Books: Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich

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

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It was so long since any of the members of the Exchange
or the Mausoleum Club had wandered 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 forthwith 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 purchase.

Thus the astounding shrewdness of Tomlinson 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 collateral trust, and
that the stock underneath never could and never can earn
a par dividend. Now,' I said, 'Mr. Tomlinson, 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 listener, in a
tone of amazement and respect. "By Jove! eh? he said he
didn't know! The man's a wizard!"

"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 Tomlinson had earned his name of the Wizard
of American Finance.

And meantime Tomlinson 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
Tomlinson 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 manner 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 Tomlinson 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 opportunity to wear seven dollar patent leather shoes
and a bell-shaped overcoat with a silk collar, to lounge
into moving-picture shows and eat chocolates and smoke
cigarettes--all these opportunities 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 humour 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.

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 colleges, 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 teaching 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 arithmetic, was the leading spirit.
She tracked out all the stocks and bonds in the front
page of the _Financial Undertone_, and on her recommendation
the Wizard bought. They knew the stocks only by their
letters, but this itself gave a touch of high finance to
their deliberations.

"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 rotunda 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 reorganize it, and
the whole floor of the Exchange scrambled 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.

But, if the Wizard of Finance had known it, at this very
moment when he sat with the Aladdin'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
means of dealing with Tomlinson's fortune. As one of the
ways and means, Destiny was sending at this moment as
its special 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 gigantic Dr. Boomer, the president
of the college, 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 Mitylene: 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 a
benefaction to the University, and that all resistance
was hopeless.

When Dr. Boomer once laid upon a capitalist'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 condemned 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 was 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 hesitated about
going to the university. The university was coming to
him. As for those millions of his, he could take his
choice--dormitories, apparatus, campuses, buildings,
endowment, 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 Tomlinson in 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 they mined.

For at this very moment, while the president of Plutoria
University drew nearer and nearer to the Grand Palaver
Hotel, the senior professor 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 THREE: 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 humunum 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 between 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 spectacles. At the least sign
of restlessness they doused him with Latin. The Wizard
of Finance, having been marked out by Dr. Boomer and Dr.
Boyster as a prospective benefactor, 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 philanthropy, 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 businessmen than to use Latin on
them. For other purposes 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 naturally only for women. Businessmen 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
business acquaintance with a roaring salutation of,
"_Terque quaterque beatus_," or stand wringing his hand
off to the tune of "_Oh et presidium et dulce decus meum_."

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 curriculo_--"

To which Dr. Boyster on the other side added, like a
chorus, "_pulverem Olympicum_."

This was their favourite quotation. It always 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!" and appealed to Mr. Tomlinson as to whether any
rational man nowadays cared what Ammianus 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 wonderful, and that it was excellent to see how
Boyster tried in vain to draw him; and Boyster 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, and with its largest buildings,
those of the faculties of industrial and mechanical
science, fronting full upon the street.

These buildings are exceptionally fine, standing fifteen
stories high and comparing favourably with the best
departmental stores or factories in the City. Indeed,
after nightfall, when they are all lighted up for the
evening technical classes and when their testing machinery
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
once said that the students looked like plumbers, and
President Boomer was so proud of it that he put the phrase
into his next Commencement address; and from there the
newspapers 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 Character 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 character from Concordia
College to Plutoria University was the work of President
Boomer. He had changed it from an old-fashioned college
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
lectures on the Bible. Now they had lectures also on
Confucianism, Mohammedanism Buddhism, 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 whirling machines
on the top of it that measured the speed of the wind,
and deep in its basements it measured earthquakes with
a seismograph; it held classes on forestry and dentistry
and palmistry; it sent life classes into the slums, and
death classes to the city morgue. It offered such a vast
variety of themes, topics and subjects 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 monographs like
driven snow from a rotary plough.

In fact, it had become, as President Boomer told all the
businessmen 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 _studia_;
indeed, if the businessmen would only build a few more
dormitories and put up enough money to form 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
little 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 president in a
sympathetic voice as one of the shivering figures went
past; "poor Withers," and he sighed.

"What's wrong with him?" said the Wizard; "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?"

"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 manage 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 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 admirably, 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.
Boyster. The latter stood in a class all by himself. 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 dismissing 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, "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, especially when one
reflected that it had been standing 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 storeys
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 today," 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 Excursion to Loon Lake on Saturday
afternoon." You could judge of the grinding routine of
the work from the nature of these notices. Anyone familiar
with the work of colleges would not heed it, but it
shocked Tomlinson 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 realized 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 GULIEMUS
HOGWORTH, LITT. DOC. "He had made a great fortune in the
produce business and wishing to mark his gratitude to
the community he erected the anemometer, the wind-measure,
on the roof of the building, attaching to it no other
condition than that his name should be printed in the
weekly reports immediately 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 reference of ours to the
four gospels should be coupled with his name."

"What's that after his name?" asked Tomlinson.

"Litt. Doc.?" said the president. "Doctor of Letters,
our honorary degree. We are always 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
bargain was being struck.

"Yes, Mr. Tomlinson," said the president, as they emerged
from the building, "no doubt you begin to realize 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 fortnight."

From the central building the three passed to the museum
building, where Tomlinson was shown a vast skeleton of
a Diplodocus Maximus, and was specially warned not to
confuse it with the Dinosaurus Perfectus, whose bones,
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 antiquated,
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
dismissed on half-pay if any man had a heart large enough
for the dismissal.

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