Gibeon was so accustomed to Abner Fownes that it took him for granted,
as if he were a spell of weather, or the Opera House which had
been erected in 1881, or the river which flowed through the town,
tumultuously in spring and parsimoniously in the heat of summer when
its moisture was most sorely needed. On the whole, Abner bore more
resemblance to the river than to either weather or Opera House. He
was tumultuous when he could do most damage, and ran in a sort of
trickle when such genius as he had might be of greater service. On the
whole, the village was glad it possessed Abner. He was its show piece,
and they compared him with the show citizens of adjacent centers of
population.
Your remote villages are conscious of their outstanding personalities,
and, however much they may dislike them personally and quarrel with
them in the family, they flaunt them in the faces of outsiders and
boast of their eccentricities and take pride in their mannerisms. So
Gibeon fancied it knew Abner Fownes from the meticulous crust in which
his tailor incased him inward to his exact geometrical center; it was
positive it comprehended his every thought and perceived the motive
for his every action. For the most part its attitude was tolerant.
Gibeon fancied it allowed Abner to function, and that it could put a
stop to his functioning whenever it desired. The power of his money was
appraised and appreciated; but it was more than a little inclined to
laugh at his bumptious pretense of arbitrary power. George Bogardus,
furniture dealer and undertaker, embalmed the public estimate in words
and phrases.
“Abner,” said Bogardus, “figgers himself out to be a hell of a feller,
and it does him a sight of good and keeps his appetite hearty--and, so
fur’s _I_ kin see, ’tain’t no detriment to nobody else.”
Gibeon had its moments of irritation when Abner seemed to take too much
for granted or when he drove with too tight a check rein, but these
were ephemeral. On the whole, the town’s attitude was to let Abner do
it, and then to call him a fool for his pains.
He was a native of Gibeon. His father before him had moved to the town
when it was only a four corners in the woods, and had acquired, little
by little, timber and mills, which increased in size from year to year.
Gibeon had grown with the mills and with the coming of the railroad.
Old Man Fownes had been instrumental in elevating it to the dignity
of county seat. He had vanished from the scene of his activities when
Abner was a young man, leaving his son extraordinarily well off for
that day.
Abner, as a youth, had belonged to that short, stout class of men
who are made fun of by the girls. He was never able to increase his
stature, but his girth responded to excellent cookery. No man denied
him the attribute of industry in those early days, and, as Gibeon
judged, it was more by doggedness and stodgy determination that he was
enabled to increase his inherited fortune than it was by the possession
of keen mental faculties.
For ten years Abner was satisfied to devote himself to the husbanding
and increasing of his resources. At the end of that time, his
wife having died, he discovered to Gibeon an ambition to rule and
a predilection for county politics. It was made apparent how he
realized himself a figure in the world, and tried to live up to the
best traditions of such personages as his narrow vision had enabled
him to catch glimpses of. He seemed, of a sudden, to cease taking
satisfaction in his moderate possessions and to desire to become a man
of commanding wealth. He bought himself garments and caused himself to
become impressive. He never allowed himself an unimpressive moment.
Always he was before the public and conducting himself as he judged the
public desired to see a personage conduct himself. By word and act he
asserted himself to be a personage, and as the years went by the mere
force of reiterated assertion caused Gibeon to accept him at his own
valuation.... He was patient.
The fact that fifty of every hundred male inhabitants were on his
payroll gave him a definite power to start with. He used this power
to its limit. It is true that Gibeon laughed up its sleeve and said
that smarter men than Abner used him as an implement in the political
workshop; but if this were true, Abner seemed unconscious of it. What
he seemed to desire was the appearance rather than the substance. It
seemed to matter little to him who actually made decisions so long as
he was publicly credited with making them. Yet, with all this, with all
Gibeon’s sure knowledge of his inner workings, it was a little afraid
of him because--well, because he _might_ possess some of the power he
claimed.
So, gradually, patiently, year by year, he had reached out farther and
farther for money and for political power until he was credited with
being a millionaire, and had at least the outward seeming of a not
inconsiderable Pooh-Bah in the councils of his party.
The word “fatuous” did not occur in the vocabulary of Gibeon. If it
had seen the word in print it could not have guessed its meaning, but
it owned colloquial equivalents for the adjective, and with these it
summed up Abner. He possessed other attributes of the fatuous man;
he was vindictive where his vanity was touched; he was stubborn; he
followed little quarrels as if they had been blood feuds. In all the
ramifications of his life there was nothing large, nothing daring,
nothing worthy of the comment of an intelligent mind. He was simply
a commonplace, pompous, inflated little man who seemed to have found
exactly what he wanted and to be determined to squeeze the last drop
of the juice of personal satisfaction out of the realization of his
ambitions.
