saw it and noticed a stripe like a mark on a tiger's back — a fault he called it — that ran over the face of the block, he was at it in an instant, beating off fragments with his little hammer.
Tomlinson and his boy Fred were logging in the underbrush near by with a long chain and yoke of oxen, but the geologist was so excited that he did not see them till the sound of his eager hammer had brought them to his side. They took him up to the frame house in the clearing, where the chatelaine was hoeing a potato patch with a man's hat on her head, and 64
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
they gave him buttermilk and soda cakes, but his hand shook so that he could hardly eat them. The geologist left Cahoga station that night for the City with a newspaper full of specimens inside his suit-case, and he knew that if any person or persons would put up money enough to tear that block of rock away and follow the fissure down, there would be found there some- thing to astonish humanity, geologists and all.
After that point in the launching of a gold mine the rest is easy. Generous, warm-hearted men, interested in geology, were soon found. There was no stint of money. The great rock was torn sideways from its place, and from be- neath it the crumbled, glittering rock-dust that sparkled in the sun was sent in little boxes to the testing laboratories of Plutoria University. There the senior professor of geology had sat up with it far into the night in a darkened laboratory, with little blue flames playing under- neath crucibles, as in a magician's cavern, and with the door locked. And as each sample that he tested was set aside and tied in a cardboard box by itself, he labelled it "aur. p. 75," and the pen shook in his hand as he marked it. For to professors of geology those symbols mean "this is seventy-five per cent pure gold." So it was no wonder that the senior professor of geology working far into the night among the 65
Arcadian Adventures with, the Idle Rich
blue flames shook with excitement; not, of course, for the gold's sake as money (he had no time to think of that), but because if this thing was true it meant that an auriferous vein had been found in what was Devonian rock of the post-tertiary stratification, and if that was so it upset enough geology to spoil a text- book. It would mean that the professor could read a paper at the next Pan-Geological Con- ference that would turn the whole assembly into a bedlam.
It pleased him, too, to know that the men he was dealing with were generous. They had asked him to name his own price for the tests that he made, and when he had said two dollars per sample they had told him to go right ahead. The professor was not, I suppose, a mercenary man, but it pleased him to think that he could clean up sixteen dollars in a single evening in his laboratory. It showed, at any rate, that business men put science at its proper value. Strangest of all was the fact that the men had told him that even this ore was apparently noth- ing to what there was; it had all come out of one single spot in the creek, not the hundredth part of the whole claim. Lower down, where they had thrown the big dam across to make the bed dry, they were taking out this same stuff and even better, so they said, in cartloads. The hydrauhc dredges were tearing it from the 66
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
bed of the creek all day, and at night a great circuit of arc lights gleamed and sputtered over the roaring labour of the friends of geological research.
Thus had the Erie Auriferous Consolidated broken In a tidal wave over financial circles. On the Stock Exchange, In the down-town of- fices, and among the palm-trees of the Mauso- leum Club they talked of nothing else. And so great was the power of the wave that It washed Tomllnson and his wife along on the crest of It, and landed them fifty feet up In their thousand-dollar suite In the Grand Palaver. And as a result of It "mother" wore a beetle- back jacket, and Tomllnson received a hundred telegrams a day, and Fred quit school and ate chocolates.
But In the business world the most amazing thing about It was the wonderful shrewdness of Tomllnson.
The first sign of it had been that he had ut- terly refused to allow the Erie Auriferous Con- solidated (as the friends of geology called themselves) to take over the top half of the Tomllnson farm. For the bottom part he let them give him one-half of the preferred stock In the company In return for their supply of development capital. This was their own prop- osition ; In fact, they reckoned that In doing this they were trading about two hundred thousand 67
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
dollars' worth of machinery for, say ten million dollars of gold. But it frightened them when Tomlinson said "Yes" to the offer, and when he said that as to common stock they might keep it, it was no use to him, they were alarmed and uneasy till they made him take a block of it for the sake of market confidence.
But the top end of the farm he refused to surrender, and the friends of applied geology knew that there must be something pretty large behind this refusal; the more so as the reason that Tomlinson gave was such a simple one. He said that he didn't want to part with the top end of the place because his father was buried on it beside the creek, and so he didn't want the dam higher up, not for any consideration.
This was regarded in business circles as a piece of great shrewdness. "Says his father is buried there, eh? Devilish shrewd that!"
It was so long since any of the members of the Exchange or the Mausoleum Club had wan- dered into such places as Cahoga County that they did not know that there was nothing strange in what Tomlinson said. His father was buried there, on the farm itself, in a grave overgrown with raspberry bushes, and with a wooden headstone encompassed by a square of cedar rails, and slept as many another pioneer of Cahoga is sleeping.
"Devilish smart idea!" they said; and forth- 68
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
with half the financial men of the city buried their fathers, or professed to have done so, in likely places — along the prospective right-of- way of a suburban railway, for example; in fact, in any place that marked them out for the joyous resurrection of an expropriation pur- chase.
Thus the astounding shrewdness of Tomlin- son rapidly became a legend, the more so as he turned everything he touched to gold.
They narrated little stories of him in the whiskey-and-soda corners of the Mausoleum Club.
"I put it to him in a casual way," related, for example, Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, "casually, but quite frankly. I said, 'See here, this is just a bagatelle to you, no doubt, but to me it might be of some use. T. C. bonds,' I said, 'have risen twenty-two and a half in a week. You know as well as I do that they are only col- lateral trust, and that the stock underneath never could and never can earn a par dividend. Now,' I said, 'Mr. Tomllnson, tell me what all that means?' Would you believe it, the fellow looked me right In the face in that queer way he has and he said, 'I don't know!' "
"He said he didn't know!" repeated the lis- tener, in a tone of amazement and respect. "By Jove! eh? he said he didn't know! The man's a wizard!"
69
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
"And he looked as If he didn't!" went on Mr. Fyshe. "That's the deuce of it. That man when he wants to can put on a look, sir, that simply means nothing, absolutely nothing."
In this way Tomllnson had earned his name of the Wizard of American Finance.
And meantime Tomllnson and his wife, within their suite at the Grand Palaver, had long since reached their decision. For there was one aspect and only one in which Tomlln- son was really and truly a wizard. He saw clearly that for himself and his wife the vast fortune that had fallen to them was of no man- ner of use. What did It bring them? The noise and roar of the City In place of the silence of the farm and the racket of the great rotunda to drown the remembered murmur of the waters of the creek.
So Tomllnson had decided to rid himself of his new wealth, save only such as might be needed to make his son a different kind of man from himself.
"For Fred, of course," he said, "it's different. But out of such a lot as that It'll be easy to keep enough for him. It'll be a grand thing for Fred, this money. He won't have to grow up like you and me. He'll have opportunities we never got."
He was getting them already. The oppor- tunity to wear seven-dollar patent leather shoes 70
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
and a bell-shaped overcoat with a silk collar, to lounge into moving picture shows and eat chocolates and smoke cigarettes — all these op- portunities he was gathering immediately. Presently, when he learned his way round a little, he would get still bigger ones.
"He's improving fast," said mother. She was thinking of his patent leather shoes.
"He's popular," said his father. "I notice it downstairs. He sasses any of them just as he likes; and no matter how busy they are, as soon as they see it's Fred they're all ready to have a laugh with him."
Certainly they were, as any hotel clerk with plastered hair is ready to laugh with the son of a multimillionaire. It's a certain sense of hu- mour that they develop.
"But for us, mother," said the Wizard, "we'll be rid of it. The gold is there. It's not right to keep it back. But we'll just find a way to pass it on to folks that need it worse than we do."
For a time they had thought of giving away the fortune. But how? Who did they know that would take it?
It had crossed their minds — for who could live in the City a month without observing the imposing buildings of Plutoria University, as fine as any departmental store in town? — that they might give it to the college. 71
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
But there, it seemed, the way was blocked.
"You see, mother," said the puzzled Wizard, "we're not known. We're strangers. I'd look fine going up there to the college and saying, 'I want to give you people a million dollars.' They'd laugh at me !"
"But don't one read it in the papers," his wife had protested, "where Mr. Carnegie gives ever so much to the colleges, more than all we've got, and they take it?"
"That's different," said the Wizard. "He's in with them. They all know him. Why, he's •a sort of chairman of different boards of col- leges, and he knows all the heads of the schools, and the professors, so it's no wonder that if he offers to give a pension, or anything, they take it. Just think of me going up to one of the professors up there in the middle of his teach- ing and saying, 'I'd like to give you a pension for life!' Imagine it! Think what he'd say!"
But the Tomlinsons couldn't imagine it, which was just as well.
So it came about that they had embarked on their system. Mother, who knew most arith- metic, was the leading spirit. She tracked out all the stocks and bonds in the front page of the Financial Undertone, and on her recommenda- tion the Wizard bought. They knew the stocks only by their letters, but this itself gave a touch of high finance to their deliberations. 72
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
"I'd buy some of this R. O. P. if I was you," said mother; "it's gone down from 127 to 107 in two days, and I reckon it'll be all gone in ten days or so."
"Wouldn't 'G. G. deb.' be better? It goes down quicker."
"Well, it's a quick one," she assented, "but it don't go down so steady. You can't rely on it. You take ones like R. O. P. and T. R. R. pfd. ; they go down all the time and you know where you are."
As a result of which Tomlinson would send his instructions. He did it all from the ro- tunda in a way of his own that he had evolved with a telegraph clerk who told him the names of brokers, and he dealt thus through brokers whom he never saw. As a result of this, the sluggish R. O. P. and T. R. R. would take as sudden a leap into the air as might a mule with a galvanic shock applied to its tail. At once the word was whispered that the "Tomlinson interests" were after the R. O. P. to reorganise it, and the whole floor of the Exchange scram- bled for the stock.
And so it was that after a month or two of these operations the Wizard of Finance saw himself beaten.
"It's no good, mother," he repeated, "it's just a kind of Destiny."
Destiny perhaps it was. 73
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
But, if the Wizard of Finance had known it, at this very moment when he sat with the Alad- din's palace of his golden fortune reared so strangely about him, Destiny was preparing for him still stranger things.
Destiny, so it would seem, was devising its own ways and m.eans of dealing with Tomlin- son's fortune. As one of the ways and means, Destiny was sending at this moment as its spe- cial emissaries two huge, portly figures, wearing gigantic goloshes, and striding downwards from the halls of Plutoria University to the Grand Palaver Hotel. And one of these was the gi- gantic Dr. Boomer, the president of the col- lege, and the other was his professor of Greek, almost as gigantic as himself. And they carried in their capacious pockets bundles of pamphlets on "Archaeological Remains of Mitylene," and the "Use of the Greek Pluperfect," and little treatises such as "Education and Philanthropy," by Dr. Boomer, and "The Excavation of Mity- lene: An Estimate of Cost," by Dr. Boyster, "Boomer on the Foundation and Maintenance of Chairs," etc.
Many a man in city finance who had seen Dr. Boomer enter his office with a bundle of these monographs and a fighting glitter in his eyes had sunk back in his chair in dismay. For it meant that Dr. Boomer had tracked him out for 74
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
a benefaction to the University, and that all resistance was hopeless.
When Dr. Boomer once laid upon a capital- ist's desk his famous pamphlet on the "Use of the Greek Pluperfect," it was as if an Arabian sultan had sent the fatal bow-string to a con- demned pasha, or Morgan the buccaneer had served the death-sign on a shuddering pirate.
So they came nearer and nearer, shouldering the passers-by. The sound of them as they talked v/as like the roaring of the sea as Homer heard it. Never did Castor and Pollux come surging into battle as Dr. Boomer and Dr. Boyster bore down upon the Grand Palaver Hotel.
Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, had hesi- tated about going to the university. The uni- versity was coming to him. As for those millions of his, he could take his choice — dormi- tories, apparatus, campuses, buildings, endow- ment, anything he liked — but choose he must. And if he feared that after all his fortune was too vast even for such a disposal. Dr. Boomer would show him how he might use it in digging up ancient Mitylene, or modern Smyrna, or the lost cities of the Plain of Pactolus. If the size of the fortune troubled him Dr. Boomer would dig him up the whole African Sahara from Alexandria to Morocco, and ask for more.
But if Destiny held all this for TomHnson in 75
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
its outstretched palm before It, it concealed stranger things still beneath the folds of its toga.
There were enough surprises there to turn the faces of the whole directorate of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated as yellow as the gold that they mined.
