Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich (13 page)

Silently Buddha recrossed the room, slowly wiping one arm across his mouth after the Hindu gesture of farewell.

For perhaps a full minute after the disappearance of Buddha not a soul moved. Then quite suddenly Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown, unable to stand the tension any longer, pressed an electric switch and the whole room was flooded with light.

There sat the affrighted guests staring at one another with pale faces.

But, to the amazement and horror of all, the little table in the centre stood empty – not a single gem, not a fraction of the gold that had lain upon it was left. All had disappeared.

The truth seemed to burst upon everyone at once. There was no doubt of what had happened.

The gold and the jewels had been deastralised. Under the occult power of the vision they had been demonetised, engulfed into the astral plane along with the vanishing Buddha.

Filled with the sense of horror still to come, somebody pulled aside the little screen. They fully expected to find the lifeless bodies of Mr. Yahi-Bahi and the faithful Ram Spudd. What they saw before them was more dreadful still. The outer Oriental garments of the two devotees lay strewn upon the floor. The long sash of Yahi-Bahi and the thick turban of Ram Spudd were side by side near them; almost sickening in its repulsive realism was the thick black head of hair of the junior devotee, apparently torn from his scalp as if by lightning and bearing a horrible resemblance to the cast-off wig of an actor.

The truth was too plain.

“They are engulfed!” cried a dozen voices at once.

It was realised in a flash that Yahi-Bahi and Ram Spudd had paid the penalty of their daring with their lives. Through some fatal neglect, against which they had fairly warned the participants of the séance, the two Orientals had been carried bodily in the astral plane.

“How dreadful!” murmured Mr. Snoop. “We must have made some awful error.”

“Are they deastralised?” murmured Mrs. Buncomhearst.

“Not a doubt of it,” said Mr. Snoop.

And then another voice in the group was heard to say, “We must hush it up. We
can’t
have it known!”

On which a chorus of voices joined in, everybody urging that it must be hushed up.

“Couldn’t you try to reastralise them?” said somebody to Mr. Snoop.

“No, no,” said Mr. Snoop, still shaking. “Better not try to. We must hush it up if we can.”

And the general assent to this sentiment shewed that after all the principles of Bahee, or Indifference to Others, had taken a real root in the society.

“Hush it up,” cried everybody, and there was a general move towards the hall.

“Good Heavens!” exclaimed Mrs. Buncomhearst; “our wraps!”

“Deastralised!” said the guests.

There was a moment of further consternation as everybody gazed at the spot where the ill-fated pile of furs and wraps had lain.

“Never mind,” said everybody, “let’s go without them – don’t stay. Just think if the police should –”

And at the word police, all of a sudden there was heard in the street the clanging of a bell and the racing gallop of the horses of the police patrol waggon.

“The police!” cried everybody. “Hush it up! Hush it up!”

For of course the principles of Bahee are not known to the police.

In another moment the door bell of the house rang with a long and violent peal, and in a second as it seemed, the whole hall was filled with bulky figures uniformed in blue.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown,” cried a loud, firm voice from the sidewalk. “We have them both. Everything is here. We got them before they’d gone a block. But if you don’t mind, the police must get a couple of names for witnesses in the warrant.”

It was the Philippine chauffeur. But he was no longer attired as such. He wore the uniform of an inspector of police, and there was the metal badge of the Detective Department now ostentatiously outside his coat.

And beside him, one on each side of him, there stood the deastralised forms of Yahi-Bahi and Ram Spudd. They wore long overcoats, doubtless the contents of the magic parcels, and the Philippine chauffeur had a grip of iron on
the neck of each as they stood. Mr. Spudd had lost his Oriental hair, and the face of Mr. Yahi-Bahi, perhaps in the struggle which had taken place, had been scraped white in patches.

They were making no attempt to break away. Indeed, Mr. Spudd, with that complete Bahee, or Submission to Fate, which is attained only by long services in state penitentiaries, was smiling and smoking a cigarette.

“We were waiting for them,” explained a tall police officer to the two or three ladies who now gathered round him with a return of courage. “They had the stuff in a hand-cart and were pushing it away. The chief caught them at the corner, and rang the patrol from there. You’ll find everything all right, I think, ladies,” he added, as a burly assistant was seen carrying an armload of furs up the steps.

