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Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich

by Stephen Leacock · English · Gutenberg #4020 · 393,075 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich

Author: Stephen Leacock


        
Release date: May 1, 2003 [eBook #4020]
                Most recently updated: December 27, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4020

Credits: Produced by Gardner Buchanan.  HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARCADIAN ADVENTURES WITH THE IDLE RICH ***




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 best
residential street in the City. It is a Grecian building of white
stone. About it are great elm trees with birds--the most expensive kind
of birds--singing in the branches.

The street in the softer hours of the morning has an almost reverential
quiet. Great motors move drowsily along it, with solitary chauffeurs
returning at 10.30 after conveying the earlier of the millionaires to
their downtown offices. The sunlight flickers through the elm trees,
illuminating expensive nurse-maids wheeling valuable children in little
perambulators. Some of the children are worth millions and millions. In
Europe, no doubt, you may see in the Unter den Linden avenue or the
Champs Elysees a little prince or princess go past with a clattering
military guard of honour. But that is nothing. It is not half so
impressive, in the real sense, as what you may observe every morning on
Plutoria Avenue beside the Mausoleum Club in the quietest part of the
city. Here you may see a little toddling princess in a rabbit suit who
owns fifty distilleries in her own right. There, in a lacquered
perambulator, sails past a little hooded head that controls from its
cradle an entire New Jersey corporation. The United States
attorney-general is suing her as she sits, in a vain attempt to make
her dissolve herself into constituent companies. Near by is a child of
four, in a khaki suit, who represents the merger of two trunk-line
railways. You may meet in the flickered sunlight any number of little
princes and princesses far more real than the poor survivals of Europe.
Incalculable infants wave their fifty-dollar ivory rattles in an
inarticulate greeting to one another. A million dollars of preferred
stock laughs merrily in recognition of a majority control going past in
a go-cart drawn by an imported nurse. And through it all the sunlight
falls through the elm trees, and the birds sing and the motors hum, so
that the whole world as seen from the boulevard of Plutoria Avenue is
the very pleasantest place imaginable.

Just below Plutoria Avenue, and parallel with it, the trees die out and
the brick and stone of the City begins in earnest. Even from the Avenue
you see the tops of the sky-scraping buildings in the big commercial
streets, and can hear or almost hear the roar of the elevated railway,
earning dividends. And beyond that again the City sinks lower, and is
choked and crowded with the tangled streets and little houses of the
slums.

In fact, if you were to mount to the roof of the Mausoleum Club itself
on Plutoria Avenue you could almost see the slums from there. But why
should 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 that
the slums existed which is much better.

There are broad steps leading up to the club, so broad and so agreeably
covered with matting that the physical exertion of lifting oneself from
one'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, when
there is a black cloud hanging over the Stock Exchange, you may see
each and every one of the members of the Mausoleum Club dragging
himself up the steps after this fashion, his restless eyes filled with
the dumb pathos of a man wondering where he can put his hand on half a
million dollars.

But at gayer times, when there are gala receptions at the club, its
steps are all buried under expensive carpet, soft as moss and covered
over with a long pavilion of red and white awning to catch the
snowflakes; and beautiful ladies are poured into the club by the
motorful. Then, indeed, it is turned into a veritable Arcadia; and for
a beautiful pastoral scene, such as would have gladdened the heart of a
poet who understood the cost of things, commend me to the Mausoleum
Club on just such an evening. Its broad corridors and deep recesses are
filled with shepherdesses such as you never saw, dressed in beautiful
shimmering gowns, and wearing feathers in their hair that droop off
sideways at every angle known to trigonometry. And there are shepherds,
too, with broad white waistcoats and little patent leather shoes and
heavy faces and congested cheeks. And there is dancing and conversation
among the shepherds and shepherdesses, with such brilliant flashes of
wit and repartee about the rise in Wabash and the fall in Cement that
the soul of Louis Quatorze would leap to hear it. And later there is
supper at little tables, when the shepherds and shepherdesses consume
preferred stocks and gold-interest bonds in the shape of chilled
champagne and iced asparagus, and great platefuls of dividends and
special quarterly bonuses are carried to and fro in silver dishes by
Chinese philosophers dressed up to look like waiters.

But on ordinary days there are no ladies in the club, but only the
shepherds. You may see them sitting about in little groups of two and
three under the palm trees drinking whiskey and soda; though of course
the more temperate among them drink nothing but whiskey and Lithia
water, and those who have important business to do in the afternoon
limit themselves to whiskey and Radnor, or whiskey and Magi water.
There are as many kinds of bubbling, gurgling, mineral waters in the
caverns of the Mausoleum Club as ever sparkled from the rocks of
Homeric Greece. And when you have once grown used to them, it is as
impossible to go back to plain water as it is to live again in the
forgotten house in a side street that you inhabited long before you
became a member.

Thus the members sit and talk in undertones that float to the ear
through the haze of Havana smoke. You may hear the older men explaining
that the country is going to absolute ruin, and the younger ones
explaining that the country is forging ahead as it never did before;
but chiefly they love to talk of great national questions, such as the
protective tariff and the need of raising it, the sad decline of the
morality of the working man, the spread of syndicalism and the lack of
Christianity in the labour class, and the awful growth of selfishness
among 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 the
noiseless Chinese philosophers turn on soft lights here and there among
the palm trees. Presently they dine at white tables glittering with cut
glass and green and yellow Rhine wines; and after dinner they sit again
among the palm-trees, half-hidden in the blue smoke, still talking of
the tariff and the labour class and trying to wash away the memory and
the sadness of it in floods of mineral waters. So the evening passes
into night, and one by one the great motors come throbbing to the door,
and the Mausoleum Club empties and darkens till the last member is
borne 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. Fareforth
Furlong on the other.

"By all means," said Mr. Furlong.

Mr. Fyshe poured out a wineglassful of soda and handed it to the rector
to drink.

"Now tell me very truthfully," he said, "is there too much carbon in
it?"

"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 was
too great for the ordinary taste?"

"I certainly should not," said Mr. Furlong, and in this he spoke the
truth.

"Very good then," said Mr. Fyshe, "I shall use it for the Duke of
Dulham this afternoon."

He uttered the name of the Duke with that quiet, democratic
carelessness which meant that he didn't care whether half a dozen other
members lunching at the club could hear or not. After all, what was a
duke to a man who was president of the People's Traction and Suburban
Co., and the Republican Soda and Siphon Co-operative, and chief
director of the People's District Loan and Savings? If a man with a
broad basis of popular support like that was proposing to entertain a
duke, surely there could be no doubt about his motives? None at all.

Naturally, too, if a man manufactures soda himself, he gets a little
over-sensitive about the possibility of his guests noticing the
existence of too much carbon in it.

In fact, ever so many of the members of the Mausoleum Club manufacture
things, or cause them to be manufactured, or--what is the same
thing--merge them when they are manufactured. This gives them their
peculiar chemical attitude towards their food. One often sees a member
suddenly call the head waiter at breakfast to tell him that there is
too much ammonia in the bacon; and another one protest at the amount of
glucose in the olive oil; and another that there is too high a
percentage of nitrogen in the anchovy. A man of distorted imagination
might think this tasting of chemicals in the food a sort of nemesis of
fate upon the members. But that would be very foolish, for in every
case the head waiter, who is the chief of the Chinese philosophers
mentioned above, says that he'll see to it immediately and have the
percentage removed. And as for the members themselves, they are about
as much ashamed of manufacturing and merging things as the Marquis of
Salisbury is ashamed of the founders of the Cecil family.

What more natural, therefore, than that Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, before
serving the soda to the Duke, should try it on somebody else? And what
better person could be found for this than Mr. Furlong, the saintly
young rector of St. Asaph's, who had enjoyed the kind of expensive
college education calculated to develop all the faculties. Moreover, a
rector of the Anglican Church who has been in the foreign mission field
is the kind of person from whom one can find out, more or less
incidentally, how one should address and converse with a duke, and
whether 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 the
People's Bank and the president of the Republican Soda Co. so trivial
in importance that he would scorn to ask about them.

So that was why Mr. Fyshe had asked Mr. Furlong to lunch with him, and
to dine with him later on in the same day at the Mausoleum Club to meet
the Duke of Dulham. And Mr. Furlong, realizing that a clergyman must be
all 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 to
dinner, even though it meant postponing the Willing Workers' Tango
Class of St. Asaph's until the following Friday.

Thus it had come about that Mr. Fyshe was seated at lunch, consuming a
cutlet and a pint of Moselle in the plain downright fashion of a man so
democratic that he is practically a revolutionary socialist, and
doesn't mind saying so; and the young rector of St. Asaph's was sitting
opposite 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. I
sent 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 a
large part of his fortune in American securities," but he thought
better of it. Even with the clergy it is well to be careful. So he
substituted "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 merely
answered, "That I don't know."

"He will find much to interest him," went on the rector in a musing
tone. "The position of the Anglican Church in America should afford him
an object of much consideration. I understand," he added, feeling his
way, "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 unfinished
soda, "that he is a man of immense wealth?"

"I suppose so," answered Mr. Fyshe quite carelessly. "All these fellows
are." (Mr. Fyshe generally referred to the British aristocracy as
"these fellows.") "Land, you know, feudal estates; sheer robbery, I
call it. How the working-class, the proletariat, stand for such tyranny
is more than I can see. Mark my words, Furlong, some day they'll rise
and the whole thing will come to a sudden end."

Mr. Fyshe was here launched upon his favourite topic; but he
interrupted 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 me
stuff 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 his
features. "These pampered fellows are getting unbearable." he said. "By
Gad, 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 to
see it that the whole working-class will one day rise against the
tyranny of the upper classes, and society will be overwhelmed."

But if Mr. Fyshe had realized that at that moment, in the kitchen of
the Mausoleum Club, in those sacred precincts themselves, there was a
walking delegate of the Waiters' International Union leaning against a
sideboard, with his bowler hat over one corner of his eye, and talking
to a little group of the Chinese philosophers, he would have known that
perhaps the social catastrophe was a little nearer than even he
suspected.

        *    *    *    *    *

"Are you inviting anyone else tonight?" asked Mr. Furlong.

"I should have liked to ask your father," said Mr. Fyshe, "but
unfortunately he is out of town."

What Mr. Fyshe really meant was, "I am extremely glad not to have to
ask 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, and
Director of the Hosanna Pipe and Steam Organ, Limited, was entirely the
wrong man for Mr. Fyshe's present purpose. In fact, he was reputed to
be as smart a man as ever sold a Bible. At this moment he was out of
town, busied in New York with the preparation of the plates of his new
Hindu Testament (copyright); but had he learned that a duke with
several millions to invest was about to visit the city, he would not
have 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 to
the Duke. Mr. Fyshe had made that sort of mistake once, and never
intended to make it again. It was only a year ago, on the occasion of
the visit of young Viscount FitzThistle to the Mausoleum Club, that Mr.
Fyshe had introduced Mr. Boulder to the Viscount and had suffered
grievously thereby. For Mr. Boulder had no sooner met the Viscount than
he invited him up to his hunting-lodge in Wisconsin, and that was the
last thing known of the investment of the FitzThistle fortune.

This Mr. Boulder of whom Mr. Fyshe spoke might indeed have been seen at
that moment at a further table of the lunch room eating a solitary
meal, an oldish man with a great frame suggesting broken strength, with
a white beard and with falling under-eyelids that made him look as if
he were just about to cry. His eyes were blue and far away, and his
still, mournful face and his great bent shoulders seemed to suggest all
the power and mystery of high finance.

Gloom indeed hung over him. For, when one heard him talk of listed
stocks and cumulative dividends, there was as deep a tone in his quiet
voice as if he spoke of eternal punishment and the wages of sin.

Under his great hands a chattering viscount, or a sturdy duke, or a
popinjay Italian marquis was as nothing.

Mr. Boulder's methods with titled visitors investing money in America
were deep. He never spoke to them of money, not a word. He merely
talked of the great American forest--he had been born sixty-five years
back, in a lumber state--and, when he spoke of primeval trees and the
howl of the wolf at night among the pines, there was the stamp of
reality about it that held the visitor spellbound; and when he fell to
talking of his hunting-lodge far away in the Wisconsin timber, duke,
earl, or baron that had ever handled a double-barrelled express rifle
listened and was lost.

"I have a little place," Mr. Boulder would say in his deep tones that
seemed almost like a sob, "a sort of shooting box, I think you'd call
it, up in Wisconsin; just a plain place"--he would add, almost
crying--"made of logs."

"Oh, really," the visitor would interject, "made of logs. By Jove, how
interesting!"

All titled people are fascinated at once with logs, and Mr. Boulder
knew it--at least subconsciously.

