Dennis Wheatley - The Haunting of Toby Jugg

'You have shaken me quite a bit,' I confessed. 'I have been out of touch with all this sort of thing for so long that I had no idea that the picture had become so black for the working rich. Still, however high they raise income and super tax, a fortune is always a fortune; and, although Grandpapa Jugg might turn in his grave, I could sell out capital to ante up my income. Even if I live to be a hundred and spent twenty thousand a year from capital for the next eighty years, that would consume less than the million and three-quarter that has piled up during my minority. So I should still be able to leave my heirs the original fourteen million.'

Helmuth threw back his massive head and roared with laughter: 'Toby, Toby; did you think of nothing but Hurricanes and Heinkels while you were in the R.A.F. and in hospital? Time marches on, I tell you. If you do live to be a hundred, it is most unlikely that you will have fourteen thousand let alone million left to leave anybody; and if you have your heirs will be lucky if the Government of the day permits them to keep more than one, thousand of it.'

I smiled a little ruefully. 'Of course I know that death duties have been going up for years; and that even now they would cut the Jugg millions in half. But do you really think that in another fifty years or so there will be practically nothing left of them?'

'Indeed I do. By that time all public services and every form of industry will be State owned: and it is highly probable that private ownership of land, houses and investments will have been abolished. But you won't have to wait that long before the bulk of your fortune is taken from you.'

I said that I thought, myself, all the odds were on the Socialists coming to power soon after the war; but that most of their leaders were sensible enough to realise the danger of throwing the nation's economy out of gear by doing anything too drastic. Helmuth shrugged and replied:

"They will be moderate to start with, but as is always the case when the Left gets into the saddle, the masses expect a Silver Age if not a Golden one to dawn before very long. That gives the extremists a rod with which to beat the moderates. They will never be able to raise enough money by ordinary means to propitiate the Labour electorate, by carrying out all the Socialist conceptions; but it can be taken from those who have it.

'The wiser men will realise that it is suicidal to seize a large part of the wealth, which for generations has financed the nation's commerce and industry, and fritter it away in unproductive channels; but they will be forced to it. They will introduce some form of Capital Levy. And then, my dear Toby, what of your fine fortune?'

'That would be killing the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs,' I said, 'because if they do, it is inevitable that they will skim the top off the cream. Say they introduce legislation to collect a hundred million, the great bulk of that would come from people like myself who might be paying anything up to nineteen and sixpence in the pound in taxes already. That means that the following year there would be the equivalent number of nineteen and sixpences less to go into the exchequer. And not for one year only, but for good. It is far worse than anticipating taxes; it is destroying the source from which they come. We couldn't continue to pay on what we no longer had; so they would have to introduce new taxation affecting the lower income groups to make up the deficit. It would be a crazy policy, even from their own point of view, because sooner or later the masses themselves would be left holding the baby.'

'Of course,' Helmuth agreed. 'But political extremists are never statesmen; otherwise they would not be extremist. Such people allow their hatred of the rich to dominate every other consideration. And it would be done in gradual stages. That is the insidious part about it. As you say, they will go for the big fish first; and if you are forced to realise only half your holdings to pay up, very few people are going to think that you have been hardly done by.

'No one will squeal until some of their own savings are seized to pay the dole. You are right too about the drop in income and surtax receipts having to be made up from somewhere, but there is a limit to what can be got by normal means; so with each successive Budget the level at which the thrifty will be robbed of their savings will go down and down, until even the little man with his few hundreds tucked away in the Post Office will find himself caught.'

He paused for a moment, then went on: 'As for yourself, having paid the first time will not exonerate you from having to pay up the second, third and fourth. So, my poor friend, I fear you will find your rosy dream of being able to spend twenty thousand a year of your capital turning out to be moonshine, long before you are my age. It won't be there any longer for you to realise.'

It was a black future that he conjured up, but I had to admit to myself that his grim prognostications were based on a perfectly possible and logical sequence of events. For a bit we remained silent, then I said:

'Well, if you are right, I'll be in a pretty mess. But I suppose the State will take care of cripples?'

'Oh yes,' he smiled cynically. 'You'll get your keep in an institution and a pound a week. You might do quite a lot better, though, if you are prepared to follow my advice. All I have been endeavouring to show you is, that if you decide to play a lone hand your millions may be reduced to hundreds by the time you are forty.'

'Do you think, then, that by becoming one of the Brotherhood I could save them?'

'No, Toby; I don't think that. But I am confident that whatever loss of fortune may overtake anyone else and even themselves, individually, as far as the possession of shares, property and bank balances go the member of the Brotherhood will continue to enjoy comparative affluence, and even luxury to such a degree as it is obtainable, in a world where all but a very few will live on a miserable pittance as little cogs in the machinery of a vast slave State.'

'How would they manage to do that?' I enquired.

"There must always be rulers,' he said quietly; 'and we shall be the rulers of the Britain of tomorrow. The bulk of the upper classes are bound to be submerged, because they have no unity. But we shall survive, because we are bound together by an indissoluble bond, pledged to help one another to the limit, and holding all our assets in common. We already have men in all sorts of key positions, both here and abroad. Our level of intelligence is far higher than that of any ordinary group of professional politicians, and we have resources that such people do not possess. The attainment of power in all its forms is the object of our association, and that having been our special study ever since our foundation you may rest assured that you will be shown how to attain it too if you decide to join us.'

'I don't quite understand,' I said. 'One can study all sorts of subjects, a knowledge of which is valuable for attaining one's ends; but I shouldn't have thought that there could be any royal road to attaining power, as such.'

'Oh yes, there is,' he smiled, as he stood up, 'and at our next chat I will tell you something about it. But I must go now, as I have some letters to write. In the meantime, you might think over what I have said.'

I did think it over, and the whole thing's extremely intriguing; but I am far from certain that I would care to become involved in this Secret Society of his.

Of course, when he said that about my whole fortune not being too big a price to pay for membership, he could not have been speaking seriously. All the same it sounds as if from anyone as rich as myself they would expect the hell of a big cheque.

If Helmuth is right in his contention that when the Socialists do get in, after a time, the extremists will dominate the moderates, and introduce a series of Capital Levies which will eventually swallow up all private investments, great and small, it would certainly be worth my while to go into this thing as a form of insurance even if they did stick me for a hundred thousand pounds. Plenty of people used to pay that much in my grandfather's day for a title, and I shouldn't miss it.