Читать книгу The Best Policy - Flower Elliott - Страница 2

Dave Murray, general agent, leaned back in his chair and looked thoughtfully at the young man before him.

“So you have run up against an unanswerable argument?” he remarked.

“It seems so to me,” said the inexperienced Owen Ross.

“My dear boy,” asserted Murray, “in the life insurance business the only unanswerable argument is a physician’s report that the applicant is not a good risk. What is the particular thing that has put you down and out?”

“Faith,” replied the young man; “just plain faith in the Almighty. Perhaps, some time in your career, you have run across a religious enthusiast who considers it a reflection on the all-seeing wisdom of the Almighty to take any measures for his own protection or the protection of his family.”

“I have,” admitted Murray, “but generally it has been a woman.”

“This is a man,” said Ross; “a sincere, devout man. If he were a hypocrite, it would be different, but it is a matter of religious conviction – a principle of faith – with him to trust in the Lord. Life insurance he considers almost sacrilegious – an evidence of man’s doubt in the wisdom of his Maker, and an attempt, in his puny insignificant way, to interfere with the plans of the Great Master. To all arguments he replies, ‘The Lord will provide for His children.’”

“And you consider that unanswerable?” asked Murray.

“In his case, yes. Even his wife is unable to move him, although she wants insurance as a provision for the future of the children and was instrumental in getting me to talk to him. How would you answer such a contention as that?”

“I wouldn’t answer it; I would agree with him.”

“And give up?”

“Quite the contrary. While there can be no doubt that he is right as far as he goes, he does not go far enough. I would turn his own argument against him.” Murray leaned forward in his chair and spoke with earnest deliberation. “The Lord provides for His children through human instrumentality. Why should not the man be the human instrument through which the Lord provides for that man’s family? The Lord does not directly intervene – at least, not in these days. If, in the hour of extremity, an unexpected legacy should come to relieve the necessities of that man’s family, he would say the Lord had provided. But it would be through human instrumentality: the legacy, and the method and law by which it reached them would be essentially human. If, when poverty knocks at the door, some generous philanthropist were moved to come to their relief, he would hold again that the Lord had provided; if some wealthy relative sought them out, it would be through the intervention of the Lord; if, through his own wise action, they are saved from want, is he more than the human instrument through which the Lord provides? May not an insurance company be the chosen instrument? I say this with all due reverence, and it seems to me to answer his objections fully. Is it only in unforeseen ways that He cares for His children? Has He nothing to do with those cases in which reasonable precautions are taken by the children themselves?”

Ross, the young solicitor, looked at his chief with unconcealed admiration.

“By George!” he exclaimed, “you’ve got the theory of this business down to a science. I’ll try the man again.”

“It’s not a business,” retorted Murray somewhat warmly, for this was a point that touched his pride; “it is a profession – at least, it lies with the man himself to make it a business or a profession, according to his own ability and character. There are small men who make a business of the law, and there are great men who make a profession of it; there are doctors to whom medicine is a mere commercial pursuit, and there are doctors to whom it is a study, a science, a profession. You may make of life insurance a cheap business, or you may make of it a dignified profession; you may be a mere annoying canvasser, or you may be a man who commands respect; but, to be really successful, you must have, or acquire, a technical knowledge of the basis of insurance, a knowledge of law, and, above all, a knowledge of human nature, – and even that will avail little if you are not temperamentally suited to the work. You can no more make a good insurance man of unpromising material than you can make a good artist.”

Ross caught some of the enthusiasm and earnestness of Murray, and unconsciously straightened up.

“You have made me look at the subject from a new point of view,” he said. “I confess I was rather ashamed of the soliciting part of the work at first – felt a good deal like a cripple selling pencils to support a sick wife.”

“And very likely you acted like it,” remarked Murray, “in which case the people you approached would so class you. It isn’t necessary to have the ‘iron nerve,’ so long identified with that branch of the work; it isn’t even helpful, for it makes a man unpopular, and the most successful men are the most popular ones. You’ve lost ground when you have reached a point where any man you know is not glad to see you enter his office. At the same time,” – musingly, – “nerve and persistence become forethought and wisdom when time proves you were right. I have known of cases where a man afterward thanked the solicitor who had once made life a burden to him; but it is always better to change a man’s mind without his knowledge.”

“Rather difficult,” laughed Ross.

