Contraband

by Clarence Budington Kelland

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 his girth 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 implement in 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 he might possess 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 set himself up as his own stalking horse.