“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.”
AN INCIDENTAL TRAGEDY
Dave Murray stretched his legs comfortably under the table, blew rings of smoke toward the ceiling, and waited for Stanley Wentworth to speak.
Having his full share of worldly wisdom, Murray knew that there was a reason for Wentworth’s most urgent invitation to lunch with him at his club. While they had been friends for years and had lunched together on many previous occasions, there was a formality about this invitation that presaged something of importance. So, when they reached the cigars, Murray smoked and waited.
“You win, Dave,” Wentworth announced at last.
“I knew I would – when you married,” returned Murray. “It was only a question of time then.”
“Especially after you got the ear of my wife,” said Wentworth. “You worked that very nicely, Dave. Do you remember the story you told her about the man who couldn’t give any time to life insurance during the busy season and who was on his death-bed when the date he had set for his examination arrived?”
“It was true, too,” asserted Murray. “The man was a good risk when I went after him, and there would have been ten thousand dollars for his wife if he hadn’t procrastinated. There’s no money in the policy that a man was just going to take out, Stanley.”
“Well, you win, anyway,” said Wentworth. “We’ve been jollying each other on this insurance business for six or eight years, and I’ve stood you off pretty well, but I can’t stand against the little woman at home. I was lost, Dave, the day I took you up to the house and introduced you to her.”
“I guess I played the cards pretty well,” laughed Murray. “I told you at the beginning that I was going to insure you before I got through, and a good insurance man doesn’t let a little matter like the personal inclinations of his subject interfere with his plans. Why, I’ve been known to put a man in a trance, have him examined, and abstract the first premium from his pocket before he waked up. But you were the hardest proposition I ever tackled. You ought to have taken out a policy ten years ago.”
“I couldn’t see any reason for it,” explained Wentworth. “I thought I was a confirmed bachelor: had no family and never expected to have one. That was at twenty-five, and at thirty I considered the matter absolutely settled, but at thirty-five the little woman