White Ashes Part 14

"If I had known you before, I undoubtedly would have done so," the girl smilingly returned.

"Times have changed since I was a youngster," Mr. Wintermuth went on. "I presume all elderly people say so, and I am afraid we are apt to make it at once a refrain and a lament, but nevertheless it is true. Forty years ago young ladies did not feel any interest in business such as fire insurance, or if they did they kept it to themselves. But," he added, "I am the gainer in this work of time, to-day at least, for it brings me the pleasure of a call from you."

"I'm afraid my interest is rather sudden and hasn't any very deep foundation," his visitor admitted. "I haven't felt it very long. Uncle Silas has been a fire insurance man ever since I can remember, but I never knew what he was actually doing, and I never tried to learn. But now I really would like to find out, and that is what brings me to you.

I have lived in a kind of unreal atmosphere, and I'm trying now to learn about something absolutely practical. I hope it won't bore you too awfully to have things shown to some one who will undoubtedly have to ask the meaning of everything she sees."

"Not in the least," the old gentleman a.s.sured her. "I shall give you an instructor who likes to explain things." He pressed a b.u.t.ton under his desk. "Ask Mr. Smith to come here," he said to the boy who responded.

"Yes, sir. Excuse me, sir, but Mr. O'Connor is going to Baltimore and he says he'd like to see you a minute before he goes."

"Ask him to come in. Miss Maitland, let me present Mr. O'Connor, our Vice-President. Miss Maitland is the niece of Mr. Silas Osgood, and she has come to look over our offices."

"Very pleased to meet you," said O'Connor. "Sorry I haven't time to help show you around, myself. I see now that I was wrong when I decided to go to Baltimore to-day. I felt a little doubtful right along, and now I'm sure I should have stayed here."

Helen thought that he spoke a trifle too glibly, but she made a civil reply, and turned to the window while O'Connor received some final advice from his chief. When the door closed behind him she turned once more, and as she did so she became aware of a young man who stood in the doorway looking expectantly at Mr. Wintermuth.

"Ah, you are here, Richard," said the President. "Miss Maitland, this is Mr. Smith. Miss Maitland is Mr. Silas Osgood's niece, and she wants to know how the Guardian runs its business. Do you think you can show her?"

"I think I can," replied the younger man, pleasantly. Then, turning to the girl, he said, "I shall at least be very glad indeed to try."

Mr. Wintermuth then went on to tell what Smith should show the visitor, and while he was doing this the two younger people looked at one another, Helen swiftly and Smith with a steadier glance. To him she seemed a girl of unusual charm, but whether this could have been guessed from his manner was problematic.

Helen, with discreet but none the less comprehensive scrutiny, saw before her a man of thirty-three or four years, erect of figure, with a clean-shaven face and gray eyes. One thing she noticed about him was a certain odd immobility of carriage, which was not in any way to be mistaken for la.s.situde or lethargy; on the contrary, it reminded her of a coiled spring. He was somewhat above the middle height, and he had rather lean hands, and he wore no jewelry except an un.o.btrusive scarf pin--thus far had Helen's a.s.sessment proceeded when a question from Mr.

Wintermuth recalled her.

"Would you like to start now to look us over?"

"If it is quite convenient to you," replied the girl, a shade stiffly.

This impa.s.sive young man, who seemed quite different from any one she had met in her Boston set, was a little out of her calculations. She knew it was unreasonable to expect Mr. Wintermuth himself to act as cicerone, but just the same she was not entirely certain that she did not resent being so definitely turned over to this youthfully unexpected subst.i.tute.

Probably Mr. Otto Bartels would have been initially more acceptable to her.

"Show Miss Maitland everything--begin at the beginning, and don't leave anything out," said the President, and dismissed them both with a fatherly wave of the hand as he pressed the b.u.t.ton that summoned his stenographer.

Smith looked keenly at the girl as they walked slowly out into the office; he was wondering what her object might be in this pilgrimage.

His mind flitted briefly over the ideas of muck-raking reporters and inquisitive lady novelists; yet surely this self-possessed but quiet young lady suggested nothing of either cla.s.s, and besides, a niece of Silas Osgood's could scarcely deserve suspicion. At the same time, detecting in her manner what impressed him as a slightly Bostonian att.i.tude of mental hauteur, Smith remained wary.

"This is the Eastern Department," he said, stopping before the first long map desk that stretched along the whole side of the room. Helen a.s.sented politely to this information, and the young man led the way through the other departments. Through the lower floors they went, Smith sketching briefly the function of each department as they pa.s.sed it.

"Here is the City Department," he said, as they reached the ground floor; and for a little while they stood and watched Cuyler in his traffic with the brokers. He was engaged in a spirited argument with a very small and somewhat soiled person who insistently thrust upon Mr. Cuyler what that gentleman had obviously no intention of accepting. Risk after risk was declined, and the turns and _ripostes_ were fast and furious.

Finally the soiled placer presented a binder which called for five thousand dollars to cover Jacob Warbalowsky on his stock of artificial flowers and feathers while contained on the fourth loft of a six-story factory building which Mr. Cuyler knew to be of cheap and light construction, dirty and hazardous throughout, and each floor but one of which was tenanted by a concern whose name indicated that its pyromorality, so to speak, was to say the least questionable. Mr. Cuyler quite distinctly recalled, scanning the names of the tenants in the card cabinet which gave the occupation and tariff rate of each, that a few years before, the concern on the third floor, having manufactured a stock of raincoats which it found impossible to sell, had been strongly suspected of disposing of its goods to the fire insurance companies instead of to the retail trade by the simple expedient of the double gas jet. This popular device was as follows. The proprietor, who was detained at his office after his employees had gone home, would, when he himself departed, leave two gas jets turned on, one at each end of the factory, one burning (as usual) and the other unlit. Long enough afterward so as to establish an alibi and remove all suspicion from himself, the escaping gas would meet the flame, and there would be an explosion and a fire which usually resulted in the desired destruction of the useless but fully insured merchandise. The cause of the fire could almost always be traced to a leaky gas jet, for which, of course, the a.s.sured was not responsible.

