From the Life/Hon. Benjamin P. Divins

by Harvey J. O'Higgins

 

FROM THE LIFE
Hon. Benjamin P. Divins

 

 

HON. BENJAMIN P. DIVINS

 

DIVINS, Benjamin Parmalee, banker, politician; b. on farm, Sullivan Co., N. Y., Apr. 15, 1853; s. John Edward and Sarah (Parks) D.; ed. common sch.; m. Mary Johanna Van Slack, of Danville, N. Y., Nov. 21, 1888. Began commercial career as clerk in P. L. Boulton's general store, Cappsville, N. Y., 1870. Started in business for himself at Danville, 1875. President Danville First Natl. Bank 1895-1900; v.-p. 1901-08; p. 1909- ; del. Nat. Convn., 1884; candidate N. Y. Assembly, 1890; state senator 2 terms, 1901-5; Dir. Ulster Electric Co., Ltd., Public Service Power Co., Ontario Suburban Ry. Co., Sullivan County Land and Investment Co., Catskill Mortgage Co., etc., Trustee Danville School, Schuyler Trust Co., Meth. Orphan Asylum, Hope Cemetery, etc. Address: 310 Walnut St., Danville, N. Y.—Who's Who.

 

1

It is not difficult to choose the most significant day to chronicle in the life of the Honorable Benjamin Parmalee Divins, nor to decide what are the illuminating incidents to use in a brief portrait-study of him. The red-letter day of his life was the day that he drove over from the railroad at Cappsville to his brother's farm among the foot-hills of the Catskills in Sullivan County. And the illuminating incidents occurred after he arrived and met his brother.

 

He had hired a livery rig in Cappsville—a buggy that was decrepit and stiff in the springs, and a horse that was shaggy with its winter coat and as slow as rheumatism. The six miles of hill roads had been washed down to bed-rock by the April rains, and the drive would have been a long boredom of jolted discomfort to the Honorable Ben if it had been anything at all to him. As a matter of fact it was nothing. It did not register on him. Although it was a road that should have been full of memories of his youth, he drove it blindly, his eyes focused on empty space over the horse's ears, the reins slack in his hands, his collar turned up, his hat pulled down, leaning forward in his seat, his mind occupied. His unbuttoned overcoat showed that he was wearing broadcloth and clean linen, as became a man of his position in life. Under the brim of his hat his eyes were a cold blue, pinched in wrinkles.

It should have been one of the romantic moments of his life. Here he was—the most successful man that the neighborhood had ever produced—coming back, for the first time in twenty years, to revisit the scenes of his early hardships. And it would have been romantic to him if it had not been that he was thinking of his future, not of his past. And that was characteristic of the Honorable Ben. He was "a go-ahead man," his admirers said. His critics put it that he was "always on the make." His victims expressed another view of the same quality when they accused him of having no conscience.

He drove steadily, indifferently, up hill and down, past the wood-lots, the rocky meadows, the shabby farm-houses, the weather-beaten barns. The spring had come late, and, though a May sunlight was fitfully warm on the road, a March wind was boisterous in the upper branches of the wayside trees and came plunging across the woods like the sound of surf. He ignored it.

He showed no interest in anything until he came to the Divins woods and saw ahead of him, on a cleared hillside, the Divins homestead. The reins tightened mechanically in his hands. The horse stopped.

Down the path from the farm-house to the road there was approaching a tall, gaunt man who walked like a moving frame of bones, lifelessly. He was dressed in clothes that had been worn and washed and sun-faded down to the essence and common nature of all cloth—an old felt hat the color of mildew, a brown cotton shirt, stained trousers, and dried cowhide boots. The house from which he came was an unpainted frame wreck that had been bleached and rotted by the inclement mountain seasons until it looked as broken and dejected as the man himself. He had an alder pole in one hand and a rusty tin can in the other.

The Honorable Ben studied him. He studied the house. Remembering it as he had known it in his boyhood, he might have looked at it with disgust for his brother's shiftlessness. He looked at it rather as if it were a property on which he was compelled to take a mortgage. He looked at it obviously with an eye to his own interests. He looked at it predaciously, speculatively, but with distaste.

