White Ashes Part 8

"What page do you want, Mr. O'Connor?" asked Herbert.

The Vice-president glanced at the daily report he held in his hand, and turned back the yellow telegraph blank that was pinned to it.

"Sheet one fifty-six," he said shortly. "No--one _fifty_-six. That will do." He turned to a boy. "Find out for me if Mr. Wintermuth is in his office."

The boy, whose name was Jimmy, sped off, soliloquizing as he went: "Gee, there must be somethin' up to get O'C. as hot as that!" Arrived at the opposite end of the big room, he reconnoitered for a view of the President's office. By virtue of some little strategy he presently managed to catch sight of Mr. Wintermuth, seated at his desk, pen in hand, in his most magisterial att.i.tude, listening judicially to the remarks of some visitor. Jimmy, who was no fool, recognized the stranger as the business manager of an insurance paper about half whose s.p.a.ce was given to articles highly eulogistic of certain insurance companies whose advertis.e.m.e.nts, by some singular coincidence, invariably appeared further on in the publication. From the position of the two Jimmy deduced that the conversation was not likely to be terminated very soon, and dashed back to Mr. O'Connor with that intelligence. The Vice-President was still studying the many-colored sheet.

"Busy, eh? Well, leave that map turned up, and let me know as soon as he is at liberty." And he strode back to his own office and shut the door with a slam that disturbed the serene spectacles of Mr. Otto Bartels, who was sedulously studying a long row of figures on a reinsurance bordereau.

Mr. Bartels was Secretary of the Guardian, and his office adjoined that of the Vice-president. Mr. Bartels, who was very short and stout, and very methodical, and Teutonic beyond all else, looked up with mild surprise in his placid eyes and the hint of something on his face which in a more mobile countenance would have been an expression of gentle remonstrance. His place was lost, in the column he was scanning, by the dislodgment of his spectacles, which he wore well down toward the lower reaches of his nose--it would have been out of place to speak of that organ as possessing an end or a tip, for it was much too bulbous for any such term to fit. Taking the spectacles with both hands, he replaced them at their wonted angle, and with that phantom of disapproval still striving for expression and outlet among his features, he resumed his employment.

Otto Bartels was a discovery of Mr. Wintermuth's, many years before, when that gentleman occupied a less conspicuous position with the corporation of which he was now long since the head. One day, sitting at his desk, he looked up to observe a youth who stood gravely regarding him in silence for at least three minutes before his speech struggled near enough the surface to make itself audible. It appeared that the stranger was in need of a position, that he was accurate, though not quick at figures, and that he would begin work for whatever wage was found proper. He was given a trial in the accounts department, and for five years his sponsor heard no more of him. At the end of that time he found that his protege had worked up to the position of a.s.sistant chief clerk. Three years later the drinking water of the New Jersey suburb where he resided terminated the earthly career of the chief clerk, and Bartels became chief clerk, managing the department as nearly as was humanly possible without speech of any kind. And when, twenty years from the time the Guardian saw him first, Otto Bartels found himself authorized to write Secretary after his flowing signature, it was an appointment inevitable. He had simply pushed his way out of the crowd by grace of his unremitting thoroughness, his industry, which was really not especially creditable, as nothing but work ever occurred to him, and a gratifying inability to make errors of detail. He knew the name of every agent on the company's list, when each one was expected to pay his balances, and how much in premiums each annually reported. He never wrote letters, for it was impossible for him to dictate to a stenographer; he rarely took a vacation, for he had nowhere to go and nothing to do outside the office; he never engaged in discernible social intercourse of any sort, for he had never known how to begin. Such was the methodical man who so efficiently kept the books and records of the Guardian. He knew and cared nothing about underwriting, regarding the insurance operations of the company as a possibly important but purely secondary consideration.

In Mr. Bartels's opinion the company's records were the company.

The underwriting department of the Guardian occupied, with the officers' quarters, the upper two floors of the rather narrow building.

On the top floor were the East and the South, under the immediate supervision of Smith, the General Agent, and the offices of Mr.

Wintermuth, Mr. O'Connor, and Mr. Bartels. The President occupied the southeast corner and the two others the northeast end, while Smith's desk was out in the open office, with the maps and files and survey cases and his subordinates under his eye.

On the floor below a.s.sistant-Secretary Wagstaff held forth; he was in charge of the Western Department, which comprised the states from Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee westward to the coast. Mr. Wagstaff was a competent, careful, unimaginative, unambitious man who did his work from day to day. He enters this story virtually not at all; be it enough to say that he had a red mustache and a bald, bright head and wore shoes with cloth tops. He took good care of his territory, and if he never made much money for the company, he never lost any. So much for Edgar Wagstaff.

