Books: Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

There sat the affrighted guests staring at one another
with pale faces.

But, to the amazement and horror of all, the little table
in the centre stood empty--not a single gem, not a fraction
of the gold that had lain upon it was left. All had
disappeared.

The truth seemed to burst upon everyone at once. There
was no doubt of what had happened.

The gold and the jewels had been deastralized. Under the
occult power of the vision they had been demonetized,
engulfed into the astral plane along with the vanishing
Buddha.

Filled with the sense of horror still to come, somebody
pulled aside the little screen. They fully expected to
find the lifeless bodies of Mr. Yahi-Bahi and the faithful
Ram Spudd. What they saw before them was more dreadful
still. The outer Oriental garments of the two devotees
lay strewn upon the floor. The long sash of Yahi-Bahi
and the thick turban of Ram Spudd were side by side near
them; almost sickening in its repulsive realism was the
thick black head of hair of the junior devotee, apparently
torn from his scalp as if by lightning and bearing a
horrible resemblance to the cast-off wig of an actor.

The truth was too plain.

"They are engulfed!" cried a dozen voices at once.

It was realized in a flash that Yahi-Bahi and Ram Spudd
had paid the penalty of their daring with their lives.
Through some fatal neglect, against which they had fairly
warned the participants of the seance, the two Orientals
had been carried bodily in the astral plane.

"How dreadful!" murmured Mr. Snoop. "We must have made
some awful error."

"Are they deastralized?" murmured Mrs. Buncomhearst.

"Not a doubt of it," said Mr. Snoop.

And then another voice in the group was heard to say,
"We must hush it up. We _can't_ have it known!"

On which a chorus of voices joined in, everybody urging
that it must be hushed up.

"Couldn't you try to reastralize them?" said somebody to
Mr. Snoop.

"No, no," said Mr. Snoop, still shaking. "Better not try
to. We must hush it up if we can."

And the general assent to this sentiment showed that,
after all, the principles of Bahee, or Indifference to
Others, had taken a real root in the society.

"Hush it up," cried everybody, and there was a general
move towards the hall.

"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Mrs. Buncomhearst; "our wraps!"

"Deastralized!" said the guests.

There was a moment of further consternation as everybody
gazed at the spot where the ill-fated pile of furs and
wraps had lain.

"Never mind," said everybody, "let's go without them--don't
stay. Just think if the police should--"

And at the word police, all of a sudden there was heard
in the street the clanging of a bell and the racing gallop
of the horses of the police patrol wagon.

"The police!" cried everybody. "Hush it up! Hush it up!"
For of course the principles of Bahee are not known to
the police.

In another moment the doorbell of the house rang with a
long and violent peal, and in a second as it seemed, the
whole hall was filled with bulky figures uniformed in
blue.

"It's all right, Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown," cried a loud,
firm voice from the sidewalk. "We have them both. Everything
is here. We got them before they'd gone a block. But if
you don't mind, the police must get a couple of names
for witnesses in the warrant."

It was the Philippine chauffeur. But he was no longer
attired as such. He wore the uniform of an inspector of
police, and there was the metal badge of the Detective
Department now ostentatiously outside his coat.

And beside him, one on each side of him, there stood the
deastralized forms of Yahi-Bahi and Ram Spudd. They wore
long overcoats, doubtless the contents of the magic
parcels, and the Philippine chauffeur had a grip of iron
on the neck of each as they stood. Mr. Spudd had lost
his Oriental hair, and the face of Mr. Yahi-Bahi, perhaps
in the struggle which had taken place, had been scraped
white in patches.

They were making no attempt to break away. Indeed, Mr.
Spudd, with that complete Bahee, or Submission to Fate,
which is attained only by long services in state
penitentiaries, was smiling and smoking a cigarette.

"We were waiting for them," explained a tall police
officer to the two or three ladies who now gathered round
him with a return of courage. "They had the stuff in a
hand-cart and were pushing it away. The chief caught them
at the corner, and rang the patrol from there. You'll
find everything all right, I think, ladies," he added,
as a burly assistant was seen carrying an armload of furs
up the steps.

Somehow many of the ladies realized at the moment what
cheery, safe, reliable people policemen in blue are, and
what a friendly, familiar shelter they offer against the
wiles of Oriental occultism.

"Are they old criminals?" someone asked.

"Yes, ma'am. They've worked this same thing in four cities
already, and both of them have done time, and lots of
it. They've only been out six months. No need to worry
over them," he concluded with a shrug of the shoulders.