For at this very moment, while the president of Plutoria University drew nearer and nearer to the Grand Palaver Hotel, the senior profes- sor of geology was working again beside the blue flames in his darkened laboratory. And this time there was no shaking excitement over him. Nor were the labels that he marked, as sample followed sample in the tests, the same as those of the previous marking. Not by any means.
And his grave face as he worked in silence was as still as the stones of the post-tertiary period.
Chapter III. — The Arrested Philanthropy of Mr. Tomlinson
THIS, Mr. Tomlinson, is our campus," said President Boomer as they passed through the iron gates of Plutoria University.
"For camping?" said the Wizard.
"Not exactly," answered the president, "though it would, of course, suit for that. Nihil humaniim alienum, eh?" and he broke into a loud, explosive laugh, while his spectacles irradiated that peculiar form of glee derived from a Latin quotation by those able to enjoy it. Dr. Boyster, walking on the other side of Mr. Tomlinson, joined in the laugh in a deep, reverberating chorus.
The two had the Wizard of Finance be- tween them, and they were marching him up to the University. He was taken along much as is an arrested man who has promised to go quietly. They kept their hands off him, but they watched him sideways through their spec- tacles. At the least sign of restlessness they doused him with Latin. The Wizard of Fi- nance, having been marked out by Dr. Boomer and Dr. Boyster as a prospective benefactor,
77
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
was having Latin poured over him to reduce him to the proper degree of plasticity.
They had already put him through the first stage. They had, three days ago, called on him at the Grand Palaver and served him with a pamphlet on "The Excavation of Mitylene" as a sort of writ. Tomlinson and his wife had looked at the pictures of the ruins, and from the appearance of them they judged that Mitylene was in Mexico, and they said that it was a shame to see it in that state and that the United States ought to intervene.
As the second stage on the path of philan- thropy, the Wizard of Finance was now being taken to look at the university. Dr. Boomer knew by experience that no rich man could look at it without wanting to give it money.
And here the president had found that there is no better method of dealing with business men than to use Latin on them. For other pur- poses the president used other things. For example at a friendly dinner at the Mausoleum Club where light conversation was in order, Dr. Boomer chatted, as has been seen, on the archaeological remains of the Navajos. In the same way, at Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's Dante luncheons, he generally talked of the Italian cinquecentisti and whether Gian Gobbo della Scala had left a greater name than Can Grande della Spiggiola. But such talk as that was nat- 78
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
urally only for women. Business men are much too shrewd for that kind of thing; in fact, so shrewd are they, as President Boomer had long since discovered, that nothing pleases them so much as the quiet, firm assumption that they know Latin. It is like writing them up an asset. So it was that Dr. Boomer would greet a busi- ness acquaintance with a roaring salutation of, "Terque quaterque heatus\ or stand wringing his hand off to the tune of ^'Oh et presidium et dulce deciis meiim."
This caught them every time.
"You don't," said Tomlinson the Wizard in a hesitating tone as he looked at the smooth grass of the campus, "I suppose, raise anything on it?"
"No, no; this Is only for field sports," said the president; "sunt quos curricula "
To which Dr. Boyster on the other side added, like a chorus, " pulverem Olympicum."
This was their favourite quotation. It al- ways gave President Boomer a chance to speak of the final letter " m " in Latin poetry, and to say that in his opinion the so-called elision of the final " m " was more properly a dropping of the vowel with a repercussion of the two last consonants. He supported this by quoting Ammianus, at which Dr. Boyster exclaimed, "Pooh! Ammianus: more dog Latin 1 " and appealed to Mr. Tomlinson as to whether any 79
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
rational man nowadays cared what Ammlanus thought?
To all of which Tomlinson answered never a word, but looked steadily first at one and then at the other. Dr. Boomer said afterwards that the penetration of Tomlinson was won- derful, and that it was excellent to see how Boyster tried in vain to draw him; and Boy- ster said afterwards that the way in which Tomlinson quietly refused to be led on by Boomer was delicious, and that it was a pity that Aristophanes was not there to do it justice.
All of which was happening as they went in at the iron gates and up the elm avenue of Plutoria University.
The university, as everyone knows, stands with its great gates on Plutoria Avenue^^ahd with its largest buildings, those of the facul- ties of industrial and mechanical science, front- ing full upon the street.
These buildings are exceptionally fine, stand- ing fifteen stories high and comparing favour- ably with the best departmental stores or fac- tories in the City. Indeed, after nightfall, when they are all lighted up for the evening technical classes and when their testing ma- chinery is in full swing and there are students going in and out in overall suits, people have often mistaken the university, or this newer part of it, for a factory. A foreign visitor 80
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
once said that the students looked like plumb- ers, and President Boomer was so proud of it that he put the phrase into his next Com- mencement address; and from there the news- papers got it and the Associated Press took it up and sent it all over the United States with the heading, " Have Appearance of Plumbers-; Plutoria University Congratulated on Char- acter of Students," and it was a proud day indeed for the heads of the Industrial Science faculty.
But the older part of the university stands so quietly and modestly at the top end of the elm avenue, so hidden by the leaves of it, that no one could mistake it for a factory. This indeed was once the whole university, and had stood there since colonial days under the name Concordia College. It had been filled with generations of presidents and professors of the older type with long white beards and rusty black clothes, and salaries of fifteen hundred dollars.
But the change both of name and of char- acter from Concordia College to Plutoria Uni- versity was the work of President Boomer. He had changed it from an old-fashioned col- lege of the by-gone type to a university in the true modern sense. At Plutoria they now taught everything. Concordia College, for example, had no teaching of religion except 8i
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
lectures on the Bible. Now they had lectures also on Confucianism, Mohammedanism, Bud- dhism, with an optional course on atheism for students in the final year.
And, of course, they had long since admitted women, and there were now beautiful creatures with Cleo de Merode hair studying astronomy at oaken desks and looking up at the teacher with eyes like comets. The university taught everything and did everything. It had whirl- ing machines on the top of it that measured the speed of the wind, and deep in its base- ments it measured earthquakes with a seismo- graph; it held classes on forestry and dentistry and palmistry; it sent life classes into the slums, and death classes to the cit)^ morgue. It offered such a vast variety of themes, topics, and sub- jects to the students, that there was nothing that a student was compelled to learn, while from its own presses in Its own press-building It sent out a shower of bulletins and mono- graphs like driven snow from a rotary plough.
In fact, It had become, as President Boomer told all the business men In town, not merely a university, but a universitas in the true sense, and every one of its faculties was now a facultas In the real acceptance of the word, and Its studies properly and truly stiidia; indeed, if the business men would only build a few more dormitories and put up enough money to form 82
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
an adequate fondatum or fundum then the good work might be looked upon as complete.
As the three walked up the elm avenue there met them a httle stream of students with college books, and female students with winged-victory hats, and professors with last year's overcoats. And some went past with a smile and others with a shiver.
"That's Professor Withers," said the presi- dent in a sympathetic voice as one of the shiv- ering figures went past; "poor Withers," and he sighed.
"What's wrong with him?" said the Wiz- ard; "is he sick?"
"No, not sick," said the president quietly and sadly, "merely inefficient."
"Inefficient?"
"Unfortunately so. Mind you, I don't mean 'inefficient' in every sense. By no means. If anyone were to come to me and say, 'Boomer, can you put your hand for me on a first-class botanist?' I'd say, 'Take Withers.' I'd say it in a minute."
This was true. He would have. In fact, if anyone had made this kind of rash speech, Dr. Boomer would have given away half the professoriate.
"Well, what's wrong with him?" repeated Tomlinson. "I suppose he ain't quite up to the mark in some ways, eh?" 83
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
"Precisely," said the president, "not quite up to the mark — a very happy way of putting it. Capax imperii nisi imperasset, as no doubt you are thinking to yourself. The fact is that Withers, though an excellent fellow, can't man- age large classes. With small classes he is all right, but with large classes the man is lost. He can't handle them."
"He can't, eh?" said the Wizard.
"No. But what can I do? There he is. I can't dismiss him, I can't pension him. I've no money for it."
Here the president slackened a little in his walk and looked sideways at the prospective benefactor. But Tomlinson gave no sign.
A second professorial figure passed them on the other side.
"There again," said the president, "that's another case of inefficiency — Professor Shottat, our senior professor of English."
"What's wrong with him?'' asked the Wizard.
"He can't handle small classes," said the president. "With large classes he is really excellent, but with small ones the man is simply hopeless."
In this fashion, before Mr. Tomlinson had
measured the length of the avenue, he had had
ample opportunity to judge of the crying need
of money at Plutoria University, and of the
84
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
perplexity of its president. He was shown professors who could handle the first year, but were powerless with the second; others who were all right with the second but broke down with the third, while others could handle the third but collapsed with the fourth. There were professors who were all right in their own subject, but perfectly impossible outside of it; others who were so occupied outside of their own subject that they were useless inside of it; others who knew their subject, but couldn't lecture; and others again who lectured admir- ably, but didn't know their subject.
In short it was clear — as it was meant to be — that the need of the moment was a sum of money sufficient to enable the president to dismiss everybody but himself and Dr. Boy- ster. The latter stood in a class all by him- self. He had known the president for forty- five years, ever since he was a fat little boy with spectacles in a classical academy, stuffing himself on irregular Greek verbs as readily as if on oysters.
But it soon appeared that the need for dis- missing the professors was only part of the trouble. There were the buildings to consider.
"This, I am ashamed to say," said Dr. Boomer, as they passed the Imitation Greek portico of the old Concordia College building, 85
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Eich
"is our original home, the fons et origo of our studies, our faculty of arts."
It was indeed a dilapidated building, yet there was a certain majesty about it, too, espe- cially when one reflected that it had been stand- ing there looking much the same at the time when its students had trooped off in a flock to join the army of the Potomac, and much the same indeed three generations before that, when the classes were closed and the students clapped three-cornered hats on their heads and were off to enlist as minute men with flintlock muskets under General Washington.
But Dr. Boomer's one idea was to knock the building down and to build on its site a real facultas ten stories high, with elevators in it.
Tomlinson looked about him humbly as he stood in the main hall. The atmosphere of the place awed him. There were bulletins and time-tables and notices stuck on the walls that gave evidence of the activity of the place. "Professor Slithers will be unable to meet his classes to-day," ran one of them, and another, "Professor Withers will not meet his classes this week," and another, "Owing to illness, Professor Shottat will not lecture this month," while still another announced, " Owing to the indisposition of Professor Podge, all botanical classes are suspended, but Professor Podge hopes to be able to join in the Botanical Picnic
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Excursion to Loon Lake on Saturday after- noon." You could judge of the grinding rou- tine of the work from the nature of these notices. Anyone familiar with the work of colleges would not heed it, but it shocked Tom- linson to think how often the professors of the college were stricken down by overwork.
Here and there in the hall, set into niches, were bronze busts of men with Roman faces and bare necks, and .the edge of a toga cast over each shoulder.
"Who would these be?" asked Tomlinson, pointing at them.
"Some of the chief founders and benefactors of the faculty," answered the president, and at this the hopes of Tomlinson sank In his heart. For he realised the class of man one had to belong to in order to be accepted as a university benefactor.
"A splendid group of men, are they not?" said the president. "We owe them much. This Is the late Mr. Hogworth, a man of singularly large heart." Here he pointed to a bronze figure wearing a wreath of laurel and inscribed "Gullelmus Hogworth, Litt. Doc." "He had made a great fortune In the produce business, and wishing to mark his gratitude to the com- munity, he erected the anemometer, the wind- measure, on the roof of the building, attaching to It no other condition than that his name 87
Arcadian Adventures tvith the Idle Rich
should be printed In the weekly reports imme- diately beside the velocity of the wind. The figure beside him Is the late Mr. Underbugg, who founded our lectures on the Four Gospels on the sole stipulation that henceforth any refer- ence of ours to the four gospels should be coupled with his name."
"What's that after his name?" asked Tom- Hnson.
"Litt. Doc?" said the president. "Doctor of Letters, our honorary degree. We are al- ways happy to grant it to our benefactors by a vote of the faculty."
Here Dr. Boomer and Dr. Boyster wheeled half round and looked quietly and steadily at the Wizard of Finance. To both their minds it was perfectly plain that an honourable bar- gain was being struck.
"Yes, Mr, Tomllnson," said the president, as they emerged from the building, "no doubt you begin to realise our unhappy position. Money, money, money," he repeated half musingly. "If I had the money I'd have that whole building down and dismantled in a fort- night."
