There are, in the side streets of many if not all the greater cities of
the civilized world, shops where skilled artisans are busily at work in
the manufacture of "antiques"--antique furniture, antique rugs or
brasses or clocks or violins. The ingenious persons engaged in this
reprehensible activity have developed their skill to such a point that
it seems probable that fully half their deceit never comes to light at
all, and it is certain that their products rarely suffer much by
contrast with the things which they seek to imitate. It is only when
the maker of the original was a great master that his modern
counterfeiter fails--and not always then.
It is, at first thought, a strange business--not so strange that men
should give their lives to it as that there should be so much demand
for a purely apocryphal product. Looked at more carefully, however,
the oddness disappears, and these men are found to be catering to a
most legitimate appetite--an appetite which had its origin deep in the
early mind of the race, even though it is now, perhaps, passing from
the control of one of man's senses into that of another.
Latinism, as a creed, is dead, or dying. There are not many Latinists
left, find the pessimistic, melancholy folk who found all the beauty of
the world in "youth and death and the old age of roses" have appeared,
probably never to return. Latinism was a flavor of the soul, and the
modern soul rarely, if ever, assumes that flavor. What Latinism did,
however, was to teach the appreciation of the dignity of time, the
beauty of the passing years, and their enriching effect on things and
men. This quality is now extant as a matter of taste, a mental
attribute, and it is widely conceived to be a sign of cultivation to
"pooh-pooh whatever's fresh and new" in favor of something which has at
least the appearance of age with or without the richness and mellowness
thereof. After all, the mellowness is the essence; if the years merely
age without mellowing a thing, they have done it no good; the same
thing new is the more desirable article.
The larger and more important a thing is, the less effect the years
have upon it, and the more difficult becomes the task of the
enterprising workman who seeks to simulate the wrinkles time would
leave. In the case of cities, the task is practically hopeless. There
is only one way for a city to attain the beauty and the haunting charm
of age, and that is to wait patiently until time has finished his slow
work. It is hard to wait, and a new city is a crude and painful thing.
One can easily imagine the older cities looking scornfully or pityingly
down upon it, themselves secure in the grim or the delicate beauty of
their age. Only once in many generations does a city rise which
achieves a character, an individuality, without waiting for the
lingering years to bestow it. It happens so seldom as to come almost
into the realm of the miraculous. Yet to him who for the first time
sees New York at night, or as the declining sun sets ten thousand roofs
for the moment aflame--a miracle seems not more wonderful than this.
There are miles on miles of roofs in many a town, stretching away
beyond the reach of sight; there is, especially in the great cities of
the old world, an immensity of movement which is at once alien and akin
to the great movements of earth and sea; there are cities which seem
great because of the multiplicity of things--men and ships and creeds
and costumes which jostle one another in every market place. New York
has all these things--yet they do not explain New York--they are almost
inconsiderable elements in the greater thing that is the city itself.
Wherein the essence lies--whether it is the purely superficial aspect
of it, the imaginative daring of its architecture, or some deeper and
more subtle thing--no man can surely say.
There are strewn about in a thousand niches of the city little groups
of buildings which seem to have assembled themselves, by some lonesome
impulse, into communities. Primarily, of course, these groupings are
ethnological, these cities within a city being originally created
largely by the timidity of strangers in a strange land. There are
little Italys, and Chinatowns, and diminutive Bohemias, all swung
together by the action of this great centripetal force of loneliness.
The buildings in these communities, inflexible enough in all conscience
as regards design, contrive none the less to take on in some way a
character and appearance peculiar to their inhabitants; this may be a
matter only of red Turkey turbans flapping in the breeze, or perhaps of
the haunting aroma of some national staple of food--but certainly it is
there. Scattered through Manhattan, from the Battery to the Bronx,
these five centers are witnesses as they stand to the effect of
circumstance on bricks and mortar. And that there should be this
visible effect is no doubt natural enough, for the difference between
nation and nation is a salient thing. It would be far stranger were it
to fail of effect even on so unimpressionable a thing as a six-story
red-brick tenement house.
