"Turn up Providence Two," said Mr. O'Connor. As the gentleman in
question appeared at his office door en route to the map desk, his
asperity of manner seemed to Herbert, the map clerk, even more
pronounced than usual, and his voice was fully accordant. It was never
a dulcet organ, at best; but its owner rarely felt that his business
transactions could be assisted by the employment of flute notes; when
he did, he sank his tones to a confidential whisper intended to flatter
and impress his auditor, and it usually seemed to serve the purpose.
But with his map clerks and his subordinates generally he gave free
play to his natural raucousness, and he probably acted upon excellent
judgment.
Herbert, whose eye and ear from long practice had grown to detect the
exact degree of urgency in every call, with the agility of his
Darwinian ancestry quickened by his native wit, dashed over to the desk
under which the Rhode Island maps reposed. He swung the big gray-bound
volume up onto the broad, flat counter with all the skill of a
successful vaudeville artist, and none too soon, for he who had
demanded it was at his elbow.
"What page do you want, Mr. O'Connor?" asked Herbert.
The Vice-president glanced at the daily report he held in his hand, and
turned back the yellow telegraph blank that was pinned to it.
"Sheet one fifty-six," he said shortly. "No--one _fifty_-six. That
will do." He turned to a boy. "Find out for me if Mr. Wintermuth is
in his office."
The boy, whose name was Jimmy, sped off, soliloquizing as he went:
"Gee, there must be somethin' up to get O'C. as hot as that!" Arrived
at the opposite end of the big room, he reconnoitered for a view of the
President's office. By virtue of some little strategy he presently
managed to catch sight of Mr. Wintermuth, seated at his desk, pen in
hand, in his most magisterial attitude, listening judicially to the
remarks of some visitor. Jimmy, who was no fool, recognized the
stranger as the business manager of an insurance paper about half whose
space was given to articles highly eulogistic of certain insurance
companies whose advertisements, by some singular coincidence,
invariably appeared further on in the publication. From the position
of the two Jimmy deduced that the conversation was not likely to be
terminated very soon, and dashed back to Mr. O'Connor with that
intelligence. The Vice-President was still studying the many-colored
sheet.
"Busy, eh? Well, leave that map turned up, and let me know as soon as
he is at liberty." And he strode back to his own office and shut the
door with a slam that disturbed the serene spectacles of Mr. Otto
Bartels, who was sedulously studying a long row of figures on a
reinsurance bordereau.
Mr. Bartels was Secretary of the Guardian, and his office adjoined that
of the Vice-president. Mr. Bartels, who was very short and stout, and
very methodical, and Teutonic beyond all else, looked up with mild
surprise in his placid eyes and the hint of something on his face which
in a more mobile countenance would have been an expression of gentle
remonstrance. His place was lost, in the column he was scanning, by
the dislodgment of his spectacles, which he wore well down toward the
lower reaches of his nose--it would have been out of place to speak of
that organ as possessing an end or a tip, for it was much too bulbous
for any such term to fit. Taking the spectacles with both hands, he
replaced them at their wonted angle, and with that phantom of
disapproval still striving for expression and outlet among his
features, he resumed his employment.
Otto Bartels was a discovery of Mr. Wintermuth's, many years before,
when that gentleman occupied a less conspicuous position with the
corporation of which he was now long since the head. One day, sitting
at his desk, he looked up to observe a youth who stood gravely
regarding him in silence for at least three minutes before his speech
struggled near enough the surface to make itself audible. It appeared
that the stranger was in need of a position, that he was accurate,
though not quick at figures, and that he would begin work for whatever
wage was found proper. He was given a trial in the accounts
department, and for five years his sponsor heard no more of him. At
the end of that time he found that his protégé had worked up to the
position of assistant chief clerk. Three years later the drinking
water of the New Jersey suburb where he resided terminated the earthly
career of the chief clerk, and Bartels became chief clerk, managing the
department as nearly as was humanly possible without speech of any
kind. And when, twenty years from the time the Guardian saw him first,
Otto Bartels found himself authorized to write Secretary after his
flowing signature, it was an appointment inevitable. He had simply
pushed his way out of the crowd by grace of his unremitting
thoroughness, his industry, which was really not especially creditable,
as nothing but work ever occurred to him, and a gratifying inability to
make errors of detail. He knew the name of every agent on the
company's list, when each one was expected to pay his balances, and how
much in premiums each annually reported. He never wrote letters, for
it was impossible for him to dictate to a stenographer; he rarely took
a vacation, for he had nowhere to go and nothing to do outside the
office; he never engaged in discernible social intercourse of any sort,
for he had never known how to begin. Such was the methodical man who
so efficiently kept the books and records of the Guardian. He knew and
cared nothing about underwriting, regarding the insurance operations of
the company as a possibly important but purely secondary consideration.
