Books: Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich

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

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From the museum they passed to the library, where there
were full-length portraits of more founders and benefactors
in long red robes, holding scrolls of paper, and others
sitting holding pens and writing on parchment, with a
Greek temple and a thunderstorm in the background.

And here again it appeared that the crying need of the
moment was for someone to come to the university and say,
"Gentlemen, what can I do for you?" On which the whole
library, for it was twenty years old and out of date,
might be blown up with dynamite and carted away.

But at all this the hopes of Tomlinson sank lower and
lower. The red robes and the scrolls were too much for
him.

From the library they passed to the tall buildings that
housed the faculty of industrial and mechanical science.
And here again the same pitiful lack of money was everywhere
apparent. For example, in the physical science department
there was a mass of apparatus for which the university
was unable to afford suitable premises, and in the
chemical department there were vast premises for which
the university was unable to buy apparatus, and so on.
Indeed it was part of Dr. Boomer's method to get himself
endowed first with premises too big for the apparatus,
and then by appealing to public spirit to call for enough
apparatus to more than fill the premises, by means of
which system industrial science at Plutoria University
advanced with increasing and gigantic strides.

But most of all, the electric department interested the
Wizard of Finance. And this time his voice lost its
hesitating tone and he looked straight at Dr. Boomer as
he began,

"I have a boy--"

"Ah!" said Dr. Boomer, with a huge ejaculation of surprise
and relief; "you have a boy!"

There were volumes in his tone. What it meant was, "Now,
indeed, we have got you where we want you," and he
exchanged a meaning look with the professor of Greek.

Within five minutes the president and Tomlinson and Dr.
Boyster were gravely discussing on what terms and in what
way Fred might be admitted to study in the faculty of
industrial science. The president, on learning that Fred
had put in four years in Cahoga County Section No. 3
School, and had been head of his class in ciphering,
nodded his head gravely and said it would simply be a
matter of a _pro tanto_; that, in fact, he felt sure that
Fred might be admitted _ad eundem_. But the real condition
on which they meant to admit him was, of course, not
mentioned.

One door only in the faculty of industrial and mechanical
science they did not pass, a heavy oak door at the end
of a corridor bearing the painted inscription: Geological
and Metallurgical Laboratories. Stuck in the door was a
card with the words (they were conceived in the courteous
phrases of mechanical science, which is almost a branch
of business in the real sense): Busy--keep out.

Dr. Boomer looked at the card. "Ah, yes," he said. "Gildas
is no doubt busy with his tests. We won't disturb him."
The president was always proud to find a professor busy;
it looked well.

But if Dr. Boomer had known what was going on behind the
oaken door of the Department of Geology and Metallurgy,
he would have felt considerably disturbed himself.

For here again Gildas, senior professor of geology, was
working among his blue flames at a final test on which
depended the fate of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated
and all connected with it.

Before him there were some twenty or thirty packets of
crumpled dust and splintered ore that glittered on the
testing-table. It had been taken up from the creek along
its whole length, at even spaces twenty yards apart, by
an expert sent down in haste by the directorate, after
Gildas's second report, and heavily bribed to keep his
mouth shut.

And as Professor Gildas stood and worked at the samples
and tied them up after analysis in little white cardboard
boxes, he marked each one very carefully and neatly with
the words, PYRITES: WORTHLESS.

Beside the professor worked a young demonstrator of last
year's graduation class. It was he, in fact, who had
written the polite notice on the card.

"What is the stuff, anyway?" he asked.

"A sulphuret of iron," said the professor, "or iron
pyrites. In colour and appearance it is practically
identical with gold. Indeed, in all ages," he went on,
dropping at once into the classroom tone and adopting
the professional habit of jumping backwards twenty
centuries in order to explain anything properly, "it has
been readily mistaken for the precious metal. The ancients
called it 'fool's gold.' Martin Frobisher brought back
four shiploads of it from Baffin Land thinking that he
had discovered an Eldorado. There are large deposits of
it in the mines of Cornwall, and it is just possible,"
here the professor measured his words as if speaking of
something that he wouldn't promise, "that the Cassiterides
of the Phoenicians contained deposits of the same sulphuret.
Indeed, I defy anyone," he continued, for he was piqued
in his scientific pride, "to distinguish it from gold
without a laboratory-test. In large quantities, I concede,
its lack of weight would betray it to a trained hand.
but without testing its solubility in nitric acid, or
the fact of its burning with a blue flame under the
blow-pipe, it cannot be detected. In short, when
crystallized in dodecahedrons--"

"Is it any good?" broke in the demonstrator.

