The Cliff-Dwellers: A Novel

by Henry Blake Fuller

The Underground National Bank, with a surplus equal to a third of its capital, had not declared a dividend for several years. Brainard, along with his son and his brother, owned five eighths of the stock. Put these two facts together and surmise the rest. Understand, without the telling, how Brainard had bought back big blocks of stock from men who had invested on his own advice and representations, only to sell out at less than two thirds the price they had paid. Understand how widowed and unprotected women, with little realization of the remote possibilities of the science of banking and no realization at all of the way in which their five thousands had come to be worth so much less than five thousand, would come to his office to implore ingenuously with sobs and tears that he would give them back their money. Consider these and a dozen other phases of the pleasant pastime known as "freeze out," and then judge whether Brainard, by this time, were capable or no of braving, warding off, beating down, despising the threats, the imprecations, the pleadings, the attacks of the harmless domestic animal known as the investor. But now another domestic animal, the wilful daughter, had entered his lair, and with this new antagonist he felt himself unable to cope.

"Ogden, won't you ask Mr. Fairchild to step this way!"

Fairchild was only the cashier of the bank, while Brainard was its head; but Fairchild was a good deal of a man—and that was more than Brainard, with all his money and his brains and his consciencelessness, and all the added power of the three combined, could have claimed for himself. He was merely a financial appliance—one of the tools of the trade.

He had no friends—none even of the poor sort known as "business" friends. He had no social relations of any kind. He had no sense of any right relation to the community in which he lived. He had next to no family life. He had no apparent consciousness of the physical basis of existence—for him diet, rest, hygiene were mere nothings. But none of these considerations disturbed him very much. He could do without friends—having so good a friend in himself. He could dispense with social diversion—so long as the affairs of the Underground, and the Illuminating Company, and those Western mines continued to occupy his attention. He could rub along without the sympathy and respect of the community—while he and it held the relative positions of knife and oyster. He could do perfectly well without hygiene and proper regimen as long as dyspepsia and nerves and rheumatism were not too pressing in their attentions. And he could, of course, trust his family to run itself without any great amount of attention from its natural head.

His family had run itself for twenty odd years. It had gone on its scattered way rejoicing—after the good, new, Western fashion which finds the unit of society less in the family than in the individual; and now a very promising young filly, after having "run" herself for a good part of this twenty years, was on the point of taking the bit between her teeth and of running away altogether. The family carryall, whose front seat he had left in order that he might irresponsibly dangle his legs out from behind, was in danger of a runaway and a smash-up, and he was forced to the humiliating expedient of installing a more competent driver than himself in his own place behind the dashboard.

Ogden slid rapidly along the narrow aisle which ran behind the row of coops that confined the tellers, and found Fairchild going over yesterday's balances with the general bookkeeper. Here he was intercepted by the last of the messengers, who had had some delay in getting his batch of drafts and notes arranged properly into a route.

He was a boy of seventeen, with a pert nose and a pasty complexion. He had put on his hat with a backward tilt that displayed his bang. He was the son of a millionnaire stockholder, and was on the threshold of his business career. He panted for consideration, and he had found, during an experience of six months, that most consideration was to be won from the newest men.

"What's up now, George?" he asked, familiarly. He twitched his narrow little shoulders as he teetered back and forth on his toes. "Old man on the rampage some more? He's had it pretty bad for the last three weeks."

"Oh, get out!" Ogden responded briefly.

Fairchild was a man well on in the fifties. He had a quiet, self-contained manner, a smooth forehead, a gray moustache. His general trustworthiness was highly esteemed by Brainard, who generally treated him with civility and sometimes almost with consideration. He had his privileges. A member of the board of directors in the Brainard interest, he would be given the opportunity to resign whenever some especially dubious piece of business was looming up, with the certainty of re-election within the year. He was too old to tear himself up by the roots, and too valuable to be allowed, in any event, the radical boon of transplantation. Of course he paid for such a concession; he acted as a buffer between Brainard and the more pathetic of the stockholders, and now, as we see, he was summoned to deal with a domestic crisis.