"Yes, logs," he would continue, still in deep sorrow; "just the plain
cedar, not squared, you know, the old original timber; I had them cut
right out of the forest."

By this time the visitor's excitement was obvious. "And is there game
there?" he would ask.

"We have the timber-wolf," said Mr. Boulder, his voice half choking at
the 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 Wisconsin
at once, even before Mr. Boulder's invitation was put in words.

And when he returned a week later, all tanned and wearing
bush-whackers' boots, and covered with wolf bites, his whole available
fortune was so completely invested in Mr. Boulder's securities that you
couldn't have shaken twenty-five cents out of him upside down.

Yet the whole thing had been done merely incidentally round a big fire
under 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 to
his 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's
arrival in New York, and saw by the _Commercial Echo and Financial
Undertone_ that he might come to the City looking for investments, he
telephoned at once to his little place in Wisconsin--which had, of
course, a primeval telephone wire running to it--and told his steward
to have the place well aired and good fires lighted; and he especially
enjoined him to see if any of the shanty men thereabouts could catch a
wolf 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 of
four. I thought the Duke might be interested in meeting Boomer. He may
care to hear something of the archaeological remains of the continent."

If the Duke did so care, he certainly had a splendid chance in meeting
the gigantic Dr. Boomer, the president of Plutoria University.

If he wanted to know anything of the exact distinction between the
Mexican Pueblo and the Navajo tribal house, he had his opportunity
right now. If he was eager to hear a short talk--say half an hour--on
the relative antiquity of the Neanderthal skull and the gravel deposits
of the Missouri, his chance had come. He could learn as much about the
stone age and the bronze age, in America, from President Boomer, as he
could about the gold age and the age of paper securities from Mr. Fyshe
and 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 come
for), inclined, let us say, to endow a chair in Primitive Anthropology,
or do any useful little thing of the sort, that was only fair business
all round; or if he even was willing to give a moderate sum towards the
general fund of Plutoria University--enough, let us say, to enable the
president to dismiss an old professor and hire a new one--that surely
was reasonable enough.

The president, therefore, had said yes to Mr. Fyshe's invitation with
alacrity, and had taken a look through the list of his more incompetent
professors to refresh his memory.

        *    *    *    *    *

The Duke of Dulham had landed in New York five days before and had
looked round eagerly for a field of turnips, but hadn't seen any. He
had been driven up Fifth Avenue and had kept his eyes open for
potatoes, but there were none. Nor had he seen any shorthorns in
Central Park, nor any Southdowns on Broadway. For the Duke, of course,
like all dukes, was agricultural from his Norfolk jacket to his
hobnailed boots.

At his restaurant he had cut a potato in two and sent half of it to the
head waiter to know if it was Bermudian. It had all the look of an
early Bermudian, but the Duke feared from the shading of it that it
might 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 Duke
with 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 his
compliments to the Duke. And the Duke was so pleased at learning this
that he had a similar potato wrapped up for him to take away, and
tipped the head waiter twenty-five cents, feeling that in an
extravagant country the only thing to do is to go the people one
better. So the Duke carried the potato round for five days in New York
and showed it to everybody. But beyond this he got no sign of
agriculture out of the place at all. No one who entertained him seemed
to know what the beef that they gave him had been fed on; no one, even
in what seemed the best society, could talk rationally about preparing
a hog for the breakfast table. People seemed to eat cauliflower without
distinguishing the Denmark variety from the Oldenburg, and few, if any,
knew Silesian bacon even when they tasted it. And when they took the
Duke out twenty-five miles into what was called the country, there were
still no turnips, but only real estate, and railway embankments, and
advertising signs; so that altogether the obvious and visible decline
of American agriculture in what should have been its leading centre
saddened the Duke's heart. Thus the Duke passed four gloomy days.
Agriculture vexed him, and still more, of course, the money concerns
which had brought him to America.

Money is a troublesome thing. But it has got to be thought about even
by those who were not brought up to it. If, on account of money
matters, one has been driven to come over to America in the hope of
borrowing money, the awkwardness of how to go about it naturally makes
one gloomy and preoccupied. Had there been broad fields of turnips to
walk in and Holstein cattle to punch in the ribs, one might have
managed to borrow it in the course of gentlemanly intercourse, as from
one cattle-man to another. But in New York, amid piles of masonry and
roaring street-traffic and glittering lunches and palatial residences
one simply couldn't do it.

Herein lay the truth about the Duke of Dulham's visit and the error of
Mr. 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 Duke
was reckoning that by putting a second mortgage on Dulham Towers for
twenty thousand sterling, and by selling his Scotch shooting and
leasing his Irish grazing and sub-letting his Welsh coal rent he could
raise altogether a hundred thousand pounds. This for a duke, is an
enormous sum. If he once had it he would be able to pay off the first
mortgage on Dulham Towers, buy in the rights of the present tenant of
the Scotch shooting and the claim of the present mortgagee of the Irish
grazing, 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 American
sense, where poverty comes as a sudden blighting stringency, taking the
form of an inability to get hold of a quarter of a million dollars, no
matter how badly one needs it, and where it passes like a storm-cloud
and is gone, but poor in that permanent and distressing sense known
only to the British aristocracy. The Duke's case, of course, was
notorious, and Mr. Fyshe ought to have known of it. The Duke was so
poor that the Duchess was compelled to spend three or four months every
year at a fashionable hotel on the Riviera simply to save money, and
his eldest son, the young Marquis of Beldoodle, had to put in most of
his time shooting big game in Uganda, with only twenty or twenty-five
beaters, and with so few carriers and couriers and such a dearth of
elephant men and hyena boys that the thing was a perfect scandal. The
Duke indeed was so poor that a younger son, simply to add his efforts
to those of the rest, was compelled to pass his days in mountain
climbing in the Himalayas, and the Duke's daughter was obliged to pay
long visits to minor German princesses, putting up with all sorts of
hardship. And while the ducal family wandered about in this
way--climbing mountains, and shooting hyenas, and saving money, the
Duke's place or seat, Dulham Towers, was practically shut up, with no
one in it but servants and housekeepers and gamekeepers and tourists;
and the picture galleries, except for artists and visitors and
villagers, were closed; and the town house, except for the presence of
servants and tradesmen and secretaries, was absolutely shut. But the
Duke knew that rigid parsimony of this sort, if kept up for a
generation or two, will work wonders, and this sustained him; and the
Duchess 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 their
misfortune very cheerfully.

The only thing that bothered the Duke was borrowing money. This was
necessary from time to time when loans or mortgages fell in, but he
hated it. It was beneath him. His ancestors had often taken money, but
had never borrowed it, and the Duke chafed under the necessity. There
was something about the process that went against the grain. To sit
down in pleasant converse with a man, perhaps almost a gentleman, and
then lead up to the subject and take his money from him, seemed to the
Duke's mind essentially low. He could have understood knocking a man
over the head with a fire shovel and taking his money, but not
borrowing it.

So the Duke had come to America, where borrowing is notoriously easy.
Any member of the Mausoleum Club, for instance, would borrow fifty
cents to buy a cigar, or fifty thousand dollars to buy a house, or five
millions 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 the
Duke's friends were known to have borrowed money in America with
magical ease, pledging for it their seats or their pictures, or one of
their 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 made
much of, and hadn't borrowed a cent. He had been asked to lunch in a
Riverside palace, and, fool that he was, had come away without so much
as a dollar to show for it. He had been asked to a country house on the
Hudson, and, like an idiot--he admitted it himself--hadn't asked his
host for as much as his train fare. He had been driven twice round
Central Park in a motor and had been taken tamely back to his hotel not
a dollar the richer. The thing was childish, and he knew it. But to
save his life the Duke didn't know how to begin. None of the things
that he was able to talk about seemed to have the remotest connection
with the subject of money. The Duke was able to converse reasonably
well over such topics as the approaching downfall of England (they had
talked of it at Dulham Towers for sixty years), or over the duty of
England towards China, or the duty of England to Persia, or its duty to
aid the Young Turk Movement, and its duty to check the Old Servia
agitation. The Duke became so interested in these topics and in
explaining that while he had never been a Little Englander he had
always been a Big Turk, and that he stood for a Small Bulgaria and a
Restricted Austria, that he got further and further away from the topic
of money, which was what he really wanted to come to; and the Duke rose
from his conversations with a look of such obvious distress on his face
that everybody realized that his anxiety about England was killing him.

And then suddenly light had come. It was on his fourth day in New York
that he unexpectedly ran into the Viscount Belstairs (they had been
together as young men in Nigeria, and as middle-aged men in St.
Petersburg), and Belstairs, who was in abundant spirits and who was
returning 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 talk
about it? Here I am wanting to borrow a hundred thousand, and I'm
hanged if I can even find an opening."

At which the Viscount had said, "Pooh, pooh! you don't need any
opening. 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 a
second glass of wine. I assure you it's absolutely nothing."

And it was just at that moment that a telegram was handed to the Duke
from Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, praying him, as he was reported to be visiting
the next day the City where the Mausoleum Club stands, to make
acquaintance with him by dining at that institution.

And the Duke, being as I say a literal man, decided that just as soon
as Mr. Fyshe should give him a second glass of wine, that second glass
should cost Mr. Fyshe a hundred thousand pounds sterling.

And oddly enough, at about the same moment, Mr. Fyshe was calculating
that provided he could make the Duke drink a second glass of the
Mausoleum champagne, that glass would cost the Duke about five million
dollars.

        *    *    *    *    *

So the very morning after that the Duke had arrived on the New York
express in the City; and being an ordinary, democratic, commercial sort
of place, absorbed in its own affairs, it made no fuss over him
whatever. The morning edition of the _Plutopian Citizen_ simply said,
"We understand that the Duke of Dulham arrives at the Grand Palaver
this morning," after which it traced the Duke's pedigree back to Jock
of Ealing in the twelfth century and let the matter go at that; and the
noon edition of the _People's Advocate_ merely wrote, "We learn that
Duke 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 understand
that the Duke of Dulham, who arrives in town today, is proposing to
invest a large sum of money in American Industrials."

And, of course, that announcement reached every member of the Mausoleum
Club within twenty minutes.

        *    *    *    *    *

The Duke of Dulham entered the Mausoleum Club that evening at exactly
seven of the clock. He was a short, thick man with a shaven face, red
as a brick, and grizzled hair, and from the look of him he could have
got a job at sight in any lumber camp in Wisconsin. He wore a dinner
jacket, just like an ordinary person, but even without his Norfolk coat
and his hobnailed boots there was something in the way in which he
walked up the long main hall of the Mausoleum Club that every imported
waiter in the place recognized in an instant.

The Duke cast his eye about the club and approved of it. It seemed to
him a modest, quiet place, very different from the staring ostentation
that one sees too often in a German hof or an Italian palazzo. He liked
it.

Mr. Fyshe and Mr. Furlong were standing in a deep alcove or bay where
there was a fire and india-rubber trees and pictures with shaded lights
and a whiskey-and-soda table. There the Duke joined them. Mr. Fyshe he
had met already that afternoon at the Palaver, and he called him
"Fyshe" as if he had known him forever; and indeed, after a few minutes
he called the rector of St. Asaph's simply "Furlong," for he had been
familiar with the Anglican clergy in so many parts of the world that he
knew that to attribute any peculiar godliness to them, socially, was
the worst possible taste.

"By Jove," said the Duke, turning to tap the leaf of a rubber tree with
his finger, "that fellow's a Nigerian, isn't he?"

"I hardly know," said Mr. Fyshe, "I imagine so"; and he added, "You've
been in Nigeria, Duke?"

"Oh, some years ago," said the Duke, "after big game, you know--fine
place 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, "My
sister was luckier, though; she potted a rhino one day, straight out of
a 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 for
pictures 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 is
a very good thing."

"I believe so," said Mr. Fyshe.

"You really have some awfully good things here," continued the Duke. He
had seen far too many pictures in too many places ever to speak of
"values" or "compositions" or anything of that sort. The Duke merely
looked at a picture and said, "Now here's a good thing," or "Ah! here
now 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 since
found it bullet-proof.

"They showed me some rather good things in New York," he went on, "but
really the things you have here seem to be awfully good things."

Indeed, the Duke was truly pleased with the pictures, for something in
their composition, or else in the soft, expensive light that shone on
them, enabled him to see in the distant background of each a hundred
thousand sterling. And that is a very beautiful picture indeed.

"When you come to our side of the water, Fyshe," said the Duke, "I must
show you my Botticelli."

Had Mr. Fyshe, who knew nothing of art, expressed his real thought, he
would have said, "Show me your which?" But he only answered, "I shall
be delighted to see it."

