Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich by Stephen Leacock (read book .TXT) 📗

of the university. Anyone conversant with the inner life of a college will realize that to many of the professoriate this was nothing less than a last wild onslaught of socialistic democracy against the solid bulwarks of society. They must fight it back or die on the walls. To others it was one more step in the splendid progress of democratic education, comparable only to such epoch-making things as the abandonment of the cap and gown, and the omission of the word "sir" in speaking to a professor.

No wonder that the fight raged. Elderberry Foible, his fluffed white hair almost on end, beat in vain with his gavel for order. Finally, Chang of Physiology, who was a perfect dynamo of energy and was known frequently to work for three or four hours at a stretch, proposed that the faculty should adjourn the question and meet for its further discussion on the following Saturday morning. This revolutionary suggestion, involving work on Saturday, reduced the meeting to a mere turmoil, in the midst of which Elderberry Foible proposed that the whole question of the use of lead-pencils should be adjourned till that day six months, and that meantime a new special committee of seventeen professors, with power to add to their number, to call witnesses and, if need be, to hear them, should report on the entire matter de novo. This motion, after the striking out of the words de novo and the insertion of ab initio, was finally carried, after which the faculty sank back completely exhausted into its chair, the need of afternoon tea and toast stamped on every face.

And it was at this moment that President Boomer, who understood faculties as few men have done, quietly entered the room, laid his silk hat on a volume of Demosthenes, and proposed the vote of a degree of Doctor of Letters for Edward Tomlinson. He said that there was no need to remind the faculty of Tomlinson's services to the nation; they knew them. Of the members of the faculty, indeed, some thought that he meant the Tomlinson who wrote the famous monologue on the Iota Subscript, while others supposed that he referred to the celebrated philosopher Tomlinson, whose new book on the Indivisibility of the Inseparable was just then maddening the entire world. In any case, they voted the degree without a word, still faint with exhaustion.

But while the university was conferring on Tomlinson the degree of Doctor of Letters, all over the City in business circles they were conferring on him far other titles. "Idiot," "Scoundrel," "Swindler," were the least of them. Every stock and share with which his name was known to be connected was coming down with a run, wiping out the accumulated profits of the Wizard at the rate of a thousand dollars a minute.

They not only questioned his honesty, but they went further and questioned his business capacity.

"The man," said Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, sitting in the Mausoleum Club and breathing freely at last after having disposed of all his holdings in the Erie Auriferous, "is an ignoramus. I asked him only the other day, quite casually, a perfectly simple business question. I said to him. 'T.C. Bonds have risen twenty-two and a half in a week. You know and I know that they are only collateral trust, and that the stock underneath never could and never would earn a par dividend. Now,' I said, for I wanted to test the fellow, 'tell me what that means?' Would you believe me, he looked me right in the face in that stupid way of his, and he said, 'I don't know!'"

"He said he didn't know!" repeated the listener contemptuously; "the man is a damn fool!"

The reason of all this was that the results of the researches of the professor of geology were being whispered among the directorate of the Erie Auriferous. And the directors and chief shareholders were busily performing the interesting process called unloading. Nor did ever a farmer of Cahoga County in haying time with a thunderstorm threatening, unload with greater rapidity than did the major shareholders of the Auriferous. Mr. Lucullus Fyshe traded off a quarter of his stock to an unwary member of the Mausoleum Club at a drop of thirty per cent, and being too prudent to hold the rest on any terms, he conveyed it at once as a benefaction in trust to the Plutorian Orphans' and Foundlings' Home; while the purchaser of Mr. Fyshe's stock, learning too late of his folly, rushed for his lawyers to have the shares conveyed as a gift to the Home for Incurables.

Mr. Asmodeus Boulder transferred his entire holdings to the Imbeciles' Relief Society, and Mr. Furlong, senior, passed his over to a Chinese mission as fast as pen could traverse paper.

Down at the office of Skinyer and Beatem, the lawyers of the company, they were working overtime drawing up deeds and conveyances and trusts in perpetuity, with hardly time to put them into typewriting. Within twenty-four hours the entire stock of the company bid fair to be in the hands of Idiots, Orphans, Protestants, Foundlings, Imbeciles, Missionaries, Chinese, and other unfinancial people, with Tomlinson the Wizard of Finance as the senior shareholder and majority control. And whether the gentle Wizard, as he sat with mother planning his vast benefaction to Plutoria University, would have felt more at home with his new group of fellow-shareholders than his old, it were hard to say.

But, meantime, at the office of Skinyer and Beatem all was activity. For not only were they drafting the conveyances of the perpetual trusts as fast as legal brains working overtime could do it, but in another part of the office a section of the firm were busily making their preparations against the expected actions for fraud and warrants of distraint and injunctions against disposal of assets and the whole battery of artillery which might open on them at any moment. And they worked like a corps of military engineers fortifying an escarpment, with the joy of battle in their faces.