So the furs were restored and the gold and the jewels
parcelled out among the owners, and in due course Mr.
Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram Spudd were lifted up into the patrol
wagon where they seated themselves with a composure worthy
of the best traditions of Jehumbabah and Bahoolapore. In
fact, Mr. Spudd was heard to address the police as "boys,"
and to remark that they had "got them good" that time.

So the seance ended and the guests vanished, and the
Yahi-Bahi Society terminated itself without even a vote
of dissolution.

And in all the later confidential discussions of the
episode only one point of mysticism remained. After they
had time really to reflect on it, free from all danger
of arrest, the members of the society realized that on
one point the police were entirely off the truth of
things. For Mr. Yahi-Bahi, whether a thief or not, and
whether he came from the Orient, or, as the police said,
from Missouri, had actually succeeded in reastralizing
Buddha.

Nor was anyone more emphatic on this point than Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown herself.

"For after all," she said, "if it was not Buddha, who
was it?"

And the question was never answered.

CHAPTER FIVE: The Love Story of Mr. Peter Spillikins

Almost any day, on Plutoria Avenue or thereabouts, you
may see little Mr. Spillikins out walking with his four
tall sons, who are practically as old as himself.

To be exact, Mr. Spillikins is twenty-four, and Bob, the
oldest of the boys, must be at least twenty. Their exact
ages are no longer known, because, by a dreadful accident,
their mother forgot them. This was at a time when the
boys were all at Mr. Wackem's Academy for Exceptional
Youths in the foothills of Tennessee, and while their
mother, Mrs. Everleigh, was spending the winter on the
Riviera and felt that for their own sake she must not
allow herself to have the boys with her.

But now, of course, since Mrs. Everleigh has remarried
and become Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins there is no need to
keep them at Mr. Wackem's any longer. Mr. Spillikins is
able to look after them.

Mr. Spillikins generally wears a little top hat and an
English morning coat. The boys are in Eton jackets and
black trousers, which, at their mother's wish, are kept
just a little too short for them. This is because Mrs.
Everleigh-Spillikins feels that the day will come some
day--say fifteen years hence--when the boys will no longer
be children, and meantime it is so nice to feel that they
are still mere boys. Bob is the eldest, but Sib the
youngest is the tallest, whereas Willie the third boy is
the dullest, although this has often been denied by those
who claim that Gib the second boy is just a trifle duller.
Thus at any rate there is a certain equality and good
fellowship all round.

Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is not to be seen walking with
them. She is probably at the race-meet, being taken there
by Captain Cormorant of the United States navy, which
Mr. Spillikins considers very handsome of him. Every now
and then the captain, being in the navy, is compelled to
be at sea for perhaps a whole afternoon or even several
days; in which case Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is very
generally taken to the Hunt Club or the Country Club by
Lieutenant Hawk, which Mr. Spillikins regards as awfully
thoughtful of him. Or if Lieutenant Hawk is also out of
town for the day, as he sometimes has to be, because he
is in the United States army, Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins
is taken out by old Colonel Shake, who is in the State
militia and who is at leisure all the time.

During their walks on Plutoria Avenue one may hear the
four boys addressing Mr. Spillikins as "father" and "dad"
in deep bull-frog voices.

"Say, dad," drawls Bob, "couldn't we all go to the ball
game?"

"No. Say, dad," says Gib, "let's all go back to the house
and play five-cent pool in the billiard-room."

"All right, boys," says Mr. Spillikins. And a few minutes
later one may see them all hustling up the steps of the
Everleigh-Spillikins's mansion, quite eager at the prospect,
and all talking together.

* * * * * * *

Now the whole of this daily panorama, to the eye that
can read it, represents the outcome of the tangled love
story of Mr. Spillikins, which culminated during the
summer houseparty at Castel Casteggio, the woodland
retreat of Mr. and Mrs. Newberry.

But to understand the story one must turn back a year or
so to the time when Mr. Peter Spillikins used to walk on
Plutoria Avenue alone, or sit in the Mausoleum Club
listening to the advice of people who told him that he
really ought to get married.

* * * * * * *

In those days the first thing that one noticed about Mr.
Peter Spillikins was his exalted view of the other sex.
Every time he passed a beautiful woman in the street he
said to himself, "I say!" Even when he met a moderately
beautiful one he murmured, "By Jove!" When an Easter hat
went sailing past, or a group of summer parasols stood
talking on a leafy corner, Mr. Spillikins ejaculated,
"My word!" At the opera and at tango teas his projecting
blue eyes almost popped out of his head.

