White Ashes Part 17

"We photograph it all, day by day."

"Oh," said Helen, "you mean you get it all from the maps you showed me?"

"Partly that. That is, the maps are part of it. They make the stage, the setting where the insurance drama is played. But the characters come on the stage through the medium of plain sheets of printed paper known as daily reports. The daily report is the link that unites this office to the throbbing life of a thousand cities around us."

"And what is a daily report? Certainly the name of it doesn't sound romantic."

"No, it doesn't. And yet the daily report is as vital a doc.u.ment as there is in the world."

"In what way? I never heard of it before."

"You never asked Mr. Osgood. He has sent us many thousand. As you know, the company receives its business from agents, scattered all through the country, at most of the important and a large number of unimportant points. In New England alone this company has nearly two hundred agents, each one writing policies when people apply for insurance."

"Does Uncle Silas write policies? I thought the companies themselves did that."

"No. Mr. Osgood has a young man in his office--his name is Reed--who does nothing else. And every time a policy is written by Mr. Reed and signed by Mr. Osgood or Mr. Cole and delivered to the a.s.sured, this peculiar doc.u.ment, the daily report, is made up and sent in to this office. It is really a complete description of the policy which has just been written."

"But there must be thousands!"

"Of course. One for every policy every agent issues. We get more than two hundred a day in this office."

"That's why Uncle Silas said I ought to go to a home office to see things properly. That's what he meant--it's the center of everything.

I begin to understand."

Smith, glancing at her, perceived that there was no question of her interest now.

"Here they come, the daily reports," he continued, "and we open them--dailies from Chicago, San Antonio, b.u.t.te, Lenox, Jersey City, Tampa, Bangor. Dailies in English, a few in Spanish, quite a number in French, for a few of our Canadian agents speak nothing else. This current of dailies flowing through this office, never ceasing day in and day out, year after year, is like the current of the blood tending back to the heart, like the response of the nerves to the pulse-beat, reporting at the brain, bringing news of the body's health, even down to the fingers' ends. And we sit here, like a spider in a web, drawing all the world."

"What do they tell you?" asked the girl, absorbedly.

"Everything;--or nearly all. Is a trust in the making? We know of it here, when we see the ownership of scattered factories change to a common head. Is prohibition gaining ground in the South? We can tell by the shut-down endors.e.m.e.nts on brewery and distillery policies and by the increasing losses on saloons whose owners can make no further profit. Is there a corner in wheat or coffee or cotton? We follow the moves in the struggle by the ebb and flow of insurance in the big warehouses and elevators and compresses. Is the automobile market overstocked? Our rising loss ratio gives the reply. Are hard times coming? We can tell it when the merchants begin to cut down their insurance, which means their stocks as well, buying what they need from day to day. Is the panic over? We learn it by a rush of new dailies, buildings in course of construction, new and costly machinery introduced in factories, increased insurance all along the line."

"It sounds almost uncanny," said Helen, slowly. "Can you really learn all these things in this way?"

"Not all, of course, or at least not always, by any means, for the Guardian is only one of many companies, and only a small part, a fraction of one per cent, of the country's business comes to us. But we learn a great deal; much of it along rather surprising lines. I learned yesterday, for example, that the scandal which has been suspected to exist between the fair but probably frail Mazie Dupont and her manager is undoubtedly a matter of fact."

"How could you find that out?" Helen was amazed to find herself asking.

The actress was a celebrity, to be sure, yet Miss Maitland, in her own self-a.n.a.lysis, should hardly have evinced curiosity regarding the details of her private life.

"Ownership of pretty country house up the Hudson transferred from his name to hers. Endors.e.m.e.nt on our policy," replied Smith. "Of course that's not proof, but its pretty good presumptive evidence. We get similar cases every day. Here's a millionaire gets caught the wrong side of the stock market and needs money. We know it because his hundred thousand dollar Franz Hals goes to the art dealer's to be sold, or some big mercantile building that he owns is mortgaged to the Universal Savings Bank. Endors.e.m.e.nt for our daily report. So they go."

"Well, I shall be afraid to have our furniture insured ever again after this," said the girl, with a laugh.

"Insure it with the Guardian, and I myself will see that your family skeletons are kept safely out of sight in the closets where they belong."

"That's very nice of you."

"I'm afraid, though, that your insurance wouldn't be very interesting, as regards sensation," the underwriter went on. "But there are lots of people the investigation of whose insurance affairs is in the field of a first-cla.s.s detective agency. There are people, as you may or may not know, who make their living by having fires. These fires are fraudulent, of course, but fraud is very hard to prove. We can never secure a witness, for no one applies a match to his shop while any one is looking on; and with only circ.u.mstantial evidence and an individual pitted against a rich corporation, the jury generally gives the firebug the benefit of the doubt. Most of these people put in a claim for goods supposed to have been totally burned but which in reality they never possessed or which have been secretly removed just before the fire. Usually they have a fraudulent set of books, too, to back up their claim; and we have to keep a close watch all the time for birds of that feather."

