“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 outermost edges 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 have you got up your sleeve this time?”
Abraham Lockwood made an elaborate business of looking up his sleeve. “A pair of slightly soiled cuffs, and a pair of cuff buttons that my dear mother gave me when I graduated from the University. However, if you ask me what I have in my billycock, I’d have another answer.”