Similarly, if he happened to be with one of his friends,
he would murmur, "I say, _do_ look at that beautiful girl,"
or would exclaim, "I say, don't look, but isn't that an
awfully pretty girl across the street?" or at the opera,
"Old man, don't let her see you looking, but do you see
that lovely girl in the box opposite?"

One must add to this that Mr. Spillikins, in spite of
his large and bulging blue eyes, enjoyed the heavenly
gift of short sight. As a consequence he lived in a world
of amazingly beautiful women. And as his mind was focused
in the same way as his eyes he endowed them with all the
virtues and graces which ought to adhere to fifty-dollar
flowered hats and cerise parasols with ivory handles.

Nor, to do him justice, did Mr. Spillikins confine his
attitude to his view of women alone. He brought it to
bear on everything. Every time he went to the opera he
would come away enthusiastic, saying, "By Jove, isn't it
simply splendid! Of course I haven't the ear to appreciate
it--I'm not musical, you know--but even with the little
that I know, it's great; it absolutely puts me to sleep."
And of each new novel that he bought he said, "It's a
perfectly wonderful book! Of course I haven't the head
to understand it, so I didn't finish it, but it's simply
thrilling." Similarly with painting, "It's one of the
most marvellous pictures I ever saw," he would say. "Of
course I've no eye for pictures, and I couldn't see
anything in it, but it's wonderful!"

The career of Mr. Spillikins up to the point of which we
are speaking had hitherto not been very satisfactory, or
at least not from the point of view of Mr. Boulder, who
was his uncle and trustee. Mr. Boulder's first idea had
been to have Mr. Spillikins attend the university. Dr.
Boomer, the president, had done his best to spread abroad
the idea that a university education was perfectly suitable
even for the rich; that it didn't follow that because a
man was a university graduate he need either work or
pursue his studies any further; that what the university
aimed to do was merely to put a certain stamp upon a man.
That was all. And this stamp, according to the tenor of
the president's convocation addresses, was perfectly
harmless. No one ought to be afraid of it. As a result,
a great many of the very best young men in the City, who
had no need for education at all, were beginning to attend
college. "It marked," said Dr. Boomer, "a revolution."

Mr. Spillikins himself was fascinated with his studies.
The professors seemed to him living wonders.

"By Jove!" he said, "the professor of mathematics is a
marvel. You ought to see him explaining trigonometry on
the blackboard. You can't understand a word of it." He
hardly knew which of his studies he liked best. "Physics,"
he said, "is a wonderful study. I got five per cent in
it. But, by Jove! I had to work for it. I'd go in for it
altogether if they'd let me."

But that was just the trouble--they wouldn't. And so in
course of time Mr. Spillikins was compelled, for academic
reasons, to abandon his life work. His last words about
it were, "Gad! I nearly passed in trigonometry!" and he
always said afterwards that he had got a tremendous lot
out of the university.

After that, as he had to leave the university, his trustee,
Mr. Boulder, put Mr. Spillikins into business. It was,
of course, his own business, one of the many enterprises
for which Mr. Spillikins, ever since he was twenty-one,
had already been signing documents and countersigning
cheques. So Mr. Spillikins found himself in a mahogany
office selling wholesale oil. And he liked it. He said
that business sharpened one up tremendously.

"I'm afraid, Mr. Spillikins," a caller in the mahogany
office would say, "that we can't meet you at five dollars.
Four seventy is the best we can do on the present market."

"My dear chap," said Mr. Spillikins, "that's all right.
After all, thirty cents isn't much, eh what? Dash it,
old man, we won't fight about thirty cents. How much do
you want?"

"Well, at four seventy we'll take twenty thousand barrels."

"By Jove!" said Mr. Spillikins; "twenty thousand barrels.
Gad! you want a lot, don't you? Pretty big sale, eh, for
a beginner like me? I guess uncle'll be tickled to death."

So tickled was he that after a few weeks of oil-selling
Mr. Boulder urged Mr. Spillikins to retire, and wrote
off many thousand dollars from the capital value of his
estate.

So after this there was only one thing for Mr. Spillikins
to do, and everybody told him so--namely to get married.
"Spillikins," said his friends at the club after they
had taken all his loose money over the card table, "you
ought to get married."

"Think so?" said Mr. Spillikins.

Goodness knows he was willing enough. In fact, up to this
point Mr. Spillikins's whole existence had been one long
aspiring sigh directed towards the joys of matrimony.

