The Lockwood Concern (14 page)

family of Richterville and the first family of Swedish Haven, Abraham Lockwood's early decision to marry an upstate girl would seem to have been extremely sapient in his long-range plan to be an important, if not dominant, figure in the life of the county. He had accomplished a desirable union with the Gibbsville oligarchy without incurring their suspicions by courting a Gibbsville girl. He had in fact, by marrying a Richterville girl, made a move that should have disarmed the cynical. He thought of himself as having made his way into the Gibbsville oligarchy modestly, through the back door. Now it appeared from the revelations of the conversations in the Stokes household that he had not made his way into it at all. For he attached greater significance to the remarks of Davey Stokes than those of an eavesdropping child. Sam Stokes was a full-fledged member of the oligarchy, and as he grew older a place would be made for him in the business and social life of Gibbsville; but meanwhile he was very much a lesser member of the Stokes-Hofman-Chapin clan, not likely to express opinions that were contrary to the prevailing mood of the important senior clansmen. He would never be a major figure in the town of Gibbsville or the county of Lantenengo, and Abraham Lockwood had long ago dismissed Sam Stokes as a possible threat to his own ascension to the place occupied by Peter W. Hofman. Once, and only once, Abraham Lockwood had done something to displease Peter Hofman: after the warning by Harry Penn Downs in the Gibbsville Club the Lockwoods, father and son, paid special attention to the affairs of the Swedish Haven bank, particularly in regard to the decreases in deposits that would give a quick clue to the identity of Swedish Haven business men who might be hoarding money to establish a second bank. Four merchants' names stood out, and Moses Lockwood was in favor of drastic action; but Abraham Lockwood, the second-generation advocate of good will, had a talk with each of the men. He said he had "received information" that the man was negotiating with Peter Hofman to open a new bank - a complete invention, since he had received no information whatever. He then would pretend to be sympathetic; if the man wanted to start a second bank with out-of-town assistance, there must be some reason. If, on the other hand, the reason was no better than merely that the man wanted to help a Gibbsville banker to go into competition with the Swedish Haven bank, Abraham Lockwood and his father were grievously disappointed. Abraham Lockwood avoided the appearance of a threat to the man. What he wanted was some admission on the man's part that he was in cahoots with Peter Hofman. In three of the four cases his guess was correct, and he had three names to mention when he paid a call on Peter Hofman. "Good morning, sir," said Peter Hofman. "What can I do for you?" "A great deal, sir," said Abraham Lockwood. "But the question is, will you? A few years ago my father and I opened a bank in Swedish Haven-" "Just a moment, sir. I believe the bank was started by some other men, and you and your father came along later and took control." "That is the impression, I know, sir. The facts prove otherwise. My father and grandfather, and later my father and I had conducted a business that was for many years the only banking service in Swedish Haven." "Yes indeed, and a highly profitable business it was." "Oh, yes. My grandfather and my father and I are not in business for our health. Neither were the men that borrowed from us, over those years. Neither are you, Mr. Hofman." "Indeed not." "Agreed. Now of course any profitable business creates its own imitators. You yourself have seen that in the leasing of coal lands. You and your father used to have that pretty much to yourselves, but others, especially Philadelphia and New York men, have known a good thing when they saw it, and you have a lot of competition." "Competition is the life of trade, so they say." "And the death of some tradesmen, when the competition gets too fierce. But may I continue, sir? In Swedish Haven there was a movement started to open a bank. Now, Mr. Hofman, who started that movement? That movement was started by some men who had been borrowing money from us, prospered, and decided that now that they were enjoying some prosperity, why not take that business away from the Lockwoods and share it among themselves?" "Logical. Understandable." "But very little goes on in Swedish Haven that my father and I don't hear about. And we knew inside of a week that a few men wanted to give us competition, but they were going to call themselves a bank. We had never thought to call ourselves a bank. That would have been presumptuous on our part. We weren't a bank. It was always either my father and grandfather, or my father and I, lending our own money and not the money of anyone else. This little group of men proposed to lend the money of their depositors, and that worried