Produced by Gardner Buchanan. HTML version by Al Haines.
Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich
By
Stephen Leacock, 1869-1944
CONTENTS
I A Little Dinner with Mr. Lucullus Fyshe II The Wizard of Finance III The Arrested Philanthropy of Mr. Tomlinson IV The Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown V The Love Story of Mr. Peter Spillikins VI The Rival Churches of St. Asaph and St. Osoph VII The Ministrations of the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing VIII The Great Fight for Clean Government
CHAPTER ONE: A Little Dinner with Mr. Lucullus Fyshe
The Mausoleum Club stands on the quietest corner of the bestresidential street in the City. It is a Grecian building of whitestone. About it are great elm trees with birds--the most expensive kindof birds--singing in the branches.
The street in the softer hours of the morning has an almost reverentialquiet. Great motors move drowsily along it, with solitary chauffeursreturning at 10.30 after conveying the earlier of the millionaires totheir downtown offices. The sunlight flickers through the elm trees,illuminating expensive nurse-maids wheeling valuable children in littleperambulators. Some of the children are worth millions and millions. InEurope, no doubt, you may see in the Unter den Linden avenue or theChamps Elysees a little prince or princess go past with a clatteringmilitary guard of honour. But that is nothing. It is not half soimpressive, in the real sense, as what you may observe every morning onPlutoria Avenue beside the Mausoleum Club in the quietest part of thecity. Here you may see a little toddling princess in a rabbit suit whoowns fifty distilleries in her own right. There, in a lacqueredperambulator, sails past a little hooded head that controls from itscradle an entire New Jersey corporation. The United Statesattorney-general is suing her as she sits, in a vain attempt to makeher dissolve herself into constituent companies. Near by is a child offour, in a khaki suit, who represents the merger of two trunk-linerailways. You may meet in the flickered sunlight any number of littleprinces and princesses far more real than the poor survivals of Europe.Incalculable infants wave their fifty-dollar ivory rattles in aninarticulate greeting to one another. A million dollars of preferredstock laughs merrily in recognition of a majority control going past ina go-cart drawn by an imported nurse. And through it all the sunlightfalls through the elm trees, and the birds sing and the motors hum, sothat the whole world as seen from the boulevard of Plutoria Avenue isthe very pleasantest place imaginable.
Just below Plutoria Avenue, and parallel with it, the trees die out andthe brick and stone of the City begins in earnest. Even from the Avenueyou see the tops of the sky-scraping buildings in the big commercialstreets, and can hear or almost hear the roar of the elevated railway,earning dividends. And beyond that again the City sinks lower, and ischoked and crowded with the tangled streets and little houses of theslums.
In fact, if you were to mount to the roof of the Mausoleum Club itselfon Plutoria Avenue you could almost see the slums from there. But whyshould you? And on the other hand, if you never went up on the roof,but only dined inside among the palm trees, you would never know thatthe slums existed which is much better.
There are broad steps leading up to the club, so broad and so agreeablycovered with matting that the physical exertion of lifting oneself fromone's motor to the door of the club is reduced to the smallest compass.The richer members are not ashamed to take the steps one at a time,first one foot and then the other; and at tight money periods, whenthere is a black cloud hanging over the Stock Exchange, you may seeeach and every one of the members of the Mausoleum Club dragginghimself up the steps after this fashion, his restless eyes filled withthe dumb pathos of a man wondering where he can put his hand on half amillion dollars.
But at gayer times, when there are gala receptions at the club, itssteps are all buried under expensive carpet, soft as moss and coveredover with a long pavilion of red and white awning to catch thesnowflakes; and beautiful ladies are poured into the club by themotorful. Then, indeed, it is turned into a veritable Arcadia; and fora beautiful pastoral scene, such as would have gladdened the heart of apoet who understood the cost of things, commend me to the MausoleumClub on just such an evening. Its broad corridors and deep recesses arefilled with shepherdesses such as you never saw, dressed in beautifulshimmering gowns, and wearing feathers in their hair that droop offsideways at every angle known to trigonometry. And there are shepherds,too, with broad white waistcoats and little patent leather shoes andheavy faces and congested cheeks. And there is dancing and conversationamong the shepherds and shepherdesses, with such brilliant flashes ofwit and repartee about the rise in Wabash and the fall in Cement thatthe soul of Louis Quatorze would leap to hear it. And later there issupper at little tables, when the shepherds and shepherdesses consumepreferred stocks and gold-interest bonds in the shape of chilledchampagne and iced asparagus, and great platefuls of dividends andspecial quarterly bonuses are carried to and fro in silver dishes byChinese philosophers dressed up to look like waiters.
But on ordinary days there are no ladies in the club, but only theshepherds. You may see them sitting about in little groups of two andthree under the palm trees drinking whiskey and soda; though of coursethe more temperate among them drink nothing but whiskey and Lithiawater, and those who have important business to do in the afternoonlimit themselves to whiskey and Radnor, or whiskey and Magi water.There are as many kinds of bubbling, gurgling, mineral waters in thecaverns of the Mausoleum Club as ever sparkled from the rocks ofHomeric Greece. And when you have once grown used to them, it is asimpossible to go back to plain water as it is to live again in theforgotten house in a side street that you inhabited long before youbecame a member.