“But it has been done,” said Murray. “As a matter of fact, you are working to save men and women from their own selfishness or heedlessness. If you think of that, you will be more convincing and will raise your work to the dignity of a profession; if you think only of the commissions, you will put yourself on the level of the shyster lawyer whose interest centers wholly in the fees he is able to get rather than in the cases he is to try. There are pot-boilers in every business and every profession, but success is not for them: they can’t see beyond the needs of the stomach, and the man who works only for his belly never amounts to much. He will stoop to small things to gain a temporary advantage, never seeing the future harm he is doing; he is the kind of man who hopes to rise by pulling others down. Remember, my boy, that insinuations as to the instability of a rival company invariably make a man suspicious of all: when you have convinced him that the rival’s proposition and methods are not based on sound financial and business principles, you have more than half convinced him that yours aren’t, either, and that very likely there is something radically wrong with the whole blame system.”

“I’m glad you spoke of that,” said Ross. “There have been cases where insinuations have been made against our company, and I have been tempted to fight back the same way. A man is at a disadvantage when he is put on the defensive and is called upon to produce evidence of what ought to be a self-evident proposition.”

“Never do it, unless the question is put to you directly,” advised Murray. “You must defend yourself when attacked, but, in every other case, go on the assumption that your company is all right, and that everybody knows it is all right. The late John J. Ingalls once said, ‘When you have to offer evidence that an egg is good, that egg is doubtful, and a doubtful egg is always bad.’ It’s worth remembering. Many a man is made doubtful of a good proposition by ill-advised efforts to prove it is good.”

“If that is invariably true,” – with a troubled scowl, – “I fear I have made some mistakes.”

“The man who thinks he makes no mistakes seldom makes anything else.”

Ross brightened perceptibly at this.

“You’ve made them yourself?” he asked.

“Lots of them,” replied Murray, and then he added whimsically: “Once I placed a risk that meant a two-hundred-dollar commission for me, and my wife and I went right out and ordered two hundred dollars’ worth of furniture and clothes. The risk was refused, and I never got the commission.”

Ross laughed.

“I’m beginning to develop enthusiasm and pride in the business – I mean profession.”

“Oh, call it a business,” returned Murray, “but think of it as a profession. It’s the way you regard it yourself that counts, and you can’t go far astray in that if you stop to think what is required of a good insurance man. Sterling integrity, for one thing, and tact and judgment. A man who brings in a good ten-thousand-dollar risk is more valuable than the man who brings in one hundred thousand dollars that is turned down by the physicians or at the home office. And the first requisite for advancement is absolute trustworthiness. There are temptations, even for a solicitor – commission rebates to the insured that are contrary to the ethics of the business – and there are greater temptations higher up. You will learn, as in no other line, that a man wants what he can’t get, even if he didn’t want it when he could get it, and he will pay a high price for what he wants. Collusion in a local office might give it to him, in spite of all precautions taken; such collusion might be worth ten thousand dollars to a man who had no record of refusal by other companies against him, and ten thousand dollars could be split up very nicely between the local agent and the company’s physician. So integrity, unswerving integrity, is rated exceptionally high, and the least suspicion of trickery or underhand dealing may keep a capable man on the lowest rung of the ladder for all time, even if it doesn’t put him out of the business entirely. You are paid to protect your company, so far as lies in your power, and to get business by all honorable means; if you resort to dishonorable means, even in your company’s interests, there is always the suspicion that you will use the same methods against its interests whenever that may be to your personal advantage.”

Owen Ross pondered this deeply on his way home. It gave a new dignity to his occupation. He had taken up insurance because it happened to be the only available opening at a time when he was out of employment. He had been a clerk for a big corporation that had recently combined two branch offices, thus materially reducing its office force, and Ross had been one of those to suffer. His father, a prosperous merchant, had expressed himself, when consulted, in this way:

“I will give you a place here whenever that is necessary to enable you to live, but I prefer that you should complete your preliminary business training under some one else. No boy can consider himself a success until he has proved his independence, and no boy can be sure he has proved that until he has made a secure place for himself outside the family circle.”

