Books: Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich
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Leacock, Stephen, 1869 1944 >> Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich
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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 permanent 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 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 beaters, 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 compelled
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--climbing 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
villagers, 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 borrowing money.
This was necessary from time to time when loans or
mortgages fell in, but he hated it. It was beneath him.
His ancestors 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 borrow 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 America 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 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
begin. None of the things that he was able to talk about
seemed to have the remotest connection with the subject
of money. The Duke was able to converse reasonably well
over such topics as the approaching downfall of England
(they had talked of it at Dulham Towers for sixty years),
or over the duty of England towards 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; and the Duke rose
from his conversations with a look of such obvious distress
on his face that everybody realized that his anxiety
about England was killing him.
And then suddenly light had come. It was on his fourth
day in New York that he unexpectedly 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 _Gloritania_ 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 borrow 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."
And it was just at that moment that a telegram was handed
to the Duke from Mr. Lucullus 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 moment, 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
morning edition of the _Plutopian Citizen_ simply said,
"We understand that the Duke of Dulham arrives 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 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 today, is proposing to
invest a large sum of money in American Industrials."
And, of course, that announcement reached every member
of the Mausoleum Club within twenty minutes.
* * * * * * *
The Duke of Dulham entered the Mausoleum 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 person, 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
recognized 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 ostentation 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 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
"Furlong," for he had been familiar with the Anglican
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 fellow'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 luckier, 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 waistcoat 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
anything 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 background 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, 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 introduced 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
asking 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 preserved 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 the charm of the whole place
and the certainty that half a million dollars was easily
findable in it, that he put his eyeglass back in his
pocket and said.
"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 happening below in
the kitchens of the Mausoleum Club, Mr. Fyshe would have
realized that just then it was turning into a most
uncomfortable place.
For the walking delegate with his hat on sideways, 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 sideways, 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 apprehension, appeared with cocktails
made by himself, in glasses that he himself had had to
wipe, did Mr. Fyshe, absorbed in the easy 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 noticed 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 halfway 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 library.
And the Duke was fascinated forthwith with the president's
knowledge of Nigerian geography, and explained that he
had once actually descended from below Timbuctoo 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 alcove 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 and flowers (as arranged
by a retreating philosopher now heading towards the Gaiety
Theatre 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 oysters 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 Nigerian 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
for the Duke with two pieces of bread the essential
difference in structure between the Mexican _pueblo_ and
the tribal house of the Navajos, and lest the Duke should
confound either or both of them with the adobe hut of
the Bimbaweh tribes he showed the difference at once with
a couple of olives.
By this time, of course, the delay in the service was
getting noticeable. Mr. Fyshe was directing angry glances
towards the door, looking for the reappearance of the
waiter, and growling 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 coming 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 civilization will end in
a great social catastrophe. Mark what I say"--and here
Mr. Fyshe became exceedingly impressive--"a great social
catastrophe. Some of us may not live to see it, 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. Beyond what's on the table, sir,
there's nothing."
The social catastrophe had come.
Mr. Fyshe sat silent with his fist clenched. Dr. Boomer,
with his great face transfixed, stared at the empty
oyster-shells, thinking perhaps 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.
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 feeling 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, waving 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
altogether."
For, of course, to an archaeologist like Dr. Boomer an
intimate acquaintance with the pedigree and fortunes of
the greater ducal families from Jock of Ealing downwards
was nothing. It went without saying. As beside the
Neanderthal 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."
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
today--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 wouldn'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 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 measure 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 _Plutopian 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, who is an
ardent sportsman, something of the American wolf."
* * * * * * *
And so the Duke went whirling westwards and northwards
with Mr. Boulder in the drawing-room end of a Pullman
car, that was all littered up with double-barrelled
express rifles and leather game bags and lynx catchers
and wolf traps and Heaven knows what. And the 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 onwards through open
fields and broken woods, the real country at last, towards
the Wisconsin forest, there was 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 ferocity 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.
CHAPTER TWO: The Wizard of Finance
Down in the City itself, just below the residential street
where the Mausoleum 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 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 patiently 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.
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