Peter

Peter.

by F. Hopkinson Smith.

CHAPTER I

Peter was still poring over his ledger one dark afternoon in December, his bald head glistening like a huge ostrich egg under the flare of the overhead gas jets, when Patrick, the night watchman, catching sight of my face peering through the outer grating, opened the door of the Bank.

The sight so late in the day was an unusual one, for in all the years that I have called at the Bank--ten, now--no, eleven since we first knew each other--Peter had seldom failed to be ready for our walk uptown when the old moon-faced clock high up on the wall above the stove pointed at four.

"I thought there was something up!" I cried. "What is it, Peter--balance wrong?"

He did not answer, only waved his hand in reply, his bushy gray eyebrows moving slowly, like two shutters that opened and closed, as he scanned the lines of figures up and down, his long pen gripped tight between his thin, straight lips, as a dog carries a bone.

I never interrupt him when his brain is nosing about like this; it is better to keep still and let him ferret it out. So I sat down outside the curved rail with its wooden slats backed by faded green curtains, close to the big stove screened off at the end of the long room, fixed one eye on the moon-face and the other on the ostrich egg, and waited.

There are no such banks at the present time--were no others then, and this story begins not so very many years" ago--A queer, out-of-date, mouldy old barn of a bank, you would say, this Exeter--for an inst.i.tution wielding its influence. Not a coat of paint for half a century; not a brushful of whitewash for goodness knows how much longer.

As for the floor, it still showed the gullies and grooves, with here and there a st.u.r.dy knot sticking up like a nut on a boiler, marking the track of countless impatient depositors and countless anxious borrowers, it may be, who had lock-stepped one behind the other for fifty years or more, in their journey from the outer door to the windows where the Peters of the old days, and the Peter of the present, presided over the funds entrusted to their care.

Well enough in its day, you might have said, with a shrug, as you looked over its forlorn interior. Well enough in its day! Why, man, old John Astor, James Beekman, Rhinelander Stewart, Moses Grinnell, and a lot of just such worthies--men whose word was as good as their notes--and whose notes were often better than the Government"s, presided over its destinies, and helped to stuff the old-fashioned vault with wads of gilt-edged securities--millions in value if you did but know it--and making it what it is to-day. If you don"t believe the first part of my statement, you"ve only to fumble among the heap of dusty ledgers piled on top of the dusty shelves; and if you doubt the latter part, then try to buy some of the stock and see what you have to pay for it. Although the gas was turned off in the directors" room, I could still see from where I sat the very mahogany table under which these same ruffle-shirted, watch-fobbed, snuff-taking old fellows tucked their legs when they decided on who should and who should not share the bank"s confidence.

And the side walls and surroundings were none the less shabby and quite as dilapidated. Even the windows had long since given up the fight to maintain a decent amount of light, and as for the grated opening protected by iron shutters which would have had barely room to swing themselves clear of the building next door, no Patrick past or present had ever dared loosen their bolts for a peep even an inch wide into the canyon below, so gruesome was the collection of old shoes, tin cans, broken bottles and battered hats which successive generations had hurried into the narrow un-get-at-able s.p.a.ce that lay between the two structures.

Indeed the only thing inside or out of this time-worn building which the most fertile of imaginations could consider as being at all up to date was the clock. Not its face--that was old-timey enough with its sun, moon and stars in blue and gold, and the name of the Liverpool maker engraved on its enamel; nor its hands, fiddle-shaped and stiff, nor its case, which always reminded me of a coffin set up on end awaiting burial--but its strike. Whatever divergences the Exeter allowed itself in its youth, or whatever lat.i.tude or longitude it had given its depositors, and that, we may be sure, was precious little so long as that Board of Directors was alive, there was no wabbling or wavering, no being behind time, when the hour hand of the old clock reached three and its note of warning rang out.

