“You mean you’re already in such a high tax bracket that you don’t care?”
“Oh no. I wouldn’t mind that so much. But I do have a problem. Quite a personal one. Somebody would have to handle the Preservator for me as if it were all his own, and I’d have to trust him to kick back some of the profits. That’s what I meant when I said if I only knew a completely honest man — someone like you... But I do know you!” A strange feverish gleam came into the little man’s wistful eyes. “If I only had time to tell you — I mean, I don’t want to bore you — oh, I know it’s too much to hope, but...
“Well, could I possibly ask you to have dinner with me? If you wouldn’t mind contributing your own trout, and you can have my two extras, as well, and I’ve got lots of vegetables and a bottle of Château Fuissé if you like wine, and if you get tired of my troubles I’ll shut up the minute you tell me.”
The Saint smiled sympathetically. The other’s babbling eagerness could not have struck a more responsive chord from his heartstrings. Already he treasured an affection for Mr Oliphant Quigg not unlike that which a tiger might have conceived for an appealing wolf cub, likewise towards dinnertime.
“You’d have to hire a bouncer to throw me out now,” he said with the utmost sincerity. “I love listening to people’s troubles, especially when they sound as unusual as yours.”
Mr Quigg’s story, he found out presently, was not quite as unusual as its advance build-up. In fact, some cynics might have said that it was not particularly unusual at all, in modern America. Mr Quigg was simply a victim of the twentieth-century philosophy, promulgated by a hard core of embattled suffragettes, and made law by a widespread gaggle of gutless jurists in mortal terror of what their own wives would do to them if they opposed it, which proclaims that any female who makes the supreme sacrifice of marrying a man and thus officially granting him the ineffable favors of her body even for a few months is thereby entitled, if they separate for any reason whatever, not only to walk off with a hog’s share of any fortune he may have been able to accumulate in all his preceding years of toil and thrift, but also to clamp an advance lien on a major percentage of anything he may earn for the rest of his life thereafter.
Mr Quigg, during twenty-five years as professor of electrical engineering at such a humble college that Simon had never heard of it, had patented two or three minor gadgets or improvements on standard equipment and had succeeded in licensing his rights for royalties which eventually attained a volume on which, with the addition of a meager pension, he was able to retire in very modest comfort. He had no plans other than to indulge his passion for fishing and to tinker with a few other scientific ideas which he had been gestating — one of which was an entirely new method of food preservation. But a capable and motherly woman of less than forty whom he met one evening in a hotel on Lake Mead, where he had gone for some bass fishing, soon remedied that deficiency of purpose, and before he fully realized what was happening he was married.
Within a year he had discovered that his wife was so capable that she had taken complete control of their finances, allowing him two dollars a week pocket money, and so motherly that she treated him like a naughty child in need of stern discipline. She considered fishing messy, stupid, and a waste of time and money: when they wanted to eat fish, they could buy it at the market in a minute, and in the long run it wouldn’t cost a fraction of what he’d been spending on tackle, bait, licenses, trips to remote places, lodgings, and boat rentals. The experiments which used to happily clutter his living room were banished to a bleak cellar, but she did not dispute their potential as money-makers and in fact upbraided him for approaching them so casually: she decided that only by putting in a proper working day of eight hours, six days a week, could he expect to get anywhere with his projects and make a real fortune, and she was going to see that he did it.
When at long last he rebelled enough to go into a bar with an old friend he ran into on his way to the store where she had sent him to buy some groceries, and stayed out for more than two hours, and came home without the money or the supplies but drunk enough to tell her that he would as soon be dead as shut up in the basement for six days a week and not even allowed to go fishing on Sunday, she fled sobbing to the nearest neighbor and was next heard from through an attorney, who wanted to know if Mr Quigg was at least prepared to give her her freedom in a gentlemanly way, after all she had done for him. Mr Quigg, who was in a slight haze of hangover, but surprisingly without remorse, agreed that he would chivalrously refrain from contesting charges of persistent drunkenness and mental cruelty. He was too relieved at the prospect of the simple solution offered by this minor sacrifice to pay much attention to the papers he was asked to sign: it was September, and the steelhead were reported thick in Klamath Glen, and he had moved some of the works of the Preservator into the kitchen and had already had a new inspiration about it while waiting for his breakfast eggs to boil.
About a month later Mr Quigg read in the paper that his wife had been granted an interlocutory decree, and that in consideration of her ordeal the judge had awarded her the community property, their savings account, their Government bonds, the car which she had already taken, and Mr Quigg’s patents together with contracts appertaining and royalties accruing thereto, plus fifty per cent of the proceeds of any invention which he might have started to work on at any time prior to the divorce.
“In other words,” said the little man, “I was left with the lease on an old house, a lot of shabby old furniture, my old fishing kit and some tools, and my pension from the college.”
“They can’t do that to you,” Simon protested.
“Oh, but they can. I went to another lawyer, when it was too late, and even he told me they could. And they had. They even get half of anything I may ever do from here on. What chance would I have of proving that anything I might invent tomorrow didn’t have its roots in something I worked at during the first fifty years of my life?”
“All the same, chum, this could be worth millions. And even half a million—”
Mr Quigg shook his head.
“I’m a funny guy. I don’t get mad very easily, but when I get mad I can stay mad for a long time. I know now that I was taken for a sucker. And I’m just sore enough that I’ll never write it off to experience and let bygones be bygones. That woman and her shyster lawyer took me for everything I had when she left me, and I can’t do a thing about it. But I can see to it that she doesn’t get half a million more. I’d rather scratch along on a pittance for the rest of my life than give her another nickel. Were you wondering about the eleven hundred dollars in my wallet?”
“Well—”
“They’re what’s left of fifteen hundred I sold another little invention for. If I’d handled it properly, it’d probably have paid me five thousand a year for life. But then there’d’ve been contracts, and checks, and records, and I couldn’t’ve kept from giving her half of it. I preferred to give the idea away, let someone else take the credit for inventing it, and settle for fifteen hundred dollars cash under the table. Do you blame me?”
“If that’s the way you feel about it, it’s your privilege,” said the Saint. “But it seems a shame about the Preservator.”
Mr Quigg poured himself another glass of wine. They had finished eating by then, and he had become progressively less inhibited with each sip that washed down the meal.