Thus the members sit and talk in undertones that float to the earthrough the haze of Havana smoke. You may hear the older men explainingthat the country is going to absolute ruin, and the younger onesexplaining that the country is forging ahead as it never did before;but chiefly they love to talk of great national questions, such as theprotective tariff and the need of raising it, the sad decline of themorality of the working man, the spread of syndicalism and the lack ofChristianity in the labour class, and the awful growth of selfishnessamong the mass of the people.
So they talk, except for two or three that drop off to directors'meetings; till the afternoon fades and darkens into evening, and thenoiseless Chinese philosophers turn on soft lights here and there amongthe palm trees. Presently they dine at white tables glittering with cutglass and green and yellow Rhine wines; and after dinner they sit againamong the palm-trees, half-hidden in the blue smoke, still talking ofthe tariff and the labour class and trying to wash away the memory andthe sadness of it in floods of mineral waters. So the evening passesinto night, and one by one the great motors come throbbing to the door,and the Mausoleum Club empties and darkens till the last member isborne away and the Arcadian day ends in well-earned repose.
* * * * *
"I want you to give me your opinion very, very frankly," said Mr.Lucullus Fyshe on one side of the luncheon table to the Rev. FareforthFurlong on the other.
"By all means," said Mr. Furlong.
Mr. Fyshe poured out a wineglassful of soda and handed it to the rectorto drink.
"Now tell me very truthfully," he said, "is there too much carbon init?"
"By no means," said Mr. Furlong.
"And--quite frankly--not too much hydrogen?"
"Oh, decidedly not."
"And you would not say that the percentage of sodium bicarbonate wastoo great for the ordinary taste?"
"I certainly should not," said Mr. Furlong, and in this he spoke thetruth.
"V
ery good then," said Mr. Fyshe, "I shall use it for the Duke ofDulham this afternoon."
He uttered the name of the Duke with that quiet, democraticcarelessness which meant that he didn't care whether half a dozen othermembers lunching at the club could hear or not. After all, what was aduke to a man who was president of the People's Traction and SuburbanCo., and the Republican Soda and Siphon Co-operative, and chiefdirector of the People's District Loan and Savings? If a man with abroad basis of popular support like that was proposing to entertain aduke, surely there could be no doubt about his motives? None at all.
Naturally, too, if a man manufactures soda himself, he gets a littleover-sensitive about the possibility of his guests noticing theexistence of too much carbon in it.
In fact, ever so many of the members of the Mausoleum Club manufacturethings, or cause them to be manufactured, or--what is the samething--merge them when they are manufactured. This gives them theirpeculiar chemical attitude towards their food. One often sees a membersuddenly call the head waiter at breakfast to tell him that there istoo much ammonia in the bacon; and another one protest at the amount ofglucose in the olive oil; and another that there is too high apercentage of nitrogen in the anchovy. A man of distorted imaginationmight think this tasting of chemicals in the food a sort of nemesis offate upon the members. But that would be very foolish, for in everycase the head waiter, who is the chief of the Chinese philosophersmentioned above, says that he'll see to it immediately and have thepercentage removed. And as for the members themselves, they are aboutas much ashamed of manufacturing and merging things as the Marquis ofSalisbury is ashamed of the founders of the Cecil family.
What more natural, therefore, than that Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, beforeserving the soda to the Duke, should try it on somebody else? And whatbetter person could be found for this than Mr. Furlong, the saintlyyoung rector of St. Asaph's, who had enjoyed the kind of expensivecollege education calculated to develop all the faculties. Moreover, arector of the Anglican Church who has been in the foreign mission fieldis the kind of person from whom one can find out, more or lessincidentally, how one should address and converse with a duke, andwhether you call him, "Your Grace," or "His Grace," or just "Grace," or"Duke," or what. All of which things would seem to a director of thePeople's Bank and the president of the Republican Soda Co. so trivialin importance that he would scorn to ask about them.
So that was why Mr. Fyshe had asked Mr. Furlong to lunch with him, andto dine with him later on in the same day at the Mausoleum Club to meetthe Duke of Dulham. And Mr. Furlong, realizing that a clergyman must beall things to all men and not avoid a man merely because he is a duke,had accepted the invitation to lunch, and had promised to come todinner, even though it meant postponing the Willing Workers' TangoClass of St. Asaph's until the following Friday.
Thus it had come about that Mr. Fyshe was seated at lunch, consuming acutlet and a pint of Moselle in the plain downright fashion of a man sodemocratic that he is practically a revolutionary socialist, anddoesn't mind saying so; and the young rector of St. Asaph's was sittingopposite to him in a religious ecstasy over a _salmi_ of duck.
"The Duke arrived this morning, did he not?" said Mr. Furlong.
"From New York," said Mr. Fyshe. "He is staying at the Grand Palaver. Isent a telegram through one of our New York directors of the Traction,and his Grace has very kindly promised to come over here to dine."
"Is he here for pleasure?" asked the rector.
"I understand he is--" Mr. Fyshe was going to say "about to invest alarge part of his fortune in American securities," but he thoughtbetter of it. Even with the clergy it is well to be careful. So hesubstituted "is very much interested in studying American conditions."
"Does he stay long?" asked Mr. Furlong.
Had Mr. Lucullus Fyshe replied quite truthfully, he would have said,"Not if I can get his money out of him quickly," but he merelyanswered, "That I don't know."
"He will find much to interest him," went on the rector in a musingtone. "The position of the Anglican Church in America should afford himan object of much consideration. I understand," he added, feeling hisway, "that his Grace is a man of deep piety."