Somehow many of the ladies realised at the moment what cheery, safe, reliable people policemen in blue are, and what a friendly, familiar shelter they offer against the wiles of Oriental occultism.

“Are they old criminals?” someone asked.

“Yes, ma’am. They’ve worked this same thing in four cities already, and both of them have done time, and lots of it. They’ve only been out six months. No need to worry over them,” he concluded with a shrug of the shoulders.

So the furs were restored and the gold and the jewels parcelled out among the owners, and in due course Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram Spudd were lifted up into the patrol waggon, where they seated themselves with a composure worthy of the best traditions of Jehumbabah and Bahoolapore. In fact, Mr. Spudd was heard to address the police as “boys,” and to remark that they had “got them good” that time.

So the séance ended and the guests vanished, and the Yahi-Bahi Society terminated itself without even a vote of dissolution.

And in all the later confidential discussions of the episode only one point of mysticism remained. After they had time really to reflect on it, free from all danger of arrest, the members of the society realised that on one point the police were entirely off the truth of things. For Mr. Yahi-Bahi, whether a thief or not, and whether he came from the Orient, or, as the police said, from Missouri, had actually succeeded in reastralising Buddha.

Nor was anyone more emphatic on this point than Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself.

“For after all,” she said, “if it was not Buddha, who was it?”

And the question was never answered.

A
lmost any day, on Plutoria Avenue or thereabouts, you may see little Mr. Spillikins out walking with his four tall sons, who are practically as old as himself.

To be exact, Mr. Spillikins is twenty-four, and Bob, the oldest of the boys, must be at least twenty. Their exact ages are no longer known, because, by a dreadful accident, their mother forgot them. This was at a time when the boys were all at Mr. Wackem’s Academy for Exceptional Youths in the foothills of Tennessee, and while their mother, Mrs. Everleigh, was spending the winter on the Riviera and felt that for their own sake she must not allow herself to have the boys with her.

But now, of course, since Mrs. Everleigh has remarried and become Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins there is no need to keep them at Mr. Wackem’s any longer. Mr. Spillikins is able to look after them.

Mr. Spillikins generally wears a little top hat and an English morning coat. The boys are in Eton jackets and black trousers, which, at their mother’s wish, are kept just a little too short for them. This is because Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins feels that the day will come some day – say fifteen years hence,
– when the boys will no longer be children, and meantime it is so nice to feel that they are still mere boys. Bob is the eldest, but Sib the youngest is the tallest, whereas Willie the third boy is the dullest, although this has often been denied by those who claim that Gib the second boy is just a trifle duller. Thus at any rate there is a certain equality and good fellowship all round.

Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is not to be seen walking with them. She is probably at the race-meet, being taken there by Captain Cormorant of the United States navy, which Mr. Spillikins considers very handsome of him. Every now and then the captain, being in the navy, is compelled to be at sea for perhaps a whole afternoon or even several days; in which case Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is very generally taken to the Hunt Club or the Country Club by Lieutenant Hawk, which Mr. Spillikins regards as awfully thoughtful of him. Or if Lieutenant Hawk is also out of town for the day, as he sometimes has to be, because he is in the United States army, Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is taken out by old Colonel Shake, who is in the State militia and who is at leisure all the time.

During their walks on Plutoria Avenue one may hear the four boys addressing Mr. Spillikins as “father” and “dad” in deep bull-frog voices.

“Say, dad,” drawls Bob, “couldn’t we all go to the ball game?”

“No, say, dad,” says Gib, “let’s all go back to the house and play five-cent pool in the billiard-room?”

“All right, boys,” says Mr. Spillikins. And a few minutes later one may see them all hustling up the steps of the Everleigh-Spillikins’s mansion, quite eager at the prospect, and all talking together.

––

Now the whole of this daily panorama, to the eye that can read it, represents the outcome of the tangled love story of Mr. Spillikins, which culminated during the summer house-party at Castel Casteggio, the woodland retreat of Mr. and Mrs. Newberry.

