Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich | Page 9

had been fed on; no one, even in what seemed the best society,
could talk rationally about preparing a hog for the breakfast table. People seemed to eat
cauliflower without distinguishing the Denmark variety from the Oldenburg, and few, if
any, knew Silesian bacon even when they tasted it. And when they took the Duke out
twenty-five miles into what was called the country, there were still no turnips, but only
real estate, and railway embankments, and advertising signs; so that altogether the
obvious and visible decline of American agriculture in what should have been its leading
centre saddened the Duke's heart. Thus the Duke passed four gloomy days. Agriculture
vexed him, and still more, of course, the money concerns which had brought him to
America.
Money is a troublesome thing. But it has got to be thought about even by those who were
not brought up to it. If, on account of money matters, one has been driven to come over to

America in the hope of borrowing money, the awkwardness of how to go about it
naturally makes one gloomy and preoccupied. Had there been broad fields of turnips to
walk in and Holstein cattle to punch in the ribs, one might have managed to borrow it in
the course of gentlemanly intercourse, as From one cattle-man to another. But in New
York, amid piles of masonry and roaring street-traffic and glittering lunches and palatial
residences one simply couldn't do it.
Herein lay the truth about the Duke of Dulham's visit and the error of Mr. Lucullus Fyshe.
Mr. Fyshe was thinking that the Duke had come to lend money. In reality he had come to
borrow it. In fact, the Duke was reckoning that by putting a second mortgage on Dulham
Towers for twenty thousand sterling, and by selling his Scotch shooting and leasing his
Irish grazing and sub-letting his Welsh coal rent he could raise altogether a hundred
thousand pounds. This for a duke, is an enormous sum. If he once had it he would be able
to pay off the first mortgage on Dulham Towers, buy in the rights of the present tenant of
the Scotch shooting and the claim of the present mortgagee of the Irish grazing, and in
fact be just where he started. This is ducal finance, which moves always in a circle.
In other words the Duke was really a poor man--not poor in the American sense, where
poverty comes as a sudden blighting stringency, taking the form of an inability to get
hold of a quarter of a million dollars, no matter how badly one needs it, and where it
passes like a storm-cloud and is gone, but poor in that permanent and distressing sense
known only to the British aristocracy. The Duke's case, of course, was notorious, and Mr.
Fyshe ought to have known of it. The Duke was so poor that the Duchess was compelled
to spend three or four months every year at a fashionable hotel on the Riviera simply to
save money, and his eldest son, the young Marquis of Beldoodle, had to put in most of
his time shooting big game in Uganda, with only twenty or twenty-five beaters, and with
so few carriers and couriers and such a dearth of elephant men and hyena boys that the
thing was a perfect scandal. The Duke indeed was so poor that a younger son, simply to
add his efforts to those of the rest, was compelled to pass his days in mountain climbing
in the Himalayas, and the Duke's daughter was obliged to pay long visits to minor
German princesses, putting up with all sorts of hardship. And while the ducal family
wandered about in this way--climbing mountains, and shooting hyenas, and saving
money, the Duke's place or seat, Dulham Towers, was practically shut up, with no one in
it but servants and housekeepers and gamekeepers and tourists; and the picture galleries,
except for artists and visitors and villagers, were closed; and the town house, except for
the presence of servants and tradesmen and secretaries, was absolutely shut. But the Duke
knew that rigid parsimony of this sort, if kept up for a generation or two, will work
wonders, and this sustained him; and the Duchess knew it, and it sustained her; in fact, all
the ducal family, knowing that it was only a matter of a generation or two, took their
misfortune very cheerfully.
The only thing that bothered the Duke was borrowing money. This was necessary from
time to time when loans or mortgages fell in, but he hated it. It was beneath him. His
ancestors had often taken money, but had never borrowed it, and the Duke chafed under
the necessity. There was something about the process that went against the grain. To sit