"Very deep," said Mr. Fyshe.
"And of great philanthropy?"
"Very great."
"And I presume," said the rector, taking a devout sip of the unfinishedsoda, "that he is a man of immense wealth?"
"I suppose so," answered Mr. Fyshe quite carelessly. "All these fellowsare." (Mr. Fyshe generally referred to the British aristocracy as"these fellows.") "Land, you know, feudal estates; sheer robbery, Icall it. How the working-class, the proletariat, stand for such tyrannyis more than I can see. Mark my words, Furlong, some day they'll riseand the whole thing will come to a sudden end."
Mr. Fyshe was here launched upon his favourite topic; but heinterrupted himself, just for a moment, to speak to the waiter.
"What the devil do you mean," he said, "by serving asparagus half-cold?"
"Very sorry, sir," said the waiter, "shall I take it out?"
"Take it out? Of course take it out, and see that you don't serve mestuff of that sort again, or I'll report you."
"Very sorry, sir," said the waiter.
Mr. Fyshe looked at the vanishing waiter with contempt upon hisfeatures. "These pampered fellows are getting unbearable." he said. "ByGad, if I had my way I'd fire the whole lot of them: lock 'em out, put'em on the street. That would teach 'em. Yes, Furlong, you'll live tosee it that the whole working-class will one day rise against thetyranny of the upper classes, and society will be overwhelmed."
But if Mr. Fyshe had realized that at that moment, in the kitchen ofthe Mausoleum Club, in those sacred precincts themselves, there was awalking delegate of the Waiters' International Union leaning against asideboard, with his bowler hat over one corner of his eye, and talkingto a little group of the Chinese philosophers, he would have known thatperhaps the social catastrophe was a little nearer than even hesuspected.
* * * * *
"Are you inviting anyone else tonight?" asked Mr. Furlong.
"I should have liked to ask your father," said Mr. Fyshe, "butunfortunately he is out of town."
What Mr. Fyshe really meant was, "I am extremely glad not to have toask your father, whom I would not introduce to the Duke on any account."
Indeed, Mr. Furlong, senior, the father of the rector of St. Asaph's,who was President of the New Amalgamated Hymnal Corporation, andDirector of the Hosanna Pipe and Steam Organ, Limited, was entirely thewrong man for Mr. Fyshe's present purpose. In fact, he was reputed tobe as smart a man as ever sold a Bible. At this moment he was out oftown, busied in New York with the preparation of the plates of his newHindu Testament (copyright); but had he learned that a duke withseveral millions to invest was about to visit the city, he would nothave left it for the whole of Hindustan.
"I suppose you are asking Mr. Boulder," said the rector.
"No," answered Mr. Fyshe very decidedly, dismissing the name absolutely.
Indeed, there was even better reason not to introduce Mr. Boulder tothe Duke. Mr. Fyshe had made that sort of mistake once, and neverintended to make it again. It was only a year ago, on the occasion ofthe visit of young Viscount FitzThistle to the Mausoleum Club, that Mr.Fyshe had introduced Mr. Boulder to the Viscount and had sufferedgrievously thereby. For Mr. Boulder had no sooner met the Viscount thanhe invited him up to his hunting-lodge in Wisconsin, and that was thelast thing known of the investment of the FitzThistle fortune.
This Mr. Boulder of whom Mr. Fyshe spoke might indeed have been seen atthat moment at a further table of the lunch room eating a solitarymeal, an oldish man with a great frame suggesting broken strength, witha white beard and with falling under-eyelids that made him look as ifhe were just about to cry. His eyes were blue and far away, and hisstill, mournful face and his great bent shoulders seemed to suggest allthe power and mystery of high finance.
Gloom indeed hung over him. For, when one heard him talk
of listedstocks and cumulative dividends, there was as deep a tone in his quietvoice as if he spoke of eternal punishment and the wages of sin.
Under his great hands a chattering viscount, or a sturdy duke, or apopinjay Italian marquis was as nothing.
Mr. Boulder's methods with titled visitors investing money in Americawere deep. He never spoke to them of money, not a word. He merelytalked of the great American forest--he had been born sixty-five yearsback, in a lumber state--and, when he spoke of primeval trees and thehowl of the wolf at night among the pines, there was the stamp ofreality about it that held the visitor spellbound; and when he fell totalking of his hunting-lodge far away in the Wisconsin timber, duke,earl, or baron that had ever handled a double-barrelled express riflelistened and was lost.
"I have a little place," Mr. Boulder would say in his deep tones thatseemed almost like a sob, "a sort of shooting box, I think you'd callit, up in Wisconsin; just a plain place"--he would add, almostcrying--"made of logs."
"Oh, really," the visitor would interject, "made of logs. By Jove, howinteresting!"
All titled people are fascinated at once with logs, and Mr. Boulderknew it--at least subconsciously.
"Yes, logs," he would continue, still in deep sorrow; "just the plaincedar, not squared, you know, the old original timber; I had them cutright out of the forest."
By this time the visitor's excitement was obvious. "And is there gamethere?" he would ask.
"We have the timber-wolf," said Mr. Boulder, his voice half choking atthe sadness of the thing, "and of course the jack wolf and the lynx."
"And are they ferocious?"
"Oh, extremely so--quite uncontrollable."
On which the titled visitor was all excitement to start for Wisconsinat once, even before Mr. Boulder's invitation was put in words.