The storm might break at any moment. Already at the office of the Financial Undertone the type was set for a special extra with a heading three inches high:

COLLAPSE
OF THE ERIE CONSOLIDATED
ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON
EXPECTED THIS AFTERNOON

Skinyer and Beatem had paid the editor, who was crooked, two thousand dollars cash to hold back that extra for twenty-four hours; and the editor had paid the reporting staff, who were crooked, twenty-five dollars each to keep the news quiet, and the compositors, who were also crooked, ten dollars per man to hold their mouths shut till the morning, with the result that from editors and sub-editors and reporters and compositors the news went seething forth in a flood that the Erie Auriferous Consolidated was going to shatter into fragments like the bursting of a dynamite bomb. It rushed with a thousand whispering tongues from street to street till it filled the corridors of the law courts and the lobbies of the offices, and till every honest man that held a share of the stock shivered in his tracks and reached out to give, sell, or destroy it. Only the unwinking Idiots, and the mild Orphans, and the calm Deaf mutes and the impassive Chinese held tight to what they had. So gathered the storm, till all the town, like the great rotunda of the Grand Palaver, was filled with a silent "call for Mr. Tomlinson," voiceless and ominous.

And while all this was happening, and while at Skinyer and Beatem's they worked with frantic pens and clattering type there came a knock at the door, hesitant and uncertain, and before the eyes of the astounded office there stood in his wide-awake hat and long black coat the figure of "the man Tomlinson" himself.

And Skinyer, the senior partner, no sooner heard what Tomlinson wanted than he dashed across the outer office to his partner's room with his hyena face all excitement as he said:

"Beatem, Beatem, come over to my room. This man is absolutely the biggest thing in America. For sheer calmness and nerve I never heard of anything to approach him. What do you think he wants to do?"

"What?" said Beatem.

"Why, he's giving his entire fortune to the university."

"By Gad!" ejaculated Beatem, and the two lawyers looked at one another, lost in admiration of the marvellous genius and assurance of Tomlinson.

Yet what had happened was very simple.

Tomlinson had come back from the university filled with mingled hope and hesitation. The university, he saw, needed the money and he hoped to give it his entire fortune, to put Dr. Boomer in a position to practically destroy the whole place. But, like many a modest man, he lacked the assurance to speak out. He felt that up to the present the benefactors of the university had been men of an entirely different class from himself. It was mother who solved the situation for him.

"Well, father," she said, "there's one thing I've learned already since we've had money. If you want to get a thing done you can always find people to do it for you if you pay them. Why not go to those lawyers that manage things for the company and get them to arrange it all for you with the college?"

As a result, Tomlinson had turned up at the door of the Skinyer and Beatem office.

"Quite so, Mr. Tomlinson," said Skinyer, with his pen already dipped in the ink, "a perfectly simple matter. I can draw up a draft of conveyance with a few strokes of the pen. In fact, we can do it on the spot."

What he meant was, "In fact, we can do it so fast that I can pocket a fee of five hundred dollars right here and now while you have the money to pay me."

"Now then," he continued, "let us see how it is to run."

"Well," said Tomlinson, "I want you to put it that I give all my stock in the company to the university."

"All of it?" said Skinyer, with a quiet smile to Beatem.

"Every cent of it, sir," said Tomlinson; "just write down that I give all of it to the college."

"Very good," said Skinyer, and he began to write, "I, so-and-so, and so-and-so, of the county of so-and-so—Cahoga, I think you said, Mr. Tomlinson?"

"Yes, sir," said the Wizard, "I was raised there."

"—do hereby give, assign, devise, transfer, and the transfer is hereby given, devised and assigned, all those stocks, shares, hereditaments, etc., which I hold in the etc., etc., all, several and whatever—you will observe, Mr. Tomlinson, I am expressing myself with as great brevity as possible—to that institution, academy, college, school, university, now known and reputed to be Plutoria University, of the city of etc., etc."

He paused a moment. "Now what special objects or purposes shall I indicate?" he asked.

Whereupon Tomlinson explained as best he could, and Skinyer, working with great rapidity, indicated that the benefaction was to include a Demolition Fund for the removal of buildings, a Retirement Fund for the removal of professors, an Apparatus Fund for the destruction of apparatus, and a General Sinking Fund for the obliteration of anything not otherwise mentioned.

"And I'd like to do something, if I could, for Mr. Boomer himself, just as man to man," said Tomlinson.

"All right," said Beatem, and he could hardly keep his face straight. "Give him a chunk of the stock—give him half a million."

"I will," said Tomlinson; "he deserves it."

"Undoubtedly," said Mr. Skinyer.

And within a few minutes the whole transaction was done, and Tomlinson, filled with joy, was wringing the hands of Skinyer and Beatem, and telling them to name their own fee.

They had meant to, anyway.

"Is that legal, do you suppose?" said Beatem to Skinyer, after the Wizard had gone. "Will it hold water?"

"Oh, I don't think so," said Skinyer, "not for a minute. In fact, rather the other way. If they make an arrest for fraudulent flotation, this conveyance, I should think, would help to send him to the penitentiary. But I very much doubt if they can arrest him. Mind you, the fellow is devilish shrewd. You know, and I know that he planned this whole flotation with a full knowledge of the fraud. You and I know it—very good—but we know it more from our trained instinct in such things than by any proof. The fellow has managed to surround himself with such an air of good faith from start to finish that it will be deuced hard to get at him."

"What will he do now?" said Beatem.

"I tell you what he'll do. Mark my words. Within twenty-four hours he'll clear out and be out of the state, and if they want to