Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich (3 page)

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 realised 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 to-day, 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 recognised 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 waist-coat pocket an eye-glass 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 eye-glass 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 realised 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 half-way 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 civilisation 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.”