And when he returned a week later, all tanned and wearingbush-whackers' boots, and covered with wolf bites, his whole availablefortune was so completely invested in Mr. Boulder's securities that youcouldn't have shaken twenty-five cents out of him upside down.
Yet the whole thing had been done merely incidentally round a big fireunder the Wisconsin timber, with a dead wolf or two lying in the snow.
So no wonder that Mr. Fyshe did not propose to invite Mr. Boulder tohis little dinner. No, indeed. In fact, his one aim was to keep Mr.Boulder and his log house hidden from the Duke.
And equally no wonder that as soon as Mr. Boulder read of the Duke'sarrival in New York, and saw by the _Commercial Echo and FinancialUndertone_ that he might come to the City looking for investments, hetelephoned at once to his little place in Wisconsin--which had, ofcourse, a primeval telephone wire running to it--and told his stewardto have the place well aired and good fires lighted; and he especiallyenjoined him to see if any of the shanty men thereabouts could catch awolf or two, as he might need them.
* * * * *
"Is no one else coming then?" asked the rector.
"Oh yes. President Boomer of the University. We shall be a party offour. I thought the Duke might be interested in meeting Boomer. He maycare to hear something of the archaeological remains of the continent."
If the Duke did so care, he certainly had a splendid chance in meetingthe gigantic Dr. Boomer, the president of Plutoria University.
If he wanted to know anything of the exact distinction between theMexican Pueblo and the Navajo tribal house, he had his opportunityright now. If he was eager to hear a short talk--say half an hour--onthe relative antiquity of the Neanderthal skull and the gravel depositsof the Missouri, his chance had come. He could learn as much about thestone age and the bronze age, in America, from President Boomer, as hecould about the gold age and the age of paper securities from Mr. Fysheand Mr. Boulder.
So what better man to meet a duke than an archaeological president?
And if the Duke should feel inclined, as a result of his American visit(for Dr. Boomer, who knew everything, understood what the Duke had comefor), inclined, let us say, to endow a chair in Primitive Anthropology,or do any useful little thing of the sort, that was only fair businessall round; or if he even was willing to give a moderate sum towards thegeneral fund of Plutoria University--enough, let us say, to enable thepresident to dismiss an old professor and hire a new one--that surelywas reasonable enough.
The president, therefore, had said yes to Mr. Fyshe's invitation withalacrity, and had taken a look through the list of his more incompetentprofessors to refresh his memory.
* * * * *
The Duke of Dulham had landed in New York five days before and hadlooked round eagerly for a field of turnips, but hadn't seen any. Hehad been driven up Fifth Avenue and had kept his eyes open forpotatoes, but there were none. Nor had he seen any shorthorns inCentral Park, nor any Southdowns on Broadway. For the Duke, of course,like all dukes, was agricultural from his Norfolk jacket to hishobnailed boots.
At his restaurant he had cut a potato in two and sent half of it to thehead waiter to know if it was Bermudian. It had all the look of anearly Bermudian, but the Duke feared from the shading of it that itmight be only a late Trinidad. And the head waiter sent it to the chef,mistaking it for a complaint, and the chef sent it back to the Dukewith a message that it was not a Bermudian but a Prince Edward Island.And the Duke sent his compliments to the chef, and the chef sent hiscompliments to the Duke. And the Duke was so pleased at learning thisthat he had a similar potato wrapped up for him to take away, andtipped the head waiter twenty-five cents, feeling that in anextravagant country the only thing to do is to go the people onebetter. So the Duke carried the potato round for five days in New Yorkand showed it to everybody. But beyond this he got no sign ofagriculture out of the place at all. No one who entertained him seemedto know what the beef that they gave him had been fed on; no one, evenin what seemed the best society, could talk rationally about preparinga hog for the breakfast table. People seemed to eat cauliflower withoutdistinguishing the Denmark variety from the Oldenburg, and few, if any,knew Silesian bacon even when they tasted it. And when they took theDuke out twenty-five miles into what was called the country, there werestill no turnips, but only real estate, and railway embankments, andadvertising signs; so that altogether the obvious and visible declineof American agriculture in what should have been its leading centresaddened the Duke's heart. Thus the Duke passed four gloomy days.Agriculture vexed him, and still more, of course, the money concernswhich had brought him to America.
Money is a troublesome thing. But it has got to be thought about evenby those who were not brought up to it. If, on account of moneymatters, one has been driven to come over to America in the hope ofborrowing money, the awkwardness of how to go about it naturally makesone gloomy and preoccupied. Had there been broad fields of turnips towalk in and Holstein cattle to punch in the ribs, one might havemanaged to borrow it in the course of gentlemanly intercourse, as fromone cattle-man to another. But in New York, amid piles of masonry androaring street-traffic and glittering lunches and palatial residencesone simply couldn't do it.
Herein lay the truth about the Duke of Dulham's visit and the error ofMr. Lucullus Fyshe. Mr. Fyshe was thinking that the Duke had come to_lend_ money. In reality he had come to _borrow_ it. In fact, the Dukewas reckoning that by putting a second mortgage on Dulham Towers fortwenty thousand sterling, and by selling his Scotch shooting andleasing his Irish grazing and sub-letting his Welsh coal rent he couldraise altogether a hundred thousand pounds. This for a duke, is anenormous sum. If he once had it he would be able to pay off the firstmortgage on Dulham Towers, buy in the rights of the present tenant ofthe Scotch shooting and the claim of the present mortgagee of the Irishgrazing, and in fact be just where he started. This is ducal finance,which moves always in a circle.
