White Ashes Part 16

"You were--you were," Helen hastened to a.s.sure him; but he shook his head.

"Not if you think, after all, that fire insurance isn't vital."

"I'm afraid I chose my word badly. What I meant, perhaps, was that it wasn't picturesque. It isn't that, is it--as the word is generally understood?"

"You mean it isn't building bridges over boiling chasms three thousand feet below in the Andes river bottoms; it isn't leading ragged armies of half-baked South American natives against a mud stockade; it isn't shooting African animals and dining on quinine and hippopotamus liver.

No, there's none of the soldier of fortune business about it. But vital! My heavens! what do you call vital?"

"I don't know," said the girl, humbly. She was somewhat abashed before this flare her words had so suddenly lighted. And she felt honestly contrite, for she saw she had hurt an ideal that was very close and real to the man before her.

At the sound of her reply Smith came to himself.

"I really beg your pardon--again," he said, with a little tremor in his voice. "I didn't appreciate what I was doing, or I wouldn't have blown up with a report like a nitroglycerine storehouse. Will you excuse me?"

Helen looked squarely at him.

"Yes--I will," she said, "on one condition."

"And what is that?"

"That you blow up again. I would really like to see it just as you do, and that is much the best way--carry me along with you."

The underwriter looked momentarily away; then his eyes rested on her thoughtfully.

"All right. I'll do it," he said. "I'll make it so plain to you that you can't escape it. I'll hold you with my glittering eye till you cannot choose but hear," he quoted, with a smile.

"I do not choose but hear," Miss Maitland said.

Smith was silent for a long minute.

"The picturesque things are all very well in their way," he said.

"Revolutions and railway building and all that. Let us take railway building for example--I was once in the construction department of a big railroad, myself. But every one can't get into that department, and even there, there is a good deal of routine and very little thrill.

It's only once in a lifetime, practically, that a man gets his chance to build the suspension bridge that swings a mile above the chasm.

With most railroad builders one day's work is pretty much like another's. Not much excitement, except at long intervals. To plan what you must do is interesting, of course, but the execution is generally a long grind."

"Yes," Helen a.s.sented; "I fancy that would be so."

"It is so. But even if it were not, the kind of obstacles that must be surmounted are very much the same, year in and year out. You ford quicksands; you evade granite hillsides; you fight walking delegates.

What I mean is that the set of obstacles doesn't change much, and the environment of the railway constructor is always about the same. But that is not so with the underwriter. One moment he is in the construction camp of the road builder, and the next in the palace of the city banker; one moment he is in an Idaho sawmill, and the next in a New England college chapel; one moment he is in a Florida orange grove, and the next in a salmon cannery on the Oregon coast. Ten thousand businesses pa.s.s before his eyes, and he must be alert to the local conditions affecting every one. There is no fixed environment for the underwriter."

The girl interrupted him.

"That may be true. But there is no work of original construction about it, is there? Can you compare the vitality of your business with that of the men who create their own ideas? There is no routine about that.

And after all, isn't that more vital than anything else can be?"

"Yes," said Smith, "I presume it is. Certainly it is for the genius; probably even for any man of high and true talent, a man able to lose himself in his own creation. Undoubtedly that is the only real elixir of life, the only ineffable exaltation. But isn't that carrying your argument out too far? We can scarcely set a standard for creative geniuses--there are too few of them. You spoke of the men who create their own ideas. How many of them are there? There are thousands of near-authors, near-musicians, near-artists, near-poets, who are painfully remote from the genuine article. Do you understand what I mean?"

"Oh, yes. And that is so. I myself have at least seen that."

"Of course it is so. And do you suppose these second-rate creators get the real thrill? Not they. In their hearts they know they are frauds, impostors, dilettantes at best. There is no vitality to their grip on things, and they know it. They deal with the spurious and fustian from cradle to grave. Why, I myself know innumerable people that spend their lives in trying to persuade themselves into thinking they are doing something worth while!"

Mentally the girl winced; the words went home so close to Pelgram, who had been in her own mind. It was this very feeling of protest, for which Smith now found voice, that had sickened her of Pelgram.

"Such people get little out of life," the underwriter went on, "probably first because they are constantly uneasy in the knowledge that they are charlatans, and second because they do not have anything real, anything alive, to face. They deal in half-tones, in nuances--"

Nuances! Was the man clairvoyant? He had suggested that an underwriter ought to be. Helen felt that this channel had been pursued far enough.

"No one defends dilettanteism as such," she said.

