Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich

by Stephen Leacock

  CHAPTER TWO: The Wizard of Finance

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

  But in Central Square the quiet of Plutoria Avenue is exchanged foranother atmosphere. There are fountains that splash unendingly andmingle their music with the sound of the motor-horns and the clatter ofthe cabs. There are real trees and little green benches, with peoplereading yesterday's newspaper, and grass cut into plots among theasphalt. There is at one end a statue of the first governor of thestate, 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 whopass by pause and look at this statue and point at it withwalking-sticks, because it is of extraordinary interest; in fact, it isan example of the new electro-chemical process of casting by which youcan cast a state governor any size you like, no matter what you startfrom. Those who know about such things explain what an interestingcontrast the two statues are; for in the case of the governor of ahundred years ago one had to start from plain, rough material and workpatiently for years to get the effect, whereas now the material doesn'tmatter at all, and with any sort of scrap, treated in the gas furnaceunder tremendous pressure, one may make a figure of colossal size likethe one in Central Square.

  So naturally Central Square with its trees and its fountains and itsstatues is one of the places of chief interest in the City. Butespecially because there stands along one side of it the vast pile ofthe Grand Palaver Hotel. It rises fifteen stories high and fills allone side of the square. It has, overlooking the trees in the square,twelve hundred rooms with three thousand windows, and it would haveheld all George Washington's army. Even people in other cities who havenever seen it know it well from its advertising; "the most homelikehotel in America," so it is labelled in all the magazines, theexpensive ones, on the continent. In fact, the aim of the company thatowns the Grand Palaver--and they do not attempt to conceal it--is tomake the place as much a home as possible. Therein lies its charm. Itis a home. You realize that when you look up at the Grand Palaver fromthe square at night when the twelve hundred guests have turned on thelights of the three thousand windows. You realize it at theatre timewhen the great string of motors come sweeping to the doors of thePalaver, to carry the twelve hundred guests to twelve hundred seats inthe theatres at four dollars a seat. But most of all do you appreciatethe character of the Grand Palaver when you step into its rotunda.Aladdin's enchanted palace was nothing to it. It has a vast ceilingwith a hundred glittering lights, and within it night and day is asurging crowd that is never still and a babel of voices that is neverhushed, and over all there hangs an enchanted cloud of thin bluetobacco smoke such as might enshroud the conjured vision of a magicianof Baghdad or Damascus.

  In and through the rotunda there are palm trees to rest the eye andrubber trees in boxes to soothe the mind, and there are great leatherlounges and deep armchairs, and here and there huge brass ash-bowls asbig as Etruscan tear-jugs. Along one side is a counter with gratedwickets like a bank, and behind it are five clerks with flattened hairand tall collars, dressed in long black frock-coats all day likemembers of a legislature. They have great books in front of them inwhich they study unceasingly, and at their lightest thought they strikea bell with the open palm of their hand, and at the sound of it a pageboy in a monkey suit, with G.P. stamped all over him in brass, boundsto the desk and off again, shouting a call into the unheeding crowdvociferously. The sound of it fills for a moment the great space of therotunda; it echoes down the corridors to the side; it floats, softlymelodious, through the palm trees of the ladies' palm room; it isheard, fainter and fainter, in the distant grill; and in the depths ofthe barber shop below the level of the street the barber arrests amoment the drowsy hum of his shampoo brushes to catch the sound--asmight a miner in the sunken galleries of a coastal mine cease in histoil a moment to hear the distant murmur of the sea.

  And the clerks call for the pages, the pages call for the guests, andthe 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 toread, the eyes of the crowd about him turned for a moment to look uponthe figure of Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance.

  There he stood in his wide-awake hat and his long black coat, hisshoulders slightly bent with his fifty-eight years. Anyone who hadknown him in the olden days on his bush farm beside Tomlinson's Creekin the country of the Great Lakes would have recognized him in amoment. There was still on his face that strange, puzzled look that ithabitually wore, only now, of course, the financial papers were callingit "unfathomable." There was a certain way in which his eye roved toand fro inquiringly that might have looked like perplexity, were it notthat the _Financial Undertone_ had recognized it as the "searching lookof a captain of industry." One might have thought that for all thegoodness in it there was something simple in his face, were it not thatthe _Commercial and Pictorial Review_ had called the face"inscrutable," and had proved it so with an illustration that left nodoubt of the matter. Indeed, the face of Tomlinson of Tomlinson'sCreek, now Tomlinson the Wizard of Finance, was not commonly spoken ofas a _face_ by the paragraphers of the Saturday magazine sections, butwas more usually referred to as a mask; and it would appear thatNapoleon the First had had one also. The Saturday editors were nevertired of describing the strange, impressive personality of Tomlinson,the great dominating character of the newest and highest finance. Fromthe moment when the interim prospectus of the Erie AuriferousConsolidated had broken like a tidal wave over Stock Exchange circles,the picture of Tomlinson, the sleeping shareholder of uncomputedmillions, had filled the imagination of every dreamer in a nation ofpoets.

