Peter was still poring over his ledger one dark afternoon in December,
his bald head glistening like a huge ostrich egg under the flare of the
overhead gas jets, when Patrick, the night watchman, catching sight of
my face peering through the outer grating, opened the door of the Bank.
The sight so late in the day was an unusual one, for in all the years
that I have called at the Bank--ten, now--no, eleven since we first knew
each other--Peter had seldom failed to be ready for our walk uptown when
the old moon-faced clock high up on the wall above the stove pointed at
four.
“I thought there was something up!” I cried. “What is it, Peter--balance
wrong?”
He did not answer, only waved his hand in reply, his bushy gray eyebrows
moving slowly, like two shutters that opened and closed, as he scanned
the lines of figures up and down, his long pen gripped tight between his
thin, straight lips, as a dog carries a bone.
I never interrupt him when his brain is nosing about like this; it is
better to keep still and let him ferret it out. So I sat down outside
the curved rail with its wooden slats backed by faded green curtains,
close to the big stove screened off at the end of the long room, fixed
one eye on the moon-face and the other on the ostrich egg, and waited.
There are no such banks at the present time--were no others then, and
this story begins not so very many years ago--A queer, out-of-date,
mouldy old barn of a bank, you would say, this Exeter--for an
institution wielding its influence. Not a coat of paint for half a
century; not a brushful of whitewash for goodness knows how much longer.
As for the floor, it still showed the gullies and grooves, with here
and there a sturdy knot sticking up like a nut on a boiler, marking the
track of countless impatient depositors and countless anxious borrowers,
it may be, who had lock-stepped one behind the other for fifty years
or more, in their journey from the outer door to the windows where the
Peters of the old days, and the Peter of the present, presided over the
funds entrusted to their care.
Well enough in its day, you might have said, with a shrug, as you looked
over its forlorn interior. Well enough in its day! Why, man, old John
Astor, James Beekman, Rhinelander Stewart, Moses Grinnell, and a lot of
just such worthies--men whose word was as good as their notes--and
whose notes were often better than the Government's, presided over its
destinies, and helped to stuff the old-fashioned vault with wads of
gilt-edged securities--millions in value if you did but know it--and
making it what it is to-day. If you don't believe the first part of my
statement, you've only to fumble among the heap of dusty ledgers piled
on top of the dusty shelves; and if you doubt the latter part, then try
to buy some of the stock and see what you have to pay for it. Although
the gas was turned off in the directors' room, I could still see
from where I sat the very mahogany table under which these same
ruffle-shirted, watch-fobbed, snuff-taking old fellows tucked their
legs when they decided on who should and who should not share the bank's
confidence.
And the side walls and surroundings were none the less shabby and quite
as dilapidated. Even the windows had long since given up the fight
to maintain a decent amount of light, and as for the grated opening
protected by iron shutters which would have had barely room to swing
themselves clear of the building next door, no Patrick past or present
had ever dared loosen their bolts for a peep even an inch wide into the
canyon below, so gruesome was the collection of old shoes, tin cans,
broken bottles and battered hats which successive generations had
hurried into the narrow un-get-at-able space that lay between the two
structures.
Indeed the only thing inside or out of this time-worn building which the
most fertile of imaginations could consider as being at all up to date
was the clock. Not its face--that was old-timey enough with its sun,
moon and stars in blue and gold, and the name of the Liverpool maker
engraved on its enamel; nor its hands, fiddle-shaped and stiff, nor
its case, which always reminded me of a coffin set up on end awaiting
burial--but its strike. Whatever divergences the Exeter allowed itself
in its youth, or whatever latitude or longitude it had given its
depositors, and that, we may be sure, was precious little so long as
that Board of Directors was alive, there was no wabbling or wavering, no
being behind time, when the hour hand of the old clock reached three and
its note of warning rang out.
Peter obeyed the ominous sound and closed his Teller's window with a
gentle bang. Patrick took notice and swung to the iron grating of the
outer door. You might peer in and beg ever so hard--unless, of course,
you were a visitor like myself, and even then Peter would have to give
his consent--you might peer through, I say, or tap on the glass, or you
might plead that you were late and very sorry, but the ostrich egg never
turned in its nest nor did the eyebrows vibrate. Three o'clock was three
o'clock at the Exeter, and everybody might go to the devil--financially,
of course--before the rule would be broken. Other banks in panicky
times might keep a side door open until four, five or six--that is, the
bronze-rail, marble-top, glass-front, certify-your-checks-as-early-as-
ten-in-the-morning-without-a-penny-on-deposit kind of banks--but not the
Exeter--that is, not with Peter's consent--and Peter was the Exeter so
far as his department was concerned--and had been for nearly thirty
years--twenty as bookkeeper, five as paying teller and five as receiving
teller.
