Books: Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich

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

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"When the sheriff comes--" said Tomlinson, and his lip
trembled as he spoke. He had no other picture of arrest
than that.

"They can't arrest you, father," broke out the boy.
"You've done nothing. You never swindled them. I tell
you, if they try to arrest you, I'll--" and his voice
broke and stopped upon a sob, and his hands clenched in
passion.

"You stay here, you and mother. I'll go down. Give me
your money and I'll go and pay them and we'll get out of
this and go home. They can't stop us; there's nothing to
arrest you for."

Nor was there. Fred paid the bill unmolested, save for
the prying eyes and babbling tongues of the rotunda.

And a few hours from that, while the town was still
ringing with news of his downfall, the Wizard with his
wife and son walked down from their thousand-dollar suite
into the corridor, their hands burdened with their
satchels. A waiter, with something between a sneer and
an obsequious smile upon his face, reached out for the
valises, wondering if it was still worth while.

"You get to hell out of that!" said Fred. He had put on
again his rough store suit in which he had come from
Cahoga County, and there was a dangerous look about his
big shoulders and his set jaw. And the waiter slunk back.

So did they pass, unarrested and unhindered, through
corridor and rotunda to the outer portals of the great
hotel.

Beside the door of the Palaver as they passed out was a
tall official with a uniform and a round hat. He was
called by the authorities a _chasseur_ or a _commissionaire_,
or some foreign name to mean that he did nothing.

At the sight of him the Wizard's face flushed for a
moment, with a look of his old perplexity.

"I wonder," he began to murmur, "how much I ought--"

"Not a damn cent, father," said Fred, as he shouldered
past the magnificent _chasseur_; "let him work."

With which admirable doctrine the Wizard and his son
passed from the portals of the Grand Palaver.

* * * * * * *

Nor was there any arrest either then or later. In spite
of the expectations of the rotunda and the announcements
of the _Financial Undertone_, the "man Tomlinson" was _not_
arrested, neither as he left the Grand Palaver nor as he
stood waiting at the railroad station with Fred and mother
for the outgoing train for Cahoga County.

There was nothing to arrest him for. That was not the
least strange part of the career of the Wizard of Finance.
For when all the affairs of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated
were presently calculated up by the labours of Skinyer
and Beatem and the legal representatives of the Orphans
and the Idiots and the Deaf-mutes they resolved themselves
into the most beautiful and complete cipher conceivable.
The salted gold about paid for the cost of the incorporation
certificate: the development capital had disappeared,
and those who lost most preferred to say the least about
it; and as for Tomlinson, if one added up his gains on
the stock market before the fall and subtracted his bill
at the Grand Palaver and the thousand dollars which he
gave to Skinyer and Beatem to recover his freehold on
the lower half of his farm, and the cost of three tickets
to Cahoga station, the debit and credit account balanced
to a hair.

Thus did the whole fortune of Tomlinson vanish in a night,
even as the golden palace seen in the mirage of a desert
sunset may fade before the eyes of the beholder, and
leave no trace behind.

* * * * * * *

It was some months after the collapse of the Erie Auriferous
that the university conferred upon Tomlinson the degree
of Doctor of Letters _in absentia_. A university must keep
its word, and Dean Elderberry Foible, who was honesty
itself, had stubbornly maintained that a vote of the
faculty of arts once taken and written in the minute book
became as irrefragable as the Devonian rock itself.

So the degree was conferred. And Dean Elderberry Foible,
standing in a long red gown before Dr. Boomer, seated in
a long blue gown, read out after the ancient custom of
the college the Latin statement of the award of the degree
of Doctor of Letters, "Eduardus Tomlinsonius, vir
clarrisimus, doctissimus, praestissimus," and a great
many other things all ending in _issimus_.

But the recipient was not there to receive. He stood at
that moment with his boy Fred on a windy hillside beside
Lake Erie, where Tomlinson's Creek ran again untrammelled
to the lake. Nor was the scene altered to the eye, for
Tomlinson and his son had long since broken a hole in
the dam with pickaxe and crowbar, and day by day the
angry water carried down the vestiges of the embankment
till all were gone. The cedar poles of the electric lights
had been cut into fence-rails; the wooden shanties of
the Italian gang of Auriferous workers had been torn down
and split into fire wood; and where they had stood, the
burdocks and the thistles of the luxuriant summer conspired
to hide the traces of their shame. Nature reached out
its hand and drew its coverlet of green over the grave
of the vanished Eldorado.