Distaste was uppermost in the way he looked at the man. He had not seen his brother for fifteen years, but he had no doubt that here was Matt himself. It might have been a hired man, but he knew that Matt could not even pay the wages of such a slouching "buckwheater" as this. It was evidently Matt—going fishing.

He waited, watching him approach. Matt did not raise his eyes till he was close. Then he took in the horse first before he turned his mild attention to the driver. He accepted the challenge of Ben's keen stare with no sign of recognition.

"Well?" Ben said. "Don't you know me?"

2

He got no answer. Matt looked at his clothes, at his hands, and then at the horse again in a silent acceptance of him that was worse than indifference. It was the sort of acceptance that you might get from a friend's dog that dislikes you and lets you pass without a sound, without so much as a sniff at your heels, regarding you inscrutably.

Ben's mouth was sufficiently tight-lipped at its best. It tightened perceptibly at his brother's manner. He snapped out, "I want to see you."

Matt did not reply, "Well, here I am." He had apparently recognized the horse; it was one that he had sold to the livery-stable, and, shifting his fishing-pole to the hand that held his bait-can, he patted the animal's flank thoughtfully.

"I want to see you alone somewhere," Ben said, with a growing impatience.

Matt nodded. He did not say, "Come along up to the house." He did not even give the invitation tacitly by moving to get into the buggy so that they might drive together to the barn. He stepped back from the horse, took the can of worms in his free hand, and said, "I'm goin' fishin'."

He said it placidly, and he met Ben's glare with an impenetrable mildness of melancholy brown eyes.

Ben caught up the reins. "Geddap!" he cried. "Get over there." He jerked the horse aside into the ditch.

Matt seemed more interested in the patient bewilderment of the horse than in the irascibility of the driver.

He was known to his neighbors as something of a philosopher. He had a theory of the earth's electric currents from which he predicted the weather. He knew the medicinal properties of some of the local plants, and dosed himself, for liver chills and rheumatism, with his own prescriptions. He knew enough of law to keep out of litigation with a quarrelsome neighbor who let his cattle run wild, and enough of politics to vote independent of his party and to despise the campaigns of the Honorable Ben. On account of his ill health and his meditative habits he was the least successful farmer on the ridge, and his wife and his neighbors did not respect him for it. But his dog and his cattle always made a friend of him, and so did his son—who had recently died of a gunshot wound. Matt had been suffering with a chronic dejection since the accident.

Ben tied the horse to a tree, took a small black bag from the buggy, and came back with it. "I want to see you alone somewhere," he repeated.

Matt looked at the bag. "I'm goin' fishin'. If you want to come along—"

"Fishing!" Ben cried. "D'you think I came up here to go fishing! My time's valuable, if yours isn't."

"Well—" Matt took off his hat and rubbed the back of his head indifferently. He had a thatch of thick hair, like the pelt of a wild animal, rusty brown in spots and shaggy. "I promised the missus I'd get some perch fer dinner—if they'll bite. Water's cold yet fer perch."

"Here!" Ben shouted. "I've got no time to fool. I've got something to say to you, and I want you to hear it."

Matt shouldered his pole. "You kin stay here if you want to. Er you kin come an' sit down in the punt an' not waste my time." He turned away unperturbed. "I got to catch some fish," he said as he moved off down the road.

The Honorable Ben stood in a helpless rage that was nearly pitiful. Pale, his lips trembling, he glared after Matt with a despairing ferocity. He blinked as if his eyes were burning. He set his teeth and swallowed, breathing through dilated nostrils, with a sound that was almost a moan of plaintive fury. But he did not turn and fling his satchel into the buggy and drive away. No. He stood there, watching Matt down the road and slowly gaining control of himself.

When Matt turned off into the woods and disappeared he put down his satchel, wiped his forehead with a shaking hand, pulled his hat down to his eyes, picked up his satchel with a jerk, and followed.

3

In the fields, on one side of the road, the first strawberry blossoms were as white as wedding wreaths in the grass. On the other side, in the warm wood shade the anemones were May-Daying, like picnicking children in holiday muslins, delighting in the breeze that set them dancing. And where Matt turned off on a narrow path among the maples the spring beauties were already coyly hidden, awaiting some sentimental rendezvous, in coquettish blushes, pink and white.

