Books: Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich

L >> Leacock, Stephen, 1869 1944 >> Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich

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This etext was produced by Gardner Buchanan

Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich

By Stephen Leacock, 1869-1944

CONTENTS

I A Little Dinner with Mr. Lucullus Fyshe

II The Wizard of Finance

III The Arrested Philanthropy of Mr. Tomlinson

IV The Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown

V The Love Story of Mr. Peter Spillikins

VI The Rival Churches of St. Asaph and St. Osoph

VII The Ministrations of the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing

VIII The Great Fight for Clean Government

CHAPTER ONE: A Little Dinner with Mr. Lucullus Fyshe

The Mausoleum Club stands on the quietest corner of the
best residential street in the City. It is a Grecian
building of white stone. About it are great elm trees
with birds--the most expensive kind of birds--singing in
the branches.

The street in the softer hours of the morning has an
almost reverential quiet. Great motors move drowsily
along it, with solitary chauffeurs returning at 10.30
after conveying the earlier of the millionaires to their
downtown offices. The sunlight flickers through the elm
trees, illuminating expensive nurse-maids wheeling 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 military guard of 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 Mausoleum Club in the quietest part of the city. 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 dissolve
herself into constituent companies. Near by is a child
of four, in a khaki suit, who represents 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. Incalculable
infants wave their fifty-dollar ivory rattles in an
inarticulate greeting to one another. A million dollars
of preferred stock laughs merrily in recognition of a
majority control going 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 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 never 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 matting that the physical
exertion of lifting oneself 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
members 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 receptions at
the club, its steps are all buried under expensive carpet,
soft as moss and covered over with a long pavilion of
red and white awning to catch the snowflakes; and beautiful
ladies are poured into the club by the motorful. Then,
indeed, it is turned into a veritable Arcadia; 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 shepherds 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 quarterly 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 them sitting about
in little groups of two and three under the palm trees
drinking whiskey and soda; though of course the more
temperate 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
inhabited long before you became a member.

Thus the members sit and talk in undertones that float
to the ear through the haze of Havana smoke. You may hear
the older men explaining 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 morality of the working man,
the spread of syndicalism 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 afternoon 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 Arcadian day
ends in well-earned repose.

* * * * * * *

"I want you to give me your opinion very, very frankly,"
said Mr. Lucullus 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 hydrogen?"

"Oh, decidedly not."

"And you would not say that the percentage 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 members 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 Suburban 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
manufactured. This gives them their peculiar chemical
attitude towards their food. One often sees a member
suddenly call the head waiter at breakfast 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 imagination might
think this tasting of chemicals in the food a sort of
nemesis of fate upon the members. 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 Marquis 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 expensive
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 what. All of which things would
seem to a director of the People's Bank and the president
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, realizing that a clergyman must be all things
to all men and not avoid a man merely because he is a
duke, had accepted the invitation 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 revolutionary 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 Traction, and his Grace has very
kindly promised 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 fortune in American
securities," but he thought better of it. Even with the
clergy it is well to be careful. So he substituted "is
very much interested in studying American conditions."

"Does he stay long?" asked Mr. Furlong.

Had Mr. Lucullus Fyshe replied quite truthfully, he would
have said, "Not if I can get his money out of him quickly,"
but he merely answered, "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 understand," 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 estates; sheer robbery, I call it. How the
working-class, the proletariat, stand for such tyranny
is more than I can see. Mark my words, Furlong, some day
they'll rise and the whole thing will come to a sudden
end."

Mr. Fyshe was here launched upon his favourite 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 pampered 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 realized that at that moment, in
the kitchen of the Mausoleum Club, in those sacred
precincts themselves, there was a walking delegate of
the Waiters' International Union leaning against a
sideboard, with his bowler hat over one corner of his
eye, and talking to a little group of the Chinese
philosophers, he would have known that perhaps the social
catastrophe was a little nearer than even he suspected.

* * * * * * *

"Are you inviting anyone else tonight?" 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 Corporation, 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.

"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 Viscount 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 Viscount 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 solitary 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, mournful 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 cumulative 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
lumber 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 express 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 subconsciously.

"Yes, logs," he would continue, still in deep 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 obvious. "And
is there game there?" he would ask.

"We have the timber-wolf," said Mr. Boulder, 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. Boulder'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 Wisconsin timber, with a dead
wolf or two lying in the snow.

So no wonder that Mr. Fyshe did not propose 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.

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 running 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 University. 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 antiquity
of the Neanderthal skull and the gravel deposits of
the Missouri, his chance had come. 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 willing 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 incompetent 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 Central Park, nor any
Southdowns on Broadway. 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 Trinidad. 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 variety from the Oldenburg,
and few, if any, knew Silesian 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 decline of American agriculture in what should
have been its leading centre saddened the Duke's heart.
Thus the Duke passed four gloomy days. Agriculture 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 Holstein cattle to punch in the
ribs, one might have managed to borrow it in the course
of gentlemanly intercourse, as from one cattle-man to
another. But in New York, amid piles of masonry and
roaring street-traffic and glittering lunches and palatial
residences one simply couldn't do it.

Herein lay the truth about the Duke of Dulham's visit
and the error of Mr. Lucullus Fyshe. 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
mortgagee of the Irish grazing, and in fact be just where
he started. This is ducal finance, which moves always in
a circle.

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