So Ross, being wise enough to see the reason and justice of this, endeavored to show his independence by securing a position with Murray. And, although fairly successful from the start, he was only just beginning to take a real interest in his work. Murray liked him and encouraged him: there was, he thought, the making of a good and successful man in him, and he frequently went to considerable trouble to explain the theory and practice of insurance. Then, too, he knew that Ross had married just before he lost his other position, and that he was living in a modest little flat on his own earnings, in spite of the fact that he had a father who would be much more ready to assist him financially than he was to take him into his own office at that particular time. In fact, the elder Ross was quite willing that his son and his son’s wife should live with him, holding only that the family influence should not extend to his first business connections, but Owen deemed the flat a necessary evidence of his independence.

“I’ll get that sanctimonious optimist to-morrow,” he mused as he walked along. “He can’t answer those arguments that Murray gave me. He is content because the Lord will provide, but why may not I be the human instrument through which the Lord makes provision? That sounds presumptuous, but why not? Hasn’t He provided for others in just this way? Hasn’t many a man, convinced against his will, protected the future of those he loved barely in time?” He laughed quietly at a thought that occurred to him. “If this man should be insured to-morrow and die the next day,” he went on, “he would think the Lord had provided, but if he has to pay the premiums for twenty years, he’ll think it all very human. I’m beginning to understand him.”

He was still smiling at this quaint conceit when he entered his flat and was informed by his wife that Mrs. Becker had been there to see him. Mrs. Becker was a woman who did washing and occasional cleaning for them.

“To see me!” he exclaimed. “Why, her dealings are all with you.”

“It has something to do with insurance,” his wife explained. “She knows you’re in that business, of course, and she is in deep distress. She was crying when she was here this afternoon, but I couldn’t understand what the trouble was. She said she’d come back this evening.”

Ross puzzled over this a good deal during dinner, and even tried to get some additional information by questioning his wife closely. Exactly what did the woman say? Her words might be “all Greek” to his wife and still be intelligible to him, if only she could repeat them.

“But I can’t,” she insisted. “I was so sorry for her and so helpless that I really didn’t hear it all, anyway. I only know that it had something to do with an application or a premium or a policy, and her husband is very sick and she needs money.”

Ross began to speculate. The ignorant have strange ideas of insurance, and very likely this woman thought she could insure a dying husband. His backbone began to stiffen at once. Of course such a thing was actually, as well as ethically, impossible, but it was going to be a very difficult matter to explain it to her, and he anticipated a distressing scene. His wife was interested in the woman, spoke frequently of her hardships and her courage, and had helped her to such trifling extent as they could afford. No doubt the woman had some wild notion that he, being an insurance man, could do this for her and would do it as a matter of charity. Ethical questions do not trouble such people.

When she came, he was prepared for a request that was impossible in honor and in fact, and he was ready to refuse it with such gentleness as he deemed due to a weary and desperate woman who did not realize what she was asking – the gentleness of sympathy coupled with the firmness of principle. Ross was a young man, inclined to exaggerate the importance and difficulties of problems that confronted him, and he was disconcerted when he found he had made an error in the basis from which he had reached his conclusion; the woman did not wish to insure a dying husband, but to protect insurance he already carried.

“Oh, good Mr. Ross,” she wailed, “you must fix it for me some way. If we don’t pay to-morrow, we’ll lose everything. And we haven’t the money, Mr. Ross, not enough to pay the doctor even, and it’s worrying Peter more than the sickness. But you can fix it for us – of course you can fix it for us,” – with appealing hopefulness.

“Sit down, Mrs. Becker, and tell me about it,” he urged. “I don’t understand.”

She sank into a chair, and looked at him with anxious, tearful doubt and hope. Worn out with work and watching, she was a prey to conflicting emotions. Never doubting that he could help her, she feared he might refuse. Her anxiety was pitiable, and it was some time before he could get the details of the story from her. Finally, however, he learned that in more prosperous days her husband had insured his life for five thousand dollars, and, even in adversity, had succeeded in keeping up the payments, until stricken by this last illness. The sum he had saved up for the next premium – the one due the following day – had been used for medicines and other necessaries, and now he was near death. The doctor held out no hope; he might live a few days, but hardly more than that, for he was slowly but surely sinking. Until the previous night, when there came a turn for the worse, his recovery had been confidently expected, and his wife had worried little about the premium; the insurance company would be glad to take it when he was well.

“But he worried,” she said with unconscious pathos; “he worried and asked about it until – he couldn’t any more. He’s too sick to know now. But,” – hopefully, – “he’ll understand when I tell him it’s all right.”

