White Ashes Part 24

"But why should the Conference try to make you belong? And will they attempt to hurt you if you resign?"

"I don't know. Possibly not. That will soon be seen. But what I can't fathom is why O'Connor, after all these years, should now lay his wires to get the Guardian out. He never does an important thing like that for nothing; he's got some idea in the back of his head. I feel certain of that from the elaborate pains he took to make me think it was not at his instigation that the thing was done. But I know better, for I know O'Connor."

"Haven't you any clew at all?"

"Not really. They're all too vague. I can't for the life of me see what O'Connor has to gain by getting the Guardian out of the Conference. What good can it possibly do him personally?"

"I feel sure you'll hit on the correct solution at last," Helen said thoughtfully, "because I have a distinct remembrance that one of your chance shots went right to the mark when Charlie Wilkinson was trying to get Mr. Hurd to insure his street car company. Charlie thought it was tremendously clever of you. It was the first time I had ever heard of you."

Smith looked at her quickly. Feeling rather than seeing the glance, the girl hastily continued:--

"I wonder whether Mr. Hurd ever decided to carry insurance."

"I wonder, too," the underwriter agreed, with amus.e.m.e.nt. "If cool nerve counts for anything, your friend Wilkinson ought to have come out all right. I must ask Mr. Osgood about it the next time I go to Boston."

"If he does succeed, I'm sure he'll feel it was quite largely due to your suggestion. And that is why I think you'll eventually solve the mystery of Mr. O'Connor's conduct."

"I wish I could believe it. But I seem to be as far away as when I began to speculate. The only things I can think of don't appear to me to be reasonable."

"What are some of them? Could I understand them?"

"Better than I, very likely. Since I've gotten you so far into this horribly businesslike affair, I may as well go all the way through. As I said, I can't see how O'Connor can personally get any advantage out of this in any conceivable way, so long as he stays with the Guardian."

"But suppose he himself resigned--what then? Or don't people ever leave the Guardian?"

"Oh, minor employees, of course--they're always s.h.i.+fting about. But no one of any importance has left the company, except by old age or death, for a good many years. n.o.body knows exactly why, but it's a good company, and every one just stays. And besides, if O'Connor got out to go with some one else, what good would this move have done him?"

"Isn't it just possible that he has gotten the impression the company has treated him badly, and he is trying to do something to hurt it before he leaves?"

"Pure malignance? Hardly that. And besides, if that were so, why should Mr. Wintermuth accept his suggestion? No, I can't believe that is it."

"What could Mr. O'Connor do, supposing that he left the Guardian and went with some other company?"

"That's another thing. As things are now, I don't see how he could do much to hurt us. It would be a bit awkward for us, I don't mind saying, if he went with some Conference company, for some of the insiders are none too scrupulous in their methods against non-Conference compet.i.tors. Of course, if the Conference should pa.s.s a separation rule--but no, that's impossible."

"What is a separation rule?"

"Why, it's a kind of boycott. The Conference might pa.s.s a rule reducing the commission of any agent who also represented non-Conference companies. You see, most agents represent several companies--a good, big agency may perhaps represent fifteen or twenty--and the Conference companies are in the majority in most of the agencies where the Guardian is represented. It would mean that those agents would have to choose between resigning us and having their commissions reduced, and there is very little doubt as to which course they would take. The Conference might even forbid its companies to be represented at all in mixed agencies--where both Conference and non-Conference companies were located--and then those agents would either have to throw us out or lose the bulk of their companies."

"But couldn't they get other non-Conference companies to fill up their agencies and keep the Guardian?"

"No--hardly. There are only a few really high-cla.s.s companies on the outside. And most of the agents couldn't afford to change. They would simply have to let us go; and that would mean that we'd have to make our agency plant practically all over again."

"And that would be hard to do, I suppose?"

"It would be just about equivalent to building a new company, for the company's agents are the company."

"But you say it's impossible they should pa.s.s this rule. Why?"

