White Ashes Part 54

CHAPTER XXV

The March winds bl.u.s.tered over Boston, and the cold salt smell of the ocean was borne tempestuously in upon the shivering city. Chill and keen out of the northeast came the air that hinted not at all of spring, but urgently of winter. The people in the streets walked briskly, with no laggard steps; they were accustomed to this sort of untimely treatment from the New England climate, and they had no intention of being betrayed thereby into pondering over southern lands or sunny vineclad hillsides where summer always lingered. Boston might not be climatically Utopian, but there was at all events something virile, something manly and admirable about a sort of weather for which no other good word could be used.

Between the tall buildings in Kilby Street, where now for three weeks the current of the insurance world had been flowing with quickened, almost feverish pulse, the activity on this bl.u.s.tering day in middle March was undiminished. Of the hastily arranged adjustment offices which the magnitude of the conflagration had made necessary, nearly all had been given up, and the comparatively few uncompleted adjustments of losses were now being handled through the regular offices.

It had been a t.i.tanic task, that of adjusting fire losses extending in the aggregate to between one and two hundred millions of dollars--for there were some indications that the Boston property damage would reach the latter figure. But after three weeks of steady work, when the lines of claimants before the adjusters' doors had hardly slackened a moment, the worst was over. Three fourths of the claims had been settled; satisfactorily to all concerned by the larger and more responsible companies; on a basis of offered compromise by those inst.i.tutions tottering on the brink of insolvency; dubiously, or with craven and flagrant unfairness by the stricken "wildcats," the irresponsible undergrounders of America and Europe. For every great fire unearths the fact that there are always companies who will gladly accept premiums,--often at surprisingly low rates,--although they are only mildly addicted to the payment of losses. And every conflagration also uncovers the fact that there are many penny-wise citizens who purchase this cla.s.s of indemnity. A great fire cleans, as nothing else does, the fire insurance stage of all but the fittest.

From this calamity, the greatest which had ever visited the city, Boston had, after a timeless period of uncomprehending and demoralized helplessness, leaped anew into activity and life. From all over the country, almost from all over the world, the need of the stricken city was met by a magnificent and human response. A vast catastrophe becomes nearly worth while by virtue of the humanity it discovers.

Food, clothing, money--all were donated with lavish hands, and aid was rushed to Boston by a hundred trains. In comparison with the area burned over, the number of people made homeless was not great; and in three weeks the city had somehow managed to drink up and absorb this surplus without leaving a sign.

Life had now begun to move more normally again; and already the city's gaze went forward toward what was to be, rather than backward at what had been. But in a certain Kilby Street office two men were talking, one of whom still looked somewhat gloomily back, while the other, with a smile of transcendent optimism, was engaged in the cosmic process of turning Boston's holocaust into a fiery but triumphant feather for his own cap.

"Has that draft come in yet, Benny?" he was demanding.

"Came this morning," answered Cole, a trifle sourly. "Here it is."

"Would you mind letting me have it? Thanks. This is the last one, isn't it? They're all here now?"

"Yes," said Cole, curtly; "this is the last."

"If you'll give me a large envelope, I'll take them with me, then,"

returned the first speaker. "With a golden touch like Midas of old will I go forth into the presence of my distinguished relation. Benny, you are a base soul with no instincts above the commercial. You do not appreciate the situation. We are rapidly approaching what is vulgarly termed the psychological moment. If you had any more feeling than a dying invertebrate, you would want to come along and witness the ceremony, which is entirely private and visitors admitted by card only."

"Thanks, but I don't care to," said Cole, shortly.

Since the change which came over the complexion of matters in his world, Cole was much less a.s.sured and less a.s.sertive than before. The receipt this morning of the Salamander's final and largest loss draft marked the last public connection between that company and the Osgood office. The Salamander had reinsured, and the news of its fall was abroad on the streets of Boston as in New York, the insurance talk of all the towns. O'Connor, temporarily at least, had disappeared, and no man knew what chasm had swallowed him up. So far as Osgood and Company were concerned, he and his company were both dead issues; and once more in the old office in the corner Mr. Osgood could be seen in his wonted place.

Immediately following the conflagration Mr. Osgood had quietly resumed his authority as active head of the firm; and the Guardian, having taken over the Salamander's unburned business, which was in reality its own, once more acknowledged as its Boston representatives Messrs. Silas Osgood and Company. Of course the separation rule of the Boston Board was still nominally in force; but with the legal decision pending there was no disposition on the part of any agency or of any company to force an action of any sort. In the face of a matter so great as the conflagration had been, the smaller things, the lesser animosities, were allowed to slip peacefully into forgotten limbo. In due time the separation rule, its chief protagonist discredited and gone none knew where, would be repealed, either under legal compulsion or without.

When that day came, the Guardian would be back in the position it had always enjoyed until Mr. O'Connor played--and lost--his meteoric game.

