“You are my first retainer,” I said.
His manner changed at once. He pulled his chair a little nearer me,
with an eager motion.
“That’s what I wanted,” he said. “That’s it. The sort that are
suffering to win their spurs. None of your egregious old-stagers, who
require their briefs to be endorsed to the tune of three figures
before they’ll move—‘monkey’-in-the-slot men, _I_ call ’em. Thinks I
to myself, Here’s the sort that’ll be willing to take up a case on
spec’.”
My enthusiasm shot down to zero.
“O!” I said, with a falling face; “on speculation!”
“There’s a fortune in it for a clever advocate,” he answered eagerly.
“A fortune! all Pactolus in a nutshell. I’ve had my experiences of the
other kind. They squeeze you, and throw you away; take the wages of
sin, and hand you over to the deuce. What do _you_ say?”
“If you will give me the particulars,” I answered, without heart, “I
shall be able to judge better. Your client——?”
He laughed joyously; frowned; put his hat on the floor; crossed his
arms over his umbrella-handle, and glowered ferociously at me,
squinting through his glasses.
“Exactly,” he said; “my client, ha-ha! Here, then, young sir, is my
client’s case.
“His name is Buggins” (I glanced involuntarily at the wall). “He is,
or was, until envy combined with detraction to ruin him, a
company-promoter. As such, his trend was always towards insurance. It
offered the best opportunities to a great creative genius. Buggins,
being all that, recognized the still amazing potentialities in a field
of commerce, which, though much worked, remains unexhausted—almost,
one might say, inexhaustible. In his younger days he showed a pretty
invention in devising and engineering what I may call personal essays
in this line. His Insurance against Waterspouts, which he worked
principally in the Midlands, brought him some handsome returns with a
single generation of farmers. It was based on a cloud-burst at
Bethesda, in Wales, which ruined quite a number. Other flights of his
immature genius were, respectively, Insurance against Death in
Diving-bells; against Death of a Broken Heart; against Official
Strangulation; against Non-fatal Disfiguration by Lightning; against
Death by Starvation (this last was largely patronized by
millionaires). On a somewhat higher plane were his _Provident
Dipsomaniary_, whose policies matured, or ‘burst,’ as Buggins phrased
it, at the age of eighty-five, an essential condition being that the
holders must put in their claims in person; his _Physical Promotion
League_, which guaranteed to pay to the parents of any child, insured
in it during his teens, a sum of ten pounds on the child’s reaching
twenty-five years of age and a minimum height of six feet, and a
thousand pounds for every additional inch which it grew afterwards;
his _Anti-Fiction Mutual_, whose policies were forfeitable on first
conviction of having written a novel (this proved one of the most
profitable of all Buggins’s enterprises for a time; but in the end the
national malady proved incurable, and subscribers fell off); his
_Psychical Pocket Research Society_, which offered an Insurance
against Ghost-seeing, the policy-holder forfeiting his claim on proof
of his first supernatural visitation (but this was so violently
assailed by the opposition society, which offered to prove that there
were not three people in the United Kingdom who were insusceptible to
spooks, that the scheme had to be abandoned); finally, in this
category, his _Bachelors’ Protection Association_, which provided
that, if a member reached the age of ninety without having married, he
should receive an annuity beginning at fifty pounds, and rising, by
yearly increments of ten pounds, to ten thousand pounds—figures
which, in a centenarian age, were successful in dazzling a great many.
“But, by then, Buggins was beginning to master the deep ethics of his
trade, and to realize that its heaviest emoluments were rooted in the
grand principle of profitable self-denial. People _will_ be unselfish
if they see money in it; you can’t stop ’em.
“One other notable venture marks this period of what I may call his
moral transition. That was his inspired scheme for insuring _against_
illness, in the sense that any policy-holder admitting him or herself
to be seriously indisposed, lost the right to compensation. It would
have proved a godsend in a neurotic age; but the antagonism of the
entire medical profession, with the single exception of the officer
appointed by the company, killed it.