From the central building the three passed to the museum building, where Tomllnson was shown a vast skeleton cf a DIplodocus Maxl- mus, and was specially warned not to confuse it with the Dinosaurus Perfectus, whose bones, 88
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
however, could be bought If anyone, any man of large heart, would come to the university and say straight out, "Gentlemen, what can I do for you?" Better still. It appeared the whole museum, which was hopelessly anti- quated, being twenty-five years old, could be entirely knocked down If a sufficient sum was forthcoming; and its curator, who was as ancient as the DInosaurus itself, could be dis- missed on half-pay If any man had a heart large enough for the dismissal.
From the museum they passed to the library, v/here there were full-length portraits of more founders and benefactors in long red robes, holding scrolls of paper, and others sitting hold- ing pens and writing on parchment, with a Greek temple and a thunderstorm in the back- ground.
And here again It appeared that the crying need of the moment was for someone to come to the university and say, "Gentlemen, what can I do for you?" On which the whole li- brary, for It was twenty years old and out of date, might be blown up with dynamite and carted away.
But at all this the hopes of Tomllnson sank lower and lower. The red robes and the scrolls were too much for him.
From the library they passed to the tall build- ings that housed the faculty of Industrial and
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
mechanical science. And here again the same pitiful lack of money was everywhere appar- ent. For example, in the physical science de- partment there was a mass of apparatus for which the university was unable to afford suit- able premises, and in the chemical department there were vast premises for which the uni- versity was unable to buy apparatus, and so on. Indeed, it was part of Dr. Boomer's method to get himself endowed first with premises too big for the apparatus, and then by appealing to public spirit to call for enough apparatus to more than fill the premises, by means of which system industrial science at Plutoria University advanced with increasing and gigantic strides.
But most of all the electric department inter- ested the Wizard of Finance. And this time his voice lost its hesitating tone and he looked straight at Dr. Boomer as he began,
"I have a boy "
"Ah!" said Dr. Boomer, with a huge ejacu- lation of surprise and relief; "you have a boy!"
There were volumes in his tone. What it meant was, " Now, indeed, we have got you where we want you," and he exchanged a mean- ing look with the professor of Greek.
Within five minutes the president and Tom- linson and Dr. Boyster were gravely discuss- ing on what terms and in what way Fred might be admitted to study in the faculty of indus- 90
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
trial science. The president, on learning that Fred had put in four years in Cahoga County Section No. 3 School, and had been head of his class in ciphering, nodded his head gravely and said it would simply be a matter of a pro tanto; that, in fact, he felt sure that Fred might be admitted ad eundem. But the real condition on which they meant to admit him was, of course, not mentioned.
One door only In the faculty of industrial and mechanical science they did not pass, a heavy oak door at the end of a corridor bear- ing the painted inscription, "Geological and Metallurgical Laboratories." Stuck in the door was a card with the words (they were con- ceived in the courteous phrases of mechanical science, which is almost a branch of business in the real sense), "Busy — keep out."
Dr. Boomer looked at the card. "Ah, yes," he said, "Gildas Is no doubt busy with his tests. We won't disturb him." The president was always proud to find a professor busy; it looked well.
But if Dr. Boomer had known what was going on behind the oaken door of the Depart- ment of Geology and Metallurgy, he would have felt considerably disturbed himself.
For here again Gildas, senior professor of geology, was working among his blue flames at a final test on which depended the fate of the 91
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Erie Auriferous Consolidated and all connected with it.
Before him there were some twenty or thirty packets of crumpled dust and splintered ore that glittered on the testing table. It had been taken up from the creek along Its whole length, at even spaces twenty yards apart, by an expert sent down in haste by the directorate, after Gildas's second report, and heavily bribed to keep his mouth shut.
And as Professor Gildas stood and worked at the samples and tied them up after analysis in little white cardboard boxes, he marked each one very carefully and neatly with the words, "Pyrites: worthless."
Beside the professor worked a young demon- strator of last year's graduation class. It was he, in fact, who had written the polite notice on the card.
"What is the stuff, anyway?" he asked.
"A sulphuret of iron," said the professor, "or iron pyrites. In colour and appearance it is practically identical with gold. Indeed, in all ages," he went on, dropping at once into the class-room tone and adopting the profes- sorial habit of jumping backwards twenty cen- turies in order to explain anything properly, "it has been readily mistaken for the precious metal. The ancients called it 'fool's gold.' Martin Frobisher brought back four shiploads 92
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
of it from Baffin Land thinking that he had discovered an Eldorado. There are large de- posits of it in the mines of Cornwall, and it is just possible," here the professor measured his words as if speaking of something that he wouldn't promise, "that the Cassiterides of the Phoenicians contained deposits of the same sul- phuret. Indeed, I defy anyone," he continued, for he was piqued in his scientific pride, "to distinguish it from gold without a laboratory test. In large quantities, I concede, its lack of weight would betray it to a trained hand, but without testing its solubility in nitric acid, or the fact of its burning with a blue flame under the blow-pipe, it cannot be detected. In short, when crystallised in dodecahedrons "
"Is it any good?" broke in the demonstrator.
"Good?" said the professor. "Oh, you mean commercially? Not in the slightest. Much less valuable than, let us say, ordinary mud or clay. In fact, it is absolutely good for nothing."
They were silent for a moment, watching the blue flames above the brazier.
Then Gildas spoke again. "Oddly enough," he said, "the first set of samples were undoubt- edly pure gold — not the faintest doubt of that. That is the really interesting part of the mat- ter. These gentlemen concerned in the enter- prise will, of course, lose their money, and I 93
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
shall therefore decline to accept the very hand- some fee which they had offered me for my services. But the main feature, the real point of interest in this matter remains. Here we have undoubtedly a sporadic deposit, — what miners call a pocket, — of pure gold in a De- vonian formation of the post-tertiary period. This once established, we must revise our en- tire theory of the distribution of igneous and aqueous rocks. In fact, I am already getting notes together for a paper for the Pan-Geo- logical under the heading, 'Auriferous Excre- tions in the Devonian Strata: a Working Hy- pothesis.' I hope to read it at the next meeting."
The young demonstrator looked at the pro- fessor with one eye half closed.
"I don't think I would if I were you," he said.
Now this young demonstrator knew nothing, or practically nothing, of geology, because he came of one of the richest and best families In town and didn't need to. But he was a smart young man, dressed in the latest fashion, with brown boots and a crosswise tie, and he knew more about money and business and the stock exchange in five minutes than Professor Gildas In his whole existence.
"Why not?" said the professor.
"Why, don't you see what's happened?" 94
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
"Eh?" saldGildas.
"What happened to those first samples? When that bunch got interested and planned to float the company? Don't you see? Somebody salted them on you."
"Salted them on me?" repeated the pro- fessor, mystified.
"Yes, salted them. Somebody got wise to what they were and swopped them on you for the real thing, so as to get your certified re- port that the stuff was gold."
"I begin to see," muttered the professor. "Somebody exchanged the samples, some per- son no doubt desirous of establishing the theory that a sporadic outcropping of the sort might be found in a post-tertiary formation. I see, I see. No doubt he intended to prepare a paper on it, and prove his thesis by these tests. I see it all!"
The demonstrator looked at the professor with a sort of pity.
"You're on!" he said, and he laughed softly to himself.
"Well," said Dr. Boomer, after Tomlinson had left the university, "what do you make of him?" The president had taken Dr. Boy- ster over to his house beside the campus, and there in his study had given him a cigar as big as a rope and taken another himself. This 95
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
was a sign that Dr. Boomer wanted Dr. Boy- ster's opinion in plain English, without any Latin about it.
"Remarkable man," said the professor of Greek; "wonderful penetration, and a man of very few words. Of course his game is clear enough?"
"Entirely so," asserted Dr. Boomer.
"It's clear enough that he means to give the money on two conditions."
"Exactly," said the president.
"First that w '. admit his son, who is quite unqualified, to tne senior studies in electrical science, and second that we grant him the de- gree of Doctor of Letters. Those are his terms."
"Can we meet them?"
"Oh, certainly. As to the son, there is no difficulty, of course; as to the degree, it's only a question of getting the faculty to vote it. I think we can manage it."
Vote it they did that very afternoon. True, if the members of the faculty had known the things that were being whispered, and more than whispered, In the City about Tomlinson and his fortune, no degree would ever have been conferred on him. But it so happened that at that moment the whole professoriate was absorbed in one of those great educational crises which from time to time shake a unlver- 96
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
sity to its base. The meeting of the faculty that day bid fair to lose all vestige of decorum in the excitement of the moment. For, as Dean Elderberry Foible, the head of the faculty, said, the motion that they had before them amounted practically to a revolution. The pro- posal was nothing less than the permission of the use of lead-pencils instead of pen and ink in the sessional examinations of the university. Anyone conversant with the inner hfe of a college will realise that to many of the pro- fessoriate this was nothing less than a last wild onslaught of socialistic democracy against the solid bulwarks of society. They must fight it back or die on the walls. To others it was one more step in the splendid progress of demo- cratic education, comparable only to such epoch- making things as the abandonment of the cap and gown, and the omission of the word "sir" in speaking to a professor.
No wonder that the fight raged. Elderberry Foible, his fluffed white hair almost on end, beat in vain with his gavel for order. Finally, Chang of Physiology, who was a perfect dyna- mo of energy and was known frequently to work for three or four hours at a stretch, pro- posed that the faculty should adjourn the ques- tion and meet for its further discussion on the following Saturday morning. This revolu- tionary suggestion, involving work on Saturday, 97
Arcadian Adventures with, the Idle Bich
reduced the meeting to a mere turmoil, in the midst of which Elderberry Foible proposed that the whole question of the use of lead-pencils should be adjourned till that day six months, and that meantime a new special committee of seventeen professors, with power to add to their number, to call witnesses and, if need be, to hear them, should report on the entire matter de novo. This motion, after the striking out of the words de novo and the insertion of ah initio, was finally carried, after which the faculty sank back completely exhausted into its chair, the need of afternoon tea and toast stamped on every face.
And it was at this moment that President Boomer, who understood faculties as few men have done, quietly entered the room, laid his silk hat on a volume of Demosthenes, and pro- posed the vote of a degree of Doctor of Letters for Edward Tomlinson. He said that there was no need to remind the faculty of Tom- linson's services to the nation; they knew them. Of the members of the faculty, indeed, some thought that he meant the Tomlinson who wrote the famous monologue on the Iota Subscript, while others supposed that he referred to the celebrated philosopher Tomlinson, whose new book on the Indivisibility of the Inseparable was just then maddening the entire world. In 98
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
any case, they voted the degree without a word, still faint with exhaustion.
But while the university was conferring on Tomllnson the degree of Doctor of Letters, all over the City in business circles they were con- ferring on him far other titles. " Idiot," "Scoundrel," "Swindler," v/ere the least of them. Every stock and share with which his name was known to be connected was coming down with a run, wiping out the accumulated profits of the Wizard at the rate of a thousand dollars a minute.
They not only questioned his honesty, but they went further and questioned his business capacity.
"The man," said Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, sit- ting in the Mausoleum Club and breathing freely at last after having disposed of all his holdings In the Erie Auriferous, "Is an Ignora- mus. I asked him only the other day, quite casually, a perfectly simple business question. I said to him. 'T.C. Bonds have risen twenty- two and a half In a week. You know and I know that they are only collateral trust, and that the stock underneath never could and never would earn a par dividend. Now,' I said, for I wanted to test the fellow, 'tell me what that means?' Would you believe me, he looked 99
Arcadian Adventures "with the Idle Rich
me right in the face in that stupid way of his, and he said, 'I don't know!' "
"He said he didn't know!" repeated the listener contemptuously; "the man is a damn fool!"
The reason of all this was that the results of the researches of the professor of geology were being whispered among the directorate of the Erie Auriferous. And the directors and chief shareholders were busily performing the interesting process called unloading. Nor did ever a farmer of Cahoga County in haying time, with a thunderstorm threatening, unload with greater rapidity than did the major share- holders of the Auriferous. Mr. Lucullus Fyshe traded off a quarter of his stock to an unwary member of the Mausoleum Club at a drop of thirty per cent., and being too prudent to hold the rest on any terms he conveyed it at once as a benefaction in trust to the Plutorian Or- phans' and Foundlings' Home; while the pur- chaser of Mr. Fyshe's stock, learning too late of his folly, rushed for his lawyers to have the shares conveyed as a gift to the Home for Incurables.
