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

Professor Podge hopes to be able to join in the Botanical Picnic Excursion to Loon Lake on Saturday afternoon." You could judge of the grinding routine of the work from the nature of these notices. Anyone familiar with the work of colleges would not heed it, but it shocked Tomlinson to think how often the professors of the college were stricken down by overwork.

Here and there in the hall, set into niches, were bronze busts of men with Roman faces and bare necks, and the edge of a toga cast over each shoulder.

"Who would these be?" asked Tomlinson, pointing at them. "Some of the chief founders and benefactors of the faculty," answered the president, and at this the hopes of Tomlinson sank in his heart. For he realized the class of man one had to belong to in order to be accepted as a university benefactor.

"A splendid group of men, are they not?" said the president. "We owe them much. This is the late Mr. Hogworth, a man of singularly large heart." Here he pointed to a bronze figure wearing a wreath of laurel and inscribed GULIEMUS HOGWORTH, LITT. DOC. "He had made a great fortune in the produce business and wishing to mark his gratitude to the community he erected the anemometer, the wind-measure, on the roof of the building, attaching to it no other condition than that his name should be printed in the weekly reports immediately beside the velocity of the wind. The figure beside him is the late Mr. Underbugg, who founded our lectures on the Four Gospels on the sole stipulation that henceforth any reference of ours to the four gospels should be coupled with his name."

"What's that after his name?" asked Tomlinson.

"Litt. Doc.?" said the president. "Doctor of Letters, our honorary degree. We are always happy to grant it to our benefactors by a vote of the faculty."

Here Dr. Boomer and Dr. Boyster wheeled half round and looked quietly and steadily at the Wizard of Finance. To both their minds it was perfectly plain that an honourable bargain was being struck.

"Yes, Mr. Tomlinson," said the president, as they emerged from the building, "no doubt you begin to realize our unhappy position. Money, money, money," he repeated half-musingly. "If I had the money I'd have that whole building down and dismantled in a fortnight."

From the central building the three passed to the museum building, where Tomlinson was shown a vast skeleton of a Diplodocus Maximus, and was specially warned not to confuse it with the Dinosaurus Perfectus, whose bones, however, could be bought if anyone, any man of large heart; would come to the university and say straight out, "Gentlemen, what can I do for you?" Better still, it appeared the whole museum which was hopelessly antiquated, being twenty-five years old, could be entirely knocked down if a sufficient sum was forthcoming; and its curator, who was as ancient as the Dinosaurus itself, could be dismissed on half-pay if any man had a heart large enough for the dismissal.

From the museum they passed to the library, where there were full-length portraits of more founders and benefactors in long red robes, holding scrolls of paper, and others sitting holding pens and writing on parchment, with a Greek temple and a thunderstorm in the background.

And here again it appeared that the crying need of the moment was for someone to come to the university and say, "Gentlemen, what can I do for you?" On which the whole library, for it was twenty years old and out of date, might be blown up with dynamite and carted away.

But at all this the hopes of Tomlinson sank lower and lower. The red robes and the scrolls were too much for him.

From the library they passed to the tall buildings that housed the faculty of industrial and mechanical science. And here again the same pitiful lack of money was everywhere apparent. For example, in the physical science department there was a mass of apparatus for which the university was unable to afford suitable premises, and in the chemical department there were vast premises for which the university was unable to buy apparatus, and so on. Indeed it was part of Dr. Boomer's method to get himself endowed first with premises too big for the apparatus, and then by appealing to public spirit to call for enough apparatus to more than fill the premises, by means of which system industrial science at Plutoria University advanced with increasing and gigantic strides.

But most of all, the electric department interested the Wizard of Finance. And this time his voice lost its hesitating tone and he looked straight at Dr. Boomer as he began,

"I have a boy—"

"Ah!" said Dr. Boomer, with a huge ejaculation of surprise and relief; "you have a boy!"

There were volumes in his tone. What it meant was, "Now, indeed, we have got you where we want you," and he exchanged a meaning look with the professor of Greek.

Within five minutes the president and Tomlinson and Dr. Boyster were gravely discussing on what terms and in what way Fred might be admitted to study in the faculty of industrial science. The president, on learning that Fred had put in four years in Cahoga County Section No. 3 School, and had been head of his class in ciphering, nodded his head gravely and said it would simply be a matter of a pro tanto; that, in fact, he felt sure that Fred might be admitted ad eundem. But the real condition on which they meant to admit him was, of course, not mentioned.

One door only in the faculty of industrial and mechanical science they did not pass, a heavy oak door at the end of a corridor bearing the painted inscription: Geological and Metallurgical Laboratories. Stuck in the door was a card with the words (they were conceived in the courteous phrases of mechanical science, which is almost a branch of business in the real sense): Busy—keep out.

Dr. Boomer looked at the card. "Ah, yes," he said. "Gildas is no doubt busy with his tests. We won't disturb him." The president was always proud to find a professor busy; it looked well.

But if Dr. Boomer had known what was going on behind the oaken door of the Department of Geology and Metallurgy, he would have felt considerably disturbed himself.

For here again Gildas, senior professor of geology, was working among his blue flames at a final test on which depended the fate of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated and all connected with it.