And as the Wizard and his son stood upon the hillside,
they saw nothing but the land sloping to the lake and
the creek murmuring again to the willows, while the
off-shore wind rippled the rushes of the shallow water.

CHAPTER FOUR: The Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown

Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown lived on Plutoria Avenue in a vast
sandstone palace, in which she held those fashionable
entertainments which have made the name of Rasselyer-Brown
what it is. Mr. Rasselyer-Brown lived there also.

The exterior of the house was more or less a model of
the facade of an Italian palazzo of the sixteenth century.
If one questioned Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown at dinner in regard
to this (which was only a fair return for drinking five
dollar champagne), she answered that the facade was
_cinquecentisti_, but that it reproduced also the Saracenic
mullioned window of the Siennese School. But if the guest
said later in the evening to Mr. Rasselyer-Brown that he
understood that his house was _cinquecentisti_, he answered
that he guessed it was. After which remark and an interval
of silence, Mr. Rasselyer-Brown would probably ask the
guest if he was dry.

So from that one can tell exactly the sort of people the
Rasselyer-Browns were.

In other words, Mr. Rasselyer-Brown was a severe handicap
to Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. He was more than that; the word
isn't strong enough. He was, as Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown
herself confessed to her confidential circle of three
hundred friends, a drag. He was also a tie, and a weight,
and a burden, and in Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's religious
moments a crucifix. Even in the early years of their
married life, some twenty or twenty-five years ago, her
husband had been a drag on her by being in the coal and
wood business. It is hard for a woman to have to realize
that her husband is making a fortune out of coal and wood
and that people know it. It ties one down. What a woman
wants most of all--this, of course, is merely a quotation
from Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's own thoughts as expressed to
her three hundred friends--is room to expand, to grow.
The hardest thing in the world is to be stifled: and
there is nothing more stifling than a husband who doesn't
know a Giotto from a Carlo Dolci, but who can distinguish
nut coal from egg and is never asked to dinner without
talking about the furnace.

These, of course, were early trials. They had passed to
some extent, or were, at any rate, garlanded with the
roses of time.

But the drag remained.

Even when the retail coal and wood stage was long since
over, it was hard to have to put up with a husband who
owned a coal mine and who bought pulp forests instead of
illuminated missals of the twelfth century. A coal mine
is a dreadful thing at a dinner-table. It humbles one so
before one's guests.

It wouldn't have been so bad--this Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown
herself admitted--if Mr. Rasselyer-Brown _did_ anything.
This phrase should be clearly understood. It meant if
there was any one thing that he _did_. For instance if he
had only _collected_ anything. Thus, there was Mr. Lucullus
Fyshe, who made soda-water, but at the same time everybody
knew that he had the best collection of broken Italian
furniture on the continent; there wasn't a sound piece
among the lot.

And there was the similar example of old Mr. Feathertop.
He didn't exactly _collect_ things; he repudiated the name.
He was wont to say, "Don't call me a collector, I'm _not_.
I simply pick things up. Just where I happen to be, Rome,
Warsaw, Bucharest, anywhere"--and it is to be noted what
fine places these are to happen to be. And to think that
Mr. Rasselyer-Brown would never put his foot outside of
the United States! Whereas Mr. Feathertop would come back
from what he called a run to Europe, and everybody would
learn in a week that he had picked up the back of a violin
in Dresden (actually discovered it in a violin shop),
and the lid of an Etruscan kettle (he had lighted on it,
by pure chance, in a kettle shop in Etruria), and Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown would feel faint with despair at the
nonentity of her husband.

So one can understand how heavy her burden was.

"My dear," she often said to her bosom friend, Miss Snagg,
"I shouldn't mind things so much" (the things she wouldn't
mind were, let us say, the two million dollars of standing
timber which Brown Limited, the ominous business name of
Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, were buying that year) "if Mr.
Rasselyer-Brown _did_ anything. But he does _nothing_. Every
morning after breakfast off to his wretched office, and
never back till dinner, and in the evening nothing but
his club, or some business meeting. One would think he
would have more ambition. How I wish I had been a man."

It was certainly a shame.

So it came that, in almost everything she undertook Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown had to act without the least help from
her husband. Every Wednesday, for instance, when the
Dante Club met at her house (they selected four lines
each week to meditate on, and then discussed them at
lunch), Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown had to carry the whole
burden of it--her very phrase, "the whole burden"--alone.
Anyone who has carried four lines of Dante through a
Moselle lunch knows what a weight it is.