In other words the Duke was really a poor man--not poor in the Americansense, where poverty comes as a sudden blighting stringency, taking theform of an inability to get hold of a quarter of a million dollars, nomatter how badly one needs it, and where
it passes like a storm-cloudand is gone, but poor in that permanent and distressing sense knownonly to the British aristocracy. The Duke's case, of course, wasnotorious, and Mr. Fyshe ought to have known of it. The Duke was sopoor that the Duchess was compelled to spend three or four months everyyear at a fashionable hotel on the Riviera simply to save money, andhis eldest son, the young Marquis of Beldoodle, had to put in most ofhis time shooting big game in Uganda, with only twenty or twenty-fivebeaters, and with so few carriers and couriers and such a dearth ofelephant men and hyena boys that the thing was a perfect scandal. TheDuke indeed was so poor that a younger son, simply to add his effortsto those of the rest, was compelled to pass his days in mountainclimbing in the Himalayas, and the Duke's daughter was obliged to paylong visits to minor German princesses, putting up with all sorts ofhardship. And while the ducal family wandered about in thisway--climbing mountains, and shooting hyenas, and saving money, theDuke's place or seat, Dulham Towers, was practically shut up, with noone in it but servants and housekeepers and gamekeepers and tourists;and the picture galleries, except for artists and visitors andvillagers, were closed; and the town house, except for the presence ofservants and tradesmen and secretaries, was absolutely shut. But theDuke knew that rigid parsimony of this sort, if kept up for ageneration or two, will work wonders, and this sustained him; and theDuchess knew it, and it sustained her; in fact, all the ducal family,knowing that it was only a matter of a generation or two, took theirmisfortune very cheerfully.
The only thing that bothered the Duke was borrowing money. This wasnecessary from time to time when loans or mortgages fell in, but hehated it. It was beneath him. His ancestors had often taken money, buthad never borrowed it, and the Duke chafed under the necessity. Therewas something about the process that went against the grain. To sitdown in pleasant converse with a man, perhaps almost a gentleman, andthen lead up to the subject and take his money from him, seemed to theDuke's mind essentially low. He could have understood knocking a manover the head with a fire shovel and taking his money, but notborrowing it.
So the Duke had come to America, where borrowing is notoriously easy.Any member of the Mausoleum Club, for instance, would borrow fiftycents to buy a cigar, or fifty thousand dollars to buy a house, or fivemillions to buy a railroad with complete indifference, and pay it back,too, if he could, and think nothing of it. In fact, ever so many of theDuke's friends were known to have borrowed money in America withmagical ease, pledging for it their seats or their pictures, or one oftheir daughters--anything.
So the Duke knew it must be easy. And yet, incredible as it may seem,he had spent four days in New York, entertained everywhere, and mademuch of, and hadn't borrowed a cent. He had been asked to lunch in aRiverside palace, and, fool that he was, had come away without so muchas a dollar to show for it. He had been asked to a country house on theHudson, and, like an idiot--he admitted it himself--hadn't asked hishost for as much as his train fare. He had been driven twice roundCentral Park in a motor and had been taken tamely back to his hotel nota dollar the richer. The thing was childish, and he knew it. But tosave his life the Duke didn't know how to begin. None of the thingsthat he was able to talk about seemed to have the remotest connectionwith the subject of money. The Duke was able to converse reasonablywell over such topics as the approaching downfall of England (they hadtalked of it at Dulham Towers for sixty years), or over the duty ofEngland towards China, or the duty of England to Persia, or its duty toaid the Young Turk Movement, and its duty to check the Old Serviaagitation. The Duke became so interested in these topics and inexplaining that while he had never been a Little Englander he hadalways been a Big Turk, and that he stood for a Small Bulgaria and aRestricted Austria, that he got further and further away from the topicof money, which was what he really wanted to come to; and the Duke rosefrom his conversations with a look of such obvious distress on his facethat everybody realized that his anxiety about England was killing him.
And then suddenly light had come. It was on his fourth day in New Yorkthat he unexpectedly ran into the Viscount Belstairs (they had beentogether as young men in Nigeria, and as middle-aged men in St.Petersburg), and Belstairs, who was in abundant spirits and who wasreturning to England on the _Gloritania_ at noon the next day,explained to the Duke that he had just borrowed fifty thousand pounds,on security that wouldn't be worth a halfpenny in England.
And the Duke said with a sigh, "How the deuce do you do it. Belstairs?"
"Do what?"
"Borrow it," said the Duke. "How do you manage to get people to talkabout it? Here I am wanting to borrow a hundred thousand, and I'mhanged if I can even find an opening."
At which the Viscount had said, "Pooh, pooh! you don't need anyopening. Just borrow it straight out--ask for it across a dinner table,just as you'd ask for a match; they think nothing of it here."
"Across the dinner table?" repeated the Duke, who was a literal man.
"Certainly," said the Viscount. "Not too soon, you know--say after asecond glass of wine. I assure you it's absolutely nothing."
And it was just at that moment that a telegram was handed to the Dukefrom Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, praying him, as he was reported to be visitingthe next day the City where the Mausoleum Club stands, to makeacquaintance with him by dining at that institution.