Before him there were some twenty or thirty packets of crumpled dust and splintered ore that glittered on the testing-table. It had been taken up from the creek along its whole length, at even spaces twenty yards apart, by an expert sent down in haste by the directorate, after Gildas's second report, and heavily bribed to keep his mouth shut.

And as Professor Gildas stood and worked at the samples and tied them up after analysis in little white cardboard boxes, he marked each one very carefully and neatly with the words, PYRITES: WORTHLESS.

Beside the professor worked a young demonstrator of last year's graduation class. It was he, in fact, who had written the polite notice on the card.

"What is the stuff, anyway?" he asked.

"A sulphuret of iron," said the professor, "or iron pyrites. In colour and appearance it is practically identical with gold. Indeed, in all ages," he went on, dropping at once into the classroom tone and adopting the professional habit of jumping backwards twenty centuries in order to explain anything properly, "it has been readily mistaken for the precious metal. The ancients called it 'fool's gold.' Martin Frobisher brought back four shiploads of it from Baffin Land thinking that he had discovered an Eldorado. There are large deposits of it in the mines of Cornwall, and it is just possible," here the professor measured his words as if speaking of something that he wouldn't promise, "that the Cassiterides of the Phoenicians contained deposits of the same sulphuret. Indeed, I defy anyone," he continued, for he was piqued in his scientific pride, "to distinguish it from gold without a laboratory-test. In large quantities, I concede, its lack of weight would betray it to a trained hand, but without testing its solubility in nitric acid, or the fact of its burning with a blue flame under the blow-pipe, it cannot be detected. In short, when crystallized in dodecahedrons—"

"Is it any good?" broke in the demonstrator.

"Good?" said the professor. "Oh, you mean commercially? Not in the slightest. Much less valuable than, let us say, ordinary mud or clay. In fact, it is absolutely good for nothing."

They were silent for a moment, watching the blue flames above the brazier.

Then Gildas spoke again. "Oddly enough," he said, "the first set of samples were undoubtedly pure gold—not the faintest doubt of that. That is the really interesting part of the matter. These gentlemen concerned in the enterprise will, of course, lose their money, and I shall therefore decline to accept the very handsome fee which they had offered me for my services. But the main feature, the real point of interest in this matter remains. Here we have undoubtedly a sporadic deposit—what miners call a pocket—of pure gold in a Devonian formation of the post-tertiary period. This once established, we must revise our entire theory of the distribution of igneous and aqueous rocks. In fact, I am already getting notes together for a paper for the Pan-Geological under the heading, Auriferous Excretions in the Devonian Strata: a Working Hypothesis. I hope to read it at the next meeting."

The young demonstrator looked at the professor with one eye half-closed.

"I don't think I would if I were you." he said.

Now this young demonstrator knew nothing or practically nothing, of geology, because he came of one of the richest and best families in town and didn't need to. But he was a smart young man, dressed in the latest fashion with brown boots and a crosswise tie, and he knew more about money and business and the stock exchange in five minutes than Professor Gildas in his whole existence.

"Why not?" said the professor.

"Why, don't you see what's happened?"

"Eh?" said Gildas.

"What happened to those first samples? When that bunch got interested and planned to float the company? Don't you see? Somebody salted them on you."

"Salted them on me?" repeated the professor, mystified.

"Yes, salted them. Somebody got wise to what they were and swopped them on you for the real thing, so as to get your certified report that the stuff was gold."

"I begin to see," muttered the professor. "Somebody exchanged the samples, some person no doubt desirous of establishing the theory that a sporadic outcropping of the sort might be found in a post-tertiary formation. I see, I see. No doubt he intended to prepare a paper on it, and prove his thesis by these tests. I see it all!"

The demonstrator looked at the professor with a sort of pity.

"You're on!" he said, and he laughed softly to himself.

"Well," said Dr. Boomer, after Tomlinson had left the university, "what do you make of him?" The president had taken Dr. Boyster over to his house beside the campus, and there in his study had given him a cigar as big as a rope and taken another himself. This was a sign that Dr. Boomer wanted Dr. Boyster's opinion in plain English, without any Latin about it.

"Remarkable man," said the professor of Greek; "wonderful penetration, and a man of very few words. Of course his game is clear enough?"

"Entirely so," asserted Dr. Boomer.

"It's clear enough that he means to give the money on two conditions."

"Exactly," said the president.

"First that we admit his son, who is quite unqualified, to the senior studies in electrical science, and second that we grant him the degree of Doctor of Letters. Those are his terms." "Can we meet them?"

"Oh, certainly. As to the son, there is no difficulty, of course; as to the degree, it's only a question of getting the faculty to vote it. I think we can manage it."

Vote it they did that very afternoon. True, if the members of the faculty had known the things that were being whispered, and more than whispered, in the City about Tomlinson and his fortune, no degree would ever have been conferred on him. But it so happened that at that moment the whole professoriate was absorbed in one of those great educational crises which from time to time shake a university to its base. The meeting of the faculty that day bid fair to lose all vestige of decorum in the excitement of the moment. For, as Dean Elderberry Foible, the head of the faculty, said, the motion that they had before them amounted practically to a revolution. The proposal was nothing less than the permission of the use of lead-pencils instead of pen and ink in the sessional examinations