Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich (26 page)

“An excellent idea,” said Mr. Fyshe.

“And could you not get three or four men to come and address it so as to stir us up?” asked Mrs. Buncomhearst anxiously.

“Oh, certainly,” said Mr. Fyshe.

So it was known after this that the women were working side by side with the men. The tea rooms of the Grand Palaver and the other hotels were filled with them every day, busy for the cause. One of them even invented a perfectly charming election scarf to be worn as a sort of badge to show one’s
allegiance: and its great merit was that it was so fashioned that it would go with anything.

“Yes,” said Mr. Fyshe to his committee, “one of the finest signs of our movement is that the women of the city are with us. Whatever we may think, gentlemen, of the question of woman’s rights in general, – and I think we know what we
do
think, – there is no doubt that the influence of women makes for purity in civic politics. I am glad to inform the committee that Mrs. Buncomhearst and her friends have organised all the working women of the city who have votes. They tell me that they have been able to do this at a cost as low as five dollars per woman. Some of the women, – foreigners of the lower classes whose sense of political morality is as yet imperfectly developed, – have been organised at a cost as low as one dollar per vote. But of course with our native American women, with a higher standard of education and morality, we can hardly expect to do it as low as that.”

Nor were the women the only element of support added to the league.

“Gentlemen,” reported Dr. Boomer, the president of the university, at the next committee meeting, “I am glad to say that the spirit which animates us has spread to the students of the university. They have organised, entirely by themselves and on their own account, a Students’ Fair Play League which has commenced its activities. I understand that they have already ducked Alderman Gorfinkel in a pond near the university. I believe they are looking for Alderman Schwefeldampf to-night. I understand they propose to throw him into the reservoir. The leaders of them, – a splendid set of young fellows, – have given me a pledge that they will do nothing to bring discredit on the university.”

“I think I heard them on the street last night,” said Mr. Newberry.

“I believe they had a procession,” said the president.

“Yes, I heard them; they were shouting ‘Rah! rah! rah! Clean Government! Clean Government! Rah! rah!’ It was really inspiring to hear them.”

“Yes,” said the president, “they are banded together to put down all the hoodlumism and disturbance on the street that has hitherto disgraced our municipal elections. Last night, as a demonstration they upset two street cars and a milk waggon.”

“I heard that two of them were arrested,” said Mr. Dick Overend.

“Only by an error,” said the president. “There was a mistake. It was not known that they were students. The two who were arrested were smashing the windows of the car, after it was upset, with their hockey sticks. A squad of police mistook them for rioters. As soon as they were taken to the police station, the mistake was cleared up at once. The chief of police telephoned an apology to the university. I believe the league is out again to-night looking for Alderman Schwefeldampf. But the leaders assure me there will be no breach of the peace whatever. As I say, I think their idea is to throw him into the reservoir.”

In the face of such efforts as these, opposition itself melted rapidly away. The
Plutorian Times
was soon able to announce that various undesirable candidates were abandoning the field. “Alderman Gorfinkel,” it said, “who, it will be recalled, was thrown into a pond last week by the students of the college, was still confined to his bed when interviewed by our representative. Mr. Gorfinkel stated that he should not offer
himself as a candidate in the approaching election. He was, he said, weary of civic honours. He had had enough. He felt it incumbent on him to step out and make way for others who deserved their turn as well as himself: in future he proposed to confine his whole attention to his Misfit Semi-Ready Establishment which he was happy to state was offering as nobby a line of early fall suiting as was ever seen at the price.”

There is no need to recount here in detail the glorious triumph of the election day itself. It will always be remembered as the purest, cleanest election ever held in the precincts of the city. The citizens’ organisation turned out in overwhelming force to guarantee that it should be so. Bands of Dr. Boomer’s students, armed with baseball bats, surrounded the polls to guarantee fair play. Any man wishing to cast an unclean vote was driven from the booth: all those attempting to introduce any element of brute force or rowdyism into the election were cracked over the head. In the lower part of the town scores of willing workers, recruited often from the humblest classes, kept order with pickaxes. In every part of the city motor cars, supplied by all the leading business men, lawyers, and doctors of the city, acted as patrols to see that no unfair use should be made of other vehicles in carrying voters to the polls.

