The Three Taps

Dedicated to
Susan and Francis Baker
(only he mustn’t sit up too late over it)

I

The Euthanasia Policy

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 tightrope 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 henhouses 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 evensong. 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 hardheaded 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.

“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 started insuring with you, half the premiums, mind you; and if I die before I reach sixty-five, then we call it off; you pay no insurance: if I live beyond sixty-five we call it off, and you pay no annuity. Come now, there’s a business offer. What do you people say to it?”

“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.