In any case there was no time to say more, for at this moment the
portly figure and the great face of Dr. Boomer, president of Plutoria
University, loomed upon them. And with him came a great burst of
conversation that blew all previous topics into fragments. He was
introduced to the Duke, and shook hands with Mr. Furlong, and talked to
both of them, and named the kind of cocktail that he wanted, all in one
breath, and in the very next he was asking the Duke about the
Babylonian hieroglyphic bricks that his grandfather, the thirteenth
Duke, had brought home from the Euphrates, and which every
archaeologist knew were preserved in the Duke's library at Dulham
Towers. And though the Duke hadn't known about the bricks himself, he
assured Dr. Boomer that his grandfather had collected some really good
things, quite remarkable.

And the Duke, having met a man who knew about his grandfather, felt in
his own element. In fact, he was so delighted with Dr. Boomer and the
Nigerian rubber tree and the shaded pictures and the charm of the whole
place and the certainty that half a million dollars was easily findable
in 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 like
to think."

But if he could have seen what was happening below in the kitchens of
the Mausoleum Club, Mr. Fyshe would have realized that just then it was
turning into a most uncomfortable place.

For the walking delegate with his hat on sideways, who had haunted it
all day, was busy now among the assembled Chinese philosophers, writing
down names and distributing strikers' cards of the International Union
and assuring them that the "boys" of the Grand Palaver had all walked
out at seven, and that all the "boys" of the Commercial and the Union
and of every restaurant in town were out an hour ago.

And the philosophers were taking their cards and hanging up their
waiters' coats and putting on shabby jackets and bowler hats, worn
sideways, and changing themselves by a wonderful transformation from
respectable Chinese to slouching loafers of the lowest type.

But Mr. Fyshe, being in an alcove and not in the kitchens, saw nothing
of these things. Not even when the head waiter, shaking with
apprehension, appeared with cocktails made by himself, in glasses that
he himself had had to wipe, did Mr. Fyshe, absorbed in the easy
urbanity of the Duke, notice that anything was amiss.

Neither did his guests. For Dr. Boomer, having discovered that the Duke
had visited Nigeria, was asking him his opinion of the famous Bimbaweh
remains of the lower Niger. The Duke confessed that he really hadn't
noticed them, and the Doctor assured him that Strabo had indubitably
mentioned them (he would show the Duke the very passage), and that they
apparently lay, if his memory served him, about halfway between Oohat
and Ohat; whether above Oohat and below Ohat or above Ohat and below
Oohat he would not care to say for a certainty; for that the Duke must
wait till the president had time to consult his library.

And the Duke was fascinated forthwith with the president's knowledge of
Nigerian geography, and explained that he had once actually descended
from below Timbuctoo to Oohat in a doolie manned only by four swats.

So presently, having drunk the cocktails, the party moved solemnly in a
body from the alcove towards the private dining-room upstairs, still
busily talking of the Bimbaweh remains, and the swats, and whether the
doolie was, or was not, the original goatskin boat of the book of
Genesis.

And when they entered the private dining-room with its snow-white table
and cut glass and flowers (as arranged by a retreating philosopher now
heading towards the Gaiety Theatre with his hat over his eyes), the
Duke again exclaimed,

"Really, you have a most comfortable club--delightful."

So they sat down to dinner, over which Mr. Furlong offered up a grace
as short as any that are known even to the Anglican clergy. And the
head waiter, now in deep distress--for he had been sending out
telephone messages in vain to the Grand Palaver and the Continental,
like the captain of a sinking ship--served oysters that he had opened
himself and poured Rhine wine with a trembling hand. For he knew that
unless by magic a new chef and a waiter or two could be got from the
Palaver, all hope was lost.

But the guests still knew nothing of his fears. Dr. Boomer was eating
his oysters as a Nigerian hippo might eat up the crew of a doolie, in
great mouthfuls, and commenting as he did so upon the luxuriousness of
modern life.

And in the pause that followed the oysters he illustrated for the Duke
with two pieces of bread the essential difference in structure between
the Mexican _pueblo_ and the tribal house of the Navajos, and lest the
Duke should confound either or both of them with the adobe hut of the
Bimbaweh tribes he showed the difference at once with a couple of
olives.

By this time, of course, the delay in the service was getting
noticeable. Mr. Fyshe was directing angry glances towards the door,
looking for the reappearance of the waiter, and growling an apology to
his guests. But the president waved the apology aside.

"In my college days," he said, "I should have considered a plate of
oysters 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!" he
exclaimed, "I should think so! It is the curse of the age. The
appalling growth of luxury, the piling up of money, the ease with which
huge fortunes are made" (Good! thought the Duke, here we are coming to
it), "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 mind
telling you, Duke--my friends here, I am sure, know it already--that I
am more or less a revolutionary socialist. I am absolutely convinced,
sir, that our modern civilization will end in a great social
catastrophe. Mark what I say"--and here Mr. Fyshe became exceedingly
impressive--"a great social catastrophe. Some of us may not live to see
it, perhaps; but you, for instance, Furlong, are a younger man; you
certainly will."

But here Mr. Fyshe was understating the case. They were all going to
live to see it, right on the spot.

For it was just at this moment, when Mr. Fyshe was talking of the
social catastrophe and explaining with flashing eyes that it was bound
to come, that it came; and when it came it lit, of all places in the
world, 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, whispered
again.

"The infernal, damn scoundrels!" said Mr. Fyshe, starting back in his
chair. "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 might
have got help from the outside, but it seems, sir, the hotels are all
the same way."

"Do you mean to say," said Mr. Fyshe, speaking very slowly, "that there
is no dinner?"

"I'm sorry, sir," moaned the waiter. "It appears the chef hadn't even
cooked 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 great
face transfixed, stared at the empty oyster-shells, thinking perhaps of
his college days. The Duke, with his hundred thousand dashed from his
lips in the second cup of champagne that was never served, thought of
his politeness first and murmured something about taking them to his
hotel.

But there is no need to follow the unhappy details of the unended
dinner. Mr. Fyshe's one idea was to be gone: he was too true an artist
to think that finance could be carried on over the table-cloth of a
second-rate restaurant, or on an empty stomach in a deserted club. The
thing 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 Fyshe
dissolved itself into its constituent elements, like broken pieces of
society in the great cataclysm portrayed by Mr. Fyshe himself.

The Duke was bowled home in a snorting motor to the brilliant rotunda
of the Grand Palaver, itself waiterless and supperless.

The rector of St. Asaph's wandered off home to his rectory, musing upon
the contents of its pantry.

And Mr. Fyshe and the gigantic Doctor walked side by side homewards
along Plutoria Avenue, beneath the elm trees. Nor had they gone any
great 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 man
doesn't need to be a duke to have a stomach."

"Oh, pooh, pooh!" said the president, waving the topic aside with his
hand in the air; "I don't refer to that. Oh, not at all. I was thinking
of his financial position--an ancient family like the Dulhams; it seems
too bad altogether."

For, of course, to an archaeologist like Dr. Boomer an intimate
acquaintance with the pedigree and fortunes of the greater ducal
families from Jock of Ealing downwards was nothing. It went without
saying. As beside the Neanderthal skull and the Bimbaweh ruins it
didn't count.

Mr. Fyshe stopped absolutely still in his tracks. "His financial
position?" he questioned, quick as a lynx.

"Certainly," said Dr. Boomer; "I had taken it for granted that you
knew. The Dulham family are practically ruined. The Duke, I imagine, is
under the necessity of mortgaging his estates; indeed, I should suppose
he is here in America to raise money."

Mr. Fyshe was a man of lightning action. Any man accustomed to the
Stock Exchange learns to think quickly.

"One moment!" he cried; "I see we are right at your door. May I just
run 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 that
you, Boulder? I was looking for you in vain today--wanted you to meet
the Duke of Dulham, who came in quite unexpectedly from New York; felt
sure you'd like to meet him. Wanted you at the club for dinner, and now
it turns out that the club's all upset--waiters' strike or some such
rascality--and the Palaver, so I hear, is in the same fix. Could you
possibly--"

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 the
hotel 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 down
from 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 no
doubt. In fact, it would seem that, dissimilar as they were in many
ways, they found a common bond of interest in sport. And it is quite
likely that Mr. Boulder may have mentioned that he had a
hunting-lodge--what the Duke would call a shooting-box--in Wisconsin
woods, and that it was made of logs, rough cedar logs not squared, and
that the timber wolves and others which surrounded it were of a
ferocity without parallel.

Those who know the Duke best could measure the effect of that upon his
temperament.

At any rate, it is certain that Mr. Lucullus Fyshe at his
breakfast-table next morning chuckled with suppressed joy to read in
the _Plutopian Citizen_ the item:

"We learn that the Duke of Dulham, who has been paying a brief visit to
the City, leaves this morning with Mr. Asmodeus Boulder for the
Wisconsin woods. We understand that Mr. Boulder intends to show his
guest, who is an ardent sportsman, something of the American wolf."

        *    *    *    *    *

And so the Duke went whirling westwards and northwards with Mr. Boulder
in the drawing-room end of a Pullman car, that was all littered up with
double-barrelled express rifles and leather game bags and lynx catchers
and wolf traps and Heaven knows what. And the Duke had on his very
roughest sporting-suit, made, apparently, of alligator hide; and as he
sat there with a rifle across his knees, while the train swept onwards
through open fields and broken woods, the real country at last, towards
the Wisconsin forest, there was such a light of genial happiness in his
face that had not been seen there since he had been marooned in the mud
jungles of Upper Burmah.

And opposite, Mr. Boulder looked at him with fixed silent eyes, and
murmured from time to time some renewed information of the ferocity of
the timber-wolf.

But of wolves other than the timber-wolf, and fiercer still into whose
hands the Duke might fall in America, he spoke never a word.

Nor is it known in the record what happened in Wisconsin, and to the
Mausoleum Club the Duke and his visit remained only as a passing and a
pleasant memory.



CHAPTER TWO: The Wizard of Finance

Down in the City itself, just below the residential street where the
Mausoleum Club is situated, there stands overlooking Central Square the
Grand Palaver Hotel. It is, in truth, at no great distance from the
club, not half a minute in one's motor. In fact, one could almost walk
it.

But in Central Square the quiet of Plutoria Avenue is exchanged for
another atmosphere. There are fountains that splash unendingly and
mingle their music with the sound of the motor-horns and the clatter of
the cabs. There are real trees and little green benches, with people
reading yesterday's newspaper, and grass cut into plots among the
asphalt. There is at one end a statue of the first governor of the
state, life-size, cut in stone; and at the other a statue of the last,
ever so much larger than life, cast in bronze. And all the people who
pass by pause and look at this statue and point at it with
walking-sticks, because it is of extraordinary interest; in fact, it is
an example of the new electro-chemical process of casting by which you
can cast a state governor any size you like, no matter what you start
from. Those who know about such things explain what an interesting
contrast the two statues are; for in the case of the governor of a
hundred years ago one had to start from plain, rough material and work
patiently for years to get the effect, whereas now the material doesn't
matter at all, and with any sort of scrap, treated in the gas furnace
under tremendous pressure, one may make a figure of colossal size like
the one in Central Square.

So naturally Central Square with its trees and its fountains and its
statues is one of the places of chief interest in the City. But
especially because there stands along one side of it the vast pile of
the Grand Palaver Hotel. It rises fifteen stories high and fills all
one side of the square. It has, overlooking the trees in the square,
twelve hundred rooms with three thousand windows, and it would have
held all George Washington's army. Even people in other cities who have
never seen it know it well from its advertising; "the most homelike
hotel in America," so it is labelled in all the magazines, the
expensive ones, on the continent. In fact, the aim of the company that
owns the Grand Palaver--and they do not attempt to conceal it--is to
make the place as much a home as possible. Therein lies its charm. It
is a home. You realize that when you look up at the Grand Palaver from
the square at night when the twelve hundred guests have turned on the
lights of the three thousand windows. You realize it at theatre time
when the great string of motors come sweeping to the doors of the
Palaver, to carry the twelve hundred guests to twelve hundred seats in
the theatres at four dollars a seat. But most of all do you appreciate
the character of the Grand Palaver when you step into its rotunda.
Aladdin's enchanted palace was nothing to it. It has a vast ceiling
with a hundred glittering lights, and within it night and day is a
surging crowd that is never still and a babel of voices that is never
hushed, and over all there hangs an enchanted cloud of thin blue
tobacco smoke such as might enshroud the conjured vision of a magician
of Baghdad or Damascus.