There are forces, however, which prove themselves hardly less potent
than this force of fellow-nationality, but which would at first thought
be denied any vital molding power over people or over things. These
are the trades, and--less distinctive in their outward aspects, at
least--the professions. It is not odd that a fishing village or a
mining camp should take on a certain character unique to itself, but
surely one would not expect a lawyer to impress on his environment a
stamp so unmistakable that one could say, observing it from without,
"In this building lawyers plot." Superficially there would be said to
be scant difference between a lawyer and a broker or a real estate
dealer or an insurance man. Yet in New York City, where communities of
these professions mesh and intermesh and overlap, there are still
streets which are, and which could be, to a trained eye, the habitat of
financiers alone, and where at once all other wayfarers are seen to be
interlopers, or at best mere visitors at a fair.
Such a street is Wall Street, and such is Broad. And on the eastern
rim of this same zone runs a street which, despite the countless
changes that the years untiringly bring, could not possibly be mistaken
for anything but what it is, the great aorta of the fire insurance
world. William Street is as distinctly a fire insurance street as any
street could possibly be distinctive of its profession.
Scattered along the intersecting ways, but lining William Street from
Pine to Fulton, are gathered the fire insurance companies and the
brokers, respectively the sellers and the buyers of insurance. There
you will find the homes of the big alert New York companies whose lofty
steel and granite buildings stand as fit monuments to their strength
and endurance and enterprise, and the United States headquarters of the
dignified but aggressive British fire offices whose risks are scattered
over every portion of the earth where there is property to insure, and
the metropolitan departments of the great corporations that have made
the name of Hartford, Connecticut, almost symbolic of fire insurance.
There are also the agencies, in each of which from one to a dozen
smaller companies have intrusted their local underwriting to some
agency firm. There too are the offices of the world's leading
reinsurance companies, most of them German or Russian, who accept their
business not from agents or property owners, but entirely from other
insurance companies. There are the elaborately equipped offices of the
local inspection and rating bureau maintained by all the companies, and
there are the offices of the dealers in automatic sprinklers, fire
alarms, extinguishers, and hose. And throughout the whole district the
buildings are honeycombed with the almost countless brokers--from firms
who transact as much business as a large insurance company down to
shabby men who have failed to succeed in other lines and who eke out an
existence on the commissions from an account or two handed them in
friendship or in charity--all of them the busy intermediaries between
the insurers and the insured.
From morning till night these insurance men throng William Street, most
of them representing the brokers who feed the business into the great
machine. And it is no wonder that the street is thronged, for the
amount of detail requisite for every insurance effected is surprisingly
great. Let us suppose that Brown, owning a building, desires to insure
it. He sends his order to Jones, a broker who has solicited the
business. Jones's clerk enters up the order and makes out a slip
called a binder, which is an abbreviated form of contract insuring the
customer until a complete contract in the form of a policy can be
issued. This binding slip is given to a clerk called the placer, whose
duty it is to place the risk, or in other words to secure the
acceptance of the insurance by some company or companies. The placer
then goes into the street, returning when his binder is completed by
the acceptance of the amount desired, the name of each company with the
amount assumed and the initials of its representative being signed in
the spaces left for that purpose. Forms must then be prepared by the
broker to suit the conditions of the risk and delivered to the
companies, the rate schedule must be scrutinized to see whether in any
way a lower rate can be obtained, and as soon as possible the policies
themselves must be secured and delivered to the assured. The premium
must then be collected and remitted, less the broker's commission, to
the companies. And the broker's duty does not end even here. He must
watch the risk for changes in occupancy, protect his client's interests
in the event of a loss, and constantly fight like a tiger before the
rating bureau to reduce the rate lest some alert rival offer his
customer better terms.
All this detail is quite smoothly transacted, supposing the business to
be in the companies' opinion desirable, but when the risk offered is
what the street terms a "skate" or a "target," there is a sudden halt,
and the completion of the binder becomes a more difficult matter. Then
the really astute placer has a chance to demonstrate his efficiency.