It was a foregone victory from the first, – overwhelming and complete. The cohorts of darkness were so completely routed that it was practically impossible to find them. As it fell dusk the streets were filled with roaring and surging crowds celebrating the great victory for clean government, while in front of every newspaper office huge lantern pictures of
Mayor McGrath, the Champion of Pure Government
, and
O. Skinyer, the People’s Solicitor
, and the other nominees of the league, called forth cheer after cheer of frenzied enthusiasm.

They held that night in celebration a great reception at the Mausoleum Club on Plutoria Avenue, given at its own suggestion by the city. The city indeed insisted on it.

Nor was there ever witnessed even in that home of art and refinement a scene of greater charm. In the spacious corridor of the club a Hungarian band wafted Viennese music from Tyrolese flutes through the rubber trees. There was champagne bubbling at a score of sideboards where noiseless waiters poured it into goblets as broad and flat as floating water-lily leaves. And through it all moved the shepherds and shepherdesses of that beautiful Arcadia – the shepherds in their Tuxedo jackets, with vast white shirt-fronts broad as the map of Africa, with spotless white waistcoats girdling their equators, wearing heavy gold watch-chains and little patent shoes blacker than sin itself, – and the shepherdesses in foaming billows of silks of every colour of the kaleidoscope, their hair bound with glittering headbands or coiled with white feathers, the very symbol of municipal purity. One would search in vain the pages of pastoral literature to find the equal of it.

And as they talked the good news spread from group to group that it was already known that the new franchise of the Citizens’ Light was to be made for two centuries so as to give the company a fair chance to see what it could do. At the word of it, the grave faces of manly bondholders flushed with pride, and the soft eyes of listening shareholders laughed back in joy. For they had no doubt or fear, now that clean government had come. They knew what the company could do.

Thus all night long, outside of the club, the soft note of the motor horns arriving and departing wakened the sleeping
leaves of the elm trees with their message of good tidings. And all night long, within its lighted corridors, the bubbling champagne whispered to the listening rubber trees of the new salvation of the city. So the night waxed and waned till the slow day broke, dimming with its cheap prosaic glare the shaded beauty of the artificial light, and the people of the city – the best of them, – drove home to their well-earned sleep, and the others, – in the lower parts of the city, – rose to their daily toil.

FINIS

A
rcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
exposes to laughter and ridicule the crass materialism that the unrestricted practice of capitalism has thrown up in the form of an American metropolitan plutocracy. From Aristophanes to Mordecai Richler, the wise satirist, he whose work endures, has turned his light upon the undying sins: pride, greed, hypocrisy. In
Arcadian Adventures
, these enduring sins are satirized within the context of such early twentieth century phenomena as stock-market scams, the rage for mystical experience, the back-to-nature vogue, effete religiosity, doctrinal ditching efforts towards an expedient ecumenism, muck-raking politics, and the hypocritical movement for municipal reform. And it appears that these seemingly topical phenomena have themselves laid claim to a permanent place in human affairs – thus the enduring value of
Arcadian Adventures
.

To appreciate Leacock’s achievement in
Arcadian Adventures
fully, readers need to know something of his earlier work,
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
. Both books are comprised of linked stories that humorously anatomize
their subjects – the big anonymous American city and the small Canadian town of Mariposa at the turn of the century – portraying in roughly the same order such fundamental social and cultural institutions as business, religion, marriage, and politics.
Arcadian Adventures
begins in the Mausoleum Club;
Sunshine Sketches
ends in one. Considered as companion volumes, or as an extended work of fiction, the two books can thus be seen to turn about the closing sketch of
Sunshine Sketches
, “L’Envoi: The Train to Mariposa,” in which two men, after a failed attempt to return imaginatively to Mariposa, find themselves sitting again in the posh chairs of a Mausoleum Club. The implied warning of “L’Envoi” is that if the “you” who is addressed throughout
Sunshine Sketches
does not find a way to recover the values that Leacock associated with the small Canadian community of Mariposa, “you” will remain entombed in a Mausoleum Club, with all the associations of cultural and spiritual death that the club’s name carries.
Arcadian Adventures
shows us what sort of modern world ensues upon the loss of those anti-materialistic values – the values of community, charity, romance, and family. In
Essays and Literary Studies
, Leacock described these values as “all less tangible and provable forms of human merit, and less tangible aspirations of the human mind.”

