White Ashes Part 9

"Where is the risk, sir?" Smith asked quietly.

"Here. Here is the daily report. It is approved by you. . . .

Probably there is something about the risk which does not appear on the face of it. Do you remember the circ.u.mstances?"

Smith looked the daily report over carefully. It certainly showed the risk, just as plainly as the map also showed it, to be a mattress factory, a cla.s.s prohibited by the Guardian, and there were Smith's own interwoven initials. Then, suddenly, at the sight of the hieroglyph, he remembered. "Why, you pa.s.sed this line yourself, Mr. O'Connor," was on his lips to say. But he did not say it. For by the cold light in the eyes of the Vice-President he knew that course useless.

"I remember the risk," he said, addressing himself to Mr. Wintermuth.

"It was a direct line of our local agents, and they were very anxious to have us take a small amount. It was accepted as an accommodation, and I reinsured one half, as you see, sir. Is it a bad loss?"

"Reported total," replied the other, turning over the telegram. "My boy, you're usually so careful, I don't understand how you came to put through such business. You ought at least to have referred it to Mr.

O'Connor or myself."

Smith glanced again at the Vice-president, but that gentleman remained silent, and the General Agent again swallowed what was on his tongue to utter.

"Yes, sir, I should have done so," he subst.i.tuted.

Mr. Wintermuth continued: "We cannot write such risks as that and hope to make an underwriting profit. They say I am a believer in 4 per cent bonds--perhaps I am, but I am _not_ a believer in 4 per cent mattress factories." The old gentleman softened his criticism with a smile.

But to Smith, feeling rather than seeing the half-hidden satisfaction of the Vice-president, the President's kindly manner proved of little comfort. For Smith and O'Connor knew that the line in question had been submitted to O'Connor, and that in view of the compet.i.tion of several very liberal companies in the Providence agency, the Vice-president had authorized its acceptance. With his wonted caution, however, he had refrained from putting himself on record, other than orally.

"Reinsure half, and put it through, Smith," he had directed; and Smith had done so.

In cases where his own security was involved, Mr. F. Mills O'Connor was an exceedingly cautious man. Looking before he leaped was with him almost a pa.s.sion; and if he expected to leap on a Thursday, it was generally estimated that he began his preliminary looking on Monday of the week before.

He was a large, clean-shaven, dark-haired man of indeterminate age. By his profession at large he was little known, but in the Guardian office he was very well known indeed and excellently understood, and an appreciation of his character and qualities truthfully set down by the observant Jimmy or by Herbert, the map clerk, would never have been selected by the O'Connor family as satisfactory material for a flattering obituary notice.

It appeared likely, however, that it would be a long time before his obituary would be written. He was probably, at this time, a year or two the other side of forty, and his care of himself was unimpeachable, for he guarded his health as carefully as he did his other a.s.sets. He had become Vice-President and underwriting head of the company several years before this story opens, and it seemed probable that he would hold that position indefinitely--or perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say until some more advantageous position lay open to him.

Mr. O'Connor was what is commonly termed a cold proposition, and if there was any sentiment in him it was so carefully secreted that for ordinary purposes it was non-existent. Yet he was not unpopular. When he so desired, he could a.s.sume a spurious geniality so closely resembling the genuine article that few persons, and none of his agents, ever discovered the difference. And his business efficiency was commonly taken for granted.

Indeed, there was but one man in the insurance fraternity who a.s.sessed Mr. O'Connor at very nearly his proper value, and that man O'Connor disliked and feared as vividly as his rather apathetic nature would admit. The one man was Smith. Whoever might sail the seas in ships of illusion regarding the Vice-president of the Guardian, Smith saw the facts clear and looked at them squarely.

The princ.i.p.al cause of Smith's own position in the company was his own vitality and industry, but next to that was the fact that Mr.

Wintermuth had originally given him a chance and then declined to permit any one to impede his natural progression. This att.i.tude was due princ.i.p.ally to the President's conviction of his own ability to judge men. Having once made up his mind, he allowed no one to tell him anything about any of his employees. He always said: "I watch the boys myself, and what I can't see I don't want to know." In the old days what he did not see was of no especial importance to the Guardian Insurance Company, but the eyes of an old lion grow also old. Yet the habit remained, and thus all Mr. O'Connor's efforts to discredit his ambitious young a.s.sistant had so far fallen on ears stone-deaf and hermetically sealed. But the Vice-president could never forgive the younger man for looking at him with so unimpressed a gaze, and never missed an opportunity to show his prejudice to their mutual chief.

