The principles of insurance, they tell us, were not hidden from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers. How anybody had the enterprise in those rough-and-tumble days to guarantee a client against “fire, water, robbery or other calamity” remains a problem for the historian; the more so as it appears that mathematical calculations were first applied to the business by the eminent John de Witt. In our own time, at any rate, the insurance companies have woven a golden net under the tight-rope walk of existence; if life is a lottery, the prudent citizen faces it with the consciousness that he is backed both ways. Had the idea been thoroughly grasped in those remoter periods, no doubt but Alfred’s hostess would have been easily consoled for the damage done to her cakes and King John handsomely compensated for all that he lost in The Wash. Let us thank the soaring genius of the human mind which has thus found a means to canalize for us the waters of affliction; and let us always be scrupulous in paying up our premiums before the date indicated on the printed card, lest calamity should come upon us and find us unprepared.
In a sense, though, insurance was but an empirical science until the Indescribable Company made its appearance. The man who is insured with the Indescribable walks the world in armour of proof; those contrary accidents and mortifications which are a source of spiritual profit to the saint are a source of material advantage to him. No east wind but flatters him with the prospect of a lucrative cold; no dropped banana skin but may suddenly hurl him into affluence. The chicken-farmer whose hen-houses are fitted with the company’s patent automatic egg-register can never make a failure of his business. The egg is no sooner laid than it falls gently through a slot which marks its passage on a kind of taximeter; and if the total of eggs at the end of the month is below the average the company pays—I had almost said, the company lays—an exact monetary equivalent for the shortage. The company which thus takes upon itself the office of a hen is equally ready when occasion arises to masquerade as a bee: if your hives are opened in the presence of its representative you can distend every empty cell with sweet nectar at the company’s expense. Doctors can guarantee themselves against an excess of panel patients, barristers against an absence of briefs. You can insure every step you take on this side of the grave, but no one of them on such handsome terms as the step which takes you into the grave; and it is confidently believed that if certain practical difficulties could be got over the Indescribable would somehow contrive to frank your passage into the world beyond. Wags have made merry at the company’s expense, alleging that a burglar can insure himself against a haul of sham jewels, and a clergyman against insufficient attendance at even-song. They tell stories of a client who murmured “Thank God!” as he fell down a lift-shaft, and a shipwrecked passenger who manifested the liveliest annoyance at the promptness of his rescuers when he was being paid for floating on a life-belt at the rate of ten pounds a minute. So thoroughly has the Indescribable reversed our scale of values here below.
But of all the company’s enterprises none can rival in importance or in popularity the so-called Euthanasia policy. One of the giant brains that organized the undertaking observed with compassion the doubtful lot of human kind, the lot which makes the business man sweat and labour and agonize, uncertain whether he himself will reap the fruits of his industry or whether they will pass to an heir in whom, on the whole, he is less interested. It follows, of course, from the actuarial point of view, that he needs a policy which covers both possibilities, immature death or unexpected longevity, but the former on a more princely scale than the latter. If you take out a Euthanasia policy you will pay very heavy premiums; that goes without saying. But you pay them with a sense of absolute security. If you should die before the age of sixty-five a fortune is immediately distributed to your heirs and assigns. If you outlive that crucial age you become thenceforward, until the decree of nature takes its tardy effect, the pensioner of the company; every faltering breath you draw in the last stages of senility is money to you; your heirs and assigns, instead of looking forward heartlessly to the moment of your release, conspire to keep your body and soul together with every known artifice of modern medicine—it is in their interest to do so. There is but one way in which you can forfeit the manifest advantages of the scheme, and that is self-murder. So complex is our human fashioning that men even may be tempted to enrich their surviving relatives by such means; and you will find, accordingly, at the bottom of your Euthanasia policy, an ominous black hand directing attention to the fact that in the event of suicide no benefits are legally recoverable.