But to understand the story one must turn back a year or so to the time when Mr. Peter Spillikins used to walk on Plutoria Avenue alone, or sit in the Mausoleum Club listening to the advice of people who told him that he really ought to get married.

In those days the first thing that one noticed about Mr. Peter Spillikins was his exalted view of the other sex. Every time he passed a beautiful woman in the street he said to himself, “I say!” Even when he met a moderately beautiful one he murmured, “By Jove!” When an Easter hat went sailing past, or a group of summer parasols stood talking on a leafy corner, Mr. Spillikins ejaculated, “My word!” At the opera and at tango teas his projecting blue eyes almost popped out of his head.

Similarly, if he happened to be with one of his friends, he would murmur, “I say,
do
look at that beautiful girl,” or would exclaim, “I say, don’t look, but isn’t that an awfully pretty girl across the street?” or at the opera, “Old man, don’t let her see you looking, but do you see that lovely girl in the box opposite?”

One must add to this that Mr. Spillikins, in spite of his large and bulging blue eyes, enjoyed the heavenly gift of short sight. As a consequence he lived in a world of amazingly beautiful women. And as his mind was focussed in the same way as his eyes he endowed them with all the virtues and graces which ought to adhere to fifty-dollar flowered hats and cerise parasols with ivory handles.

Nor, to do him justice, did Mr. Spillikins confine this attitude to his view of women alone. He brought it to bear on everything. Every time he went to the opera he would come away enthusiastic, saying, “By Jove, isn’t it simply splendid! Of course, I haven’t the ear to appreciate it – I’m not musical, you know – but even with the little that I know, it’s great; it absolutely puts me to sleep.” And of each new novel that he bought he said, “It’s a perfectly wonderful book! Of course I haven’t the head to understand it, so I didn’t finish it, but it’s simply thrilling.” Similarly with painting, “It’s one of the most marvellous pictures I ever saw,” he would say. “Of course I’ve no eye for pictures, and I couldn’t see anything in it, but it’s wonderful!”

The career of Mr. Spillikins up to the point of which we are speaking had hitherto not been very satisfactory, or at least not from the point of view of Mr. Boulder, who was his uncle and trustee. Mr. Boulder’s first idea had been to have Mr. Spillikins attend the university. Dr. Boomer, the president, had done his best to spread abroad the idea that a university education was perfectly suitable even for the rich; that it didn’t follow that because a man was a university graduate he need either work or pursue his studies any further; that what the university aimed to do was merely to put a certain stamp upon a man. That was all. And this stamp, according to the tenor of the president’s convocation addresses, was perfectly harmless. No one ought to be afraid of it. As a result, a great many of the very best young men in the City, who had no need for education at all, were beginning to attend college. “It marked,” said Dr. Boomer, “a revolution.”

Mr. Spillikins himself was fascinated with his studies. The professors seemed to him living wonders.

“By Jove!” he said, “the professor of mathematics is a marvel. You ought to see him explaining trigonometry on the blackboard. You can’t understand a word of it.” He hardly knew which of his studies he liked best. “Physics,” he said, “is a wonderful study. I got five per cent in it. But, by Jove! I had to work for it. I’d go in for it altogether if they’d let me.”

But that was just the trouble – they wouldn’t. And so in course of time Mr. Spillikins was compelled, for academic reasons, to abandon his life-work. His last words about it were, “Gad! I nearly passed in trigonometry!” and he always said afterwards that he had got a tremendous lot out of the university.

After that, as he had to leave the university, his trustee, Mr. Boulder, put Mr. Spillikins into business. It was, of course, his own business, one of the many enterprises for which Mr. Spillikins, ever since he was twenty-one, had already been signing documents and countersigning cheques. So Mr. Spillikins found himself in a mahogany office selling wholesale oil. And he liked it. He said that business sharpened one up tremendously.

“I’m afraid, Mr. Spillikins,” a caller in the mahogany office would say, “that we can’t meet you at five dollars. Four seventy is the best we can do on the present market.”

“My dear chap,” said Mr. Spillikins, “that’s all right. After all, thirty cents isn’t much, eh what? Dash it, old man, we won’t fight about thirty cents. How much do you want?”