White Ashes Part 6

The young man nodded gravely.

"You are right. Your information, so far as it extends, is absolutely correct, but it hardly goes far enough. Trolley cars belong to trolley companies which operate trolley systems. That's very well put, don't you think?"

"Very. Go on--I'm awfully interested."

"I'll put it a little more simply. The scientific att.i.tude is too difficult to maintain. And besides, that was just about as far as I could go scientifically, anyway. I had much better deal with concrete facts--or with what I hope to convert into them. Don't you agree?

Although I felt rather well in my academic habiliments."

"Much better," Miss Maitland promptly agreed. "And there would be the additional advantage that I would quite likely know what you were talking about, which would not be at all a certainty if you insisted on retaining your scientific manner."

"It's this way, then," said her companion. "It's this way. John M.

Hurd, Isabel's father, my step-uncle, Mrs. Hurd's husband--John M.

Hurd, in short, is the President of the most important trolley system in this vicinity, the Ma.s.sachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company.

He is also, ex-officio, chairman of the board of directors, and except for some dynamos, cars, conductors, tracks, and other equipment, he is the trolley system."

"That sounds like Mr. Hurd," the girl acknowledged.

"Now I must ask you another leading question," the other continued.

"What do you know about fire insurance?"

"Well, I ought to know a little about it," replied Helen, "considering the fact that my uncle, Mr. Osgood, has one of the leading fire insurance agencies in Boston. Whenever there's a big fire he's always quoted as 'Silas Osgood, the veteran underwriter, said so and so.'"

"You will pardon me," said Mr. Wilkinson, "if my legal method of thought calls to your attention that 'ought to know' and 'do know' are not in all cases coincident. My original question was, 'What do you know about fire insurance?'"

"Not as much as I ought, I'm afraid," Helen confessed. "Uncle Silas belongs to the school which believes in locking his business in the safe when he leaves the office, and as he never mentions it, I know very little about it--though I don't at all care for your legal method of establishing my ignorance."

"A true gentleman ignores a lady's embarra.s.sments. Fire insurance, to put it briefly, is indemnity against losses by fire. Companies do it.

You pay them a little money called a premium--no connection with trading stamps--and when your house burns down they pay you a tremendous amount. It's a remarkable idea."

"It certainly sounds so, as you put it."

"The personal application is this: John M. Hurd owns a trolley system which ought to be insured for five or six million dollars if it was insured at all. But it isn't. And it is my life work to make him put on that insurance, and make him do it in a way that will count--for me, you understand."

"But how do you expect to convince him?" asked the girl. "If he never has insured the system, the chances are that he doesn't believe in insurance, or that he doesn't think the system is likely to burn up, or that he has some other good reason for not insuring it."

"That's exactly why I'm asking your advice," her companion replied.

"Probably you are correct in all three of your conjectures. What I want is some way to make him do something that he doesn't believe in and from which he never expects to get his money back and that he has some other perfectly proper argument for turning down--and make him do it, just the same. Eventually he's _got_ to do it--it's a case of sheer necessity--for me."

"Why don't you ask Isabel? I think I hear her coming."

And Isabel entered, the teakettle boiling in her wake. As she dispensed the material concomitants, the conversation went on.

"We have been talking about fire insurance and trolley systems," said Helen. And she summarized Wilkinson's remarks for her friend's benefit. Isabel listened with interest but skepticism.

"If you really expect father to insure anything, Charlie, I'm afraid you will be disappointed," she said frankly. "I hope you're not serious about it."

"Serious! I should think I was! I would naturally be just a little serious about something on which depended the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of Charles S. Wilkinson, Esquire. It is a matter of most vital necessity, I a.s.sure you--nothing less. And now having acquainted you with the salience of the situation, I will allow you a period for reflection undisturbed by pleasantries or philosophic observations from myself which might conceivably divert the currents of your minds. Meanwhile _I_ shall devote this period to an intelligent appreciation of Isabel's compendious and soul-satisfying tea."

The two girls looked blankly at one another.

"My dear Charlie," Miss Hurd said, "it is very painful to have to overturn the family water cooler on your ambitious young hopes, but are you aware that for thirty years my mother--or her representative--has carried the silver upstairs every night because as a family we did not believe in insuring it? Burglary insurance, life insurance, fire insurance--father has never paid a dollar for any one of them. And do you happen to recall the line of my distinguished parent's jaw? If I were you, Charlie, I would try to insure somebody else's trolley system."

Wilkinson shook his head sadly.

"No, that won't do, Isabel. John M. is the only relative I have who owns a trolley system, or much of anything else. Most of the other systems are insured already, anyway, and the people who own them undoubtedly insure them through their own connections--I was about to say poor relations. No, my only hope is here, and it grieves me deeply, Isabel, to see you take so pessimistic a view. Nevertheless, I am not downcast; I will arise buoyantly to ask whether you cannot do better?--whether you cannot devise some expedient whereby the heart of your worthy father may be melted and become as other men's hearts. I don't demand a permanent or even a protracted melting--all I ask is a temporary thaw, just long enough to let me extract a promise from him to let me insure those car barns and power houses. Then he can revert to adamant and be--and welcome, so far as I am concerned. Now, Miss Maitland, have you nothing to suggest?"

"Wouldn't it be more satisfactory to succeed by your own ideas and devices?" Helen inquired.

"All very pretty, my plausible girl, but what if one has no ideas or devices? That is very nearly my case, and it is a hard one. I've only one real shot in my locker, and if that doesn't reach its mark, I'm lost."

"And what is that?" Helen and Isabel asked almost simultaneously.

