Peter: A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

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 glass, 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, glass-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 partition. 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 passed 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 shaggy 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.