Mr. Cuyler, regarding the names of the tenants, noticed that the top floor was occupied by a maker of automobile accessories, named Pendleton.

He turned cheerfully back to the placer.

"Phil, I'd like to help you out," he said, "but I can't write anything in that building. I know it's hard to get. Why, my brother-in-law's factory is on the top floor, and only last Sunday, when I saw him up at the house, he asked me if I wasn't going to loosen up and put the Guardian on for a small line. His broker can't get anywhere near enough to cover him. And I had to tell him nay, nay. You couldn't really expect me to do something for you, Phil, that I couldn't do for one of my own family."

The soiled placer removed a cigarette b.u.t.t from his mouth, and threw it on the floor with a gesture of extreme impatience.

"Your brother-in-law like h.e.l.l!" he remarked, quite disregarding the presence of Miss Maitland in the background. "What kind of a fairy story are you trying to put across on me? I suppose you're claiming that Pendleton, the automobile man, is your brother-in-law. Well, he moved out about a month ago. The card hasn't been changed yet, but the firm in there now is a bunch of Kikes that make boys' pants--Lipper, Loeb, and Kahn. I saw their sign when I went up to get this order from Warbalowsky. Which of them did your sister marry?"

Mr. Cuyler was momentarily discomfited, but his presence of mind almost immediately returned.

"All three," he said calmly to his excited adversary. "All three. You just saw the sign, you say. You didn't meet any of them personally, did you? Well, you couldn't have."

"Why, what do you mean?" asked the astonished placer, pausing in the act of lighting a fresh cigarette.

"Why, Phil," said Mr. Cuyler, kindly, "my sister married a man named Reginald Whitney. His name isn't his fault. And he is a manufacturer of boys' pants. Now, Phil, you understand local conditions as well as nearly any one I know, and I ask you: What chance of success would a boys' pants manufacturer named Reginald Whitney have? Absolutely none.

He therefore operates under the name of Lipper, Loeb, and Kahn, and I don't mind saying he is doing very well, but I hope he won't stay long in that building, for some of that bunch of crooks under him--I don't mean Warbalowsky, you understand--will probably touch off the place some night and leave him with a total loss and only forty per cent insurance to value."

While this controversy was going on, Smith, watching his companion shrewdly, saw the light of real interest for the first time dawn in her eye. And when Cuyler finished, she laughed outright, and the two returned to the elevator the better for one shared amus.e.m.e.nt.

"I suppose Mr. Cuyler was--embroidering the truth a little?" queried Helen, comprehendingly.

"He never had a sister in his life!" nodded her escort, cheerfully.

"I'm afraid, Mr. Smith," Helen said as they regained the top floor, "that I don't really understand the first principles of fire insurance well enough to appreciate what you have shown me. It's a humiliating admission, but I must make it. I don't believe you began near enough the bottom--with the elementary, one-syllable things."

The underwriter surveyed her thoughtfully but with covert approval. Wary though he was, like all idealists, regarding the things near to his soul, it now for the first time struck him that he wished very much that Miss Maitland should understand what meant so much to him. And he felt that he could make her understand; hitherto it had not seemed so.

"I wonder if I could really show you," he answered, half to himself, and there was something in his tone that made the girl reply, "I wish you would try."

"Let's start all over, then," said Smith, buoyantly. "We'll begin right here. Now, this is a map desk in which the maps are kept and on top of which they are laid out when in use. The map desk is really the home of underwriting, just as the stage is of the drama. And just as there are stage conventions, certain things which are taken for granted, such as the idea that a character on the stage cannot escape over the footlights into the audience--that there is an imaginary blank wall between the audience and the players--so we have our conventions and symbols in the maps." He called for Boston One, which the map clerk laid instantly open at his elbow. It was a large volume bound in gray canvas, perhaps two by three feet in dimensions, and weighing several pounds. Smith turned to a page which showed some of the blocks surrounding the Common, and Miss Maitland bent close to look. "All these little colored objects represent buildings, red for brick and yellow for frame; and they are drawn on a scale of fifty feet to the inch. We get so accustomed to them that automatically we grow to visualize the buildings themselves from these diagrams. See, there is the State House on top of the hill; there's Beacon Street; there's--"

"Beacon Street! Where is number forty-five? I want to see what that looks like."

"What number did you say?" inquired Smith.

"Forty-five."

"There it is."

"Why, so it is! What is that queer little wiggle sticking out of the front?"

"It looks like a bay window in the front room of the second floor. Is there one in that house?"

"Yes. . . . Have you got Deerfield Street in this map?"

Smith found the place.

"Number?" he asked again.

"Here it is," the girl said amusedly. "That is where I live. Now let me see how much visualizing you can do on that. Let me see how nearly right you can get it. And why is it brown instead of red?"

"With pleasure," said the underwriter, with a smile. "In the first place, it is brown because it is of steel and concrete fireproof construction. It is an eight-story and bas.e.m.e.nt apartment building with a tile roof and a short mansard of tile in front only. There are two sections, cut off from one another except for a metal-clad door in the bas.e.m.e.nt. The elevator is at the right as you enter; the stairway runs around it. There are two light courts, one front and one rear, both with stairway fire escapes. Which is your apartment?"

"West front, on the fourth floor."