The Idiot at Home Part 21

"Abroad," replied the Idiot. "We have never been abroad, you know. I've been abroad, and Mrs. Idiot has been abroad, but _we_ have never been abroad. We are going together this time, and we are going to take the children, and for a year we propose to see Europe under the most favorable conditions. I think that abroad will seem a little different if we go together."

"Undoubtedly," said Mr. Whitechoker. "But London is a cold, G.o.dless place."

"It is if you go alone," said the Idiot.

"And Paris is vile," suggested Mr. Brief.

"To the man who has only himself to think of," said the Idiot.

"And Italy is dirty," said the Bibliomaniac.

"There's water in Venice," observed the Idiot. "Not very clean water, to be sure, but wet enough to wash the edges of the sidewalks."

"And travel is uncomfortable," observed the Poet.

"Admitted," said the Idiot. "Travel is about the hardest work and the worst-paid work I know of, but we cannot help ourselves. Now that we are rich we must accept the penalties imposed by modern society upon the wealthy. You never knew a rich man to lead a comfortable life, did you, Mr. Pedagog?"

"There are few of them who seem to know how," admitted the Schoolmaster.

"But--you do."

"No doubt," said the Idiot. "But you see I do not wish to be ostentatiously different from my kind, so having made a fortune I am going to live as people of fortune do and be as uncomfortable as I know how."

"I don't understand about this fortune," said Mr. Brief. "Have you run up against a rich uncle somewhere, or is this sudden wealth the result of your inventions, concerning which we have heard so much lately?"

"Neither," replied the Idiot. "The fact is, I made an investment some years ago in a certain stock, for which I paid twenty-three. I sold it three weeks ago for one hundred and sixty-three, clearing one hundred and forty dollars each on a thousand shares."

The Poet gasped.

"One hundred and forty thousand dollars profit!" cried Mr. Whitechoker.

"Yes," said the Idiot, calmly, "that's about the size of it. Terrible, isn't it? Here I was a happy man; content to stay at home and toil eight hours a day for a small stipend; living in tolerable comfort, and nothing to worry over. All of a sudden this thing happens, and like all other men of wealth I must become a wanderer. I shudder to think of what might have happened if I'd made a million; I shouldn't have had a home at all then."

The guests looked at their host with amazement. To most of them he had reached the supreme moment of his idiocy.

"Ahem!" said the Poet. "I fail to see why."

"Look at the ways of the millionaire and you'll see," observed the Idiot, suavely. "Given his million he gives up his house and builds himself a small, first-cla.s.s hotel in some big city, which for the greater part of the year is occupied by servants. He next erects a country palace at Lenox or at Newport. This he calls a cottage, though it usually looks more like a public library or a hospital or a club-house. Then he builds himself a camp, with stained-gla.s.s windows, in the Adirondacks, and has to float a small railroad in order to get himself and his wife's trunks into camp. Shortly after these follows a bungalow modelled after a French chateau, somewhere in the South, and then a yacht warranted to cross the ocean in ten days, and to produce sea-sickness twelve hours sooner than the regular ocean-steamer, becomes one of the necessities of life. Result, he never lives anywhere. To occupy all his residences, camps, and bungalows he has to keep eternally on the move, and when he thinks he needs a trip to Europe he has his yacht got ready and sends it over, going himself on a fast steamer. He meets his yacht at Southampton, and orders the captain to proceed directly to some Mediterranean port, going himself, meanwhile, to London. After a month of London he goes to Paris, and thence to the Mediterranean port, where, after steaming aboard of the yacht for three or four days, he sends the boat back to New York and returns himself by the regular liner. Oh, it's a terrible thing to be a millionaire and have nowhere to lay one's head, with every poorer man envying you, many hating you, and hands raised against you everywhere."

There was a pause, and the a.s.sembled company properly expressed their appreciation of the millionaire's hard lot by silence.

"The scheme has its advantages," observed Mrs. Idiot.