It is his function to persuade with winged words his adversary, the
company's local underwriter or "counterman," that the stock of cheap
millinery belonging to the Slavonic gentlemen with the unfortunate
record of two fires of unknown origin and two opportune failures is
even more desirable--at the rate--than the large line on the
substantial office building which he half exhibits, holding
suggestively back. It is his duty to place all his business, not the
good alone, and generally he succeeds in eventually doing so, although
some binders become tattered and grimy with age and from having been
handed futilely back and forth over the company counters. The owner of
many a Fifth Avenue dwelling would be surprised could he know that the
insurance on his property had been utilized to force on some reluctant
company a small line covering the sewing machines in Meyer Leshinsky's
Pike Street sweatshop. Many an ingenious placer has had the binders of
his very worst risks--that he had been totally unable to cover--freshly
typewritten every morning in order to convey the impression that the
order had that moment been secured by his firm and that the hesitating
counterman to whom it was being presented with elaborate indifference
was the first--the best friend of the placer--to whom the line had been
offered.
On an eligible corner on the west side of William Street, at the very
center of the Street's activity, stood, in the year 1912, a gray stone
structure of dignified though scarcely decorative appearance. On the
stone slabs each side of the doorway, old style brass letters
proclaimed--if so modest an announcement could be termed a
proclamation--that here were the offices of
THE GUARDIAN FIRE INSURANCE COMPANY
OF THE
CITY OF NEW YORK
Over this portal gray walls rose to the height of eight stories. Such
was the headquarters, from an external aspect, of one of the oldest,
safest, and best of local companies, which invariably, for brevity, was
known to friends and foes alike as "The Guardian of New York."
Entering the somewhat narrow vestibule, the visitor found himself in a
small and gloomy hall, confronted by two debilitated grille elevator
doors which seemed sadly to need oiling, the elevators behind which
carried conservatively and without precipitancy those who wished to
ascend. The two individuals who directed the leisurely progress of
these cars were elderly men who, like most of those in the Guardian's
employment, had been in the service of the company since it moved into
the "new" building. This migration had occurred about the time that
torch-light parades were marching up Broadway to the rhythmic cheers
for "Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine!" It is a melancholy truth that
in a generation and a half eyes grow dim and limbs falter, but in the
opinion of the Guardian's management the fact that a man was no longer
as young as he had once been was no valid reason, unless he were
actually incompetent, why he should not be allowed to continue doing
the best he could. President Wintermuth himself had once been
considerably younger, and he knew it. He called all his old employees
by their first names, and unless there rose a question of fidelity, he
would no sooner have thought of discharging one of them than he would
have thought of going home and discharging his wife. Some of the older
ones, indeed, antedated Mr. Wintermuth himself, and still regarded him
with the kindly tolerance of the days when they were the _cognoscenti_,
and he the neophyte, learning the ropes at their hands.
One of the oldest in tenure, but a man incurably young for all that,
was James Cuyler, the head of the company's local department, in charge
of all the business of the Metropolitan District, and an underwriter as
well known to the fraternity as the asphalt pavement of the street.
The Guardian's local department, which occupied the entire first floor
of the building, except the elevator space, was a busy place from nine
o'clock till five on ordinary days and from nine till one on Saturdays.
Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, Mr. Cuyler stood
behind his long map counter, his genial but penetrating eye instantly
assessing each man that approached, sifting with quick glance the
business offered, and detecting almost automatically any trick or
"joker" in that which his visitors presented. Most of the men across
the counter naturally were brokers or their placing clerks, armed with
binders on risks of all kinds, some good and many more bad, for the
good risks are usually snapped up in large amounts by the first
companies to whom they are taken, but the bad ones make their weary and
often fruitless tour of the entire street. All of them, the good and
bad alike, the placers commonly presented to Mr. Cuyler with a bland
innocence which deceived that astute veteran not at all. The purpose
of the average broker was to induce the Guardian to accept his chaff
with as little wheat as he could possibly bestow, while Mr. Cuyler's,
on the contrary, was to take the wheat and the wheat alone. The chaff
he declined in three thousand manners, in every case fitting his
refusal to the refused one, always bearing in mind that that worthy's
affections must not be permanently and hopelessly alienated.
