Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich (10 page)

And as the Wizard and his son stood upon the hill-side, they saw nothing but the land sloping to the lake and the creek murmuring again to the willows, while the off-shore wind rippled the rushes of the shallow water.

M
rs. Rasselyer-Brown lived on Plutoria Avenue in a vast sandstone palace, in which she held those fashionable entertainments which have made the name of Rasselyer-Brown what it is. Mr. Rasselyer-Brown lived there also.

The exterior of the house was more or less a model of the façade of an Italian palazzo of the sixteenth century. If one questioned Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown at dinner in regard to this (which was only a fair return for drinking five-dollar champagne) she answered that the façade was cinquecentisti, but that it reproduced also the Saracenic mullioned window of the Siennese School. But if the guest said later in the evening to Mr. Rasselyer-Brown that he understood that his house was cinquecentisti, he answered that he guessed it was. After which remark and an interval of silence Mr. Rasselyer-Brown would probably ask the guest if he was dry.

So from that one can tell exactly the sort of people the Rasselyer-Browns were.

In other words, Mr. Rasselyer-Brown was a severe handicap to Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. He was more than that; the
word isn’t strong enough. He was, as Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself confessed to her confidential circle of three hundred friends, a drag. He was also a tie, and a weight, and a burden, and in Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown’s religious moments a crucifix. Even in the early years of their married life, some twenty or twenty-five years ago, her husband had been a drag on her by being in the coal and wood business. It is hard for a woman to have to realise that her husband is making a fortune out of coal and wood and that people know it. It ties one down. What a woman wants most of all – this, of course, is merely a quotation from Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown’s own thoughts as expressed to her three hundred friends – is room to expand, to grow. The hardest thing in the world is to be stifled: and there is nothing more stifling than a husband who doesn’t know a Giotto from a Carlo Dolci, but who can distinguish nut coal from egg and is never asked to dinner without talking about the furnace.

These, of course, were early trials. They had passed to some extent, or were, at any rate, garlanded with the roses of time.

But the drag remained.

Even when the retail coal and wood stage was long since over, it was hard to have to put up with a husband who owned a coal mine and who bought pulp forests instead of illuminated missals of the twelfth century. A coal mine is a dreadful thing at a dinner-table. It humbles one so before one’s guests.

It wouldn’t have been so bad – this Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself admitted – if Mr. Rasselyer-Brown
did
anything. This phrase should be clearly understood. It meant if there was any one thing that he
did
. For instance if he had only
collected
anything. Thus, there was Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, who made soda-water, but at the same time everybody knew
that he had the best collection of broken Italian furniture on the continent; there wasn’t a sound piece among the lot.

And there was the similar example of old Mr. Feathertop. He didn’t exactly
collect
things; he repudiated the name. He was wont to say, “Don’t call me a collector, I’m
not
. I simply pick things up. Just where I happen to be, Rome, Warsaw, Bucharest, anywhere” – and it is to be noted what fine places these are to happen to be. And to think that Mr. Rasselyer-Brown would never put his foot outside of the United States! Whereas Mr. Feathertop would come back from what he called a run to Europe, and everybody would learn in a week that he had picked up the back of a violin in Dresden (actually discovered it in a violin shop), and the lid of an Etruscan kettle (he had lighted on it, by pure chance, in a kettle shop in Etruria), and Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown would feel faint with despair at the nonentity of her husband.

So one can understand how heavy her burden was.

“My dear,” she often said to her bosom friend, Miss Snagg, “I shouldn’t mind things so much” (the things she wouldn’t mind were, let us say, the two million dollars of standing timber which Brown Limited, the ominous business name of Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, were buying that year) “if Mr. Rasselyer-Brown
did
anything. But he does
nothing
. Every morning after breakfast off to his wretched office, and never back till dinner, and in the evening nothing but his club, or some business meeting. One would think he would have more ambition. How I wish I had been a man.”

It was certainly a shame.

