Read Ebook: White Ashes by Kennedy Sidney R Sidney Robinson Noble Alden Charles

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Ebook has 2182 lines and 114386 words, and 44 pages

"Whose idea was this, did you say?" she asked.

"His name was Smith," said Wilkinson, soberly.

"Wish me luck," he said, as he turned to go. "More depends upon this than you pampered children of luxury can ever guess. Isabel, I congratulate you on the educational advance of your butler. Miss Maitland, I am your very devoted."

The curtains of the drawing room shut him from sight and sound, except the faint rumor of his descending feet upon the steps.

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."

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 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."

"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 0,000 was ample; its surplus of 0,000 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.

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.

"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.

"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 prot?g? 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.

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