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 6ve 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.
