The Golden Bum

by Richard Connell

 

The Golden Bum

A Wall Street Man Falls into a Fortune—and
Doesn't Recognize It Till It's Forced upon Him

By Richard Connell

HECTOR J. COWER, plutocrat, gave the buzzer-button on his mahogany desk a dig with an obese thumb. One of his many secretaries popped into the room with a secretarial genuflection.

“Tell Mr. Robert I'll see him now,” Mr. Gower said gruffly, as he bit off the end of a bulbous, black cigar that cost a school-teacher's daily wage.

Robert was his only son. He had filed a memorandum asking for an interview with his father three days before.

Bob entered with a great show of briskness.

“Well?” shot out Mr. Gower, senior.

Bob knew better than to waste words.

“Two things,” he said. “First, when are you going to take a vacation? Second, I want to give all the men in the New York office two weeks off this summer.”

Bob's title was General Manager of the New York office. His father regarded him as too easy-going to be really efficient. He admitted, however, that at twenty-eight Bob did have an unusual knack for getting along with people. Men liked to work for him.

Hector Gower took a puff on his opulent cigar, that was almost a snort.

“Hang it all!” he said. “I told you once that I don't believe in vacations. I don't want one. I never took one in my life. Why should I go down in my pocket to let a lot of young whippersnappers get sunburned? They get Saturday afternoons and Sundays and holidays, don't they? What do they want? The earth?”

“Other companies give vacations,” began Bob.

“Yes, and they aren't as successful as the Gower companies, are they?” demanded Hector. “I tell you I don't believe in this pampering and coddling. Men ought to get their pleasure out of their work. That's what they were put in the world for. If they don't want to work here, let 'em go elsewhere.”

He poised a thumb over the buzzer to signify that the interview was over.

“But what about yourself?” Bob knew that Hector was interested in that topic. “You're fifty-four, you know—and not as thin as you used to be. Better take a rest, don't you think? A month or two off—go fishing, perhaps——”

The thumb descended abruptly on the buzzer button. A secretary popped into the room. Bob, seeing that it was useless to say more, returned to his own office.

The newspapers referred variously to Hector J. Gower as a Colossus of Finance, a Captain of Industry, a Titan of Trade and a Money King. In Wall Street he was called, though never to his face, “Bull” Gower; and the title was apposite.

He had snorted, ripped, trampled, plunged and torn his way to great wealth and power, and to-day, in manner and aspect, he was not unlike some ponderous Holstein monarch.

HECTOR'S story is a fairly common one in annals of American business. At fourteen he was wrapping up cranberries, soap and gingham in the general store of Henry Terwilliger at Hooley, Ohio (pop. 391). He slept under the counter, thus saving lodging money, and lived on dried apples and crackers from the store, thus saving board. He received, as every child who reads the success magazines knows, 11.50 a week, of which he saved one dollar and a half.

At twenty-three he owned a string of stores. At thirty he organized his first trust. At fifty he had become a person of terrifying importance, so unbending, dignified, aloof, that to ordinary mortals, like us, he seemed not a person but an Institution or a Legend.

That he had any human weaknesses was unthinkable; it seemed incredible that the great Hector Gower should hesitate nonplused over a tray of French pastry; or that he should fear a hat-check boy's disdain; or that he should laugh when a fat man slipped on a vacant banana; or that he should worry about his liver. When his time comes to die every one will be amazed that he should make this concession to human frailty. No one will be sorry.

As he sat at his massive desk—suggesting somehow an ocean liner in dock—reverential underlings brought documents to be signed and he quickened their steps with roared orders.

He was the mainspring of a vast, complex financial machine.