There had been several incidents of a similar nature previous to the mattress factory loss, where Smith had been either indirectly advised or permitted by O'Connor to take a certain course, only to find himself excoriated when the risk burned or the outcome proved otherwise disastrous. Only a short time before, Smith had been sent into New York State, acting under vice-presidential order of procedure, to straighten out the Guardian's relations with the local division of the Eastern Conference. The Eastern Conference was an organization to which most of the leading companies belonged. Its function was the orderly regulation of all matters affecting its members' relations with their agents. Theoretically its primary purpose was to prevent the overcompensation of some agents at the expense of others. If it did not always succeed in doing this, it did at least succeed in making extremely embarra.s.sing the lot of any company operating outside of its organization. It was everywhere an arbitrary body, and its New York State branch was perhaps the least disciplined of any of its const.i.tuent parts, and was moreover suspected of favoring some of its own members at the expense of others. President Wintermuth, loyal to his a.s.sociates, but patient only up to a certain point, had of late begun to consider that his company was decidedly in the latter cla.s.s.

It was easy to see that a diplomat's hand was needed to accomplish what Smith was sent to accomplish, and Smith could be a diplomat of parts when the need arose; but his instructions from Mr. O'Connor had left him so little lat.i.tude that he was obliged to return without securing any positive action of any sort.

"They will take the matter up at the next meeting," he reported.

O'Connor transmitted this report to the President with an expression of disappointment.

"We ought to have had that thing fixed up. And if it had been handled right, it would have been fixed up now," he said.

Whereat the President, with one of his flashes of clear vision, replied suavely, "And who gave Smith his instructions?"

It was only a chance shot on Mr. Wintermuth's part, but it went straight to the mark, and it rankled. O'Connor knew--or felt reasonably sure--that Smith had not mentioned the matter to any one but himself, yet the chief had struck unerringly the nail's head. And all this endeared Smith but little to the man who had never liked him.

It is none too comfortable to work for a man who will covertly begrudge you your successes and indifferently conceal his satisfaction at your mistakes; for the stoutest hearted it is a discouraging business. This Smith found it, and he would have found it still more discouraging had it not been for the exuberance of his enthusiasm for his profession and his healthy appet.i.te for most real things that came his way--real work, real pleasures, real sport, and perhaps a few real follies. Many times, after a bad hour spent in a futile defense against the only half-perceptible hostility of O'Connor, he would find himself seriously questioning whether he would not do more wisely to leave the Guardian and hazard a new fortune in another field. Yet all the while he knew that this course of speculation was idle and a waste of time and cerebral tissues. He was a Guardian man, and with the Guardian he was going to stay--unless the Company itself took a different view. Of course there was a time coming when Mr. Wintermuth would lay down his badge of office, but before that time much would occur. Sufficient unto that day would be its own evil, without enhancing it by imaginary additions. So Smith stood by his post, but there was at times an expression in his face which gave F. Mills O'Connor himself cause for careful consideration.

But to Darius Howell, somewhat awkwardly saying good-by at the Guardian's door, Smith's smile was as sunny as the skies of Schuyler, Maine. For troubles often turned out to be largely imaginary, while Darius was indubitably real.

CHAPTER VI

Promptly at nine o'clock in the morning of every business day for fifteen years, Hannibal G. Pelgram, uncle of Stanwood Pelgram, had seated himself at his desk in the office of the Pelgram Plumbers' Supply Company, and it was rarely that he left before his stenographer had begun to show signs of impatience and anxiety. But in the sixteenth year of his reign his liver, which up to that time had acted with the most commendable regularity, began to develop alarming eccentricities of behavior. Mr.

Pelgram became gradually less certain in his attendance, and finally his struggle with the refractory liver ended in the victory of that inconspicuous but important organ, and he pa.s.sed peacefully away at a German spa in the course of taking a cure which would very likely have killed him even had he been in perfectly normal health.

