White Ashes Part 13

"It has been represented to me," he had tersely said, "that if a large fire should involve our Pemberton Street barn and power house, notwithstanding the presumably fireproof construction of those buildings, we should quite likely incur a much larger loss than we would find it convenient to pay at a time when additional financing might be somewhat embarra.s.sing. I am therefore laying before you gentlemen the question of doing what we have never previously done, and carrying fire insurance on our properties. I prefer not to advise you, and suggest an open discussion of the matter."

Mr. Hurd sat down; his directors surveyed one another and the situation with concern. Could the old man be losing his grip, or was this merely a transient eccentricity? In the debate which followed the President took no part; only once, in answer to a question by Mr. Jonas Green, much the most penurious man at the table, as to what had brought the question up at the present time, Mr. Green being an enthusiastic exponent of the doctrine of _laissez faire_ when any additional expenditure was proposed, Mr. Hurd made reply:--

"It is represented to me that if it became public knowledge that we carry no insurance, banking and financial inst.i.tutions generally may come to feel that our conservatism is open to criticism and that they are rating our stock somewhat too highly as collateral. It is intimated that some of us might conceivably be annoyed by requests to subst.i.tute in part other collateral or somewhat reduce loans secured by Ma.s.sachusetts Traction stock."

"But so far as the banks are concerned, we're in exactly the same position we've always been. How is the fact we don't insure going to become public knowledge now any more than in the past?" persisted Mr.

Green.

"It is suggested that news spreads--if not of its own volatility, at least with only the most trifling a.s.sistance. And that, I take it,"

concluded Mr. Hurd, "will be supplied."

Mr. Green's face grew almost purple.

"Why!" he exclaimed, "that's--that's pretty close to blackmail!"

The President's lips half concealed the merest trace of a smile.

"Possibly," he a.s.sented. "But I am inclined to think it is business."

The controversy continued. And Mr. Hurd, listening, found himself more and more moved to austere amus.e.m.e.nt by the effect of Charlie's suave proposal. When he had placed the matter before the directorate, it was because he himself had not made up his mind on the question of its desirability. He had slowly come to feel that his personal prejudice against carrying insurance should not be made forcibly to apply to the policy of a corporation, in which many others were interested, and he felt that he would prefer to shift the responsibility on this point to the gentlemen who presumably were paid for deciding just such things.

And as he listened, he found growing upon him the hope that Charlie's plan would be adopted. This hope, unexpressed, was so utterly out of keeping with what he had supposed to be his convictions that he strangled it without a qualm. It was, he supposed, dead, when he sat up at the further request of Mr. Jonas Green to answer a few additional queries.

"Tell me," said Mr. Green, "do you honestly believe there's a particle of danger of a big fire in this city? Pooh!" He dismissed the subject almost contemptuously.

Some odd chord of recollection stirred in Mr. Hurd. Almost unconsciously he responded:--

"The best technical engineers--not alarmists, but men who are careful students of such things--agree that the conflagration hazard in the congested district of Boston is not a thing one can exactly calculate, but it would be difficult to overestimate its gravity."

The sounding syllables pa.s.sed from his lips with a faint, far echo which he found vaguely but unidentifiably familiar. But into the group around the long table the utterance fell with cryptic, crucial solemnity. Only Mr. Green, stubbornly contentious to the last, and thinking anxiously of both horns of the dilemma at once, found voice or will to reply.

"You don't say so!" he said feebly.

"I do," Mr. Hurd coolly rejoined. "And now, gentlemen, the motion is in order: Shall the Ma.s.sachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company insure its properties against loss by fire?"

And when the motion was put, there was no dissenting voice.

Of this somewhat unprecedented meeting the close at least was normal.

But Mr. Jonas Green grasped his ten dollar gold piece more firmly than ever as he pa.s.sed through the doorway.

CHAPTER VIII

One of the most inexplicable things in human nature is, commonly, the stuff out of which other people carve their fetiches. A philosopher is a man who can understand the incomprehensible selections by other men of the objects of their adoration. But philosophers are uncommon.

To Helen Maitland, leaving Fifth Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street and straying northwestward into the early autumn splendor of the Park, it seemed as though for the first time she could understand the viewpoint of those unidentified myriads to whom New York is a fetich; and as she walked on beneath the trees soon to lay aside their valedictory robes, she appreciated most fully those to whom Central Park is a fetich within a fetich, a guarded flame within the inmost chamber of the shrine.

Partly the spell was that of Autumn, that grave, melodious season; and as Helen went forward, her mind lingered on the "tragic splendor" at whose "mute signal, leaf by golden leaf, crumbles the gorgeous year."

In the past she had never been inordinately fond of New York. In common with most of her fellow Bostonians, she had found it too big, too noisy, too garish, and too unfriendly. To her it was iron and stone and dust and the tumult of a harsh and heartless unceasing struggle. But now, under the alchemic hand of Autumn, she found herself thrilling to the town as never before had she thought possible. Only two days had elapsed since her departure from Boston, but it seemed to her now that she was a partic.i.p.ant in some slow-moving pageant, not a hostile critic in the audience, but a minor actor in an unfamiliar yet strangely familiar play.