"Several reasons. It's pretty arbitrary--it looks a little like a combination in restraint of trade, although company organizations in a lot of states have separation rules. But I doubt whether the Eastern Conference has the backbone to put such a rule in effect. Besides, it's scarcely worth while as things now stand--almost all the good companies are in the Conference, and as for the rest, they're either used to them or they feel they're hardly worth bothering about."

"But the Guardian is, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Smith, thoughtfully, "I suppose it is. Still, what good would it do O'Connor? That's what I keep coming back to, because I'm absolutely certain he wouldn't have put this thing through without some personal end in sight."

"Might not he be disinterested, for once?"

"Not O'Connor," said Smith, dryly. "But good heavens! haven't we talked intrigues and cabals and plots long enough? There are one or two other things in life, you know--I've hardly given you a chance to speak, and I've been holding forth like an unsuccessful detective reporting to his superior officer."

And the conversation drifted into other channels.

A great city is a wonderful place in a thousand ways, not the least of which is its magical influence upon human relations.h.i.+ps. Perhaps its mere size, the multiplicity of its sights and sounds, its effect of isolating an individual in the midst of an almost impenetrable throng--perhaps these things are chiefly responsible. But it is certain that, in common with the desert and the sea, a city like London or Paris or New York carries in its very atmosphere a sense of almost devotional reality, of almost the pure essence of life. In the very shrine of the unreal and the artificial, reality grips with a power elsewhere unknown. Beyond all the curious striving for the immaterial, the sense of the utter futility of that very effort becomes wholly clear. Follies and affectations may be sought with added fervor for the mind and the body, but the want of them is stilled in the soul.

Since this is so, in the very home of conventions and conventionalities these artificial ideas become more palpably ridiculous. Surrounded by needless man-made fetters, one sees them to be inane. The wind that blows between the worlds blows in the world's great cities, and it blows, for their lovers at least, the cobwebs from the heart. What is natural is seen to be right, and what is real is seen to be true.

To Smith, lover of his city as he was, these truths were peculiarly obvious; and to Helen Maitland, seeing them largely from the angle of Smith's vision, they became the truth no less. She remembered with some surprise her quite recent dislike of New York, and her even more recent chill of distaste and dread, when she came from the Park, which had checked for the moment the liking she felt springing to life. Of course it was loneliness; but here was a man who had told her that New York's loneliness was one of its greatest charms, and who regarded the apparent heartlessness of the city as one of its most inspiring tonics.

Somehow, and apparently most naturally, she found it was coming to seem so to her.

If a man wishes to interest a woman, he does well to speak to her of his enthusiasms; and if he desires to alienate her interest, he will do well to forget them. Smith, who cared deeply for New York, and who was moving unconsciously along the sunny way that led to Helen Maitland, found that never two enthusiasms welded so readily as these. Part of this, no doubt, was due to the city's own influence, but probably the greater part was due to his own genuine understanding and affection for the town itself.

And Helen had not been the readiest of converts, for in the first place, coming as she did from Boston, her sympathies were not with the larger city. She had found its confusion rather tiresome, its contrasts perhaps a little crude, its poverty somewhat distressing, and its wealth a trifle vulgar. With Smith, a new viewpoint was hers, and her old conceptions, which now seemed hopelessly provincial, melted like mist before the sun.

Smith knew his city as a maestro knows his instrument, and their voyages together were like incursions into an enchanted s.p.a.ce where time was not. He seemed to know exactly what had been in every nook and corner of the town at every period of its career. Once they stood on Broadway near Columbia University, on whose granite wall was fixed the plate which told of Was.h.i.+ngton's muster upon those very heights; and Smith had built up for her, not as an historian, but as an actor in the drama, the picture before her eyes. He showed her the old Jumel Mansion farther up town, and they went back together a century and a half to all the strange sights those old halls had seen.