In and through the rotunda there are palm trees to rest the eye and
rubber trees in boxes to soothe the mind, and there are great leather
lounges and deep armchairs, and here and there huge brass ash-bowls as
big as Etruscan tear-jugs. Along one side is a counter with grated
wickets like a bank, and behind it are five clerks with flattened hair
and tall collars, dressed in long black frock-coats all day like
members of a legislature. They have great books in front of them in
which they study unceasingly, and at their lightest thought they strike
a bell with the open palm of their hand, and at the sound of it a page
boy in a monkey suit, with G.P. stamped all over him in brass, bounds
to the desk and off again, shouting a call into the unheeding crowd
vociferously. The sound of it fills for a moment the great space of the
rotunda; it echoes down the corridors to the side; it floats, softly
melodious, through the palm trees of the ladies' palm room; it is
heard, fainter and fainter, in the distant grill; and in the depths of
the barber shop below the level of the street the barber arrests a
moment the drowsy hum of his shampoo brushes to catch the sound--as
might a miner in the sunken galleries of a coastal mine cease in his
toil a moment to hear the distant murmur of the sea.

And the clerks call for the pages, the pages call for the guests, and
the guests call for the porters, the bells clang, the elevators rattle,
till home itself was never half so homelike.

        *    *    *    *    *

"A call for Mr. Tomlinson! A call for Mr. Tomlinson!"

So went the sound, echoing through the rotunda.

And as the page boy found him and handed him on a salver a telegram to
read, the eyes of the crowd about him turned for a moment to look upon
the figure of Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance.

There he stood in his wide-awake hat and his long black coat, his
shoulders slightly bent with his fifty-eight years. Anyone who had
known him in the olden days on his bush farm beside Tomlinson's Creek
in the country of the Great Lakes would have recognized him in a
moment. There was still on his face that strange, puzzled look that it
habitually wore, only now, of course, the financial papers were calling
it "unfathomable." There was a certain way in which his eye roved to
and fro inquiringly that might have looked like perplexity, were it not
that the _Financial Undertone_ had recognized it as the "searching look
of a captain of industry." One might have thought that for all the
goodness in it there was something simple in his face, were it not that
the _Commercial and Pictorial Review_ had called the face
"inscrutable," and had proved it so with an illustration that left no
doubt of the matter. Indeed, the face of Tomlinson of Tomlinson's
Creek, now Tomlinson the Wizard of Finance, was not commonly spoken of
as a _face_ by the paragraphers of the Saturday magazine sections, but
was more usually referred to as a mask; and it would appear that
Napoleon the First had had one also. The Saturday editors were never
tired of describing the strange, impressive personality of Tomlinson,
the great dominating character of the newest and highest finance. From
the moment when the interim prospectus of the Erie Auriferous
Consolidated had broken like a tidal wave over Stock Exchange circles,
the picture of Tomlinson, the sleeping shareholder of uncomputed
millions, had filled the imagination of every dreamer in a nation of
poets.

They all described him. And when each had finished he began again.

"The face," so wrote the editor of the "Our Own Men" section of
_Ourselves Monthly_, "is that of a typical American captain of finance,
hard, yet with a certain softness, broad but with a certain length,
ductile but not without its own firmness."

"The mouth," so wrote the editor of the "Success" column of _Brains_,
"is strong but pliable, the jaw firm and yet movable, while there is
something in the set of the ear that suggests the swift, eager mind of
the born leader of men."

So from state to state ran the portrait of Tomlinson of Tomlinson's
Creek, drawn by people who had never seen him; so did it reach out and
cross the ocean, till the French journals inserted a picture which they
used for such occasions, and called it _Monsieur Tomlinson, nouveau
capitaine de la haute finance en Amerique_; and the German weeklies,
inserting also a suitable picture from their stock, marked it _Herr
Tomlinson, Amerikanischer Industrie und Finanzcapitan_. Thus did
Tomlinson float from Tomlinson's Creek beside Lake Erie to the very
banks of the Danube and the Drave.

Some writers grew lyric about him. What visions, they asked, could one
but read them, must lie behind the quiet, dreaming eyes of that
inscrutable face?

They might have read them easily enough, had they but had the key.
Anyone who looked upon Tomlinson as he stood there in the roar and
clatter of the great rotunda of the Grand Palaver with the telegram in
his hand, fumbling at the wrong end to open it, might have read the
visions of the master-mind had he but known their nature. They were
simple enough. For the visions in the mind of Tomlinson, Wizard of
Finance, were for the most part those of a wind-swept hillside farm
beside Lake Erie, where Tomlinson's Creek runs down to the low edge of
the lake, and where the off-shore wind ripples the rushes of the
shallow water: that, and the vision of a frame house, and the snake
fences of the fourth concession road where it falls to the lakeside.
And if the eyes of the man are dreamy and abstracted, it is because
there lies over the vision of this vanished farm an infinite regret,
greater in its compass than all the shares the Erie Auriferous
Consolidated has ever thrown upon the market.

        *    *    *    *    *

When Tomlinson had opened the telegram he stood with it for a moment in
his hand, looking the boy full in the face. His look had in it that
peculiar far-away quality that the newspapers were calling "Napoleonic
abstraction." In reality he was wondering whether to give the boy
twenty-five cents or fifty.

The message that he had just read was worded, "Morning quotations show
preferred A. G. falling rapidly recommend instant sale no confidence
send instructions."

The Wizard of Finance took from his pocket a pencil (it was a
carpenter's pencil) and wrote across the face of the message: "Buy me
quite a bit more of the same yours truly."

This he gave to the boy. "Take it over to him," he said, pointing to
the telegraph corner of the rotunda. Then after another pause he
mumbled, "Here, sonny," and gave the boy a dollar.

With that he turned to walk towards the elevator, and all the people
about him who had watched the signing of the message knew that some big
financial deal was going through--a _coup_, in fact, they called it.

The elevator took the Wizard to the second floor. As he went up he felt
in his pocket and gripped a quarter, then changed his mind and felt for
a fifty-cent piece, and finally gave them both to the elevator boy,
after which he walked along the corridor till he reached the corner
suite of rooms, a palace in itself, for which he was paying a thousand
dollars a month ever since the Erie Auriferous Consolidated Company had
begun tearing up the bed of Tomlinson's Creek in Cahoga County with its
hydraulic dredges.

"Well, mother," he said as he entered.

There was a woman seated near the window, a woman with a plain, homely
face such as they wear in the farm kitchens of Cahoga County, and a set
of fashionable clothes upon her such as they sell to the ladies of
Plutoria Avenue.

This was "mother," the wife of the Wizard of Finance and eight years
younger than himself. And she, too, was in the papers and the public
eye; and whatsoever the shops had fresh from Paris, at fabulous prices,
that they sold to mother. They had put a Balkan hat upon her with an
upright feather, and they had hung gold chains on her, and everything
that was most expensive they had hung and tied on mother. You might see
her emerging any morning from the Grand Palaver in her beetle-back
jacket and her Balkan hat, a figure of infinite pathos. And whatever
she wore, the lady editors of _Spring Notes_ and _Causerie du Boudoir_
wrote it out in French, and one paper had called her a _belle
chatelaine_, and another had spoken of her as a grande dame, which the
Tomlinsons thought must be a misprint.

But in any case, for Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, it was a great
relief to have as his wife a woman like mother, because he knew that
she had taught school in Cahoga County and could hold her own in the
city with any of them.

So mother spent her time sitting in her beetle jacket in the
thousand-dollar suite, reading new novels in brilliant paper covers.
And the Wizard on his trips up and down to the rotunda brought her the
very best, the ones that cost a dollar fifty, because he knew that out
home she had only been able to read books like Nathaniel Hawthorne and
Walter Scott, that were only worth ten cents.

        *    *    *    *    *

"How's Fred?" said the Wizard, laying aside his hat, and looking
towards the closed door of an inner room. "Is he better?"

"Some," said mother. "He's dressed, but he's lying down."

Fred was the son of the Wizard and mother. In the inner room he lay on
a sofa, a great hulking boy of seventeen in a flowered dressing-gown,
fancying himself ill. There was a packet of cigarettes and a box of
chocolates on a chair beside him, and he had the blind drawn and his
eyes half-closed to impress himself.

Yet this was the same boy that less than a year ago on Tomlinson's
Creek had worn a rough store suit and set his sturdy shoulders to the
buck-saw. At present Fortune was busy taking from him the golden gifts
which the fairies of Cahoga County, Lake Erie, had laid in his cradle
seventeen years ago.

The Wizard tip-toed into the inner room, and from the open door his
listening wife could hear the voice of the boy saying, in a tone as of
one distraught with suffering.

"Is there any more of that jelly?"

"Could he have any, do you suppose?" asked Tomlinson coming back.

"It's all right," said mother, "if it will sit on his stomach." For
this, in the dietetics of Cahoga County, is the sole test. All those
things can be eaten which will sit on the stomach. Anything that won't
sit there is not eatable.

"Do you suppose I could get them to get any?" questioned Tomlinson.
"Would it be all right to telephone down to the office, or do you think
it would be better to ring?"

"Perhaps," said his wife, "it would be better to look out into the hall
and see if there isn't someone round that would tell them."

This was the kind of problem with which Tomlinson and his wife, in
their thousand-dollar suite in the Grand Palaver, grappled all day. And
when presently a tall waiter in dress-clothes appeared, and said,
"Jelly? Yes, sir, immediately, sir; would you like, sir, Maraschino,
sir, or Portovino, sir?" Tomlinson gazed at him gloomily, wondering if
he would take five dollars.

"What does the doctor say is wrong with Fred?" asked Tomlinson, when
the waiter had gone.

"He don't just say," said mother; "he said he must keep very quiet. He
looked in this morning for a minute or two, and he said he'd look in
later in the day again. But he said to keep Fred very quiet."

Exactly! In other words Fred had pretty much the same complaint as the
rest of Dr. Slyder's patients on Plutoria Avenue, and was to be treated
in the same way. Dr. Slyder, who was the most fashionable practitioner
in the City, spent his entire time moving to and fro in an almost
noiseless motor earnestly advising people to keep quiet. "You must keep
very quiet for a little while," he would say with a sigh, as he sat
beside a sick-bed. As he drew on his gloves in the hall below he would
shake his head very impressively and say, "You must keep him very
quiet," and so pass out, quite soundlessly. By this means Dr. Slyder
often succeeded in keeping people quiet for weeks. It was all the
medicine that he knew. But it was enough. And as his patients always
got well--there being nothing wrong with them--his reputation was
immense.

Very naturally the Wizard and his wife were impressed with him. They
had never seen such therapeutics in Cahoga County, where the practice
of medicine is carried on with forceps, pumps, squirts, splints, and
other instruments of violence.

The waiter had hardly gone when a boy appeared at the door. This time
he presented to Tomlinson not one telegram but a little bundle of them.

The Wizard read them with a lengthening face. The first ran something
like this, "Congratulate you on your daring market turned instantly";
and the next, "Your opinion justified market rose have sold at 20
points profit"; and a third, "Your forecast entirely correct C. P. rose
at once send further instructions."

These and similar messages were from brokers' offices, and all of them
were in the same tone; one told him that C. P. was up, and another T.
G. P. had passed 129, and another that T. C. R. R. had risen ten--all
of which things were imputed to the wonderful sagacity of Tomlinson.
Whereas if they had told him that X. Y. Z. had risen to the moon he
would have been just as wise as to what it meant.

"Well," said the wife of the Wizard as her husband finished looking
through the reports, "how are things this morning? Are they any better?"

"No," said Tomlinson, and he sighed as he said it; "this is the worst
day yet. It's just been a shower of telegrams, and mostly all the same.
I can't do the figuring of it like you can, but I reckon I must have
made another hundred thousand dollars since yesterday."

"You don't say so!" said mother, and they looked at one another
gloomily.

"And half a million last week, wasn't it?" said Tomlinson as he sank
into a chair. "I'm afraid, mother," he continued, "it's no good. We
don't know how. We weren't brought up to it."

All of which meant that if the editor of the _Monetary Afternoon_ or
_Financial Sunday_ had been able to know what was happening with the
two wizards, he could have written up a news story calculated to
electrify all America.

For the truth was that Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, was attempting
to carry out a _coup_ greater than any as yet attributed to him by the
Press. He was trying to lose his money. That, in the sickness of his
soul, crushed by the Grand Palaver, overwhelmed with the burden of high
finance, had become his aim, to be done with it, to get rid of his
whole fortune.

But if you own a fortune that is computed anywhere from fifty millions
up, with no limit at the top, if you own one-half of all the preferred
stock of an Erie Auriferous Consolidated that is digging gold in
hydraulic bucketfuls from a quarter of a mile of river bed, the task of
losing it is no easy matter.

