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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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 especially 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 magazines, 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 realize that when you look up at the Grand Palaver
from the square at night when the twelve hundred guests
have turned on the lights of the three thousand windows.
You realize it at theatre time when the great string 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 Baghdad 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 armchairs,
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 unceasingly,
and at their lightest thought they 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 galleries of a coastal mine
cease in his toil a moment 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 homelike.
* * * * * * *
"A call for Mr. Tomlinson! A call for Mr. Tomlinson!"
So went the sound, echoing through the rotunda.
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.
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 recognized 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 "unfathomable." 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 recognized it as the "searching look of a
captain of industry." One might have thought that for
all the goodness 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
Tomlinson the Wizard of Finance, was not commonly 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 personality of Tomlinson, the
great dominating character of the newest and highest
finance. 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 shareholder of uncomputed millions, had
filled the imagination 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 pliable, 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 occasions, 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 Industrie
und Finanzcapitan_. 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, fumbling
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.
* * * * * * *
When Tomlinson had opened the telegram he stood with it
for a moment in his hand, looking the boy full in the
face. His look had in it that peculiar far-away quality
that the newspapers 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 elevator, 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 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 Company had begun tearing up the
bed of Tomlinson's Creek in Cahoga County with its
hydraulic 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 himself. 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 morning
from the Grand Palaver in her beetle-back jacket and her
Balkan hat, a figure of infinite pathos. And whatever
she wore, the lady editors of _Spring Notes_ and _Causerie
du Boudoir_ wrote it out in French, and one paper had
called her a _belle chatelaine_, and another had spoken of
her as a grande dame, which the Tomlinsons thought must
be a misprint.
But in any case, for Tomlinson, 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 Wizard 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.
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-dollar suite in the Grand
Palaver, grappled all day. And when presently a tall
waiter in dress-clothes appeared, and said, "Jelly? Yes,
sir, immediately, sir; would you like, sir, Maraschino,
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 advising 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 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 practice of medicine is carried on with
forceps, pumps, squirts, splints, and other instruments
of violence.
The waiter had hardly gone when a boy appeared at the
door. This time he presented to Tomlinson not one telegram
but a little bundle of them.
The Wizard read them with a lengthening face. The first
ran something like this, "Congratulate you on your daring
market turned instantly"; and the next, "Your opinion
justified 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 brokers' offices,
and all of them were in the same tone; one told him that
C. P. was up, and another 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 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
like you can, but I reckon I must have made another
hundred thousand 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 anywhere from
fifty millions up, with no limit at the top, if you own
one-half of all the preferred stock of an Erie Auriferous
Consolidated that is digging gold in hydraulic bucketfuls
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 prescience 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 Wizard 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 Tomlinson had made his vast
fortune by his own indomitable pluck and dogged industry.
Some 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 lumberjack who,
by sheer doggedness, had got possession of the whole
lumber forest of the Lake district. Others said that he
had been a miner in a Lake Superior copper mine who had,
by the doggedness 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 trying to make the paper pay) wanted to
effect.
But in reality the making of Tomlinson's fortune 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 Tomlinson's father had, and never discover
it for one's self. For that indeed the best medium of
destiny 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 pleasure?--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 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 something
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 beneath
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 underneath
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 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
textbook. It would mean that the professor could read a
paper at the next Pan-Geological Conference 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 or 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 businessmen put science at its proper
value. Strangest of all was the fact that the men had
told him that even this ore was apparently nothing 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 hydraulic
dredges were tearing it from the 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 downtown offices, and among the palm trees of the
Mausoleum Club they talked of nothing else. And so great
was the power of the wave that it washed Tomlinson 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 Tomlinson 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 Tomlinson.
The first sign of it had been that he had utterly refused
to allow the Erie Auriferous Consolidated (as the friends
of geology called themselves) to take over the top half
of the Tomlinson 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 proposition; in fact, they reckoned that
in doing this they were trading about two hundred thousand
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!"
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