"John," he would say with a smile, "I'll write thirty-five thousand on
that fireproof building for you, but I can't take that rag stock. I'd
like to help you out, you understand, but I simply can't touch the
class. Two years ago I wrote an accommodation line for Billy
Heilbrun--some old junk shop in Sullivan Street--and she smoked for a
total loss in about a month, and I can still recall the post-mortem I
had with the President."
And under cover of this painful but purely fictitious incident he would
whisk away the binder on the fireproof building, returning it signed
with one and the same movement, and smiling a smile of chastened sorrow
over his inability to assist his friend with the undesirable rag
offering. Or else the office would see him lean forward impressively,
and say, in a hushed whisper, across the counter: "Now, Mr. Charles
Webb, you're wasted in the insurance business. If you have the cold
nerve to offer me that old skate that's been turned down by every
company from the Continental down to the Kickapoo Lloyds--well, you
ought to be in the legislature, that's where you ought to be!"
"But here's something to go with it--to sweeten it up," the unabashed
Mr. Webb would probably protest, producing another risk of equally
detrimental description. Then Mr. Cuyler would turn.
"Harry," he would say, "put on your hat and take Mr. Webb back to his
office. He's not himself; the heat is too much for him."
And Mr. Webb would smile--and be lost.
There are very few positions which make greater demands upon one's
judgment, one's diplomacy, and one's temper than this one which Mr.
Cuyler had filled so long and so inimitably. To pick a man's pocket of
all its contents, deliberately selecting those of sufficient value to
retain and throwing the remainder back in his face, is a matter for
fine art, for the broker must not be angered or a good connection is
lost to the office.
And there are artists in both galleries. There are placers who have
all the fine frenzy of a starving poet in a midnight garret, men who
would make the fortune of a country hotel if they would but write for
it a single testimonial advertisement, men whose flow of persuasive
talk is almost hypnotic, whose victims are held just as surely as ever
was Wedding Guest--and with this difference, that while that classic
personage merely turned up late to the ceremony, these charmed men
listen to the siren tongue until they find themselves doing things
which may very readily--if fate is unkind and the risk burns--cost them
their repute and their positions as well.
When such a Pan-Hellenic meeting occurred, Mr. Cuyler rose to his
highest triumphs. It was perhaps a frame celluloid goods factory in
Long Island City, which some soul-compelling voice had just finished
describing, accoutering the grisly thing in all the garments of verbal
glory. One gathered that the Guardian's fate hung on the acceptance of
this translucent risk, that it was a prize saved from the clutches of a
hundred grasping competitors and brought to the counter of the Guardian
like a pure white lamb to the altar of the gods. When it was all over,
and nothing was wanting except Mr. Cuyler's signature to the
binder--then Mr. Cuyler came into his own.
"Joe," the organ note would start--"Joe, that looks as if it might be a
first-rate risk of its class, and some folks think it's not a bad
class, too, when the hazards are properly arranged. I've always
thought myself that the bad record on celluloid workers was largely
accidental. And I don't see how I can turn down anything that comes
from your office--I guess I'll have to help you out with a small line,
anyway. Where's your binder? Wait a second, though. Let me look at
that map again--I forgot my exposing lines. Well! we seem to be pretty
full in that block--eighty-five, ten, twelve-five, sixteen--by Jove!
I'm afraid I'll have to pass that up, after all--I didn't think I had
so much around there. Awfully sorry, old man; I'd take it for you if I
could for any man in the world."
And the binder was affably passed back over the counter. But when, as
probably developed at this point, Mr. Cuyler was advised that his
remarks bore convincing traces of the proximity of an active
steam-radiator and that the broker knew perfectly well that the
Guardian hadn't a dollar at risk within three blocks--it was then that
the real contest began. Celluloid was a mighty hazardous article--was
Joe aware that in New York State alone the losses had been nearly three
times the premiums on the class? Perhaps this was accidental, but it
was a fact just the same. But after all, what else could one expect?