His home was indicative of his personality. It was a square, red-brick
house with an octagonal cupola on its top. It boasted a drive and
evergreens, and on the lawn stood an alert iron buck. The cupola
was painted white and there was a lightning rod which projected
glitteringly from the top of it. You knew the lightning rod was not
intended to function as a protection against electrical storms as
soon as you looked at it. It was not an active lightning rod in any
sense. It was a bumptious lightning rod which flaunted itself and its
ornamental brass ball, and looked upon itself as quite capping the
climax of Abner Fownes’s displayful life. The whole house impressed one
as not being intended as a dwelling, but as a display. It was not to
live in, but to inform passers-by that here was an edifice, erected at
great expense, by a personage. Abner lived there after a fashion, and
derived satisfaction from the house and its cupola, but particularly
from its lightning rod. An elderly woman kept house for him.
Abner never came out of his house--he emerged from it. The act was a
ceremony, and one could imagine he visualized himself as issuing forth
between rows of bowing servitors, or through a lane of household troops
in wonderful uniforms. Always he drove to his office in a surrey,
occupying the back seat, erect and conscious, while his unliveried
coachman sagged down in the front seat, sitting on his shoulder blades,
and quite destroying the effect of solemn state. Abner, however, was
not particular about lack of state except in his own person. Perhaps
he had arrived at the conclusion that his own person was so impressive
as to render negligible the appearance of any contiguous externals.
It was his office, however, which, to his mind, perfectly set him
off. It was the setting for the jewel which was himself, and it was
a perfect setting. The office knew it. It oozed self-importance.
It realized its responsibilities in being the daily container for
Abner Fownes. It was an overbearing office, a patronizing office. It
was quite the most bumptious place of business imaginable; and when
Abner was in place behind his flat-topped mahogany desk the room took
on an air of complacency which would be maddening to an irritated
proletariat. It was an impossible office for a lumberman. It might
have been the office of a grand duke. Gibeon poked fun at the office,
but boasted to strangers about it. It had on its walls two pictures in
shadow boxes which were believed to be old masters rifled from some
European gallery. What the pictures thought about themselves is not
known, but they put the best possible face on the matter and pretended
they had not been painted in a studio in the loft of a furniture store
in Boston. Their frames were expensive. The walls were paneled with
some wood of a golden tone which Abner was reputed to have imported for
the purpose from South America. The sole furniture was that occupied
by Abner Fownes--his desk and chair. There was no resting place for
visitors--they remained standing when admitted to the presence.
If Abner Fownes, for some purpose of his own, with Machiavellian
intelligence, had set out to create for himself a personality which
could be described only by the word fatuous, he could not have done
better. Every detail seemed to have been planned for the purpose of
impressing the world with the fact that he was a man with illusions
of grandeur, motivated by obstinate folly, blind to his silliness;
perfectly contented in the belief that he was a human being who
quite overshadowed his contemporaries. If he had possessed a strong,
determined, rapacious, keen mind, determined upon surreptitious
depredations upon finance and morals, he could not have chosen better.
If he wished to set up a dummy Abner which would assert itself so
loudly and foolishly as to render the real, mole-digging Abner
invisible to the human eye, he could not have wrought more skillfully.
He was a perfect thing; his life was a perfect thing.... Many men,
possessing real, malevolent power, erect up clothes-horses to function
in their names. It was quite unthinkable that such a man should set
_himself_ up as his own stalking horse.
Abner sat before his desk, examining a sheaf of tally sheets. They were
not the tally sheets of his own lumber yard, but figures showing the
amount of spruce and pine and birch and maple piled in numerous mill
yards throughout the state. Abner owned this lumber. In the fall he had
watched the price of lumber decline until he calculated it had reached
a price from which it could only rise. Others had disagreed with him.
Nevertheless, he had bought and bought and bought, intent upon one
_coup_ which should make him indeed the power in the lumber industry of
the country, which was his objective. He had used all available funds
and then had carried his credit into the market, stretching it until
it cried for mercy. Now he owned enough cut lumber to build a small
city--and the price had continued to drop. That morning’s market prices
continued the decline. Abner’s state of mind was not one to arouse envy.
The sum of money he must lose if he sold at the market represented
something more than the total of his possessions. Gibeon rated him as a
millionaire. That he was in difficulties was a secret which he had been
able to conceal for months--and being who he was, and having created
the myth of Abner Fownes, he had been able to frown down inquisitive
bank officials and creditors and to maintain a very presentable aspect
of solvency. But Abner needed money. He needed it daily and weekly.