Even the hurrying throng of people who confronted her, when at length she sought again the street on her way homeward, seemed less hostile and alien, less inimical to her and her mood than ever before. As she went southward on the street car--for her careful New Englandism forbade her taking a taxicab in sunny weather--she found herself reflecting with a smile that Boston in her recollection was an astonishing distance away.

She also detected with surprise a very slight irritation at the intense preoccupation of the thronging thousands in their own concerns and their utter carelessness of her and hers.

As a matter of fact she had no concerns of her own, or at least none whose vitality would gain attention. And suddenly her friendly sense of being a part of this flowing life dissolved sourly into mockery. She was in it and not of it--again the hostile critic. And then it occurred to her that perhaps momentarily she was a little lonely. And her utter impotence in this huge careless city heightened this feeling. She could make no headway against the current of this life. The remarkable persistent vitality of the thing around her made her feel totally unimportant and quite helpless. The feeling was far from pleasant, but it was salutary, and stimulus for the first remedy at hand, and the natural depression of impotence did not overcome the exhilaration of curiosity.

When she reached Washington Square again, she said something of this to Miss Wardrop, who nodded comprehendingly.

"Every one feels that way for a time," she said; "it's like sitting out a cotillion by one's self. What you need is something or somebody to pull you into the whirl."

"I suppose that is so," agreed the girl,--"but where am I to find it--or him? I don't know anybody who is in. Of course I have Uncle Silas's letter to Mr. Wintermuth, but I didn't really know whether I'd have the courage to use it or not."

"Who may Mr. Wintermuth be?" demanded her aunt.

"A friend of Uncle Silas, and the President of the Guardian Fire Insurance Company."

"Fire Insurance? A fire insurance company? Wait one moment.

Jenks. . . . Jenks! Bring me that envelope from the mantelpiece. . . .

No," she added, "my policy is not in the Guardian. I thought perhaps it might be."

"What is the matter?" inquired her niece. "Have you had a fire?"

"Yes, I have," returned her aunt, "or rather Jenks has. He burned off the lamp shade from my reading lamp. And Jane Vanderdecken says because he did it out of sheer clumsiness I cannot ask the company to pay for it."

Helen remembered the shade in question, which had been in the eyes of all save its owner a horror upon horrors, a mausoleum preserving, apparently for all time, the ghastly glories of a dead era of alleged ornamentation.

So it was with dubious sympathy that she said:--

"I don't know whether Jane Vanderdecken is right or not."

"You can go and find out. Mr. What's-his-name can tell you, even if it isn't his company that will have to pay."

And in this way it came about that Helen found herself, not many days later, descending from the Elevated Station at Cortlandt Street, and turning her steps eastward toward William Street. It was half-past ten when she found herself before a portal on which were the words: The Guardian Fire Insurance Company of the City of New York.

Intrusting herself to the deliberate conveyance of the elevator, she arrived eventually at the top floor, and to a clerk near the door she expressed her desire to see Mr. James Wintermuth. One of the princ.i.p.al a.s.sets of this employee was his readiness to a.s.sume an expression, when any one inquired for the President, suggestive that in his opinion such a desire could scarcely be expected by the visitor to be gratified, and he was also supposed to decide by inquiry or intuition whether he should so far intrude on Mr. Wintermuth's privacy as to present the stranger's name. He had come to be uncommonly adept at this, but the spectacle of this dark-eyed young woman was quite beyond the gamut of his routine experience. In a sort of charmed coma he surveyed the visitor, and found himself starting to inform the President of her arrival without a preliminary inquisition even to the extent of inquiring the nature of her business with that gentleman. Accordingly, after the briefest of intervals she found herself ushered into the office of an elderly gentleman who rose courteously to welcome her.

"Miss Maitland, I think. You are the niece of Silas Osgood of Boston?"

he inquired. "Mr. Osgood wrote that I might expect to see you here."

The girl handed him the letter.

"Here are my credentials," she said, with a smile. "I am also an envoy extraordinary from my aunt, Miss Wardrop, on a diplomatic mission connected with the burning of a long-cherished but doubtfully valuable lamp shade!"

"Won't you sit down, please? You will pardon me if I read your uncle's letter?" Mr. Wintermuth responded.

Helen a.s.sented, and the other leisurely read the few lines the letter contained. In the interim the visitor glanced about the room to apprehend the setting of the scene into which she was now come.

Presently her host spoke.

"I gather from what your uncle says that you have come not to call on an old friend of his, but to look at maps and daily reports and surveys, and find out what a fire insurance company is really like. And although I am quite old enough to be your father, I would really much rather you had come to see me," he remarked pleasantly.