White Ashes Part 11

"Are you at liberty for a few moments?" he soberly inquired. He took care to delete every vestige of animation from his tone and manner, and so radical a change did this effect that his step-uncle blinked. A man as keen as John M. Hurd could not be blind to a mutation so great. He looked Mr. Wilkinson over with more care than he had ever employed before, for he recognized at once that this was no ordinary visit.

"I am as much at liberty as I am likely to be," he replied noncommittally.

His visitor wistfully and somewhat suggestively eyed a chair, but made no move to be seated. He felt that, no matter how the interview was to close, punctiliousness should begin it.

"Be seated," said Mr. Hurd, briefly.

"I have come to see you, sir," his young relative began, feeling his way cautiously, "with reference to a matter that I have never mentioned to you, although I have been studying it for some time. Perhaps you may be of the opinion that if it were of paramount importance I could have presented it to you without a long preliminary investigation. But each of us has to work in his own way, and this affair was of a sort in which I had little or no previous experience. The result was that it has taken me a considerable time to formulate my idea, and I want you to give it a fair opportunity to sink in, so to speak, before you reach any decision."

With his curiosity somewhat stirred, his hearer grunted a qualified a.s.sent.

"I have, of course, fortified myself by the possession of facts,--actual facts, sir,--and without them I should not have trespa.s.sed on your time, for I must tell you at once that my proposition concerns itself with the fire insurance of the Ma.s.sachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company."

The knowledge that this was probably the most perilous point in his pa.s.sage would have caused Wilkinson to hurry past with all possible speed, but his uncle interrupted him with a grim laugh.

"That need give you no concern, my young friend," he said curtly, "for the company does not carry any insurance."

A trace of Mr. Wilkinson's normal impudence returned momentarily to his tone when he replied:--

"My dear sir, didn't I say that I had made a long preliminary investigation of this? You can scarcely hold my intelligence at so low a figure as to think that I didn't know _that_ fact. That's why I'm here--because I _do_ know it."

It may have been the effect of the return to the normal in his step-nephew's tone, or it may have been merely Mr. Hurd's business method, which expelled his next remark from sardonic lips.

"Then you need but one more fact to make your knowledge of the subject complete, and that I will now give you. Not only does my company carry no insurance, but it never intends or expects to. Is there anything else this morning?"

Charlie smiled calmly, unmoved.

"Now we are ready to begin, sir. You have disbelieved in insurance so strongly and so long that such a remark was exactly what I expected you to make. In fact, I should have been not only surprised, but positively embarra.s.sed, had you not made it. Now, I repeat, we are ready to talk business. And I have your promise to listen to my plan."

It did not occur to the magnate that he had made no such promise, until Wilkinson was well launched; after that, he forgot about it.

"Did any one ever call to your attention, sir, the fact that the statistics show that the fire losses on traction schedules in the Eastern states exceed the insurance premiums on those schedules by nearly thirty-five per cent?"

Mr. Hurd shook his head shortly.

"I did not know it."

Wilkinson did not know it either, but it could not be disproved, and served excellently as a gambit.

"And I am not interested in other traction companies' fires," added his uncle.

"No, of course not. But the law of average works in the end. Your properties are subject to exactly the same conditions and hazards as others, and in the end the Ma.s.sachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company will incur more in losses than it would ever have to pay in premiums. In the long run the average wins. So far you have been surprisingly fortunate, and that is another reason why you should begin now to insure. The law of average is perfectly inexorable, and every year of low losses brings you nearer the big losses that are bound to come. You've been gambling, and now is the time to play safe."

"Perhaps, my boy," Mr. Hurd replied with amus.e.m.e.nt, "you believe these things that you quote so glibly. Perhaps not. Let us a.s.sume that you do. Therefore let me ask you this: if the insurance companies pay more losses than they get in premiums on traction schedules, why don't they cut off this loss by ceasing to insure them? Hey?"

"Oh, lots of them do," Wilkinson returned easily. "A few of the others may have had a streak of luck for a few years, just as you have had, but the rest take it all in the day's work, think that the rates may go up on account of the bad record of the cla.s.s and then it would be an advantage to have the business on their books, or else they try to make it up on other better paying cla.s.ses. And besides, they have the use of the money which is paid in premiums during good years when losses are light." Not for nothing had he listened to the painstaking explanations of Cole, and whatever his eccentricities, Charlie had a native shrewdness hardly second to that of old John M. himself.

Perhaps the older man was thinking of this when he next spoke.