my father." "Indeed?" "Yes. It wasn't only that some of these self-styled bankers were pretty small potatoes, and not entitled to much credit with our firm. The thing that worried my father was, what if this new bank should fail? Who would suffer? The depositors would suffer." "Moses Lockwood was worried about the depositors of this new bank? A touching concern, my dear sir. Very touching." "I'll ignore that, sir. Just hear me out, please. Common courtesy. I don't argue that my father was worried for sentimental reasons. He was worried for business reasons. If that bank failed, we failed, because it could very well be the end of Swedish Haven. If the people that worked for us put their money in this new, risky bank, and the bank failed, who would be able to pay us our rentals? That's just one source of our income, but a big one. You know what our holdings are." "I can make a pretty good guess." "Therefore, my father and I stepped in, got rid of those we knew were not good business men, and, as you put it, took control. But without us there'd have been no bank." "Meanwhile, of course, holding on to your money-lending business." "Naturally. We could afford to take risks with our money that a bank could not." "Oh, that's the way you put it? How interesting." "I challenge you to put it any other way. Because those are the facts, my dear sir. The facts. The hard-cash facts." "As seen by you, my dear Mr. Lockwood." "As seen by my father and me, who are in a much better position to know the facts than anyone else, whether they're merchants in Swedish Haven or magnates in Gibbsville. I invite you to dispute anything I have told you." "I could dispute it all, if I chose." "Oh, you could dispute anything, just for the sake of argument. But would you care to deny that you are now contemplating giving assistance to another group of men, to help them start a second bank in Swedish Haven?" "My dear young sir, who are you to come to my office and challenge me to dispute this or deny that?" "Who am I? Well, I'm the legitimate son of a man who made his own way in the world, served his country and was badly wounded in the service of his country. One of the very first. A man who has shown great courage, and without it wouldn't be alive today. And, in this discussion, most of all, a man with an unblemished business record. Unblemished, Mr. Hofman. Unblemished, I repeat that. Would you say the same for Paul Ulrich?" "Paul Ulrich?" "Oh, come now, Mr. Hofman. Paul Ulrich is one of the men you are in cahoots with." "I don't like that word at all, cahoots." "What word do you like? You wouldn't like any word I use, not when I accompany the word with the name of one of your cronies." "I don't like that word, either, and I don't like your manners." "I'm told my manners are very good. I had them polished at the University and brought to a high gloss in Washington society. Please don't complain about my manners, Mr. Hofman. Paul Ulrich's manners aren't outstanding. Neither are Cyrus Reichelderfer's. Did you find Cyrus Reichelderfer another Lord Chesterfield? When he's come to me for money I always have to open the window. Cyrus has something that the medical students used to call animated dandruff. But I've done business with him, helped him out from time to time. I don't object to his manners or the things that grow on him, Mr. Hofman. I do object to his underhanded dealings with you." "How dare you, sir?" "Well, I'm doing you a favor. If he'll go behind my back, he'll go behind yours. Shall I give you some more names, Mr. Hofman? I know you thought you were working in great secrecy, but here I've already given you the names of two of your conspirators. I have more." "You are insulting, sir. I must ask you to-" "To leave your office. Very well. And do you know where I think I'll pay a call when I leave? When I get back to Swedish Haven I may pay a business call on Wilhelm Strotz. Wilhelm Strotz. I'll explain to Willy that you wouldn't admit to having any dealings with him. Mr. Hofman, I've never tried to take any business away from you, but I'll take it away from you if you try to take it away from us. I know my people. Good day, sir." The second bank was not again heard of in Swedish Haven, and Peter Hofman, while not cordial, usually nodded and spoke to Abraham Lockwood by name when they visited the Gibbsville Club. Abraham Lockwood accordingly assumed that no rancor remained from the bank dispute, but he was a young man, not so liable to remember the unpleasantness of the discussion. Moreover, the dispute had ended in a triumph for him in his first encounter with the Gibbsville oligarchy, and while the triumph was extremely satisfactory and encouraging, Abraham Lockwood was too ambitious to rest there. With his eye on the future he overlooked the damage his triumph had inflicted on Peter Hofman's hitherto unchallenged self-esteem. Abraham Lockwood, it was true, knew his people, but he really knew next to nothing of Peter Hofman. But he was