Payrolls must be met; current overhead expenses must be taken care of.
Notes coming due must be reduced where possible--and with all market
conditions in chaos Abner had early seen there could be no hope of
legitimate profit lifting him out of the trap into which he had lowered
himself.
His reasoning had been good, but he had not foreseen what labor
would do. In his lumber camps through the winter of 1919-20 and the
succeeding winter, he had paid woodsmen the unprecedented wage of
seventy-five to eighty-five dollars a month. Some of his cutting he had
jobbed, paying each individual crew eight dollars a thousand feet for
cutting, hauling, and piling in the rollways. It had seemed a thing
impossible that six months should see these same lumberjacks asking
employment at thirty-five dollars, with prospects of a drop of five
or six dollars more! With labor up, lumber must go up. It had dropped
below cost; now the labor cost had dropped and he found himself holding
the bag, and it was a very cumbersome bag indeed.
Therefore he required a steady flow of money in considerable sums. It
was a situation which no fatuous, self-righteous man could handle. It
called for imagination, lack of righteousness, a cleverness in device,
a fearlessness of God and man, lawlessness, daring. Honest methods
of business could not save him.... Abner Fownes was in a bad way....
And yet when money had been required it was produced. He tided things
over. He produced considerable amounts from nowhere and there was no
inquiring mind to ask questions. They accepted the fact. Abner always
had controlled money, and it was in no wise surprising that he should
continue to control money.... One thing is worthy of note. Abner kept
in his private safe a private set of books, or rather, a single book.
It was not large, but it was ample for the purpose. In this book
Abner’s own gold fountain pen made entries, and of these entries his
paid bookkeepers in the office without had no knowledge whatever. The
books of Abner Fownes, Incorporated, showed a story quite different
from that unfolded by the pages of the little red morocco book in
Abner’s safe.
There came a rap on the door, and Abner, with a quick, instinctive
movement of his whole gelatinous body, became the Abner Fownes
the village knew, pompous, patronizingly urbane, insufferably
self-satisfied.
“Come in,” he said.
The door opened and Deputy Jenney quite filled the opening. He stepped
quickly inside, and closed the door after him with elaborate caution.
“Don’t be so confounded careful,” Abner said. “There’s nothing like a
parade of carefulness to make folks suspect something.”
“Huh!... Jest wanted to report we hain’t seen nothin’ of that
motortruck of your’n that was stole.” He grinned broadly. “Figger to
git some news of it to-night--along about midnight, maybe.”
“Let Peewee know.”
“I have.”
“Er----” Abner assumed character again. “I have heard stories of this
Lakeside Hotel.... Blot on the county.... Canker in our midst. Stories
of debauchery.... Corrupt the young.... Duty of the prosecutor to
investigate.”
“Eh?”
“I shall come out publicly and demand it,” said Abner. “The place
should be closed. I shall lead a campaign against it.”
Deputy Jenney’s eyes grew so big the lids quite disappeared in the
sockets.
“Say----” he began.
“This Peewee Bangs--so called--should be driven out. No telling.
Probably sells whisky.... Do you suppose he sells liquor, Deputy?”
“I--why--I don’t b’lieve Peewee’d do no sich thing. No, sir.”
“I shall find out.... By the way, I note that Lancelot Bangs has an
advertisement in the _Free Press_. Tell him to discontinue it--or his
profits will drop. Make it clear.”
“Say, that professor wrote a piece about me in to-day’s paper. Can’t
make out what he’s hittin’ at. For two cents I’d lambaste him till he
couldn’t drag himself off on his hind laigs.”
“Er--no violence, Deputy....” Abner Fownes’s lips drew together in an
expression which was not at all fatuous. “A paper can do great harm
even in a few issues,” he said. “That girl’s a stubborn piece.” His
eyes half closed. “What’s the professor doing?”
“Snoopin’ around.”
Abner nodded. “If he could be induced--er--to go away.”
“He kin,” said Mr. Jenney, “on the toe of my boot.”
“Wrote a piece about you, eh?”
“I’ll ’tend to his case,” said Mr. Jenney. “What be you goin’ to do
wuth that newspaper?”
“Why--er--Deputy, you wouldn’t have me--ah--interfere with the liberty
of the press.... Palladium of freedom. Free speech.... There was
nothing else, Deputy?”
“That’s all.”
“I--er--hope you recover my truck. Reward, you know.”
Deputy Jenney grinned again, more broadly than before, and left the
room.