And the regularity and persistency of this clock! Not only did it
announce the hours, but it sounded the halves and quarters, clearing its
throat with a whirr like an admonitory cough before each utterance.
I had samples of its entire repertoire as I sat there:
One...two...three...four...five--then half an hour later a whir-r and a
single note. “Half-past five,” I said to myself. “Will Peter never find
that mistake?” Once during the long wait the night watchman shifted his
leg--he was on the other side of the stove--and once Peter reached up
above his head for a pile of papers, spreading them out before him under
the white glare of the overhead light, then silence again, broken only
by the slow, dogged tock-tick, tock-tick, or the sagging of a hot coal
adjusting itself for the night.
Suddenly a cheery voice rang out and Peter's hands shot up above his
head.
“Ah, Breen & Co.! One of those plaguey sevens for a nine. Here we are!
Oh, Peter Grayson, how often have I told you to be careful! Ah, what
a sorry block of wood you carry on your shoulders. I won't be a minute
now, Major.” A gratuitous compliment on the part of my friend, I being
a poor devil of a contractor without military aspirations of any kind.
“Well, well, how could I have been so stupid. Get ready to close up,
Patrick. No, thank you, Patrick, my coat's inside; I'll fetch it.”
He was quite another man now, closing the great ledger with a bang;
shouldering it as Moses did the Tables of the Law, and carrying it into
the big vault behind him--big enough to back a buggy into had the great
door been wider--shooting the bolts, whirring the combination into
so hopeless and confused a state that should even the most daring and
expert of burglars have tried his hand or his jimmy on its steel plating
he would have given up in despair (that is unless big Patrick fell
asleep--an unheard-of occurrence) and all with such spring and
joyousness of movement that had I not seen him like this many times
before I would have been deluded into the belief that the real Peter
had been locked up in the dismal vault with the musty books and that an
entirely different kind of Peter was skipping about outside.
But that was nothing to the air with which he swept his papers into the
drawer of his desk, brushed away the crumpled sheets upon which he
had figured his balance, and darted to the washstand behind the narrow
partition. Nor could it be compared to the way in which he stripped
off his black bombazine office-coat with its baggy pockets--quite a
disreputable-looking coat I must say--taking it by the nape of the neck,
as if it were some loathsome object to be got rid of, and hanging it
upon a hook behind him; nor to the way in which he pulled up his shirt
sleeves and plunged his white, long-fingered, delicately modeled hands
into the basin, as if cleanliness were a thing to be welcomed as a
part of his life. These carefully dried, each finger by itself--not
forgetting the small seal ring on the little one--he gave an extra
polish to his glistening pate with the towel, patted his fresh,
smooth-shaven cheeks with an unrumpled handkerchief which he had
taken from his inside pocket, carefully adjusted his white neck-cloth,
refastening the diamond pin--a tiny one but clear as a baby's tear--put
on his frock-coat with its high collar and flaring tails, took down
his silk hat, gave it a flourish with his handkerchief, unhooked his
overcoat from a peg behind the door (a gray surtout cut something like
the first Napoleon's) and stepped out to where I sat.
You would never have put him down as being sixty years of age had you
known him as well as I did--and it is a great pity you didn't. Really,
now that I come to think of it, I never did put him down as being of any
age at all. Peter Grayson and age never seemed to have anything to do
with each other. Sometimes when I have looked in through the Receiving
Teller's window and have passed in my book--I kept my account at the
Exeter--and he has lifted his bushy shutters and gazed at me suddenly
with his merry Scotch-terrier eyes, I have caught, I must admit, a line
of anxiety, or rather of concentrated cautiousness on his face, which
for the moment made me think that perhaps he was looking a trifle older
than when I last saw him; but all this was scattered to the winds when I
met him an hour afterward swinging up Wall Street with that cheery lift
of the heels so peculiarly his own, a lift that the occupants of every
office window on both sides of the street knew to be Peter's even when
they failed to recognize the surtout and straight-brimmed high hat. Had
any doubting Thomas, however, walked beside him on his way up Broadway
to his rooms on Fifteenth Street, and had the quick, almost boyish lift
of Peter's heels not entirely convinced the unbeliever of Peter's youth,
all questions would have been at once disposed of had the cheery bank
teller invited him into his apartment up three flights of stairs
over the tailor's shop--and he would have invited him had he been his
friend--and then and there forced him into an easy chair near the open
wood fire, with some such remark as: “Down, you rascal, and sit close
up where I can get my hands on you!” No--there was no trace of old age
about Peter.