Peter obeyed the ominous sound and closed his Teller"s window with a gentle bang. Patrick took notice and swung to the iron grating of the outer door. You might peer in and beg ever so hard--unless, of course, you were a visitor like myself, and even then Peter would have to give his consent--you might peer through, I say, or tap on the gla.s.s, or you might plead that you were late and very sorry, but the ostrich egg never turned in its nest nor did the eyebrows vibrate. Three o"clock was three o"clock at the Exeter, and everybody might go to the devil--financially, of course--before the rule would be broken. Other banks in panicky times might keep a side door open until four, five or six--that is, the bronze-rail, marble-top, gla.s.s-front, certify-your-checks-as-early-as- ten-in-the-morning-without-a-penny-on-deposit kind of banks--but not the Exeter--that is, not with Peter"s consent--and Peter was the Exeter so far as his department was concerned--and had been for nearly thirty years--twenty as bookkeeper, five as paying teller and five as receiving teller.

And the regularity and persistency of this clock! Not only did it announce the hours, but it sounded the halves and quarters, clearing its throat with a whirr like an admonitory cough before each utterance.

I had samples of its entire repertoire as I sat there:

One...two...three...four...five--then half an hour later a whir-r and a single note. "Half-past five," I said to myself. "Will Peter never find that mistake?" Once during the long wait the night watchman shifted his leg--he was on the other side of the stove--and once Peter reached up above his head for a pile of papers, spreading them out before him under the white glare of the overhead light, then silence again, broken only by the slow, dogged tock-tick, tock-tick, or the sagging of a hot coal adjusting itself for the night.

Suddenly a cheery voice rang out and Peter"s hands shot up above his head.

"Ah, Breen & Co.! One of those plaguey sevens for a nine. Here we are!

Oh, Peter Grayson, how often have I told you to be careful! Ah, what a sorry block of wood you carry on your shoulders. I won"t be a minute now, Major." A gratuitous compliment on the part of my friend, I being a poor devil of a contractor without military aspirations of any kind.

"Well, well, how could I have been so stupid. Get ready to close up, Patrick. No, thank you, Patrick, my coat"s inside; I"ll fetch it."

He was quite another man now, closing the great ledger with a bang; shouldering it as Moses did the Tables of the Law, and carrying it into the big vault behind him--big enough to back a buggy into had the great door been wider--shooting the bolts, whirring the combination into so hopeless and confused a state that should even the most daring and expert of burglars have tried his hand or his jimmy on its steel plating he would have given up in despair (that is unless big Patrick fell asleep--an unheard-of occurrence) and all with such spring and joyousness of movement that had I not seen him like this many times before I would have been deluded into the belief that the real Peter had been locked up in the dismal vault with the musty books and that an entirely different kind of Peter was skipping about outside.

But that was nothing to the air with which he swept his papers into the drawer of his desk, brushed away the crumpled sheets upon which he had figured his balance, and darted to the washstand behind the narrow part.i.tion. Nor could it be compared to the way in which he stripped off his black bombazine office-coat with its baggy pockets--quite a disreputable-looking coat I must say--taking it by the nape of the neck, as if it were some loathsome object to be got rid of, and hanging it upon a hook behind him; nor to the way in which he pulled up his shirt sleeves and plunged his white, long-fingered, delicately modeled hands into the basin, as if cleanliness were a thing to be welcomed as a part of his life. These carefully dried, each finger by itself--not forgetting the small seal ring on the little one--he gave an extra polish to his glistening pate with the towel, patted his fresh, smooth-shaven cheeks with an unrumpled handkerchief which he had taken from his inside pocket, carefully adjusted his white neck-cloth, refastening the diamond pin--a tiny one but clear as a baby"s tear--put on his frock-coat with its high collar and flaring tails, took down his silk hat, gave it a flourish with his handkerchief, unhooked his overcoat from a peg behind the door (a gray surtout cut something like the first Napoleon"s) and stepped out to where I sat.

You would never have put him down as being sixty years of age had you known him as well as I did--and it is a great pity you didn"t. Really, now that I come to think of it, I never did put him down as being of any age at all. Peter Grayson and age never seemed to have anything to do with each other. Sometimes when I have looked in through the Receiving Teller"s window and have pa.s.sed in my book--I kept my account at the Exeter--and he has lifted his bushy shutters and gazed at me suddenly with his merry Scotch-terrier eyes, I have caught, I must admit, a line of anxiety, or rather of concentrated cautiousness on his face, which for the moment made me think that perhaps he was looking a trifle older than when I last saw him; but all this was scattered to the winds when I met him an hour afterward swinging up Wall Street with that cheery lift of the heels so peculiarly his own, a lift that the occupants of every office window on both sides of the street knew to be Peter"s even when they failed to recognize the surtout and straight-brimmed high hat. Had any doubting Thomas, however, walked beside him on his way up Broadway to his rooms on Fifteenth Street, and had the quick, almost boyish lift of Peter"s heels not entirely convinced the unbeliever of Peter"s youth, all questions would have been at once disposed of had the cheery bank teller invited him into his apartment up three flights of stairs over the tailor"s shop--and he would have invited him had he been his friend--and then and there forced him into an easy chair near the open wood fire, with some such remark as: "Down, you rascal, and sit close up where I can get my hands on you!" No--there was no trace of old age about Peter.