learning. The low-ranking Samuel Stokes had inadvertently told Abraham Lockwood that the Lockwood link with the ruling clan of the county consisted of a single, tenuous connection by marriage, a marriage to an in-law of the same low-ranking Samuel Stokes. Abraham Lockwood had made the kind of mistake he seldom made in business: he had overrated the worth of something. But he rarely made the same mistake twice. The discovery that his marriage had accomplished so little did not alter his determination to take advantage of everything in his favor. Abraham Lockwood at this time was on the outer-most edge of the Peter Hofman oligarchy; the time would come when it would be a Lockwood oligarchy, and the importance of any individual would depend on his closeness to the Lockwood line. Abraham Lockwood was not convinced that this reversal would occur in his own generation; he himself might not live to become a Peter Hofman. The Hofmans happened at the moment to be in the ascendancy in Lantenengo County, and besides their Lantenengo relatives they had kinship with Muhlenbergs and Womelsdorfs in the counties to the south, pre-Revolutionary families of distinction. Abraham Lockwood, not positively certain of the identity of his own grandmother, fully appreciated the size of the task he had set himself; but now that he had two sons, George and Penrose, he might at any rate live to see one of them - or both - the acknowledged symbol of power in the county. His ambition, of course, did not stop there. In some distant day men of his blood would have national and international renown; too late, perhaps, for him to share in it; but he was building toward it. Abraham Lockwood had learned that as the leading family of a region his children and their children would carry more prestige than as members of one more family in New York or Philadelphia. Peter Hofman was an unimaginative man, who apparently had no ambitions beyond Lantenengo County. Abraham Lockwood wanted to overtake and pass Peter Hofman in the county, and go on from there while still remaining a Lantenengo County citizen. Future Lockwoods would always have Lantenengo, and Swedish Haven to come back to; they must never abandon their Pennsylvania, Lantenengo County, Swedish Haven, identity, for to do so would be to lose their uniqueness. Abraham Lockwood was, in effect, granting himself a title and his children a dukedom. And an attractive feature of his long-range plan was that while money in large quantity was an essential, it did not have to match one of the great fortunes that were being amassed in Philadelphia and New York. He would bring up his sons so that they had respect for money and at least an inculcated sense of how to make it; but the model he secretly chose for imitation by his sons was Morris Homestead. Morris Homestead was not Abraham Lockwood's choice of the man with whom he would do business, since Morris Homestead was not inclined to make more money, or to make it quickly, or to make it for anyone else. Nevertheless Morris Homestead was the kind of millionaire Abraham Lockwood wanted his sons to be. Abraham Lockwood had justifiable confidence in his own ability to make money, to establish a fortune; then once having taught George and Penrose how to take care of their inheritance, they could remain in comfortable, affluent obscurity while deciding which boards to sit on, which ambassadorships to take, what games to play, whose women to sleep with. Now, with only twenty years of the Century remaining, Abraham Lockwood had nothing to fear from the Gibbsville oligarchy, despite the knowledge that his concept of a Gibbsville-Swedish Haven-Richterville axis (which he would rapidly control) was an error. He had misjudged Peter Hofman, and he had taken too much for granted as regarding the three-town axis; but his inheritance from his father and the money he was making through his own efforts gave him protection from the Gibbsville money-men. Knowing what they thought of him, he could afford to be nice. His father, and his father-in-law, Levi Hoffner, would have declared war on the covertly hostile Gibbsville men; but Abraham Lockwood was an original strategist. And while he conceded that he had misjudged Peter Hofman, he was convinced that he had not misjudged the others in Gibbsville, whom he held in lower esteem, a judgment based on the knowledge that among the others there had not been in thirty years a single man who seriously challenged the placid despotism of Peter Hofman. The only threat to Peter Hofman's dominance had come not from Gibbsville but from outsiders, from Philadelphia and New York. Abraham Lockwood therefore asked to call on Hofman, knowing that the old man's curiosity would overcome his impulse to refuse to see him. Hofman did not rise when Abraham Lockwood entered his private office. The old man turned in his swivel chair and folded his hands across his belly. "Good afternoon, sir," said Peter Hofman. "Good afternoon, Mr. Hofman." "Well, what