There are, in every great city, a few individuals who from their fullness of experience in an epoch of the city's life come to epitomize that epoch in the general mind; when one thinks of a city or of a section of the country in more personal terms than its square miles, its towering buildings, and its censused millions, one must think of those individuals. Almost every great industry owns one and seldom more than one; that often enough is not, in a money sense, the predominant figure of his industry; others of his rivals or even of his partners may be actually more powerful than he; but he is the personality; he represents to the outsiders the romance and mystery of the secrets and early, naked adventures of the great achievement. Thus, to think of the great mercantile establishments of State Street is to think immediately of one man; another very vivid and picturesque personality stands for the stockyards; another rises from the wheat pit; one more from the banks; one from the steel works. The man who was pacing restlessly and alone the rooms of the Fort Dearborn Club on this stormy afternoon was the man who, to most people, bodied forth the life underlying all other commerce thereabouts but the least known, the life of the lakes.
The lakes, which mark unmistakably those who get their living from them, had put their marks on him. Though he was slight in frame with a spare, almost ascetic leanness, he had the wiry strength and endurance of the man whose youth had been passed upon the water. He was very close to sixty now, but his thick, straight hair was still jet black except for a slash of pure white above one temple; his brows were black above his deep blue eyes. Unforgettable eyes, they were; they gazed at one directly with surprising, disconcerting intrusion into one's thoughts; then, before amazement altered to resentment, one realized that, though he was still gazing, his eyes were vacant with speculation—a strange, lonely withdrawal into himself. His acquaintances, in explaining him to strangers, said he had lived too much by himself of late; he and one man servant shared the great house which had been unchanged—and in which nothing appeared to have been worn out or have needed replacing—since his wife left him, suddenly and unaccountably, about twenty years before. At that time he had looked much the same as now; since then, the white slash upon his temple had grown a bit broader perhaps; his nose had become a trifle aquiline, his chin more sensitive, his well formed hands a little more slender. People said he looked more French, referring to his father who was known to have been a skin-hunter north of Lake Superior in the 50's but who later married an English girl at Mackinac and settled down to become a trader in the woods of the North Peninsula, where Benjamin Corvet was born.
During his boyhood, men came to the peninsula to cut timber; young Corvet worked with them and began building ships. Thirty-five years ago, he had been only one of the hundreds with his fortune in the fate of a single bottom; but to-day in Cleveland, in Duluth, in Chicago, more than a score of great steamers under the names of various interdependent companies were owned or controlled by him and his two partners, Sherrill and young Spearman.
He was a quiet, gentle-mannered man. At times, however, he suffered from fits of intense irritability, and these of late had increased in frequency and violence. It had been noticed that these outbursts occurred generally at times of storm upon the lake, but the mere threat of financial loss through the destruction of one or even more of his ships was not now enough to cause them; it was believed that they were the result of some obscure physical reaction to the storm, and that this had grown upon him as he grew older.
To-day his irritability was so marked, his uneasiness so much greater than any one had seen it before, that the attendant whom Corvet had sent, a half hour earlier, to reserve his usual table for him in the grill—"the table by the second window"—had started away without daring to ask whether the table was to be set for one or more. Corvet himself had corrected the omission: "For two," he had shot after the man. Now, as his uneven footsteps carried him to the door of the grill, and he went in, the steward, who had started forward at sight of him, suddenly stopped, and the waiter assigned to his table stood nervously uncertain, not knowing whether to give his customary greeting or to efface himself as much as possible.
The tables, at this hour, were all unoccupied. Corvet crossed to the one he had reserved and sat down; he turned immediately to the window at his side and scraped on it a little clear opening through which he could see the storm outside. Ten minutes later he looked up sharply but did not rise, as the man he had been awaiting—Spearman, the younger of his two partners—came in.
Spearman's first words, audible through the big room, made plain that he was late to an appointment asked by Corvet; his acknowledgment of this took the form of an apology, but one which, in tone different from Spearman's usual bluff, hearty manner, seemed almost contemptuous. He seated himself, his big, powerful hands clasped on the table, his gray eyes studying Corvet closely. As Corvet, without acknowledging the apology, took the pad and began to write an order for both, Spearman interfered; he had already lunched; he would take only a cigar. The waiter took the order and went away.
When he returned, the two men were obviously in bitter quarrel. Corvet's tone, low pitched but violent, sounded steadily in the room, though his words were inaudible. The waiter, as he set the food upon the table, felt relief that Corvet's outburst had fallen on other shoulders than his.
It had fallen, in fact, upon the shoulders best able to bear it. Spearman—still called, though he was slightly over forty now, "young" Spearman—was the power in the great ship-owning company of Corvet, Sherrill, and Spearman. Corvet had withdrawn, during recent years, almost entirely from active life; some said the sorrow and mortification of his wife's leaving him had made him choose more and more the seclusion of his library in the big lonely house on the North Shore, and had given Spearman the chance to rise; but those most intimately acquainted with the affairs of the great ship-owning firm maintained that Spearman's rise had not been granted him but had been forced by Spearman himself. In any case, Spearman was not the one to accept Corvet's irritation meekly.
For nearly an hour, the quarrel continued with intermitted truces of silence. The waiter, listening, as waiters always do, caught at times single sentences.
"You have had that idea for some time?" he heard from Corvet.
"We have had an understanding for more than a month."
"How definite?"
Spearman's answer was not audible, but it more intensely agitated Corvet; his lips set; a hand which held his fork clasped and unclasped nervously; he dropped his fork and, after that, made no pretense of eating.
The waiter, following this, caught only single words. "Sherrill"—that, of course, was the other partner. "Constance"—that was Sherrill's daughter. The other names he heard were names of ships. But, as the quarrel went on, the manners of the two men changed; Spearman, who at first had been assailed by Corvet, now was assailing him. Corvet sat back in his seat, while Spearman pulled at his cigar and now and then took it from his lips and gestured with it between his fingers, as he jerked some ejaculation across the table.
Corvet leaned over to the frosted window, as he had done when alone, and looked out. Spearman shot a comment which made Corvet wince and draw back from the window; then Spearman rose. He delayed, standing, to light another cigar deliberately and with studied slowness. Corvet looked up at him once and asked a question, to which Spearman replied with a snap of the burnt match down on the table; he turned abruptly and strode from the room. Corvet sat motionless.
The revulsion to self-control, sometimes even to apology, which ordinarily followed Corvet's bursts of irritation had not come to him; his agitation plainly had increased. He pushed from him his uneaten luncheon and got up slowly. He went out to the coat room, where the attendant handed him his coat and hat. He hung the coat upon his arm. The doorman, acquainted with him for many years, ventured to suggest a cab. Corvet, staring strangely at him, shook his head.
"At least, sir," the man urged, "put on your coat."
Corvet ignored