He was ready now--hatted, coated and gloved--not a hint of the ostrich egg or s.h.a.ggy shutters visible, but a well-preserved bachelor of forty or forty-five; strictly in the mode and of the mode, looking more like some stray diplomat caught in the wiles of the Street, or some retired magnate, than a modest bank clerk on three thousand a year. The next instant he was tripping down the granite steps between the rusty iron railings--on his toes most of the way; the same cheery spring in his heels, slapping his thin, shapely legs with his tightly rolled umbrella, adjusting his hat at the proper angle so that the well-trimmed side whiskers--the veriest little dabs of whiskers hardly an inch long--would show as well as the fringes of his grey hair.

Not that he was anxious to conceal these slight indications of advancing years, nor did he have a spark of cheap personal vanity about him, but because it was his nature always to put his best foot foremost and keep it there; because, too, it behooved him in manner, dress and morals, to maintain the standards he had set for himself, he being a Grayson, with the best blood of the State in his veins, and with every table worth dining at open to him from Fourteenth Street to Murray Hill, and beyond.

"Now, it"s all behind me, my dear boy," he cried, as we reached the sidewalk and turned our faces up Wall Street toward Broadway. "Fifteen hours to live my own life! No care until ten o"clock to-morrow.

Lovely life, my dear Major, when you think of it. Ah, old Micawber was right--income one pound, expense one pound ten shillings; result, misery: income one pound ten, expense one pound, outcome, happiness!

What a curse this Street is to those who abuse its power for good; half of them trying to keep out of jail and the other half fighting to keep out of the poor-house! And most of them get so little out of it. Just as I can detect a counterfeit bill at sight, my boy, so can I put my ringer on these money-getters when the poison of money-getting for money"s sake begins to work in their veins. I don"t mean the laying up of money for a rainy day, or the providing for one"s family. Every man should lay up a six-months" doctor"s bill, just as every man should lay up money enough to keep his body out of Potter"s Field. It"s laying up the SURPLUS that hurts."

Peter had his arm firmly locked in mine now.

"Now that concern of Breen & Company, where I found my error, are no better than the others. They are new to this whirlpool, but they will soon get in over their heads. I think it is only the third or fourth year since they started business, but they are already floating all sorts of schemes, and some of them--if you will permit me in confidence, strictly in confidence, my dear boy--are rather shady, I think: at least I judge so from their deposits."

"What are they, bankers?" I ventured. I had never heard of the firm; not an extraordinary thing in my case when bankers were concerned.

Peter laughed:

"Yes, BANKERS--all in capital letters--the imitation kind. Breen came from some place out of town and made a lucky hit in his first year--mines or something--I forget what. Oh, but you must know that it takes very little now-a-days to make a full-fledged banker. All you have to do is to hoist in a safe--through the window, generally, with the crowd looking on; rail off half the office; scatter some big ledgers over two or three newly varnished desks; move in a dozen arm-chairs, get a ticker, a black-board and a boy with a piece of chalk; be pleasant to every fellow you meet with his own or somebody else"s money in his pocket, and there you are. But we won"t talk of these things--it isn"t kind, and, really, I hardly know Breen, and I"m quite sure he wouldn"t know me if he saw me, and he"s a very decent gentleman in many ways, I hear. He never overdraws his account, any way--never tries--and that"s more than I can say for some of his neighbors."

The fog, which earlier in the afternoon had been but a blue haze, softening the hard outlines of the street, had now settled down in earnest, choking up the doorways, wiping out the tops of the buildings, their facades starred here and there with gas-jets, and making a smudged drawing of the columns of the Custom House opposite.

