Читать книгу The Cliff-Dwellers - Henry Blake Fuller - Страница 8

In one of the first-floor corners of the Clifton is situated the Underground National Bank—Erastus H. Brainard, president.

The Underground is not so styled on account of the policy and methods of its head, oblique and subterranean though they may be; it is merely that the Clifton is almost entirely shut in by its tall neighbors, and that, so far as its lower floors are concerned, direct sunlight, except for a month or two in the early summer, is pretty nearly out of the question. We shall have to throw our own sunlight on the Underground and on the man who is its president and its principal stockholder.

The Underground is not one of the old banks, nor is it one of the large ones; if Brainard had no other irons in the fire he would not cut much of a figure in business circles. The Underground is simply one in a batch of banks that have sprung up in the last seven or eight years and that are almost unknown, even by name, to men who, in the clearing-house at that time, have since passed on to other and different affairs. It is spoken of as Brainard's bank, just as other banks are spoken of as Shayne's, or Cutter's, or Patterson's. Sow Shayne, for example, began life with a fruit-stand—Jim Shayne they called him. The fruit-stand developed into a retail grocery, and Jim Shayne (about the time of the Fire) became J. H. Shayne. The retail grocery expanded into a wholesale grocery, and the sign read, "James H. Shayne & Co.," and the firm made money. But the day dawned when his wife began to figure at dances and receptions—her own and those of other people—as Mrs. James Horton Shayne, and when his daughter's wedding was not far away, with all the splendor that St. Asaph's could command. This was no juncture for laying undue stress on the wholesale grocery business; it seemed worth while to become identified a little less closely with mercantile circles and a little more closely with financial circles. Shayne & Co. went right on—both routine and profits; but the High-flyers' National was started, and James Horton Shayne was more likely to be found on La Salle Street than on River Street.

Cutter was in hardware. His daughter was a great beauty. One day he dropped hardware in favor of his sons, to become the head of a board of directors. Then people could say, "Ah! a fine girl that! Her father runs the Parental National."

Patterson's case was different. He had just invested half a million in a big business block, and his daughter had just invested her all in a husband. The best office in the new building remained tenantless at the end of six months, and the man of his daughter's choice continued practically without occupation during the same term. The office was worth ten thousand dollars, the son-in-law—in the present state of things—about ten thousand cents. So Patterson, in order to secure a tenant for his new building and a career for his new son, started a new financial institution—the Exigency Trust Co.

But no such considerations as these influenced Erastus Brainard when he founded the Underground. He was far aside from all social ambitions, and his domestic affairs took care of themselves. His business interests spread all over the city, the state, the West, even the Ear West, and this vast web must have a centre. That centre was on the lower floor of the Clifton, where he ran a bank, true, but a good many other things besides.

Brainard had come up from the southern part of the state—from "Egypt," as it is called. A darkness truly Egyptian brooded over his early history, so that if it is a fact that he was an exhorter at Methodist camp-meetings in his early twenties, proof of that fact might be sought for in vain. The first definite point in his career is this: that as a youngish man he was connected in some capacity with a cross-country railroad on the far side of Centralia. How successful he was in transporting souls no one can say; that he has been successful in transporting bodies no one will deny. He is unrivalled in his mastery of the street-car question, and his operations have lain in many scattered fields.

To claim that Brainard has a national reputation would be going too far. However, his reputation might fairly be termed inter-state. If the man were to die to-morrow, sketches of his life would appear in the papers of Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and St. Louis; and the caustic and frankly abusive paragraphs would be copied appreciatively as far as the remoter counties of Nebraska. For Brainard's success is not without the elements of public scandal. His manipulation of city councils and of state legislatures has been freely charged. Old stories of his brief incarceration in prison, or of his narrow escape from it, sometimes arise and flutter; and there are those who think that if he never has been in jail, then this is all the more reason for his being there now. His demise would indeed set the clipping-bureaus to work; but the work would not be started by the direction of his surviving family. Such is the chief to whom young George Ogden has sworn allegiance.

"I shall marry him," said a voice quite firmly; "you may make up your mind to that."

Ogden started. These words came through a door which stood ajar in the partition that separated him from the president's room; the office was splendid with bevelled glass and oxidized iron-work, yet it was as compact as high rentals compel. They were words in striking contrast to most of the talk that his pen commanded. "Make it thirty days more"; "I'll take the rest in small bills, please"; "It will be due day after to-morrow." And with these—"I shall marry him; make up your mind to that."