In all these things her husband was useless, quite useless.
It is not right to be ashamed of one's husband. And to
do her justice, Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown always explained to
her three hundred intimates that she was _not_ ashamed of
him; in fact, that she _refused_ to be. But it was hard to
see him brought into comparison at their own table with
superior men. Put him, for instance, beside Mr. Sikleigh
Snoop, the sex-poet, and where was he? Nowhere. He couldn't
even understand what Mr. Snoop was saying. And when Mr.
Snoop would stand on the hearth-rug with a cup of tea
balanced in his hand, and discuss whether sex was or was
not the dominant note in Botticelli, Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown
would be skulking in a corner in his ill-fitting dress
suit. His wife would often catch with an agonized ear
such scraps of talk as, "When I was first in the coal
and wood business," or, "It's a coal that burns quicker
than egg, but it hasn't the heating power of nut," or
even in a low undertone the words, "If you're feeling
_dry_ while he's reading--" And this at a time when everybody
in the room ought to have been listening to Mr. Snoop.

Nor was even this the whole burden of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown.
There was another part of it which was perhaps more _real_,
though Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself never put it into
words. In fact, of this part of her burden she never
spoke, even to her bosom friend Miss Snagg; nor did she
talk about it to the ladies of the Dante Club, nor did
she make speeches on it to the members of the Women's
Afternoon Art Society, nor to the Monday Bridge Club.

But the members of the Bridge Club and the Art Society
and the Dante Club all talked about it among themselves.

Stated very simply, it was this: Mr. Rasselyer-Brown
drank. It was not meant that he was a drunkard or that
he drank too much, or anything of that sort. He drank.
That was all.

There was no excess about it. Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, of
course, began the day with an eye-opener--and after all,
what alert man does not wish his eyes well open in the
morning? He followed it usually just before breakfast
with a bracer--and what wiser precaution can a businessman
take than to brace his breakfast? On his way to business
he generally had his motor stopped at the Grand Palaver
for a moment, if it was a raw day, and dropped in and
took something to keep out the damp. If it was a cold
day he took something to keep out the cold, and if it
was one of those clear, sunny days that are so dangerous
to the system he took whatever the bartender (a recognized
health expert) suggested to tone the system up. After
which he could sit down in his office and transact more
business, and bigger business, in coal, charcoal, wood,
pulp, pulpwood, and woodpulp, in two hours than any other
man in the business could in a week. Naturally so. For
he was braced, and propped, and toned up, and his eyes
had been opened, and his brain cleared, till outside of
very big business, indeed, few men were on a footing with
him.

In fact, it was business itself which had compelled Mr.
Rasselyer-Brown to drink. It is all very well for a junior
clerk on twenty dollars a week to do his work on sandwiches
and malted milk. In big business it is not possible. When
a man begins to rise in business, as Mr. Rasselyer-Brown
had begun twenty-five years ago, he finds that if he
wants to succeed he must cut malted milk clear out. In
any position of responsibility a man has got to drink.
No really big deal can be put through without it. If two
keen men, sharp as flint, get together to make a deal in
which each intends to outdo the other, the only way to
succeed is for them to adjourn to some such place as the
luncheon-room of the Mausoleum Club and both get partially
drunk. This is what is called the personal element in
business. And, beside it, plodding industry is nowhere.

Most of all do these principles hold true in such manly
out-of-door enterprises as the forest and timber business,
where one deals constantly with chief rangers, and
pathfinders, and wood-stalkers, whose very names seem to
suggest a horn of whiskey under a hemlock tree.

But--let it be repeated and carefully understood--there
was no excess about Mr. Rasselyer-Brown's drinking.
Indeed, whatever he might be compelled to take during
the day, and at the Mausoleum Club in the evening, after
his return from his club at night Mr. Rasselyer-Brown
made it a fixed rule to take nothing. He might, perhaps,
as he passed into the house, step into the dining-room
and take a very small drink at the sideboard. But this
he counted as part of the return itself, and not after
it. And he might, if his brain were over-fatigued, drop
down later in the night in his pajamas and dressing-gown
when the house was quiet, and compose his mind with a
brandy and water, or something suitable to the stillness
of the hour. But this was not really a drink. Mr.
Rasselyer-Brown called it a _nip_; and of course any man
may need a _nip_ at a time when he would scorn a drink.