He was ready now--hatted, coated and gloved--not a hint of the ostrich
egg or shaggy shutters visible, but a well-preserved bachelor of forty
or forty-five; strictly in the mode and of the mode, looking more like
some stray diplomat caught in the wiles of the Street, or some retired
magnate, than a modest bank clerk on three thousand a year. The next
instant he was tripping down the granite steps between the rusty iron
railings--on his toes most of the way; the same cheery spring in his
heels, slapping his thin, shapely legs with his tightly rolled umbrella,
adjusting his hat at the proper angle so that the well-trimmed side
whiskers--the veriest little dabs of whiskers hardly an inch long--would
show as well as the fringes of his grey hair.
Not that he was anxious to conceal these slight indications of advancing
years, nor did he have a spark of cheap personal vanity about him, but
because it was his nature always to put his best foot foremost and keep
it there; because, too, it behooved him in manner, dress and morals, to
maintain the standards he had set for himself, he being a Grayson, with
the best blood of the State in his veins, and with every table worth
dining at open to him from Fourteenth Street to Murray Hill, and beyond.
“Now, it's all behind me, my dear boy,” he cried, as we reached the
sidewalk and turned our faces up Wall Street toward Broadway. “Fifteen
hours to live my own life! No care until ten o'clock to-morrow.
Lovely life, my dear Major, when you think of it. Ah, old Micawber
was right--income one pound, expense one pound ten shillings; result,
misery: income one pound ten, expense one pound, outcome, happiness!
What a curse this Street is to those who abuse its power for good; half
of them trying to keep out of jail and the other half fighting to keep
out of the poor-house! And most of them get so little out of it. Just as
I can detect a counterfeit bill at sight, my boy, so can I put my finger
on these money-getters when the poison of money-getting for money's sake
begins to work in their veins. I don't mean the laying up of money for a
rainy day, or the providing for one's family. Every man should lay up a
six-months' doctor's bill, just as every man should lay up money enough
to keep his body out of Potter's Field. It's laying up the SURPLUS that
hurts.”
Peter had his arm firmly locked in mine now.
“Now that concern of Breen & Company, where I found my error, are no
better than the others. They are new to this whirlpool, but they will
soon get in over their heads. I think it is only the third or fourth
year since they started business, but they are already floating all
sorts of schemes, and some of them--if you will permit me in confidence,
strictly in confidence, my dear boy--are rather shady, I think: at least
I judge so from their deposits.”
“What are they, bankers?” I ventured. I had never heard of the firm; not
an extraordinary thing in my case when bankers were concerned.
Peter laughed:
“Yes, BANKERS--all in capital letters--the imitation kind. Breen
came from some place out of town and made a lucky hit in his first
year--mines or something--I forget what. Oh, but you must know that it
takes very little now-a-days to make a full-fledged banker. All you have
to do is to hoist in a safe--through the window, generally, with the
crowd looking on; rail off half the office; scatter some big ledgers
over two or three newly varnished desks; move in a dozen arm-chairs, get
a ticker, a black-board and a boy with a piece of chalk; be pleasant
to every fellow you meet with his own or somebody else's money in his
pocket, and there you are. But we won't talk of these things--it isn't
kind, and, really, I hardly know Breen, and I'm quite sure he wouldn't
know me if he saw me, and he's a very decent gentleman in many ways, I
hear. He never overdraws his account, any way--never tries--and that's
more than I can say for some of his neighbors.”
The fog, which earlier in the afternoon had been but a blue haze,
softening the hard outlines of the street, had now settled down in
earnest, choking up the doorways, wiping out the tops of the buildings,
their facades starred here and there with gas-jets, and making a smudged
drawing of the columns of the Custom House opposite.
“Superb, are they not?” said Peter, as he wheeled and stood looking at
the row of monoliths supporting the roof of the huge granite pile, each
column in relief against the dark shadows of the portico. “And they
are never so beautiful to me, my boy, as when the ugly parts of the old
building are lost in the fog. Follow the lines of these watchmen of the
temple! These grave, dignified, majestic columns standing out in the
gloom keeping guard! But it is only a question of time--down they'll
come! See if they don't!”
“They will never dare move them,” I protested. “It would be too great a
sacrilege.” The best way to get Peter properly started is never to agree
with him.
“Not move them! They will break them up for dock-filling before ten
years are out. They're in the way, my boy; they shut out the light;
can't hang signs on them; can't plaster them over with theatre bills; no
earthly use. 'Wall Street isn't Rome or any other excavated ruin; it's
the centre of the universe'--that's the way the fellows behind these
glass windows talk.” Here Peter pointed to the offices of some prominent
bankers, where other belated clerks were still at work under shaded
gas-jets. “These fellows don't want anything classic; they want
something that'll earn four per cent.”
