Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich
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.