"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.