“O!” I said, with a falling face; “on speculation!”
“There’s a fortune in it for a clever advocate,” he answered eagerly. “A fortune! all Pactolus in a nutshell. I’ve had my experiences of the other kind. They squeeze you, and throw you away; take the wages of sin, and hand you over to the deuce. What do you say?”
“If you will give me the particulars,” I answered, without heart, “I shall be able to judge better. Your client——?”
He laughed joyously; frowned; put his hat on the floor; crossed his arms over his umbrella-handle, and glowered ferociously at me, squinting through his glasses.
“Exactly,” he said; “my client, ha-ha! Here, then, young sir, is my client’s case.
“His name is Buggins” (I glanced involuntarily at the wall). “He is, or was, until envy combined with detraction to ruin him, a company-promoter. As such, his trend was always towards insurance. It offered the best opportunities to a great creative genius. Buggins, being all that, recognized the still amazing potentialities in a field of commerce, which, though much worked, remains unexhausted—almost, one might say, inexhaustible. In his younger days he showed a pretty invention in devising and engineering what I may call personal essays in this line. His Insurance against Waterspouts, which he worked principally in the Midlands, brought him some handsome returns with a single generation of farmers. It was based on a cloud-burst at Bethesda, in Wales, which ruined quite a number. Other flights of his immature genius were, respectively, Insurance against Death in Diving-bells; against Death of a Broken Heart; against Official Strangulation; against Non-fatal Disfiguration by Lightning; against Death by Starvation (this last was largely patronized by millionaires). On a somewhat higher plane were his Provident Dipsomaniary, whose policies matured, or ‘burst,’ as Buggins phrased it, at the age of eighty-five, an essential condition being that the holders must put in their claims in person; his Physical Promotion League, which guaranteed to pay to the parents of any child, insured in it during his teens, a sum of ten pounds on the child’s reaching twenty-five years of age and a minimum height of six feet, and a thousand pounds for every additional inch which it grew afterwards; his Anti-Fiction Mutual, whose policies were forfeitable on first conviction of having written a novel (this proved one of the most profitable of all Buggins’s enterprises for a time; but in the end the national malady proved incurable, and subscribers fell off); his Psychical Pocket Research Society, which offered an Insurance against Ghost-seeing, the policy-holder forfeiting his claim on proof of his first supernatural visitation (but this was so violently assailed by the opposition society, which offered to prove that there were not three people in the United Kingdom who were insusceptible to spooks, that the scheme had to be abandoned); finally, in this category, his Bachelors’ Protection Association, which provided that, if a member reached the age of ninety without having married, he should receive an annuity beginning at fifty pounds, and rising, by yearly increments of ten pounds, to ten thousand pounds—figures which, in a centenarian age, were successful in dazzling a great many.
“But, by then, Buggins was beginning to master the deep ethics of his trade, and to realize that its heaviest emoluments were rooted in the grand principle of profitable self-denial. People will be unselfish if they see money in it; you can’t stop ’em.
“One other notable venture marks this period of what I may call his moral transition. That was his inspired scheme for insuring against illness, in the sense that any policy-holder admitting him or herself to be seriously indisposed, lost the right to compensation. It would have proved a godsend in a neurotic age; but the antagonism of the entire medical profession, with the single exception of the officer appointed by the company, killed it.
“We come now to Buggins’s final matured achievements. I beg your pardon?”
I had said nothing; but I suppose there is such a thing as a “speaking” silence. Certainly, if I had looked as I felt, I was a more drivelling maniac by now than Buggins himself. The visitor seemed to shoot out his eyes like an angry crab.