CHAPTER VIII
GIBEON was so accustomed to Abner Fownes that it took him for granted, as if he were a spell of weather, or the Opera House which had been erected in 1881, or the river which flowed through the town, tumultuously in spring and parsimoniously in the heat of summer when its moisture was most sorely needed. On the whole, Abner bore more resemblance to the river than to either weather or Opera House. He was tumultuous when he could do most damage, and ran in a sort of trickle when such genius as he had might be of greater service. On the whole, the village was glad it possessed Abner. He was its show piece, and they compared him with the show citizens of adjacent centers of population.
Your remote villages are conscious of their outstanding personalities, and, however much they may dislike them personally and quarrel with them in the family, they flaunt them in the faces of outsiders and boast of their eccentricities and take pride in their mannerisms. So Gibeon fancied it knew Abner Fownes from the meticulous crust in which his tailor incased him inward to his exact geometrical center; it was positive it comprehended his every thought and perceived the motive for his every action. Forthe most part its attitude was tolerant. Gibeon fancied it allowed Abner to function, and that it could put a stop to his functioning whenever it desired. The power of his money was appraised and appreciated; but it was more than a little inclined to laugh at his bumptious pretense of arbitrary power. George Bogardus, furniture dealer and undertaker, embalmed the public estimate in words and phrases.
“Abner,” said Bogardus, “figgers himself out to be a hell of a feller, and it does him a sight of good and keeps his appetite hearty—and, so fur’sIkin see, ’tain’t no detriment to nobody else.”
Gibeon had its moments of irritation when Abner seemed to take too much for granted or when he drove with too tight a check rein, but these were ephemeral. On the whole, the town’s attitude was to let Abner do it, and then to call him a fool for his pains.
He was a native of Gibeon. His father before him had moved to the town when it was only a four corners in the woods, and had acquired, little by little, timber and mills, which increased in size from year to year. Gibeon had grown with the mills and with the coming of the railroad. Old Man Fownes had been instrumental in elevating it to the dignity of county seat. He had vanished from the scene of his activities when Abner was a young man, leaving his son extraordinarily well off for that day.
Abner, as a youth, had belonged to that short, stout class of men who are made fun of by the girls. He was never able to increase his stature, but hisgirth responded to excellent cookery. No man denied him the attribute of industry in those early days, and, as Gibeon judged, it was more by doggedness and stodgy determination that he was enabled to increase his inherited fortune than it was by the possession of keen mental faculties.
For ten years Abner was satisfied to devote himself to the husbanding and increasing of his resources. At the end of that time, his wife having died, he discovered to Gibeon an ambition to rule and a predilection for county politics. It was made apparent how he realized himself a figure in the world, and tried to live up to the best traditions of such personages as his narrow vision had enabled him to catch glimpses of. He seemed, of a sudden, to cease taking satisfaction in his moderate possessions and to desire to become a man of commanding wealth. He bought himself garments and caused himself to become impressive. He never allowed himself an unimpressive moment. Always he was before the public and conducting himself as he judged the public desired to see a personage conduct himself. By word and act he asserted himself to be a personage, and as the years went by the mere force of reiterated assertion caused Gibeon to accept him at his own valuation.... He was patient.
The fact that fifty of every hundred male inhabitants were on his payroll gave him a definite power to start with. He used this power to its limit. It is true that Gibeon laughed up its sleeve and said that smarter men than Abner used him as an implementin the political workshop; but if this were true, Abner seemed unconscious of it. What he seemed to desire was the appearance rather than the substance. It seemed to matter little to him who actually made decisions so long as he was publicly credited with making them. Yet, with all this, with all Gibeon’s sure knowledge of his inner workings, it was a little afraid of him because—well, because hemightpossess some of the power he claimed.
So, gradually, patiently, year by year, he had reached out farther and farther for money and for political power until he was credited with being a millionaire, and had at least the outward seeming of a not inconsiderable Pooh-Bah in the councils of his party.
The word “fatuous” did not occur in the vocabulary of Gibeon. If it had seen the word in print it could not have guessed its meaning, but it owned colloquial equivalents for the adjective, and with these it summed up Abner. He possessed other attributes of the fatuous man; he was vindictive where his vanity was touched; he was stubborn; he followed little quarrels as if they had been blood feuds. In all the ramifications of his life there was nothing large, nothing daring, nothing worthy of the comment of an intelligent mind. He was simply a commonplace, pompous, inflated little man who seemed to have found exactly what he wanted and to be determined to squeeze the last drop of the juice of personal satisfaction out of the realization of his ambitions.
