IIThe Deluge
THE Middleboro Security Bank, housed in a modest two-storied brick three squares up from the railroad station, seemed on that morning of mornings to be a center of subdued excitement. Early in the forenoon as it was, a number of farm teams were halted at the curb, and little knots of country folk and townspeople obstructed the sidewalk. David Vallory nodded good-morning to one and another in the groups as he swung past, and was immediately conscious of a sort of hushed restraint on the part of those who returned his greetings.
In the bank an orderly throng was inching and shuffling its way in sober silence to the paying teller’s window. There were no signs of panic, and any excitement that might underlie the unusual crush of business seemed to be carefully suppressed. But Vallory saw that old Abner Winkle, and the clerk he had called into the cage to help him, wore anxious faces; and Winkle’s hands, the hands of a man who had grown gray in the serviceof the country-town bank, were tremulous and uncertain as he counted out the money to the waiting cheque-holders.
David made his way to the rear of the narrow lobby, to a door with a ground-glass panel bearing the word “President” in black lettering. He entered without knocking, but was careful to snap the catch of the lock to prevent a possible intrusion. A tall, thinly bearded man, prematurely white-haired, with a face that was almost effeminate in its skin texture and the fineness of its lines, and with the near-sighted eyes and round-shouldered stoop of a student and book lover, got rather uncertainly out of his chair at the old-fashioned desk.
“David!” he exclaimed. “I knew you’d come, and I’m glad you are here. Was the train late?”
“An hour or thereabouts. Didn’t you get my answer to your wire?”
The older man put his hand to his head. “Did I?” he asked half absently. “I suppose I must have, if you sent one. I—I think I haven’t been quite responsible since I telegraphed you. You saw what is going on out in the bank; it has been that way since day before yesterday. I waited as long as I dared. I knew it would be a shock to you, and I—I didn’t want to shock you, son.”
David Vallory placed a chair for himself at the desk end and felt mechanically for his pipe and tobacco. Disaster was plainly in the air and he prepared himself to meet it.
“When you’re ready, Dad,” he said.
Adam Vallory sank into his chair. There was a bit of string on the desk and he picked it up and began aimlessly to untie the knots in it.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come; I didn’t know whether you could come. It isn’t fair to take you away from your work; but——”
“Of course, I’d come!” David broke in warmly. “I’m here to take hold with you, and you must remember that there are two of us now. What has gone wrong?”
Adam Vallory shook his head sadly.
“The thing that went wrong dates back to a time before you were born, David; to the time when I allowed your grandfather, and some others, to persuade me that I ought to make a business man of myself. That was a mistake; a very sorry mistake. I haven’t been a good banker.”
David shook his head in honest filial deprecation. “You have been the best and kindest of fathers to Lucille and me, and that counts for much more than being a successful money-grabber. And you’ve earned the love and respect of everybodyworth while in Middleboro. What is the present trouble? Are you having a run on the bank?”
“I suppose you wouldn’t call it a run, as yet. There is no special excitement and the people are very quiet and orderly. But there have been a great many withdrawals, and there will doubtless be more. If it should come to a real run——”
“Let me have it all,” the son encouraged, when the pause grew over-long. “Do you mean that the bank isn’t solvent?”
“It is not,” was the low-toned rejoinder, given without qualification. “I have made a number of bad loans. So long as I had to deal only with neighbors and friends, men whom I have known and trusted all my life, I got along fairly well, though the bank has never earned much more than the family living, as you know. But when the town began to grow and the factories came in the conditions were changed—for me. Then Mugridge started the Middleboro National, and that was the beginning of the end. He took his pick of the new customers and let me have the fag ends. The Stove Works went into bankruptcy a week ago, and that was the last straw.”
“You were carrying Carnaby, of the Stove Works?” David asked.
“Yes; and for much more than his capitalization, or our resources, would warrant. He has been very smooth and plausible, and I have believed in him, as I have in others. The story of my involvement with Carnaby leaked out, as such stories always do. As I have said, there has been no panic; just the steady stream of withdrawals and account-closings. It’s telling on us fast now, and the end is practically in sight. This is no world for the idealist in business, David.”