* * * * * * *

But after all, a woman may find herself again in her
daughter. There, at least, is consolation. For, as Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown herself admitted, her daughter, Dulphemia,
was herself again. There were, of course, differences,
certain differences of face and appearance. Mr. Snoop
had expressed this fact exquisitely when he said that it
was the difference between a Burne-Jones and a Dante
Gabriel Rossetti. But even at that the mother and daughter
were so alike that people, certain people, were constantly
mistaking them on the street. And as everybody that
mistook them was apt to be asked to dine on five-dollar
champagne there was plenty of temptation towards error.

There is no doubt that Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown was a
girl of remarkable character and intellect. So is any
girl who has beautiful golden hair parted in thick bands
on her forehead, and deep blue eyes soft as an Italian
sky.

Even the oldest and most serious men in town admitted
that in talking to her they were aware of a grasp, a
reach, a depth that surprised them. Thus old Judge
Longerstill, who talked to her at dinner for an hour on
the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce Commission,
felt sure from the way in which she looked up in his face
at intervals and said, "How interesting!" that she had
the mind of a lawyer. And Mr. Brace, the consulting
engineer, who showed her on the table-cloth at dessert
with three forks and a spoon the method in which the
overflow of the spillway of the Gatun Dam is regulated,
felt assured, from the way she leaned her face on her
hand sideways and said, "How extraordinary!" that she
had the brain of an engineer. Similarly foreign visitors
to the social circles of the city were delighted with
her. Viscount FitzThistle, who explained to Dulphemia
for half an hour the intricacies of the Irish situation,
was captivated at the quick grasp she showed by asking
him at the end, without a second's hesitation, "And which
are the Nationalists?"

This kind of thing represents female intellect in its
best form. Every man that is really a man is willing to
recognize it at once. As to the young men, of course
they flocked to the Rasselyer-Brown residence in shoals.
There were batches of them every Sunday afternoon at five
o'clock, encased in long black frock-coats, sitting very
rigidly in upright chairs, trying to drink tea with one
hand. One might see athletic young college men of the
football team trying hard to talk about Italian music;
and Italian tenors from the Grand Opera doing their best
to talk about college football. There were young men in
business talking about art, and young men in art talking
about religion, and young clergymen talking about business.
Because, of course, the Rasselyer-Brown residence was
the kind of cultivated home where people of education
and taste are at liberty to talk about things they don't
know, and to utter freely ideas that they haven't got.
It was only now and again, when one of the professors
from the college across the avenue came booming into the
room, that the whole conversation was pulverized into
dust under the hammer of accurate knowledge.

The whole process was what was called, by those who
understood such things, a _salon_. Many people said that
Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's afternoons at home were exactly
like the delightful _salons_ of the eighteenth century:
and whether the gatherings were or were not _salons_ of
the eighteenth century, there is no doubt that Mr.
Rasselyer-Brown, under whose care certain favoured guests
dropped quietly into the back alcove of the dining-room,
did his best to put the gathering on a par with the best
saloons of the twentieth.

Now it so happened that there had come a singularly slack
moment in the social life of the City. The Grand Opera
had sung itself into a huge deficit and closed. There
remained nothing of it except the efforts of a committee
of ladies to raise enough money to enable Signor Puffi
to leave town, and the generous attempt of another
committee to gather funds in order to keep Signor Pasti
in the City. Beyond this, opera was dead, though the fact
that the deficit was nearly twice as large as it had been
the year before showed that public interest in music was
increasing. It was indeed a singularly trying time of
the year. It was too early to go to Europe; and too late
to go to Bermuda. It was too warm to go south, and yet
still too cold to go north. In fact, one was almost
compelled to stay at home--which was dreadful.

As a result Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown and her three hundred
friends moved backwards and forwards on Plutoria Avenue,
seeking novelty in vain. They washed in waves of silk
from tango teas to bridge afternoons. They poured in
liquid avalanches of colour into crowded receptions, and
they sat in glittering rows and listened to lectures on
the enfranchisement of the female sex. But for the moment
all was weariness.