The Honorable Ben had no eyes for them. And if Matt had noticed them as he passed it would only have been to observe the progress of the season by them, as automatically as a city man notes the hour on the street clocks. He was deeply ruminative. He did not look behind him to see whether Ben was following. He did not need to. He had a woodman's ears, and Ben's footsteps rustled and crackled on dead leaves and fallen branches.

The path joined an old wood road that led through a second-growth forest of beech and maple—a forest of gray tree-trunks and green underbrush, where the sunlight was caught in a net of low-hung branches and tossed among entangling leaves. Matt went placidly toward the glimmering streak of water at the end of the vista. Ben followed in a furious silence.

He could hardly have expected a more friendly reception. His relations with his brother had not been friendly—not since their school-days—not since Ben had hired himself to the owner of the Cappsville general store and Matt had remained at home to work his father's farm. When the father died he left the farm to both of them, and Ben had deeded his half of the property to Matt in return for a mortgage on the whole of it. He had taken advantage of Matt's impracticality in order to saddle him with a much larger mortgage than the place was worth, and then he had sold the mortgage to the Sullivan County Land and Investment Company, of which he afterward became a director. They squeezed the interest out of Matt implacably. When he could no longer meet it they foreclosed. Matt was now paying them rent. He was allowed to occupy the farm only because no one else wanted it. And he might well have regarded his brother as the heartless leech who had bled and impoverished him all his life.

Curiously enough, he did not so regard him. "Well," he would say, "that's the way Ben is"—with a sort of philosophic and superior contempt. It was the contempt of a wronged man who knows that he has done nothing to deserve the injustice that has been done him. All the anger was on Ben's side. He felt toward his brother as if Matt had been an opponent who had lost to him in a card game, and who blamed him instead of blaming his own unskilfulness or his ill luck. The game was over. He had come to Matt—with his winnings in his little satchel—prepared to talk sense to him. And Matt, walking away from him like a contemptuous dumb animal, compelled him to follow ignominiously. Every step that he took added to the insult.

Matt came to the swampy edge of the lake where there was an unfinished landing-place made of stakes driven in like a row of piles to hold a filling of loose rocks. And tied to one of the stakes was a flat-bottomed punt, unpainted, coffin-shaped, home-made, as crude as one of those "stone-boats" in which the Sullivan County farmer sledges the stones from his fields.

Matt was stooping to grope for a pair of oars in their hiding-place under the trunk of a fallen hemlock when his brother came to the wharf, saw the punt, and saw it as shiftlessness and poverty made manifest in the shape of a boat. He scowled at it. He scowled at the unfinished wharf. There was a gruesome fatality connected with the history of the wharf and he knew it, but he did not intend to refer to it—not yet. He was holding that, to lead up to it as his climax.

He began suddenly in a blustering voice: "Why don't you fix up your place? Your house 's a disgrace. No fence. No steps. Not fit to live in!"

Matt said, calmly, as if addressing the oars in his hands: "It ain't my house any more, an' you know it. Besides, I don't need a fence there. The fields are fenced an' the dog stays 'round the front door. He keeps out the cattle. I never got 'round to fixin' the porch steps. We don't need 'em, anyway."

"You get 'round to going fishing."

Matt untied the boat and put his fishing-tackle into it. "I promised the missus I'd get some perch."

Ben said, "Hell!" with the grunted disgust of intelligence balked by stupid reiteration.

Matt climbed into the boat and held it to the wharf, waiting for Ben to take his place in the stern.

"How far are you going?"

Matt moved his head in the direction of the lower lake. Ben hesitated a moment, his lips working. Then he got in and sat down, muttering profanity, and put the bag on the seat beside him because the bottom of the boat was wet and dirty.

Matt fitted his oars to the rowlocks and shoved off. A gust of wind helped him to get under way. A burst of sunlight was blown across the lake in a sudden glory with the flying clouds. He began to row, beaten from his course by sudden side buffets of wind and bringing the head of the boat back mechanically without looking 'round to see his direction.

"Where 're you going?" Ben demanded.