In Mr. Bartels's opinion the company's records were the company.
The underwriting department of the Guardian occupied, with the
officers' quarters, the upper two floors of the rather narrow building.
On the top floor were the East and the South, under the immediate
supervision of Smith, the General Agent, and the offices of Mr.
Wintermuth, Mr. O'Connor, and Mr. Bartels. The President occupied the
southeast corner and the two others the northeast end, while Smith's
desk was out in the open office, with the maps and files and survey
cases and his subordinates under his eye.
On the floor below Assistant-Secretary Wagstaff held forth; he was in
charge of the Western Department, which comprised the states from Ohio,
Kentucky, and Tennessee westward to the coast. Mr. Wagstaff was a
competent, careful, unimaginative, unambitious man who did his work
from day to day. He enters this story virtually not at all; be it
enough to say that he had a red mustache and a bald, bright head and
wore shoes with cloth tops. He took good care of his territory, and if
he never made much money for the company, he never lost any. So much
for Edgar Wagstaff.
Before returning to the top floor, however, one character in Mr.
Wagstaff's entourage must be brought majestically forward into view.
This dignified personage was Jenkins, the clerk of the Pacific Coast
accounts. Mr. Jenkins was, in his youth, a mathematician of remarkable
promise. His dexterity with arithmetic and algebra was such that his
family began to think that could this ability at figures be translated
into terms of Wall Street there might be a Napoleon of finance bearing
the proud if somewhat homely name of Jenkins. But unfortunately it
seemed otherwise to the fates, for Mr. Jenkins, with advancing years,
found his Napoleonic onrush irresistibly diverted toward pleasant
byways frequented in the golden age by one Bacchus, god of wine.
Apparently the disinclination for the dusty road of duty had resulted
in much satisfaction and no lasting damage to Bacchus, but far
otherwise was it with Jenkins. He fared as conscientiously in
Bacchus's footsteps as he could, but his was not the true Bacchanalian
temperament. Under the influence of the grape Jenkins, instead of
becoming gay, waxed ever more portentous and sublime. When he was
almost sober, say of a Friday afternoon, he was grave, merely creating
the impression that some long-past tragedy had clouded his life. When
he was by way of being what one may denominate half-interested, his
face assumed the saturnine expression of an ancient misanthrope, but
when at last he reached the full flower of his magnificent endeavors,
the silent severity of his countenance became so forbidding and
sinister as to freeze the smile from the lips of a happy child. By his
face you might know him, but it would of necessity be by the face
alone, for so perfect was his control of his dominated limbs that never
a quiver betrayed him, and no degree of saturation seemed to affect at
all the impeccable footing of his columns.
A spiral staircase connected the seventh and eighth floors of the
Guardian building, constructed for the convenience of the clerks who
had to do with several departments. It was near the top of this
staircase that Smith had his desk, in the center of the maelstrom.
Smith strongly believed in being in the center of things, and from
where he sat he could overlook every foot of the space occupied by the
Eastern Department. As he was supervisor, he intended to
supervise--wherein lay one of the chief sources of his value.
"Jimmy, bring me the _Journal of Commerce_," he said to the invaluable
and ubiquitous one.
"Mr. O'Connor's got it on his desk, sir," replied that youth, almost
breathlessly. Speed in action had so demanded equivalent celerity in
diction that often speech came badly second in endurance, causing him
to sputter and gasp for completed utterance.
"Well, go and see if he isn't through with it," Smith directed. "I
haven't seen the losses yet this morning."
Almost immediately, a modern Manhattan Mercury, Jimmy was again at his
side.
"No, sir--he says he's still usin' it," he reported.
"Bring it to me when he's finished," Smith closed the matter, devoting
himself to other things. Those requiring his attention were numerous
enough, but first of all came an interruption in the shape of a caller.
All manner of men come into the agency department of an insurance
company. Smith's field covered the whole Atlantic Coast and Gulf
sections of the country, and the agents from these states alone made
quite an army, and any one of these agents was likely at any time to
appear from a bland blue sky, completely upsetting the General Agent's
continuity of work. Then there were the placers from the brokerage
firms, offering out-of-town risks which most of them had personally
never seen and knew little or nothing about, and whose descriptive
powers were all the greater for being unhampered by any blunt facts, a
few of which are so often fatal to a successful rhetorical ascension.