We were now opposite the Sub-Treasury, its roof lost in the settling
fogs, the bronze figure of the Father of His Country dominating the
flight of marble steps and the adjacent streets.
Again Peter wheeled; this time he lifted his hat to the statue.
“Good evening, your Excellency,” he said in a voice mellowed to the same
respectful tone with which he would have addressed the original in the
flesh.
Suddenly he loosened his arm from mine and squared himself so he could
look into my face.
“I notice that you seldom salute him, Major, and it grieves me,” he said
with a grim smile.
I broke into a laugh. “Do you think he would feel hurt if I didn't.”
“Of course he would, and so should you. He wasn't put there for
ornament, my boy, but to be kept in mind, and I want to tell you that
there's no place in the world where his example is so much needed as
right here in Wall Street. Want of reverence, my dear boy”--here he
adjusted his umbrella to the hollow of his arm--“is our national sin.
Nobody reveres anything now-a-days. Much as you can do to keep people
from running railroads through your family vaults, and, as to one's
character, all a man needs to get himself battered black and blue, is to
try to be of some service to his country. Even our presidents have to
be murdered before we stop abusing them. By Jove! Major, you've GOT to
salute him! You're too fine a man to run to seed and lose your respect
for things worth while. I won't have it, I tell you! Off with your hat!”
I at once uncovered my head (the fog helped to conceal my own identity,
if it didn't Peter's) and stood for a brief instant in a respectful
attitude.
There was nothing new in the discussion. Sometimes I would laugh at him;
sometimes I would only touch my hat in unison; sometimes I let him
do the bowing alone, an act on his part which never attracted
attention--looking more as if he had accosted some passing friend.
We had reached Broadway by this time and were crossing the street
opposite Trinity Churchyard.
“Come over here with me,” he cried, “and let us look in through the iron
railings. The study of the dead is often more profitable than knowledge
of the living. Ah, the gate is open! It is not often I am here at this
time, and on a foggy afternoon. What a noble charity, my boy, is a
fog--it hides such a multitude of sins--bad architecture for one,” and
he laughed softly.
I always let Peter run on--in fact I always encourage him to run on. No
one I know talks quite in the same way; many with a larger experience
of life are more profound, but none have the personal note which
characterizes the old fellow's discussions.
“And how do you suppose these by-gones feel about what is going on
around them?” he rattled on, tapping the wet slab of a tomb with the end
of his umbrella. “And not only these sturdy patriots who lie here, but
the queer old ghosts who live in the steeple?” he added, waving his hand
upward to the slender spire, its cross lost in the fog. “Yes, ghosts and
goblins, my boy. You don't believe it?--I do--or I persuade myself I
do, which is better. Sometimes I can see them straddling the chimes when
they ring out the hours, or I catch them peeping out between the slats
of the windows away up near the cross. Very often in the hot afternoons
when you are stretching your lazy body under the tents of the mighty--”
(Peter referred to some friends of mine who owned a villa down on Long
Island, and were good enough to ask me down for a week in August) “I
come up here out of the rush and sit on these old tombstones and talk
to these old fellows--both kinds--the steeple boys and the old cronies
under the sod. You never come, I know. You will when you're my age.”
I had it in my mind to tell him that the inside of a dry tent had some
advantages over the outside of a damp tomb, so far as entertaining one's
friends, even in hot weather, was concerned, but I was afraid it might
stop the flow of his thoughts, and checked myself.
“It is not so much the rest and quiet that delights me, as the feeling
that I am walled about for the moment and protected; jerked out of the
whirlpool, as it were, and given a breathing spell. On these afternoons
the old church becomes a church once more--not a gate to bar out the
rush of commercialism. See where she stands--quite out to the very curb,
her warning finger pointing upward. 'Thus far shalt thou come, and no
farther,' she cries out to the Four Per Cents. 'Hug up close to me, you
old fellows asleep in your graves; get under my lea. Let us fight it out
together, the living and the dead!' And now hear these abominable Four
Per Cents behind their glass windows: 'No place for a church,' they say.
'No place for the dead! Property too valuable. Move it up town. Move it
out in the country--move it any where so you get it out of our way. We
are the Great Amalgamated Crunch Company. Into our maw goes respect for
tradition, reverence for the dead, decency, love of religion, sentiment,
and beauty. These are back numbers. In their place, we give you
something real and up-to-date from basement to flagstaff, with fifty
applicants on the waiting list. If you don't believe it read our
prospectus!'”
Peter had straightened and was standing with his hand lifted above
his head, as if he were about to pronounce a benediction. Then he said
slowly, and with a note of sadness in his voice:
“Do you wonder, now, my boy, why I touch my hat to His Excellency?”