



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