Читать книгу The Cliff-Dwellers - Henry Blake Fuller - Страница 4

On the tenth floor of the Clifton is the office of the Massachusetts Brass Company.

Those whose minds are attuned to an appreciation of upholstery and kindred matters pronounce this little suite the gem of the whole establishment. Even many who are not adepts in the matter of house-furnishing, and who are much too rushed and preoccupied to become such, have been known to pause in their course through the Clifton's long corridors, on occasions when the ribbed glass door of the Brass Company happened to be standing ajar, and to say to themselves, with certain home offices in mind,

"Now, why can't our people do as much for us?"

Indeed, there is cause enough for envy in that small square of velvety Axminster, in the harmonious tinting of the walls, in the padded leather backs of the swivel chairs, in the polished brightness of the cherry desk-tops, in the fresh blotting-pads and the immaculate inkstands. To sit in this pleasant little apartment for half an hour is to receive quite a new impression of the possible luxury of business, the ultimate elegance of trade. This may be managed as easily as not if you happen to have any dealings with "D. Walworth Floyd, Agt."—according to the legend on the translucent pane of the door—who is quite unlikely to hurry you out before you have finished.

"Don't be in such a drive," he will perhaps say to you; "stay and smoke a cigar."

For business is not too exacting a consideration with the western branch of the Massachusetts Brass Company. It is less a hive of industry than a social exchange. The hours are easy, and the habitues are as frequently callers as customers. They are often Jacks or Toms, whose fathers are social pillars in Boston and large land-owners in Wyoming and Dakota, and Jack and Tom—birds of passage in Scotch cheviots and billycock hats—are given to alighting for a brief breathing-spell on this lofty perch, where they reproach the slipshod dress and careless, speech of their friend's small office force by the trim neatness of their own clothes and conversation.

It may be guessed that this snug haven of refuge has been established and maintained less to extend the Company's trade than to provide a place for the Company's Walworth. I say Company's Walworth, for in this case "company" and "family" are interchangeable terms. The Massachusetts Brass Company is the Floyd family, and the Floyd family is the Massachusetts Brass Company. The Company pays no dividends, but it is very generous in its salaries. It is liberal with Hosea G. Floyd, who is its president, and with Winthrop C. Floyd, who is its treasurer, and with H. Lovell Floyd, who is its New York agent, and with Cadwallader P. Floyd, who looks after the Philadelphia interests; nor does it quite forget D. Walworth Floyd, who holds up one end more or less effectively in the West. But Walworth is the last and the youngest of the Floyds; his marriage was not to the complete satisfaction of his family, and his single independent venture before leaving home, in the direction of coffee and spices, compelled his brothers to put their hands into their pockets rather deeply. So, while the rest of the Floyds think that, all considered, they have rather done the fair thing by Walworth, yet Walworth, on the other hand, regards his assignment to the West as a mild form of punishment and exile.

"It does give me a little elbow-room, though."

This is the silent acknowledgment that Walworth sometimes makes to himself—but grudgingly.

Walworth Floyd is a sleek, well-fed, prosperous-looking fellow of thirty. His figure is a trifle too short and dumpy to be pronounced absolutely good; but it is always strikingly well-dressed—for he has lived in the West hardly a year as yet. His face is not handsome, but it is gentlemanly quite. One might, indeed, complain of the retreating lines of his forehead, and regret, too, that his chin, once perfect, now shows leanings towards the duplex; but, on the other hand, his well-bridged nose, you are sure, has been figuring in family portraits for the last hundred years, and his plump hands, by reason of the fine texture of the skin and the shapeliness of the nails, form a point that is distinctly aristocratic. Yet penmanship, under his manipulations, becomes a very crabbed and laborious affair, and this light species of manual labor is usually performed, so far as he is concerned, by other hands. He has a sort of general clerk, and he shares the services of a stenographer with two or three of his neighbors. He employs, too, an office-boy, who would idle away a good deal of time if Walworth were not in the habit of sending frequent communications to the steward of his club. Walworth, garmented in his plump placidity, has been accustomed to fare sumptuously every day, and to worry his head about as few things as possible. His dining he does for himself; his thinking he has somebody else do for him: His book-keeping and auditing and so on are done in the East, and a friend of his—he has no enemies—once said that his stomach was in Chicago, while his brains were in Boston.

Walworth, considering his family training and traditions, is inexplicably expansive. Even more than his limited capabilities for business, even more than the exactions of a wife whose pinched girlhood has helped her to a full appreciation of her present membership in a wealthy family, has his own open-hearted bonhomie "kept him back." He is just the man to whom one writes a letter of introduction without any sense of imposing a burden, or to whom one may present it without experiencing any great sense of embarrassment. And it is a letter of introduction, in point of fact, which is now lying half folded on the extended elbow-rest of his desk, and has been lying there for a quarter of an hour.

Most of us know something about letters of introduction—promised so thoughtlessly, written so glibly, presented so reluctantly, received so grudgingly. But when the letter is merely a trifling and insignificant line—a line which has no great importance for the bearer and can cause no great annoyance to the recipient—and when its presentation here and its accounting for there may be considered as but a minute item in the general system of social book-keeping, then we have an episode that passes quickly and lightly for all concerned. Such appears to be the situation in the office of the Massachusetts Brass Company.