Before returning to the top floor, however, one character in Mr.

Wagstaff's entourage must be brought majestically forward into view.

This dignified personage was Jenkins, the clerk of the Pacific Coast accounts. Mr. Jenkins was, in his youth, a mathematician of remarkable promise. His dexterity with arithmetic and algebra was such that his family began to think that could this ability at figures be translated into terms of Wall Street there might be a Napoleon of finance bearing the proud if somewhat homely name of Jenkins. But unfortunately it seemed otherwise to the fates, for Mr. Jenkins, with advancing years, found his Napoleonic onrush irresistibly diverted toward pleasant byways frequented in the golden age by one Bacchus, G.o.d of wine.

Apparently the disinclination for the dusty road of duty had resulted in much satisfaction and no lasting damage to Bacchus, but far otherwise was it with Jenkins. He fared as conscientiously in Bacchus's footsteps as he could, but his was not the true Baccha.n.a.lian temperament. Under the influence of the grape Jenkins, instead of becoming gay, waxed ever more portentous and sublime. When he was almost sober, say of a Friday afternoon, he was grave, merely creating the impression that some long-past tragedy had clouded his life. When he was by way of being what one may denominate half-interested, his face a.s.sumed the saturnine expression of an ancient misanthrope, but when at last he reached the full flower of his magnificent endeavors, the silent severity of his countenance became so forbidding and sinister as to freeze the smile from the lips of a happy child. By his face you might know him, but it would of necessity be by the face alone, for so perfect was his control of his dominated limbs that never a quiver betrayed him, and no degree of saturation seemed to affect at all the impeccable footing of his columns.

A spiral staircase connected the seventh and eighth floors of the Guardian building, constructed for the convenience of the clerks who had to do with several departments. It was near the top of this staircase that Smith had his desk, in the center of the maelstrom.

Smith strongly believed in being in the center of things, and from where he sat he could overlook every foot of the s.p.a.ce occupied by the Eastern Department. As he was supervisor, he intended to supervise--wherein lay one of the chief sources of his value.

"Jimmy, bring me the _Journal of Commerce_," he said to the invaluable and ubiquitous one.

"Mr. O'Connor's got it on his desk, sir," replied that youth, almost breathlessly. Speed in action had so demanded equivalent celerity in diction that often speech came badly second in endurance, causing him to sputter and gasp for completed utterance.

"Well, go and see if he isn't through with it," Smith directed. "I haven't seen the losses yet this morning."

Almost immediately, a modern Manhattan Mercury, Jimmy was again at his side.

"No, sir--he says he's still usin' it," he reported.

"Bring it to me when he's finished," Smith closed the matter, devoting himself to other things. Those requiring his attention were numerous enough, but first of all came an interruption in the shape of a caller.

All manner of men come into the agency department of an insurance company. Smith's field covered the whole Atlantic Coast and Gulf sections of the country, and the agents from these states alone made quite an army, and any one of these agents was likely at any time to appear from a bland blue sky, completely upsetting the General Agent's continuity of work. Then there were the placers from the brokerage firms, offering out-of-town risks which most of them had personally never seen and knew little or nothing about, and whose descriptive powers were all the greater for being unhampered by any blunt facts, a few of which are so often fatal to a successful rhetorical ascension.

Then there were the various clients of the company who came straggling in to have a New York City policy transferred to cover for six days at Old Point Comfort, or to ask whether the presence of a j.a.panese heater--size two by three and one half inches--would destroy the validity of their policy; and there was the lady whose false teeth fell into the kitchen stove while she was putting on a scuttle of coal, and who thought the company should reimburse her for the loss under her policy which covered all her personal effects and wearing apparel; and then there was the suspicious individual who called to make sure that his premium had been properly transmitted to the company, for the local agent in his town has strange ways and looked very peculiar when accepting the money.

These and a hundred others, all in the way of business; and in addition there were the shifting atoms of humanity who float in and out of the office buildings of a great city, pensioners for the most part on either the bounty or the carelessness of busy men--waifs in the industrial orbit who gain their living by various established or ingenious variations of the more indirect forms of brigandage. There were men selling books that probably no one in the world would ever wish to buy or to read; women soliciting funds for charitable inst.i.tutions which might or might not exist; salesmen positively enthusiastic in their desire to give the Guardian the benefit of their patent pencil sharpeners, or gas crowns, or asbestos window shades, or loose-leaf ledgers, or roach powder of peculiar pungency and efficiency. Of course the elevator attendants were supposed to distinguish between the sheep and the goats, and to let only legitimate callers ascend, but the discretionary power of the Ethiopian is scarcely subtle--or at least such was the case with the Guardian's staff of watchdogs--and as a result many a visitor reached the floor where Smith presided only to have his disguise fall from him at his first word and to be politely ejected by the invaluable Jimmy, who was accustomed to accompany the gentle strangers as far as the street door in order that there might be no misapprehension on their part.