Matt replied, "Down to Alder Point."

4

They both had boyhood memories of Alder Point, and it may have been these that kept Ben silent and preoccupied for the rest of the way. Or he may have been thinking of what he had to say and how he was to say it. In either case he was so deep in thought that even when Matt had dropped his anchor-stone off Alder Point and shipped his oars and taken up his fishing-pole Ben did not speak. Matt looked up at him a moment from his can of bait and began to crowd his hook with a bunch of wriggling worms. He said, smiling grimly, "Been doin' purty well, Ben?"

It startled Ben. "Who?" he asked, hoarsely.

Matt did not reply. He flung his line. "Boys growin' up?"

Ben made as if to speak, checked himself, looked at his watch, and asked, in a harsh tone: "Well, what about your place? What do you want? Money?"

"What's that to you?"

"They're throwing it up to me for letting one of my family live here in this sort of way. It isn't my fault, is it? What's the matter with you? Don't you care how you live? I'd think your wife 'd want to do better if you wouldn't."

Matt replied: "I didn't have your luck, Ben. I didn't marry money."

"If you think I got anything out of my wife's money— She's given more to her church than she ever had when I married her."

After an interval of thought Matt observed: "She's took to religion, eh? Well, that's better than rum."

"What's rum got to do with it?"

"Nuthin'," Matt said, "'cept that I hear your boys are goin' in fer it pretty strong."

Ben did not reply.

Matt fished. "People nowadays," he reflected, "they don't seem to think there's any hell—so I guess we'll all be happy in heaven, uh? Think you're goin' there, Ben?" He added, in interpretation of his brother's eye-puckered silence: "Don't care whether you do er not, uh? Not botherin' you any."

"My religion's my own concern."

"I guess that's right." He nodded. "I guess that's right."

The boat swung 'round on its anchor-line with the shifting wind. Matt drew in his hook to see if it had caught on any of the brown lily-pads that had not yet lifted themselves to the surface of the water. "No perch comin', I guess."

The reference to perch was too much for Ben's irritability. He broke out: "I tell you what's the matter with you—you're lazy. You'd sooner sit in a boat all day waiting for a five-cent fish than go out in the field and earn an honest dollar. That's why you're living the way you are. It's shiftlessness. It's laziness—sheer, damn laziness!"

Matt had put the butt of his pole under his leg and taken out his pipe. "Well, Ben," he said, "you've worked hard."

"You're damn right I have."

"You've worked hard, an' your two boys have gone to the devil with drink—"

"That's none of my doing."

"An' your wife's trying to buy fergiveness fer you with the money you sold yer soul fer. An' you're just about as happy as if you'd gone to hell already. You've worked hard, an' you've got what you've been workin' fer. Well, you can have it. I don't want it."

Ben controlled himself, in a white rage. Matt lit his pipe deliberately.

"You folks that make money call us failures. You're the failures." He puffed. "You remind me of the bees in a hive—workin' yerselves to death to store up honey that's no use to you. The bumblebee's got more horse sense. When it gets enough fer its family it's satisfied. You tell me I'm lazy because I'd sooner be a bumblebee. An' I tell you you're just sort o' foolish."

Ben said, sneeringly, "I'd like to buy you at my price and sell you at yours."

Matt nodded. "You can't buy what ain't fer sale. That's been your trouble right along. You've been so busy gettin' money you haven't got any o' the things that money can't buy—the things that 're worth more than money. You're a failure, Ben. I'm sorry fer you. That's the feelin' I have. I'm sorry fer you."

"Is that all? Is that all you have to say?"

Matt took up his rod again. "That 'll do me."

"Good." Ben stretched out his arms to bare his wrists like a man about to deal cards. "Now," he said, in a cold passion, "listen to me. There were some people over on the other side of the lake last summer. They used to row over here to get milk and eggs and so forth from you. Do you remember?"

Matt nodded.