Ross was as much distressed as the woman, but he could give her little comfort. He could protect the insurance only by paying the premium himself, and he was not able to do that. Still, almost all policies provided for the payment of something proportionate to the amount paid in, even when the premiums were not kept up, so – He paused uncomfortably at this point, for the woman’s attitude and expression had changed from tearful anxiety to dull, sullen suspicion. She did not believe him; like all insurance men, he was ready to seize any opportunity to defraud her; she was helpless, and a rich company would take advantage of her helplessness.

“You can get the money, Owen,” his wife urged, almost in tears herself.

“I’ll pay it back to you – when he dies!” cried the woman, and Ross gave her a quick glance. It seemed heartless, but he saw it was not. The woman was tried beyond her endurance; she, with her two children, faced a future that was absolutely devoid of hope; she was sick, wretched, despairing, and the husband she had striven so hard to keep with her was already beyond recall. She spoke of his approaching death merely as something certain, that could not be prevented, and that force of circumstances compelled her to consider. She had to think for herself and children, plan for herself and children, even at this fearful time, for there was no one to do it for her, no one to relieve her of any part of the burden. The problem of the larder and the problem of burial would confront her simultaneously; she had to face these cold, hard, brutal facts, in spite of the grief and sorrow of the moment.

All this Ross saw and appreciated, and he gave his attention to various possible ways of raising the necessary money.

“Perhaps I can arrange it,” he said at last. “In what company is he insured?”

It proved to be his own company. Instantly, his talk with Murray flashed through his mind. “You are paid to protect your company, so far as lies in your power,” Murray had said. Absolute loyalty to its interests was imperative. Would it be honorable for him to enter into any arrangement with this woman that would cost his company money? Had he any right to do more than the company would do itself? What would be thought of an employee in any other line of business who advanced money that was to be used to the financial disadvantage of his employer, however proper it might be in the case of some one else?

“I can do nothing,” he announced shortly.

“Oh, Owen!” cried his wife reproachfully.

“It is impossible!” he insisted. “If it were a proper thing to do, Murray would do it for her himself.”

“Mr. Murray doesn’t understand the situation,” urged his wife.

“Murray would understand my situation and his,” he returned. “We are taking money from this company, we are its trusted agents, and we can not do anything that would be to its disadvantage. It is a matter of business integrity.”

The woman did not weep now, but the look she gave him haunted him all that night. And his wife’s entreaties and reproaches added to his unhappiness.

“Why, Jennie,” he explained, “I stand alone between the company and a loss of over four thousand dollars. I know that this man is dying; I know that, if I pay this premium, the company will have to pay out the full amount of the insurance within a few days; I know that the premiums paid to date amount to only about five hundred or six hundred dollars, which, under the terms of the policy, the woman will not wholly lose. For me, an employee, to conspire to get the rest of the money for her would be like taking it from the cash drawer. I won’t do it; I can’t do it after Murray’s talk to me to-day about business integrity!”

“The company can afford it,” persisted Mrs. Ross, “and the woman needs it so badly.”

“There are lots of companies and individuals who could afford to let the woman have five thousand dollars,” replied Ross.

Still, Mrs. Ross could not understand. If he had been willing to pay the premium to another company, why not to his own?

“Resign and pay it!” she exclaimed suddenly, feeling that she had solved the problem; but that was a greater sacrifice than he was prepared to make. He was sincerely sorry for the woman; the case was on his mind all the following morning; but Murray’s talk had made a deep impression. This was one of the severe temptations of the business – the more severe because there was no question of corruption, but only of sympathy, in it. Such, he had read, were the temptations that led men of the best intentions astray in many of the affairs of life.

He was thinking of this when he called to see the “sanctimonious optimist”; he was thinking of it when he advanced the arguments Murray had given him; he was still thinking of it when the man said he was almost convinced and would telephone him after talking with his wife. Consequently, this success failed to elate him.

“The law of humanity,” he told himself, “is higher and more sacred than the law of business.”

He had walked unconsciously in the direction of his father’s office, and, still arguing with himself, he went in.

“Father,” he said, “I want to borrow a hundred dollars.” The premium was a little more than that, but he could supply the remainder.

“For what?” asked the senior Ross.

“There is something I may wish to do,” was the enigmatical reply. “I will repay it as rapidly as possible.”

“Commissions few and small?” laughed the senior Ross. “Well, a young man never finds out exactly what he’s worth, while working for a relative or a friend, so this experience ought to be valuable.”

