5
Of course it didn’t quite run straight down Hotsy Totsy Drive, not with Keyes around it couldn’t. Next day, when the New York wire cleared everything he called Delavan from my office to tell him it was O.K. Then he began to stall, and then he hung up. And then, after studying the wire some more, he said: “Ed, I think I’m disapproving this risk.”
“And why, if I may ask?”
“Concealment.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. But he was surprised.”
“At you okaying something?”
“I told him I’d heard from New York, that his application was approved, and he was surprised. He thought it wouldn’t be, and there’s nothing he’s told me or I’ve told him that should make him think it wouldn’t be. That means there’s something he expected me to find out. I’ve got to know what that is.”
Now I know why he was surprised. After Jane had told him his application would be disapproved, to be told five days later that it had been passed was enough to surprise anybody. But what I had told her and what she had told him I regarded as completely outside the scope of a company investigation, and if Delavan still wanted to accept his insurance I didn’t mean to be blocked off from my cup on some crazy hunch by a guy trying to find stuff that would make headlines in the newspapers. I just calmly got up and walked into the outer office and told Linda to get Mr. Norton on the telephone. Norton’s president of the company. He’s not quite the man his father was, that founded our company and a couple of other companies and built them up and formulated most of the policies we’ve got, but he’s a nice guy just the same and what I wasn’t forgetting in any way, he was a little fed up with Keyes. I spoke to Linda good and loud, so Keyes heard me. When I came back we just sat there, he smoking his cigar and thinking. I smoking mine and burning.
“Mr. Norton?”
“Hello, Horner, what’s on your mind?”
I gave him enough of it, even if it was a long distance call, for him to get what it was about. “Now, Mr. Norton, I’ve got some cups on my bookcase that say I’m one of the best agents you’ve got. I’ve got my eye on another, maybe you know about that. But here’s something that maybe you don’t know. I’ve got three letters in front of me, three letters as yet unanswered, from other companies, offering me territory, with general agent rank, in cities a lot bigger than Reno, cities that—”
“Now, Horner!”
“Could mean, to me—”
“Will you let me talk? If you’ll meet that afternoon plane, I’ll have somebody aboard that I think can straighten things out. Now just take it easy. Play some golf. And let me talk to Keyes.”
Keyes hated it, but he had to stand there and say “Yes, sir” every ten seconds, and when he hung up his face was so red it looked like a Technicolor gag. Then he put on his coat and went out.
I expected H. P. Davis, senior vice-president, or maybe Vic Rose, chief of underwriters, but I almost fell over backwards when Norton himself came down the ladder. Oh yes, he did. An insurance company puts first things first, and it knows what the first things are. What brings in its business is agents, and when one of them blows his top even the President’s not too proud to jump on a plane. He was just like any other guy as I drove him in, and we went direct to my office, as he was taking the sleeper back and wouldn’t need a room at the hotel. “What do they call you, Horner — Ed?”
“My friends do, yes.”
“And my name is Jason — Jace if you like me.”
“I’d feel funny about that.”
“Oh, this is the West.”
“Yeah, but a corporation president, he ought not to have people getting familiar. J.P., though, I’d like that all right.”
Well, that made him laugh, so by the time we hit town we were getting along fine. Keyes was there when we came in, looking pretty thick, but we went all over it, and then Norton took charge: “Keyes, you knew my father pretty well?”
“Better than you did, perhaps.”
“On insurance, I’m sure you did. But I knew him too, and on questions like this, I’ve heard him say a thousand times: ‘Insurance is the assumption of risk. Pig-iron under water is a perfect risk, but nobody takes out a policy on it. That’s what the underwriter must always bear in mind: if the applicant weren’t in some way uneasy, he’d never buy insurance. The risk must be there for the surety to be sought and the mere presence of risk is not in itself sufficient reason for rejection of the business.’ Do you recall his saying that?”
“No.”
“I do, distinctly.”
“He never said it.”
“He said it forty times a day for forty years.”
“What he said was: ‘Insurance is the assumption of a calculated risk.’ He was, as you probably recall, opposed to conservatism in the acceptance of business. He accepted business that most companies turned down, but it was in no way a gamble with him, except as all of it is a gamble. He brought the calculation of a risk to a science that was way ahead of his time, with a department of investigation that brought in stuff that hadn’t even been heard of then. Yet the ratio of his losses was as sound as any in the business. I’ll recommend no risk I can’t calculate, and in this case there is concealment. There is concealment on the part of the beneficiary, of the assured, and I think on the part of the agent.”
I flared up but Norton cut me off: “Ed, what is this?”
“I’m stuck on the beneficiary, J. P.”
“Mrs. Delavan?”
“I’m going to marry her.”
“Is that the matter that’s been concealed?”
“No, I wouldn’t say so. The main item of concealment is that Mr. Keyes is stuck on the wife of the lady’s first husband, but she’s not going to marry him — and that’s what this is all about, though what romance has got to do with the calculation of risk I don’t exactly see — though I’m willing to be shown.”
I guess it was a dirty crack at Keyes, but I was pretty sore. Norton’s mouth began to twitch and I could see he was having a hard time not to laugh. Keyes talked some more, and the trouble with him was that when he got that look in his eye, and told all the times before that he had been right when he smelled something wrong without even knowing what it was yet, he’d shake you, in spite of yourself. Away down deep in me, if I’d told the truth, he shook me, but I was getting bull-headed by then and nothing could change me. He shook Norton, I could see that, for a while we all three sat there, drumming our fingers on our chairs. I called to Linda to put through my New York call. It was the apartment of a big shot in a company that wanted me bad, and he was standing by, because I’d wired him to. Pretty soon it came through, but it was Norton that picked up the receiver. “He’s changed his mind, Linda. Doesn’t want the New York call.”
I took them to the Palm Room of the Club Fortune, but at eight Norton had to run for his train. He thought it funny Keyes didn’t go with him, and as I put him in his cab he asked if there was a little resentment around. “Romance, J. P. has to say goodbye.”
“Say, who is the dame?”
“A Mrs. Sperry, I believe her name is.”
“Not Constance?”
“You know her?”
“Boy, is that a twenty-minute egg!”
“Well, Keyes is carrying it in his Easter basket.”
“Ed, you don’t know how funny this is. Before she married this Englishman, there were at least six guys that thought they’d grab that fortune, but even they couldn’t take it. And now Keyes, the guy that can’t be fooled, is plunking a guitar under her window — say, that’s a real joke.”