  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 issomething in the set of the ear that suggests the swift, eager mind ofthe born leader of men."

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

  Some writers grew lyric about him. What visions, they asked, could onebut read them, must lie behind the quiet, dreaming eyes of thatinscrutable 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 andclatter of the great rotunda of the Grand Palaver with the telegram inhis hand, fumbling at the wrong end to open it, might have read thevisions of the master-mind had he but known their nature. They weresimple enough. For the visions in the mind of Tomlinson, Wizard ofFinance, were for the most part those of a wind-swept hillside farmbeside Lake Erie, where Tomlinson's Creek runs down to the low edge ofthe lake, and where the off-shore wind ripples the rushes of theshallow water: that, and the vision of a frame house, and the snakefences of the fourth concession road where it falls to the lakeside.And if the eyes of the man are dreamy and abstrac
ted, it is becausethere lies over the vision of this vanished farm an infinite regret,greater in its compass than all the shares the Erie AuriferousConsolidated has ever thrown upon the market.

  * * * * *

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

  The message that he had just read was worded, "Morning quotations showpreferred A. G. falling rapidly recommend instant sale no confidencesend instructions."

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

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

  With that he turned to walk towards the elevator, and all the peopleabout him who had watched the signing of the message knew that some bigfinancial 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 feltin his pocket and gripped a quarter, then changed his mind and felt fora fifty-cent piece, and finally gave them both to the elevator boy,after which he walked along the corridor till he reached the cornersuite of rooms, a palace in itself, for which he was paying a thousanddollars a month ever since the Erie Auriferous Consolidated Company hadbegun tearing up the bed of Tomlinson's Creek in Cahoga County with itshydraulic dredges.

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

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

  This was "mother," the wife of the Wizard of Finance and eight yearsyounger than himself. And she, too, was in the papers and the publiceye; 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 anupright feather, and they had hung gold chains on her, and everythingthat was most expensive they had hung and tied on mother. You might seeher emerging any morning from the Grand Palaver in her beetle-backjacket and her Balkan hat, a figure of infinite pathos. And whatevershe wore, the lady editors of _Spring Notes_ and _Causerie du Boudoir_wrote it out in French, and one paper had called her a _bellechatelaine_, and another had spoken of her as a grande dame, which theTomlinsons thought must be a misprint.

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

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

  * * * * *

  "How's Fred?" said the Wizard, laying aside his hat, and lookingtowards 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 ona sofa, a great hulking boy of seventeen in a flowered dressing-gown,fancying himself ill. There was a packet of cigarettes and a box ofchocolates on a chair beside him, and he had the blind drawn and hiseyes half-closed to impress himself.

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

  The Wizard tip-toed into the inner room, and from the open door hislistening wife could hear the voice of the boy saying, in a tone as ofone 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." Forthis, in the dietetics of Cahoga County, is the sole test. All thosethings can be eaten which will sit on the stomach. Anything that won'tsit 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 thinkit would be better to ring?"

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

  This was the kind of problem with which Tomlinson and his wife, intheir thousand-dollar suite in the Grand Palaver, grappled all day. Andwhen 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 ifhe would take five dollars.

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

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

  Exactly! In other words Fred had pretty much the same complaint as therest of Dr. Slyder's patients on Plutoria Avenue, and was to be treatedin the same way. Dr. Slyder, who was the most fashionable practitionerin the City, spent his entire time moving to and fro in an almostnoiseless motor earnestly advising people to keep quiet. "You must keepvery quiet for a little while," he would say with a sigh, as he satbeside a sick-bed. As he drew on his gloves in the hall below he wouldshake his head very impressively and say, "You must keep him veryquiet," and so pass out, quite soundlessly. By this means Dr. Slyderoften succeeded in keeping people quiet for weeks. It was all themedicine that he knew. But it was enough. And as his patients alwaysgot well--there being nothing wrong with them--his reputation wasimmense.

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

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

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

  These and similar messages were from brokers' offices, and all of themwere 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--allof 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 hewould have been just as wise as to what it meant.

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

  "No," said Tomlinson, and he sighed as he said it; "this is the worstday 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 havemade another hundred thousand dollars since yesterday."

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

  "And half a million last week, wasn't it?" said Tomlinson as he sankinto a chair. "I'm afraid, mother," he continued, "it's no good. Wedon'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 thetwo wizards, he could have written up a news story calculated toelectrify all America.

