White Ashes Part 2

Only a few miles to the eastward the roofs of Boston and the golden dome of the Capitol glittered in the morning sun, and there were the bright rails stretching clean and straight up to the very gates of the city. Railroading was a silly business anyway, thought Smith. An express train should be consistent, and not suddenly decide to become a landmark instead of a mobile and dynamic agent. He almost wished he had taken his ticket by the Fall River boat--as he probably would have done had he been a Bostonian.

"Without reference to its political aspect," he reflected, "I believe strongly in water. I might have been deeply disturbed if there had been a ground swell or a cross sea going around Point Judith, but I wouldn't have been threatened with approaching senile decay en route."

Smith was from New York. The elderly Bostonian who shared his section had thought so from the first. He had guessed it when Smith took out for the second time his watch and replaced it with a snap; he had felt his belief strengthened when his fellow traveler raised the sash and looked impatiently up the idle track; and he had dismissed all doubt when Smith, conversing with the apathetic brakeman, crisply indicated his desire to return from a study of still life to the moving picture show for which he had paid admission. The elderly Bostonian had observed many New Yorkers, but it had never ceased to be a source of surprise to him why they all should be so incessantly restless with an electric anxiety to be getting somewhere else. To his own thinking one place was very much the same as another,--with the exception of Boston,--and a comfortable inertia was by no means to be condemned. If people were waiting for one, and one didn't appear, they merely waited a little longer--that was all. If eternity was really eternity, there was exactly as much time coming as had pa.s.sed. In any event no well-regulated New England mind would permit itself to become disturbed over so small a matter.

Smith, guessing perhaps something of this from his companion's placid face, felt a momentary embarra.s.sment at his own impatience.

"I've an engagement at ten o'clock," he remarked, somewhat apologetically, to his conservative neighbor. "Do you suppose this train is going to let me keep it?"

The gentleman addressed cautiously expressed the opinion that if no further malign influences were felt, and the train were presently to start, the remainder of the journey would occupy comparatively little time.

And so in due course it came to pa.s.s as the elderly Bostonian had predicted, clearly proving--if Smith had been open to accept proof--that the Oriental method of reasoning is the most comfortable, whatever may be said of its efficiency. He had left home at eleven on the night before, and he arrived at the offices of Silas Osgood and Company, 175 Kilby Street, at exactly half an hour before eleven in the morning.

The exercise of walking up from the South Station, although the walk was a short one, had wholly dispelled the irritation of the delay, so that his smile was as genuine as ever when Mr. Silas Osgood held out his courtly hand in welcome It would have been a very bitter mood that could have withstood the Bostonian's greeting.

"We were looking for you a little earlier in the morning," he said, when the first greetings were over. "You come so seldom nowadays that we feel you ought to come as early as possible."

Smith laughed.

"If you'd said that to me when I had been waiting two hours somewhere just the other side of North, East, West, or South Newton, I would have probably snarled like a dyspeptic terrier. Now, seeing you, sir, I can blandly reply that I came via Springfield and that the train was a trifle late."

"Exceedingly courteous, I am sure, for one not a native," agreed the other, smiling. "I am advised that the train has been known to be delayed."

"Well, I'm here now, anyway," Smith rejoined, "and very glad to be. It must be six weeks since I saw the good old gilded dome on the hill, and six weeks seems a long time--or would, if they didn't keep me pretty busy at the other end."

The two men were by this time in Mr. Osgood's private office, and the closing door shut out the click of typewriters and the other sounds of the larger room outside. As Mr. Osgood seated himself a trifle stiffly in his wide desk chair, Smith looked at him affectionately. The reflection came into his mind that the old gentleman was just a little older than when they had last met, and the thought gave a pang.

Silas Osgood was nearing his seventieth year. A long life of kindly and gentle thinking, of clean and correct living, had left him at this age as clear-eyed and direct of gaze as a child, but the veins showed blue in the rather frail hands, and the face was seamed with tiny wrinkles. Mr. Osgood had been in business in the fire insurance world of Boston for almost half a century. He was as well known as the very pavement of Kilby Street, that great local artery of insurance life, and the pulse of that life beat in him as strongly as his own.

