White Ashes | Page 8

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