So it came that, in almost everything she undertook Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown had to act without the least help from her husband. Every Wednesday, for instance, when the Dante Club met at her house (they selected four lines each
week to meditate on, and then discussed them at lunch), Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown had to carry the whole burden of it – her very phrase, “the whole burden” – alone. Anyone who has carried four lines of Dante through a Moselle lunch knows what a weight it is.

In all these things her husband was useless, quite useless. It is not right to be ashamed of one’s husband. And to do her justice, Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown always explained to her three hundred intimates that she was
not
ashamed of him; in fact, that she
refused
to be. But it was hard to see him brought into comparison at their own table with superior men. Put him, for instance, beside Mr. Sikleigh Snoop, the sex-poet, and where was he? Nowhere. He couldn’t even understand what Mr. Snoop was saying. And when Mr. Snoop would stand on the hearth-rug with a cup of tea balanced in his hand, and discuss whether sex was or was not the dominant note in Botticelli, Mr. Rasselyer-Brown would be skulking in a corner in his ill-fitting dress-suit. His wife would often catch with an agonised ear such scraps of talk as, “When I was first in the coal and wood business,” or, “It’s a coal that burns quicker than egg, but it hasn’t the heating power of nut,” or even in a low undertone the words, “If you’re feeling
dry
while he’s reading –” And this at a time when everybody in the room ought to have been listening to Mr. Snoop.

Nor was even this the whole burden of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. There was another part of it which was perhaps more
real
, though Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself never put it into words. In fact, of this part of her burden she never spoke, even to her bosom friend Miss Snagg; nor did she talk about it to the ladies of the Dante Club, nor did she make speeches on it to the members of the Women’s Afternoon Art Society, nor to the Monday Bridge Club.

But the members of the Bridge Club and the Art Society and the Dante Club all talked about it among themselves.

Stated very simply, it was this: Mr. Rasselyer-Brown drank.

It was not meant that he was a drunkard or that he drank too much, or anything of that sort. He drank. That was all.

There was no excess about it. Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, of course, began the day with an eye-opener – and after all, what alert man does not wish his eyes well open in the morning? He followed it usually just before breakfast with a bracer – and what wiser precaution can a business man take than to brace his breakfast? On his way to business he generally had his motor stopped at the Grand Palaver for a moment, if it was a raw day, and dropped in and took something to keep out the damp. If it was a cold day he took something to keep out the cold, and if it was one of those clear, sunny days that are so dangerous to the system he took whatever the bartender (a recognised health expert) suggested to tone the system up. After which he could sit down in his office and transact more business, and bigger business, in coal, charcoal, wood, pulp, pulp-wood, and wood-pulp, in two hours than any other man in the business could in a week. Naturally so. For he was braced, and propped, and toned up, and his eyes had been opened, and his brain cleared, till outside of very big business indeed few men were on a footing with him.

In fact, it was business itself which had compelled Mr. Rasselyer-Brown to drink. It is all very well for a junior clerk on twenty dollars a week to do his work on sandwiches and malted milk. In big business it is not possible. When a man begins to rise in business, as Mr. Rasselyer-Brown had begun twenty-five years ago, he finds that if he wants to succeed he must cut malted milk clear out. In any position of responsibility a
man has got to drink. No really big deal can be put through without it. If two keen men, sharp as flint, get together to make a deal in which each intends to outdo the other, the only way to succeed is for them to adjourn to some such place as the luncheon-room of the Mausoleum Club and both get partially drunk. This is what is called the personal element in business. And, beside it, plodding industry is nowhere.

Most of all do these principles hold true in such manly out-of-door enterprises as the forest and timber business, where one deals constantly with chief rangers, and pathfinders, and wood-stalkers, whose very names seem to suggest a horn of whiskey under a hemlock-tree.