Celluloid was very much like gun-cotton--made out of practically the
same constituents--and only a little less dangerous to handle. It also
appeared that celluloid works all over the country had for the last
year been _unusually_ disastrous to the underwriters, and that the
President himself had written a letter on the subject to the various
rating bureaus. Honestly, it would be more than Cuyler, with all his
extreme desire to oblige, would dare do--to tell the old man that the
local department had written a celluloid factory. His good friend, the
caller, Mr. Cuyler felt certain, would not wish to see the venerable
hairs of the Guardian's local secretary trampled into the dust by the
infuriate heels of the board of directors, led by the outraged
President Wintermuth himself. No, he was extremely sorry, but he
simply--could not--take--the risk.
And take it he would not. Such was James Cuyler. For thirty years he
had stood at the Guardian's local threshold, fidelity personified, a
watch-dog extraordinary that could not have been duplicated in all
watchdogdom. He had but one superstition and but one grievance.
His superstition was that he would not allow a customer to enter the
office after the clock struck the first blow of five. At that moment,
if no employee was at hand, he himself would step out from behind the
counter, close the door, and turn the key in the lock. And the best
friend of the office could not have gained admission once the key was
turned.
"Why do I do it?" he would say. "My boy, at about half-past five P.M.
on June fourteenth, eighteen eighty-nine, I was alone in the office,
and Herman White, who used to be placer for Schmidt and Sulzbacher,
came in with a ten thousand dollar line on coffee in one of those
Brooklyn shorefront warehouses. I guess all the other offices must
have shut up, for Herman never gave me anything he didn't have to. He
banged on the door, and I let him in, and the risk was all right and we
were wide open, and I took his ten thousand. . . . And about twenty
minutes later, as I stood on the front deck of the Wall Street
ferryboat crossing the river, the flames burst out of the roof of that
warehouse, and we paid nine thousand two hundred and thirty-seven
dollars for that coffee. . . . This office closes at five P.M."
This was his superstition, and he lived up to it with absolute
consistency. His one grievance was not quite so deep, which probably
explained his lesser insistence upon it. This grievance was simply
that the conservative policy of the company would not let him accept
more than a fraction of what he would have wished to write on the
island of Manhattan. Like all men who constantly live in the presence
of a peril and grow thus to minimize it, Mr. Cuyler had grown to think
and to feel that New York, _his_ New York, could never have a serious,
sweeping fire, a conflagration. This being so, and the local business
being profitable, to write so small an amount in the city was
equivalent to throwing money sinfully away. Why, companies not half so
large were doing double the Guardian's business, and with golden
results. But only at long intervals did he permit himself the luxury
of articulately bemoaning his fate, for in spite of his own conviction
he felt that any implied criticism of his chief was disloyal.
Occasionally, however, his feelings would overcome him, and then he
would burst forth into a hurricane of lamentations.
"The finest town in the country," he would say; "and look at what we
write! I could double our income in a week if the old man would let
me. But he won't. He keeps talking 'conflagration hazard' and 'keep
your lines down in the dry goods district' and 'aggregate liability,'
and I can't get him to loosen up a particle. He always says we have
enough at risk now. Enough at risk! Look at what the company writes
in Boston! Why, the Guardian must have half as much at risk in the
congested district of Boston as I write here! And Boston! Of all
towns in the world!"
Mr. Cuyler was not a Bostonian.
It was perfectly true; Mr. Wintermuth was not a strictly consistent
underwriter, and perhaps some day he would adopt Mr. Cuyler's
viewpoint. And then, the flood-gates open, the local secretary would
come into his metropolitan own. Certainly, if the Guardian's line in
Boston was safe, its liability in New York was small indeed. But the
Boston business had always shown a profit, and James Wintermuth and
Silas Osgood had grown up together in the insurance world; and so for
the present the Boston line would stand. And it was impossible to
satisfy Mr. Cuyler,--he was continually moaning about the restrictions
under which he labored,--and so it was likely that nothing would be
done in New York, either. James Wintermuth was a conservative man.