David Vallory was silent for a time, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his chin propped in his palms. His pipe had gone out, but he still held it clamped between his teeth. In Middleboro tradition it was said that he favored his mother’s people, and the square-set, firm-lipped mouth bore out the assertion. But the good gray eyes were, not the eyes of a dreamer, perhaps, but the eyes of the son of a dreamer; more—they were the eyes of a man who had not yet outgrown the illusions. Adam Vallory had matured slowly; he was in his thirties when he married. And the slow maturing process seemed to have been handed on to the son. A stronger man than his father, this David, one would have said; though perhaps only as athletic youth is stronger than age. And a close observer, like the crop-beardedstranger of the Pullman car, might have added that the strength was idealistic rather than practical; a certain potency of endurance rather than of militancy.
“Just how bad is it—in actual figures?” the son asked, at the end of the chin-nursing pause.
Adam Vallory closed his eyes as one wearied and stunned in the clash and clamor of a battle too great for him.
“We can go on paying out to-day, and perhaps to-morrow. Beyond that, there is failure for the bank; and—and beyond the failure, David, there is a prison for me!”
The younger man straightened up quickly and there was unfeigned horror in the good gray eyes.
“Good heavens, Dad!—you don’t mean anything like that!” he exclaimed in a shocked voice.
“I wish I didn’t, son, but it is true. I have been weak; criminally weak, some will say. All along I have been clinging desperately to the hope that I could pull through; that the bad paper the bank is holding would somehow miraculously turn into good paper. A better business man would have faced the worst weeks ago. I didn’t. We have gone on receiving deposits when I knew that we were, to all intents and purposes, insolvent. That, as you know, is a penitentiary offense.”
David Vallory got upon his feet and began to pace up and down the length of the small room, three strides and a turn. It was his maiden projection into the jostling arena of business, and for the moment he could only struggle hardily for standing room in it. He had always known, in a general way, that his book-loving father was no money-getter in any modern sense of the term, but there had always been enough and something to spare for him and for the blind sister whose birth had cost the mother’s life. With the healthy ambition of the average boy and youth, he had looked forward to a time when he should go to work for himself in some chosen field and manfully build up the slender fortunes of the family. But now the world of youthful anticipation had gone suddenly and hopelessly awry.
“We can’t think of giving up, Dad!” he broke out, after he had tramped his way through to some measure of decision. “There must be something that we can turn into money and save the bank and your good name. Can’t you find somebody who will carry you until we can make the turn?”
Adam Vallory shook his head in patient despair.
“That ground has all been plowed long ago, son. It is now six months or more since I beganborrowing on my private resources, such as they are. There is nothing left; not even the house we live in. I suppose I should have told you sooner, but that was another weakness. I wished you to have a chance to finish your college course and get your start in the world without distractions, and that much, at least, has been accomplished.”
Once more the younger man sought to stem the torrent of the incredible reversals, and this time he was partly successful.
“We can still hope that it isn’t altogether as bad as you think it is, Dad,” he said, with greater optimism than his inner conviction warranted. “In a few minutes I’m going to pull off my coat and have a look at things from the inside. We’re not going down without a fight; that’s settled. Aside from this prison scare—and it’s only a scare, you know—no Middleboro jury would ever believe for a single moment that you meant to do a criminal act—aside from that, there are two mighty good reasons why we mustn’t go to the dogs.”
“Lucille?” queried the father.
“Yes; she is one of the reasons, and a pretty stout one. Life is always going to be hard enough for the little sister, without adding poverty and a sorrow that she can neither help nor hinder.”
“Quite true; and the other reason?”
David Vallory had sat down again, and a boyish flush came to darken the healthy brown which was the gift of a more or less athletic youth.
“I didn’t intend to tell you—not just yet,” he demurred; “at least, not until I had shown you that I could make good on my own, and prove that you haven’t been throwing your money away on me. I—I’ve found the girl, Dad.”
The older man leaned back in his chair and the tired eyes were closed.
“That is natural, and was to be expected,” he acquiesced. “You have been very moderate, David. Many another young fellow would have found, not one girl, but a round dozen, before reaching your age.”
David Vallory’s laugh matched the absurdity of the “round dozen.”
“Nothing like that; I’m not built that way, I guess,” he returned. “There is only one girl, and though I hadn’t realized it until lately, I think I discovered her to be that one while I was still wearing knickerbockers.”
Adam Vallory nodded as one who understood.
“I have often wondered if it might not turn out that way,” he said; “wondered and been just a trifle—no, I won’t say it. Judith is a good girl,and she will doubtless make you a warm-hearted, loyal wife.”