"Good?" said the professor. "Oh, you mean commercially?
Not in the slightest. Much less valuable than, let us
say, ordinary mud or clay. In fact, it is absolutely good
for nothing."

They were silent for a moment, watching the blue flames
above the brazier.

Then Gildas spoke again. "Oddly enough," he said, "the
first set of samples were undoubtedly pure gold--not the
faintest doubt of that. That is the really interesting
part of the matter. These gentlemen concerned in the
enterprise will, of course, lose their money, and I shall
therefore decline to accept the very handsome fee which
they had offered me for my services. But the main feature,
the real point of interest in this matter remains. Here
we have undoubtedly a sporadic deposit--what miners call
a pocket--of pure gold in a Devonian formation of the
post-tertiary period. This once established, we must
revise our entire theory of the distribution of igneous
and aqueous rocks. In fact, I am already getting notes
together for a paper for the Pan-Geological under the
heading, Auriferous Excretions in the Devonian Strata:
a Working Hypothesis. I hope to read it at the next
meeting."

The young demonstrator looked at the professor with one
eye half-closed.

"I don't think I would if I were you." he said.

Now this young demonstrator knew nothing or practically
nothing, of geology, because he came of one of the richest
and best families in town and didn't need to. But he was
a smart young man, dressed in the latest fashion with
brown boots and a crosswise tie, and he knew more about
money and business and the stock exchange in five minutes
than Professor Gildas in his whole existence.

"Why not?" said the professor.

"Why, don't you see what's happened?"

"Eh?" said Gildas.

"What happened to those first samples? When that bunch
got interested and planned to float the company? Don't
you see? Somebody salted them on you."

"_Salted_ them on me?" repeated the professor, mystified.

"Yes, salted them. Somebody got wise to what they were
and swopped them on you for the real thing, so as to get
your certified report that the stuff was gold."

"I begin to see," muttered the professor. "Somebody
exchanged the samples, some person no doubt desirous of
establishing the theory that a sporadic outcropping of
the sort might be found in a post-tertiary formation. I
see, I see. No doubt he intended to prepare a paper on
it, and prove his thesis by these tests. I see it all!"

The demonstrator looked at the professor with a sort of
pity.

"You're on!" he said, and he laughed softly to himself.

* * * * * * *

"Well," said Dr. Boomer, after Tomlinson had left the
university, "what do you make of him?" The president had
taken Dr. Boyster over to his house beside the campus,
and there in his study had given him a cigar as big as
a rope and taken another himself. This was a sign that
Dr. Boomer wanted Dr. Boyster's opinion in plain English,
without any Latin about it.

"Remarkable man," said the professor of Greek; "wonderful
penetration, and a man of very few words. Of course his
game is clear enough?"

"Entirely so," asserted Dr. Boomer.

"It's clear enough that he means to give the money on
two conditions."

"Exactly," said the president.

"First that we admit his son, who is quite unqualified,
to the senior studies in electrical science, and second
that we grant him the degree of Doctor of Letters. Those
are his terms." "Can we meet them?"

"Oh, certainly. As to the son, there is no difficulty,
of course; as to the degree, it's only a question of
getting the faculty to vote it. I think we can manage
it."

* * * * * * *

Vote it they did that very afternoon. True, if the members
of the faculty had known the things that were being
whispered, and more than whispered, in the City about
Tomlinson and his fortune, no degree would ever have been
conferred on him. But it so happened that at that moment
the whole professoriate was absorbed in one of those
great educational crises which from time to time shake
a university to its base. The meeting of the faculty that
day bid fair to lose all vestige of decorum in the
excitement of the moment. For, as Dean Elderberry Foible,
the head of the faculty, said, the motion that they had
before them amounted practically to a revolution. The
proposal was nothing less than the permission of the use
of lead-pencils instead of pen and ink in the sessional
examinations of the university. Anyone conversant with
the inner life of a college will realize that to many of
the professoriate this was nothing less than a last wild
onslaught of socialistic democracy against the solid
bulwarks of society. They must fight it back or die on
the walls. To others it was one more step in the splendid
progress of democratic education, comparable only to such
epoch-making things as the abandonment of the cap and
gown, and the omission of the word "sir" in speaking to
a professor.