His home was indicative of his personality. It was a square, red-brick house with an octagonal cupola on its top. It boasted a drive and evergreens, and on the lawn stood an alert iron buck. The cupola was painted white and there was a lightning rod which projected glitteringly from the top of it. You knew the lightning rod was not intended to function as a protection against electrical storms as soon as you looked at it. It was not an active lightning rod in any sense. It was a bumptious lightning rod which flaunted itself and its ornamental brass ball, and looked upon itself as quite capping the climax of Abner Fownes’s displayful life. The whole house impressed one as not being intended as a dwelling, but as a display. It was not to live in, but to inform passers-by that here was an edifice, erected at great expense, by a personage. Abner lived there after a fashion, and derived satisfaction from the house and its cupola, but particularly from its lightning rod. An elderly woman kept house for him.
Abner never came out of his house—he emerged from it. The act was a ceremony, and one could imagine he visualized himself as issuing forth between rows of bowing servitors, or through a lane of household troops in wonderful uniforms. Always he drove to his office in a surrey, occupying the back seat, erect and conscious, while his unliveried coachman sagged down in the front seat, sitting on his shoulder blades, and quite destroying the effect of solemn state. Abner, however, was not particular about lack of state except in his own person.Perhaps he had arrived at the conclusion that his own person was so impressive as to render negligible the appearance of any contiguous externals.
It was his office, however, which, to his mind, perfectly set him off. It was the setting for the jewel which was himself, and it was a perfect setting. The office knew it. It oozed self-importance. It realized its responsibilities in being the daily container for Abner Fownes. It was an overbearing office, a patronizing office. It was quite the most bumptious place of business imaginable; and when Abner was in place behind his flat-topped mahogany desk the room took on an air of complacency which would be maddening to an irritated proletariat. It was an impossible office for a lumberman. It might have been the office of a grand duke. Gibeon poked fun at the office, but boasted to strangers about it. It had on its walls two pictures in shadow boxes which were believed to be old masters rifled from some European gallery. What the pictures thought about themselves is not known, but they put the best possible face on the matter and pretended they had not been painted in a studio in the loft of a furniture store in Boston. Their frames were expensive. The walls were paneled with some wood of a golden tone which Abner was reputed to have imported for the purpose from South America. The sole furniture was that occupied by Abner Fownes—his desk and chair. There was no resting place for visitors—they remained standing when admitted to the presence.
If Abner Fownes, for some purpose of his own, with Machiavellian intelligence, had set out to create for himself a personality which could be described only by the word fatuous, he could not have done better. Every detail seemed to have been planned for the purpose of impressing the world with the fact that he was a man with illusions of grandeur, motivated by obstinate folly, blind to his silliness; perfectly contented in the belief that he was a human being who quite overshadowed his contemporaries. If he had possessed a strong, determined, rapacious, keen mind, determined upon surreptitious depredations upon finance and morals, he could not have chosen better. If he wished to set up a dummy Abner which would assert itself so loudly and foolishly as to render the real, mole-digging Abner invisible to the human eye, he could not have wrought more skillfully. He was a perfect thing; his life was a perfect thing.... Many men, possessing real, malevolent power, erect up clothes-horses to function in their names. It was quite unthinkable that such a man should sethimselfup as his own stalking horse.
Abner sat before his desk, examining a sheaf of tally sheets. They were not the tally sheets of his own lumber yard, but figures showing the amount of spruce and pine and birch and maple piled in numerous mill yards throughout the state. Abner owned this lumber. In the fall he had watched the price of lumber decline until he calculated it had reached a price from which it could only rise. Others haddisagreed with him. Nevertheless, he had bought and bought and bought, intent upon onecoupwhich should make him indeed the power in the lumber industry of the country, which was his objective. He had used all available funds and then had carried his credit into the market, stretching it until it cried for mercy. Now he owned enough cut lumber to build a small city—and the price had continued to drop. That morning’s market prices continued the decline. Abner’s state of mind was not one to arouse envy.