To be an insurance man--and by that is meant primarily a fire insurance man--is in New England no mean or casual thing. South, West, in the newer and more open lands, where traditions are fewer and there is less time for the dignities and observance of the amenities of commerce, fire insurance takes its chance with a thousand other roads to an honest dollar. If a Western lawyer has a few spare hours, he hangs out an insurance sign and between briefs he or his clerk writes policies.

The cas.h.i.+er of the Farmers' State Bank in the prairie town ekes out his small salary with the commissions he receives as agent for a few companies. If a grist-mill owner or a storekeeper has a busy corner of two Southern streets where pa.s.sers-by congregate on market day, he gets the representation of a fire company or two, and from time to time sends in a risk to the head office, whose underwriters go nearly frantic in endeavoring to decipher the hidden truth in the dusty reports of these well-intentioned amateurs.

But it is not so in New England. In New England fire insurance reaches its proudest estate. It is a profession, and to its true votaries almost a religion. Its sons have, figuratively speaking, been born with a rate book in one hand and a blank proof-of-loss clutched tightly in the other. And in the mouth a silver spoon or not, as the case might be, but in any event a conclusive argument for the superior loss-paying ability and liberality in adjustment of the companies they respectively represent. They are fire insurance men by birth, education, and tradition--they and their fathers before them. Four generations back, Silas Osgood's family had been supported by the staid old English public's fear of fire. Three generations in Ma.s.sachusetts had been similarly preserved from the pangs of hunger. Likenesses of all four were hanging on the wall of Mr. Osgood's office; as to ident.i.ty the first two were highly questionable, but their uniforms in the old prints showed up fresh and bright. In those old days gentlemen only, men of education and station, whose judgment and courage were beyond question, were intrusted with the responsibility of fighting the flames. It is hard to say why this important and exciting work should no longer attract the same sort of men to its service.

Hanging beside the four generations were the commissions of the fire companies locally represented in the Osgood office. Stout old companies they were, too, for the most part; one of the older ones was well in the second century of its triumph over fire and the fear of fire and the ashes thereof; this was a foreign company which Osgood held for old sake's sake. The other commissions bore American signatures, most of them well known and well esteemed. On the wall right above where Smith sat was the gold seal of his own company, the Guardian, and against the seal the inexplicable hieroglyph which served Mr. James Wintermuth for his presidential signature. Then there was the great white sheet with the black border which set forth to all the world by these presents that Silas Osgood and Company were the duly accredited agents of the Atlantic Fire Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut. The narrow placque of the old Birmingham Indemnity of Birmingham, England, looked like a calling card beside the Atlantic's flamboyant placard.

Smith, seeing Mr. Osgood's look fixed for a moment on the parchment above his head, said inquiringly, "How long is it that you have represented the Guardian in Boston?"

The older man smiled reflectively and turned his eyegla.s.s in his hand as he spoke.

"It was the year after the big fire when I first took the Guardian into my office. You are a close enough student of the game to know that that was just about forty years ago."

Smith nodded.

"Before Richard Smith was born. But I remember the date. Who appointed you as agent?"

Mr. Osgood pointed to the scrawl at the foot of the framed commission.

"My old friend, James Wintermuth," he said. He paused a moment. "I can almost see him now as he looked when he came to call on me--in the old office farther down the street. Tall and quick-tempered, and you can imagine how strong in the fingers he was in those days! I recall I used to keep my glove on when I shook hands with him. He was a fine young chap, was James. Perhaps a _little_ too hasty for us conservative New Englanders, but--" He broke off, a half-smile on his lips.

Smith remained silent.

"It's a fault you young New Yorkers are apt to have," the Bostonian presently went on. "Most of you are a trifle aggressive for us over here--just a bit radical."

The other laughed good-naturedly.