And the Duke, being as I say a literal man, decided that just as soonas Mr. Fyshe should give him a second glass of wine, that second glassshould cost Mr. Fyshe a hundred thousand pounds sterling.
And oddly enough, at about the same moment, Mr. Fyshe was calculatingthat provided he could make the Duke drink a second glass of theMausoleum champagne, that glass would cost the Duke about five milliondollars.
* * * * *
So the very morning after that the Duke had arrived on the New Yorkexpress in the City; and being an ordinary, democratic, commercial sortof place, absorbed in its own affairs, it made no fuss over himwhatever. The morning edition of the _Plutopian Citizen_ simply said,"We understand that the Duke of Dulham arrives at the Grand Palaverthis morning," after which it traced the Duke's pedigree back to Jockof Ealing in the twelfth century and let the matter go at that; and thenoon edition of the _People's Advocate_ merely wrote, "We learn thatDuke Dulham is in town. He is a relation of Jack Ealing." But the_Commercial Echo and Financial Undertone_, appearing at four o'clock,printed in its stock-market columns the announcement: "We understandthat the Duke of Dulham, who arrives in town today, is proposing toinvest a large sum of money in American Industrials."
And, of course, that announcement reached every member of the MausoleumClub within twenty minutes.
* * * * *
The Duke of Dulham entered the Mausoleum Club that evening at exactlyseven of the clock. He was a short, thick man with a shaven face, redas a brick, and grizzled hair, and from the look of him he could havegot a job at sight in any lumber camp in Wisconsin. He wore a dinnerjacket, just like an ordinary person, but even without his Norfolk coatand his hobnailed boots there was something in the way in which hewalked up the long main hall of the Mausoleum Club that every importedwaiter in the place recognized in an instant.
The Duke cast his eye about the club and approved of it. It seemed tohim a modest, quiet place, very different from the staring ostentationthat one sees too often in a German hof or an Italian palazzo. He likedit.
Mr. Fyshe and Mr. Furlong were standing in a deep alcove or bay wherethere was a fire and india-rubber trees and pictures with shaded lightsand a whiskey-and-soda table. There the Duke joined them. Mr. Fyshe hehad met already that afternoon at the Palaver, and he called him"Fyshe" as if he had known him forever; and indeed, after a few minuteshe called the rector of St. Asaph's simply "Furlong," for he had beenfamiliar with the Anglican clergy in so many parts of the world that heknew that to attribute any peculiar godliness to them, socially, wasthe worst possible taste.
"By Jove," said the Duke, turning to tap the leaf of a rubber tree withhis finger, "that fellow's a Niger
ian, isn't he?"
"I hardly know," said Mr. Fyshe, "I imagine so"; and he added, "You'vebeen in Nigeria, Duke?"
"Oh, some years ago," said the Duke, "after big game, you know--fineplace for it."
"Did you get any?" asked Mr. Fyshe.
"Not much," said the Duke; "a hippo or two."
"Ah," said Mr. Fyshe.
"And, of course, now and then a giro," the Duke went on, and added, "Mysister was luckier, though; she potted a rhino one day, straight out ofa doolie; I call that rather good."
Mr. Fyshe called it that too.
"Ah, now here's a good thing," the Duke went on, looking at a picture.He carried in his waistcoat pocket an eyeglass that he used forpictures and for Tamworth hogs, and he put it to his eye with one hand,keeping the other in the left pocket of his jacket; "and this--this isa very good thing."
"I believe so," said Mr. Fyshe.
"You really have some awfully good things here," continued the Duke. Hehad seen far too many pictures in too many places ever to speak of"values" or "compositions" or anything of that sort. The Duke merelylooked at a picture and said, "Now here's a good thing," or "Ah! herenow is a very good thing," or, "I say, here's a really good thing."
No one could get past this sort of criticism. The Duke had long sincefound it bullet-proof.
"They showed me some rather good things in New York," he went on, "butreally the things you have here seem to be awfully good things."
Indeed, the Duke was truly pleased with the pictures, for something intheir composition, or else in the soft, expensive light that shone onthem, enabled him to see in the distant background of each a hundredthousand sterling. And that is a very beautiful picture indeed.
"When you come to our side of the water, Fyshe," said the Duke, "I mustshow you my Botticelli."
Had Mr. Fyshe, who knew nothing of art, expressed his real thought, hewould have said, "Show me your which?" But he only answered, "I shallbe delighted to see it."
In any case there was no time to say more, for at this moment theportly figure and the great face of Dr. Boomer, president of PlutoriaUniversity, loomed upon them. And with him came a great burst ofconversation that blew all previous topics into fragments. He wasintroduced to the Duke, and shook hands with Mr. Furlong, and talked toboth of them, and named the kind of cocktail that he wanted, all in onebreath, and in the very next he was asking the Duke about theBabylonian hieroglyphic bricks that his grandfather, the thirteenthDuke, had brought home from the Euphrates, and which everyarchaeologist knew were preserved in the Duke's library at DulhamTowers. And though the Duke hadn't known about the bricks himself, heassured Dr. Boomer that his grandfather had collected some really goodthings, quite remarkable.
And the Duke, having met a man who knew about his grandfather, felt inhis own element. In fact, he was so delighted with Dr. Boomer and theNigerian rubber tree and the shaded pictures and the charm of the wholeplace and the certainty that half a million dollars was easily findablein it, that he put his eyeglass back in his pocket and said.
"A charming club you have here, really most charming."
