“Do you have a car?”
“I’m taking a cab.”
“I’ll ride you out.”
I rode her out and arranged to bring her back, and took Jackie aside and said if she showed any signs of being able to ride she should have a run on the Count. But where I went then, as fast as I could scoot into town, was the Sierra Manor, to see Delavan, her husband, and find out what it was all about. I preferred talking to him there than at my office, where he had come earlier in the day. I told him what she’d said and told him to put it on the line and put all of it on the line. “Just a minute, Mr. Horner. There’s something in your manner I don’t wholly like. You act as though I’ve concealed things from you.”
“Well, she says you have.”
“Pardon me, Mr. Horner, but I’ll decide what’s relevant.”
“No. I will. What’s back of this?”
“An action for annulment.”
“That’s she’s bringing?”
“That I am.”
“Then what’s she doing here?”
“She came here for the usual six-weeks period of residence, expecting to get a divorce. With my knowledge, of course. But my situation changed. I couldn’t let her.”
“How did it change?”
“The lady I expect to marry objected.”
“What did she have to do with it?”
“Though American, she’s the granddaughter of an Anglican bishop. These people have strong, almost unshakable convictions on the remarriage of divorced persons. So long as there was no help for it, she was willing to give up the church wedding, performed by her own rector, a thing that means a great deal to her. But when a chance remark of mine, made a couple of weeks ago, just after Jane left for the West, showed that grounds for annulment existed, the whole picture changed and she demanded that I take advantage of my opportunity. I’ve run into a pretty thick situation with her, I can tell you, and not only with her but the family. If I can get an annulment I have to do it.”
“...Annulment? You mean — you and your wife have been married in name only?”
“No, I mean her first divorce may have been defective. You’ve heard about correspondent unknown?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Except she wasn’t unknown.”
“Oh, that was bad judgment.”
“They let Jane’s maid make the $500.”
“Is the maid here?”
“I’m serving her papers today.”
“As a material witness?”
“Yes. Compelling her to give bond.”
“But what does she know?”
“That the alleged infidelity, on the part of Jane’s former husband, was a complete phony, cooked up by Jane, the husband, and the maid. That the whole divorce was collusive, based on manufactured evidence.”
“Well, no wonder she’s sore.”
“She has no reason.”
“Except she’ll still be married to No. 1.”
“Don’t be silly. He’s married again.”
“Then he’ll be a bigamist.”
“Nowhere but in Nevada and on the basis of a Nevada decision.”
“But you still feel guilty?”
“It upsets me, yes.”
“And you want this insurance so you can begin taking the curse off it? So you can feel like a hero instead of a heel?”
“In case of eventuality, yes.”
He began to falter and stammer, and then to talk fast and jerky, but straight to the point, as well as I could see. I mean, he got to it at last, the reason for this $100,000 straight life policy he had come in to see me about this morning. He had very little money, he said, in spite of his name, which he seemed to think had made me drop in a faint when I heard it, on account of the dough his family was supposed to have. It meant nothing to me, which may prove how ignorant I am, or on the other hand how big the country is. Anyhow, in West Virginia was an old coal mine he owned, that had been closed down, but that opened up again when some kind of a machine was invented that made operation profitable where they’d been in the red before. And he’d got a dividend check of two or three thousand dollars that he didn’t expect. And what he wanted to do was sock this dough into the first premium of the life policy, so his wife would be protected the first year after the annulment, and he would feel easier in his mind about it. I said: “What about the second year?”
“...I may have to let it lapse.”
“So I judge. But I mean about her?”
“Mr. Horner, do I have to go on with this marriage for the rest of my life? Jane and I made a mistake, but in marriage a mistake takes two to make. Once it’s erased from the ledger, why not be honest about it? Jane is a well-bred, good-looking girl, who’s going to get married again and make some guy a swell wife. That’s fine with me, and I wish her, and him when he comes, everything that life can give them. But I see no need for overlap. All I think is necessary is to see that she’s protected in the near future — as I said, in case of eventuality. In the case of an annulment, no alimony, property settlement, or anything of the kind is possible, since of course it is merely the legal declaration that no marriage existed. But if I should die in the near future, if for some reason I did come into money and a large estate were settled, I don’t want her left out completely in the cold. Does that answer all your questions?”
It did, or I thought it did, even if it struck me he was more interested in going through the motions of protecting her than actually doing it. I mean, it seemed to me he was going to kid himself he was actually making her a present of $100,000, and square it up with himself for the way he figured to leave her, neither married or not married, just dangling in mid-air, with no court to take her side, because mixing it up that way is what most of the courts, including our 100 % wonderful Supreme Court, seem to be fondest of. But I didn’t see, on my end of it, why I was called on to step in and block the insurance in any way, whether she was squawking or not. Because in the first place, it’s practically impossible to convince an agent he’s doing anybody an injury, or in fact anything but a favor, in helping them become beneficiary of any kind of policy at all. And in the second place, there was kind of a personal reason I’d better be on the level about, as later the subject came up. My company, the General Pan-Pacific of California, General Pan for short, gives an annual cup to the agent making the best score for the year, all averaged up so the fellow in a small city has just as good a chance as a big city general agent, and my first few years, when I was just a kid, I collected four of those, one right after the other. But when Washington upped the high Army brass from four stars to five, the home office upped General Pan, because until then the cup had four stars on it, for his rank. And that new one, with five stars all in a cluster, I hadn’t been able to get, and I wanted it, and specially before my thirtieth birthday, so bad I could cry. With this $100,000 policy, I’d grab it in a walk. And it was none of my business if next year he let it lapse or not. Plenty of policies lapse, and the contest had no rule covering that. If I wrote the business, and he paid the first premium due, that was that, and that was all. So when he finished, and I thought it over, and said O.K. I’d shoot his application through, I could feel my heart doing flip-flops inside. General Five-Star Cup, come to baby.
2
When I got back to the stable, my friend Mrs. Delavan had the Count on the track, and Jackie was out there watching it. I mean it was something to see. He was under an English saddle, with curb bit and martingales, and my own Western saddle was nowhere around. Believe it or not, she was walking him. It was the first time I knew he could walk. He’s a gray, with dark mane and tail, and a comical forelock that makes him look a little like Whirly, if you remember him, and he’s a clown, but strictly a dancing clown, not a walking clown. And it took me a minute or two to figure it out. There was 105 pounds of will power on his back that said walk and he walked. In a minute her feet shifted and he went into a canter, then into a dead run. It was beautiful, the way he obeyed. I mean, he loved it the way she handled him, and he was letting her know it, every move that he made, how he liked to go when there was somebody up there that knew how to make him go. She pulled him down to a trot, and then, so sudden you wondered why she didn’t go over his head, to a walk, and came on over. “What on earth, Mr. Horner, have you been doing with this horse?”