Now it happened, whether by accident or design, that just
at this moment of general _ennui_ Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown and
her three hundred friends first heard of the presence in
the city of Mr. Yahi-Bahi, the celebrated Oriental mystic.
He was so celebrated that nobody even thought of asking
who he was or where he came from. They merely told one
another, and repeated it, that he was _the_ celebrated
Yahi-Bahi. They added for those who needed the knowledge
that the name was pronounced Yahhy-Bahhy, and that the
doctrine taught by Mr. Yahi-Bahi was Boohooism. This
latter, if anyone inquired further, was explained to be
a form of Shoodooism, only rather more intense. In fact,
it was esoteric--on receipt of which information everybody
remarked at once how infinitely superior the Oriental
peoples are to ourselves.

Now as Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown was always a leader in
everything that was done in the best circles on Plutoria
Avenue, she was naturally among the first to visit Mr.
Yahi-Bahi.

"My dear," she said, in describing afterwards her experience
to her bosom friend, Miss Snagg, "it was _most_ interesting.
We drove away down to the queerest part of the City, and
went to the strangest little house imaginable, up the
narrowest stairs one ever saw--quite Eastern, in fact,
just like a scene out of the Koran."

"How fascinating!" said Miss Snagg. But as a matter of
fact, if Mr. Yahi-Bahi's house had been inhabited, as it
might have been, by a streetcar conductor or a railway
brakesman, Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown wouldn't have thought it
in any way peculiar or fascinating.

"It was all hung with curtains inside," she went on,
"with figures of snakes and Indian gods, perfectly weird."

"And did you see Mr. Yahi-Bahi?" asked Miss Snagg.

"Oh no, my dear. I only saw his assistant Mr. Ram Spudd;
such a queer little round man, a Bengalee, I believe. He
put his back against a curtain and spread out his arms
sideways and wouldn't let me pass. He said that Mr.
Yahi-Bahi was in meditation and mustn't be disturbed."

"How delightful!" echoed Miss Snagg.

But in reality Mr. Yahi-Bahi was sitting behind the
curtain eating a ten-cent can of pork and beans.

"What I like most about eastern people," went on Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown, "is their wonderful delicacy of feeling.
After I had explained about my invitation to Mr. Yahi-Bahi
to come and speak to us on Boohooism, and was going away,
I took a dollar bill out of my purse and laid it on the
table. You should have seen the way Mr. Ram Spudd took
it. He made the deepest salaam and said, 'Isis guard you,
beautiful lady.' Such perfect courtesy, and yet with the
air of scorning the money. As I passed out I couldn't
help slipping another dollar into his hand, and he took
it as if utterly unaware of it, and muttered, 'Osiris
keep you, O flower of women!' And as I got into the motor
I gave him another dollar and he said, 'Osis and Osiris
both prolong your existence, O lily of the ricefield,'
and after he had said it he stood beside the door of the
motor and waited without moving till I left. He had such
a strange, rapt look, as if he were still expecting
something!"

"How exquisite!" murmured Miss Snagg. It was her business
in life to murmur such things as this for Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown. On the whole, reckoning Grand Opera
tickets and dinners, she did very well out of it.

"Is it not?" said Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. "So different
from our men. I felt so ashamed of my chauffeur, our new
man, you know; he seemed such a contrast beside Ram Spudd.
The rude way in which the opened the door, and the rude
way in which he climbed on to his own seat, and the
_rudeness_ with which he turned on the power--I felt
positively ashamed. And he so managed it--I am sure he
did it on purpose--that the car splashed a lot of mud
over Mr. Spudd as it started."

Yet, oddly enough, the opinion of other people on this
new chauffeur, that of Miss Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown
herself, for example, to whose service he was specially
attached, was very different.

The great recommendation of him in the eyes of Miss
Dulphemia and her friends, and the thing that gave him
a touch of mystery was--and what higher qualification
can a chauffeur want?--that he didn't look like a chauffeur
at all.

"My dear Dulphie," whispered Miss Philippa Furlong, the
rector's sister (who was at that moment Dulphemia's second
self), as they sat behind the new chauffeur, "don't tell
me that he is a chauffeur, because he _isn't_. He can
chauffe, of course, but that's nothing."

For the new chauffeur had a bronzed face, hard as metal,
and a stern eye; and when he put on a chauffeur's overcoat
some how it seemed to turn into a military greatcoat;
and even when he put on the round cloth cap of his
profession it was converted straightway into a military
shako. And by Miss Dulphemia and her friends it was
presently reported--or was invented?--that he had served
in the Philippines; which explained at once the scar upon
his forehead, which must have been received at Iloilo,
or Huila-Huila, or some other suitable place.

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