No wonder that the fight raged. Elderberry Foible, his
fluffed white hair almost on end, beat in vain with his
gavel for order. Finally, Chang of Physiology, who was
a perfect dynamo of energy and was known frequently to
work for three or four hours at a stretch, proposed that
the faculty should adjourn the question and meet for its
further discussion on the following Saturday morning.
This revolutionary suggestion, involving work on Saturday,
reduced the meeting to a mere turmoil, in the midst of
which Elderberry Foible proposed that the whole question
of the use of lead-pencils should be adjourned till that
day six months, and that meantime a new special committee
of seventeen professors, with power to add to their
number, to call witnesses and, if need be, to hear them,
should report on the entire matter _de novo_. This motion,
after the striking out of the words _de novo_ and the
insertion of _ab initio_, was finally carried, after which
the faculty sank back completely exhausted into its chair,
the need of afternoon tea and toast stamped on every
face.

And it was at this moment that President Boomer, who
understood faculties as few men have done, quietly entered
the room, laid his silk hat on a volume of Demosthenes,
and proposed the vote of a degree of Doctor of Letters
for Edward Tomlinson. He said that there was no need to
remind the faculty of Tomlinson's services to the nation;
they knew them. Of the members of the faculty, indeed,
some thought that he meant the Tomlinson who wrote the
famous monologue on the Iota Subscript, while others
supposed that he referred to the celebrated philosopher
Tomlinson, whose new book on the Indivisibility of the
Inseparable was just then maddening the entire world. In
any case, they voted the degree without a word, still
faint with exhaustion.

* * * * * * *

But while the university was conferring on Tomlinson the
degree of Doctor of Letters, all over the City in business
circles they were conferring on him far other titles.
"Idiot," "Scoundrel," "Swindler," were the least of them.
Every stock and share with which his name was known to
be connected was coming down with a run, wiping out the
accumulated profits of the Wizard at the rate of a thousand
dollars a minute.

They not only questioned his honesty, but they went
further and questioned his business capacity.

"The man," said Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, sitting in the
Mausoleum Club and breathing freely at last after having
disposed of all his holdings in the Erie Auriferous, "is
an ignoramus. I asked him only the other day, quite
casually, a perfectly simple business question. I said
to him. 'T.C. Bonds have risen twenty-two and a half in
a week. You know and I know that they are only collateral
trust, and that the stock underneath never could and
never would earn a par dividend. Now,' I said, for I
wanted to test the fellow, 'tell me what that means?'
Would you believe me, he looked me right in the face in
that stupid way of his, and he said, 'I don't know!'"

"He said he didn't know!" repeated the listener
contemptuously; "the man is a damn fool!"

* * * * * * *

The reason of all this was that the results of the
researches of the professor of geology were being whispered
among the directorate of the Erie Auriferous. And the
directors and chief shareholders were busily performing
the interesting process called unloading. Nor did ever
a farmer of Cahoga County in haying time with a thunderstorm
threatening, unload with greater rapidity than did the
major shareholders of the Auriferous. Mr. Lucullus Fyshe
traded off a quarter of his stock to an unwary member of
the Mausoleum Club at a drop of thirty per cent, and
being too prudent to hold the rest on any terms, he
conveyed it at once as a benefaction in trust to the
Plutorian Orphans' and Foundlings' Home; while the
purchaser of Mr. Fyshe's stock, learning too late of his
folly, rushed for his lawyers to have the shares conveyed
as a gift to the Home for Incurables.

Mr. Asmodeus Boulder transferred his entire holdings to
the Imbeciles' Relief Society, and Mr. Furlong, senior,
passed his over to a Chinese mission as fast as pen could
traverse paper.

Down at the office of Skinyer and Beatem, the lawyers of
the company, they were working overtime drawing up deeds
and conveyances and trusts in perpetuity, with hardly
time to put them into typewriting. Within twenty-four
hours the entire stock of the company bid fair to be in
the hands of Idiots, Orphans, Protestants, Foundlings,
Imbeciles, Missionaries, Chinese, and other unfinancial
people, with Tomlinson the Wizard of Finance as the senior
shareholder and majority control. And whether the gentle
Wizard, as he sat with mother planning his vast benefaction
to Plutoria University, would have felt more at home with
his new group of fellow-shareholders than his old, it
were hard to say.

