Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich - Stephen Leacock
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What is the setting and social atmosphere of the Mausoleum Club at the start of the story?
Chapter one Part one of Arcadian Adventures with the Idol Rich. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer. Please visit Librevox dot org Recording by Lindley Paquet Arcadian Adventures with the Idol Rich by Stephen Leecock Chapter one Part one A little dinner with Mr Lucullus Feisch. The Mausoleum Club stands on the quietest corner of the best residential street in the city. It is a Grecian building of white stone. About it are great elm trees with birds. The most expensive kind of birds singing in the branches. The street in the softer hours of the morning has an almost reverential quiet. Great motors moved drowsily along it, with solitary chauffeurs returning at ten thirty after conveying the earlier of the millionaires to their downtown offices.
The sunlight flickers through the elm trees, illuminating expensive nursemaids, wheeling valuable children and little perambulators. Some of the children are worth millions and millions. In Europe, no doubt, you may see in the Unter Denlinden Avenue or the Champs Elyse, a little prince or princess go past with a clattering military guard of honour. But that is nothing. It is not half so impressive in the real sense as what you may observe every morning on Plutoria Avenue beside the Mausoleum Club in the quietest part of the city. Here you may see a little toddling princess in a rabbit suit who owns fifty distilleries in her own right. There, in a lacquered perambulator, sails past a little hooded head that controls from its cradle an entire New Jersey corporation.
The United States Attorney General is suing her as she sits in a vain attempt to make her dissolve herself into constituent companies. Nearby is a child of four in a khaki suit who represents the merger of two trunk line railways. You may meet in the flickered sunlight any number of little princes and princesses far more real than the poor survivals of Europe. Incalculable infants wave their fifty dollar ivory rattles in an inarticulate greeting to one another. A million dollars of preferred stock laughs merely in recognition of a majority control going past in a go kart drawn by an imported nurse. And through it all the sunlight falls through the elm trees, and the birds sing and the motors hum. So that the whole world, as seen from the boulevard of Plutoria Avenue, is the very pleasantest place imaginable.
Just below Plutoria Avenue, and parallel with it, the trees die out and the brick and stone of the city begins in earnest. Even from the avenue, you see the tops of the skyscraping buildings in the big commercial streets, and can hear or almost hear the roar of the elevated railway earning dividends. And beyond that, again the city sinks lower. and is choked and crowded with the tangled streets and little houses of the slums. In fact, if you were to mount to the roof of the Mausoleum Club itself on Plutoria Avenue, you could almost see the slums from there. But why should you? And on the other hand, if you never went up on the roof, But only dined inside among the palm trees, you would never know that the slums existed, which is much better.
There are broad steps leading up to the club, so broad and so agreeably covered with matting that the physical exertion of lifting oneself from one's motor to the door of the club is reduced to the smallest compass. The richer members are not ashamed to take the steps one at a time. First one foot and then the other. And at tight money periods, when there is a black cloud hanging over the stock exchange, you may see each and every one of the members of the Mausoleum Club dragging himself up the steps after this fashion. His restless eyes filled with the dumb pathos of a man wondering where he can put his hand on half a million dollars. But at gayer times, when there are gala receptions at the club, its steps are all buried under expensive carpet, soft as moss and covered over with a long pavilion of red and white awning to catch the snowflakes.
And beautiful ladies are poured into the club by the motorful.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the setting and social atmosphere of the Mausoleum Club at the start of the story?
0:00–19:01
2
How does the conversation shift when the Duke of Dullham arrives and the dinner plans unfold?
19:01–1:44:28
3
How does Tomlinson try to donate his entire fortune to the university?
1:44:28–3:05:55
4
What new society does Mrs. Raselier Brown become involved with?
3:05:55–3:40:31
5
What romantic entanglements develop among Philippa, Dolphemia, and Mr. Spillikins?
3:40:31–4:49:05
6
How does the story transition to the rivalry between Saint Asif and Saint Osif churches?
4:49:05–5:12:40
7
How is the merger of Saint Asaph’s and Saint Osoph’s churches concluded?
5:12:40–6:27:21
8
What is the Great Fight for Clean Government and how does it begin?
6:27:21–6:46:47
Speakers
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