There are men, no doubt, versed in finance, who might succeed in doing
it. But they have a training that Tomlinson lacked. Invest it as he
would in the worst securities that offered, the most rickety of stock,
the most fraudulent bonds, back it came to him. When he threw a handful
away, back came two in its place. And at every new coup the crowd
applauded the incomparable daring, the unparalleled prescience of the
Wizard.

Like the touch of Midas, his hand turned everything to gold.

"Mother," he repeated, "it's no use. It's like this here Destiny, as
the books call it."

        *    *    *    *    *

The great fortune that Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, was trying his
best to lose had come to him with wonderful suddenness. As yet it was
hardly six months old. As to how it had originated, there were all
sorts of stories afloat in the weekly illustrated press. They agreed
mostly on the general basis that Tomlinson had made his vast fortune by
his own indomitable pluck and dogged industry. Some said that he had
been at one time a mere farm hand who, by sheer doggedness, had fought
his way from the hay-mow to the control of the produce market of
seventeen states. Others had it that he had been a lumberjack who, by
sheer doggedness, had got possession of the whole lumber forest of the
Lake district. Others said that he had been a miner in a Lake Superior
copper mine who had, by the doggedness of his character, got a
practical monopoly of the copper supply. These Saturday articles, at
any rate, made the Saturday reader rigid with sympathetic doggedness
himself, which was all that the editor (who was doggedly trying to make
the paper pay) wanted to effect.

But in reality the making of Tomlinson's fortune was very simple. The
recipe for it is open to anyone. It is only necessary to own a hillside
farm beside Lake Erie where the uncleared bush and the broken fields go
straggling down to the lake, and to have running through it a creek,
such as that called Tomlinson's, brawling among the stones and willows,
and to discover in the bed of a creek--a gold mine.

That is all.

Nor is it necessary in these well-ordered days to discover the gold for
one's self. One might have lived a lifetime on the farm, as Tomlinson's
father had, and never discover it for one's self. For that indeed the
best medium of destiny is a geologist, let us say the senior professor
of geology at Plutoria University. That was how it happened.

The senior professor, so it chanced, was spending his vacation near by
on the shores of the lake, and his time was mostly passed--for how
better can a man spend a month of pleasure?--in looking for
outcroppings of Devonian rock of the post-tertiary period. For which
purpose he carried a vacation hammer in his pocket, and made from time
to time a note or two as he went along, or filled his pockets with the
chippings of vacation rocks.

So it chanced that he came to Tomlinson's Creek at the very point where
a great slab of Devonian rock bursts through the clay of the bank. When
the senior professor of geology saw it and noticed a stripe like a mark
on a tiger's back--a fault he called it--that ran over the face of the
block, he was at it in an instant, beating off fragments with his
little hammer.

Tomlinson and his boy Fred were logging in the underbrush near by with
a long chain and yoke of oxen, but the geologist was so excited that he
did not see them till the sound of his eager hammer had brought them to
his side. They took him up to the frame house in the clearing, where
the chatelaine was hoeing a potato patch with a man's hat on her head,
and they gave him buttermilk and soda cakes, but his hand shook so that
he could hardly eat them.

The geologist left Cahoga station that night for the City with a
newspaper full of specimens inside his suit-case, and he knew that if
any person or persons would put up money enough to tear that block of
rock away and follow the fissure down, there would be found there
something to astonish humanity, geologists and all.

        *    *    *    *    *

After that point in the launching of a gold mine the rest is easy.
Generous, warm-hearted men, interested in geology, were soon found.
There was no stint of money. The great rock was torn sideways from its
place, and from beneath it the crumbled, glittering rock-dust that
sparkled in the sun was sent in little boxes to the testing
laboratories of Plutoria University. There the senior professor of
geology had sat up with it far into the night in a darkened laboratory,
with little blue flames playing underneath crucibles, as in a
magician's cavern, and with the door locked. And as each sample that he
tested was set aside and tied in a cardboard box by itself, he labelled
it "aur. p. 75," and the pen shook in his hand as he marked it. For to
professors of geology those symbols mean "this is seventy-five per cent
pure gold." So it was no wonder that the senior professor of geology
working far into the night among the blue flames shook with excitement;
not, of course, for the gold's sake as money (he had no time to think
of that), but because if this thing was true it meant that an
auriferous vein had been found in what was Devonian rock of the
post-tertiary stratification, and if that was so it upset enough
geology to spoil a textbook. It would mean that the professor could
read a paper at the next Pan-Geological Conference that would turn the
whole assembly into a bedlam.

It pleased him, too, to know that the men he was dealing with were
generous. They had asked him to name his own price or the tests that he
made and when he had said two dollars per sample they had told him to
go right ahead. The professor was not, I suppose, a mercenary man, but
it pleased him to think that he could, clean up sixteen dollars in a
single evening in his laboratory. It showed, at any rate, that
businessmen put science at its proper value. Strangest of all was the
fact that the men had told him that even this ore was apparently
nothing to what there was; it had all come out of one single spot in
the creek, not the hundredth part of the whole claim. Lower down, where
they had thrown the big dam across to make the bed dry, they were
taking out this same stuff and even better, so they said, in cartloads.
The hydraulic dredges were tearing it from the bed of the creek all
day, and at night a great circuit of arc lights gleamed and sputtered
over the roaring labour of the friends of geological research.

Thus had the Erie Auriferous Consolidated broken in a tidal wave over
financial circles. On the Stock Exchange, in the downtown offices, and
among the palm trees of the Mausoleum Club they talked of nothing else.
And so great was the power of the wave that it washed Tomlinson and his
wife along on the crest of it, and landed them fifty feet up in their
thousand-dollar suite in the Grand Palaver. And as a result of it
"mother" wore a beetle-back jacket; and Tomlinson received a hundred
telegrams a day, and Fred quit school and ate chocolates.

But in the business world the most amazing thing about it was the
wonderful shrewdness of Tomlinson.

The first sign of it had been that he had utterly refused to allow the
Erie Auriferous Consolidated (as the friends of geology called
themselves) to take over the top half of the Tomlinson farm. For the
bottom part he let them give him one-half of the preferred stock in the
company in return for their supply of development capital. This was
their own proposition; in fact, they reckoned that in doing this they
were trading about two hundred thousand dollars' worth of machinery
for, say ten million dollars of gold. But it frightened them when
Tomlinson said "Yes" to the offer, and when he said that as to common
stock they might keep it, it was no use to him, they were alarmed and
uneasy till they made him take a block of it for the sake of market
confidence.

But the top end of the farm he refused to surrender, and the friends of
applied geology knew that there must be something pretty large behind
this refusal; the more so as the reason that Tomlinson gave was such a
simple one. He said that he didn't want to part with the top end of the
place because his father was buried on it beside the creek, and so he
didn't want the dam higher up, not for any consideration.

This was regarded in business circles as a piece of great shrewdness.
"Says his father is buried there, eh? Devilish shrewd that!"

It was so long since any of the members of the Exchange or the
Mausoleum Club had wandered into such places as Cahoga County that they
did not know that there was nothing strange in what Tomlinson said. His
father was buried there, on the farm itself, in a grave overgrown with
raspberry bushes, and with a wooden headstone encompassed by a square
of cedar rails, and slept as many another pioneer of Cahoga is sleeping.

"Devilish smart idea!" they said; and forthwith half the financial men
of the city buried their fathers, or professed to have done so, in
likely places--along the prospective right-of-way of a suburban
railway, for example; in fact, in any place that marked them out for
the joyous resurrection of an expropriation purchase.

Thus the astounding shrewdness of Tomlinson rapidly became a legend,
the more so as he turned everything he touched to gold.

They narrated little stories of him in the whiskey-and-soda corners of
the Mausoleum Club.

"I put it to him in a casual way," related, for example, Mr. Lucullus
Fyshe, "casually, but quite frankly. I said, 'See here, this is just a
bagatelle to you, no doubt, but to me it might be of some use. T. C.
bonds,' I said, 'have risen twenty-two and a half in a week. You know
as well as I do that they are only collateral trust, and that the stock
underneath never could and never can earn a par dividend. Now,' I said,
'Mr. Tomlinson, tell me what all that means?' Would you believe it, the
fellow looked me right in the face in that queer way he has and he
said, 'I don't know!'"

"He said he didn't know!" repeated the listener, in a tone of amazement
and respect. "By Jove! eh? he said he didn't know! The man's a wizard!"

"And he looked as if he didn't!" went on Mr. Fyshe. "That's the deuce
of it. That man when he wants to can put on a look, sir, that simply
means nothing, absolutely nothing."

In this way Tomlinson had earned his name of the Wizard of American
Finance.

And meantime Tomlinson and his wife, within their suite at the Grand
Palaver, had long since reached their decision. For there was one
aspect and only one in which Tomlinson was really and truly a wizard.
He saw clearly that for himself and his wife the vast fortune that had
fallen to them was of no manner of use. What did it bring them? The
noise and roar of the City in place of the silence of the farm and the
racket of the great rotunda to drown the remembered murmur of the
waters of the creek.

So Tomlinson had decided to rid himself of his new wealth, save only
such as might be needed to make his son a different kind of man from
himself.

"For Fred, of course," he said, "it's different. But out of such a lot
as that it'll be easy to keep enough for him. It'll be a grand thing
for Fred, this money. He won't have to grow up like you and me. He'll
have opportunities we never got." He was getting them already. The
opportunity to wear seven dollar patent leather shoes and a bell-shaped
overcoat with a silk collar, to lounge into moving-picture shows and
eat chocolates and smoke cigarettes--all these opportunities he was
gathering immediately. Presently, when he learned his way round a
little, he would get still bigger ones.

"He's improving fast," said mother. She was thinking of his patent
leather shoes.

"He's popular," said his father. "I notice it downstairs. He sasses any
of them just as he likes; and no matter how busy they are, as soon as
they see it's Fred they're all ready to have a laugh with him."

Certainly they were, as any hotel clerk with plastered hair is ready to
laugh with the son of a multimillionaire. It's a certain sense of
humour that they develop.

"But for us, mother," said the Wizard, "we'll be rid of it. The gold is
there. It's not right to keep it back. But we'll just find a way to
pass it on to folks that need it worse than we do."

For a time they had thought of giving away the fortune. But how? Who
did they know that would take it?

It had crossed their minds--for who could live in the City a month
without observing the imposing buildings of Plutoria University, as
fine as any departmental store in town?--that they might give it to the
college.

But there, it seemed, the way was blocked.

"You see, mother," said the puzzled Wizard, "we're not known. We're
strangers. I'd look fine going up there to the college and saying, 'I
want to give you people a million dollars.' They'd laugh at me!"

"But don't one read it in the papers," his wife had protested, "where
Mr. Carnegie gives ever so much to the colleges, more than all we've
got, and they take it?"

"That's different," said the Wizard. "He's in with them. They all know
him. Why, he's a sort of chairman of different boards of colleges, and
he knows all the heads of the schools, and the professors, so it's no
wonder that if he offers to give a pension, or anything, they take it.
Just think of me going up to one of the professors up there in the
middle of his teaching and saying; 'I'd like to give you a pension for
life!' Imagine it! Think what he'd say!"

But the Tomlinsons couldn't imagine it, which was just as well.

So it came about that they had embarked on their system. Mother, who
knew most arithmetic, was the leading spirit. She tracked out all the
stocks and bonds in the front page of the _Financial Undertone_, and on
her recommendation the Wizard bought. They knew the stocks only by
their letters, but this itself gave a touch of high finance to their
deliberations.

"I'd buy some of this R.O.P. if I was you," said mother; "it's gone
down from 127 to 107 in two days, and I reckon it'll be all gone in ten
days or so."

"Wouldn't 'G.G. deb.' be better? It goes down quicker."

"Well, it's a quick one," she assented, "but it don't go down so
steady. You can't rely on it. You take ones like R.O.P. and T.R.R.
pfd.; they go down all the time and you know where you are."

As a result of which, Tomlinson would send his instructions. He did it
all from the rotunda in a way of his own that he had evolved with a
telegraph clerk who told him the names of brokers, and he dealt thus
through brokers whom he never saw. As a result of this, the sluggish
R.O.P. and T.R.R. would take as sudden a leap into the air as might a
mule with a galvanic shock applied to its tail. At once the word was
whispered that the "Tomlinson interests" were after the R.O.P. to
reorganize it, and the whole floor of the Exchange scrambled for the
stock.

And so it was that after a month or two of these operations the Wizard
of Finance saw himself beaten.

"It's no good, mother," he repeated, "it's just a kind of Destiny."

Destiny perhaps it was.

But, if the Wizard of Finance had known it, at this very moment when he
sat with the Aladdin's palace of his golden fortune reared so strangely
about him, Destiny was preparing for him still stranger things.