In his brief college days his timid glances had wandered
by an irresistible attraction towards the seats on the
right-hand side of the class room, where the girls of
the first year sat, with golden pigtails down their backs,
doing trigonometry.

He would have married any of them. But when a girl can
work out trigonometry at sight, what use can she possibly
have for marriage? None. Mr. Spillikins knew this and it
kept him silent. And even when the most beautiful girl
in the class married the demonstrator and thus terminated
her studies in her second year, Spillikins realized that
it was only because the man was, undeniably, a demonstrator
and knew things.

Later on, when Spillikins went into business and into
society, the same fate pursued him. He loved, for at
least six months, Georgiana McTeague, the niece of the
presbyterian minister of St. Osoph's. He loved her so
well that for her sake he temporarily abandoned his pew
at St. Asaph's, which was episcopalian, and listened to
fourteen consecutive sermons on hell. But the affair got
no further than that. Once or twice, indeed, Spillikins
walked home with Georgiana from church and talked about
hell with her; and once her uncle asked him into the
manse for cold supper after evening service, and they
had a long talk about hell all through the meal and
upstairs in the sitting-room afterwards. But somehow
Spillikins could get no further with it. He read up all
he could about hell so as to be able to talk with Georgiana,
but in the end it failed: a young minister fresh from
college came and preached at St. Osoph's six special
sermons on the absolute certainty of eternal punishment,
and he married Miss McTeague as a result of it.

And, meantime, Mr. Spillikins had got engaged, or
practically so, to Adelina Lightleigh; not that he had
spoken to her, but he considered himself bound to her.
For her sake he had given up hell altogether, and was
dancing till two in the morning and studying action bridge
out of a book. For a time he felt so sure that she meant
to have him that he began bringing his greatest friend,
Edward Ruff of the college football team, of whom Spillikins
was very proud, up to the Lightleighs' residence. He
specially wanted Adelina and Edward to be great friends,
so that Adelina and he might ask Edward up to the house
after he was married. And they got to be such great
friends, and so quickly, that they were married in New
York that autumn. After which Spillikins used to be
invited up to the house by Edward and Adelina. They both
used to tell him how much they owed him; and they, too,
used to join in the chorus and say, "You know, Peter,
you're awfully silly not to get married."

Now all this had happened and finished at about the time
when the Yahi-Bahi Society ran its course. At its first
meeting Mr. Spillikins had met Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown.
At the very sight of her he began reading up the life of
Buddha and a translation of the Upanishads so as to fit
himself to aspire to live with her. Even when the society
ended in disaster Mr. Spillikins's love only burned the
stronger. Consequently, as soon as he knew that Mr. and
Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown were going away for the summer, and
that Dulphemia was to go to stay with the Newberrys at
Castel Casteggio, this latter place, the summer retreat
of the Newberrys, became the one spot on earth for Mr.
Peter Spillikins.

Naturally, therefore, Mr. Spillikins was presently
transported to the seventh heaven when in due course of
time he received a note which said, "We shall be so
pleased if you can come out and spend a week or two with
us here. We will send the car down to the Thursday train
to meet you. We live here in the simplest fashion possible;
in fact, as Mr. Newberry says, we are just roughing it,
but I am sure you don't mind for a change. Dulphemia is
with us, but we are quite a small party."

The note was signed "Margaret Newberry" and was written
on heavy cream paper with a silver monogram such as people
use when roughing it.

* * * * * * *

The Newberrys, like everybody else, went away from town
in the summertime. Mr. Newberry being still in business,
after a fashion, it would not have looked well for him
to remain in town throughout the year. It would have
created a bad impression on the market as to how much he
was making.

In fact, in the early summer everybody went out of town.
The few who ever revisited the place in August reported
that they hadn't seen a soul on the street.

It was a sort of longing for the simple life, for nature,
that came over everybody. Some people sought it at the
seaside, where nature had thrown out her broad plank
walks and her long piers and her vaudeville shows. Others
sought it in the heart of the country, where nature had
spread her oiled motor roads and her wayside inns. Others,
like the Newberrys, preferred to "rough it" in country
residences of their own.

Some of the people, as already said, went for business
reasons, to avoid the suspicion of having to work all
the year round. Others went to Europe to avoid the reproach
of living always in America. Others, perhaps most people,
went for medical reasons, being sent away by their doctors.
Not that they were ill; but the doctors of Plutoria
Avenue, such as Doctor Slyder, always preferred to send
all their patients out of town during the summer months.
No well-to-do doctor cares to be bothered with them. And
of course patients, even when they are anxious to go
anywhere on their own account, much prefer to be sent
there by their doctor.