"Yes," said Mr. Fyshe, in a casual tone, "a comfortable place, we liketo think."
But if he could have seen what was happening below in the kitchens ofthe Mausoleum Club, Mr. Fyshe would have realized that just then it wasturning into a most uncomfortable place.
For the walking delegate with his hat on sideways, who had haunted itall day, was busy now among the assembled Chinese philosophers, writingdown names and distributing strikers' cards of the International Unionand assuring them that the "boys" of the Grand Palaver had all walkedout at seven, and that all the "boys" of the Commercial and the Unionand of every restaurant in town were out an hour ago.
And the philosophers were taking their cards and hanging up theirwaiters' coats and putting on shabby jackets and bowler hats, wornsideways, and changing themselves by a wonderful transformation fromrespectable Chinese to slouching loafers of the lowest type.
But Mr. Fyshe, being in an alcove and not in the kitchens, saw nothingof these things. Not even when the head waiter, shaking withapprehension, appeared with cocktails made by himself, in glasses thathe himself had had to wipe, did Mr. Fyshe, absorbed in the easyurbanity of the Duke, notice that anything was amiss.
Neither did his guests. For Dr. Boomer, having discovered that the Dukehad visited Nigeria, was asking him his opinion of the famous Bimbawehremains of the lower Niger. The Duke confessed that he really hadn'tnoticed them, and the Doctor assured him that Strabo had indubitablymentioned them (he would show the Duke the very passage), and that theyapparently lay, if his memory served him, about halfway between Oohatand Ohat; whether above Oohat and below Ohat or above Ohat and belowOohat he would not care to say for a certainty; for that the Duke mustwait till the president had time to consult his library.
And the Duke was fascinated forthwith with the president's knowledge ofNigerian geography, and explained that he had once actually descendedfrom below Timbuctoo to Oohat in a doolie manned only by four swats.
So presently, having drunk the cocktails, the party moved solemnly in abody from the alcove towards the private dining-room upstairs, stillbusily talking of the Bimbaweh remains, and the swats, and whether thedoolie was, or was not, the original goatskin boat of the book ofGenesis.
And when they entered the private dining-room with its snow-white tableand cut glass and flowers (as arranged by a retreating philosopher nowheading towards the Gaiety Theatre with his hat over his eyes), theDuke again exclaimed,
"Really, you have a most comfortable club--delightful."
So they sat down to dinner, over which Mr. Furlong offered up a graceas short as any that are known even to the Anglican clergy. And thehead waiter, now in deep distress--for he had been sending outtelephone messages in vain to the Grand Palaver and the Continental,like the captain of a sinking ship--served oysters that he had openedhimself and poured Rhine wine with a trembling hand. For he knew thatunless by magic a new chef and a waiter or two could be got from thePalaver, all hope was lost.
But the guests still knew nothing of his fears. Dr. Boomer was eatinghis oysters as a Nigerian hippo might eat up the crew of a doolie, ingreat mouthfuls, and commenting as he did so upon the luxuriousness ofmodern life.
And in the pause that followed the oysters he illustrated for the Dukewith two pieces of bread the essential difference in structure betweenthe Mexican _pueblo_ and the tribal house of the Navajos, and lest theDuke should confound either or both of them with the adobe hut of theBimbaweh tribes he showed the difference at once with a couple ofolives.
By this time, of course, the delay in the service was gettingnoticeable. Mr. Fyshe was directing angry glances towards the door,looking for the reappearance of the waiter, and growling an apology tohis guests. But the president waved the apology aside.
"In my college days," he said, "I should have considered a plate ofoysters an ample meal. I should have asked for nothing more. We eat,"he said, "too much."
This, of course, started Mr. Fyshe on his favourite topic. "Luxury!" heexclaimed, "I should think so! It is the curse of the age. Theappalling growth of luxury, the piling up of money, the ease with whichhuge fortunes are made" (Good! thought the Duke, here we are coming toit), "these are the things that are going to ruin us. Mark my words,the whole thing is bound to end in a tremendous crash. I don't mindtelling you, Duke--my friends here, I am sure, know it already--that Iam more or less a revolutionary socialist. I am absolutely convinced,sir, that our modern civilization will end in a great socialcatastrophe. Mark what I say"--and here Mr. Fyshe became exceedinglyimpressive--"a great social catastrophe. Some of us may not live to seeit, perhaps; but you, for instance, Furlong, are a younger man; youcertainly will."
But here Mr. Fyshe was understating the case. They were all going tolive to see it, right on the spot.
For it was just at this moment, when Mr. Fyshe was talking of thesocial catastrophe and explaining with flashing eyes th
at it was boundto come, that it came; and when it came it lit, of all places in theworld, right there in the private dining-room of the Mausoleum Club.
For the gloomy head waiter re-entered and leaned over the back of Mr.Fyshe's chair and whispered to him.
"Eh? what?" said Mr. Fyshe.
The head waiter, his features stricken with inward agony, whisperedagain.
"The infernal, damn scoundrels!" said Mr. Fyshe, starting back in hischair. "On strike: in this club! It's an outrage!"
"I'm very sorry sir. I didn't like to tell you, sir. I'd hoped I mighthave got help from the outside, but it seems, sir, the hotels are allthe same way."
"Do you mean to say," said Mr. Fyshe, speaking very slowly, "that thereis no dinner?"
"I'm sorry, sir," moaned the waiter. "It appears the chef hadn't evencooked it. Beyond what's on the table, sir, there's nothing."