But, meantime, at the office of Skinyer and Beatem all
was activity. For not only were they drafting the
conveyances of the perpetual trusts as fast as legal
brains working overtime could do it, but in another part
of the office a section of the firm were busily making
their preparations against the expected actions for fraud
and warrants of distraint and injunctions against disposal
of assets and the whole battery of artillery which might
open on them at any moment. And they worked like a corps
of military engineers fortifying an escarpment, with the
joy of battle in their faces.

The storm might break at any moment. Already at the office
of the _Financial Undertone_ the type was set for a special
extra with a heading three inches high:

COLLAPSE
OF THE ERIE CONSOLIDATED
ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON
EXPECTED THIS AFTERNOON

Skinyer and Beatem had paid the editor, who was crooked,
two thousand dollars cash to hold back that extra for
twenty-four hours; and the editor had paid the reporting
staff, who were crooked, twenty-five dollars each to keep
the news quiet, and the compositors, who were also crooked,
ten dollars per man to hold their mouths shut till the
morning, with the result that from editors and sub-editors
and reporters and compositors the news went seething
forth in a flood that the Erie Auriferous Consolidated
was going to shatter into fragments like the bursting of
a dynamite bomb. It rushed with a thousand whispering
tongues from street to street till it filled the corridors
of the law courts and the lobbies of the offices, and
till every honest man that held a share of the stock
shivered in his tracks and reached out to give, sell, or
destroy it. Only the unwinking Idiots, and the mild
Orphans, and the calm Deaf mutes and the impassive Chinese
held tight to what they had. So gathered the storm, till
all the town, like the great rotunda of the Grand Palaver,
was filled with a silent "call for Mr. Tomlinson,"
voiceless and ominous.

And while all this was happening, and while at Skinyer
and Beatem's they worked with frantic pens and clattering
type there came a knock at the door, hesitant and uncertain,
and before the eyes of the astounded office there stood
in his wide-awake hat and long black coat the figure of
"the man Tomlinson" himself.

And Skinyer, the senior partner, no sooner heard what
Tomlinson wanted than he dashed across the outer office
to his partner's room with his hyena face all excitement
as he said:

"Beatem, Beatem, come over to my room. This man is
absolutely the biggest thing in America. For sheer calmness
and nerve I never heard of anything to approach him. What
do you think he wants to do?"

"What?" said Beatem.

"Why, he's giving his entire fortune to the university."

"By Gad!" ejaculated Beatem, and the two lawyers looked
at one another, lost in admiration of the marvellous
genius and assurance of Tomlinson.

* * * * * * *

Yet what had happened was very simple.

Tomlinson had come back from the university filled with
mingled hope and hesitation. The university, he saw,
needed the money and he hoped to give it his entire
fortune, to put Dr. Boomer in a position to practically
destroy the whole place. But, like many a modest man, he
lacked the assurance to speak out. He felt that up to
the present the benefactors of the university had been
men of an entirely different class from himself. It was
mother who solved the situation for him.

"Well, father," she said, "there's one thing I've learned
already since we've had money. If you want to get a thing
done you can always find people to do it for you if you
pay them. Why not go to those lawyers that manage things
for the company and get them to arrange it all for you
with the college?"

As a result, Tomlinson had turned up at the door of the
Skinyer and Beatem office.

* * * * * * *

"Quite so, Mr. Tomlinson," said Skinyer, with his pen
already dipped in the ink, "a perfectly simple matter.
I can draw up a draft of conveyance with a few strokes
of the pen. In fact, we can do it on the spot."

What he meant was, "In fact, we can do it so fast that
I can pocket a fee of five hundred dollars right here
and now while you have the money to pay me."

"Now then," he continued, "let us see how it is to run."

"Well," said Tomlinson, "I want you to put it that I give
all my stock in the company to the university."

"All of it?" said Skinyer, with a quiet smile to Beatem.

"Every cent of it, sir," said Tomlinson; "just write down
that I give all of it to the college."

"Very good," said Skinyer, and he began to write, "I,
so-and-so, and so-and-so, of the county of so-and-so--
Cahoga, I think you said, Mr. Tomlinson?"

"Yes, sir," said the Wizard, "I was raised there."

"--do hereby give, assign, devise, transfer, and the
transfer is hereby given, devised and assigned, all those
stocks, shares, hereditaments, etc., which I hold in the
etc., etc., all, several and whatever--you will observe,
Mr. Tomlinson, I am expressing myself with as great
brevity as possible--to that institution, academy, college,
school, university, now known and reputed to be Plutoria
University, of the city of etc., etc."