Then there were the various clients of the company who came straggling
in to have a New York City policy transferred to cover for six days at
Old Point Comfort, or to ask whether the presence of a Japanese
heater--size two by three and one half inches--would destroy the
validity of their policy; and there was the lady whose false teeth fell
into the kitchen stove while she was putting on a scuttle of coal, and
who thought the company should reimburse her for the loss under her
policy which covered all her personal effects and wearing apparel; and
then there was the suspicious individual who called to make sure that
his premium had been properly transmitted to the company, for the local
agent in his town has strange ways and looked very peculiar when
accepting the money.
These and a hundred others, all in the way of business; and in addition
there were the shifting atoms of humanity who float in and out of the
office buildings of a great city, pensioners for the most part on
either the bounty or the carelessness of busy men--waifs in the
industrial orbit who gain their living by various established or
ingenious variations of the more indirect forms of brigandage. There
were men selling books that probably no one in the world would ever
wish to buy or to read; women soliciting funds for charitable
institutions which might or might not exist; salesmen positively
enthusiastic in their desire to give the Guardian the benefit of their
patent pencil sharpeners, or gas crowns, or asbestos window shades, or
loose-leaf ledgers, or roach powder of peculiar pungency and
efficiency. Of course the elevator attendants were supposed to
distinguish between the sheep and the goats, and to let only legitimate
callers ascend, but the discretionary power of the Ethiopian is
scarcely subtle--or at least such was the case with the Guardian's
staff of watchdogs--and as a result many a visitor reached the floor
where Smith presided only to have his disguise fall from him at his
first word and to be politely ejected by the invaluable Jimmy, who was
accustomed to accompany the gentle strangers as far as the street door
in order that there might be no misapprehension on their part.
This particular morning Smith disposed with more or less ease of
several claimants to his attention, before he was finally brought to a
pause by the appearance of Mr. Darius Howell of Schuyler, Maine, who
had come to New York in connection with his potato business, and who
had incidentally decided to call at the office of the Guardian which he
also had the honor locally to represent. Years before, Smith had once
visited Schuyler, and at that time had met the small, grizzled
individual who now stood before him. He had not, however, the
slightest idea of the identity of his visitor, and waited a brief
moment for a clew to aid him.
"You don't remember me, I reckon," said the caller. "I remember you,
though, Mr. Smith. My name is Darius--"
"Howell," said Smith, instantly, getting up to shake hands. Of all the
agents reporting to him there was only one Darius. "I remember you
very well. I hope you haven't come to tell me that Schuyler has burned
up. Come in and sit down. It must be five years since I've seen you."
"Six years come next July," agreed the other, cautiously. It would
have been impossible for him to admit the simplest proposition without
some sort of qualification; he never had done so, and there seemed no
valid reason to suppose that he ever would.
"And how is Schuyler coming along?" inquired the General Agent, with
decided deference to the conventionalities of such interviews.
"Oh, so so," replied the man from Maine. "There ain't been much change
up there since you was there. That is, not what you'd really call a
change. How's things with you? The company still pays dividends, I
see."
Mr. Howell was the owner of four shares of the company's stock.
"Doing all right," Smith responded. "The Guardian believes in making
haste slowly, you know; we don't go ahead very fast, but we keep
plugging along. Mr. Wintermuth feels it's always best to be on the
safe side. Occasionally it's discouraging when we see some competitor
build up an income in three or four years as big as ours that it's
taken three or four generations to establish, but when we read some
morning that our enterprising friends have had to reinsure their
liability with some stronger concern and retire from business because
their losses have caught up to them, we don't feel quite so badly.
Personally I think we could travel a little faster, and I'd like to see
our premiums twice what they are now. And I hope you'll double them
this year in Schuyler, anyway."
"Maybe so, but you never can tell. Business is liable to slack up just
when you think it's going along all right. And there ain't been any
new building in Schuyler of any account for two years back but Dodge's
feed mill and the new Union School. You've got a line on both of them."
At this point their conversation was interrupted because of the
departure of the persistent gentleman, who had been closeted with Mr.
Wintermuth. As the door closed on him, Jimmy disappeared around the
corner and thrust his head and fore quarters, so to speak, into
O'Connor's open doorway.
"Th' President's at liberty now," he announced.
Without replying, the Vice-President picked up the _Journal of
Commerce_ and the daily report with the yellow telegram affixed to it,
and strode over, past Smith's desk, to the office of his chief.
"Can you come out and look at the map a minute, sir?" he asked
respectfully.
"Certainly. What is it? A loss?" replied Mr. Wintermuth, noticing the
telegraph slip as he rose from his chair and followed O'Connor toward
the map counter.