Mr. Asmodeus Boulder transferred his en- tire holdings to the Imbeciles' Relief Society, and Mr. Furlong, senior, passed his over to a Chinese mission as fast as pen could traverse paper.
100
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Down at the office of Skinyer and Beatem, the lawyers of the company, they were work- ing overtime drawing up deeds and conveyances and trusts in perpetuity, with hardly time to put them Into typewriting. Within twenty-four hours the entire stock of the company bid fair to be In the hands of Idiots, Orphans, Protest- ants, Foundlings, Imbeciles, Missionaries, Chin- ese, and other unfinanclal people, with Tom- linson the Wizard of Finance as the senior shareholder and majority control. iVnd whether the gentle Wizard, as he sat with mother planning his vast benefaction to Plu- toria University, would have felt more at home with his new group of fellow-shareholders than his old, it were hard Indeed to say.
But meantime at the office of Skinyer and Beatem all was activity. For not only were they drafting the conveyances of the perpetual trusts as fast as legal brains working overtime could do It, but in another part of the office a section of the firm were busily making their preparations against the expected actions for fraud and warrants of distraint and Injunctions against disposal of assets and the whole battery of artillery which might open on them at any moment. And they worked Hke a corps of military engineers fortifying an escarpment, with the joy of battle In their faces.
The storm might break at any moment.
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Already at the office of the Financial Undertone the type was set for a special extra with a head- ing three inches high:
COLLAPSE
OF THE ERIE CONSOLIDATED
ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON
EXPECTED THIS AFTERNOON
Skinyer and Beatem had paid the editor, who was crooked, two thousand dollars cash to hold back that extra for twenty-four hours; and the editor had paid the reporting staff, who were crooked, twenty-five dollars each to keep the news quiet, and the compositors, who were also crooked, ten dollars per man to hold their mouths shut till the morning, with the result that from editors and sub-editors and reporters and compositors the news went seething forth in a flood that the Erie Auriferous Consolidated was going to shatter into fragments like the bursting of a dynamite bomb. It rushed with a thousand whispering tongues from street to street, till it filled the corridors of the law- courts and the lobbies of the offices, and till every honest man that held a share of the stock shivered in his tracks and reached out to give, sell, or destroy it. Only the unwinking Idiots, and the mild Orphans, and the calm Deaf-
102
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
mutes, and the impassive Chinese held tight to what they had. So gathered the storm, till all the town, like the great rotunda of the Grand Palaver, was filled with a silent "call for Mr. Tomlinson," voiceless and ominous.
And while all this was happening, and while at Skinyer and Beatem's they worked with frantic pens and clattering type, there came a knock at the door, hesitant and uncertain, and before the eyes of the astounded office there stood in his wide-awake hat and long black coat the figure of ' the man Tomlinson ' him- self.
And Skinyer, the senior partner, no sooner heard what Tomlinson wanted than he dashed across the outer office to his partner's room with his hyena face all excitement as he said:
"Beatem, Beatem, come over to my room. This man is absolutely the biggest thing in America. For sheer calmness and nerve I never heard of anything to approach him. What do you think he wants to do?"
"What?" said Beatem.
"Why, he's giving his entire fortune to the university."
"By Gadl" ejaculated Beatem, and the two lawyers looked at one another, lost in admira- tion of the marvellous genius and assurance of Tomlinson.
103
Arcadian Adventures tcith the Idle Rich
Yet what had happened was very simple.
Tomhnson had come back from the univer- sity filled with mingled hope and hesitation. The university, he saw, needed the money, and he hoped to give it his entire fortune, to put Dr. Boomer in a position to practically de- stroy the whole place. But, Hl^e many a mod- est man, he lacked the assurance to speak out. He felt that up to the present the benefactors of the university had been men of an entirely different class from himself.
It was mother who solved the situation for him.
"Well, father," she said, "there's one thing I've learned already since we've had money. If you want to get a thing done you can always find people to do it for you if you pay them. Why not go to those lawyers that manage things for the company and get them to arrange it all for you with the college?"
As a result, Tomhnson had turned up at the door of the Skinyer and Beatem office.
"Quite so, Mr. Tomlinson," said Skinyer, with his pen already dipped in the ink, "a per- fectly simple matter. I can draw up a draft of conveyance with a few strokes of the pen. In fact, we can do It on the spot."
What he meant was, "In fact, we can do It so fast that I can pocket a fee of five hundred 104
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
dollars right here and now while you have the money to pay me."
"Now then," he continued, "let us see how It is to run."
"Well," said Tomlinson, "I want you to put it that I give all my stock in the company to the university."
"All of it?" said Skinyer, with a quiet smile to Beatem.
"Every cent of it, sir," said Tomlinson; "just write down that I give all of it to the college."
"Very good," said Skinyer, and he began to write, "I, so-and-so, and so-and-so, of the county of so-and-so — Cahoga, I think you said, Mr. Tomlinson?"
"Yes, sir," said the Wizard, "I was raised there."
" — do hereby give, assign, devise, transfer, and the transfer is hereby given, devised and assigned, all those stocks, shares, hereditaments, etc., which I hold in the etc., etc., all, several and whatever — you will observe, Mr. Tomlin- son, I am expressing myself with as great brev- ity as possible — to that institution, academy, college, school, university, now known and re- puted to be Plutoria University, of the city of etc., etc' "
He paused a moment. "Now what special objects or purposes shall I indicate? " he asked. 105
Arcadian Adventures tcith the Idle Rich
Whereupon Tomlinson explained as best he could, and Sklnyer, working with great rapidity, indicated that the benefaction was to include a Demolition Fund for the removal of build- ings, a Retirement Fund for the removal of professors, an Apparatus Fund for the destruc- tion of apparatus, and a General Sinking Fund for the obliteration of anything not otherwise mentioned.
"And I'd like to do something, if I could, for Mr. Boomer himself, just as man to man," said Tomlinson.
"All right," said Beatem, and he could hardly keep his face straight. "Give him a chunk of the stock — give him half a million."
"I will," said Tomlinson; "he deserves it."
"Undoubtedly," said Mr. Skinyer.
And within a few minutes the whole tran- saction was done, and Tomlinson, filled with joy, was wringing the hands of Skinyer and Beatem, and telling them to name their own fee.
They had meant to, anyway.
"Is that legal, do you suppose?" said Beatem to Skinyer, after the Wizard had gone. "Will it hold water?"
"Oh, I don't think so," said Skinyer, "not for a minute. In fact, rather the other way. If they make an arrest for fraudulent flota- io6
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
tlon, this conveyance, I should think, would help to send him to the penitentiary. But I very much doubt if they can arrest him. Mind you, the fellow is devilish shrewd. You know, and I know, that he planned this whole flota- tion with a full knowledge of the fraud. You and / know it — very good — but we know It more from our trained instinct In such things than by any proof. The fellow has managed to surround himself with such an air of good faith from start to finish that It will be deuced hard to get at him."
"What will he do now?" said Beatem.
"I tell you what he'll do. Mark my words. Within twenty-four hours he'll clear out and be out of the state, and if they want to get him they'll have to extradite. I tell you he's a man of extraordinary capacity. The rest of us are nowhere beside him."
In which, perhaps, there was some truth.
"Well, mother," said the Wizard, when he reached the thousand-dollar suite, after his Interview with Sklnyer and Beatem, his face Irradiated v/ith simple joy, "It's done. I've put the college now In a position it never was In before, nor any other college; the lawyers say so themselves."
"That's good," said mother.
"Yes, and it's a good thing I didn't lose the 107
Arcadian Adventures icitli the Idle Rich
money when I tried to. You see, mother, what I hadn't realised was the good that could be done with all that money if a man put his heart into it. They can start in as soon as they like and tear down those buildings. My! but it's just wonderful what you can do with money. I'm glad I didn't lose' it."
So they talked far into the evening. That night they slept in an Aladdin's palace filled with golden fancies.
And In the morning the palace and all its visions fell tumbling about their heads in sud- den and awful catastrophe. For with Tomlin- son's first descent to the rotunda it broke. The whole great space seemed filled with the bulle- tins and the broadside sheets of the morning papers, the crowd surging to and fro buying the papers, men reading them as they stood, and everywhere in great letters there met his eye:
COLLAPSE
OF THE ERIE AURIFEROUS
THE GREAT GOLD SWINDLE
ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON
EXPECTED THIS MORNING
So stood the Wizard of Finance beside a pillar, the paper fluttering In his hand, his eyes io8
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
fixed, while about him a thousand eager eyes and rushing tongues sent shame into his stricken heart.
And there his boy Fred, sent from upstairs, found him; and at the sight of the seething crowd and his father's stricken face, aged as it seemed all in a moment, the boy's soul woke within him. What had happened he could not tell, only that his father stood there, dazed, beaten, and staring at him on every side in giant letters :
ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON
*'Come, father, come upstairs," he said, and took him by the arm, dragging him through the crowd.
In the next half-hour as they sat and waited for the arrest in the false grandeur of the thou- sand-dollar suite, — Tomlinson, his wife, and Fred, — the boy learnt more than all the teach- ing of the industrial faculty of Plutoria Uni- versity could have taught him in a decade. Ad- versity laid its hand upon him, and at its touch his adolescent heart turned to finer stuff than the salted gold of the Erie Auriferous. As he looked upon his father's broken figure wait- ing meekly for arrest, and his mother's blub- bered face, a great wrath burned itself into his soul.
109
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
"When the sheriff comes " said Tomlin-
son, and his lip trembled as he spoke. He had no other picture of arrest than that.
"They can't arrest you, father," broke out the boy. " You've done nothing. You never swindled them. I tell you, if they try to arrest
you, I'll " and his voice broke and stopped
upon a sob, and his hands clenched in passion.
"You stay here, you and mother. I'll go down. Give me your money and I'll go and pay them and we'll get out of this and go home. They can't stop us; there's nothing to arrest you for."
Nor was there. Fred paid the bill unmo- lested, save for the prying eyes and babbling tongues of the rotunda.
And a few hours from that, while the town was still ringing with news of his downfall, the Wizard with his wife and son walked down from their thousand-dollar suite into the cor- ridor, their hands burdened with their satchels. A waiter, with something between a sneer and an obsequious smile upon his face, reached out for the valises, wondering if It was still worth while.
"You get to hell out of that!" said Fred. He had put on again his rough store suit in which he had come from Cahoga County, and there was a dangerous look about his big
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
shoulders and his set jaw. And the waiter slunk back.
So did they pass, unarrested and unhindered, through corridor and rotunda to the outer por- tals of the great hotel.
Beside the door of the Palaver as they passed out was a tall official with a uniform and a round hat. He was called by the authorities a chasseur or a commissionaire, or some foreign name to mean that he did nothing.
At the sight of him the Wizard's face flushed for a moment, with a look of his old perplexity.
"I wonder," he began to murmur, "how much I ought "
"Not a damn cent, father," said Fred, as he shouldered past the magnificent chasseur; "let him work."
With which admirable doctrine the Wizard and his son passed from the portals of the Grand Palaver.
Nor was there any arrest either then or later. In spite of the expectations of the rotunda and the announcements of the Financial Undertone, the "man Tomllnson " was not arrested, neither as he left the Grand Palaver nor as he stood waiting at the railroad station with Fred and mother for the outgoing train for Cahoga County.
There was nothing to arrest him for. That
Arcadian Adventures tcith the Idle Rich
was not the least strange part of the career of the Wizard of Finance, For when all the affairs of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated were presently calculated up by the labours of Skinyer and Beatem and the legal representa- tives of the Orphans and the Idiots and the Deaf-mutes, they resolved themselves into the most beautiful and complete cipher conceiv- able. The salted gold about paid for the cost of the incorporation certificate: the develop- ment capital had disappeared, and those who lost most preferred to say the least about it; and as for Tomlinson, if one added up his gains on the stock market before the fall and sub- tracted his bill at the Grand Palaver and the thousand dollars which he gave to Skinyer and Beatem to recover his freehold on the lower half of his farm, and the cost of three tickets to Cahoga station, the debit and credit account balanced to a hair.
Thus did the whole fortune of Tomlinson vanish in a night, even as the golden palace seen in the mirage of a desert sunset may fade before the eyes of the beholder, and leave no trace behind.