It goes without saying that the Indescribable Building is among the finest in London. It appears to be an axiom with those who conduct business in the modern, or American, manner that efficiency is impossible unless all your transactions are conducted in an edifice not much smaller and not much less elaborate than the Taj Mahal. Why this should be so it is difficult to explain. In a less credulous age we might have been tempted to wonder where all the money came from; whether (to put it brutally) our premiums might not have worked out a little lower if the company’s premises had not been quite so high. After all, our solicitor lives in horrid, dingy little chambers, with worn-out carpets and immemorial cobwebs on the wall—does he never feel that this squalor will fail to inspire confidence? Apparently not; yet the modern insurance company must impress us all through the palatial splendour of its offices with the idea that there is a vast reserve of capital behind it. The wildest voluptuousness of an Eastern tyrant is less magnificent in its architectural scheme than the hard-headed efficiency of the American business man. Chatting in the waiting-room of some such edifice, Sardanapalus might have protested that it stumped him how they did it, and Kublai Khan might have registered the complaint that it was all very well but the place didn’t feel homey.
Indescribable House is an enormously high building with long, narrow windows that make it look like an Egyptian tomb. It is of white stone, of course, so time-defying in its appearance that it seems almost blasphemous to remember the days when it was simply a gigantic shell composed of iron girders. Over the front door there is a group of figures in relief, more than life-size; the subject is intended, I believe, to be Munificence wiping away the tears of Widowhood, though the profane have identified it before now as Uncle Sam picking Britannia’s pocket. This is continued all round the four sides by a frieze, ingeniously calculated to remind the spectator of the numerous risks which mortality has to run: here a motor accident, with an ambulance carrying off the injured parties; here an unmistakable shipwreck; there a big-game hunter being gored by a determined-looking buffalo, while a lion prowls thoughtfully in the background. Of the interior I cannot speak so positively, for even those who are favoured enough to be the company’s clients never seem to go up beyond the first storey. But rumour insists that there is a billiard-room for the convenience of the directors (who never go there); and that from an aeroplane, in hot weather, you can see the clerks playing tennis on the roof. What they do when they are not playing tennis and what possible use there can be in all those multitudinous rooms on the fifth, sixth and seventh floors are thoughts that paralyze the imagination.
In one of the waiting-rooms on the ground floor, sitting under a large palm-tree and reading a closely reasoned article in the Actuaries’ and Bottomry Gazette, sat a client to whom the reader will do well to direct attention, for our story is concerned with him. His look, his dress, his manner betrayed the rich man only to those who have frequented the smaller provincial towns and know how little in those centres money has to do with education. He had a short black coat with very broad and long lapels, a starched collar that hesitated between the Shakespeare and the all-the-way-and-back-again patterns, a double-breasted waistcoat from which hung a variety of seals, lockets and charms—in London, in fact, you would have put him down for an old-fashioned bank cashier with a moderate income. Actually, he could have bought you out of your present job at double the salary and hardly felt it. In Pullford, a large Midland town which you probably will never visit, men nudged one another and pointed to him as one of the wealthiest residents. In the anteroom of the Indescribable offices he looked, and perhaps felt, like a schoolboy waiting his turn for pocket-money. Yet even here he was a figure recognizable to the attendant who stood there smoothing out back numbers of the Actuaries’ and Bottomry Gazette. For this man, called Mottram by accident of birth and Jephthah through the bad taste of his parents, was the holder of a Euthanasia policy.
Another attendant approached him, summoning him to his appointed interview. There was none of that “Mr. Mottram, please!” which reverberates so grimly through the dentist’s waiting-room. At the Indescribable the attendants come close to you and beckon you away with confidential whispers; it is part of the tradition. Mr. Mottram rose, and was gently sucked up by the lift to the first storey, where fresh attendants ushered him on into one of the few rooms that really mattered. Here he was met by a pleasant, rather languid young man, delicately dressed, university-bred, whose position in the complicated hierarchy of the Indescribable it is no business of ours to determine.
“How do you do, Mr. Mottram? Keeping well, I hope?”
Mr. Mottram had the blunt manner of his fellow townsmen, and did not appreciate the finesse of metropolitan conversational openings. “Ah, that’s right,” he said; “best for you I should keep well, eh? You and I won’t quarrel there. Well, it may surprise you, but it’s my health I’ve come to talk about. I don’t look ill, do I?”
“You look fit for anything. I’d sooner be your insurance agent than your family doctor, Mr. Mottram.” The young man was beginning to pick up the Pullford idea of light small talk.