This particular morning Smith disposed with more or less ease of several claimants to his attention, before he was finally brought to a pause by the appearance of Mr. Darius Howell of Schuyler, Maine, who had come to New York in connection with his potato business, and who had incidentally decided to call at the office of the Guardian which he also had the honor locally to represent. Years before, Smith had once visited Schuyler, and at that time had met the small, grizzled individual who now stood before him. He had not, however, the slightest idea of the ident.i.ty of his visitor, and waited a brief moment for a clew to aid him.

"You don't remember me, I reckon," said the caller. "I remember you, though, Mr. Smith. My name is Darius--"

"Howell," said Smith, instantly, getting up to shake hands. Of all the agents reporting to him there was only one Darius. "I remember you very well. I hope you haven't come to tell me that Schuyler has burned up. Come in and sit down. It must be five years since I've seen you."

"Six years come next July," agreed the other, cautiously. It would have been impossible for him to admit the simplest proposition without some sort of qualification; he never had done so, and there seemed no valid reason to suppose that he ever would.

"And how is Schuyler coming along?" inquired the General Agent, with decided deference to the conventionalities of such interviews.

"Oh, so so," replied the man from Maine. "There ain't been much change up there since you was there. That is, not what you'd really call a change. How's things with you? The company still pays dividends, I see."

Mr. Howell was the owner of four shares of the company's stock.

"Doing all right," Smith responded. "The Guardian believes in making haste slowly, you know; we don't go ahead very fast, but we keep plugging along. Mr. Wintermuth feels it's always best to be on the safe side. Occasionally it's discouraging when we see some compet.i.tor build up an income in three or four years as big as ours that it's taken three or four generations to establish, but when we read some morning that our enterprising friends have had to reinsure their liability with some stronger concern and retire from business because their losses have caught up to them, we don't feel quite so badly.

Personally I think we could travel a little faster, and I'd like to see our premiums twice what they are now. And I hope you'll double them this year in Schuyler, anyway."

"Maybe so, but you never can tell. Business is liable to slack up just when you think it's going along all right. And there ain't been any new building in Schuyler of any account for two years back but Dodge's feed mill and the new Union School. You've got a line on both of them."

At this point their conversation was interrupted because of the departure of the persistent gentleman, who had been closeted with Mr.

Wintermuth. As the door closed on him, Jimmy disappeared around the corner and thrust his head and fore quarters, so to speak, into O'Connor's open doorway.

"Th' President's at liberty now," he announced.

Without replying, the Vice-President picked up the _Journal of Commerce_ and the daily report with the yellow telegram affixed to it, and strode over, past Smith's desk, to the office of his chief.

"Can you come out and look at the map a minute, sir?" he asked respectfully.

"Certainly. What is it? A loss?" replied Mr. Wintermuth, noticing the telegraph slip as he rose from his chair and followed O'Connor toward the map counter.

"Yes," said the Vice-president. He was pa.s.sing the desk of the General Agent, and he took care that his remark might be overheard. "And it looks to me like something we ought not to have had."

"What's that?" rejoined the older man, quickly. "We're not accepting business that we shouldn't write, are we? What is it? And who pa.s.sed it?"

"Smith seems to have approved the line," O'Connor said slowly.

"Herbert, I thought I told you to leave that Providence map out for me."

"It's right there, sir," said the map clerk; "right where you left it, sir."

"Here's the risk," said the Vice-president, pointing it out to his superior with every sign of decent regret. "It seems to be a mattress factory, a cla.s.s we never write. . . . Smith appears to have pa.s.sed it--there's his initial. Of course, he may have had some special reason for--"

Mr. Wintermuth interrupted him.

"Herbert, ask Mr. Smith if he will not step this way for a moment, please."

To the man from Maine the General Agent said: "You'll excuse me for a minute?"

And Darius Howell, with astonishing definiteness, replied: "Sure--go ahead."

Smith found his two officers awaiting him by the open map. From the expression on O'Connor's face he suspected that that gentleman had discovered something not displeasing to him, and unconsciously he found his own shoulders squaring themselves as though for a conflict.

"We have here," began the President, slowly, "a loss at Providence on a risk which Mr. O'Connor seems to think we should not have written."