Destiny, so it would seem, was devising Its own ways and means of
dealing with Tomlinson's fortune. As one of the ways and means, Destiny
was sending at this moment as its special emissaries two huge, portly
figures, wearing gigantic goloshes, and striding downwards from the
halls of Plutoria University to the Grand Palaver Hotel. And one of
these was the gigantic Dr. Boomer, the president of the college, and
the other was his professor of Greek, almost as gigantic as himself.
And they carried in their capacious pockets bundles of pamphlets on
"Archaeological Remains of Mitylene," and the "Use of the Greek
Pluperfect," and little treatises such as "Education and Philanthropy,"
by Dr. Boomer, and "The Excavation of Mitylene: An Estimate of Cost,"
by Dr. Boyster, "Boomer on the Foundation and Maintenance of Chairs,"
etc.

Many a man in city finance who had seen Dr. Boomer enter his office
with a bundle of these monographs and a fighting glitter in his eyes
had sunk back in his chair in dismay. For it meant that Dr. Boomer had
tracked him out for a benefaction to the University, and that all
resistance was hopeless.

When Dr. Boomer once laid upon a capitalist's desk his famous pamphlet
on the "Use of the Greek Pluperfect," it was as if an Arabian sultan
had sent the fatal bow-string to a condemned pasha, or Morgan the
buccaneer had served the death-sign on a shuddering pirate.

So they came nearer and nearer, shouldering the passers-by. The sound
of them as they talked was like the roaring of the sea as Homer heard
it. Never did Castor and Pollux come surging into battle as Dr. Boomer
and Dr. Boyster bore down upon the Grand Palaver Hotel.

Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, had hesitated about going to the
university. The university was coming to him. As for those millions of
his, he could take his choice--dormitories, apparatus, campuses,
buildings, endowment, anything he liked but choose he must. And if he
feared that, after all, his fortune was too vast even for such a
disposal, Dr. Boomer would show him how he might use it in digging up
ancient Mitylene, or modern Smyrna, or the lost cities of the Plain of
Pactolus. If the size of the fortune troubled him, Dr. Boomer would dig
him up the whole African Sahara from Alexandria to Morocco, and ask for
more.

But if Destiny held all this for Tomlinson in its outstretched palm
before it, it concealed stranger things still beneath the folds of its
toga.

There were enough surprises there to turn the faces of the whole
directorate of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated as yellow as the gold
they mined.

For at this very moment, while the president of Plutoria University
drew nearer and nearer to the Grand Palaver Hotel, the senior professor
of geology was working again beside the blue flames in his darkened
laboratory. And this time there was no shaking excitement over him. Nor
were the labels that he marked, as sample followed sample in the tests,
the same as those of the previous marking. Not by any means.

And his grave face as he worked in silence was as still as the stones
of the post-tertiary period.



CHAPTER THREE: The Arrested Philanthropy of Mr. Tomlinson

"This, Mr. Tomlinson, is our campus," said President Boomer as they
passed through the iron gates of Plutoria University.

"For camping?" said the Wizard.

"Not exactly," answered the president, "though it would, of course,
suit for that. _Nihil humunum alienum_, eh?" and he broke into a loud,
explosive laugh, while his spectacles irradiated that peculiar form of
glee derived from a Latin quotation by those able to enjoy it. Dr.
Boyster, walking on the other side of Mr. Tomlinson, joined in the
laugh in a deep, reverberating chorus.

The two had the Wizard of Finance between them, and they were marching
him up to the University. He was taken along much as is an arrested man
who has promised to go quietly. They kept their hands off him, but they
watched him sideways through their spectacles. At the least sign of
restlessness they doused him with Latin. The Wizard of Finance, having
been marked out by Dr. Boomer and Dr. Boyster as a prospective
benefactor, was having Latin poured over him to reduce him to the
proper degree of plasticity.

They had already put him through the first stage. They had, three days
ago, called on him at the Grand Palaver and served him with a pamphlet
on "The Excavation of Mitylene" as a sort of writ. Tomlinson and his
wife had looked at the pictures of the ruins, and from the appearance
of them they judged that Mitylene was in Mexico, and they said that it
was a shame to see it in that state and that the United States ought to
intervene.

As the second stage on the path of philanthropy, the Wizard of Finance
was now being taken to look at the university. Dr. Boomer knew by
experience that no rich man could look at it without wanting to give it
money.

And here the president had found that there is no better method of
dealing with businessmen than to use Latin on them. For other purposes
the president used other things. For example at a friendly dinner at
the Mausoleum Club where light conversation was in order, Dr. Boomer
chatted, as has been seen, on the archaeological remains of the
Navajos. In the same way, at Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's Dante luncheons, he
generally talked of the Italian _cinquecentisti_ and whether Gian Gobbo
della Scala had left a greater name than Can Grande della Spiggiola.
But such talk as that was naturally only for women. Businessmen are
much too shrewd for that kind of thing; in fact, so shrewd are they, as
President Boomer had long since discovered, that nothing pleases them
so much as the quiet, firm assumption that they know Latin. It is like
writing them up an asset. So it was that Dr. Boomer would greet a
business acquaintance with a roaring salutation of, "_Terque quaterque
beatus_," or stand wringing his hand off to the tune of "_Oh et
presidium et dulce decus meum_."

This caught them every time.

"You don't," said Tomlinson the Wizard in a hesitating tone as he
looked at the smooth grass of the campus, "I suppose, raise anything on
it?"

"No, no; this is only for field sports," said the president; "_sunt
quos curriculo_--"

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

This was their favourite quotation. It always gave President Boomer a
chance to speak of the final letter "m" in Latin poetry, and to say
that in his opinion the so-called elision of the final "m" was more
properly a dropping of the vowel with a repercussion of the two last
consonants. He supported this by quoting Ammianus, at which Dr. Boyster
exclaimed, "Pooh! Ammianus: more dog Latin!" and appealed to Mr.
Tomlinson as to whether any rational man nowadays cared what Ammianus
thought?

To all of which Tomlinson answered never a word, but looked steadily
first at one and then at the other. Dr. Boomer said afterwards that the
penetration of Tomlinson was wonderful, and that it was excellent to
see how Boyster tried in vain to draw him; and Boyster said afterwards
that the way in which Tomlinson quietly refused to be led on by Boomer
was delicious, and that it was a pity that Aristophanes was not there
to do it justice.

All of which was happening as they went in at the iron gates and up the
elm avenue of Plutoria University.

The university, as everyone knows, stands with its great gates on
Plutoria Avenue, and with its largest buildings, those of the faculties
of industrial and mechanical science, fronting full upon the street.

These buildings are exceptionally fine, standing fifteen stories high
and comparing favourably with the best departmental stores or factories
in the City. Indeed, after nightfall, when they are all lighted up for
the evening technical classes and when their testing machinery is in
full swing and there are students going in and out in overall suits,
people have often mistaken the university, or this newer part of it,
for a factory. A foreign visitor once said that the students looked
like plumbers, and President Boomer was so proud of it that he put the
phrase into his next Commencement address; and from there the
newspapers got it and the Associated Press took it up and sent it all
over the United States with the heading, "Have Appearance of Plumbers;
Plutoria University Congratulated on Character of Students," and it was
a proud day indeed for the heads of the Industrial Science faculty.

But the older part of the university stands so quietly and modestly at
the top end of the elm avenue, so hidden by the leaves of it, that no
one could mistake it for a factory. This, indeed, was once the whole
university, and had stood there since colonial days under the name
Concordia College. It had been filled with generations of presidents
and professors of the older type with long white beards and rusty black
clothes, and salaries of fifteen hundred dollars.

But the change both of name and of character from Concordia College to
Plutoria University was the work of President Boomer. He had changed it
from an old-fashioned college of the by-gone type to a university in
the true modern sense. At Plutoria they now taught everything.
Concordia College, for example, had no teaching of religion except
lectures on the Bible. Now they had lectures also on Confucianism,
Mohammedanism Buddhism, with an optional course on atheism for students
in the final year.

And, of course, they had long since admitted women, and there were now
beautiful creatures with Cleo de Merode hair studying astronomy at
oaken desks and looking up at the teacher with eyes like comets. The
university taught everything and did everything. It had whirling
machines on the top of it that measured the speed of the wind, and deep
in its basements it measured earthquakes with a seismograph; it held
classes on forestry and dentistry and palmistry; it sent life classes
into the slums, and death classes to the city morgue. It offered such a
vast variety of themes, topics and subjects to the students, that there
was nothing that a student was compelled to learn, while from its own
presses in its own press-building it sent out a shower of bulletins and
monographs like driven snow from a rotary plough.

In fact, it had become, as President Boomer told all the businessmen in
town, not merely a university, but a _universitas_ in the true sense,
and every one of its faculties was now a _facultas_ in the real
acceptance of the word, and its studies properly and truly _studia_;
indeed, if the businessmen would only build a few more dormitories and
put up enough money to form an adequate _fondatum_ or _fundum_, then
the good work might be looked upon as complete.

As the three walked up the elm avenue there met them a little stream of
students with college books, and female students with winged-victory
hats, and professors with last year's overcoats. And some went past
with a smile and others with a shiver.

"That's Professor Withers," said the president in a sympathetic voice
as one of the shivering figures went past; "poor Withers," and he
sighed.

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

"No, not sick," said the president quietly and sadly, "merely
inefficient."

"Inefficient?"

"Unfortunately so. Mind you, I don't mean 'inefficient' in every sense.
By no means. If anyone were to come to me and say, 'Boomer, can you put
your hand for me on a first-class botanist?' I'd say, 'Take Withers.'
I'd say it in a minute." This was true. He would have. In fact, if
anyone had made this kind of rash speech, Dr. Boomer would have given
away half the professoriate.

"Well, what's wrong with him?" repeated Tomlinson, "I suppose he ain't
quite up to the mark in some ways, eh?"

"Precisely," said the president, "not quite up to the mark--a very
happy way of putting it. _Capax imperii nisi imperasset_, as no doubt
you are thinking to yourself. The fact is that Withers, though an
excellent fellow, can't manage large classes. With small classes he is
all right, but with large classes the man is lost. He can't handle
them."

"He can't, eh?" said the Wizard.

"No. But what can I do? There he is. I can't dismiss him. I can't
pension him. I've no money for it."

Here the president slackened a little in his walk and looked sideways
at the prospective benefactor. But Tomlinson gave no sign.

A second professorial figure passed them on the other side.

"There again," said the president, "that's another case of
inefficiency--Professor Shottat, our senior professor of English."

"What's wrong with _him_?" asked the Wizard.

"He can't handle _small_ classes," said the president. "With large
classes he is really excellent, but with small ones the man is simply
hopeless."

In this fashion, before Mr. Tomlinson had measured the length of the
avenue, he had had ample opportunity to judge of the crying need of
money at Plutoria University, and of the perplexity of its president.
He was shown professors who could handle the first year, but were
powerless with the second; others who were all right with the second
but broke down with the third, while others could handle the third but
collapsed with the fourth. There were professors who were all right in
their own subject, but perfectly impossible outside of it; others who
were so occupied outside of their own subject that they were useless
inside of it; others who knew their subject, but couldn't lecture; and
others again who lectured admirably, but didn't know their subject.

In short it was clear--as it was meant to be--that the need of the
moment was a sum of money sufficient to enable the president to dismiss
everybody but himself and Dr. Boyster. The latter stood in a class all
by himself. He had known the president for forty-five years, ever since
he was a fat little boy with spectacles in a classical academy,
stuffing himself on irregular Greek verbs as readily as if on oysters.

But it soon appeared that the need for dismissing the professors was
only part of the trouble. There were the buildings to consider.

"This, I am ashamed to say," said Dr. Boomer, as they passed the
imitation Greek portico of the old Concordia College building, "is our
original home, the _fons et origo_ of our studies, our faculty of arts."

It was indeed a dilapidated building, yet there was a certain majesty
about it, too, especially when one reflected that it had been standing
there looking much the same at the time when its students had trooped
off in a flock to join the army of the Potomac, and much the same,
indeed, three generations before that, when the classes were closed and
the students clapped three-cornered hats on their heads and were off to
enlist as minute men with flintlock muskets under General Washington.

But Dr. Boomer's one idea was to knock the building down and to build
on its site a real _facultas_ ten storeys high, with elevators in it.