At a word from him the price of butter went up two cents in a thousand chain stores, one less oyster was put in the stews of a thousand white-tiled restaurants, the bootblacks in a thousand railroad stations trembled for their jobs, and five Senators grew pale. At his sneeze six banks in Tokio suspended payments, and a sardine cannery in Maine ceased to can. At his frown, cotton, linseed oil and leather findings dropped nine points. The eyes of the whole world, so it seemed, were focused on Hector J. Gower, and the least of his words were relayed around the world and on the bourses were weighed, interpreted, acted upon. Fortunes were lost the day he first showed signs of dyspepsia.

Of all the thousands of men who worked for him no one was busier than Hector Gower himself. The story that he had installed a private time-clock in his own office which he punched with faithful regularity was given wide circulation.

Hector Gower had two very pronounced obsessions. They constituted a paradox. He loved fame. And he hated publicity. It was his bitterest complaint that he couldn't pull down his vest or stroke his chin without the paper's printing a story about it, and a diagram with X marking the spot where the momentous thing occurred.

“A man of affairs has no privacy,” he would say. He was known to have punched camera men.

And yet it was the wish nearest his heart that the name Hector Gower should be known in every side street and alley of the universe. He wanted “Gower” to become synonymous with “power.” It was his hope—and indeed his belief—that no one in the civilized globe mentioned his name without adding, in a reverent whisper “the great financier.”

Hector Gower gave the overworked buzzer another prod. A sleek secretary appeared, jinnee-like.

“Tibbits,” snapped Hector Gower, “see that my bag is packed for three days. Have my car attached to the Twentieth Century. I'm going to Chicago to-night—to smash that tin-can combine. I'll be back Friday—perhaps Saturday.”

Tibbits bowed and vanished. Hector seized a paper from a high-piled basket on his desk, and studied it, with a frown. A disquieting thought seemed to interrupt his perusal.

“Vacations?” he muttered, between cigar-puffs. “Humph! I'll vacation 'em.”

AN AGILE, ubiquitous mosquito, and Hector Gower in a nightshirt of fine linen, were the only occupants of his elaborate private car as it glided through Ohio that sultry June night, headed for Chicago. Between the mosquito and the heat, Hector Gower could not sleep. He tossed about; he drank cooling drinks in vain. At last he got up and went out to the observation platform of his car, sprawled in a wicker easy-chair and watched the nocturnal scenery shoot past. He grew cooler and more at peace with the world.

The train slowed down a bit and, by the flickering light of a station lamp, Hector read the name of a station: “Grantville.”

Grantville! The name gave a jolt to Hector Gower's memory. For Grantville was the place where, thirty years or more ago, he had courted Robert's mother. It was the place, also, where he had saved his first thousand dollars. If Hector Gower had my tender memories in a mind crammed with deals and figures, they were connected with Grantville, and with Hooley, twenty miles farther along, where his boyhood had been spent; for even he had had a boyhood of a sort.

What a lot of water had gone over the dam since those days! By George, he did have fun catching catfish in the Skinner River. Were any left? He wondered. A long suppressed desire asserted itself. He'd like to spend a day fishing for catfish. He'd like—well, why couldn't he? He, the master of millions! No, there was this meeting in Chicago to-morrow; then a conference on those copper mines as he whizzed back to New York on the train; then that steamship company's affairs had to be straightened out; then that South American oil business, and so ad infinitum. Besides, if he came back to Hooley, silk-hatted, cutaway-coated, batteries of movie operators would follow him, a band would probably meet him at the station, and all the inhabitants would be self-conscious or fawning, in the hope that he would give them a library or a fire engine or something. Ugh!

Suddenly a thought struck him that made him smite the shiny brass gates of the platform with his big hand.

By George! He was really the prisoner of his wealth. Here he wanted to do a ample little thing like trying to catch a catfish or two in the Skinner River and he couldn't do it. The whole world would hear about it and discuss it. The costume he wore would be the subject of lively debates. The catfish, if he caught one, would be photographed, weighed, stuffed, and perhaps hung up in the Union League Club.

He was Hector Gower, the great financier, and what good did it do him? The veriest clerk in any of his thousands of stores or banks or factories was more free than he.