He paused a moment. "Now what special objects or purposes
shall I indicate?" he asked.

Whereupon Tomlinson explained as best he could, and
Skinyer, working with great rapidity, indicated that the
benefaction was to include a Demolition Fund for the
removal of buildings, a Retirement Fund for the removal
of professors, an Apparatus Fund for the destruction of
apparatus, and a General Sinking Fund for the obliteration
of anything not otherwise mentioned.

"And I'd like to do something, if I could, for Mr. Boomer
himself, just as man to man," said Tomlinson.

"All right," said Beatem, and he could hardly keep his
face straight. "Give him a chunk of the stock--give him
half a million."

"I will," said Tomlinson; "he deserves it."

"Undoubtedly," said Mr. Skinyer.

And within a few minutes the whole transaction was done,
and Tomlinson, filled with joy, was wringing the hands
of Skinyer and Beatem, and telling them to name their
own fee.

They had meant to, anyway.

* * * * * * *

"Is that legal, do you suppose?" said Beatem to Skinyer,
after the Wizard had gone. "Will it hold water?"

"Oh, I don't think so," said Skinyer, "not for a minute.
In fact, rather the other way. If they make an arrest
for fraudulent flotation, this conveyance, I should think,
would help to send him to the penitentiary. But I very
much doubt if they can arrest him. Mind you, the fellow
is devilish shrewd. You know, and I know that he planned
this whole flotation with a full knowledge of the fraud.
_You_ and _I_ know it--very good--but we know it more from
our trained instinct in such things than by any proof.
The fellow has managed to surround himself with such an
air of good faith from start to finish that it will be
deuced hard to get at him."

"What will he do now?" said Beatem.

"I tell you what he'll do. Mark my words. Within twenty-four
hours he'll clear out and be out of the state, and if
they want to get him they'll have to extradite. I tell
you he's a man of extraordinary capacity. The rest of us
are nowhere beside him."

In which, perhaps, there was some truth.

* * * * * * *

"Well, mother," said the Wizard, when he reached the
thousand-dollar suite, after his interview with Skinyer
and Beatem, his face irradiated with simple joy, "it's
done. I've put the college now in a position it never
was in before, nor any other college; the lawyers say so
themselves."

"That's good," said mother.

"Yes, and it's a good thing I didn't lose the money when
I tried to. You see, mother, what I hadn't realized was
the good that could be done with all that money if a man
put his heart into it. They can start in as soon as they
like and tear down those buildings. My! but it's just
wonderful what you can do with money. I'm glad I didn't
lose it!"

So they talked far into the evening. That night they
slept in an Aladdin's palace filled with golden fancies.

And in the morning the palace and all its visions fell
tumbling about their heads in sudden and awful catastrophe.
For with Tomlinson's first descent to the rotunda it
broke. The whole great space seemed filled with the
bulletins and the broadside sheets of the morning papers,
the crowd surging to and fro buying the papers, men
reading them as they stood, and everywhere in great
letters there met his eye:

COLLAPSE
OF THE ERIE AURIFEROUS

THE GREAT GOLD SWINDLE

ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON
EXPECTED THIS MORNING

So stood the Wizard of Finance beside a pillar, the paper
fluttering in his hand, his eyes fixed, while about him
a thousand eager eyes and rushing tongues sent shame into
his stricken heart.

And there his boy Fred, sent from upstairs, found him;
and at the sight of the seething crowd and his father's
stricken face, aged as it seemed all in a moment, the
boy's soul woke within him. What had happened he could
not tell, only that his father stood there, dazed, beaten,
and staring at him on every side in giant letters:

ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON

"Come, father come upstairs," he said, and took him by
the arm, dragging him through the crowd.

In the next half-hour as they sat and waited for the
arrest in the false grandeur of the thousand-dollar
suite-Tomlinson, his wife, and Fred-the boy learnt more
than all the teaching of the industrial faculty of Plutoria
University could have taught him in a decade. Adversity
laid its hand upon him, and at its touch his adolescent
heart turned to finer stuff than the salted gold of the
Erie Auriferous. As he looked upon his father's broken
figure waiting meekly for arrest, and his mother's
blubbered face, a great wrath burned itself into his
soul.

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