"One can, though, easily enough, if one wishes," Smith promptly responded. "After all, to do things for the love of doing them is the right way. But they must be the right things, and to get the full taste out of anything one must have faced real dragons to attain it.

There is no lack of dragons in the insurance business. You're fighting them all the time. If it isn't against time to keep your premiums up, it's against fate to keep your losses down. And of course all your days you're fighting on not one but a thousand battle lines to keep your rivals from getting your business away from you. Now your little artist, your semi-creator, hasn't anything like that. So long as he lives he hasn't any real facts to face."

"No; I suppose not," said the girl, slowly.

"The same trouble, or very nearly the same, exists for your soldier of fortune. To be sure, he faces facts--there can be no doubt about that--but they are facts he deliberately seeks, and not the actual obstacles that the world rolls up before him. He gets color and excitement all right, but the quality of the self-constructed excitement isn't quite so fine; in fact, after a while it begins to pall on one. Then, too, a man wearies of doing things that serve no useful end and that get nowhere; he begins to feel awkward and superfluous in the whole scheme of things. And these soldiers of fortune don't really _do_ anything, they merely put on the canvas a few bold strokes that attract ephemeral attention but which their successors promptly paint out, and they leave the world precisely where it was before they entered it or carried on their living."

"But isn't that much the same with you, too? Fire insurance doesn't _get_ anywhere, does it? Of course it's more useful to provide people with fire insurance than with South American revolutions, but after all it isn't indispensable. The world could move, couldn't it," she said diffidently, "without fire insurance? At least it did so for a good many centuries."

"The modern world couldn't," Smith said promptly. "Insurance is one of the things that the world, having had, could not do without. You do not perhaps realize the trend of the world to-day. It is no longer military; it is along commercial lines. Napoleon and Wellington to-day would be capitalists, either bankers or merchants or manufacturers, and their battles would be fought with money, not men. The world is ruled by commerce and trade--and where would trade be without fire insurance?

Nowhere. The foundation of modern trade is credit. Without credit, no trade--or either petty trade limited to cash transactions or trade carried on by great millionaires or trusts who are above the fear of fire--although it is doubtful if there are any such. But for ordinary people, take credit away and trade is at an end."

"How is that? I don't understand," the girl said.

"Business to-day is transacted mainly on borrowed money. Jones, who keeps a corner grocery store, hasn't enough money to buy groceries because his customers don't pay him until the end of the month. So he goes to White and Company, who are wholesale grocers, and buys his stock on credit. But do you suppose White and Company would let him have those groceries if it were not for insurance? Certainly not; that's their only protection. If Jones's store burned with that stock before it was sold, and there was no insurance, who would lose? Not Jones--White and Company could force him into bankruptcy, but that wouldn't collect their bill. As I said, trade would be impossible, except cash trade and that in the grip of interests so vast that the ordinary run of fire losses wouldn't count."

"I never thought of that before," the girl remarked.

"Would the cotton grower s.h.i.+p his cotton north to the New England mills or to Liverpool if he couldn't insure it in transportation? No; he wouldn't dare take the risk. His cotton would remain on his plantation until some venturesome buyer came, paid him cash, and carried it away with him. We should go back to the commercial dark ages."

"You have crushed me, Mr. Smith," Helen said with a smile. "I will admit that insurance is indispensable."

"I was in hopes that you would admit it, not because you were crushed, but because you saw."

"I think I'm beginning to see," she answered.

The underwriter regarded her a little doubtfully; then a whimsical smile crossed his lips, making him singularly youthful and--Helen noted--singularly attractive. By a sudden change of thought he turned toward the window.

"A seaport city is a wonderful thing," he said. "Here come the keels of the world, bringing the tribute of the seven seas. It is a fine place to work, Miss Maitland, this down town New York within sight of the water and the water front. Even if you seldom get time to look at it, you have the feeling that it is there. There is never a minute, summer or winter, night or day, when those keels are not bringing argosies home to these old docks. Merely to walk along the sh.o.r.e front is as though one were in touch with all the world."

"I've seen some of it in Boston," said the girl; "but Boston is not the port it used to be."

"There are places in the world, they say--Port Said is one of them and the Cafe de la Paix in Paris is another--where all things and all people come soon or late. Those places must be the most interesting in the world."

"You have never been abroad?" the girl asked.

"No; I never had time. I have to get my world travel, world strangeness, world movement, as I can. And I get it pretty well, here in this office."

"Here! What do you mean?"