"They complained to your wife one day about that wharf of yours. She said it was your wharf, and like everything you did it was a failure. She said you never finished anything you started and never started anything you could put off. She said she was ambitious when she married you—a girl of good education—wanted to be a school-teacher. You were studying, then, at night, and she thought you were going to be another Abraham Lincoln. You were studying law. A little later you were reading medical books. Then you took to reading newspapers and talking politics. You studied everything but farming and did everything but attend to your work. She saw she'd never escape from poverty unless the boy pulled her out of it. And she kept him at school, and slaved for him and pushed him along, and let you do as you liked.... Well?"

Matt looked up, with the gaze of a man whose thoughts are turned inward upon himself and his past.

The brother clenched his hand. "That boy tripped on your wharf and shot himself! On your wharf—the wharf you were too lazy to finish. He tripped on one of the stakes you were too lazy to even off—and killed himself! Those people told me about it when I saw them in town. They told me your wife was as good as crazy—that she went around like a madwoman, stone dumb—that she never even shed a tear—that you'd killed the boy and worse than killed her. They found out that you were related to me and they asked me to come up here and try to do something for your wife." He sat back with a contemptuous gesture of withdrawal from the discussion. "You tell me I'm a failure. You!"

Matt said, hoarsely: "You don't understand. She don't, either. I've been— All my life—" He looked down at his feet, clumsy in their "cow-hides." "The boy was an accident. It might have happened, anyway. A woman isn't responsible fer what she says like that."

It was as if he had found his tongue as clumsy as his feet, as fumbling as his hands, and struggled within himself, futilely, without expression, bewildered by this new and terrible view of himself as a criminal failure in life. He, who had always thought of himself as above his circumstances and better than his neighbors, as a thinker and a superior man!

He looked up at his brother pathetically. "I couldn't do the way you did. I couldn't go on workin' except I knew what I was workin' fer. I didn't want to live like a cow. I wanted to know what we were all livin' fer. I didn't want to make money just fer the sake o' makin' money, like you fellas in the city—"

"Look here," Ben said, fiercely, "I want you to understand that I went after money because I had brains enough to see that no one could live a healthy life without it. Poverty—it was poverty that killed your boy, because you hadn't money enough to build a decent wharf. It's your poverty that makes your wife despise you. You want money—that's all! You're a failure because you tried to live without getting the means to live on."

Matt shook his head, humped over his knees. "What's the matter with things? Why 'm I—what you people think I am, when I tried to be—what I did? Why are you what you are when you used to be"—he choked up—"you used to be 'Benny'?"

That fond little name of their childhood came upon them from their past with a tender appeal that silenced them. They stared at each other, and Matt had a mist of tears in his eyes.

Ben glanced aside quickly at the green edge of Alder Point. "That's got nothing to do with it," he muttered.

The sunshine burst upon their silence with a sudden light that seemed to make their emotion public and improper. The Honorable Ben thrust his forefinger down between the back of his neck and his shirt-collar and made a pretense of easing the pinch of the linen. "Look here," he said, with a determined gruffness, "I came up here to say this: I'm looking for a bit of land to build on. The wife likes the country. I want a place for her to live—in case of trouble. We could get this land around here for a song, if you'd run the farm for us or see that the natives didn't steal the whole damn place while our backs were turned. What's the land worth up here?"

"Seven to ten dollars an acre."

"You could make farming pay here as well as anywhere if you had the capital behind you. You could work it on shares if you liked."

Matt said nothing.

"Who owns this?" He waved a hand to the shores of the lake.

"A man named Coddington."

"Would he sell the whole thing—lake and all?"

"Yes. I guess so."

The man of large affairs nodded curtly. "Take me ashore yonder and we'll look it over."

Matt drew in his forgotten line and lifted his anchor-stone aboard. Under cover of the action Ben said, "I want you to help my family, now, Matt—and I'll help yours."

Matt looked at the stone. "It ain't that," he reflected, dully. "There's something wrong. If a man don't make money, he kills his children. An' if he does, they kill themselves. There's something wrong. Look at you an' me. Look at any young uns an' then see what they grow into. Look at how a man starts out to do the right thing—an' can't."

"Nonsense!" Ben said, impatient of all this moralizing. "Nonsense! Let's look at the land." He rubbed his hands together, chilled by the wind. "I want you to buy it for me. I'll put up the money—and more, too—but I don't want my name to appear. Understand? I want this to be between us two. See? Just— Who's that?"

