Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich (5 page)

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 windswept 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 châtelaine
, 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 lumber-jack 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 text-book. 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.