Perhaps the softest spot in Smith's sympathies was held by the Knickerbockers--those st.u.r.dy old citizens who seemed all of them somehow to have taken something of the mold of their redoubtable leader and the greatest of them all, Peter Stuyvesant. Smith was familiar with them all, from Peter down. And old Minuit, the Indian, selling his island for a song, was so much a matter of reality to Smith that Helen came to believe in him also as a real individual.

"There he is now!" Smith once suddenly remarked, as they turned a corner and found themselves almost in the arms of an exceptionally spirited cigar-store figure.

"Who?" Helen had asked in surprise.

"Why, old Peter Minuit himself, in the very act of reaching for the proceeds," Smith explained. For which piece of simple levity it is to be feared that he was neither properly ashamed nor adequately rebuked.

It was in the old city, below Twenty-third Street, that the work of time had been most diverse. Here four full eras had left their mark--the aboriginal, the early Dutch, the English-American, and lastly the modern age of granite canyons and sky-seeking towers and marvels of high air and below ground. Smith knew all four, and if one knows where to search, there are plenty of interesting relics of the first three still to be found. He knew how the southern end of Manhattan looked when Hendrick Hudson moored the Half Moon in the lower harbor; and where the sh.o.r.e line lay when the old Dutch keels with their high p.o.o.ps and proud pennons rode at anchor in the river; and again later on when the English flag had replaced the Dutch, and the towering masts of frigates and brigs and schooners made with their threaded rigging a constant etching of the water front.

He guided Helen through old streets where a century's relics still persisted and where one could still find an occasional cornerstone which the flight of a hundred hurrying years had not displaced. He was familiar with most of the old street names,--how West Broadway was once Chapel Street,--many of them long since abandoned for modern changelings far less effective. For the first time Helen realized the origin of the name of "Bouwerie," and how far into New York's and the nation's traditions reached some of the mossy gravestones in Trinity Churchyard.

The city, during the progress of the Civil War, of which Helen had heard Augustus Lispenard speak, was clearer in her vision than ever before, for Smith's grandfather had marched down Broadway in '61, and, unlike Mr. Lispenard, he had not come back.

"They were just starting Central Park," Smith said; "because I have heard mother say often that her father's letters from the front asked several times how the Park was getting along."

"It seems odd, doesn't it? I had always looked on the Park as something which must always have been where it is," Miss Maitland commented. "But I suppose there must have been a beginning some time."

Now all these wanderings and this companions.h.i.+p could not go wholly for naught. Smith was not at all a sentimental person, and Miss Maitland was not in search of emotional adventure, but they were on hazardous ground, and it was hazardous because it was very pleasant to them both.

Miss Mary Wardrop was a lady in whom discretion was held in but lukewarm esteem. Had this not been so, she would have doubtless interposed, for convention's sake at least, in the swiftly developing friends.h.i.+p between her niece and this young insurance man. But Miss Wardrop had long since ceased to care what the world said, and her satisfaction with her own views was sufficient to permit her ignoring those who disagreed with them. She saw nothing objectionable in Smith, and if she speculated on the affair at all, she probably reflected that Miss Maitland was now twenty-five years old and if she didn't know her own mind at that age, it didn't much matter what happened to her.

So Smith, who was blandly ignorant of the fact that propriety as strictly measured in Boston would have been aghast at his candid manner of following his inclinations, met with no obstacles save from Miss Maitland herself. She, it is true, now and again drew back when it seemed to her that their friends.h.i.+p was perhaps progressing too rapidly; but she was not used to men like Smith. There was nothing of the Puritan about him, nothing of the false idea that if a thing is pleasant, it must therefore be somehow sinful. On the contrary, Smith believed that with a normal person the gratification of wishes was the natural result of their possession. If he felt hungry, he ate; if he wanted to see Helen, he went and saw her. Against this hopeless lack of affectation ordinary feminine weapons were badly blunted; in fact, they came to strike Miss Maitland as rather silly. After all, if he wished to see her, why shouldn't he do so? The mere fact that he had seen her the day before was not germane. The one germane thing would have been a lack of inclination on her part to see Smith--and curiously enough, this lack did not manifest itself.