Still undecided, but with the money in his pocket, Ross left his father’s office and went to his own. He wanted to pay that premium, but it seemed to him a very serious matter, ethically and actually. The woman faced a future of privation; he faced what seemed to him a crisis in his business career. He revolted at the thought of being false to his employer, but to let the woman suffer would be heartless.

“A letter for you, Ross,” said one of the clerks, as he entered the office. “Your wife left it.”

He opened it with nervous haste, and a notice of a premium due dropped out.

“You must find some way to help this woman, Owen,” his wife wrote. “I went to see her to-day, and the situation is pitiable. She has used up every cent she had and is in debt. Her husband is conscious at intervals, and he looks at you so wistfully, so anxiously, that it makes your heart bleed. Oh! if I could only tell him that the insurance is all right! It would give him peace for the little time that is left to him on this earth. Owen! resign, if necessary, but do what I ask!”

Ross crumpled the note in his hand and walked into Murray’s private office.

“Mr. Murray,” he said, “please accept my verbal resignation.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Murray.

“I have no time to explain now,” said Ross. “I want to be released from my obligations to the company at once.”

“You’re excited,” said Murray. “Sit down! Now, what’s the matter?”

Ross hesitated a moment, and then blurted out the whole story.

“You wish to pay this premium?” asked Murray.

“I’m going to pay it!” said Ross defiantly. “It will stick the company for more than four thousand dollars, but I’m going to pay it!”

“And you wish to resign to do it honorably?”

“Yes.”

“Pay it!” said Murray. “But your resignation is not accepted. I wouldn’t lose such a man as you for ten times four thousand dollars.”

“It is all right?” asked Ross, bewildered.

“Of course it’s all right,” asserted Murray. “As a matter of sympathy and justice, it is not only right but highly commendable; as a matter of financial profit to you, it would be despicable. Pay that premium, and I tell you now that the company will never pay a death benefit with less hesitation than it will pay this one. What is one risk more or less? We do business on the general average, and any sum is well invested that uncovers so conscientious an employee. Pay it, and come back to me.”

Three minutes later, Ross, with the receipt in his pocket, was at the telephone.

“It’s all right,” he told his wife. “The premium is paid.”

“Oh, Owen!” exclaimed Mrs. Ross, and her voice broke a little, “you don’t know what comfort you have given a dying man! If you could only see – ”

“Get a cab!” he broke in. “He doesn’t know it yet, and you must tell him. Get a cab and drive like – ”

He stopped short, but his wife knew what he almost said, and she forgave him without even a preliminary reproach.

His eyes were bright and his heart was light when he went back to Murray. Mrs. Becker’s situation was sad enough, but surely he had lessened the gloom of it by removing one great source of anxiety. He felt that he had done something worthy of a man, and it was a joy that he could do this without transcending the rules of business integrity and loyalty.

“I want you,” said Murray, and there was something of admiration in his tone; “I want you so much that I am going to put you in the way of making more money. You have a great deal to learn about the insurance business before you will cease making unnecessary problems for yourself, but you have one quality that makes you valuable to me.” He paused and smiled a little at the recollection of what had passed. “I would suggest,” he went on, “that you bear this in mind: life insurance is not for one life only or for one generation only, but for the centuries. Otherwise, we could not do business on the present plan. We exist by reducing the laws of chance to a science that makes us secure in the long run, although, on the basis of a single year, there may be considerable losses. And a good company will no more stoop to shabby tricks than you will; nor will it seek to escape obligations through technicalities or petty subterfuges. That’s why I told you to pay that premium, and I respect you for doing it.”

Murray picked up a memorandum on his desk.

“By the way,” he added, glancing at it, “you must have made good use of the arguments I gave you, for your sanctimonious optimist telephoned that, if you would call this afternoon or to-morrow, he would arrange with you for a ten-thousand-dollar policy.”

Grateful as Murray’s praise was to his ears, the greeting from his wife gave Ross the most joy.

“He was conscious for a moment and understood,” she said, as she put her arms around her husband’s neck, “and there was such an expression of restful peace on his face that it made me happy, in spite of the shadow of death hovering over. It made him a little better, the doctor said, but nothing can save him. And I’m so proud of you, Owen!”

“To tell the truth, dearest,” he replied tenderly, “I’m almost proud of myself.”