“We come now to Buggins’s final matured achievements. I beg your
pardon?”
I had said nothing; but I suppose there is such a thing as a
“speaking” silence. Certainly, if I had looked as I felt, I was a more
drivelling maniac by now than Buggins himself. The visitor seemed to
shoot out his eyes like an angry crab.
“Young man, young man!” he said warningly, “I begin to be suspicious
that, after all, I may be misplacing my confidence.”
He looked banefully into his hat, where it stood rim upwards on the
floor; then, suddenly overwrought, kicked it fiercely across the room.
The action seemed to restore him to complete urbanity. He smiled.
“So perish all Buggins’s enemies!” he said loftily; “and hail the
grand climacteric!”
He pinned me, like a live butterfly, to the wall behind me with a
fixed and penetrating gaze.
“What would you say,” he said quietly, “to an Insurance against
Brigandage, available to all travelling in Sicily or the Balkans, and
realizable” (his watchfulness was intense) “on the receipt, at the
head-offices in the Shetland Islands, of a nose, ear, or other organ,
attested, under urgency, by the nearest consul, to be the personal
property of the applicant desiring a ransom?”
He paused significantly. “I should say,” I responded drivellingly,
“that, as a feat of pure inspiration, it—it takes the cake.”
“Ah!” He shouted it, and sprang to his feet joyously. “You are the man
for me! You justify my confidence, as the returns justified Buggins’s
daring conception. Would you believe it: within the first few months,
bushels of noses were received at the head-offices, every one of which
Buggins had no difficulty in proving to be false! But, hush!
stay!—there was to be a higher flight!”
He had been pacing riotously up and down. Now he flounced to a stop
before me, and held me once more with his glittering eye.
“It took the form,” he whispered, “of a _Purgatory Mutual_, on the
Tontine principle, the last out to take the pool!”
I rose, trembling, to my feet, as he burst into a violent fit of
laughter.
“It was that,” he shouted, as he set to racing up and down again,
“which let loose the dogs of envy, spite, and slander. They called him
mad—_him_, Buggins, _mad_, ha-ha! It was the fools themselves were
mad. He ignored their clamour; his vast brain was yet busy with
immortal conceptions; he matured a scheme against _Death from
Flying-machines_” (here he tore off one whisker and threw it into the
fireplace); “he did more—he personally tested the theory of
aerostatics” (here he tore off the other whisker, and stamped on it).
“Too great, too absorbed, he never noticed that the unstable engine
had landed him in the grounds of a private asylum, and, relieved of
his weight, had soared away again. The attendants came; they seized
and immured him; they would not believe his assurances that he was a
perfect stranger. From that day to this, when fortuitous circumstances
enabled him to escape, he has appealed to their justice, their
humanity, in vain.”
Again he stopped before me, and, flinging his spectacles in my face,
rent open the breast of his coat.
“Know me at last for what I am!” he yelled. “I am Buggins, and I
appoint you my advocate in the action I am about to bring against the
Commissioners of Lunacy!”
The door opened softly, and a masculine face peered round the edge.
Its scrutiny appearing satisfactory, it was followed by the whole of
an official form, which, in its entering, revealed another, large and
passionless, standing behind it.
“Now, Mr. Buggins,” said the first, “we’re a-waitin’ for you to take
up your cue.”
The visitor whipped round, started, chuckled, and, to my relief and
surprise, responded rather abjectly.
“All right, Johnson,” he said. “I just slipped out between the acts
for a whiff of fresh air.”
“Well,” said the man, “you must be quick and come along, or you’ll
spile the play.”
He went quite tamely, and the second official outside received him
stolidly into custody. Mate number one lingered to touch his cap to me
and explain.
“Flyborough Asylum, sir. They give him a part in some private
theatricals, and he tuk advantage of his disguise as a family lawyer
to hook it between the acts. None of us reco’nized him, or guessed
what he’d done, till the time come for him to take up his cue; and
then, with the prompter howling for him and him not answering, the
truth struck us of a heap.”