It was some months after the collapse of the Erie Auriferous that the university conferred upon Tomlinson the degree of Doctor of Let- ters in absentia. A university must keep Its
112
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
word, and Dean Elderberry Foible, who was honesty itself, had stubbornly maintained that a vote of the faculty of arts once taken and written in the minute book became as irrefrag- able as the Devonian rock Itself.
So the degree was conferred. And Dean Elderberry Foible, standing In a long red gown before Dr. Boomer, seated In a long blue gown, read out after the ancient custom of the college the Latin statement of the award of the degree of Doctor of Letters, "Eduardus Tomlinsonius, vir clarisslmus, doctlsslmus, prsestlssimus," and a great many other things all ending in issimus.
But the recipient was not there to receive. He stood at that moment with his boy Fred on a windy hill-side beside Lake Erie, where Tomlinson's Creek ran again untrammelled to the lake. Nor was the scene altered to the eye, for Tomlinson and his son had long since broken a hole In the dam with pickaxe and crowbar, and day by day the angry water car- ried down the vestiges of the embankment till all were gone. The cedar poles of the electric lights had been cut into fence-rails ; the wooden shanties of the Italian gang of Auriferous workers had been torn down and split Into fire- wood; and where they had stood, the burdocks and the thistles of the luxuriant summer con- spired to hide the traces of their shame. Nature
113
Arcadian Adventures "with the Idle Rich
reached out its hand and drew Its coverlet of green over the grave of the vanished Eldorado. And as the Wizard and his son stood upon the hill-side, they saw nothing but the land sloping to the lake and the creek murmuring again to the willows, while the off-shore wind rippled the rushes of the shallow water.
"4
Chapter IV.— The Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown
MRS. RASSELYER-BROWN lived t)n Plutoria Avenue in a vast sandstone palace, in which she held those fashionable entertain- ments which have made the name of Rasselyer- Brown what it is. Mr. Rasselyer-Brown lived there also.
The exterior of the house was more or less a model of the facade of an Italian palazzo of the sixteenth century. If one questioned Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown at dinner in regard to this (which was only a fair return for drinking five-dollar champagne) she answered that the facade was cinquecentisti, but that it reproduced also the Saracenic mullioned window of the Siennese School. But if the guest said later in the evening to Mr. Rasselyer-Brown that he understood that his house was cinquecentisti, he answered that he guessed it was. After which remark and an interval of silence Mr. Rasselyer-Brown would probably ask the guest if he was dry.
So from that one can tell exactly the sort of people the Rasselyer-Browns were. IIS
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
In other words, Mr, Rasselyer-Brown was a severe handicap to Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. He was more than that; the word isn't strong enough. He was, as Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself confessed to her confidential circle of three hundred friends, a drag. He was also a tie, and a weight, and a burden, and in Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's religious moments a cruci- fix. Even in the early years of their married life, some twenty or twenty-five years ago, her husband had been a drag on her by being in the coal and wood business. It is hard for a woman to have to realise that her husband is making a fortune out of coal and wood and that people know it. It ties one down. What a woman wants most of all — this, of course, is merely a quotation from Mrs. Rasselyer- Brown's own thoughts as expressed to her three hundred friends — is room to expand, to grow. The hardest thing in the word is to be stifled: and there is nothing more stifling than a hus- band who doesn't know a Giotto from a Carlo Dolci, but who can distinguish nut coal from egg and is never asked to dinner without talking about the furnace.
These, of course, were early trials. They had passed to some extent, or were, at any rate, garlanded with the roses of time.
But the drag remained.
Even when the retail coal and wood stage ii6
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
was long since over, it was hard to have to put up with a husband who owned a coal mine and who bought pulp forests instead of illumi- nated missals of the twelfth century. A coal mine is a dreadful thing at a dinner-table. It humbles one so before one's guests.
It wouldn't have been so bad — this Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself admitted — if Mr. Rasselyer-Brown did anything. This phrase should be clearly understood. It meant if there was any one thing that he did. For instance if he had only collected anything. Thus, there was Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, who made soda-water, but at the same time everybody knew that he had the best collection of broken Italian furni- ture on the continent; there wasn't a sound piece among the lot.
And there was the similar example of old Mr. Feathertop. He didn't exactly collect things; he repudiated the name. He was wont to say, "Don't call me a collector, I'm not. I simply pick things up. Just where I happen to be, Rome, Warsaw, Bucharest, anywhere" — and it is to be noted what fine places these are to happen to be. And to think that Mr. Rasselyer-Brown would never put his foot out- side of the United States! Whereas Mr. Feathertop would come back from what he called a run to Europe, and everybody would learn in a week that he had picked up the back "7
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
of a violin in Dresden (actually discovered it in a violin shop), and the lid of an Etruscan kettle (he had lighted on it, by pure chance, in a kettle shop in Etruria), and Mrs. Rasselyer- Brown would feel faint with despair at the nonentity of her husband.
So one can understand how heavy her bur- den was.
"My dear," she often said to her bosom friend. Miss Snagg, "I shouldn't mind things so much" (the things she wouldn't mind were, let us say, the two million dollars of standing timber which Brown Limited, the ominous business name of Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, were buying that year) "if Mr. Rasselyer-Brown did anything. But he does tiothing. Every morning after breakfast off to his wretched office, and never back till dinner, and in the evening nothing but his club, or some business meeting. One would think he would have more ambition. How I wish I had been a man."
It was certainly a shame.
So it came that, in almost everything she undertook Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown had to act without the least help from her husband. Every Wednesday, for instance, when the Dante Club met at her house (they selected four lines each week to meditate on, and then discussed them at lunch), Mrs. Rasselyer- Brown had to carry the whole burden of it — ii8
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
her very phrase, " the whole burden " — alone. Anyone who has carried four lines of Dante through a Moselle lunch knows what a weight it is.
In all these things her husband was useless, quite useless. It is not right to be ashamed of one's husband. And to do her justice, Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown always explained to her three hundred Intimates that she was not ashamed of him; in fact, that she refused to be. But it was hard to see him brought into comparison at their own table with superior men. Put him, for instance, beside Mr. Sikleigh Snoop, the sex-poet, and where was he? Nowhere. He couldn't even understand what Mr. Snoop was saying. And when Mr. Snoop would stand on the hearth-rug with a cup of tea balanced In his hand, and discuss whether sex was or was not the dominant note in Botticelli, Mr. Rassel- yer-Brown would be skulking in a corner in his ill-fitting dress-suit. His wife would often catch with an agonised ear such scraps of talk as, "When I was first in the coal and wood busi- ness," or, "It's a coal that burns quicker than egg, but It hasn't the heating power of nut," or even In a low undertone the words, "If
you're feeling dry while he's reading "
And this at a time when everybody in the room ought to have been listening to Mr. Snoop.
Nor was even this the whole burden of Mrs. 119
Arcadian Adventures ivith the Idle Rich
Rasselyer-Brown. There was another part of it which was perhaps more real, though Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself never put it into words. In fact, of this part of her burden she never spoke, even to her bosom friend Miss Snagg; nor did she talk about it to the ladies of the Dante Club, nor did she make speeches on it to the members of the Women's After- noon Art Society, nor to the Monday Bridge Club.
But the members of the Bridge Club and the Art Society and the Dante Club all talked about it among themselves.
Stated very simply, it was this : Mr. Rassel- yer-Brown drank.
It was not meant that he was a drunkard or that he drank too much, or anything of that sort. He drank. That was all.
There was no excess about it. Mr. Rassel- yer-Brown, of course, began the day with an eye-opener — and after all, what alert man does not wish his eyes well open in the morning? He followed it usually just before breakfast with a bracer — and what wiser precaution can a business man take than to brace his break- fast? On his way to business he generally had his motor stopped at the Grand Palaver for a moment, if it was a raw day, and dropped in and took something to keep out the damp. If it was a cold day he took something to keep
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
out the cold, and if it was one of those clear, sunny days that are so dangerous to the sys- tem he took whatever the bar-tender (a recog- nised health expert) suggested to tone the sys- tem up. After which he could sit down in his office and transact more business, and bigger business, in coal, charcoal, wood, pulp, pulp- wood, and wood-pulp, in two hours than any other man in the business could in a week. Nat- urally so. For he was braced, and propped, and toned up, and his eyes had been opened, and his brain cleared, till outside of very big business indeed few men were on a footing with him.
In fact, it was business itself which had com- pelled Mr. Rasselyer-Brown to drink. It is all very well for a junior clerk on twenty dollars a week to do his work on sandwiches and malted milk. In big business it is not possible. When a man begins to rise in business, as Mr. Rassel- yer-Brown had begun twenty-five years ago, he finds that if he wants to succeed he must cut malted milk clear out. In any position of responsibility a man has got to drink. No really big deal can be put through without it. If two keen men, sharp as flint, get together to make a deal in which each intends to outdo the other, the only way to succeed is for them to adjourn to some such place as the luncheon- room of the Mausoleum Club and both get
Arcadian Adventures 'with the Idle Rich
partially drunk. This is what is called the per- sonal element in business. And, beside it, plodding industry is nowhere.
Most of all do these principles hold true in such manly out-of-door enterprises as the forest and timber business, where one deals constantly with chief rangers, and pathfinders, and wood- stalkers, whose very names seem to suggest a horn of whiskey under a hemlock-tree.
But, — let it be repeated and carefully under- stood,— there was no excess about Mr. Rassel- yer-Brown's drinking. Indeed, whatever he might be compelled to take during the day, and at the Mausoleum Club in the evening, after his return from his club at night Mr. Rasselyer- Brown made it a fixed rule to take nothing. He might, perhaps, as he passed into the house, step into the dining-room and take a very small drink at the sideboard. But this he counted as part of the return itself, and not after it. And he might, if his brain were over-fatigued, drop down later in the night in his pajamas and dressing-gown when the house was quiet, and compose his mind with a brandy and water, or something suitable to the stillness of the hour. But this was not really a drink. Mr. Rassel- yer-Brown called it a nip; and of course any man may need a uip at a time when he would scorn a drink.
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
But after all, a woman may find herself again in her daughter. There, at least, is con- solation. For, as Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown her- self admitted, her daughter Dulphemia was herself again. There were, of course, differ- ences, certain differences of face and appear- ance. Mr. Snoop had expressed this fact ex- quisitely when he said that it was the differ- ence between a Burne- Jones and a Dante Ga- briel Rossetti. But even at that the mother and daughter were so alike that people, cer- tain people, were constantly mistaking them on the street. And as everybody that mistook them was apt to be asked to dine on five-dollar champagne there was plenty of temptation towards error.
There is no doubt that Dulphemia Rassel- yer-Brown was a girl of remarkable character and intellect. So is any girl who has beautiful golden hair parted In thick bands on her fore- head, and deep blue eyes soft as an Italian sky.
Even the oldest and most serious men in town admitted that in talking to her they were aware of a grasp, a reach, a depth that sur- prised them. Thus old Judge Longerstill, who talked to her at dinner for an hour on the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce Com- mission, felt sure from the way in which she looked up in his face at intervals and said, "How interesting!" that she had the mind 123
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
of a lawyer. And Mr. Brace, the consulting engineer, who showed her on the table-cloth at dessert with three forks and a spoon the method in which the overflow of the spillway of the Gatun Dam is regulated, felt assured, from the way she leaned her face on her hand sideways and said, "How extraordinary!" that she had the brain of an engineer. Similarly foreign visitors to the social circles of the city were delighted with her. Viscount FitzThistle, who explained to Dulphemia for half an hour the intricacies of the Irish situation, was cap- tivated at the quick grasp she showed by ask- ing him at the end, without a second's hesita- tion, "And which are the Nationalists?"
This kind of thing represents female intel- lect In Its best form. Every man that is really a man Is willing to recognise It at once.
As to the young men, of course they flocked to the Rasselyer-Brown residence in shoals. There were batches of them every Sunday aft- ernoon at five o'clock, encased in long black frockcoats, sitting very rigidly in upright chairs, trying to drink tea with one hand. One might see athletic young college men of the football team trying hard to talk about Italian music; and Italian tenors from the Grand Opera doing their best to talk about college football. There were young men in business talking about art, and young men in art talking about religion, 124
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
and young clergymen talking about business. Because, of course, the Rasselyer-Brown resi- dence was the kind of cultivated home where people of education and taste are at liberty to talk about things they don't know, and to utter freely ideas that they haven't got. It was only now and again, when one of the professors from the college across the avenue came boom- ing into the room, that the whole conversation was pulverised into dust under the hammer of accurate knowledge.