5

Matt was bending forward, busy with his oars. The boat had swung around so that its nose was pointing toward the home shore again. There was a man in a topcoat and a derby standing at the landing.

"Who is it? Who's that?"

A note of alarm in the voice startled Matt to attention. He caught the direction of Ben's eyes and turned in his seat to look.

The man was a stranger to him. "I dunno," he said. "What's the matter?"

Ben reached a hand to his satchel, put it on the bottom of the boat between his feet, and said, quietly: "Wait. Wait a minute. I think I know him. Don't row in." He had opened the bag. "In case anything happens I want you to buy that land for me. Understand?" He drew out a package of bank bills the size of a brick, strapped with elastic bands. He stooped to conceal his action from the man ashore, and threw the money along the bottom of the punt to his brother. It struck Matt's boot. "Whatever there's left over I want you to just put away safely for me. I'll trust you."

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing. Nothing. It's just the financial stringency. There's been trouble at the bank. Things will be tied up for a while. I've saved this out. Understand? I want you to buy the land. Just hide that somewhere and say nothing about it."

Matt looked down at the money, without loosening his stiffened hold on the oars. "What's the matter? Why can't you buy it yerself?"

Ben glanced at the shore. The wind was carrying them slowly toward Alder Point. He said: "I'm in a little difficulty—for the time. That's my wife's money. I've saved it out of the smash." His impatience showed in his voice. "She'd be fool enough to give it up. Understand? I want you to buy the land for her and keep what's left over until I see you again."

Matt drew back his foot from the package.

Ben said, anxiously: "I want you to work the place for us on shares. That's what I came up here for. Anything you need you're welcome to, too. Understand? Just take what you want yourself. I'll trust you. You're honest." His voice had begun to grate in a dry throat. "It's money. That's what you want—money. Understand? Fix yourself up. Make your wife happy."

Matt did not move.

"Listen! I can't keep that money myself. The bottom's dropped out of everything for me. I've lost everything but this. They'll take it. They'll take everything. I want you to keep this for me. I'll trust you. We'll all go in together. You're getting too old to work. I'll see that you don't have to. ... They can't touch me. I'll get out of it, I guess. But they'll pluck me to the last cent. I want you to keep this for me. Take it! Take it!"

Matt sat motionless, his eyes on the money, as if he did not hear. The water lapped and chuckled along the side of the punt maliciously as a puff of wind hurried them toward the shore.

"Say! Say, Matt. Look here. For God's sake! It's all we have. Everything's gone to smash. They've been watching me while they—they've been going over the books. That's one of them at the landing. He's come to— Matt! Take it! Don't let them get it! Matt!"

Matt shook his head, without raising his eyes.

Their progress had put the Point between them and the landing. The Honorable Benjamin, seeing that he was hidden from the man on the wharf, crouched, half risen from his seat, grasping the thwarts. "G— damn it!" he cursed in a fierce undertone, "aren't you good for anything? Won't you even save yourself and all the rest of us from the poorhouse now that you've got the chance? That man's come here to arrest me! Matt! Hide it! Hide it!"

Matt did not move. Ben looked back over his shoulder at the lake, reached one hand toward the money, and then said to himself, desperately, "It 'd float!"

There was a long pause and silence. The crackle of a trodden branch sounded from the laurel-bushes. Ben sprang from his seat in a passion of angry despair, snatched off his hat and flung it at his feet, plucked from his pocket a bright metal object that flashed in the sunlight, and put it to his mouth in both hands, holding it as if it were a flask from which he was to drink. Then a little cloud of yellowish-blue smoke exploded from it and blew him backward, stiffly, over the stern of the boat—and his face was still distorted with an expression of anger as he fell, but his eyes, meeting the blaze of sunlight, looked surprised, startled, as if he had suddenly realized what he had done.

And when the man from the landing burst through the laurel-bushes—with his warrant for the arrest of the president of the wrecked Danville National Bank—he found an old farmer with a pair of oars still grasped stiffly in his hands, sitting in a coffin-shaped punt, staring, horrified, at a spot of blood and bubbles on the water a few yards from shore—with a small fortune in bank bills lying in plain view at his feet.