"Then it has probably occurred to you that the Ma.s.sachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company can do the same thing--and does. I use the interest and profits of my insurance fund which I have acc.u.mulated by not paying premiums, to pay losses. How about that?"

"That would be all right if your properties were widely enough distributed. But they're not. Some day you'll get a big loss, which will wipe out your interest, profits, and fund all together for twenty years. Your fund's all right for cars that burn on the road or for small fires; but what if something big went? And the insurance money would come in very nicely when you most needed it. You'd have trouble enough on your hands without having to go out and raise money, too, if your new Pemberton Street barn should burn up with half a million dollars' worth of cars in it--which it is quite possible it may do at almost any time."

"What! The new barn?" said the magnate, incredulously. "Why, my boy, that barn is the latest thing in fireproof construction! There isn't a stick of wood in that building from cellar to attic."

"And the cars, are they fireproof, too?"

John M. Hurd looked up sharply.

"No," he said slowly. "No, I don't suppose they are. . . . Still, there's nothing to set the cars afire. They're safe enough in that building. Nothing can happen to them there."

"The building itself is not located on a desert island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean," said his nephew, thoughtfully. "It _might_ be exposed to a serious fire in some of the neighboring buildings--that big paper-box factory, for example, across the alley to the south.

There _might_, in fact,"--he paused--"there _might_ be a general fire in that part of Boston."

"A conflagration, you mean? Nonsense! Boston is safe as a church."

"Probably safer than St. Stephen's, out in Cambridge, that burned to the ground last week," returned his visitor, with a smile.

"To be sure," said Mr. Hurd, hastily. "But there'll never be a big, sweeping fire in Boston."

"Why not? There was one once."

"Forty years ago. That's no criterion. Things are very different now.

This is a modern city we're talking about--half the buildings down town are fireproof or nearly so. Modern cities don't burn the way older ones did."

"Baltimore did, as you may recall; also San Francisco. And they were modern--as modern as Boston. There _are_ people--not Bostonians, of course--who would consider them more so."

"Come now, do you mean to tell me any one honestly believes there is any danger of another really big fire here?" rejoined Mr. Hurd, almost contemptuously; but under the surface Charlie believed that his att.i.tude of contempt was more or less a.s.sumed. He believed he had made a distinct impression, and it was therefore almost with a gambler's instinct that he brought forth his trump card.

"I tell you, sir," he said, with all the impressiveness he could command, "that the best technical engineers--not alarmists, but men who are careful students of such things--agree that the danger here is as great as in any of the big cities of the United States. The conflagration hazard in the congested district of Boston is not a thing one can exactly calculate, but it would be difficult to overestimate its gravity."

Mr. Hurd regarded him with amazement.

"Would you mind repeating that?" he asked at length.

"Certainly not, since I know it to be true. I say that the conflagration hazard in the congested district of Boston is not a thing one can exactly calculate, but it would be difficult to overestimate its gravity."

The traction magnate walked slowly to the window, and looked out. On the sunny pavements below him people were going back and forth on their various concerns. Around the corner came the familiar delivery wagon of a well-known dealer in wholesale groceries. Somehow the sight of these common things restored to Mr. Hurd his ordinary tranquillity of mind, which he now saw had been disturbed by the astonis.h.i.+ng utterances of his plausible young relation. He smiled rather grimly when he thought of how near he had come to being impressed by what Charlie had said. Of course, there could be nothing in it; certainly not, from such a source. It was the old John M. Hurd who turned again to face his visitor, who with but one card left to play awaited breathlessly but with outward nonchalance the effect of his cherished speech.

"Well, I've enjoyed talking this over with you, Charlie," the older man said with candor. "There's something in what you say, too. Perhaps our insurance fund isn't as large as it ought to be. But I couldn't consider carrying insurance for the Ma.s.sachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company. And why are you so interested in this, all of a sudden, anyway?"

"Partly philanthropic and partly mercenary," said his nephew, easily.

"Philanthropic, because I would like to do something of real benefit to the most distinguished member of my family--who least needs my a.s.sistance; mercenary, because I need the money. I rather expect you to let me have charge of the placing of this insurance, sir."

"Well, Charlie, I don't mind saying that you've made a better impression than any of these other insurance men that occasionally get into my office, and if I were going to take out insurance on the traction properties, I believe I'd let you make your commission on it.

But I'm not. And now I must ask you to excuse me."

"Oh, I've not quite finished," returned Wilkinson. As he was in for it now, he would see it through. "I think you're making a mistake, sir; and there are still one or two aspects of the matter which you have not considered."

"And what may they be?" inquired his uncle. "Please remember I'm a busy man."