This whole process was what was called, by those who understood such things, a salon. Many people said that Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's afternoons at home were exactly like the de- lightful salons of the eighteenth century: and whether the gatherings were or were not salons of the eighteenth century, there is no doubt that Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, under whose care certain favoured guests dropped quietly into the back alcove of the dining-room, did his best to put the gathering on a par with the best saloons of the twentieth.
Now It so happened that there had come a singularly slack moment In the social life of the City. The Grand Opera had sung Itself into a huge deficit and closed. There remained nothing of It except the efforts of a committee of ladies to raise enough money to enable Sig- ner Puffi to leave town, and the generous at- 125
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Bich
tempt of another committee to gather funds in order to keep Signor Past! in the City. Be- yond this, opera was dead, though the fact that the deficit was nearly twice as large as it had been the year before showed that public interest in music was increasing. It was indeed a singularly trying time of the year. It was too early to go to Europe, and too late to go to Bermuda. It was too warm to go south, and yet still too cold to go north. In fact, one was almost compelled to stay at home — which was dreadful.
As a result Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown and her three hundred friends moved backward and forward on Plutoria Avenue, seeking novelty In vain. They washed In waves of silk from tango teas to bridge afternoons. They poured in liquid avalanches of colour into crowded re- ceptions, and they sat in glittering rows and listened to lectures on the enfranchisement of the female sex. But for the moment all was weariness.
Now it happened, whether by accident or design, that just at this moment of general ennui Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown and her three hundred friends first heard of the presence in the city of Mr. Yahl-Bahi, the celebrated Ori- ental mystic. He was so celebrated that no- body even thought of asking who he was or where he came from. They merely told one 126
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
another, and repeated it, that he was the cele- brated Yahi-Bahi. They added for those who needed the knowledge that the name was pro- nounced Yahhy-Bahhy, and that the doctrine taught by Mr. Yahi-Bahi was Boohooism. This latter, if anyone inquired further, was explained to be a form of Shoodooism, only rather more intense. In fact, it was esoteric — on receipt of which information everybody remarked at once how infinitely superior the Oriental peoples are to ourselves.
Now as Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown was always a leader in everything that was done in the best circles on Plutoria Avenue, she was naturally among the first to visit Mr. Yahi-Bahi.
"My dear," she said, in describing after- wards her experience to her bosom friend. Miss Snagg, " it was most interesting. We drove away down to the queerest part of the City, and went to the strangest little house imagin- able, up the narrowest stairs one ever saw — quite Eastern, in fact, just like a scene out of the Koran."
"How fascinating!" said Miss Snagg. But as a matter of fact, if Mr. Yahi-Bahi's house had been inhabited, as it might have been, by a street-car conductor or a railway brakesman, Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown wouldn't have thought it in any way peculiar or fascinating.
"It was all hung with curtains inside," she 127
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
went on, "with figures of snakes and Indian gods, perfectly weird."
"And did you see Mr. Yahi-Bahi?" asked Miss Snagg.
"Oh no, my dear. I only saw his assistant, Mr. Ram Spudd; such a queer little round man, a Bengalee, I believe. He put his back against a curtain and spread out his arms sideways and wouldn't let me pass. He said. that Mr. Yahi- Bahi was in meditation and musn't be dis- turbed."
"How delightful!" echoed Miss Snagg.
But in reality Mr. Yahi-Bahi was sitting be- hind the curtain eating a ten-cent can of pork and beans.
"What I like most about eastern people," went on Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown, "is their won- derful delicacy of feeling. After I had ex- plained about my invitation to Mr. Yahi-Bahi to come and speak to us on Boohooism, and was going away, I took a dollar bill out of my purse and laid it on the table. You should have seen the way Mr. Ram Spudd took it. He made the deepest salaam and said, 'Isis guard you, beautiful lady.' Such perfect cour- tesy, and yet with the air of scorning the money. As I passed out I couldn't help slipping an- other dollar into his hand, and he took it as if utterly unaware of It, and muttered, 'Osiris keep you, O flower of women 1' And as I 128
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
got Into the motor I gave him another dollar and he said, 'Osis and Osiris both prolong your existence, O lily of the rice-field' ; and after he had said it he stood beside the door of the motor and waited without moving till I left. He had such a strange, rapt look, as if he were still expecting something!"
"How exquisite!" murmured Miss Snagg. It was her business in life to murmur such things as this for Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. On the whole, reckoning Grand Opera tickets and dinners, she did very well out of it.
"Is it .not?" said Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. "So different from our men. I felt so ashamed of my chauffeur, our new man, you know; he seemed such a contrast beside Ram Spudd. The rude way in which he opened the door, and the rude way in which he climbed on to his own seat, and the rudeness with which he turned on the power — I felt positively ashamed. «And he so managed it — I am sure he did it on pur- pose— that the car splashed a lot of mud over Mr. Spudd as it started."
Yet, oddly enough, the opinion of other peo- ple on this new chauffeur, that of Miss Dul- phemia Rasselyer-Brown herself, for example, to whose service he was specially attached, was very different.
The great recommendation of him In the eyes of Miss -Dulphemla and her friends, and 129
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
the thing that gave him a touch of mystery was — and what higher qualification can a chauffeur want? — that he didn't look like a chauffeur at all.
"My dear Dulphle," whispered Miss Phil- ippa Furlong, the rector's sister (who was at that moment Dulphemia's second self), as they sat behind the new chauffeur, "don't tell me that he is a chauffeur, because he isn't. He can chauffe, of course, but that's nothing."
For the new chauffeur had a bronzed face, hard as metal, and a stern eye; and when he put on a chauffeur's overcoat somehow it seemed.to turn into a military greatcoat; and even when he put on the round cloth cap of his profession it was converted straightway into a military shako. And by Miss Dulphemia and her friends It was presently reported — or was in- vented?— that he had served in the Philippines; which .explained at once the scar upon his fore- head, which must have been received at Iloilo, or Huila-Huila, or some other suitable place.
But what affected Miss Dulphemia Brown herself was the splendid rudeness of the chauf- feur's manner. It was so different from that of the young men of the salon. Thus, when Mr. Sikleigh Snoop handed her into the car at any time he would dance about saying, "Allow me," and, "Permit me," and would dive for- ward to arrange the robes. But the Philippine 130
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
chauffeur merely swung the door open and said to Dulphemia, "Get in," and then slammed it. This, of course, sent a thrill up tHe spine and through the imagination of Miss Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown, because it showed that the chauffeur was a gentleman in disguise. She thought it very probable that he was a British nobleman, a younger son, very wild, of a ducal family; and she had her own theories as to why he had entered the service of the Rasselyer- Browns. To be quite candid about it, she ex- pected that the Philippine chauffeur meant to elope with her, and every time he drove her from a dinner or a dance she sat back luxuri- ously, wishing and expecting the elopement to begin.
But for the time being the interest of Dul- phemia, as of everybody else that was anybody at all, centred round Mr. Yahi-Bahi and the new cult of Boohooism.
After the visit of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown a great number of ladies, also in motors, drove down to the house of Mr. Yahi-Bahi. And all of them, whether they saw Mr. Yahi-Bahi him- self or his Bengalee assistant, Mr. Ram Spudd, came back delighted.
"Such exquisite tact!" said one. "Such deli- cacy! As I was about to go I laid a five-dollar gold piece on the edge of the little table. 131
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Mr. Spudd scarcely seemed to see It. He mur- mured, 'Osiris help you!' and pointed to the ceiling. I raised my eyes instinctively, and when I lowered them the money had disap- peared. I think he must have caused it to vanish."
**Oh, I'm sure he did," said the listener.
Others came back with wonderful stories of Mr. Yahi-Bahi's occult powers, especially his marvellous gift of reading the future.
Mrs. Buncomhearst, who had just lost her third husband — by divorce — had received from Mr. Yahi-Bahi a glimpse Into the future that was almost uncanny in its exactness. She had asked for a divination, and Mr. Yahi-Bahi had effected one by causing her to lay six ten-dollar pieces on the table arranged in the form of a mystic serpent. Over these he had bent and peered deeply, as If seeking to unravel their meaning, and finally he had given her the prophecy, "Many things are yet to happen be- fore others begin."
"How does he do it?" asked everybody.
As a result of all this it naturally came about that Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram Spudd were Invited to appear at the residence of Mrs. Ras- selyer-Brown; and it was understood that steps would be taken to form a special society, to be known as the Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society. 132
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Mr. SIkleigh Snoop, the sex-poet, was the leading spirit in the organisation. He had a special fitness for the task: he had actually re- sided in India. In fact, he had spent six weeks there on a stop-over ticket of a round-the-world 635 dollar steamship pilgrimage; and he knew the whole country from Jehumbapore in Bhoo- tal to Jehumbalabad in the Carnatic. So he was looked upon as a great authority on India, China, Mongolia, and all such places, by the ladies of Plutoria Avenue.
Next in importance was Mrs. Buncomhearst, who became later, by a perfectly natural proc- ess, the president of the society. She was al- ready president of the Daughters of the Revo- lution, a society confined exclusively to the de- scendants of Washington's officers and others; she was also president of the Sisters of Eng- land, an organisation limited exclusively to women born in England and elsewhere; of the Daughters of Kossuth, made up solely of Hun- garians and friends of Hungary and other na- tions; and of the Circle of Franz Joseph, which was composed exclusively of the partisans, and others, of Austria. In fact, ever since she had lost her third husband, Mrs. Buncomhearst had thrown herself — that was her phrase — into out- side activities. Her one wish was, on her own statement, to lose herself. So very naturally Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown looked at once to Mrs. 133
Arcadian Adventures -with the Idle liich
Buncomhearst to preside over the meetings of the new society.
The large dining-room at the Rasselyer- Browns' had been cleared out as a sort of audi- torium, and in it some fifty or sixty of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's more intimate friends had gathered. The whole meeting was composed of ladies, except for the presence of one or two men who represented special cases. There was, of course, httle Mr. Spillikins, with his vacuous face and football hair, who was there, as every- body knew, on account of Dulphemia; and there was old Judge Longerstill, who sat lean- ing on a gold-headed stick with his head side- ways, trying to hear some fraction of what was being said. He came to the gathering in the hope that it would prove a likely place for sec- onding a vote of thanks and saying a few words — half an hour's talk, perhaps — on the consti- tution of the United States. Failing that, he felt sure that at least someone would call him "this eminent old gentleman," and even that was better than staying at home.
But for the most part the audience was composed of women, and they sat in a little buzz of conversation waiting for Mr. Yahi- Bahi.
"I wonder," called Mrs. Buncomhearst from the chair, "if some lady would be good enough 134
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
to write minutes? Miss Snagg, I wonder if you would be kind enough to write minutes? Could you?"
"I shall be delighted," said Miss Snagg, "but I'm afraid there's hardly time to write them before we begin, is there?"
"Oh, but it would be all right to write them afterwards," chorussed several ladies who understood such things; "it's quite often done that way."
"And I should like to move that we vote a constitution," said a stout lady with a double eye-glass.
"Is that carried?" said Mrs. Buncomhearst. "All those in favour please signify."
Nobody stirred.
"Carried," said the president. "And per- haps you would be good enough, Mrs. Fyshe," she said, turning towards the stout lady, "to write the constitution."
"Do you think it necessary to write it?" said Mrs. Fyshe. "I should like to move, if I may, that I almost wonder whether it is necessary to write the constitution — unless, of course, any- body thinks that we really ought to."
"Ladies," said the president, "you have heard the motion. All those against it "
There was no sign.
"All those in favour of it "
There was still no sign. 135
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
"Lost," she said.
Then, looking across at the clock on the mantel-piece, and realising that Mr. Yahi-Bahi must have been delayed and that something must be done, she said:
"And now, ladies, as we have in our midst a most eminent gentleman who probably has thought more deeply about constitutions than
All eyes turned at once towards Judge Long- erstill, but as fortune had it at this very mo- ment Mr. Sikleigh Snoop entered, followed by Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram Spudd.
Mr. Yahi-Bahi was tall. His drooping Ori- ental costume made him taller still. He had a long brown face and liquid brown eyes of such depth that v^hen he turned them full upon the ladies before him a shiver of interest and ap- prehension followed in the track of his glance.
"My dear," said Miss Snagg afterwards, "he seemed simply to see right through us."
This was correct. He did.