Tomlinson looked about him humbly as he stood in the main hall. The
atmosphere of the place awed him. There were bulletins and time-tables
and notices stuck on the walls that gave evidence of the activity of
the place. "Professor Slithers will be unable to meet his classes
today," ran one of them, and another "Professor Withers will not meet
his classes this week," and another, "Owing to illness, Professor
Shottat will not lecture this month," while still another announced,
"Owing to the indisposition of Professor Podge, all botanical classes
are suspended, but Professor Podge hopes to be able to join in the
Botanical Picnic Excursion to Loon Lake on Saturday afternoon." You
could judge of the grinding routine of the work from the nature of
these notices. Anyone familiar with the work of colleges would not heed
it, but it shocked Tomlinson to think how often the professors of the
college were stricken down by overwork.

Here and there in the hall, set into niches, were bronze busts of men
with Roman faces and bare necks, and the edge of a toga cast over each
shoulder.

"Who would these be?" asked Tomlinson, pointing at them. "Some of the
chief founders and benefactors of the faculty," answered the president,
and at this the hopes of Tomlinson sank in his heart. For he realized
the class of man one had to belong to in order to be accepted as a
university benefactor.

"A splendid group of men, are they not?" said the president. "We owe
them much. This is the late Mr. Hogworth, a man of singularly large
heart." Here he pointed to a bronze figure wearing a wreath of laurel
and inscribed GULIEMUS HOGWORTH, LITT. DOC. "He had made a great
fortune in the produce business and wishing to mark his gratitude to
the community he erected the anemometer, the wind-measure, on the roof
of the building, attaching to it no other condition than that his name
should be printed in the weekly reports immediately beside the velocity
of the wind. The figure beside him is the late Mr. Underbugg, who
founded our lectures on the Four Gospels on the sole stipulation that
henceforth any reference of ours to the four gospels should be coupled
with his name."

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

"Litt. Doc.?" said the president. "Doctor of Letters, our honorary
degree. We are always happy to grant it to our benefactors by a vote of
the faculty."

Here Dr. Boomer and Dr. Boyster wheeled half round and looked quietly
and steadily at the Wizard of Finance. To both their minds it was
perfectly plain that an honourable bargain was being struck.

"Yes, Mr. Tomlinson," said the president, as they emerged from the
building, "no doubt you begin to realize our unhappy position. Money,
money, money," he repeated half-musingly. "If I had the money I'd have
that whole building down and dismantled in a fortnight."

From the central building the three passed to the museum building,
where Tomlinson was shown a vast skeleton of a Diplodocus Maximus, and
was specially warned not to confuse it with the Dinosaurus Perfectus,
whose bones, however, could be bought if anyone, any man of large
heart; would come to the university and say straight out, "Gentlemen,
what can I do for you?" Better still, it appeared the whole museum
which was hopelessly antiquated, being twenty-five years old, could be
entirely knocked down if a sufficient sum was forthcoming; and its
curator, who was as ancient as the Dinosaurus itself, could be
dismissed on half-pay if any man had a heart large enough for the
dismissal.

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

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

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

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

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

"I have a boy--"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why not?" said the professor.

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

"Eh?" said Gildas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

        *    *    *    *    *

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

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

"Entirely so," asserted Dr. Boomer.

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

"Exactly," said the president.

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

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

        *    *    *    *    *

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

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

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

        *    *    *    *    *

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

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

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

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

        *    *    *    *    *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?" said Beatem.

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

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

        *    *    *    *    *

Yet what had happened was very simple.

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

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

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

        *    *    *    *    *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Undoubtedly," said Mr. Skinyer.

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

They had meant to, anyway.

        *    *    *    *    *

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

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

"What will he do now?" said Beatem.

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

In which, perhaps, there was some truth.

        *    *    *    *    *

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

"That's good," said mother.

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

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

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

            COLLAPSE
      OF THE ERIE AURIFEROUS

     THE GREAT GOLD SWINDLE

   ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON
      EXPECTED THIS MORNING

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

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

     ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON

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

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

"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.

But what affected Miss Dulphemia Brown herself was the splendid
rudeness of the chauffeur's manner. It was so different from that of
the young men of the _salon_. Thus, when Mr. Sikleigh Snoop handed her
into the car at any time he would dance about saying, "Allow me," and
"Permit me," and would dive forward to arrange the robes. But the
Philippine chauffeur merely swung the door open and said to Dulphemia,
"Get in," and then slammed it.

This, of course, sent a thrill up the spine and through the imagination
of Miss Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown, because it showed that the chauffeur
was a gentleman in disguise. She thought it very probable that he was a
British nobleman, a younger son, very wild, of a ducal family; and she
had her own theories as to why he had entered the service of the
Rasselyer-Browns. To be quite candid about it, she expected that the
Philippine chauffeur meant to elope with her, and every time he drove
her from a dinner or a dance she sat back luxuriously, wishing and
expecting the elopement to begin.

        *    *    *    *    *

But for the time being the interest of Dulphemia, as of everybody else
that was anybody at all, centred round Mr. Yahi-Bahi and the new cult
of Boohooism.

After the visit of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown a great number of ladies, also
in motors, drove down to the house of Mr. Yahi-Bahi. And all of them,
whether they saw Mr. Yahi-Bahi himself or his Bengalee assistant, Mr.
Ram Spudd, came back delighted.

"Such exquisite tact!" said one. "Such delicacy! As I was about to go I
laid a five dollar gold piece on the edge of the little table. Mr.
Spudd scarcely seemed to see it. He murmured, 'Osiris help you!' and
pointed to the ceiling. I raised my eyes instinctively, and when I
lowered them the money had disappeared. I think he must have caused it
to vanish."

"Oh, I'm sure he did," said the listener.

Others came back with wonderful stories of Mr. Yahi-Bahi's occult
powers, especially his marvellous gift of reading the future.

Mrs. Buncomhearst, who had just lost her third husband--by divorce--had
received from Mr. Yahi-Bahi a glimpse into the future that was almost
uncanny in its exactness. She had asked for a divination, and Mr.
Yahi-Bahi had effected one by causing her to lay six ten-dollar pieces
on the table arranged in the form of a mystic serpent. Over these he
had bent and peered deeply, as if seeking to unravel their meaning, and
finally he had given her the prophecy, "Many things are yet to happen
before others begin."

"How _does_ he do it?" asked everybody.

        *    *    *    *    *

As a result of all this it naturally came about that Mr. Yahi-Bahi and
Mr. Ram Spudd were invited to appear at the residence of Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown; and it was understood that steps would be taken to
form a special society, to be known as the Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society.

Mr. Sikleigh Snoop, the sex-poet, was the leading spirit in the
organization. He had a special fitness for the task: he had actually
resided in India. In fact, he had spent six weeks there on a stop-over
ticket of a round-the-world 635 dollar steamship pilgrimage; and he
knew the whole country from Jehumbapore in Bhootal to Jehumbalabad in
the Carnatic. So he was looked upon as a great authority on India,
China, Mongolia, and all such places, by the ladies of Plutoria Avenue.

Next in importance was Mrs. Buncomhearst, who became later, by a
perfectly natural process, the president of the society. She was
already president of the Daughters of the Revolution, a society
confined exclusively to the descendants of Washington's officers and
others; she was also president of the Sisters of England, an
organization limited exclusively to women born in England and
elsewhere; of the Daughters of Kossuth, made up solely of Hungarians
and friends of Hungary and other nations; and of the Circle of Franz
Joseph, which was composed exclusively of the partisans, and others, of
Austria. In fact, ever since she had lost her third husband, Mrs.
Buncomhearst had thrown herself--that was her phrase--into outside
activities. Her one wish was, on her own statement, to lose herself. So
very naturally Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown looked at once to Mrs. Buncomhearst
to preside over the meetings of the new society.

        *    *    *    *    *

The large dining-room at the Rasselyer-Browns' had been cleared out as
a sort of auditorium, and in it some fifty or sixty of Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown's more intimate friends had gathered. The whole meeting
was composed of ladies, except for the presence of one or two men who
represented special cases. There was, of course, little Mr. Spillikins,
with his vacuous face and football hair, who was there, as everybody
knew, on account of Dulphemia; and there was old Judge Longerstill, who
sat leaning on a gold-headed stick with his head sideways, trying to
hear some fraction of what was being said. He came to the gathering in
the hope that it would prove a likely place for seconding a vote of
thanks and saying a few words--half an hour's talk, perhaps--on the
constitution of the United States. Failing that, he felt sure that at
least someone would call him "this eminent old gentleman," and even
that was better than staying at home.

But for the most part the audience was composed of women, and they sat
in a little buzz of conversation waiting for Mr. Yahi-Bahi.

"I wonder," called Mrs. Buncomhearst from the chair, "if some lady
would be good enough to write minutes? Miss Snagg, I wonder if you
would be kind enough to write minutes? Could you?"

"I shall be delighted," said Miss Snagg, "but I'm afraid there's hardly
time to write them before we begin, is there?"

"Oh, but it would be all right to write them _afterwards_," chorussed
several ladies who understood such things; "it's quite often done that
way."

"And I should like to move that we vote a constitution," said a stout
lady with a double eye-glass.

"Is that carried?" said Mrs. Buncomhearst. "All those in favour please
signify."

Nobody stirred.

"Carried," said the president. "And perhaps you would be good enough,
Mrs. Fyshe," she said, turning towards the stout lady, "to _write_ the
constitution."

"Do you think it necessary to _write_ it?" said Mrs. Fyshe. "I should
like to move, if I may, that I almost wonder whether it is necessary to
write the constitution--unless, of course, anybody thinks that we
really ought to."

"Ladies," said the president, "you have heard the motion. All those
against it--"

There was no sign.

"All those in favour of it--"

There was still no sign.

"Lost," she said.

Then, looking across at the clock on the mantel-piece, and realizing
that Mr. Yahi-Bahi must have been delayed and that something must be
done, she said:

"And now, ladies, as we have in our midst a most eminent gentleman who
probably has thought more deeply about constitutions than--"

All eyes turned at once towards Judge Longerstill, but as fortune had
it at this very moment Mr. Sikleigh Snoop entered, followed by Mr.
Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram Spudd.

Mr. Yahi-Bahi was tall. His drooping Oriental costume made him taller
still. He had a long brown face and liquid brown eyes of such depth
that when he turned them full upon the ladies before him a shiver of
interest and apprehension followed in the track of his glance.

"My dear," said Miss Snagg afterwards, "he seemed simply to see right
through us."

This was correct. He did.

Mr. Ram Spudd presented a contrast to his superior. He was short and
round, with a dimpled mahogany face and eyes that twinkled in it like
little puddles of molasses. His head was bound in a turban and his body
was swathed in so many bands and sashes that he looked almost circular.
The clothes of both Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Ram Spudd were covered with the
mystic signs of Buddha and the seven serpents of Vishnu.

It was impossible, of course, for Mr. Yahi-Bahi or Mr. Ram Spudd to
address the audience. Their knowledge of English was known to be too
slight for that. Their communications were expressed entirely through
the medium of Mr. Snoop, and even he explained afterwards that it was
very difficult. The only languages of India which he was able to speak,
he said, with any fluency were Gargamic and Gumaic both of these being
old Dravidian dialects with only two hundred and three words in each,
and hence in themselves very difficult to converse in. Mr. Yahi-Bahi
answered in what Mr. Snoop understood to be the Iramic of the Vedas, a
very rich language, but one which unfortunately he did not understand.
The dilemma is one familiar to all Oriental scholars.

All of this Mr. Snoop explained in the opening speech which he
proceeded to make. And after this he went on to disclose, amid deep
interest, the general nature of the cult of Boohooism. He said that
they could best understand it if he told them that its central doctrine
was that of Bahee. Indeed, the first aim of all followers of the cult
was to attain to Bahee. Anybody who could spend a certain number of
hours each day, say sixteen, in silent meditation on Boohooism would
find his mind gradually reaching a condition of Bahee. The chief aim of
Bahee itself was sacrifice: a true follower of the cult must be willing
to sacrifice his friends, or his relatives, and even strangers, in
order to reach Bahee. In this way one was able fully to realize oneself
and enter into the Higher Indifference. Beyond this, further meditation
and fasting--by which was meant living solely on fish, fruit, wine, and
meat--one presently attained to complete Swaraj or Control of Self, and
might in time pass into the absolute Nirvana, or the Negation of
Emptiness, the supreme goal of Boohooism.

As a first step to all this, Mr. Snoop explained, each neophyte or
candidate for holiness must, after searching his own heart, send ten
dollars to Mr. Yahi-Bahi. Gold, it appeared, was recognized in the cult
of Boohooism as typifying the three chief virtues, whereas silver or
paper money did not; even national banknotes were only regarded as do
or, a halfway palliation; and outside currencies such as Canadian or
Mexican bills were looked upon as entirely boo, or contemptible. The
Oriental view of money, said Mr. Snoop, was far superior to our own,
but it also might be attained by deep thought, and, as a beginning, by
sending ten dollars to Mr. Yahi-Bahi.