It may prove helpful to think of
Arcadian Adventures
’ Plutoria Avenue (the main commercial thoroughfare of the unnamed American city) and
Sunshine Sketches
’ Mariposa as supplying the two poles of Leacock’s fictional landscape. Although portrayed ironically, Mariposa remains the ideal community of the Canadian humanist and tory, the community eulogized for its diversity in unity yet viewed with an acknowledgement of human fallibility. Plutoria is the twentieth century, a negative exemplar of modernity’s tendencies
towards obsessive individualism and materialism. What is worthwhile in Mariposa must be remembered, recovered, and brought into the present, if the extremes of mechanistic capitalism – Plutoria – are to be, if not defeated or avoided, at least opposed or countered.

The plutocrats of Plutoria Avenue, the wealthy inhabitants of an American city such as Chicago or New York, will do anything, and do everything, for money. Society, education, religion, romance, and of course business and politics are reduced to the all-consuming love of lucre, obsessive compulsive pecuniary acquisitiveness, the getting of green-backs, making a pile.
Arcadian Adventures
can be summed up that simply.
If
we leave out the humour. Which we can’t. For who would want to exclude from any discussion of
Arcadian Adventures
the lucrative infants of Plutoria Avenue, such as the “little toddling princess in a rabbit suit who owns fifty distilleries in her own right;” or forget President Boomer’s praise of such benefactors of Plutoria University as “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;” or overlook the sham seer, Yahi-Bahi, who accepts six ten-dollar gold pieces arranged in the form of a mystic serpent and then prognosticates, “Many things are yet to happen before others begin;” or skip the corrupt Plutorian newspaper’s unintentional pillorying of one of its scheming would-be politicians, when it captions a picture, “Tract of ground offered for cemetery by Mr. Furlong, showing rear of tanneries, with head of Mr. Furlong inserted.”

Arcadian Adventures
is arguably Leacock’s funniest book. But Leacock described humour as “the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life and the artistic expression
thereof,” and he seems in this book to violate his dictum of “kindliness.” Readers should know, however, that for Leacock the word “kindliness” carried associations of
kin
ship, of shared humanity; the word was not synonymous with gentleness. Those characters who live in disregard of their humanity, those such as the plutocrats of
Arcadian Adventures
, become prime targets for Leacock’s humorous satire.

As a traditional tory (as opposed to a neo-conservative) and humanist, Leacock believed in the nobility of his fellow man while remaining sensitive to his fallibility, to his need to be reminded of his social responsibilities. It would, therefore, be equally wrong to exclude from consideration the opening and closing references to the slum-dwellers and the working poor of the city, references which serve as a kind of frame for
Arcadian Adventures
. The adventures of these idle Plutorians take place within range of “slums” that can be seen from the roof of the Mausoleum Club; and the book concludes with reference to those “others – in the lower parts of the city – [who] rose to their daily toil.” Behind the humorous satire of
Arcadian Adventures
is Leacock the compassionate political economist who strove to infuse humanitarianism into the capitalists and captains of industry. “Few persons can attain to adult life without being profoundly impressed by the appalling inequalities of our human lot,” he wrote in
The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice
. “Riches and poverty jostle one another upon our streets. The tattered outcast dozes on his bench while the chariot of the wealthy is drawn by. The palace is the neighbour of the slum. We are, in modern life, so used to this that we no longer see it.” We are in modern life indeed. Leacock was not, however, promoting a socialist state. He was recommending his own brew of a traditional toryism that already contained a sense of responsibility for the less
fortunate – a duty to find work for all willing members of a society which should see as its first duty the care and education of its children. The Soviet Union, which translated and published
Arcadian Adventures
for its incisive critique of bourgeois capitalism (thus causing Leacock to complain wryly till the end of his life that they owed him bags of rubles), selectively ignored such remarks of Leacock’s as, “This socialism, this communism, would work only in Heaven where they don’t need it, or in Hell where they already have it.” Leacock’s social-political philosophy is best described as a middle way between socialism and liberalism.