Mr. Ram Spudd presented a contrast to his superior. He was short and round, with a dimpled mahogany face and eyes that twinkled In it like little puddles of molasses. His head was bound in a turban and his body was Swathed in so many bands and sashes that he looked almost circular. The. clothes of both Mr. Yahi- Bahi and Ram Spudd were covered with the 136
^Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
mystic signs of Buddha and the seven serpents of Vishnu.
It was impossible, of course, for Mr. Yahi- Bahi or Mr. Ram Spudd to address the audi- ence. Their knowledge of English was known to be too slight for that. Their communica- tions were expressed entirely through the me- dium of Mr. Snoop, and even he explained af- terwards that it was very difficult. The only languages of India which he was able to speak, he said, with any fluency were Gargamic and Gumaic, both of these being old Dravidian dia- lects with only two hundred and three words in each, and hence in themselves very difficult to converse in. Mr. Yahi-Bahi answered in what Mr. Snoop understood to be the Iramic of the Vedas, a very rich language, but one which unfortunately he did not understand. The dilemma is one familiar to all Oriental scholars.
All of this Mr. Snoop explained in the open- ing speech which he proceeded to make. And after this he went on to disclose, amid deep interest, the general nature of the cult of Boo- hooism. He said that they could best under- stand it if he told them that its central doc- trine was that of Bahee. Indeed, the first aim of all followers of the cult was to attain to Bahee. Anybody who could spend a certain number of hours each day, say sixteen, in silent meditation on Boohooism would find his mind 137
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
gradually reaching a condition of Bahee. The chief aim of Bahee itself was sacrifice: a true follower of the cult must be willing to sacrifice his friends, or his relatives, and even strangers, in order to reach Bahee. In this way one was able fully to realise oneself and enter into the Higher Indifference. Beyond this, further meditation and fasting — by which was meant living solely on fish, fruit, wine, and meat — one presently attained to complete Swaraj or Control of Self, and might in time pass into the absolute Nirvana, or the Negation of Empti- ness, the supreme goal of Boohooism.
As a first step to all this, Mr. Snoop ex- plained, each neophyte or candidate for holi- ness must, after searching his own heart, send ten dollars to Mr. Yahi-Bahi. Gold, it ap- peared, was recognised in the cult of Boohoo- ism as typifying the three chief virtues, whereas silver or paper money did not; even national bank-notes were only regarded as do or, a half- way palliation; and outside currencies such as Canadian or Mexican bills were looked upon as entirely boo, or contemptible. The Oriental view of money, said Mr. Snoop, was far su- perior to our own, but it also might be attained by deep thought, and, as a beginning, by send- ing ten dollars to Mr. Yahi-Bahi.
After this Mr. Snoop, in conclusion, read a very beautiful Hindu poem, translating it as he 138
Arcadian Adventure'^ with the Idle Rich
went along. It began, "O cow, standing be- side the Ganges, and apparently without visible occupation," and it was voted exquisite by all who heard it. The absence of rhyme and the entire removal of ideas marked it as far be- yond anything reached as yet by Occidental culture.
When Mr. Snoop had concluded the presi- dent called upon Judge Longerstill for a few words of thanks, which he gave, followed by a brief talk on the constitution of the United States.
After this the society was declared consti- tuted, Mr. Yahi-Bahi made four salaams, one to each point of the compass, and the meeting dispersed.
And that evening, over fifty dinner tables, everybody discussed the nature of Bahee, and tried in vain to explain it to men too stupid to understand.
Now it so happened that on the very after- noon of this meeting at Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's, the Philippine chauffeur did a strange and pe- cuhar thing. He first asked Mr. Rasselyer- Brown for a few hours' leave of absence to at- tend the funeral of his mother-in-law. This was a request which Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, on principle, never refused to a man-servant.
Whereupon, the Philippine chauffeur, no 139
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
longer attired as one, visited the residence of Mr. Yahi-Bahi. He let himself in with a mar- vellous little key which he produced from a very wonderful bunch of such. He was in the house for nearly half an hour, and when he emerged the notebook in his breast pocket, had there been an eye to read it, would have been seen to be filled with stranger details in regard to Ori- ental mysticism than even Mr. Yahi-Bahi had given to the world. So strange were they that before the Philippine chauffeur returned to the Rasselyer-Brown residence he telegraphed cer- tain and sundry parts of them to New York. But why he should have addressed them to the head of a detective bureau instead of to a col- lege of Oriental research it passes the imagina- tion to conceive. But as the chauffeur duly re- appeared at motor-time In the evening the inci- dent passed unnoticed.
It is beyond the scope of the present narra- tive to trace the progress of Boohooism during the splendid but brief career of the Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society. There could be no doubt of its success. Its principles appealed with great strength to all the more cultivated among the ladies of Plutoria Avenue. There was some- thing in the Oriental mysticism of its doctrines which rendered previous belief stale and puerile. The practice of the sacred rites began at once. 140
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
The ladies' counters of the Plutorian banks were Inundated with requests for ten-dollar pieces in exchange for bank-notes. At dinner In the best houses nothing was eaten except a thin soup (or bru), followed by fish, succeeded by meat or by game, especially such birds as are particularly pleasing to Buddha, as the partridge, the pheasant, and the woodcock. After this, except for fruits and wine, the prin- ciple of Swaraj, or denial of self, was rigidly imposed. Special Oriental dinners of this sort were given, followed by listening to the reading of Oriental poetry, with closed eyes and with the mind as far as possible in a state of Stoj, or Negation of Thought.
By this means the general doctrine of Boo- hooism spread rapidly. Indeed, a great many of the members of the society soon attained to a stage of Bahee, or the Higher Indifference, that it would have been hard to equal outside of Juggapore or Jumbumbabad. For example, when Mrs. Buncomhearst learned of the re- marriage of her second husband — she had lost him three years before, owing to a difference of opinion on the emancipation of women — she shewed the most complete Bahee possible. And when Miss Snagg learned that her brother In Venezuela had died — a very sudden death brought on by drinking rum for seventeen years — and had left her ten thousand dollars, the 141
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Bahee which she exhibited almost amounted to Nirvana.
In fact, the very general dissemination of the Oriental idea became more and more notice- able with each week that passed. Some mem- bers attained to so complete a Bahee, or Higher Indifference, that they even ceased to attend the meetings of the society; others reached a Swaraj, or Control of Self, so great that they no longer read its pamphlets; while others again actually passed into Nirvana, to a Complete Negation of Self, so rapidly that they did not even pay their subscriptions.
But features of this sort, of course, are fa- miliar wherever a successful occult creed makes its way against the prejudices of the multitude.
The really notable part of the whole experi- ence was the marvellous demonstration of oc- cult power which attended the final seance of the society, the true nature of which is still wrapped in mystery.
For some weeks it had been rumoured that a very special feat or demonstration of power by Mr. Yahi-Bahi was under contemplation. In fact, the rapid spread of Swaraj and of Nir- vana among the members rendered such a feat highly desirable. Just what form the demon- stration would take was for some time a matter of doubt. It was whispered at first that Mr. Yahi-Bahi would attempt the mysterious east- 142
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
ern rite of burying Ram Spudd alive in the garden of the Rasselyer-Brown residence and leaving him there in a state of Stoj, or Sus- pended Inanition, for eight days. But this pro- ject was abandoned, owing to some doubt, ap- parently, in the mind of Mr. Ram Spudd as to his astral fitness for the high state of Stoj necessitated by the experiment.
At last it became known to the members of the Poosh, or Inner Circle, under the seal of confidence, that Mr. Yahi-Bahi would attempt nothing less than the supreme feat of occultism, namely, a reincarnation, or more correctly a reastralisation of Buddha.
The members of the Inner Circle shivered with a luxurious sense of mystery when they heard of it.
"Has it ever been done before?" they asked of Mr. Snoop.
"Only a few times," he said; "once, I be- lieve, by Jam-bum, the famous Yogi of the Carnatic; once, perhaps twice, by Boohoo, the founder of the sect. But it is looked upon as extremely rare. Mr. Yahi tells me that the great danger is that, if the slightest part of the formula is incorrectly observed, the person at- tempting the astralisation is swallowed up into nothingness. However, he declares himself willing to try."
143
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
The seance was to take place at Mrs. Ras- selyer-Brown's residence, and was to be at mid- night.
"At midnight I" said each member in surprise. And the answer was, "Yes, at midnight. You see, midnight here is exactly midday in Allah- abad in India."
This explanation was, of course, ample. "Midnight," repeated everybody to everybody else, "is exactly midday in Allahabad." That made things perfectly clear. Whereas if mid- night had been midday in Timbuctoo the whole situation would have been different.
Each of the ladies was requested to bring to the seance some ornament of gold; but it must be plain gold, without any setting of stones.
It was known already that, according to the cult of Boohooism, gold, plain gold, is the seat of the three virtues — beauty, wisdom, and grace. Therefore, according to the creed of Boohooism, anyone who has enough gold, plain gold, is endowed with these virtues and is all right. All that is needed is to have enough of it; the virtues follow as a consequence.
But for the great experiment the gold used must not be set with stones, with the one excep- tion of rubles, which are known to be endowed with the three attributes of Hindu worship — modesty, loquacity, and pomposity.
In the present case it was found that as ^ 144
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
number of ladies had nothing but gold orna- ments set with diamonds, a second exception was made; especially as Mr. Yahi-Bahi, on ap- peal, decided that diamonds, though less pleas- ing to Buddha than rubies, possessed the secondary Hindu virtues of divisibility, mova- bility, and disposability.
On the evening in question the residence of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown might have been ob- served at midnight wrapped in utter darkness. No hghts were shown. A single taper, brought by Ram Spudd from the Taj Mohal, and resem- bling in its outer texture those sold at the five- and-ten store near Mr. Spudd's residence, burned on a small table in the vast dining-room. The servants had been sent upstairs and ex- pressly enjoined to retire at half past ten. Moreover, Mr. Rasselyer-Brown had had to attend that evening, at the Mausoleum Club, a meeting of the trustees of the Church of St. Asaph, and he had come home at eleven o'clock, as he always did after diocesan work of this sort, quite used up; in fact, so fatigued that he had gone upstairs to his own suite of rooms sideways, his knees bending under him. So utterly used up was he with his church work that, as far as any interest in what might be going on in his own residence, he had attained to a state of Bahee, or Higher Indifference^ that even Buddha might have envied. 145
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
The guests, as had been arranged, arrived noiselessly and on foot. All motors were left at least a block away. They made their way up the steps of the darkened house, and were admitted without ringing, the door opening silently in front of them. Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram Spudd, who had arrived on foot car- rying a large parcel, were already there, and were behind a screen in the darkened room, reported to be in meditation.
At a whispered word from Mr. Snoop, who did duty at the door, all furs and wraps were discarded in the hall and laid in a pile. Then the guests passed silently into the great dining- room. There was no hght in it except the dim taper which stood on a little table. On this table each guest, as instructed, laid an ornament of gold, and at the same time was uttered in a low voice the word "Ksvoo." This means, "O Buddha, I herewith lay my unworthy offer- ing at thy feet; take it and keep it for ever." It was explained that this was only a form.
"What is he doing?" whispered the assem- bled guests as they saw Mr. Yahi-Bahi pass across the darkened room and stand in front of the sideboard.
"Hush!" said Mr. Snoop; "he's laying the propitiatory offering for Buddha." 146
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
"It's an Indian rite," whispered Mrs. Ras- selyer-Brown.
Mr. Yahi-Bahl could be seen dimly moving to and fro in front of the sideboard. There was a faint clinking of glass.
"He has to set out a glass of Burmese brandy, powdered over with nutmeg and aromatics," whispered Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. "I had the greatest hunt to get it all for him. He said that nothing but Burmese brandy would do, because in the Hindu religion the god can only be in- voked with Burmese brandy, or, failing that, Hennessy's with three stars, which Is not en- tirely displeasing to Buddha."
"The aromatics," whispered Mr. Snoop, "are supposed to waft a perfume or incense to reach the nostrils of the god. The glass of propitiatory wine and the aromatic spices are mentioned in the Vishnu-Buddayat."
Mr. Yahi-Bahl, his preparations completed, was nov/ seen to stand in front of the sideboard 'bowing deeply four times In an Oriental salaam. The light of the single taper had by this time burned so dim that his movements were vague and uncertain. His body cast great flickering shadows on the half-seen wall. From his throat there Issued a low wail in which the word wahl wah ! could be distinguished.
The excitement was intense. 147
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
"What does 'wah' mean?" whispered Mr. Spillikins.
