“I’m sorry; I’m frightfully sorry. But, you know, we’ve had this kind of offer before, and the company has always taken the line that it can’t go back on the original contract. If we lose, we lose; if the client loses, he must shoulder the responsibility. If we once went in for cancelling our insurances like that, our whole credit would suffer. I know you mean well by us, Mr. Mottram, and we’re grateful to you for the generosity of the offer; but it can’t be done; really it can’t.”
There was a heavy silence for nearly a minute. Then Mr. Mottram, pathetic in his disappointment, tried his last card.
“You could put it to the directors, couldn’t you? Stands to reason you couldn’t accept an offer of that kind without referring it to them. But you could put it to them at their next meeting, eh?”
“I could put it to the directors; indeed, I will. But I’m sorry to say I can’t hold out any hopes. The premium of the Euthanasia policy is so stiff that we’re always having people wanting to back out of it halfway, but the directors have never consented. If you take my advice, Mr. Mottram, you’ll take a second opinion about your health, go carefully this next year or two, and live to enjoy that annuity—for many years, I hope.” The young man, after all, was a paid official; he did not stand to lose.
Mr. Mottram rose; he declined all offers of refreshment. A little wearily, yet holding his head high, he let the confidential attendants usher him out. The young man made some notes, and the grim business of the Indescribable Company went on. In distant places ships were foundering, factories were being struck by lightning, crops were being spoiled by blight, savages were raiding the peaceful countryside; men were lying on air-cushions, fighting for breath in the last struggle of all. And to the Indescribable Company all these things meant business; most of them meant loss. But the loss never threatened its solvency for a moment; the law of averages saw to that.
II
The Detective Malgré Lui
I have already mentioned that the Indescribable kept its own tame doctor, a man at the very head of his profession. He was not in the least necessary to it; that is to say, a far cheaper man would have done the work equally well. But it suited the style of the Indescribable to have the very best man, and to advertise the fact that he had given up his practice in order to work exclusively for the company; it was all of a piece with the huge white building, and the frieze, and the palms in the waiting-room. It looked well. For a quite different reason the Indescribable retained its own private detective. This fact was not advertised; nor was he ever referred to in the official communications of the company except as “our representative.” He carried neither a lens nor a forceps—not even a revolver; he took no injections; he had no stupid confidential friend; but a private detective he was for all that. An amateur detective I will not call him, for the company paid him, and as you would expect, quite handsomely; but he had nothing whatever to do with Scotland Yard, where the umbrellas go to.
He was not an ornament to the company; he fulfilled a quite practical purpose. There are, even outside the humorous stories, business men in a small way who find it more lucrative to burn down their premises than to sell their stock. There are ladies—ladies whose names the Indescribable would never dream of giving away—who pawn their jewels, buy sham ones, and then try to make the original insurance policy cover them in the event of theft. There are small companies (believe it or not) which declare an annual loss by selling their stuff below cost price to themselves under another name. Such people flocked to the Indescribable. It was so vast a concern that you felt no human pity about robbing it—it was like cheating the income tax, and we all know how some people feel about that. The Indescribable never prosecuted for fraud; instead, it allowed a substantial margin for these depredations, which it allowed to continue. But where shady work was suspected “our representative” would drop in in the most natural way in the world and by dint of some searching inquiries made while the delinquent’s back was turned would occasionally succeed in showing up a fraud and saving the company a few hundreds of thousands by doing so.
The company’s “representative,” and our hero, was Miles Bredon, a big, good-humoured, slightly lethargic creature still in the early thirties. His father had been a lawyer of moderate eminence and success. When Miles went to school it was quite clear that he would have to make his own way in the world, and very obscure how he was going to do it. He was not exactly lazy, but he was the victim of hobbies which perpetually diverted his attention. He was a really good mathematician, for example; but as he never left a sum unfinished and “went on to the next” his marks never did him justice. He was a good cross-country runner, but in the middle of a run he would usually catch sight of some distraction which made him wander three miles out of his course and come in last. It was his nature to be in love with the next thing he had to do, to shrink in loathing from the mere thought of the next but one. The war came in time to