He knew the voice perfectly well; he had heard it a fortnight before in Floyd's office.

The door in the partition opened a foot or two wider; the bulky figure of Erastus Brainard appeared and his hard and determined face. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a close-clipped gray beard and a shaven upper lip. Two or three red veins showed prominently in his bulbous nose. He wore black broadcloth; his coat had a velvet collar, and on his shoulders there was a light fall of dandruff. He wore boots. On Sundays his boots had "tongues," and his trade was the mainstay of a German shoemaker who kept a shop behind his house, and whom, twice a year, he literally terrified into a fit.

But now his big figure clutched at the red-cherry door-jamb with a tremulous hesitancy, the hard, fierce eyes looked out appealingly from under their coarse and shaggy brows, and the proud and cruel lips opened themselves to address the young man with an order that was almost an entreaty.

"Ogden, won't you ask Mr. Fairchild to step this way?"

For a mouse had come into the place, and the elephant was in terror.

The Underground National Bank, with a surplus equal to a third of its capital, had not declared a dividend for several years. Brainard, along with his son and his brother, owned five eighths of the stock. Put these two facts together and surmise the rest. Understand, without the telling, how Brainard had bought back big blocks of stock from men who had invested on his own advice and representations, only to sell out at less than two thirds the price they had paid. Understand how widowed and unprotected women, with little realization of the remote possibilities of the science of banking and no realization at all of the way in which their five thousands had come to be worth so much less than five thousand, would come to his office to implore ingenuously with sobs and tears that he would give them back their money. Consider these and a dozen other phases of the pleasant pastime known as "freeze out," and then judge whether Brainard, by this time, were capable or no of braving, warding off, beating down, despising the threats, the imprecations, the pleadings, the attacks of the harmless domestic animal known as the investor. But now another domestic animal, the wilful daughter, had entered his lair, and with this new antagonist he felt himself unable to cope.

"Ogden, won't you ask Mr. Fairchild to step this way!"

Fairchild was only the cashier of the bank, while Brainard was its head; but Fairchild was a good deal of a man—and that was more than Brainard, with all his money and his brains and his consciencelessness, and all the added power of the three combined, could have claimed for himself. He was merely a financial appliance—one of the tools of the trade.

He had no friends—none even of the poor sort known as "business" friends. He had no social relations of any kind. He had no sense of any right relation to the community in which he lived. He had next to no family life. He had no apparent consciousness of the physical basis of existence—for him diet, rest, hygiene were mere nothings. But none of these considerations disturbed him very much. He could do without friends—having so good a friend in himself. He could dispense with social diversion—so long as the affairs of the Underground, and the Illuminating Company, and those Western mines continued to occupy his attention. He could rub along without the sympathy and respect of the community—while he and it held the relative positions of knife and oyster. He could do perfectly well without hygiene and proper regimen as long as dyspepsia and nerves and rheumatism were not too pressing in their attentions. And he could, of course, trust his family to run itself without any great amount of attention from its natural head.

His family had run itself for twenty odd years. It had gone on its scattered way rejoicing—after the good, new, Western fashion which finds the unit of society less in the family than in the individual; and now a very promising young filly, after having "run" herself for a good part of this twenty years, was on the point of taking the bit between her teeth and of running away altogether. The family carryall, whose front seat he had left in order that he might irresponsibly dangle his legs out from behind, was in danger of a runaway and a smash-up, and he was forced to the humiliating expedient of installing a more competent driver than himself in his own place behind the dashboard.

Ogden slid rapidly along the narrow aisle which ran behind the row of coops that confined the tellers, and found Fairchild going over yesterday's balances with the general bookkeeper. Here he was intercepted by the last of the messengers, who had had some delay in getting his batch of drafts and notes arranged properly into a route.

He was a boy of seventeen, with a pert nose and a pasty complexion. He had put on his hat with a backward tilt that displayed his bang. He was the son of a millionnaire stockholder, and was on the threshold of his business career. He panted for consideration, and he had found, during an experience of six months, that most consideration was to be won from the newest men.

"What's up now, George?" he asked, familiarly. He twitched his narrow little shoulders as he teetered back and forth on his toes. "Old man on the rampage some more? He's had it pretty bad for the last three weeks."

"Oh, get out!" Ogden responded briefly.

