White Ashes. Sidney R. Kennedy
as he sat looking out of the car window at an apathetic brakeman who languidly gazed down the shining rails. For no cause that could be guessed, the train had now been resting nearly half an hour. The colored porter had ceased to perform prodigies by shutting between the upper berth and the wall three times as many blankets, mattresses, board partitions, and other paraphernalia as one would have thought the space could possibly contain, and was sitting in the corner section reflectively chewing a toothpick. There appeared to be a distressing lack of interest in the train on the part of all its proximate officials; no one seemed ready to alter the status quo.
Only a few miles to the eastward the roofs of Boston and the golden dome of the Capitol glittered in the morning sun, and there were the bright rails stretching clean and straight up to the very gates of the city. Railroading was a silly business anyway, thought Smith. An express train should be consistent, and not suddenly decide to become a landmark instead of a mobile and dynamic agent. He almost wished he had taken his ticket by the Fall River boat—as he probably would have done had he been a Bostonian.
"Without reference to its political aspect," he reflected, "I believe strongly in water. I might have been deeply disturbed if there had been a ground swell or a cross sea going around Point Judith, but I wouldn't have been threatened with approaching senile decay en route."
Smith was from New York. The elderly Bostonian who shared his section had thought so from the first. He had guessed it when Smith took out for the second time his watch and replaced it with a snap; he had felt his belief strengthened when his fellow traveler raised the sash and looked impatiently up the idle track; and he had dismissed all doubt when Smith, conversing with the apathetic brakeman, crisply indicated his desire to return from a study of still life to the moving picture show for which he had paid admission. The elderly Bostonian had observed many New Yorkers, but it had never ceased to be a source of surprise to him why they all should be so incessantly restless with an electric anxiety to be getting somewhere else. To his own thinking one place was very much the same as another—with the exception of Boston—and a comfortable inertia was by no means to be condemned. If people were waiting for one, and one didn't appear, they merely waited a little longer—that was all. If eternity was really eternity, there was exactly as much time coming as had passed. In any event no well-regulated New England mind would permit itself to become disturbed over so small a matter.
Smith, guessing perhaps something of this from his companion's placid face, felt a momentary embarrassment at his own impatience.
"I've an engagement at ten o'clock," he remarked, somewhat apologetically, to his conservative neighbor. "Do you suppose this train is going to let me keep it?"
The gentleman addressed cautiously expressed the opinion that if no further malign influences were felt, and the train were presently to start, the remainder of the journey would occupy comparatively little time.
And so in due course it came to pass as the elderly Bostonian had predicted, clearly proving—if Smith had been open to accept proof—that the Oriental method of reasoning is the most comfortable, whatever may be said of its efficiency. He had left home at eleven on the night before, and he arrived at the offices of Silas Osgood and Company, 175 Kilby Street, at exactly half an hour before eleven in the morning.
The exercise of walking up from the South Station, although the walk was a short one, had wholly dispelled the irritation of the delay, so that his smile was as genuine as ever when Mr. Silas Osgood held out his courtly hand in welcome It would have been a very bitter mood that could have withstood the Bostonian's greeting.
"We were looking for you a little earlier in the morning," he said, when the first greetings were over. "You come so seldom nowadays that we feel you ought to come as early as possible."
Smith laughed.
"If you'd said that to me when I had been waiting two hours somewhere just the other side of North, East, West, or South Newton, I would have probably snarled like a dyspeptic terrier. Now, seeing you, sir, I can blandly reply that I came via Springfield and that the train was a trifle late."
"Exceedingly courteous, I am sure, for one not a native," agreed the other, smiling. "I am advised that the train has been known to be delayed."
"Well, I'm here now, anyway," Smith rejoined, "and very glad to be. It must be six weeks since I saw the good old gilded dome on the hill, and six weeks seems a long time—or would, if they didn't keep me pretty busy at the other end."
The two men were by this time in Mr. Osgood's private office, and the closing door shut out the click of typewriters and the other sounds of the larger room outside. As Mr. Osgood seated himself a trifle stiffly in his wide desk chair, Smith looked at him affectionately. The reflection came into his mind that the old gentleman was just a little older than when they had last met, and the thought gave a pang.
Silas Osgood was nearing his seventieth year. A long life of kindly and gentle thinking, of clean and correct living, had left him at this age as clear-eyed and direct of gaze as a child, but the veins showed blue in the rather frail hands, and the face was seamed with tiny wrinkles. Mr. Osgood had been in business in the fire insurance world of Boston for almost half a century. He was as well known as the very pavement of Kilby Street, that great local artery of insurance life, and the pulse of that life beat in him as strongly as his own.
To be an insurance man—and by that is meant primarily a fire insurance man—is in New England no mean or casual thing. South, West, in the newer and more open lands, where traditions are fewer and there is less time for the dignities and observance of the amenities of commerce, fire insurance takes its chance with a thousand other roads to an honest dollar. If a Western lawyer has a few spare hours, he hangs out an insurance sign and between briefs he or his clerk writes policies. The cashier of the Farmers' State Bank in the prairie town ekes out his small salary with the commissions he receives as agent for a few companies. If a grist-mill owner or a storekeeper has a busy corner of two Southern streets where passers-by congregate on market day, he gets the representation of a fire company or two, and from time to time sends in a risk to the head office, whose underwriters go nearly frantic in endeavoring to decipher the hidden truth in the dusty reports of these well-intentioned amateurs.
But it is not so in New England. In New England fire insurance reaches its proudest estate. It is a profession, and to its true votaries almost a religion. Its sons have, figuratively speaking, been born with a rate book in one hand and a blank proof-of-loss clutched tightly in the other. And in the mouth a silver spoon or not, as the case might be, but in any event a conclusive argument for the superior loss-paying ability and liberality in adjustment of the companies they respectively represent. They are fire insurance men by birth, education, and tradition—they and their fathers before them. Four generations back, Silas Osgood's family had been supported by the staid old English public's fear of fire. Three generations in Massachusetts had been similarly preserved from the pangs of hunger. Likenesses of all four were hanging on the wall of Mr. Osgood's office; as to identity the first two were highly questionable, but their uniforms in the old prints showed up fresh and bright. In those old days gentlemen only, men of education and station, whose judgment and courage were beyond question, were intrusted with the responsibility of fighting the flames. It is hard to say why this important and exciting work should no longer attract the same sort of men to its service.
Hanging beside the four generations were the commissions of the fire companies locally represented in the Osgood office. Stout old companies they were, too, for the most part; one of the older ones was well in the second century of its triumph over fire and the fear of fire and the ashes thereof; this was a foreign company which Osgood held for old sake's sake. The other commissions bore American signatures, most of them well known and well esteemed. On the wall right above where Smith sat was the gold seal of his own company, the Guardian, and against the seal the inexplicable hieroglyph which served Mr. James Wintermuth for his presidential signature. Then there was the great white sheet with the black border which set forth to all the world by these presents that Silas Osgood and Company were the duly accredited agents of the Atlantic Fire Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut. The narrow placque of the old Birmingham Indemnity of Birmingham, England, looked like a calling card beside the Atlantic's flamboyant placard.