"I myself should say that my honored chief had lived down his radicalism long ago. It's lucky for Silas Osgood and Company that there is a little of it left somewhere in the company, for the President convalesced from his attack of radicalism in eighteen eighty-five or thereabouts and has never been threatened with a relapse or a recurrence. You may criticize us, sir, but you will have to admit that unless there was a little radicalism in my own department, the Guardian would never have accepted the lines and the liability in this down-town district that you have sent us and are sending us now. I hope I'm conservative enough, but with all due respect to Mr.

Wintermuth, what he calls conservatism often strikes me as dry rot."

He stopped, laughing again.

"This is not an explosive protest," he said. "It is merely the result of having traveled on the conservative Boston and Manhattan, which would turn a phlegmatic Pennsylvania Dutchman into a Nihilist."

Then both men laughed together, and turned their attention to the business before them, Mr. Osgood's pale silver head close beside Smith's brown one.

In the outer office typewriters clicked, clients hung over desks, and the traffic of a busy morning proceeded. It was just about twelve o'clock when the clerks nearest the door stopped their work for a brief minute to look up and smile, for Charles Wilkinson, whenever he came to that office, timed his arrival with a skill that was perfectly understood by all. Mr. Wilkinson beamed blandly over the map counter, and still more blandly inquired whether Mr. Bennington Cole was in.

Mr. Cole was, it appeared, at his desk, and Mr. Wilkinson required no one to show him the way.

"h.e.l.lo, Benny," he said cheerfully. "You hardly expected to see me here to-day, did you? But I'm the early bird, all right. The excessively shy and unseasonable habits of the matinal worm never appealed favorably to me, but we have to have him once in a while, so here I am. You know what for, don't you? Or do you?"

Cole surveyed his visitor dispa.s.sionately.

"I fancy I can guess," he replied.

"No, upon my word," the other rejoined with spirit; "you do me a grave injustice, Benny. I've already had luncheon--that is to say, I've just had breakfast. You can more fully appreciate the significance of my call when I tell you that I came to you directly from the breakfast table. No, sir, the object of this visit is strictly business."

Bennington Cole gravely b.u.t.toned up his coat and thrust both hands into his pockets.

Mr. Wilkinson smiled buoyantly.

"Benny, you've a delightful surprise in store for you," he said.

"Having astonished you by telling you that I was not open to an invitation to lunch, I am going to follow it up by a.s.suring you that I do not intend to suggest the extension of even the paltriest of pecuniary accommodations. I am after bigger game."

Cole's suspicion melted into a semblance of interest.

"You don't mean--" he began.

"Yes, but I do, though," said the other. "That's the precise meaning of this pious pilgrimage at this unG.o.dly hour. I want to find out where you keep that worm. Yesterday afternoon, at the Hurds', you had an idea. You know you did--you can't conceal it from my piercing sense of penetration. And your idea had the ring of real currency when you accidentally dropped it. So I'm here to collaborate, that's all."

Mr. Osgood's junior partner looked around at the clerks, who hastily resumed their interrupted duties.

"Come in here," he said to the visitor, and he led his guest into an inner office next to Mr. Osgood's own, and closed the door behind him.

"I _did_ have an idea," he conceded, as he motioned Wilkinson to a seat, "and it was an idea that had several things to recommend it. But it was a business proposition, and if you will pardon my saying so, Charlie, you are not the kind of a collaborator I would choose, if I were doing the choosing."

"But you're not, my boy," replied the other, unabashed. "I'm doing the choosing, myself, and I choose you. Your idea was palpably based on separating my barnacled connection from some of the ghastly pile of glittering gold that he has taken, five cents at a time, from the widows, orphans, blind, halt, and lame who patronize his trolley lines.

Elucidate forthwith, Benny--in the vernacular, unbelt. I am listening."

Cole was reflecting. No one knew better than he how little regard John M. Hurd really felt for this mercurial youth. Yet Mr. Hurd had resisted with entire success all other means of approach. After all, family connections counted for something, even with the retentive old trolley magnate. So when at last he spoke, it was with the determination to show a part of his hand, at least, to Wilkinson.