The social catastrophe had come.
Mr. Fyshe sat silent with his fist clenched. Dr. Boomer, with his greatface transfixed, stared at the empty oyster-shells, thinking perhaps ofhis college days. The Duke, with his hundred thousand dashed from hislips in the second cup of champagne that was never served, thought ofhis politeness first and murmured something about taking them to hishotel.
But there is no need to follow the unhappy details of the unendeddinner. Mr. Fyshe's one idea was to be gone: he was too true an artistto think that finance could be carried on over the table-cloth of asecond-rate restaurant, or on an empty stomach in a deserted club. Thething must be done over again; he must wait his time and begin anew.
And so it came about that the little dinner party of Mr. Lucullus Fyshedissolved itself into its constituent elements, like broken pieces ofsociety in the great cataclysm portrayed by Mr. Fyshe himself.
The Duke was bowled home in a snorting motor to the brilliant rotundaof the Grand Palaver, itself waiterless and supperless.
The rector of St. Asaph's wandered off home to his rectory, musing uponthe contents of its pantry.
And Mr. Fyshe and the gigantic Doctor walked side by side homewardsalong Plutoria Avenue, beneath the elm trees. Nor had they gone anygreat distance before Dr. Boomer fell to talking of the Duke.
"A charming man," he said, "delightful. I feel extremely sorry for him."
"No worse off, I presume, than any of the rest of us," growled Mr.Fyshe, who was feeling in the sourest of democratic moods; "a mandoesn't need to be a duke to have a stomach."
"Oh, pooh, pooh!" said the president, waving the topic aside with hishand in the air; "I don't refer to that. Oh, not at all. I was thinkingof his financial position--an ancient family like the Dulhams; it seemstoo bad altogether."
For, of course, to an archaeologist like Dr. Boomer an intimateacquaintance with the pedigree and fortunes of the greater ducalfamilies from Jock of Ealing downwards was nothing. It went withoutsaying. As beside the Neanderthal skull and the Bimbaweh ruins itdidn't count.
Mr. Fyshe stopped absolutely still in his tracks. "His financialposition?" he questioned, quick as a lynx.
"Certainly," said Dr. Boomer; "I had taken it for granted that youknew. The Dulham family are practically ruined. The Duke, I imagine, isunder the necessity of mortgaging his estates; indeed, I should supposehe is here in America to raise money."
Mr. Fyshe was a man of lightning action. Any man accustomed to theStock Exchange learns to think quickly.
"One moment!" he cried; "I see we are right at your door. May I justrun in and use your telephone? I want to call up Boulder for a moment."
Two minutes later Mr. Fyshe was saying into the telephone, "Oh, is thatyou, Boulder? I was looking for you in vain today--wanted you to meetthe Duke of Dulham, who came in quite unexpectedly from New York; feltsure you'd like to meet him. Wanted you at the club for dinner, and nowit turns out that the club's all upset--waiters' strike or some suchrascality--and the Palaver, so I hear, is in the same fix. Could youpossibly--"
Here Mr. Fyshe paused, listening a moment, and then went on, "Yes, yes;an excellent idea--most kind of you. Pray do send your motor to thehotel and give the Duke a bite of dinner. No, I wouldn't join you,thanks. Most kind. Good night--"
And within a few minutes more the motor of Mr. Boulder was rolling downfrom Plutoria Avenue to the Grand Palaver Hotel.
What passed between Mr. Boulder and the Duke that evening is not known.That they must have proved congenial company to one another there is nodoubt. In fact, it would seem that, dissimilar as they were in manyways, they found a common bond of interest in sport. And it is quitelikely that Mr. Boulder may have mentioned that he had ahunting-lodge--what the Duke would call a shooting-box--in Wisconsinwoods, and that it was made of logs, rough cedar logs not squared, andthat the timber wolves and others which surrounded it were of aferocity without parallel.
Those who know the Duke best could measure the effect of that upon histemperament.
At any rate, it is certain that Mr. Lucullus Fyshe at hisbreakfast-table next morning chuckled with suppressed joy to read inthe _Plutopian Citizen_ the item:
"We learn that the Duke of Dulham, who has been paying a brief visit tothe City, leaves this morning with Mr. Asmodeus Boulder for theWisconsin woods. We understand that Mr. Boulder intends to show hisguest, who is an ardent sportsman, something of the American wolf."
* * * * *
And so the Duke went whirling westwards and northwards with Mr. Boulderin the drawing-room end of a Pullman car, that was all littered up withdouble-barrelled express rifles and leather game bags and lynx catchersand wolf traps and Heaven knows what. And the Duke had on his veryroughest sporting-suit, made, apparently, of alligator hide; and as hesat there with a rifle across his knees, while the train swept onwardsthrough open fields and broken woods, the real country at last, towardsthe Wisconsin forest, there was such a light of genial happiness in hisface that had not been seen there since he had been marooned in the mudjungles of Upper Burmah.
And opposite, Mr. Boulder looked at him with fixed silent eyes, andmurmured from time to time some renewed information of the ferocity ofthe timber-wolf.
But of wolves other than the timber-wolf, and fiercer still into whosehands the Duke might fall in America, he spoke never a word.
Nor is it known in the record what happened in Wisconsin, and to theMausoleum Club the Duke and his visit remained only as a passing and apleasant memory.
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich Page 1