It had been such fun to lie all day Sunday in the cool shade on the banks of the Skinner, in a cotton shirt and overalls, or perhaps, nothing at all, catching fish, or taking a swim whenever you felt like it. And my, didn't those catfish smell good when you and Herv Smalley popped them into an ancient frying-pan over a twig fire! And oh, how good they tasted when you ate them brown and crisp and hot from the pan! The smell and taste of them came down through the years to him. And, he remembered with an inward groan, he would never experience that delight again. He was Hector Gower, and catfish were beneath his dignity. Besides, he was a dyspeptic, a nibbler of toast and a bibber of cultured milk.

The flying train would be nearing Hooley in a minute and would soon pass over the trestle that crossed the winding, shallow Skinner.

Hector Gower leaned far out to get one full sniff of the well-remembered scent—a baffling combination of locust blossoms and mud flats.

And then!

The shiny brass gates gave way with a snap, and a fat financier in a fine linen nightshirt shot through the air, and missing the wooden trestle by a flapper's eyebrow, landed in one foot of muddy water, and two feet of the blackest and stickiest mud in these or any other United States.

A dictaphone, had one been on the spot, would have recorded two sounds:

Flampf.

Woo-oo-oo-oosh.

The “flampf” was caused by Hector Gower's broad face and well-cushioned frame striking the mud and water. The “woo-oo-oo-oosh” was the breath being knocked out of the great man.

LIKE a Gargantuan mud-turtle, Hector Gower emerged, stickily, from the Skinner. His iron-gray mustache and hair were caked with rich, black mud. There was mud in his ears. He sat panting, palpitating on the bank.

By Gad! This would cost somebody a pretty penny. Defective gates!

Why, he. Hector Gower, might have been killed! He felt of his ribs, gingerly, and found they were intact. He busied himself scraping the mud from his torso with a stick. He could scrape off only a little at a time. It tickled.

What should he do? He had but to walk down the track till he sighted a human habitation, announce himself, and be given the best bed, and deferential treatment. He started to follow this plan, but the cinders cut his feet. He decided to wait till daybreak. He sat down in a clump of bushes. It occurred to him that he was tired. The smell of locust blossoms and mud flats was sweet to his nostrils. He wondered if he might not pause long enough in the morning to catch just one catfish. He closed his eyes.

The sun was riding high when Hector Gower woke. He observed, with a startled stare, his surroundings, and his mud-caked nightshirt. Then he remembered. He decided that it would be easier on his feet to take the dusty highroad that led toward the hamlet of Hooley.

It amused him to think of the sensation he was creating, and was about to create.

In Chicago, consternation! The newspapers full of headlines about him: “GOWER GONE—Titan of Finance Mysteriously Missing—Did He Fall or Was He Pushed?”

There would be excursions and alarms.

Then he pictured the amazement of the farmer whom he would presently approach.

“My friend,” he would say, “I am Hector Gower.” (Farmer registers astounded awe.) “I just fell from my private car.” (Farmer registers deep concern.) “Kindly get me some clothes, and get Mr. Millership, president of the First Bank of Chicago, on the long-distance phone for me.” (Farmer bestirs himself to do the great man's bidding.)

He became conscious that his garb was hardly a dignified one. A brief, mud-plastered nightshirt, even of finest linen, is no fit garment for a Colossus of Finance—especially if he be quite plump—to appear in, in public. But the main difficulty was providentially solved. He spied an old, oil-spotted, tattered pair of overalls hanging on a fence near the railroad track. He put them on.

He walked slowly, and with as much dignity as he could muster, down the road. He felt very much in need of breakfast.

A small, white farm-house came into view. Smoke was curling up from its chimney, and the overalled figure of a man could be seen, busy at the wo pile.