But, – let it be repeated and carefully understood, – there was no excess about Mr. Rasselyer-Brown’s drinking. Indeed, whatever he might be compelled to take during the day, and at the Mausoleum Club in the evening, after his return from his club at night Mr. Rasselyer-Brown made it a fixed rule to take nothing. He might, perhaps, as he passed into the house, step into the dining-room and take a very small drink at the sideboard. But this he counted as part of the return itself, and not after it. And he might, if his brain were over-fatigued, drop down later in the night in his pyjamas and dressing-gown when the house was quiet, and compose his mind with a brandy and water, or something suitable to the stillness of the hour. But this was not really a drink. Mr. Rasselyer-Brown called it a
nip
; and of course any man may need a
nip
at a time when he would scorn a drink.

But after all, a woman may find herself again in her daughter. There, at least, is consolation. For, as Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself admitted, her daughter Dulphemia was herself again. There were, of course, differences, certain differences of face
and appearance. Mr. Snoop had expressed this fact exquisitely when he said that it was the difference between a Burne-Jones and a Dante Gabriel Rossetti. But even at that the mother and daughter were so alike that people, certain people, were constantly mistaking them on the street. And as everybody that mistook them was apt to be asked to dine on five-dollar champagne there was plenty of temptation towards error.

There is no doubt that Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown was a girl of remarkable character and intellect. So is any girl who has beautiful golden hair parted in thick bands on her forehead, and deep blue eyes soft as an Italian sky.

Even the oldest and most serious men in town admitted that in talking to her they were aware of a grasp, a reach, a depth that surprised them. Thus old Judge Longerstill, who talked to her at dinner for an hour on the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce Commission, felt sure from the way in which she looked up in his face at intervals and said, “How interesting!” that she had the mind of a lawyer. And Mr. Brace, the consulting engineer, who showed her on the tablecloth at dessert with three forks and a spoon the method in which the overflow of the spillway of the Gatun Dam is regulated, felt assured, from the way she leaned her face on her hand sideways and said, “How extraordinary!” that she had the brain of an engineer. Similarly foreign visitors to the social circles of the city were delighted with her. Viscount FitzThistle, who explained to Dulphemia for half an hour the intricacies of the Irish situation, was captivated at the quick grasp she showed by asking him at the end, without a second’s hesitation, “And which are the Nationalists?”

This kind of thing represents female intellect in its best form. Every man that is really a man is willing to recognise it at once.

As to the young men, of course they flocked to the Rasselyer-Brown residence in shoals. There were batches of them every Sunday afternoon at five o’clock, encased in long black frockcoats, sitting very rigidly in upright chairs, trying to drink tea with one hand. One might see athletic young college men of the football team trying hard to talk about Italian music; and Italian tenors from the Grand Opera doing their best to talk about college football. There were young men in business talking about art, and young men in art talking about religion, and young clergymen talking about business. Because, of course, the Rasselyer-Brown residence was the kind of cultivated home where people of education and taste are at liberty to talk about things they don’t know, and to utter freely ideas that they haven’t got. It was only now and again, when one of the professors from the college across the avenue came booming into the room, that the whole conversation was pulverised into dust under the hammer of accurate knowledge.

This whole process was what was called, by those who understood such things a
salon
. Many people said that Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown’s afternoons at home were exactly like the delightful
salons
of the eighteenth century: and whether the gatherings were or were not
salons
of the eighteenth century, there is no doubt that Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, under whose care certain favoured guests dropped quietly into the back alcove of the dining-room, did his best to put the gathering on a par with the best saloons of the twentieth.

Now it so happened that there had come a singularly slack moment in the social life of the City. The Grand Opera had sung itself into a huge deficit and closed. There remained nothing of it except the efforts of a committee of ladies to raise enough money to enable Signor Puffito leave town, and the generous attempt of another committee to gather funds in
order to keep Signor Pasti in the City. Beyond this, opera was dead, though the fact that the deficit was nearly twice as large as it had been the year before showed that public interest in music was increasing. It was indeed a singularly trying time of the year. It was too early to go to Europe, and too late to go to Bermuda. It was too warm to go south, and yet still too cold to go north. In fact, one was almost compelled to stay at home – which was dreadful.