“Judith?” said David, and now his flush was darker.
“Yes. You thought you were mighty secret about it, but I knew it, all along; knew that you were corresponding with her while you were at college, and missed you every time you spent an evening at the Fallons’. It’s all right, son. I haven’t a word to say.”
“But—but—you’re tremendously mistaken, Dad!” the younger man protested earnestly. “There has never been anything serious between Judith and me. We were just good chums together in school, and——”
“Hold on a minute, son,” said Adam Vallory gently. “We have no money, but we still have a few traditions. One of them is that no man of the Vallory name has ever put the burden of proof on a woman, so far as the records show. You admit that you wrote to Judith while you were in college, and all Middleboro knows that you were always going about with her in your vacations. Haven’t you been writing back and forth while you were in Florida?”
“Oh, yes; now and then, of course. But——”
“You are trying to tell me that I have guessedwrong. Before you go any farther, let me say this: your relations with Judith may have meant nothing to you; but how about Judith herself? She is warm-blooded, ardent, and much more mature than you are, in spite of the difference in your ages. Be very sure that you don’t owe her something, David—the biggest debt that a woman can ever hold against a man. Now go on and tell me as much as you care to about the other girl—the real one.”
David was still showing the marks of disturbance, but he went on manfully.
“There isn’t so very much to tell. I’ve—well, I’ve just found her, that’s all. I met her last winter at Palm Beach. She was down there with a bunch of New York people who go there every year. Raglan, my chief on the Government job, knew her and some of her New York friends. He began to introduce me, but she laughed and said, ‘Mr. Vallory and I were rocked in the same cradle—in Old Middleboro,’ and that settled it.”
The beaten man in the desk chair roused himself to say: “Then you did know her as a child? She belongs here?”
“Not now. She is a citizen of a very much larger world.”
“Do I know her, or her people?—but of course I must.”
“You do. You have held her on your knee and told her fairy tales many a time, while I stood by and listened. Doesn’t that place her for you?”
Adam Vallory shook his head with a smile that was reminiscent of pleasanter things than the navigating of stormy seas in a sinking business craft.
“I have held many little girls on my knee to tell them fairy stories, David. That is another reason why I should never have been a banker; I love children—and fairy tales—far too well.”
“You would never guess,” said David, with all the fatuousness of the new-born lover. “Yet you and her father were schoolboys together.”
Adam Vallory roused himself again. “Not Eben Grillage?” he said.
“Yes; she is Mr. Grillage’s daughter; the brown-eyed little Vinnie we used to know; though they all call her ‘Miss Virginia’ now.”
Again the upcast of reminiscence came to make the unsuccessful banker forget for the moment the rotten business craft that was sinking beneath him.
“Eben Grillage,” he mused. “He was, and is, everything that I am not. He was a born leader, even as a boy. Success, or what most people value as success, has been his for the taking. You haveseen him, David? Is he growing old, as I am?”
“You are old only in hard work; work that doesn’t appeal to you,” the son said loyally. Then: “I have met Mr. Grillage only once, and—well, I guess he didn’t have much time to throw away on an apprentice engineer who was just then trying his prettiest to get a chance to talk over old times with his daughter. I remember he asked about you.”
“That was in Florida?”
“Yes. I chased over to Palm Beach as often as I could during the short season, but it didn’t do me much good. There were too many other fellows ahead of me. It was on one of these trips that I met Mr. Grillage. He had run down from some place in Georgia, where his company was building a dam, to spend a week-end with his daughter. The most that he said to me was in the nature of a good-humored ‘josh’ for burying myself in a Government job.”
Adam Vallory nodded.
“You don’t remember Vinnie’s mother, of course; she died while you were still only a little lad. She was what we, in my younger days, used to call a belle; a most attractive woman, and as true and good as she was beautiful. Eben Grillage had none of the qualities that such women aresupposed to care for—save one; he was big enough and strong enough to reach out and take what he wanted. He idolized his wife; and the love which was hers while she lived has been carried along to his daughter.”
“Any one can see that,” said David, laughing. “Virginia is the apple of his eye. Have you kept in touch with him at all since he left Middleboro?”
“Only at long intervals.”
“They say he is rich, and rapidly growing richer. He has made the Grillage Engineering Company; built it from the ground up; and there isn’t any undertaking too big for him to tackle and carry through. If he wasn’t Virginia’s father, I’d strike him for a job—after we get things straightened out here for you.”
