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.
“Fit for anything, that’s right. And, mind you, I feel fit for anything. Never felt better. Two years!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Two years, that’s what he says. What’s the good of being able to know about these things if they can’t do anything for ’em, that’s what I want to know? And, mind you, he says there isn’t anything for it, not in the long run. He tells me to take this and that, you know, and give up this and that—”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Mottram, but I don’t quite understand. Is this your doctor you’re talking about?”
“No doctor of mine. My doctor down in Pullford, he couldn’t tell what was the matter. Sent me on to this big man in London I’ve been seeing this morning. Two years, he says. Seems hard, doesn’t it?”
“Oh! … You’ve been to a specialist. I say, I’m most awfully sorry.” The young man was quite serious in his condolences, though he was even more embarrassed than actually grieved. It seemed horrible to him that this red-faced man who looked so well and obviously enjoyed his meals should be going where Numa and Ancus went before him: he did not fit into the picture. No taint of professionalism entered into this immediate reaction. But Mr. Mottram still took the business line.
“Ah! ‘sorry’—you may say that. It may mean half a million to you, mayn’t it?”
“Yes; but, look here, these specialists are often wrong. Famous case of one who went potty and told all his patients they were in for it. Look here, what about seeing our man? He’d vet you, gladly.”
It need hardly be said that the Indescribable keeps its own private physician, whose verdict must be obtained before any important insurance is effected. He is considered to be one of the three best doctors in England, and fantastic stories are told about the retaining fee which induced him to give up his practice in Harley Street. Once more the young man was entirely disinterested; once more Mr. Mottram saw ground for suspicion. It looked to him as if the company were determined to get stable information about the exact state of his health, and he did not like the idea.
“It’s of no consequence, thank you all the same. It isn’t as if my case were a doubtful one; I can give you the doctor’s certificate if needed. But I didn’t come here to talk about that; I came on business. You know how I stand?”
The young man had just been looking up Mr. Mottram’s docket and knew all about him well enough. But the Indescribable cultivates the family touch; it likes to treat its clients as man to man, not as so many lives. “Let’s see”—the young man appeared to be dragging the depths of memory—“you should be sixty-three now, eh? And in two years’ time—why, it looks as if it were just touch and go whether your policy covered a case of—h’m!—premature decease or not, doesn’t it?”
“That’s right. My birthday’s in a fortnight’s time, more or less. If that doctor was dead accurate, it’ll stand you in five hundred thousand; if he put the date a bit too soon, then I get nothing, and you pay nothing; that’s how it is, isn’t it?”
“Looks like it, I’m afraid. Of course, you’ll understand, Mr. Mottram, the company has to work by rule of thumb in these cases.”
“I see that. But look at it this way. When I took out that policy I wasn’t thinking much of the insurance part; I’ve no kith nor kin except one nephew, and he’s seen fit to quarrel with me, so nothing goes to him, anyhow. If that half-million falls in, it will just go to charity. But what I’d set my heart on was the annuity; we’re a long-lived family, mostly, and I’d looked forward to spending my last days in comfort, d’you see? Well, there’s no chance of that after what the doctor’s been telling me. So I don’t value that Youth-in-Asia policy as much as I did, see? And I’ve come here to make you a fair offer.”
“The company—” began the young man.
“Let me have my say, and you shall have yours afterward. They call me rich, and I suppose I am rich; but my stuff is tied up more than you’d think; with money as tight as it is, you can’t just sell out of a thing when you feel inclined. What I want is ready money—doctors’ bills, you know, and foreign travel, and treatment, and that. So this is my offer: you pay back half the premiums from the time I