The sum of money he must lose if he sold at the market represented something more than the total of his possessions. Gibeon rated him as a millionaire. That he was in difficulties was a secret which he had been able to conceal for months—and being who he was, and having created the myth of Abner Fownes, he had been able to frown down inquisitive bank officials and creditors and to maintain a very presentable aspect of solvency. But Abner needed money. He needed it daily and weekly. Payrolls must be met; current overhead expenses must be taken care of. Notes coming due must be reduced where possible—and with all market conditions in chaos Abner had early seen there could be no hope of legitimate profit lifting him out of the trap into which he had lowered himself.
His reasoning had been good, but he had not foreseen what labor would do. In his lumber camps through the winter of 1919-20 and the succeeding winter, he had paid woodsmen the unprecedentedwage of seventy-five to eighty-five dollars a month. Some of his cutting he had jobbed, paying each individual crew eight dollars a thousand feet for cutting, hauling, and piling in the rollways. It had seemed a thing impossible that six months should see these same lumberjacks asking employment at thirty-five dollars, with prospects of a drop of five or six dollars more! With labor up, lumber must go up. It had dropped below cost; now the labor cost had dropped and he found himself holding the bag, and it was a very cumbersome bag indeed.
Therefore he required a steady flow of money in considerable sums. It was a situation which no fatuous, self-righteous man could handle. It called for imagination, lack of righteousness, a cleverness in device, a fearlessness of God and man, lawlessness, daring. Honest methods of business could not save him.... Abner Fownes was in a bad way.... And yet when money had been required it was produced. He tided things over. He produced considerable amounts from nowhere and there was no inquiring mind to ask questions. They accepted the fact. Abner always had controlled money, and it was in no wise surprising that he should continue to control money.... One thing is worthy of note. Abner kept in his private safe a private set of books, or rather, a single book. It was not large, but it was ample for the purpose. In this book Abner’s own gold fountain pen made entries, and of these entries his paid bookkeepers in the office without had noknowledge whatever. The books of Abner Fownes, Incorporated, showed a story quite different from that unfolded by the pages of the little red morocco book in Abner’s safe.
There came a rap on the door, and Abner, with a quick, instinctive movement of his whole gelatinous body, became the Abner Fownes the village knew, pompous, patronizingly urbane, insufferably self-satisfied.
“Come in,” he said.
The door opened and Deputy Jenney quite filled the opening. He stepped quickly inside, and closed the door after him with elaborate caution.
“Don’t be so confounded careful,” Abner said. “There’s nothing like a parade of carefulness to make folks suspect something.”
“Huh!... Jest wanted to report we hain’t seen nothin’ of that motortruck of your’n that was stole.” He grinned broadly. “Figger to git some news of it to-night—along about midnight, maybe.”
“Let Peewee know.”
“I have.”
“Er——” Abner assumed character again. “I have heard stories of this Lakeside Hotel.... Blot on the county.... Canker in our midst. Stories of debauchery.... Corrupt the young.... Duty of the prosecutor to investigate.”
“Eh?”
“I shall come out publicly and demand it,” said Abner. “The place should be closed. I shall lead a campaign against it.”
Deputy Jenney’s eyes grew so big the lids quite disappeared in the sockets.
“Say——” he began.
“This Peewee Bangs—so called—should be driven out. No telling. Probably sells whisky.... Do you suppose he sells liquor, Deputy?”
“I—why—I don’t b’lieve Peewee’d do no sich thing. No, sir.”
“I shall find out.... By the way, I note that Lancelot Bangs has an advertisement in theFree Press. Tell him to discontinue it—or his profits will drop. Make it clear.”
“Say, that professor wrote a piece about me in to-day’s paper. Can’t make out what he’s hittin’ at. For two cents I’d lambaste him till he couldn’t drag himself off on his hind laigs.”
“Er—no violence, Deputy....” Abner Fownes’s lips drew together in an expression which was not at all fatuous. “A paper can do great harm even in a few issues,” he said. “That girl’s a stubborn piece.” His eyes half closed. “What’s the professor doing?”
“Snoopin’ around.”
Abner nodded. “If he could be induced—er—to go away.”
“He kin,” said Mr. Jenney, “on the toe of my boot.”
“Wrote a piece about you, eh?”
“I’ll ’tend to his case,” said Mr. Jenney. “What be you goin’ to do wuth that newspaper?”
“Why—er—Deputy, you wouldn’t have me—ah—interferewith the liberty of the press.... Palladium of freedom. Free speech.... There was nothing else, Deputy?”
“That’s all.”
“I—er—hope you recover my truck. Reward, you know.”
Deputy Jenney grinned again, more broadly than before, and left the room.