"But how can you?"

"Oh, we have a pretty complete fire record compiled from loss experiences sent by every company to the publisher. All companies subscribe to this record. If a man has several suspicious-looking fires, n.o.body will insure him. If he gets such a bad fire reputation in one town that he can't get insurance there, he moves somewhere else, but the record keeps track of him, and finally he has to turn honest--or change his name."

"Do many of them do that?"

"Not so many as you'd think. You see, it's not so easy to disguise one's personality. The La Mode Cloak and Suit Company may turn out to be our old friend Lazarus Epstein; but we have the service of the princ.i.p.al commercial agencies to aid us in becoming better acquainted with our policyholders. And any one who has no rating in these commercial agencies we investigate very thoroughly, making our local agent tell us all he knows of the man, and sending for a full detailed report by the commercial agency besides. Even then we occasionally get caught with a crook, but not often. The Guardian is very careful; if all other companies were equally so, there would be fewer firebugs in business."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, many companies rely wholly on their agents; they don't send for these special reports, and the result is that they get caught for a dishonest loss, and the crook who is smart enough to make the agent think he is straight gets away with it. Thus encouraging the impostors."

"But are not the commercial agency men fooled too?"

"Oh, yes, they're only human; but at least you have two sources of information to draw on--and three, if the man has a fire record. By the time we've finished we are apt to know a good deal about our policyholder, here at the home office, and sometimes we learn very strange things--sometimes humorous and sometimes quite the reverse."

He stopped, and Miss Maitland, seeing his pause, hesitated with the question she had been about to put.

"I wonder if you'd care to hear about a case that came to my notice yesterday," he said.

"I would very much," the girl replied.

"You know these commercial agency reports are by no means what I should term models of English prose style. They are usually about as dull and dry doc.u.ments as any I know in the manner of their presentation of facts. Their authors have about as much need for imagination as the gentlemen who compile city directories and telephone books; beside them articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica are yellow journalism. All the same, they deal with facts, and facts can be more tragic than any romantic fiction ever produced. This case I speak of was simply the story of a harness maker who lived in Robbinsville, a small town up in the center of New York State. A little while ago our local agent wrote a policy on this man's stock, and because he had no rating showing his financial responsibility, the underwriter who pa.s.ses on New York State business sent for a detailed report, which after some delay came to us yesterday."

Again he paused, and there was silence in the little office until he resumed.

"The rating said--and the manner of it showed that the reporter felt the poignancy of his words--that the harness maker was bankrupt. For nearly fifty years he had kept a harness shop in that same little town, and compet.i.tion by a younger, more aggressive man had taken away a good many of his customers, his money had gone in ordinary living expenses, his a.s.sets had shrunk to almost nothing, and his liabilities had increased to fifteen hundred dollars, which to him might just as well have been a million, and now all he could do was to throw himself on the mercy of his creditors. Which he did."

"And what did they do?" said Helen, in a low voice.

"This is what the old man said--the commercial agency reporter gave it just as the old man said it: 'I have sold harness in this town since I was twenty years old. Now you say I am bankrupt. I want to do what is right. I don't want to cheat any man. I don't know where the money has gone. You gentlemen must do what is best. But I hope you can make some arrangement by which I can keep my business. I have had it so many, so many years. It probably won't be for much longer anyhow. But we don't want to go on the town--my wife and I. A man and his wife ought not to go on the town when he's worked honest all his life and is willing to work still.'"

Smith rose abruptly, and turned toward the window. "I've heard of 'Over the Hills to the Poorhouse' and similar things," the underwriter went on, after a moment, not looking at the girl, "but this somehow seemed different. Perhaps it was its unexpectedness, or finding it in such a way. Do you know," he said, "I felt as though I'd like to write a check for fifteen hundred dollars and send it to that old harness maker up in Robbinsville, just to give him one more chance."

He turned at the touch of a light hand on his arm.

"I'd like to go halves with you," said a voice which Helen's Boston acquaintances would hardly have recognized as hers.

"It's a go," said Smith. "I can't afford it; but five or six hundred dollars in actual cash would probably straighten things out pretty well, and if the creditors don't grant the extension to give the old fellow enough to carry him the rest of the way--by Jove, we'll finance the harness business, you and I!"

"You can count on me for my half. Shake hands on the bargain!" cried Helen, in the exhilaration following emotion sustained, and Smith gravely took her hand in his own. For a moment they stood side by side looking out on the East River which O'Connor's office overlooked, and for a s.p.a.ce neither spoke. Then Helen returned somewhat sedately to her seat, and demurely spoke to Smith's back:--

"Well, my present interest in the fire insurance business is all that its most ardent champion could wish."

The underwriter turned back to her.

"I'm awfully glad if I haven't bored you," he said. "I've been holding forth like a vendor at a county fair. But I didn't mean to do it."

"You know you haven't bored me," she replied. "But I must be going now. I thank you very much for the trouble you have taken with my education. I hope it will not turn out to be altogether barren."