"Yes," said the Vice-president. He was passing the desk of the General
Agent, and he took care that his remark might be overheard. "And it
looks to me like something we ought not to have had."
"What's that?" rejoined the older man, quickly. "We're not accepting
business that we shouldn't write, are we? What is it? And who passed
it?"
"Smith seems to have approved the line," O'Connor said slowly.
"Herbert, I thought I told you to leave that Providence map out for me."
"It's right there, sir," said the map clerk; "right where you left it,
sir."
"Here's the risk," said the Vice-president, pointing it out to his
superior with every sign of decent regret. "It seems to be a mattress
factory, a class we never write. . . . Smith appears to have passed
it--there's his initial. Of course, he may have had some special
reason for--"
Mr. Wintermuth interrupted him.
"Herbert, ask Mr. Smith if he will not step this way for a moment,
please."
To the man from Maine the General Agent said: "You'll excuse me for a
minute?"
And Darius Howell, with astonishing definiteness, replied: "Sure--go
ahead."
Smith found his two officers awaiting him by the open map. From the
expression on O'Connor's face he suspected that that gentleman had
discovered something not displeasing to him, and unconsciously he found
his own shoulders squaring themselves as though for a conflict.
"We have here," began the President, slowly, "a loss at Providence on a
risk which Mr. O'Connor seems to think we should not have written."
"Where is the risk, sir?" Smith asked quietly.
"Here. Here is the daily report. It is approved by you. . . .
Probably there is something about the risk which does not appear on the
face of it. Do you remember the circumstances?"
Smith looked the daily report over carefully. It certainly showed the
risk, just as plainly as the map also showed it, to be a mattress
factory, a class prohibited by the Guardian, and there were Smith's own
interwoven initials. Then, suddenly, at the sight of the hieroglyph,
he remembered. "Why, you passed this line yourself, Mr. O'Connor," was
on his lips to say. But he did not say it. For by the cold light in
the eyes of the Vice-President he knew that course useless.
"I remember the risk," he said, addressing himself to Mr. Wintermuth.
"It was a direct line of our local agents, and they were very anxious
to have us take a small amount. It was accepted as an accommodation,
and I reinsured one half, as you see, sir. Is it a bad loss?"
"Reported total," replied the other, turning over the telegram. "My
boy, you're usually so careful, I don't understand how you came to put
through such business. You ought at least to have referred it to Mr.
O'Connor or myself."
Smith glanced again at the Vice-president, but that gentleman remained
silent, and the General Agent again swallowed what was on his tongue to
utter.
"Yes, sir, I should have done so," he substituted.
Mr. Wintermuth continued: "We cannot write such risks as that and hope
to make an underwriting profit. They say I am a believer in 4 per cent
bonds--perhaps I am, but I am _not_ a believer in 4 per cent mattress
factories." The old gentleman softened his criticism with a smile.
But to Smith, feeling rather than seeing the half-hidden satisfaction
of the Vice-president, the President's kindly manner proved of little
comfort. For Smith and O'Connor knew that the line in question had
been submitted to O'Connor, and that in view of the competition of
several very liberal companies in the Providence agency, the
Vice-president had authorized its acceptance. With his wonted caution,
however, he had refrained from putting himself on record, other than
orally.
"Reinsure half, and put it through, Smith," he had directed; and Smith
had done so.
In cases where his own security was involved, Mr. F. Mills O'Connor was
an exceedingly cautious man. Looking before he leaped was with him
almost a passion; and if he expected to leap on a Thursday, it was
generally estimated that he began his preliminary looking on Monday of
the week before.
He was a large, clean-shaven, dark-haired man of indeterminate age. By
his profession at large he was little known, but in the Guardian office
he was very well known indeed and excellently understood, and an
appreciation of his character and qualities truthfully set down by the
observant Jimmy or by Herbert, the map clerk, would never have been
selected by the O'Connor family as satisfactory material for a
flattering obituary notice.
It appeared likely, however, that it would be a long time before his
obituary would be written. He was probably, at this time, a year or
two the other side of forty, and his care of himself was unimpeachable,
for he guarded his health as carefully as he did his other assets. He
had become Vice-President and underwriting head of the company several
years before this story opens, and it seemed probable that he would
hold that position indefinitely--or perhaps it would be nearer the
truth to say until some more advantageous position lay open to him.
Mr. O'Connor was what is commonly termed a cold proposition, and if
there was any sentiment in him it was so carefully secreted that for
ordinary purposes it was non-existent. Yet he was not unpopular. When
he so desired, he could assume a spurious geniality so closely
resembling the genuine article that few persons, and none of his
agents, ever discovered the difference. And his business efficiency
was commonly taken for granted.