"Hush!" said Mr. Snoop; "it means, *0 Buddha, wherever thou art in thy lofty Nir- vana, descend yet once in astral form before our eyesl' "
Mr. Yahi-Bahi rose. He was seen to place one finger on his lips and then, silently moving across the room, he disappeared behind the screen. Of what Mr. Ram Spudd was doing during this period there is no record. It was presumed that he was still praying.
The stillness was now absolute.
"We must wait in perfect silence," whispered Mr. Snoop from the extreme tips of his lips.
Everybody sat in strained intensity, silent, looking towards the vague outline of the side- board.
The minutes passed. No one moved. All were spellbound in expectancy.
Still the minutes passed. The taper had flick- ered down till the great room was almost in darkness.
Could it be that by some neglect in the prepa- rations, the substitution perhaps of the wrong brandy, the astralisation could not be effected?
But no.
Quite suddenly, it seemed, everybody in the darkened room was aware of a presence. That was the word as afterwards repeated in a hun- 148
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
dred confidential discussions. A presence. One couldn't call it a body. It wasn't. It was a figure, an astral form, a presence.
"Buddha !" they gasped as they looked at It.
Just how the figure entered the room, the spectators could never afterwards agree. Some thought It appeared through the wall, deliber- ately astralising itself as it passed through the bricks. Others seemed to have seen it pass In at the further door of the room, as If It had astralised itself at the foot of the stairs In the back of the hall outside.
Be that as it may, there it stood before them, the astralised shape of the Indian deity, so that to every lip there rose the half-articulated word, "Buddha"; or at least to every lip except that of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. From her there came no sound.
The figure as afterwards described was at- tired In a long shirdk, such as Is worn by the Grand Llama of Tibet, and resembling. If the comparison were not profane, a modern dress- ing-gown. The legs, If one might so call them, of the apparition were enwrapped in loose pun- jahamas, a word which Is said to be the origin of the modern pyjamas; while the feet, If they were feet, were encased In loose slippers.
Buddha moved slowly across the room. Ar- rived at the sideboard the astral figure paused, and even in the uncertain light Buddha was 149
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
seen to raise and drink the propitiatory offer- ing. That much was perfectly clear. Whether Buddha spoke or not is doubtful. Certain of the spectators thought that he said, "Must a fagotnit," which is Hindustanee for "Blessings on this house." To Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's distracted mind it seemed as if Buddha said, "I must have forgotten it." But this wild fancy she never breathed to a soul.
Silently Buddha recrossed the room, slowly wiping one arm across his mouth after the Hindu gesture of farewell.
For perhaps a full minute after the disap- pearance of Buddha not a soul moved. Then quite suddenly Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown, unable to stand the tension any longer, pressed an electric switch and the whole room was flooded with light.
There sat the affrighted guests staring at one another with pale faces.
But, to the amazement and horror of all, the little table in the centre stood empty — not a single gem, not a fraction of the gold that had lain upon it was left. All had disappeared.
The truth seemed to burst upon everyone at once. There was no doubt of what had hap- pened.
The gold and the jewels had been deastral- Ised. Under the occult power of the vision 150
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
they had been demonetised, engulfed into the astral plane along with the vanishing Buddha.
Filled with the sense of horror still to come, somebody pulled aside the little screen. They fully expected to find the lifeless bodies of Mr. Yahi-Bahi and the faithful Ram Spudd. What they saw before them was more dreadful still. The outer Oriental garments of the two de- votees lay strewn upon the floor. The long sash of Yahi-Bahi and the thick turban of Ram Spudd were side by side near them; almost sick- ening in its repulsive realism was the thick black head of hair of the junior devotee, ap- parently torn from his scalp as if by lightning and bearing a horrible resemblance to the cast- off wig of an actor.
The truth was too plain.
"They are engulfed!" cried a dozen voices at once.
It was realised in a flash that Yahi-Bahi and Ram Spudd had paid the penalty of their dar- ing with their Hves. Through some fatal neg- lect, against which they had fairly warned the participants of the seance, the two Orientals had been carried bodily in the astral plane.
"How dreadful!" murmured Mr. Snoop. "We must have made some awful error,"
"Are they deastralised?" murmured Mrs. Buncomhearst.
"Not a doubt of it," said Mr. Snoop. 151
Arcadian Adventures tvith the Idle Rich
And then another voice in the group was heard to say, "We must hush it up. We can't have it known!"
On which a chorus of voices joined in, every- body urging that it must be hushed up.
"Couldn't you try to reastralise them?" said somebody to Mr. Snoop.
"No, no," said Mr. Snoop, still shaking. "Better not try to. We must hush it up if we can."
And the general assent to this sentiment shewed that after all the principles of Bahee, or Indifference to Others, had taken a real root in the society.
"Hush it up," cried everybody, and there was a general move rowards the hall.
"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Mrs. Buncom- hearst; "our wraps!"
"Deastralised!" said the guests.
There was a moment of further consterna- tion as everybody gazed at the spot where the ill-fated pile of furs and wraps had lain.
"Never mind," said everybody, "let's go without them — don't stay. Just think if the police should "
And at the word police, all of a sudden there was heard in the street the clanging of a bell and the racing gallop of the horses of the police patrol waggon.
152
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
"The police!" cried everybody. "Hush it up! Hush it up!"
For of course the principles of Bahee are not known to the police.
In another moment the door bell of the house rang with a long and violent peal, and In a sec- ond as it seemed, the whole hall was filled with bulky figures uniformed in blue.
"It's all right, Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown," cried a loud, firm voice from the sidewalk. "We have them both. Everything is here. We got them before they'd gone a block. But if you don't mind, the police must get a couple of names for witnesses in the warrant."
It was the Philippine chauffeur. But he was no longer attired as such. He wore the uni- form of an Inspector of police, and there was the metal badge of the Detective Department now ostentatiously outside his coat.
And beside him, one on each side of him, there stood the deastralised forms of Yahl- Bahi and Ram Spudd. They wore long over- coats, doubtless the contents of the magic par- cels, and the Philippine chauffeur had a grip of iron on the neck of each as they stood. Mr. Spudd had lost his Oriental hair, and the face of Mr. Yahi-Bahi, perhaps In the struggle which had taken place, had been scraped white in patches.
They were making no attempt to break away. 153
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle liich
Indeed, Mr. Spudd, with that complete Bahee, or Submission to Fate, which is attained only by long services in state penitentiaries, was smiling and smoking a cigarette.
"We were waiting for them," explained a tall police officer to the two or three ladies who now gathered round him with a return of cour- age. "They had the stuff in a hand-cart and were pushing it away. The chief caught them at the corner, and rang the patrol from there. You'll find everything all right, I think, ladies," he added, as a burly assistant was seen carrying an armload of furs up the steps.
Somehow many of the ladies realised at the moment what cheery, safe, reliable people po- licemen in blue are, and what a friendly, fa- miliar shelter they offer against the wiles of Oriental occultism.
"Are they old criminals?" someone asked.
"Yes, ma'am. They've worked this same thing in four cities already, and both of them have done time, and lots of it. They've only been out six months. No need to worry over them," he concluded with a shrug of the shoulders.
So the furs were restored and the gold and the jewels parcelled out among the owners, and in due course Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram Spudd were lifted up into the patrol waggon, where they seated themselves with a composure IS4
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
worthy of the best traditions of Jehumbabah and Bahoolapore. In fact, Mr. Spudd was heard to address the police as "boys," and to remark that they had "got them good" that time.
So the seance ended and the guests vanished, and the Yahi-Bahi Society terminated Itself without even a vote of dissolution.
And in all the later confidential discussions of the episode only one point of mysticism re- mained. After they had time really to reflect on it, free from all danger of arrest, the mem- bers of the society realised that on one point the police were entirely off the truth of things. For Mr. Yahi-Bahi, whether a thief or not, and whether he came from the Orient, or, as the police said, from Missouri, had actually suc- ceeded in reastralising Buddha.
Nor was anyone more emphatic on this point than Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself.
"For after all," she said, "If it was not Bud- dha, who was it?"
And the question was never answered.
iSS
Chapter V. — The Love Story of Mr. Peter Spillikins
ALMOST any day, on Plutoria Avenue or thereabouts, you may see little Mr. Spillikins out walking with his four tall sons, who are practically as old as himself.
To be exact, Mr. Spillikins is twenty-four, and Bob, the oldest of the boys, must be at least twenty. Their exact ages are no longer known, because, by a dreadful accident, their mother forgot them. This was at a time when the boys were all at Mr. Wackem's Academy for Excep- tional Youths In the foothills of Tennessee, and while their mother, Mrs. Everleigh, was spend- ing the winter on the Riviera and felt that for their own sake she must not allow herself to have the boys with her.
But now, of course, since Mrs. Everleigh has remarried and become Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins there is no need to keep them at Mr. Wackem's any longer. Mr. Spillikins is able to look after them.
Mr. Spillikins generally wears a little top hat and an English morning coat. The boys are in Eton jackets and black trousers, which, at their is6
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
mother's wish, are kept just a little too short for them. This is because Mrs. Everleigh-Spilli- kins feels that the day will come some day — say fifteen years hence, — when the boys will no longer be children, and meantime it is so nice to feel that they are still mere boys. Bob is the eldest, but Sib the youngest is the tallest, where- as Willie the third boy is the dullest, although this has often been denied by those who claim that Gib the second boy is just a trifle duller. Thus at any rate there is a certain equality and good fellowship all round.
Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is not to be seen walking with them. She is probably at the race- meet, being taken there by Captain Cormorant of the United States navy, which Mr. Spillikins considers very handsome of him. Every now and then the captain, being in the navy, is com- pelled to be at sea for perhaps a whole after- noon or even several days; in which case Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is very g^erally taken to the Hunt Club or the Country Club by Lieu- tenant Hawk, which Mr. Spillikins regards as awfully thoughtful of him. Or if Lieutenant Hawk is also out of town for the day, as he sometimes has to be, because he is in the United States army, Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is taken out by old Colonel Shake, who is in the State militia and who is at leisure all the time.
During their walks on Plutoria Avenue one 157
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
may hear the four boys addressing Mr. Spilli- kins as "father" and "dad" in deep bull-frog voices.
"Say, dad," drawls Bob, "couldn't we all go to the ball game?"
"No, say, dad," says Gib, "let's all go back to the house and play five-cent pool In the bil- liard-room?"
"All right, boys," says Mr. Spillikins. And a few minutes later one may see them all hustling up the steps of the Everleigh-SpUllklns's man- sion, quite eager at the prospect, and all talking together.
Now the whole of this daily panorama, to the eye that can read it, represents the outcome of the tangled love story of Mr. Spillikins, which culminated during the summer house-party at Castel Castegglo, the woodland retreat of Mr. and Mrs. Newberry.
But to understand the story one must turn back a year or so to the time when Mr. Peter Spillikins used to walk on Plutoria Avenue alone, or sit in the Mausoleum Club listening to the advice of people who told him that he really ought to get married.
In those days the first thing that one noticed about Mr. Peter SpiHIklns was his exalted view of the other sex. Every time he passed a beau- is8
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
tiful woman in the street he said to himself, "I say!" Even when he met a moderately beauti- ful one he murmured, "By Jove!" When an Easter hat went sailing past, or a group of sum- mer parasols stood talking on a leafy corner, Mr. Spillikins ejaculated, "My word!" At the opera and at tango teas his projecting blue eyes almost popped out of his head.
Similarly, if he happened to be with one of his friends, he would murmur, "I say, do look at that beautiful girl," or would exclaim, "I say, don't look, but isn't that an awfully pretty girl across the street?" or at the opera, "Old man, don't let her see you looking, but do you see that lovely girl in the box opposite?"
One must add to this that Mr. Spillikins, in spite of his large and bulging blue eyes, enjoyed the heavenly gift of short sight. As a conse- quence he lived in a world of amazingly beauti- ful women. And as his mind was focussed in the same way as his eyes he endowed them with all the virtues and graces which ought to adhere to fifty-dollar flowered hats and cerise parasols with ivory handles.
Nor, to do him justice, did Mr. Spillikins confine this attitude to his view of women alone. He brought is to bear on everything. Every time he went to the opera he would come away enthusiastic, saying, "By Jove, isn't it simply splendid! Of course I haven't the ear to appre- 159
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
date it — I'm not musical, you know — but even with the little that I know, it's great; it abso- lutely puts me to sleep." And of each new novel