"Superb, are they not?" said Peter, as he wheeled and stood looking at the row of monoliths supporting the roof of the huge granite pile, each column in relief against the dark shadows of the portico. "And they are never so beautiful to me, my boy, as when the ugly parts of the old building are lost in the fog. Follow the lines of these watchmen of the temple! These grave, dignified, majestic columns standing out in the gloom keeping guard! But it is only a question of time--down they"ll come! See if they don"t!"

"They will never dare move them," I protested. "It would be too great a sacrilege." The best way to get Peter properly started is never to agree with him.

"Not move them! They will break them up for dock-filling before ten years are out. They"re in the way, my boy; they shut out the light; can"t hang signs on them; can"t plaster them over with theatre bills; no earthly use. "Wall Street isn"t Rome or any other excavated ruin; it"s the centre of the universe"--that"s the way the fellows behind these gla.s.s windows talk." Here Peter pointed to the offices of some prominent bankers, where other belated clerks were still at work under shaded gas-jets. "These fellows don"t want anything cla.s.sic; they want something that"ll earn four per cent."

We were now opposite the Sub-Treasury, its roof lost in the settling fogs, the bronze figure of the Father of His Country dominating the flight of marble steps and the adjacent streets.

Again Peter wheeled; this time he lifted his hat to the statue.

"Good evening, your Excellency," he said in a voice mellowed to the same respectful tone with which he would have addressed the original in the flesh.

Suddenly he loosened his arm from mine and squared himself so he could look into my face.

"I notice that you seldom salute him, Major, and it grieves me," he said with a grim smile.

I broke into a laugh. "Do you think he would feel hurt if I didn"t."

"Of course he would, and so should you. He wasn"t put there for ornament, my boy, but to be kept in mind, and I want to tell you that there"s no place in the world where his example is so much needed as right here in Wall Street. Want of reverence, my dear boy"--here he adjusted his umbrella to the hollow of his arm--"is our national sin.

n.o.body reveres anything now-a-days. Much as you can do to keep people from running railroads through your family vaults, and, as to one"s character, all a man needs to get himself battered black and blue, is to try to be of some service to his country. Even our presidents have to be murdered before we stop abusing them. By Jove! Major, you"ve GOT to salute him! You"re too fine a man to run to seed and lose your respect for things worth while. I won"t have it, I tell you! Off with your hat!"

I at once uncovered my head (the fog helped to conceal my own ident.i.ty, if it didn"t Peter"s) and stood for a brief instant in a respectful att.i.tude.

There was nothing new in the discussion. Sometimes I would laugh at him; sometimes I would only touch my hat in unison; sometimes I let him do the bowing alone, an act on his part which never attracted attention--looking more as if he had accosted some pa.s.sing friend.

We had reached Broadway by this time and were crossing the street opposite Trinity Churchyard.

"Come over here with me," he cried, "and let us look in through the iron railings. The study of the dead is often more profitable than knowledge of the living. Ah, the gate is open! It is not often I am here at this time, and on a foggy afternoon. What a n.o.ble charity, my boy, is a fog--it hides such a mult.i.tude of sins--bad architecture for one," and he laughed softly.

I always let Peter run on--in fact I always encourage him to run on. No one I know talks quite in the same way; many with a larger experience of life are more profound, but none have the personal note which characterizes the old fellow"s discussions.

"And how do you suppose these by-gones feel about what is going on around them?" he rattled on, tapping the wet slab of a tomb with the end of his umbrella. "And not only these st.u.r.dy patriots who lie here, but the queer old ghosts who live in the steeple?" he added, waving his hand upward to the slender spire, its cross lost in the fog. "Yes, ghosts and goblins, my boy. You don"t believe it?--I do--or I persuade myself I do, which is better. Sometimes I can see them straddling the chimes when they ring out the hours, or I catch them peeping out between the slats of the windows away up near the cross. Very often in the hot afternoons when you are stretching your lazy body under the tents of the mighty--"

(Peter referred to some friends of mine who owned a villa down on Long Island, and were good enough to ask me down for a week in August) "I come up here out of the rush and sit on these old tombstones and talk to these old fellows--both kinds--the steeple boys and the old cronies under the sod. You never come, I know. You will when you"re my age."