HECTOR opened a creaking gate and walked up a poppy-lined path toward the figure. The man, on seeing him, straightened up and rubbed his eyes. Then he took off his steel spectacles, polished them with a red handkerchief, set them back on his thin, vermilion nose and peered at the alarming spectacle Hector Gower presented. The farmer was a weazened, old man, about half as big as Hector.

“My friend,” began Hector Gower in his most commanding bass voice, “I am Hector Gower!”

“You git to hell outen here, whoever you are,” shrilled the farmer, reaching for a pitchfork.

“But I tell you I'm Hector Gower,” cried Hector.

“Well, I ain't denyin' it, am I? I don't care who you be. I won't have no lousy bums traipsin' round my place. Git!”

“But I'm the Hector Gower—Wall Street, you know,” protested the great man, in a tone that for him was exceedingly conciliatory.

“Well, Hector, you git back to Wall Street, and git mighty soon! I wouldn't be surprised if you was one of the crooks that did me out of sixteen dollars in 1908.” The farmer was waxing more wrathy.

“But surely you've heard of me,” said Hector. “You know Gower. Gower! Gower!!”

“Well,” admitted the farmer, “I was readin' a piece in the paper about a feller named Gower who didn't believe in vacations. He's the only Gower I ever heerd tell of. If I thought you was him I'd set the dog on ye.”

Hector was too shocked to say anything for a full minute. So this was his fame! The man who didn't believe in vacations!

The farmer snapped him out of his coma.

“Now, are you goin' to git, or do you want to be the breakfast for a healthy bulldog?” he demanded. Then he called, “Here, Pershing, Pershing, Pershing!”

A hungry bark and the scrambling of canine feet around the comrner of the house warned Hector that he had better flee, and flee he did, with a portly but rapid trot. Pershing lost the race to the gate by inches.

Hector Gower felt a blind, bull-like fury surge through him—the sort that had made great bankers cower. He'd show that miserable wart of a man—he'd show him—but Pershing's hungry, disappointed growl told him he had better not attempt any reprisals just then.

So Hector continued along the road, until he came to another farm-house, from which came a tantalizing odor. Hector recognized it. Fried catfish!

Humbly and, for the first time in years, a bit timidly, Hector Gower approached the back door and knocked. A fat farmer came to the door.

“I am Hector Gower,” said the great man, impressively.

The fat farmer let forth a bellow of raucous laughter.

“Hey, Jen! Hey, Jen!” he shouted back into the house. “Come a-runnin'. The frowsiest bum I ever sot eyes on is out here, claimin' he's Hector Gower.”

“Sakes alive!” exclaimed his wife, appearing with a platter of fried catfish. “Ef he ain't the beatin'est. Hector Gower?” She echoed her husband's laughter.

Hector eyed the fish hungrily.

“Say!” the woman demanded, in a voice that was not unkind. “Ef you wanted to pick out somebody to be, why did you pick out that ol' heathen Hector Gower? Why, the papers say he don't believe in givin' his hired men vacations.”

“But I tell you I am the real Hector Gower,” insisted the financier.

“There, there!” said the woman, in a soothing voice. “You kin be Napoleon, or William Jennings O'Brien, or anybody you please. Bums is always great men. Why, I've fed three Rockefellers, a couple of Vanderbilts, Rudyard Kipling and Sherlock Holmes on this very doorstep! If it's a meal you want, why don't you say so like a man—not try to put on airs?”

“Well,” said Hector, “I am hungry. That's a fact. You see I fell from my private car while crossing the Skinner.”

The fat farmer evidently thought this screaming. He fairly whooped.

“He fell? Did ye hear that? His private car? Oh, my poor sides. Did ye hear that, Jen. His private car! That's a hot one. Guess you haven't traveled this route before, Mr. Bum Gower. Why, Skinner River is where they always chuck off all the bums.”

The wife appeared with a bar of soap and a towel. “Here,” she said, thrusting them at Hector. “Make yourself decent, at the pump. Guess we can spare you a few catfish. You kin have some ef you'll help a spell with the chores.”