"My dear madam," Dr. Slyder would say to a lady who, as
he knew, was most anxious to go to Virginia, "there's
really nothing I can do for you." Here he spoke the truth.
"It's not a case of treatment. It's simply a matter of
dropping everything and going away. Now why don't you go
for a month or two to some quiet place, where you will
simply _do nothing?_" (She never, as he knew, did anything,
anyway.) "What do you say to Hot Springs,
Virginia?--absolute quiet, good golf, not a soul there,
plenty of tennis." Or else he would say, "My dear madam,
you're simply _worn out_. Why don't you just drop everything
and go to Canada?--perfectly quiet, not a soul there,
and, I believe, nowadays quite fashionable."

Thus, after all the patients had been sent away, Dr.
Slyder and his colleagues of Plutoria Avenue managed to
slip away themselves for a month or two, heading straight
for Paris and Vienna. There they were able, so they said,
to keep in touch with what continental doctors were doing.
They probably were.

Now it so happened that both the parents of Miss Dulphemia
Rasselyer-Brown had been sent out of town in this fashion.
Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's distressing experience with
Yahi-Bahi had left her in a condition in which she was
utterly fit for nothing, except to go on a Mediterranean
cruise, with about eighty other people also fit for
nothing.

Mr. Rasselyer-Brown himself, though never exactly an
invalid, had confessed that after all the fuss of the
Yahi-Bahi business he needed bracing up, needed putting
into shape, and had put himself into Dr. Slyder's hands.
The doctor had examined him, questioned him searchingly
as to what he drank, and ended by prescribing port wine
to be taken firmly and unflinchingly during the evening,
and for the daytime, at any moment of exhaustion, a light
cordial such as rye whiskey, or rum and Vichy water. In
addition to which Dr. Slyder had recommended Mr.
Rasselyer-Brown to leave town.

"Why don't you go down to Nagahakett on the Atlantic?"
he said.

"Is that in Maine?" said Mr. Rasselyer-Brown in horror.

"Oh, dear me, no!" answered the doctor reassuringly.
"It's in New Brunswick, Canada; excellent place, most
liberal licence laws; first class cuisine and a bar in
the hotel. No tourists, no golf, too cold to swim--just
the place to enjoy oneself."

So Mr. Rasselyer-Brown had gone away also, and as a result
Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown, at the particular moment of
which we speak, was declared by the Boudoir and Society
column of the _Plutorian Daily Dollar_ to be staying with
Mr. and Mrs. Newberry at their charming retreat, Castel
Casteggio.

The Newberrys belonged to the class of people whose one
aim in the summer is to lead the simple life. Mr. Newberry
himself said that his one idea of a vacation was to get
right out into the bush, and put on old clothes, and just
eat when he felt like it.

This was why he had built Castel Casteggio. It stood
about forty miles from the city, out among the wooded
hills on the shore of a little lake. Except for the
fifteen or twenty residences like it that dotted the
sides of the lake it was entirely isolated. The only way
to reach it was by the motor road that wound its way
among leafy hills from the railway station fifteen miles
away. Every foot of the road was private property, as
all nature ought to be. The whole country about Castel
Casteggio was absolutely primeval, or at any rate as
primeval as Scotch gardeners and French landscape artists
could make it. The lake itself lay like a sparkling gem
from nature's workshop--except that they had raised the
level of it ten feet, stone-banked the sides, cleared
out the brush, and put a motor road round it. Beyond that
it was pure nature.

Castel Casteggio itself, a beautiful house of white brick
with sweeping piazzas and glittering conservatories,
standing among great trees with rolling lawns broken with
flower-beds as the ground sloped to the lake, was perhaps
the most beautiful house of all; at any rate, it was an
ideal spot to wear old clothes in, to dine early (at
7.30) and, except for tennis parties, motor-boat parties,
lawn teas, and golf, to live absolutely to oneself.

It should be explained that the house was not called
Castel Casteggio because the Newberrys were Italian: they
were not; nor because they owned estates in Italy: they
didn't nor had travelled there: they hadn't. Indeed, for
a time they had thought of giving it a Welsh name, or a
Scotch. But the beautiful country residence of the
Asterisk-Thomsons had stood close by in the same primeval
country was already called Penny-gw-rydd, and the woodland
retreat of the Hyphen-Joneses just across the little lake
was called Strathythan-na-Clee, and the charming chalet
of the Wilson-Smiths was called Yodel-Dudel; so it seemed
fairer to select an Italian name.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15