"In my single way I will endeavor to answer both these interrogations at once. It is, then, the suggestion of a man I met in the office of Silas Osgood and Company, a man by the wild, barbaric, outre name of Smith. Richard Smith, I believe. And his suggestion--I tell it to you in confidence, relying on your honor not to steal my stolen thunder--was, very briefly, to put before my distinguished relation the sad, disheartening effect it would have on the popularity of the trolley stock in the banks and on the stock exchange if it became generally noised abroad that the road carried no insurance and maintained no proper insurance fund. What do you think of that?"

"I begin to see," said Isabel, thoughtfully. "People have bought the stock and banks have lent money on it without knowing whether the property was protected by insurance or not?"

"On the contrary, rather a.s.suming that it was. Your father's antipathy to insurance is a little unusual, you know. So far no one has ever made a point of bringing it strongly before the public. And banks and stock markets are queer things--and confidence is jarred with singular ease. There are a number of pretty important men in this town who would dislike to have some of their loans called or to have Ma.s.sachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction drop ten or fifteen points. Of course this needn't happen--and for a preventative, apply to Charles Wilkinson, Esquire, restorer of lost confidences."

Helen spoke.

"Whose idea was this, did you say?" she asked.

"His name was Smith," said Wilkinson, soberly.

Helen started to ask another question; then changed her mind, and was silent. What surprised her was the fact that she found herself interested, sharply interested, in the problem Charles had presented.

She was, in fact, more interested than she had been in anything for some time. She was astonished to find this to be so. She had always been under the impression, common enough among the more sheltered of her cla.s.s, that business was a thing in which only the men who carried it on could possibly be absorbed. Yet here she had been interested to the exclusion of all else in a matter that was of absolutely no aesthetic value and with the terms and locale of which she was quite unfamiliar. As it had been presented to her and she had tried, at Charles's demand, to find a way out for him--she stated the problem over more clearly--she admitted feeling a trifle piqued when she racked her brain for a solution only to find it barren of expedients and a hopeless blank. Yet this chance acquaintance of Charlie's had apparently hit on _his_ expedient casually enough. Once more she restrained the impulse to ask another question, although she scarcely knew why she did so, and she remained silent until, a few moments later, she was roused by the departure of the satiated Wilkinson.

"Wish me luck," he said, as he turned to go. "More depends upon this than you pampered children of luxury can ever guess. Isabel, I congratulate you on the educational advance of your butler. Miss Maitland, I am your very devoted."

The curtains of the drawing room shut him from sight and sound, except the faint rumor of his descending feet upon the steps.

CHAPTER IV

There are, in the side streets of many if not all the greater cities of the civilized world, shops where skilled artisans are busily at work in the manufacture of "antiques"--antique furniture, antique rugs or bra.s.ses or clocks or violins. The ingenious persons engaged in this reprehensible activity have developed their skill to such a point that it seems probable that fully half their deceit never comes to light at all, and it is certain that their products rarely suffer much by contrast with the things which they seek to imitate. It is only when the maker of the original was a great master that his modern counterfeiter fails--and not always then.

It is, at first thought, a strange business--not so strange that men should give their lives to it as that there should be so much demand for a purely apocryphal product. Looked at more carefully, however, the oddness disappears, and these men are found to be catering to a most legitimate appet.i.te--an appet.i.te which had its origin deep in the early mind of the race, even though it is now, perhaps, pa.s.sing from the control of one of man's senses into that of another.

Latinism, as a creed, is dead, or dying. There are not many Latinists left, find the pessimistic, melancholy folk who found all the beauty of the world in "youth and death and the old age of roses" have appeared, probably never to return. Latinism was a flavor of the soul, and the modern soul rarely, if ever, a.s.sumes that flavor. What Latinism did, however, was to teach the appreciation of the dignity of time, the beauty of the pa.s.sing years, and their enriching effect on things and men. This quality is now extant as a matter of taste, a mental attribute, and it is widely conceived to be a sign of cultivation to "pooh-pooh whatever's fresh and new" in favor of something which has at least the appearance of age with or without the richness and mellowness thereof. After all, the mellowness is the essence; if the years merely age without mellowing a thing, they have done it no good; the same thing new is the more desirable article.

The larger and more important a thing is, the less effect the years have upon it, and the more difficult becomes the task of the enterprising workman who seeks to simulate the wrinkles time would leave. In the case of cities, the task is practically hopeless. There is only one way for a city to attain the beauty and the haunting charm of age, and that is to wait patiently until time has finished his slow work. It is hard to wait, and a new city is a crude and painful thing.

One can easily imagine the older cities looking scornfully or pityingly down upon it, themselves secure in the grim or the delicate beauty of their age. Only once in many generations does a city rise which achieves a character, an individuality, without waiting for the lingering years to bestow it. It happens so seldom as to come almost into the realm of the miraculous. Yet to him who for the first time sees New York at night, or as the declining sun sets ten thousand roofs for the moment aflame--a miracle seems not more wonderful than this.

There are miles on miles of roofs in many a town, stretching away beyond the reach of sight; there is, especially in the great cities of the old world, an immensity of movement which is at once alien and akin to the great movements of earth and sea; there are cities which seem great because of the multiplicity of things--men and ships and creeds and costumes which jostle one another in every market place. New York has all these things--yet they do not explain New York--they are almost inconsiderable elements in the greater thing that is the city itself.

Wherein the essence lies--whether it is the purely superficial aspect of it, the imaginative daring of its architecture, or some deeper and more subtle thing--no man can surely say.