THE Captain of Industry sat gratefully on the back steps and for the first time in months relished his breakfast. His dyspepsia seemed to fade away before the magic of fried catfish and a real outdoor appetite. When he had finished, seven little tails told of seven catfish departed.

As he munched the crisp, browned fish. Hector Gower was thinking. Was he really his own master? Didn't his affairs really entangle him, surround him, strangle him—as a many-tentacled octopus might? Did he own his companies, or did they own him? By right, he should be even now pounding a table at a directors' meeting in Chicago, domineering, scheming. Instead, how comfortable, how restful to sit in the shade, and drink in the scents of June in the country, so different from the asphalt and gasoline perfume of the big city! But it was an accident. To-morrow he would be forced back into the place he had carved for himself in the scheme of things. To-morrow he would be high-hatted, cutaway-coated, stiff-collared. But to-day he was in overalls. To-morrow the weight of responsibility would bear down on him again. But to-day he was—free! Free to go fishing. Free to roam whither he would. No prying eyes. No cameras. Exercise, freedom from worry and rush—that's what his dyspepsia needed. And, by George, that's what his soul needed!

They didn't believe he was really Hector Gower. Then he wouldn't be.

He set about his task of splitting kindling wood. At noon the housewife expressed herself as well pleased with his industry.

“The way you piled that there wood shows you got a good head, if you was a mind to use it,” she said, and added: “It's a pity some men is so shiftless. What was you before you became a tramp?”

Hector, by a rapid twist of his tongue, turned “financier” into “fisherman.”

“Well,” said the woman, “how would you like to go out to the Skinner this afternoon and ketch a mess of catfish for to-morrow's breakfast?”

Would he? In a battered straw hat—such as mules wear—a blue shirt, overalls, and clodhopper shoes, the Titan of Trade sat all that dreamy, delicious afternoon in the haunts of his boyhood by the meandering Skinner. Now and then he would jerk out a shining fish. They were biting well. It was the most perfect day he could remember. Banks, stocks, panics, corners, prices and the hurly-burly of it all seemed centuries away. Sometimes he dozed, to be wakened by the tug of a finny victim. He let his bare feet dabble in the cool stream.

At sundown he brought twenty-seven catfish, and a ravenous appetite, back to the farm-house.

He rapped at the back door. The minute the wife came to the door, he feared the worst. She was obviously dressed up, in a blue and white polka-dot dress, white stockings, polished shoes, and a company manner. Also, she was obviously embarrassed.

“Drop them fish right there, Mr. Gower,” she said, in a nervous voice. “James will fetch you his best suit to put on.”

Hector Gower stared at her.

“Now you ain't goin' to be hard on two poor folks who was mistaken, are you? If it hadn't been for the mud, we'd have knowed you right off,” she said.

“But I don't understand,” said Hector Gower, although he understood all too well.

“Why, you are the rich Mr. Gower!” said the woman. “The evenin' paper just come from Columbus and it has your picture in it. They're draggin' all the rivers between Chicago and New York for your body.”

“An' there's a reward of ten thousand dollars,” added her husband, appearing in his Sunday celluloid collar.

Hector Gower thought rapidly, and then spoke swiftly.

“You'll get that reward. I give you my word you will. But don't give me up just yet. Just let me stay here, and do chores, and sleep in your barn, and—go catfishing.”

The next morning Hector Gower handed the farmer a note.

“Will you do me a great favor and take this down to Columbus and post it?” he said. “It's to my son.”

ROBERT GOWER, in his New York office, found this note in his morning's mail, written in his father's familiar, bold scrawl:

Dear Son:

You're old enough to take my place. Go to it. I'm taking a long vacation. If the newspapers ask where I am, just say I've gone catfishing.

Hector Gower.

P. S. Give the boys all the vacation they can stand.