Indeed, there was but one man in the insurance fraternity who assessed
Mr. O'Connor at very nearly his proper value, and that man O'Connor
disliked and feared as vividly as his rather apathetic nature would
admit. The one man was Smith. Whoever might sail the seas in ships of
illusion regarding the Vice-president of the Guardian, Smith saw the
facts clear and looked at them squarely.
The principal cause of Smith's own position in the company was his own
vitality and industry, but next to that was the fact that Mr.
Wintermuth had originally given him a chance and then declined to
permit any one to impede his natural progression. This attitude was
due principally to the President's conviction of his own ability to
judge men. Having once made up his mind, he allowed no one to tell him
anything about any of his employees. He always said: "I watch the boys
myself, and what I can't see I don't want to know." In the old days
what he did not see was of no especial importance to the Guardian
Insurance Company, but the eyes of an old lion grow also old. Yet the
habit remained, and thus all Mr. O'Connor's efforts to discredit his
ambitious young assistant had so far fallen on ears stone-deaf and
hermetically sealed. But the Vice-president could never forgive the
younger man for looking at him with so unimpressed a gaze, and never
missed an opportunity to show his prejudice to their mutual chief.
There had been several incidents of a similar nature previous to the
mattress factory loss, where Smith had been either indirectly advised
or permitted by O'Connor to take a certain course, only to find himself
excoriated when the risk burned or the outcome proved otherwise
disastrous. Only a short time before, Smith had been sent into New
York State, acting under vice-presidential order of procedure, to
straighten out the Guardian's relations with the local division of the
Eastern Conference. The Eastern Conference was an organization to
which most of the leading companies belonged. Its function was the
orderly regulation of all matters affecting its members' relations with
their agents. Theoretically its primary purpose was to prevent the
overcompensation of some agents at the expense of others. If it did
not always succeed in doing this, it did at least succeed in making
extremely embarrassing the lot of any company operating outside of its
organization. It was everywhere an arbitrary body, and its New York
State branch was perhaps the least disciplined of any of its
constituent parts, and was moreover suspected of favoring some of its
own members at the expense of others. President Wintermuth, loyal to
his associates, but patient only up to a certain point, had of late
begun to consider that his company was decidedly in the latter class.
It was easy to see that a diplomat's hand was needed to accomplish what
Smith was sent to accomplish, and Smith could be a diplomat of parts
when the need arose; but his instructions from Mr. O'Connor had left
him so little latitude that he was obliged to return without securing
any positive action of any sort.
"They will take the matter up at the next meeting," he reported.
O'Connor transmitted this report to the President with an expression of
disappointment.
"We ought to have had that thing fixed up. And if it had been handled
right, it would have been fixed up now," he said.
Whereat the President, with one of his flashes of clear vision, replied
suavely, "And who gave Smith his instructions?"
It was only a chance shot on Mr. Wintermuth's part, but it went
straight to the mark, and it rankled. O'Connor knew--or felt
reasonably sure--that Smith had not mentioned the matter to any one but
himself, yet the chief had struck unerringly the nail's head. And all
this endeared Smith but little to the man who had never liked him.
It is none too comfortable to work for a man who will covertly begrudge
you your successes and indifferently conceal his satisfaction at your
mistakes; for the stoutest hearted it is a discouraging business. This
Smith found it, and he would have found it still more discouraging had
it not been for the exuberance of his enthusiasm for his profession and
his healthy appetite for most real things that came his way--real work,
real pleasures, real sport, and perhaps a few real follies. Many
times, after a bad hour spent in a futile defense against the only
half-perceptible hostility of O'Connor, he would find himself seriously
questioning whether he would not do more wisely to leave the Guardian
and hazard a new fortune in another field. Yet all the while he knew
that this course of speculation was idle and a waste of time and
cerebral tissues. He was a Guardian man, and with the Guardian he was
going to stay--unless the Company itself took a different view. Of
course there was a time coming when Mr. Wintermuth would lay down his
badge of office, but before that time much would occur. Sufficient
unto that day would be its own evil, without enhancing it by imaginary
additions. So Smith stood by his post, but there was at times an
expression in his face which gave F. Mills O'Connor himself cause for
careful consideration.
But to Darius Howell, somewhat awkwardly saying good-by at the
Guardian's door, Smith's smile was as sunny as the skies of Schuyler,
Maine. For troubles often turned out to be largely imaginary, while
Darius was indubitably real.