In Mr. Cole's office, meanwhile, the small pile of checks and drafts was being counted over with scrupulous care by Mr. Wilkinson.

"They seem to be in order," he said. "Three hundred and fifty-five thousand, six hundred and eighty-seven dollars and fifty-two cents.

Benny, a thought strikes me! Why should not an insurance broker get a commission on losses as well as premiums? It seems to me that that is a very reasonable idea--I wonder it has never occurred to anybody before."

"You get your commission when the line is rewritten, of course," Cole responded. "What more do you want?"

"Why, that's so; I hadn't thought of that. I presume that such an operation will be more or less lucrative--unless my sagacious though unwilling father-in-law executes his sometime threat."

"Oh, I don't believe even John M. Hurd would be such a jackal without benefit of clergy as to do that."

"Well, perhaps not. Do you think of anything else, Benny, before I depart?"

"Absolutely nothing. And for heaven's sake get out!--I'm busy, and you lend an atmosphere of inertia to the whole place."

"And yet," returned Mr. Wilkinson, suavely, rising, nevertheless,--"and yet this is, in the plebeian phrase of the world of trade, my busy day.

To be sure I have other occasional days when I handle transactions that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars; but I don't mind admitting to you that these usually take place in the last ineffable hour of slumber preceding the dawn. But to-day--to-day it is true!

Benny, I will go to the length of buying you a drink, a short and frugal drink."

"At eleven A.M.? Not for me," responded Cole. "Run along."

"I go," rejoined the other, gracefully, and the door swung shut behind his debonaire retreat.

A few minutes later to the youth from South Framingham he spoke nonchalantly:--

"Mr. Hurd?"

The calm presumption of that rising inflection seemed to indicate the absence of all doubt as to whether Mr. Hurd would receive him. The South Framingham scion regarded him with bovine gaze.

"Yes, I guess he's in," he said dubiously.

"Then tell him, if you please, that Mr. Charles Wilkinson wishes to see him on a matter of important business." The sentence ended so incisively that South Framingham blinked. Any display of emotion more significant was not, perhaps, to be expected. The messenger and his message started vaguely toward the door of Mr. Hurd's private office, and for an awkward moment no sound came forth.

"He says to come in," said South Framingham, reappearing.

"With alacrity but dignity," said Charles to himself; and found himself in another moment in the presence of Mr. Hurd. The traction magnate did not rise. He laid the paper which he had been reading on the desk before him, and looked fixedly across it at the intruder.

"Good-morning, sir," said Mr. Wilkinson, cheerfully.

Mr. Hurd's response to this greeting could only be denominated a grunt, but his visitor had no desire to force an issue of cordiality, so, waiving the doubtful courtesy of this reply, he continued:--

"Mrs. Hurd is well, I trust?"

"Mrs. Hurd is quite well, thank you. Did you come here through any apprehension about her health?" inquired the gentleman at the desk, with some degree of asperity to be detected in his tone by one as well acquainted with him as was Charlie. "I understood from my clerk that you came on business."

"And so I did," said the unruffled Wilkinson, "although I always endeavor that business and courtesy shall not necessarily exclude one another."

The financier looked sharply at the young man; but he felt that he was scarcely in a position to take offense at such a commendable statement.

"My business," continued the visitor, "deals with one of the best single pieces of business you ever did for the Ma.s.sachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company."

"Is the loss finally closed up?" said Mr. Hurd, curtly.

His son-in-law stood dramatically before him; he slipped his left hand into the inner breast pocket where reposed the doc.u.ments with which his coup was to be made.

"Mr. Hurd," he said impressively, "you permitted me to place the insurance on your trolley system because I convinced you that it ought to be insured. Do you recall what I said about the conflagration hazard in the congested district of Boston? Well, I won't repeat it, but until I called it to your notice you had never given it serious consideration. And even after the schedule was placed, you said that another year you would not carry insurance. You may also recall that you withheld your consent to a certain marriage, which I proposed to contract with a member of your family, and which--"

"Stick to the matter in hand," suggested the traction magnate, tartly.

"I am doing so, because the point I want to make is this. On both these matters, if you'll pardon my saying so, you were equally wrong.

You were afraid that as a son-in-law all my entries would be on the wrong side of your ledger. Well, I don't believe I'll overdraw my account with you for some little time, Mr. Hurd, for I hand you herewith--as we say to our stenographers--to the order of the Ma.s.sachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company, checks and drafts to the amount of three hundred and fifty-five thousand, six hundred and eighty-seven dollars and fifty-two cents, in payment of the loss on your Pemberton Street car barn and power house and a few minor items.

Here they are, and, to use a colloquialism, I want to rub them in. Not to glorify my own ac.u.men or to minimize yours,--you showed good judgment to insure your property,--but to prove to you that you made a mistake about me."

"A mistake?" said the other man.