White Ashes

by Sidney R. Kennedy; Alden Charles Noble

This was but the beginning. After this overture the stings and slurs came thick and fast. It seemed to the dismayed Vice-President that every one in New York took delight in recalling to publicity some detail discreditable to his Bostonian discovery. From all over the East he began to receive applications for agencies from men whom even he knew to be unworthy of trust; and he realized that he had encouraged their approach like vultures on the unhappy Guardian. Within a fortnight of making the Boston appointment he had seriously considered revoking it; but this would have necessitated the admission of his initial error, and he lacked the courage to carry out his better judgment. So, with a shrug of his mental shoulders and a cynical reflection that good luck might perhaps avert the results of his imprudence, he let the matter stand.

But good luck failed to materialize, and it was not long before the expected began to happen. Sternberg, Bloom, and McCoy's business appeared outwardly passable, but curiously enough it almost always seemed—after the loss—that the risk was one on which the company should never have been committed. And there were two unpleasant incidents where the Guardian was "caught on a binder"—where the loss occurred before the agents could issue the policy or report the acceptance of the risk to the New York office; and though Smith investigated these, and in each case was obliged to hold the agents blameless, the experience left an unfortunate impression. However, Sternberg, Bloom, and McCoy undoubtedly controlled an unusually large volume of business. If losses were heavy, so were premiums, and the relatively small losses which naturally attend a growing business where no policy has been in force more than a month or two, postponed, for a time at least, the worst of the evil days. But long before they came the heavens had grown dark with trouble in numerous other quarters.

The general ruling of the Conference, providing that, except under almost impossible qualifications and with reduced compensation, no agent could continue to represent both Conference and non-Conference companies, was now in effect. And it seemed as though never before had there been such precision and unanimity in Conference methods; and Smith, gloomily regarding the grim spectacle of the Guardian's decline, could only curse under his breath the act of O'Connor that had brought about this state of affairs.

Certainly there was no hesitancy about the Conference campaign, and the results became at once apparent in the non-Conference offices. Hardly a day passed which failed to bring to the Guardian the resignation of one or more of its agents, with none to take their places except the vultures, many of whom Mr. Gunterson remembered to have assisted in accelerating the downfall of some of the other underwriting institutions with which he had been connected. With a chill of dismay he read of what a splendid opening awaited the Guardian in the general agency of Henry Trafalgar and Company of Memphis, or Bates and Newsome of Atlanta.

From the Guardian's own agents the letters of resignation were very much alike, for the company was popular in a modest way, and most of the writers had represented it for many years.

"We are notified by the committee in charge of this district," they wrote, "that in order to secure the customary graded commission scale we must resign our non-Conference companies. We are extremely sorry to let the Guardian go, but the difference to us financially is such that we would not feel justified in declining the Conference offer."

And so, one after one, they went. Many an agent wrote bitterly attacking the Conference procedure and asking whether the Guardian could not arrange to take care of his entire business, and stating that if this could be done he would retain the Guardian and let the others go. This, however, in nearly every case was out of the question, and eventually all these agencies went with their fellows. During the first month of the new year almost one hundred agents, some of them among the most satisfactory and profitable of the Guardian's plant, had been compelled to resign. The income from these agencies reached to the neighborhood of one hundred thousand dollars annually, and Mr. Wintermuth began to take decided notice of his strategic position.

Of course, whenever an agency was lost, there was the possibility of replacing the company in some non-Conference office; but this was not so easy a matter. The non-Conference agents were principally lower grade, cut-rate concerns, and not of the standard either professionally or financially to which the Guardian was accustomed. The company's field men, continually confronted by the discouraging task of finding in a town a satisfactory agent, when none existed save in Conference offices, became disheartened. Their letters to the home office indicated their demoralization and Mr. Gunterson could not think how to direct their campaigns for them.

At this juncture the hand on the reins needed to be both delicate and firm, and the hand of Mr. Gunterson, while it may have had its moments of inflexibility, was never delicate. And it was firm with less and less frequency as the days went by. Never any too well convinced, at the bottom of his heart, of the soundness of any course he elected to pursue, the apparent necessity of sitting helplessly in his office and watching his agency plant disintegrate before his eyes robbed him of much of the assurance that had always been one of his predominant factors. Outwardly his manner remained as impressive as ever, but it was retained with an ever increasing difficulty.

In this dark hour his only sustaining reflection was that this rule, which was working such havoc among the Guardian's smaller agencies, did not apply to the larger cities whence came a large proportion of the company's premium income. Boston, of course, with a local rule even more radical than that of the field generally, had gone the way of the small towns; but in New York separation was out of the question since most of the important companies maintained their own local departments, dispensing with agents altogether; in Philadelphia the local underwriters had never been able to agree among themselves on any drastic measures and there seemed no likelihood of a change; while in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore soothingly sepulchral silence and calm reigned.