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

  But if you own a fortune that is computed anywhere from fifty millionsup, with no limit at the top, if you own one-half of all the preferredstock of an Erie Auriferous Consolidated that is digging gold inhydraulic bucketfuls from a quarter of a mile of river bed, the task oflosing it is no easy matter.

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

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

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

  * * * * *

  The great fortune that Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, was trying hisbest to lose had come to him with wonderful suddenness. As yet it washardly six months old. As to how it had originated, there were allsorts of stories afloat in the weekly illustrated press. They agreedmostly on the general basis that Tomlinson had made his vast fortune byhis own indomitable pluck and dogged industry. Some said that he hadbeen at one time a mere farm hand who, by sheer doggedness, had foughthis way from the hay-mow to the control of the produce market ofseventeen states. Others had it that he had been a lumberjack who, bysheer doggedness, had got possession of the whole lumber forest of theLake district. Others said that he had been a miner in a Lake Superiorcopper mine who had, by the doggedness of his character, got apractical monopoly of the copper supply. These Saturday articles, atany rate, made the Saturday reader rigid with sympathetic doggednesshimself, which was all that the editor (who was doggedly trying to makethe paper pay) wanted to effect.

  But in reality the making of Tomlinson's fortune was very simple. Therecipe for it is open to anyone. It is only necessary to own a hillsidefarm beside Lake Erie where the uncleared bush and the broken fields gostraggling 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 forone's self. One might have lived a lifetime on the farm, as Tomlinson'sfather had, and never discover it for one's self. For that indeed thebest medium of destiny is a geologist, let us say the senior professorof geology at Plutoria University. That was how it happened.

  The senior professor, so it chanced, was spending his vacation near byon the shores of the lake, and his time was mostly passed--for howbetter can a man spend a month of pleasure?--in looking foroutcroppings of Devonian rock of the post-tertiary period. For whichpurpose he carried a vacation hammer in his pocket, and made from timeto time a note or two as he went along, or filled his pockets with thechippings of vacation rocks.

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

  Tomlinson and his boy Fred were logging in the underbrush near by witha long chain and yoke of oxen, but the geologist was so excited that hedid not see them till the sound of his eager hammer had brought them tohis side. They took him up to the frame house in the clearing, wherethe 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 thathe could hardly eat them.

  The geologist left Cahoga station that night for the City with anewspaper full of specimens inside his suit-case, and he knew that ifany person or persons would put up money enough to tear that block ofrock away and follow the fissure down, there would be found theresomething 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 itsplace, and from beneath it the crumbled, glittering rock-dust thatsparkled in the sun was sent in little boxes to the testinglaboratories of Plutoria University. There the senior professor ofgeology had sat up with it far into the night in a darkened laboratory,with little blue flames playing underneath crucibles, as in amagician's cavern, and with the door locked. And as each sample that hetested was set aside and tied in a cardboard box by itself, he labelledit "aur. p. 75," and the pen shook in his hand as he marked it. For toprofessors of geology those symbols mean "this is seventy-five per centpure gold." So it was no wonder that the senior professor of geologyworking 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 thinkof that), but because if this thing was true it meant that anauriferous vein had been found in what was Devonian rock of thepost-tertiary stratification, and if that was so it upset enoughgeology to spoil a textbook. It would mean that the professor couldread a paper at the next Pan-Geological Conference that would turn thewhole assembly into a bedlam.

  It pleased him, too, to know that the men he was dealing with weregenerous. They had asked him to name his own price or the tests that hemade and when he had said two dollars per sample they had told him togo right ahead. The professor was not, I suppose, a mercenary man, butit pleased him to think that he could, clean up sixteen dollars in asingle evening in his laboratory. It showed, at any rate, thatbusinessmen put science at its proper value. Strangest of all was thefact that the men had told him that even this ore was apparentlynothing to what there was; it had all come out of one single spot inthe creek, not the hundredth part of the whole claim. Lower down, wherethey had thrown the big dam across to make the bed dry, they weretaking out this same stuff and even better, so they said, in cartloads.The hydraulic dredges were tearing it from the bed of the creek allday, and at night a great circuit of arc lights gleamed and sputteredover the roaring labour of the friends of geological research.

  Thus had the Erie Auriferous Consolidated broken in a tidal wave overfinancial circles. On the Stock Exchange, in the downtown offices, andamong 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 hiswife along on the crest of it, and landed them fifty feet up in theirthousand-dollar suite in the Grand Palaver. And as a result of it"mother" wore a beetle-back jacket; and Tomlinson received a hundredtelegrams a day, and Fred quit school and ate chocolates.