His will began by the customary direction to his executor to pay his just debts and funeral expenses--exactly as though the executor was a.s.sumed to be a thoroughly unscrupulous person who, although not benefiting himself in the least by his dishonesty, would try in every possible way to evade settlement with all the dead man's legitimate creditors, including the undertaker. Then he left a small bequest to a faithful cook and another to an endowed retreat for tuberculous Baptists which already had more money than it could hope ever to use. The residue, consisting princ.i.p.ally of stock in the Plumbers' Supply Company, went to Stanwood, with the earnest wish that his nephew enter and eventually a.s.sume the direction of the business with which the family name had been so long and so honorably identified.

Stanwood received the news with modified rapture. He was grateful for financial independence, but the idea of taking up the bathtub business struck him with dismay. So with prudent forethought he sought out Amory Carruth, a lawyer of his acquaintance; and to him explained his dilemma.

It required some measure of specious ingenuity to explain his errand as he wished; but Mr. Carruth, being used to squirming legatees, understood and came to the point with a candor which made Pelgram wince. After first flippantly suggesting that the plumbing business would at least afford Pelgram the chance to indulge his taste in porcelains, he eased the artist's mind by a phrase as soothing as it was noncommittal.

"You can follow your uncle's will as regards the disposition of his property. That part is sane enough. Whether it was equally sagacious, equally sane, to try to plunge you into the plumbing business is not so clear. We are, therefore, clearly justified if we say that he knew how he wished to dispose of his estate, but his mental condition was such that his legatee felt justified in modifying--in some degree--certain of his requests."

This apologetic theory was finally accepted. Dawes, the manager, whose surplus income had gone into the bank rather than into his liver, purchased the estate's interest, and on the proceeds Stanwood had now for five years been conducting his elaborate studio on Copley Square.

The completion of Miss Maitland's portrait was marked by one of the artist's characteristic functions. By any person in the ordinary walks of life it would have been called a tea, but Pelgram preferred to denominate it a private view. Every time he completed a work that he considered of real importance--relatively more often than modesty might have prescribed--he celebrated the birth of the masterpiece by one of these oddly termed baptisms in tannin. Possibly they were ent.i.tled to be called views, as the opus bravely challenged the tea table in popularity, and occasionally won by superior powers of endurance over a necessarily limited supply of edibles, but certainly the privacy was questionable, as to each one of them Stanwood invited nearly every one who might be expected to come.

Fortunately not a large proportion of these actually turned up. Some came because they were under obligations to the artist, and some because he was under obligations to them; some from vague curiosity, and others from sheer ignorance. Those who appeared at such a one as this, where the portrait of a young girl was displayed, were roughly limited to a few easily identified cla.s.ses. There was centrally the young girl herself, and then there were the members of her family, all radiant except the purchaser of the picture, who customarily showed traces of sobriety and skepticism. There were one or two prospective patrons lured to the trap; some ephemeral sycophants, volunteer or mercenary; a few idle fellow artists who enjoyed seeing a colleague make what they considered to be an exhibition of himself; some inevitable people who went everywhere they were asked, especially when there was a prospect of something to eat; and a few puzzled and lonely-looking souls who could furnish no explanation of their attendance, did not stay very long, and never came a second time.

At this view the role of sycophants was to be played by two young girls who had taken up self-cultivation as a sort of fad, and had somehow become obsessed with the curious idea that art such as was found in Pelgram's studio could a.s.sist them in their commendable pursuit of culture. Their host was consequently delighted when, at an early hour, Miss Heatherton and Miss Long arrived, as they had promised to do. Their manifest adoration would produce an admirable spot light in which he might stand during the function, but more than that, he hoped that Helen herself would be impressed by the deep regard in which these fair disciples evidently held him and his work. Miss Heatherton was to pour the tea, and Miss Long was to distribute the thin lettuce sandwiches which formed its somewhat unsubstantial accompaniment.

Miss Heatherton's initial remark demonstrated the fact that, despite her plunge into what her family considered a dangerous part of Bohemia, she had managed to preserve intact her adherence to the traditional in conversational matters. When Pelgram escorted her to the tea table, she bleated a pathetic protest against his positive inhumanity in placing her where the great work was invisible.

"Oh, Mr. Pelgram, you are really cruel! Eleanor, don't you think he might have put me where I could sit and look at that beautiful portrait, and not down here at the other end of the room?"

Miss Long, a tall girl with large liquid eyes and a weak red mouth, languidly murmured a sympathetic a.s.sent, and their host smiled deprecatingly, but with an inward glow of satisfaction; such a remark was obviously not inspired by the exact truth, but it was nevertheless pleasant to hear.