After this Mr. Snoop, in conclusion, read a very beautiful Hindu poem,
translating it as he went along. It began, "O cow, standing beside the
Ganges, and apparently without visible occupation," and it was voted
exquisite by all who heard it. The absence of rhyme and the entire
removal of ideas marked it as far beyond anything reached as yet by
Occidental culture.

When Mr. Snoop had concluded, the president called upon Judge
Longerstill for a few words of thanks, which he gave, followed by a
brief talk on the constitution of the United States.

After this the society was declared constituted, Mr. Yahi-Bahi made
four salaams, one to each point of the compass, and the meeting
dispersed.

And that evening, over fifty dinner tables, everybody discussed the
nature of Bahee, and tried in vain to explain it to men too stupid to
understand.

        *    *    *    *    *

Now it so happened that on the very afternoon of this meeting at Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown's, the Philippine chauffeur did a strange and peculiar
thing. He first asked Mr. Rasselyer-Brown for a few hours' leave of
absence to attend the funeral of his mother in-law. This was a request
which Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, on principle, never refused to a man-servant.

Whereupon, the Philippine chauffeur, no longer attired as one, visited
the residence of Mr. Yahi-Bahi. He let himself in with a marvellous
little key which he produced from a very wonderful bunch of such. He
was in the house for nearly half an hour, and when he emerged, the
notebook in his breast pocket, had there been an eye to read it, would
have been seen to be filled with stranger details in regard to Oriental
mysticism than even Mr. Yahi-Bahi had given to the world. So strange
were they that before the Philippine chauffeur returned to the
Rasselyer-Brown residence he telegraphed certain and sundry parts of
them to New York. But why he should have addressed them to the head of
a detective bureau instead of to a college of Oriental research it
passes the imagination to conceive. But as the chauffeur duly
reappeared at motor-time in the evening the incident passed unnoticed.

        *    *    *    *    *

It is beyond the scope of the present narrative to trace the progress
of Boohooism during the splendid but brief career of the Yahi-Bahi
Oriental Society. There could be no doubt of its success. Its
principles appealed with great strength to all the more cultivated
among the ladies of Plutoria Avenue. There was something in the
Oriental mysticism of its doctrines which rendered previous belief
stale and puerile. The practice of the sacred rites began at once. The
ladies' counters of the Plutorian banks were inundated with requests
for ten-dollar pieces in exchange for banknotes. At dinner in the best
houses nothing was eaten except a thin soup (or bru), followed by fish,
succeeded by meat or by game, especially such birds as are particularly
pleasing to Buddha, as the partridge, the pheasant, and the woodcock.
After this, except for fruits and wine, the principle of Swaraj, or
denial of self, was rigidly imposed. Special Oriental dinners of this
sort were given, followed by listening to the reading of Oriental
poetry, with closed eyes and with the mind as far as possible in a
state of Stoj, or Negation of Thought.

By this means the general doctrine of Boohooism spread rapidly. Indeed,
a great many of the members of the society soon attained to a stage of
Bahee, or the Higher Indifference, that it would have been hard to
equal outside of Juggapore or Jumbumbabad. For example, when Mrs.
Buncomhearst learned of the remarriage of her second husband--she had
lost him three years before, owing to a difference of opinion on the
emancipation of women--she showed the most complete Bahee possible. And
when Miss Snagg learned that her brother in Venezuela had died--a very
sudden death brought on by drinking rum for seventeen years--and had
left her ten thousand dollars, the Bahee which she exhibited almost
amounted to Nirvana.

In fact, the very general dissemination of the Oriental idea became
more and more noticeable with each week that passed. Some members
attained to so complete a Bahee, or Higher Indifference, that they even
ceased to attend the meetings of the society; others reached a Swaraj,
or Control of Self, so great that they no longer read its pamphlets;
while others again actually passed into Nirvana, to a Complete Negation
of Self, so rapidly that they did not even pay their subscriptions.

But features of this sort, of course, are familiar wherever a
successful occult creed makes its way against the prejudices of the
multitude.

The really notable part of the whole experience was the marvellous
demonstration of occult power which attended the final seance of the
society, the true nature of which is still wrapped in mystery.

For some weeks it had been rumoured that a very special feat or
demonstration of power by Mr. Yahi-Bahi was under contemplation. In
fact, the rapid spread of Swaraj and of Nirvana among the members
rendered such a feat highly desirable. Just what form the demonstration
would take was for some time a matter of doubt. It was whispered at
first that Mr. Yahi-Bahi would attempt the mysterious eastern rite of
burying Ram Spudd alive in the garden of the Rasselyer-Brown residence
and leaving him there in a state of Stoj, or Suspended Inanition, for
eight days. But this project was abandoned, owing to some doubt,
apparently, in the mind of Mr. Ram Spudd as to his astral fitness for
the high state of Stoj necessitated by the experiment.

At last it became known to the members of the Poosh, or Inner Circle,
under the seal of confidence, that Mr. Yahi-Bahi would attempt nothing
less than the supreme feat of occultism, namely, a reincarnation, or
more correctly a reastralization of Buddha.

The members of the Inner Circle shivered with a luxurious sense of
mystery when they heard of it.

"Has it ever been done before?" they asked of Mr. Snoop.

"Only a few times," he said; "once, I believe, by Jam-bum, the famous
Yogi of the Carnatic; once, perhaps twice, by Boohoo, the founder of
the sect. But it is looked upon as extremely rare. Mr. Yahi tells me
that the great danger is that, if the slightest part of the formula is
incorrectly observed, the person attempting the astralization is
swallowed up into nothingness. However, he declares himself willing to
try."

        *    *    *    *    *

The seance was to take place at Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's residence, and
was to be at midnight.

"At midnight!" said each member in surprise. And the answer was, "Yes,
at midnight. You see, midnight here is exactly midday in Allahabad in
India."

This explanation was, of course, ample. "Midnight," repeated everybody
to everybody else, "is exactly midday in Allahabad." That made things
perfectly clear. Whereas if midnight had been midday in Timbuctoo the
whole situation would have been different.

Each of the ladies was requested to bring to the seance some ornament
of gold; but it must be plain gold, without any setting of stones.

It was known already that, according to the cult of Boohooism, gold,
plain gold, is the seat of the three virtues--beauty, wisdom and grace.
Therefore, according to the creed of Boohooism, anyone who has enough
gold, plain gold, is endowed with these virtues and is all right. All
that is needed is to have enough of it; the virtues follow as a
consequence.

But for the great experiment the gold used must not be set with stones,
with the one exception of rubies, which are known to be endowed with
the three attributes of Hindu worship, modesty, loquacity, and
pomposity.

In the present case it was found that as a number of ladies had nothing
but gold ornaments set with diamonds, a second exception was made;
especially as Mr. Yahi-Bahi, on appeal, decided that diamonds, though
less pleasing to Buddha than rubies, possessed the secondary Hindu
virtues of divisibility, movability, and disposability.

On the evening in question the residence of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown might
have been observed at midnight wrapped in utter darkness. No lights
were shown. A single taper, brought by Ram Spudd from the Taj Mohal,
and resembling in its outer texture those sold at the five-and-ten
store near Mr. Spudd's residence, burned on a small table in the vast
dining-room. The servants had been sent upstairs and expressly enjoined
to retire at half past ten. Moreover, Mr. Rasselyer-Brown had had to
attend that evening, at the Mausoleum Club, a meeting of the trustees
of the Church of St. Asaph, and he had come home at eleven o'clock, as
he always did after diocesan work of this sort, quite used up; in fact,
so fatigued that he had gone upstairs to his own suite of rooms
sideways, his knees bending under him. So utterly used up was he with
his church work that, as far as any interest in what might be going on
in his own residence, he had attained to a state of Bahee, or Higher
Indifference, that even Buddha might have envied.

The guests, as had been arranged, arrived noiselessly and on foot. All
motors were left at least a block away. They made their way up the
steps of the darkened house, and were admitted without ringing, the
door opening silently in front of them. Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram
Spudd, who had arrived on foot carrying a large parcel, were already
there, and were behind a screen in the darkened room, reported to be in
meditation.

At a whispered word from Mr. Snoop, who did duty at the door, all furs
and wraps were discarded in the hall and laid in a pile. Then the
guests passed silently into the great dining room. There was no light
in it except the dim taper which stood on a little table. On this table
each guest, as instructed, laid an ornament of gold, and at the same
time was uttered in a low voice the word Ksvoo. This means, "O Buddha,
I herewith lay my unworthy offering at thy feet; take it and keep it
for ever." It was explained that this was only a form.

        *    *    *    *    *

"What is he doing?" whispered the assembled guests as they saw Mr.
Yahi-Bahi pass across the darkened room and stand in front of the
sideboard.

"Hush!" said Mr. Snoop; "he's laying the propitiatory offering for
Buddha."

"It's an Indian rite," whispered Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown.

Mr. Yahi-Bahi could be seen dimly moving to and fro in front of the
sideboard. There was a faint clinking of glass.

"He has to set out a glass of Burmese brandy, powdered over with nutmeg
and aromatics," whispered Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. "I had the greatest
hunt to get it all for him. He said that nothing but Burmese brandy
would do, because in the Hindu religion the god can only be invoked
with Burmese brandy, or, failing that, Hennessy's with three stars,
which is not entirely displeasing to Buddha."

"The aromatics," whispered Mr. Snoop, "are supposed to waft a perfume
or incense to reach the nostrils of the god. The glass of propitiatory
wine and the aromatic spices are mentioned in the Vishnu-Buddayat."

Mr. Yahi-Bahi, his preparations completed, was now seen to stand in
front of the sideboard bowing deeply four times in an Oriental salaam.
The light of the single taper had by this time burned so dim that his
movements were vague and uncertain. His body cast great flickering
shadows on the half-seen wall. From his throat there issued a low wail
in which the word wah! wah! could be distinguished.

The excitement was intense.

"What does wah mean?" whispered Mr. Spillikins.

"Hush!" said Mr. Snoop; "it means, 'O Buddha, wherever thou art in thy
lofty Nirvana, descend yet once in astral form before our eyes!'"

Mr. Yahi-Bahi rose. He was seen to place one finger on his lips and
then, silently moving across the room, he disappeared behind the
screen. Of what Mr. Ram Spudd was doing during this period there is no
record. It was presumed that he was still praying.

The stillness was now absolute.

"We must wait in perfect silence," whispered Mr. Snoop from the extreme
tips of his lips.

Everybody sat in strained intensity, silent, looking towards the vague
outline of the sideboard.

The minutes passed. No one moved. All were spellbound in expectancy.

Still the minutes passed. The taper had flickered down till the great
room was almost in darkness.

Could it be that by some neglect in the preparations, the substitution
perhaps of the wrong brandy, the astralization could not be effected?

But no.

Quite suddenly, it seemed, everybody in the darkened room was aware of
a _presence_. That was the word as afterwards repeated in a hundred
confidential discussions. A _presence_. One couldn't call it a body. It
wasn't. It was a figure, an astral form, a presence.

"Buddha!" they gasped as they looked at it.

Just how the figure entered the room, the spectators could never
afterwards agree. Some thought it appeared through the wall,
deliberately astralizing itself as it passed through the bricks. Others
seemed to have seen it pass in at the farther door of the room, as if
it had astralized itself at the foot of the stairs in the back of the
hall outside.

Be that as it may, there it stood before them, the astralized shape of
the Indian deity, so that to every lip there rose the half-articulated
word, "Buddha"; or at least to every lip except that of Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown. From her there came no sound.

The figure as afterwards described was attired in a long _shirak_, such
as is worn by the Grand Llama of Tibet, and resembling, if the
comparison were not profane, a modern dressing-gown. The legs, if one
might so call them, of the apparition were enwrapped in loose
punjahamas, a word which is said to be the origin of the modern
pyjamas; while the feet, if they were feet, were encased in loose
slippers.

Buddha moved slowly across the room. Arrived at the sideboard the
astral figure paused, and even in the uncertain light Buddha was seen
to raise and drink the propitiatory offering. That much was perfectly
clear. Whether Buddha spoke or not is doubtful. Certain of the
spectators thought that he said, 'Must a fagotnit', which is
Hindustanee for "Blessings on this house." To Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's
distracted mind it seemed as if Buddha said, "I must have forgotten it"
But this wild fancy she never breathed to a soul.

Silently Buddha recrossed the room, slowly wiping one arm across his
mouth after the Hindu gesture of farewell.

For perhaps a full minute after the disappearance of Buddha not a soul
moved. Then quite suddenly Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown, unable to stand the
tension any longer, pressed an electric switch and the whole room was
flooded with light.

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 a

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