Fairchild was a man well on in the fifties. He had a quiet, self-contained manner, a smooth forehead, a gray moustache. His general trustworthiness was highly esteemed by Brainard, who generally treated him with civility and sometimes almost with consideration. He had his privileges. A member of the board of directors in the Brainard interest, he would be given the opportunity to resign whenever some especially dubious piece of business was looming up, with the certainty of re-election within the year. He was too old to tear himself up by the roots, and too valuable to be allowed, in any event, the radical boon of transplantation. Of course he paid for such a concession; he acted as a buffer between Brainard and the more pathetic of the stockholders, and now, as we see, he was summoned to deal with a domestic crisis.

"My dear girl," Ogden presently heard him saying in a dry, cautious, and yet somewhat parental tone, "you know what his position is. Not in the church; no, I don't mean that. He is only a policy clerk in that insurance office, at ten dollars a week, probably—hardly enough for him to live on decently, alone. Yes, I know he gets more from the choir, but even that—"

Ogden stopped one ear by propping his elbow on his ledger and putting his hand to his head, and went on with his writing as well as he could. But he had left the Underground for St. Asaph's; he was busy no longer with notes for collection, but with the notes—the melting tenor notes—of the all-admired Vibert. His fellow—clerks noiselessly retired, and a long train of choristers slowly made their way through the long aisle the others had left vacant. Among them Vibert—tall, dark, hard, and cruel; an angel, possibly; but if so, surely one of the fallen. And a little girl of eighteen, whose blue eyes showed out from under her fluffy blond locks, and whose lips were parted in a radiant, reverent smile, steadied a trembling hand on the back of a pew and looked after him with a fond, open, and intense regard that was a perfect epitome of love.

Those same blue eyes were now on the other side of the partition, regarding her father's lieutenant with a look as bright and hard as was ever her father's own; and as she listened to the words of warning, those same full and pliant lips set themselves in a firm line that Brainard himself could not have made straighter or more unswerving.

"Nobody really knows" the cashier went on, "who his people are, or where he is from, or anything definite about him. He is one of thousands. Here is a town full to overflowing with single young men. They come from everywhere, for all reasons. They are taken on faith, largely, and are treated pretty well. Most of them are all right, no doubt; but others—Of course I know nothing about Mr.—about this one; but your own brother, now—"

"That's just what I tell her," broke in Brainard, with a distressful whimper. "Burt says, and he knows it's true, that—"

Ogden again stopped his ears. If by any possibility there was aught good under that chaste surplice, he would not wilfully deprive himself of any chance for belief. If that full neck and heavy jaw and sinister eye and world-worn cheek and elaborate assumption of professional sanctity offered the slightest prospect of decent manliness and of happy home life, he would not allow one mere solitary phrase to shut that prospect out. But he could not shut out a disgust that gradually crept in upon him—a disgust for the man who would arrange the most sacred and confidential affairs of his family circle in the same general fashion that he would use for dealing with the concerns of an ordinary business acquaintance; a disgust for the family life in which such a state of things was possible. Had the girl no mother? She had, indeed; but that mother was an invalid—one who, with the advancing years, had come to know more and more of tonics and cordials, and less and less of her daughters' needs. Had she no brother? But what can a brother do?—order the intruder from the premises and intimidate him from returning, which Burt had done. Were there no friends or relations to see how matters were going and to speak out their minds boldly? But whenever has such a course availed? The friends cease to be friends, and the relatives are relatives at a greater remove only, and all goes on as before. No; there was only one way to settle this affair—the "business" way; and that way Brainard took—necessarily, instinctively.

He had never lived for anything but business. He had never eaten and drunk for anything but business—his family shared his farm-like fare and his primitive hours. He had never built for anything but business; though constantly investing in grounds and buildings, he had occupied his own home for fifteen years as a tenant merely, before he could bring himself to a grudging purchase. He never dressed for anything but business—he had never worn a dress-coat in his life. He wrote about nothing but business—his nearest relative was nevermore than "dear sir," and he himself was never otherwise than "yours truly"; and he wrote on business letterheads even to his family. And now that the present domestic difficulty was to be adjusted, no other method was available. But he had the satisfaction of feeling that his daughter was meeting him in his own spirit and on his own ground.

She eyed him with a cold and direct gaze like that of the sun which is setting in a clear winter sky. Not a single cloud-shred of affection showed itself in the wide expanse of crisp and tingling atmosphere which she seemed to have created about her; not a particle of floating vapor helped to diffuse a glow of sentiment over a situation which had much need of some such softening influence. Her fierce little glance tore down every scrap of reverence, of home love, of filial duty: life had never seemed to him quite so bald, so unfurnished, so bereft of un-businesslike non-essentials.'