"Some," said the Idiot. "But think, my dear, of the town house with thirty-nine servants; the Newport house with thirty-four; the camp with sixty, including gamekeepers and guides; the bungalow with thirty more, and the yacht with a captain, a crew, stewards, stewardesses, and a cook you can't get away from without jumping overboard. Just think how that would multiply your troubles. You would come to me from time to time and ask me how I could expect you to discharge seven butlers and four cooks in one morning, and no doubt you'd request me sometimes to stop in at the intelligence office on my way home and employ a dozen housemaids for you."

"But you would have a manager for all this," suggested Mrs. Pedagog.

"That's the point," observed the Idiot. "We'd have to have a manager, and for my part I shouldn't relish being managed. What chance would Mrs.

Idiot have against a manager ahead of an army of servants of such magnitude? We have more than we can keep in subjection as we stand now, with this one small house. If it wasn't for Mary, who keeps an eye on things, I don't know what we should do."

"Well, I am glad you're rich, pa," said Tommy; "you can increase my allowance."

"And I can have a pony," lisped Mollie.

"Alas! Poor children!" cried the Idiot. "That is the saddest part of wealth. Instead of bringing the little ones up ourselves, to be wholly fas.h.i.+onable it will be necessary to sublet the contract to a committee of tutors and governesses. The obligations of social life hereafter will require that we meet our children by appointment only, and that when they dine they shall eat in solitary grandeur until they become so polished in manners that their parents may once more formally welcome them at table. All the good old democratic ways of the domestic republic are now to be set aside. Tommy, instead of yelling for a buckwheat-cake at the top of his lungs, upon our return will request a butler in choicest French to hand him a _pate de foie gras_; and dear little Mollie will have to give up attracting the waitress' attention by shying an olive-pit at her and imperiously summon her by means of an electric buzzer set to buzzing with her toe."

"Mercy! What a picture of woe!" cried Mr. Pedagog.

"Not altogether true, is it?" suggested the Doctor.

"Have you ever visited Newport?" asked the Idiot.

"No," said the Doctor, "never."

"Well, don't," said the Idiot, "unless you wish to look upon that picture--a picture of life whence childhood is abolished; where _blase_ little swells take the place of lively small boys, and diminutive grand d.u.c.h.esses, clad in regal garb, have supplanted the little daughters who bring smiles and suns.h.i.+ne into the life of the common people. Ah, my friends," the Idiot continued, with a shake of his head, "there are sad sights to be seen in this world, but I know of none sadder than those rich little scions of the American aristocracy in whose veins the good red blood of a not very remote ancestry has turned blue through too much high living and too little real living."

"I should think you'd take that hundred and forty thousand dollars and throw it into the sea," said Mr. Brief.

"That would be wicked waste," observed the Idiot. "I propose to use it to win back the good old home-life, and the best way to perpetuate that is to leave it for a time and travel. When you have travelled and seen how uncomfortable others are, and discovered how uncomfortable you are while travelling, nothing can exceed the bliss of getting back to the first simple principles of the real home."

"As a sensible man, why don't you stay here, then?" queried the Poet.

"Because," said the Idiot, "if I stayed here with that hundred and forty thousand dollars on my mind I should nurse it, and in a short while I'd become a millionaire, and such a misfortune as that I shall never invite. We shall go abroad and spend--"

"Not all of it, I hope?" said Mr. Whitechoker.

"No," replied the Idiot. "But enough of it to mitigate the horrors of our condition while absent."

And so it was that Castle Idiot was closed, and that for a time at least "The Idiot at Home" became a thing of the past. Wherever he and his small family may be, may I not bespeak for him the kindly, even affectionate, esteem of those who have followed him with me through these pages? He has his faults; they are many and manifest, for he has never shown the slightest disposition to conceal them, but, as Mrs.

Pedagog remarked to me the other night, "He has a large heart, and it is in the right place. If he only wouldn't talk so much!"

THE END