One could have told it at his first glance about the President's
office, on the top floor of the Guardian building. In the first place,
the office, although it was located in the sunniest corner of the
building, preserved nevertheless a kind of cathedral gloom. Dark
shades in the windows reduced the light across Mr. Wintermuth's
obsolete roll-top desk to never more than that of a dull afternoon. No
impertinent rays of the sun could further fade the faded rug which
clothed the center of the room. On the wall hung likenesses of the
former heads of the company, now long since in their graves. Over the
desk was an old print of the Lisbon earthquake; the germaneness of this
did not at once appear,--in fact, it never appeared,--but the picture
had always hung there, and in Mr. Wintermuth's opinion that was ample
cause and justification.
Only in the corner, almost out of sight behind the desk, was the room's
single absolute incongruity. There the surprised visitor saw, reposing
quietly in its shadowy retreat, a hundred pound dumb-bell. This was
the President's sole remaining animal joy, the presence of this
dumb-bell. He rarely touched it now, although the colored janitor's
assistant scrupulously dusted it each morning, but it was an agreeable
reminder of the days when the old lion was young and when his teeth,
metaphorically speaking, were new and sharp. For years it had been his
custom to lift this ponderous object three times above his head before
opening his mail in the morning--and he would never hire a field man or
inspector who could not do likewise.
Now, of course, these trials of strength were over for Mr.
Wintermuth--and what he no longer did himself he asked none other to
do. But there the relic lay, a substantial memorial of Spring in the
veins. Once in a while, at long intervals, Smith, in whom the old man
had a sort of shamefaced pride, would eye the thing respectfully.
"Put it up, Richard," Mr. Wintermuth would direct; "I used to do it
every morning for twenty years." And Smith--with considerable
effort--would put it up.
"I'd never have let you go to work for the Guardian, when you came and
struck me for a position, if you hadn't been able to do that, my boy,"
said the President, reflectively.
And Smith would listen patiently to the oft-told tale. He was
sincerely fond of the old autocrat, and able to bear with his growing
acerbity better than he could have done had he not known the real
spirit of the man. During the past year or two it seemed to Smith that
his chief was showing his age more plainly than ever before. He was
still under sixty-five, but he was coming to live more than ever in the
past, and was growing more and more impervious to the new ideas and new
methods which modern conditions constantly brought.
"The greatest trouble with the old man is," as Cuyler was heard to say
on one occasion, "he has the 4 per cent bond habit."
It was perfectly, true. What was safe and what was sure appealed more
strongly to James Wintermuth with the passage of every year. Not for
him were the daring methods of those companies who employed their
resources in tremendous plunges in and out of the stock market, not for
him the long chances in which most of his competitors gloried. The
Guardian was doing well enough. Its capital of $750,000 was ample; its
surplus of $500,000 very respectable; its premium income of a million
and three quarters perfectly adequate, in Mr. Wintermuth's opinion.
And the stockholders, receiving dividends of 12 per cent per annum,
lean years and fat alike, never audibly complained.
In appearance the Guardian's President upheld the best traditions of
the old school from which he sprang. Above middle height, his erect
figure gave him still much the air of a cavalier. His acute black eyes
and trim white mustache made him certain to attract notice wherever he
went--a fact of which he was not wholly unconscious. Even now, when
gradually, almost imperceptibly, the springiness was fading from his
step, he seemed a strong and virile man. His directors, most of them
his contemporaries and whose insurance knowledge was limited to what
they had learned on the Guardian directorate, trusted and believed in
him with absolute implicitness. Any act on behalf of the company, when
done by the President, they promptly ratified; and indeed they had for
many years made it palpable to the meanest intelligence that they
considered James Wintermuth the head, brain, heart, and all the other
vital organs of the company which they--nominally--directed. In short,
James Wintermuth _was_ the Guardian.
There was in all the Street one man alone who would have taken
exception to this analysis--and he kept his opinion securely locked in
his secretive, his very secretive brain. This man was F. Mills
O'Connor, Vice-President of the Guardian.