"Ah, Miss Heatherton," he replied, "perhaps after all it is better as I have ordered it. For its little hour the picture should reign with its sovereignty unquestioned, while if you were near by--" he broke off meaningly, and Miss Long rewarded his compliment with a bovine glance of rapture, while Miss Heatherton looked modestly down at the teapot. Even to an unaesthetic person the arrangement seemed very good indeed, but rather for the more practical reason that the proximity of food and drink would very likely have distracted the attention of some of the more hungry visitors to such a degree that the work of art might have been comparatively ignored.

The next to arrive were Isabel Hurd and Wilkinson. Wilkinson had not been invited, but on hearing his cousin say that she was starting for the studio, he promptly announced that he would accompany her. He knew that Pelgram disliked him intensely, but he did not feel the slightest hesitation on that account in accepting the artist's hospitality, and in fact quite enjoyed the prospect of a dash into the enemy's country. To be sure, he saw little chance of loot except a trifling modification of his chronic afternoon hunger; but Isabel's society was desirable, and Pelgram appealed vividly to his sense of the ludicrous. His reception was all he could have hoped; his host greeted him with outward affability, but when he extended his hand from the black velvet cuff with the handkerchief tucked into it, his face expressed the hidden anguish of antic.i.p.ated ridicule to such a degree that Wilkinson felt his visit already justified.

"It is very good of you to come," said the artist, with a forced smile.

"I had no idea you were interested in art."

"Oh, but I am, though," returned the other, confidently. "I have no idea what it is, but I'm very much interested in it. And every one says I have the artistic temperament in the highest degree. By the way, what is art, anyway? No one ever told me."

Pelgram gave a preliminary cough, and glanced hastily about the room, but calculating that his audience would be larger later on, he restrained himself.

"What is art?" he slowly repeated, half-closing his eyes and smiling mystically on his guests. "What is art?" Miss Long hung breathlessly on his words.

As, however, he seemed more interested in the question than apt to reply to it, Wilkinson moved on toward Miss Heatherton and the tea table, while his place was taken by Miss Maitland and her mother, who had just come into the room.

The studio was presently quite full, and conversation rose to a shriller pitch. The talk was mostly of art. Catch phrases indicative of informality and intimacy with the manufacture of the beautiful were recklessly flung about. The pace quickened. The operations of Miss Heatherton and Miss Long threatened speedily to be terminated because of exhausted resources as well as insufficient s.p.a.ce. It was warmer, and there was a queer mixed odor of tea, roses, and paint. John M. Hurd, greatly relieved after he discovered that he was not immediately expected to buy anything, was recounting with animation to a fat man in a frock coat how the basis of the family fortune had been laid by Mr. Hurd's grandfather whose one life rule was never to invest his money in anything west of Albany, New York. One of Pelgram's colleagues had pinned Miss Maitland into a corner and was raptly telling her how great an influence a certain old master of whom she had never heard had exerted on the work of an extraordinarily talented young man from Fall River whose name and pictures alike were entirely unknown to her.

Pelgram went by with his arm familiarly pa.s.sed through that of a phlegmatic-looking young Chinaman whom he led up to Miss Maitland's portrait. Ling Hop had been cook on a yacht, when an artistic friend of Pelgram's and a parasite of the yacht's owner had discovered one day that the guardian of the galley was a fair draughtsman with some little imagination; and much to his own surprise the Oriental had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from the cook stove and thrust into the artistic arena. It was lucky for him that his scene was set in Boston, which is always sympathetically on edge to embrace exotic genius. In a society delicately attuned to intellectual harmonies from all sources, however strange or weird, the success of a Chinaman possessing the slightest facility with the brush was a.s.sured from the first. His industrious compatriots in the local laundries, themselves more impa.s.sionate critics, doubtless regarded Ling Hop as an impudent charlatan; but Boston in its most restricted and exclusive sense looked at his work with interest and respect, though sadly without humor. The guest stood silently before the portrait, scanning it earnestly, almost with anxiety, blinking his almond eyes behind his sh.e.l.l-rimmed gla.s.ses. As, however, he did not know enough about the technique of painting to offer a sensible appreciation, he wisely confined himself to a very few vaguely eulogistic monosyllables, which seemed greatly to gratify the artist.