“He would do well by you, for old times’ sake, I don’t doubt. To me, Eben Grillage has never been the hard man that others seem to find him; he is still the loyal friend of the boyhood days—our boyhood. Different as we were, or perhaps just because of that difference, we were like brothers. Why should the fact that he is Vinnie’s father make you hold back?”
“I don’t know that I could explain it, even to you, Dad. But, somehow, I should feel handcapped. Virginia has a mighty keen, sharp-edgedlittle mind of her own. I have a notion that she wouldn’t think much of a fellow that her father was nursing along by hand.”
“Perhaps you are right. But tell me more about her.”
“I wish there were more to tell. I have met her a few times, and she has been mighty sweet to me—for the sake of the kiddie days here in Middleboro, as she occasionally took care to remind me. I’m not in her set, you know; not even in the outer edges of it. Besides, as I have said, she has a string of fellows as long as your arm. It’s only a pipe-dream for me, as yet, and I’m going to forget all about it now, until after we’ve staved off this trouble of yours. Will you turn me loose among the money papers and securities? I’d like to make a few figures for myself.”
With this for a beginning, David Vallory’s first day in the home town resolved itself into a grind of hard work. Through what was left of the forenoon, and straight on to three o’clock—welcome hour when the bank doors were shut upon the public, and the tired old paying teller and his assistant had an opportunity to balance their cash—the young man probed steadily, sometimes with his father at his elbow, but oftener alone.
What he discovered sobered him at first, andlater evoked symptoms of a panicky nature. The Middleboro Security, a one-man bank in all that the term implies, was—unless some of the bad paper could be redeemed—plainly insolvent; and, what was much worse, the insolvent condition was of long standing. The failure of the Carnaby Stove Works had been merely the tiring spark to set off the explosion. Without immediate help; help that must run into the tens of thousands; the bank must close its doors.
Though the June afternoon was not oppressively warm, David Vallory found himself sweating profusely when the final column of figures had been added. In the quiet of the semi-darkened bank, where Winkle and the three clerks were still striving silently for their balances after the strenuous business day, a menacing shadow fell. It was not only ruin; it was ruin with disgrace. David was far from holding his father responsible in any moral sense, this though it was apparent that the present state of affairs had been long threatened. That it had not reached a climax sooner was due chiefly to the fact that for many years the country-town bank had done business only with honest customers. David was not blind to his father’s one amiable weakness. It was known far and wide that Adam Vallory couldnever say “No” to a sufficiently importunate borrower; also, that he judged all men by his own upright standards.
David Vallory got up from the table-desk at which he had been working and slowly struggled into his coat. Grown man as he was, this was his first rude collision with life in its commercial aspect, and he rose from the preliminary grapple with a belittling feeling of inadequacy; as if, as a boy, he had been rudely buffeted into the gutter by a man. But the feeling did not becloud the clearly defined conclusion at which he had arrived. He did not—could not—minify the impending consequences. The bank examiner would come, and at his coming the pitiless mill of publicity would begin to grind. There would be exposure and a criminal prosecution. Those who knew Adam Vallory, the man, would refuse to believe that he had consciously committed a crime; but to the wider world he would figure merely as another addition to the ranks of those who gamble with other people’s money; a banker who had taken the desperate chance involved in going on and receiving deposits when there was no reasonable hope of repaying the depositors.
The old-fashioned clock on the wall was striking four as the volunteer checker of accountsgathered up the slips of scratch paper which he had covered with figures and passed out to the small room at the rear of the working space. The gray-faced man bending dejectedly over his desk and waiting had no illusions. “Well, son?” he said, as David came in.
The young man dropped heavily into a chair and sat for some moments staring at the slips of scratch paper.
“This morning when you told me where we stood you didn’t make it any worse than it really is,” he announced soberly. “Winkle gave me his figures just now—the withdrawals for to-day. If they come after us to-morrow as they have to-day, we shan’t be able to last until three o’clock. I’ve gone over everything in the vault with a fine-tooth comb; we need something like a hundred thousand dollars more than we have in sight.”
Adam Vallory’s gaze was fixed upon the dust-covered steamship lithograph hanging above his desk, but he saw the picture only with the outward eye.
“A hundred thousand,” he repeated slowly. “David, it might as well be a million. There is no use. I shall telegraph to the bank examiner to-night, and we won’t open the bank doors in the morning.”