Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich | Page 4

IV The Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown
V The Love Story of Mr. Peter Spillikins
VI The Rival Churches of St. Asaph and St. Osoph
VII The Ministrations of the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing
VIII The Great Fight for Clean Government

CHAPTER ONE
: A Little Dinner with Mr. Lucullus Fyshe
The Mausoleum Club stands on the quietest corner of the best residential street in the
City. It is a Grecian building of white stone. About it are great elm trees with birds--the
most expensive kind of birds--singing in the branches.
The street in the softer hours of the morning has an almost reverential quiet. Great motors
move drowsily along it, with solitary chauffeurs returning at 10.30 after conveying the
earlier of the millionaires to their downtown offices. The sunlight flickers through the
elm trees, illuminating expensive nurse-maids wheeling valuable children in little
perambulators. Some of the children are worth millions and millions. In Europe, no doubt,
you may see in the Unter den Linden avenue or the Champs Elysees a little prince or
princess go past with a clattering military guard of honour. But that is nothing. It is not
half so impressive, in the real sense, as what you may observe every morning on Plutoria
Avenue beside the Mausoleum Club in the quietest part of the city. Here you may see a
little toddling princess in a rabbit suit who owns fifty distilleries in her own right. There,
in a lacquered perambulator, sails past a little hooded head that controls from its cradle an
entire New Jersey corporation. The United States attorney-general is suing her as she sits,
in a vain attempt to make her dissolve herself into constituent companies. Near by is a
child of four, in a khaki suit, who represents the merger of two trunk-line railways. You
may meet in the flickered sunlight any number of little princes and princesses far more
real than the poor survivals of Europe. Incalculable infants wave their fifty-dollar ivory
rattles in an inarticulate greeting to one another. A million dollars of preferred stock
laughs merrily in recognition of a majority control going past in a go-cart drawn by an
imported nurse. And through it all the sunlight falls through the elm trees, and the birds

sing and the motors hum, so that the whole world as seen from the boulevard of Plutoria
Avenue is the very pleasantest place imaginable.
Just below Plutoria Avenue, and parallel with it, the trees die out and the brick and stone
of the City begins in earnest. Even from the Avenue you see the tops of the sky-scraping
buildings in the big commercial streets, and can hear or almost hear the roar of the
elevated railway, earning dividends. And beyond that again the City sinks lower, and is
choked and crowded with the tangled streets and little houses of the slums.
In fact, if you were to mount to the roof of the Mausoleum Club itself on Plutoria Avenue
you could almost see the slums from there. But why should you? And on the other hand,
if you never went up on the roof, but only dined inside among the palm trees, you would
never know that the slums existed which is much better.
There are broad steps leading up to the club, so broad and so agreeably covered with
matting that the physical exertion of lifting oneself from one's motor to the door of the
club is reduced to the smallest compass. The richer members are not ashamed to take the
steps one at a time, first one foot and then the other; and at tight money periods, when
there is a black cloud hanging over the Stock Exchange, you may see each and every one
of the members of the Mausoleum Club dragging himself up the steps after this fashion,
his restless eyes filled with the dumb pathos of a man wondering where he can put his
hand on half a million dollars.
But at gayer times, when there are gala receptions at the club, its steps are all buried
under expensive carpet, soft as moss and covered over with a long pavilion of red and
white awning to catch the snowflakes; and beautiful ladies are poured into the club by the
motorful. Then, indeed, it is turned into a veritable Arcadia; and for a beautiful pastoral
scene, such as would have gladdened the heart of a poet who understood the cost of
things, commend me to the Mausoleum Club on just such an evening. Its broad corridors
and deep recesses are filled with shepherdesses such as you never saw, dressed in
beautiful shimmering gowns, and wearing feathers in their hair that droop off sideways at
every angle known to trigonometry. And there are shepherds, too, with broad white
waistcoats and little