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

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

>   But the top end of the farm he refused to surrender, and the friends ofapplied geology knew that there must be something pretty large behindthis refusal; the more so as the reason that Tomlinson gave was such asimple one. He said that he didn't want to part with the top end of theplace because his father was buried on it beside the creek, and so hedidn'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 theMausoleum Club had wandered into such places as Cahoga County that theydid not know that there was nothing strange in what Tomlinson said. Hisfather was buried there, on the farm itself, in a grave overgrown withraspberry bushes, and with a wooden headstone encompassed by a squareof cedar rails, and slept as many another pioneer of Cahoga is sleeping.

  "Devilish smart idea!" they said; and forthwith half the financial menof the city buried their fathers, or professed to have done so, inlikely places--along the prospective right-of-way of a suburbanrailway, for example; in fact, in any place that marked them out forthe 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 ofthe Mausoleum Club.

  "I put it to him in a casual way," related, for example, Mr. LucullusFyshe, "casually, but quite frankly. I said, 'See here, this is just abagatelle 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 knowas well as I do that they are only collateral trust, and that the stockunderneath never could and never can earn a par dividend. Now,' I said,'Mr. Tomlinson, tell me what all that means?' Would you believe it, thefellow looked me right in the face in that queer way he has and hesaid, 'I don't know!'"

  "He said he didn't know!" repeated the listener, in a tone of amazementand 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 deuceof it. That man when he wants to can put on a look, sir, that simplymeans nothing, absolutely nothing."

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

  And meantime Tomlinson and his wife, within their suite at the GrandPalaver, had long since reached their decision. For there was oneaspect 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 hadfallen to them was of no manner of use. What did it bring them? Thenoise and roar of the City in place of the silence of the farm and theracket of the great rotunda to drown the remembered murmur of thewaters of the creek.

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

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

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

  "He's popular," said his father. "I notice it downstairs. He sasses anyof them just as he likes; and no matter how busy they are, as soon asthey 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 tolaugh with the son of a multimillionaire. It's a certain sense ofhumour that they develop.

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

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

  It had crossed their minds--for who could live in the City a monthwithout observing the imposing buildings of Plutoria University, asfine as any departmental store in town?--that they might give it to thecollege.

  But there, it seemed, the way was blocked.

  "You see, mother," said the puzzled Wizard, "we're not known. We'restrangers. I'd look fine going up there to the college and saying, 'Iwant 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, "whereMr. Carnegie gives ever so much to the colleges, more than all we'vegot, and they take it?"

  "That's different," said the Wizard. "He's in with them. They all knowhim. Why, he's a sort of chairman of different boards of colleges, andhe knows all the heads of the schools, and the professors, so it's nowonder 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 themiddle of his teaching and saying; 'I'd like to give you a pension forlife!' 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, whoknew most arithmetic, was the leading spirit. She tracked out all thestocks and bonds in the front page of the _Financial Undertone_, and onher recommendation the Wizard bought. They knew the stocks only bytheir letters, but this itself gave a touch of high finance to theirdeliberations.

  "I'd buy some of this R.O.P. if I was you," said mother; "it's gonedown from 127 to 107 in two days, and I reckon it'll be all gone in tendays 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 sosteady. 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 itall from the rotunda in a way of his own that he had evolved with atelegraph clerk who told him the names of brokers, and he dealt thusthrough brokers whom he never saw. As a result of this, the sluggishR.O.P. and T.R.R. would take as sudden a leap into the air as might amule with a galvanic shock applied to its tail. At once the word waswhispered that the "Tomlinson interests" were after the R.O.P. toreorganize it, and the whole floor of the Exchange scrambled for thestock.

  And so it was that after a month or two of these operations the Wizardof 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 hesat with the Aladdin's palace of his golden fortune reared so strangelyabout him, Destiny was preparing for him still stranger things.

  Destiny, so it would seem, was devising Its own ways and means ofdealing with Tomlinson's fortune. As one of the ways and means, Destinywas sending at this moment as its special emissaries two huge, portlyfigures, wearing gigantic goloshes, and striding downwards from thehalls of Plutoria University to the Grand Palaver Hotel. And one ofthese was the gigantic Dr. Boomer, the president of the college, andthe 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 GreekPluperfect," 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 officewith a bundle of these monographs and a fighting glitter in his eyeshad sunk back in his chair in dismay. For it meant that Dr. Boomer hadtracked him out for a benefaction to the University, and
that allresistance was hopeless.

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

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

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

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

  There were enough surprises there to turn the faces of the wholedirectorate of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated as yellow as the goldthey mined.

  For at this very moment, while the president of Plutoria Universitydrew nearer and nearer to the Grand Palaver Hotel, the senior professorof geology was working again beside the blue flames in his darkenedlaboratory. And this time there was no shaking excitement over him. Norwere 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 stonesof the post-tertiary period.